Pam-Ann

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License
Notes

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author.

With grateful thanks, to Becca
K. and Carol P., whose assistance, advice and, not least, patience,
was invaluable and very much appreciated. Thank you, ladies.

Chapter One

“Keep your damned hands to
yourself, Captain Todd!” Pam shrugged her shoulder out from under
the man’s palm. Angry that he had followed her to continue their
heated discussion, she did not turn to confront him. In the narrow,
cramped space of the airplane’s galley their bodies would be almost
touching.

“Will you just listen to what
I’m telling you for one minute? For heaven’s sake, my career is on
the line here!”

“Maybe you should have thought
of that before you started groping me last night,” Pam snapped
back, replacing the coffee pot and picking up her cup.

“I already told you, I was only
steering you towards our table.”

“Yeah, with your hand on my
butt. And I suppose your proposition to share your hotel room was
entirely innocent too.”

“It was your waist, not your
ass,” Todd said. “You’re an attractive young woman, Miss Weston,
and we were both off duty. Or I thought we were.”

Pam felt a thrill of triumph.
She had suckered him there, sure enough. She took a sideways step
and turned to face him. “On or off Company time, Captain, you have
a responsibility to uphold the airline’s standards. That does not
include molesting the cabin staff.”

Todd’s expression grew more
exasperated. “I repeat, Miss Weston, I do not molest our
stewardesses.” He wagged a finger at her when she raised a
sardonically sceptical eyebrow. “Don’t think I don’t know who’s
behind these allegations, or that I won’t be denying them and
backing it up with proof. I’ve got letters from Tracy Shaw
describing in detail what she’d like to do to me. Graphic, explicit
descriptions. You’ve got it all wrong. Tracy’s obsessed with me.
She made the accusations because I wouldn’t play ball.”

“I’m not at liberty to divulge
who made the allegations,” Pam said, “and I see no reason to
discuss the matter further. You’ll have your chance to present your
side of the story at our New York office. And I will be presenting
the evidence I gathered during yesterday’s flight,
and
the
rather disagreeable time I had to spend with you last evening.”

He snorted. “Evidence! Is that
what you’re calling it? Entrapment, more like. You’d made your mind
up about me before we even met, Miss Weston.”

“It’s
Ms.
Weston,” Pam
said icily, carrying her coffee along the short passage leading to
the small passenger cabin at the front of the cargo-carrying Boeing
707. She had immediately regretted agreeing to take the flight Todd
had hitched with a colleague at Heathrow, instead of waiting for
the airline’s own scheduled passenger service, but he had been
eager to get back to New York as soon as possible. If he was so
determined to hang himself why should she stand in his way?

“Whoever he was, the guy must
have done a real job on you to turn you into what you are,
Ms.
Weston.”

Pam winced. A surge of fury made
her stop dead, and she almost turned to hurl her coffee, cup and
all, into Todd’s face. A second later she reasserted the calm,
rigid control of her feelings she had developed in the last two
years, and continued towards the cabin.

The plane lurched suddenly and
the floor momentarily fell away beneath her feet. Hot coffee
spilled onto her hand. Once more Todd grasped her shoulder and once
more she felt a disturbing tingle across her skin where his hand
rested, as she had when he had done it the previous night. Had it
really been her waist?

“It’s okay, it’s only a little
turbulence,” he said.

She gave him a frigid look. “I
flew as cabin staff for two years before I became a sexual
harassment investigator. I can recognise turbulence.”

Without warning the plane
dropped again, filling Pam’s stomach with the sensation of being in
an express elevator. An abrupt jolt flung her and Todd against one
wall of the narrow passageway and then the other. She dropped her
cup.

“What the hell!” The man’s
exclamation came at the same moment Pam’s mouth fell open as she
watched her coffee spill upwards and her cup rise towards the
ceiling instead of falling to the floor. She and Todd were doing
the same. Her head bumped painfully on the cabin roof and a
heartbeat later she hit the floor as gravity righted itself.

“That wasn’t turbulence.” Todd
had fallen harder but got up, scrambled the short distance to the
door of the cockpit and yanked it open. “What’s going on?” he
demanded as the aircraft lurched again. “Jesus!”

Pam crammed into the doorway
beside him, heedless of her body pressing against his as she looked
between the shoulders of the pilot and co-pilot and through the
windscreen beyond.

“What the hell is it?” Todd
asked hoarsely.

“God knows, but I’m turning
away, so hang on,” the pilot said. “What’s our position?”

“Thirty-nine degrees north,
twenty-five degrees west,” the co-pilot answered as they banked
hard to port.

Pam stared. Ahead of them was…
something. Something a deeper, darker black than she had ever seen,
blackness so intense it hurt her eyes to look at it. Yet she found
it impossible to look away. It had no shape that she could have
described. Around it the clouds boiled and writhed, thrashing and
swirling with all the fury of a storm-tossed sea. Yet within the
blackness was nothing. It could have been a solid wall or a
bottomless pit, and with no reference point to judge by, as near as
a mile or as far away as fifty.

The aircraft leaned further as
the pilot banked more steeply. A teeth-jarring shaking joined its
sudden lifting and dropping. Bracing one arm against the doorframe,
Todd circled Pam’s waist with the other and she was glad of its
comfort. There was something horribly, frighteningly unworldly
about whatever it was she was looking at.

“This isn’t right,” she heard
Todd say, and shivered at the tremor in his voice.

“What the hell is happening?”
the pilot demanded. “I’ve turned nearly a hundred and eighty
degrees and it’s still in front of us.”

