Ashley’s Reviews > Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales > Status Update

This is the Stephen King universe, of course, where character named Jenkins in the Langoliars muses that you can’t appear in the Texas State school book depository on November 22, 1963 and put a stop to the Kennedy assassination, so such things shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it did. Period. I love that kind of discovered symmetry.

But there are times, so the emperor, more sadly still, when one must lose a little beauty. If one is to keep a little beauty one already has I do not fear you, yourself, but I fear another man what man? Some other man who seeing you will build a thing of bright papers and bamboo like this, but the other man will have an evil face and an evil heart And the beauty will be gone. It is this man I fear.

…. hoping his sister will understand and forgive him. There’s a loud noise in the war comes pouring out of his head. Just another old fart, self-destructing. Except that now I can hear the sounds, too. Sounds like cannot be mistaken for anything else. Now I see strange black shapes in the night sky. Hungry, still unsatiated, coming back for more.

An old man rips out his hearing aid in the world fall silent the mantle clock stops ticking, the outside world goes away, the creek sound settling lumber of his home, cease their punctuation of the night, and he is left alone with the sound of the warbird. He finishes his bourbon, snubs his lucky and pull the trigger with closed and tearless eyes, hoping his sister will understand and forgive him….

They climbed each other to reach his lips. The narrow fanged mouth only allowed one at a time, and they were beyond counting. They cuddled up his shivering body and into the gate of Teeth, but he could fill them piling up inside his belly, restless, hungry for trouble, and he could feel a whole New World, cold, black, and infinite, inside. Before the last one disappeared into his mouth, the 727 touchdown.

Numbly, he picked up the mask, seeing too late with new eyes. It was not a trinket or a treasure, or a mask. It was a door. The blood he had spilled had opened it. To let them leave this place, the door only had to open again. It was simple, when there was no other choice, but to accept. Ryan put the mask on his face. The hard, rough inner surface, caressed him with splinters that grew in intertwined under his skin.