Captain Quad (17 page)

It's a goddam dream it has to be!

There was a sound then, a faint, keening whistle underlaid by an almost subaural rumble, like a synthesized bass note. The whistling sound heightened until it reached a whining, ultrasonic peak that made him want to clap his hands over his ears—

The jet roared by a hundred yards beneath him at what Peter estimated was at least Mach 2. There, and then gone, it had materialized out of the sun and then vanished into the maw of the west, the only signs of its passing a clean white contrail and a crackling sonic boom.

Feeling like a god, Peter gave chase. He dropped to the level of the vapor trail and followed it, skimming along its dissipating surface like a glory-bound soul on a celestial speedway. Powered by his will, he cranked an interior throttle and felt that hand on the crown of his head again, that compressible blister of resistance he'd had to overcome the first time. Thrusting relentlessly against it, he felt it give with an audible pop!

He was back in the corridor now, barely aware of the jet as he arrowed past it. Throttling down, he slowed to a hover and waited, unable to imagine how far or how fast he had traveled.

It was then that he spotted the string, slung over his shoulder and receding in the direction from which he had come. Slender as a thread, its slack length glowed with a faint blue light, reminding him of the fiberoptic filaments he'd read about in Scientific American, fine tendrils of glass along which light could be induced to travel.

Soulstring, he thought, recalling the title of a novel by a favorite author. That's my soulstring.

Jesus, this is real!

That whistling sound was back again.

Sick with excitement, Peter turned and prepared to meet it.

The jet came out of the explosive light of the sun like a dart hurled by a colossus. It bore down on him at breakneck speed, sunflares winking off its wing tips and tinted canopy. Matching its speed, Peter cut through the air above it, close enough to read the markings on its seamless frame. It was a Mirage 2000 in camouflage blues, packing twin Mantra 530s, sleek air-to-air missiles. It was a French fighter jet, part, Peter guessed, of the air show that had skipped to the cities south of Sudbury and would continue on a westward sweep for another few weeks until its completion in Vancouver.

As he shadowed the jet, Peter dug in his memory—a memory that lost almost nothing—and came up with the specs on this aircraft. Capable of Mach 2.3, the forty-eight-foot fighter jet had a range of just under a thousand miles and a service ceiling of 59,000 feet. He had studied aircraft the way a bird-watcher studied birds and could name most of them at a glance.

Ho-leeee fuck, we're really flyin' now!

Like some ghostly hitchhiker, Peter lowered himself onto the tinted canopy. Clasping its raised lip, he glued his face to the Plexiglas, barely noticing that, like a ghost, he cast no reflection. Beneath him the pilot's helmet gleamed like an ivory cue ball. A gogglelike visor the same smoky tint as the canopy concealed the upper half of the pilot's face, and an oxygen mask muzzled the rest. Bulky chute straps looped his shoulders, and between his spread knees a gloved hand clasped the joystick.

The old thrill was back with a vengeance. Wahooo! Peter howled in a childlike cry of joy. Ride 'em, cowboy!

The jet banked sharply to starboard, dropping Peter's stomach, and in his mind he begged the pilot to cut the bird loose, belly-roll, loop-the-loop, do something delinquent.

And then he did.

The jet rolled through a sudden 360 and Peter tumbled off. When he tried to regain control he found that he couldn't and now he was falling, twisting toward the misty curve of the earth like a jettisoned sack of potatoes. An updraft caught him and spun him around, tangling him in that blue thread of light, like a fish all snagged in its line. In a fit of panic, Peter saw that in places his soulstring was ragged, nearly worn through.

Twirling like a drill bit, Peter fell.

And in the great vacuum of his descent, he blacked out.

When he came to, he was back in his body, the sensation of free-fall still churning his guts. Dressed in a gaudy pink uniform, a cleaning lady stood hunched at the foot of his bed, the sound of the vacuum she was trailing a lot like the whine of a jet.

