Jorge Joestar (Light Novel)

Chapter 11: Gremlin

Word reached me that people were seeing strange 'things' during flights. Other pilots started blaming any airborne mechanical failures on these monsters. They were small, skinny people with no eyes, the stories said, so of course I thought of the 'evil thing' that Faraday had seen the evening Kenton Motorize died. There were dark pits where his eyes should be. His skin was brown, like any Spanish child. The times and places of these monsters sightings were all over the place, and at first the targets seemed indiscriminate, but I changed my thinking as stories of this monster began focusing in on me, until the Royal Aero Club's own Jim Graham came in shouting,

"I saw it! It was clinging to the underside of my plane! Look!"

he added, slapping the side of the plane he'd just landed, a French-borne beauty named Simone. It was a Blériot XI monoplane with two wheels under the main wing and one under the tail, and the panel between the front wheels was hanging open. The engine was visible inside that square hole, and two or three screws near the cylinder had come loose and fallen out.

"See!? I thought the engine was making a terrible racket, and this is why!"

Jim said, quite beside himself. He explained that he's seen a tiny eyeless creature, maybe 50 centimeters tall, scrabbling about under his plane, doing something. 50 cm? That was far smaller than I'd imagined.

"Nah, it didn't look like a Spaniard at all. No way that thing was human. All its teeth were sharpened, and its claws were long and pointy, and it kept grinning at me like it knew I couldn't do anything. It kept messing about down there and then the engine started acting funny and I about shit myself. I turned and came straight back here before that thing made me crash, but it must have dropped off somewhere..."

Jim Graham began carrying a pistol with him whenever he flew, but he never saw the monster again. People began saying the pistol kept it away, and imitating him, but I wasn't so sure. I wanted to prove it was real before I banished it. Prove it was the same

eyeless thing that had shown up at the Motorize Manor. So I started bringing a camera into my cockpit. A boxy camera made by Kodak, called the Brownie. If anything happened, I would take a snapshot, and if I got a photo I planned to visit the Motorize Manor again, and get Faraday to verify it, but before that happened I got a photo of something else. I was trying to photograph JG Rollins' stunt flying, and as he turned his Leslie upside-down, I saw the silhouette of a plane through a gap in the clouds far behind him. When I showed the photo around nobody in the club had ever seen anything like it, but I was pretty sure I had. I knew I'd seen it somewhere but I couldn't quite remember where until one day the dots finally connected. I'd never seen the plane itself. I'd only seen the schematics for it. When it was just a dream, a scribbling in his notes in the Motorize shed. Yes. It was Steven's Motorizing.

Steven was supposed to be in France, so why was he flying close to the Dover coast? If he'd flown all the way from France this was not a public flight. This was not an era where just anyone could cross country lines whenever they liked. Was he flying home from France? But if he was flying back from France on a plane of his own design people would be talking about it, and word would have reached us. To begin with, I had no idea what Steven was even doing in France. France and England had never really got along but eight years ago they'd signed a trade agreement and travel between the two countries was quite common. I had a lot of pilot friends in France, but none of them had ever heard of Steven Motorize, and none of the airplane makers had heard of him, either. It was still a very small industry, so if he was openly involved in it I would almost certainly have heard something about him. So he must not be openly involved, I guess. He was flying his plane in secret. His own original creation. It cost money to make an airplane, so that