“Get us away from it, for
Christ’s sake!” the co-pilot said.

“What about diving under it?”
Todd asked.

“Oh shit, it’s too late!”

The blackness swelled. It shot
towards them in a heartbeat. The roiling clouds vanished and utter
darkness filled the windscreen. Pam’s heart leapt. It was inside
the cabin, rolling like an unstoppable wall of water over the
pilots in their seats and hurtling towards her and Todd in the
doorway. She opened her mouth to scream. Something with the
consistency of molasses engulfed her, trapping the cry in her
throat, filling eyes and mouth and nostrils. At the same moment she
felt painfully heavy, and then abruptly had no weight at all. Her
bottom hit the floor with a painful thump.

Pam’s mouth and nose were clear
again. She could breathe. “My God, what happened?” She could speak
too. She opened her eyes and her vision was normal. What she saw
was not. The cockpit was gone and so were the pilots. The
reassuring pressure of Todd’s arm was gone as well. In a weak glow
of electric light she looked down a windowless corridor of shiny
metal that ended after a few feet
at
an
equally shiny door. Pam looked behind. The corridor continued until
it stopped at another identical door. The plane had disappeared, or
– she gulped and panic swelled inside her – she had disappeared
from the plane.

She rubbed her eyes with her
fists and looked again. The scene had not changed. It suddenly
seemed important to stand but her legs refused to move. The metal
floor was cold against her bottom and vibrating gently. She heard
the faint hum of what might have been engines. Fear and shock were
tying knots in her stomach and tangling her racing thoughts. Pam
forced herself to stop her rapid panting and breathe deeply and
slowly. Panicking would not help. Wherever she was, it was man-made
and that meant there must be people here, and people would help
her. At last she found the strength to get to her feet. The thin
sheet metal of the corridor wall gave under her weight as she
leaned against it. She looked from one door to the other. Which
way?

The choice was made for her. A
clunking noise came from one of the doors and its polished metal
swung open. A man stepped over the bulkhead and paused as he saw
her. He came closer and she got an impression of highly polished
shoes, knife-edged creases in dark-blue trousers and shining brass
buttons on a dark-blue coat.

He gave a short laugh. “Another
one so soon. This is getting ridiculous.”

Pam stared at the face beneath
the narrow-peaked cap he wore. “Captain Todd. Oh, thank God! I
thought I was all alone here. What’s happened to us?”

To her astonishment he laughed
again. “Nothing’s happened to me, girl, but I guarantee you’ve got
yourself into a heap of trouble. Let’s see where you’ve been
hiding.” A grip like a steel band closed around Pam’s upper arm and
drew her to the other door.

“Wait, what’s going on? Do you…?
Have you…? Oh, what’s happened to us? What’s happened to the plane?
That… that thing, what was it?”

“It’s too late to be changing
your mind now,” he said, opening the door. “You should have thought
about the consequences before you snuck on board.” Pulling her
after him he looked around the metal-walled room beyond the door.
Old-fashioned trunks and suitcases were piled together under rope
nets. A corner of one of the nets was loose from its fastening hook
and turned back. Todd drew her towards it.

“Didn’t you realise you could
have been injured or killed if the baggage had shifted?” he asked,
keeping his grip on her as he stooped to drag a blanket out from a
narrow gap between piled suitcases. He gestured at it and the
folded overcoat and canvas bag lying on top. “And that’s hopelessly
inadequate. You might have died of cold if you’d stayed here much
longer. But I guess that’s why you decided to come out when you
did. What’s your name?”

Pam’s bewilderment increased.
“You know my name. Are you okay, Captain Todd? Has the shock
affected you?” Or had it affected her much more than she thought?
Was this all a hallucination, a dream?

“
I’m
okay, girl.
Everything is routine as far as I’m concerned, which is more than
you’ll be able to say before it’s over. And my name isn’t Todd.
It’s Lieutenant Drake, but of course you will call me ‘Sir’. Now
tell me your name.”

Pam blinked hard but the face
she was staring at remained that of Todd. “But it’s me, Pam. Pamela
Weston. Don’t you know me? We were on the plane together a few
minutes ago. You must know me. You must!” Desperation joined the
fear twisting her gut. Had he gone mad or was it her? Heart
pounding she looked around the blank metallic walls of the room.
“Oh, God, this can’t be happening!”

Todd, who said he was Drake,
shook her. “Stop your nonsense or I’ll smack you. Stand there while
I have a look through your bag.”

It’s not my bag, Pam wanted to
say, but she had to concentrate all of her energy on slowing her
breathing and suppressing her rising panic. She watched him rifle
through the bag and withdraw a folded sheet of paper.

“It’s a good thing you brought
your passport or it would have gone even harder for you,” he said,
after unfolding the document.

Her passport was back on the
plane. Looking at the paper upside down she could see it looked
official, headed by the words ‘United States Of America’ printed in
old-fashioned lettering in red and black ink.

Todd, who denied that he was
Todd, met her gaze, his expression stony. “So Pamela Weston is
really Ann Estemay of Dayton, Ohio, born June sixteenth nineteen
sixty-one and described as….” He broke off to look her up and down,
then read from the document. “Five feet seven inches, blue eyes,
light-brown hair, small mole beneath the jaw line, right side. I’d
say that’s a pretty fair description, wouldn’t you, Ann?”

Disbelieving, Pam realised that
except for the name it was. “No. No! My name is Pamela Weston. I’m
not….”