What was that noise? It would be nice to see once more. Blind as a bat, now, though. Everything red, and growing redder. A deep, deep red. A funny noise, that. Like a plane. The planes of other pilots who had died? Did a pilot go on flying after he was dead? As dying people hear voices of those who have gone before them, did a dying pilot hear the planes of pilots who had already gone? A funny sound, but a nice sound. Just like an aircraft engine. No sound in all the world so deeply thrilling as the sweet song of an aircraft engine, and the hymn sung by wings in the wind. You had to be a pilot to know that. So this was it? Well, that was okay. No pain at all. A sort of comforting silence. Like slipping off to sleep in a nice soft bed. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN _The Dead Return_ A nice warm comfy bed. And a soothing silence all about. Rest, beautiful rest in a world of fluffy white silence. It ... Like a half drowned man groping his way up through fathoms of silent waters to the surface, Dave Dawson rose up from the depths of unconsciousness. And as a man saved from drowning remembers things that passed through his mind while down in the depths, so were Dawson's first conscious thoughts a continuance of what he had been thinking in another world. A nice, warm comfy bed, and ... And though it was still dark all about, the sense of touch returned to him, and his finger tips telegraphed to his brain the fact that he was actually in a warm, comfy bed. He could feel smooth sheets, and a soft mattress underneath him. And then little by little he became conscious of sound. Not individual sounds, but a merging of all different kinds of sound into a sort of faintly pulsating murmur. And with that faintly pulsating murmur there came to him a sense of motion, too. A gentle vibration that traveled throughout his entire body. It had all the effect of lulling him into deep and untroubled slumber. But in that it did not quite succeed. It didn't because at that moment his eyes opened slowly and there was the image of Freddy Farmer's face centered in a vast expanse of white. But it was more than an image of Freddy, for the lips moved back in a smile, the eyes glistened with joy, and then came the spoken words. "That's better, my lad. How do you feel, Dave?" Dawson stared for a moment, and then closed his eyes tight, but when he opened them again Freddy Farmer's smiling face was still there. "You dead, too, Freddy?" he heard his own voice speak. "How did it happen, fellow?" The smiling lips broke into a chuckle, and Freddy Farmer shook his head in positive negation. "Not a bit of it, old thing," he said. "I'm not dead, and neither are you. Though by rights you should be. How do the arm and leg feel?" "Not dead?" Dawson mumbled, as he strived to get his brain functioning faster. "And what arm, and what leg?"