In The Sky, A House Of Mirrors [FICTOID]

She bought an old PBY Catalina amphibian seaplane, spent her life savings refurbishing it, then set off in pursuit of thunderstorms. 

Her friends and family in Prague wondered why she did this.   “You are a professor of English literature,” they said.  “Why have you abandoned that to become a storm chaser?”

“There are some things you just need to do,” she lied. 

The truth was this:  Certain truths remain hidden,

The assassination of JFK was a carefully arranged suicide. 

World War One never happened, it was a hoax to hide the still unexplained demises millions of people in Europe. 

And while UFOs exist, they are not the strangest things in the shy.  

She caught allusions to this when she began a summary of American pulp fiction from 1920 to 1960.  In it she saw tantalizing glimpses of something deeper, more mysterious than the clouds, something cultures more primitive than ours referred to as gods or angels or demons. 

Bit by bit she pieced the information together.  Old pulp writers often befriended a variety of people, using their experiences in their stories.  Many befriended aviators and meteorologists and from them learned hints of what remained hidden from most people, that somewhere up in the clouds floated a vast house of mirrors big enough to fly through.

She assembled this information in bits and pieces, counter-referencing notes covering hundreds of stories over four decades. 

In the end she narrowed her area of search down to thunderstorms.  She took flying lessons, acquired the Catalina, and set off its search of the house of mirrors. 

Now her savings were exhausted, her credit card strained to their limit, her tanks only three-quarters full, much required maintenance remaining undone. 

A thunderstorm approached and like a trapdoor spider she waited patiently for her prey to manifest itself on her doorstep before pouncing. 

As the storm loomed over the horizon, muted orange flashes illuminating the dark clouds, she fired up her tired old engines and rumbled down the runway. 

The weary old war bird climbed into the air like an elderly arthritic patient with emphysema. 

Setting an intercept course, she aimed for the heart of the storm.

She'd done this hundreds of times before, this would be her last. 

Strong winds buffeted her as she approached the cloud.  The PBY Catalina, designed for long range combat missions in World War Two then later pressed into service as a search and rescue craft and a storm chaser, squeaked and groaned as strong winds buffeted its ancient airframe.

She pressed on.  It felt like flying through dense thick smoke, lightning would brilliantly flash up the clouds then fade to darkness.  The Catalina circled inside the cloud looking for the house of mirrors then she caught a glimpse of something sparkling in the distance.

Ice crystals in the clouds fooled her before but this seemed more substantial. 

She banked in that direction, the storm clouds winds determined to push her back.

Relentlessly she strove on.  Another flash of lightning and this time she saw it more clearly.

There was something in the clouds ahead. 

She flew towards it and this time when the lightning flashed she saw the opening to a huge house of mirrors, a giant cathedral of reflective surfaces. 

They found the wreckage of the Catalina scattered over three counties.  As best the Accident Investigation Team could tell, the gale force winds tore the decrepit old aircraft apart, blowing the debris in all directions. 

Of the Czech English literature professor, they found no trace.  They presumed she bailed out and the storm wind blew her parachute over the sea and there she was lost forever.  The team would never know/ 

As for the professor herself, she had much to reflect on.

© Buzz Dixon