(dreamjustadreamjustastupidfuckingdrearm)

Starting as Peter's head came up off his pillow, the cleaning lady said good morning with a thick Italian accent, then resumed her labors.

"Gina," Peter said, for he knew all the staff by name, "open the curtains for me, will you?"

"Sure," Gina said, laying the hose aside and toeing the machine into silence. "It's a nice day outside, no?"

"Please," Peter said, the urgency of his tone making the cleaning lady stumble. "Hurry."

Gina swept the curtains open, flooding the room with morning light.

Peter craned his neck.

And there, high against a curving canopy of blue, was the spectral slash of a vapor trail, already dissipating.

Smiling, Peter thanked the woman, then dropped comfortably back to sleep.

When Sam sauntered in that evening with his book-loaded knapsack slung over his shoulder, he took one look at his brother and stopped dead in his tracks. There was something wrong, and although Sam could not immediately put a name to it, it struck him like a rush of poisoned air.

"What's up?" Peter said cheerfully. "You look as if you just stepped barefoot in a cow pie."

"I. . . uh. . .” Sam stammered—and then he had it: Peter was smiling. Not the forced congenial grin he sometimes managed but a huge, sparkling, face-splitting smile the likes of which Sam had last seen about eight years ago, on the day Peter's flight instructor handed him his pilot's license. Sam shrugged off his bad feeling—it was great to see his brother happy for a change—but a shred of it remained, like an itch just out of reach.

"You look great," he said as he drew up a chair.

"Feel great," Peter said, his smile widening.

For a clumsy moment Sam was at a loss, and he just sat there, staring. He'd been excited on his way over here from the library, where he'd spent the morning scanning the surprising volume of literature that was available on the out-of-body experience. The more he read, the more convinced he became that Peter had experienced just that. According to the literature, the OBE was generally accepted as the last stage of physical death, a sort of reluctant parting of essence and flesh. In the more legitimate works, large amounts of data had been amassed, individual case reports including statements made by patients who, through medical intervention, had been snatched back from death's very doorstep. What Sam found remarkable about these statements was their almost exact correlation with each other—and with what Peter had told him about his own near-death experience.

As with all things unusual, the OBE had its lunatic fringe, fire-eyed zealots who claimed they could leave their bodies at will, travel great distances at blurring speeds—attached the whole time to their bodies via an incredibly elastic thread—and return intact, refreshed and more intensely alive than the rest of us could even begin to comprehend.

But loony or not, how else could Sam explain it? His brother had been in the apartment. . . and their mother had sensed his presence. After reading about it, Sam had been eager to share with Peter some of the things he'd found out. . . but that smile. Somehow that smile had taken the edge off his excitement. Maybe he'd just leave the books in his knapsack and forget about the whole crazy thing.

Peter's head came off the pillow, the action as always making Sam think of a man buried to the neck in desert sand.

"Whatcha got in the sack, Jack?"

"I've been doing a little research," Sam said uneasily, thinking, not for the first time, that Peter seemed able to read his thoughts. He reached into the knapsack and withdrew the topmost book. "And I think I know what happened to you the other night."

"I do, too," Peter replied, still smiling. "And it happened again."

"No shit?"

"No shit, bud." He made a shrill whistling sound through his teeth, jerking his head toward the window as he did so. "Last night. And it was un-fucking-real, if you'll pardon my French."

He related in detail the happenings of the night before, beginning with his voyeuristic encounter with Nurse Blane—which made Sam blush and Peter roar with laughter—then moving on to his flight at the rim of dawn. By the time he was done Sam had all but forgotten his earlier inkling of dread.

"And you saw the string?" Sam probed eagerly.

"Sure did, Sambo. But it was more like a thread, a fine, glowing blue thread. I even gave it a name: soulstring."

"Yeah," Sam agreed. "That really says it."

"So what about these books?"

Sam held up the first of them for his brother's inspection. It was a plain black paperback entitled The Projection of the Astral Body.

"Well," Sam began, unaware of the terrible Pandora's box he was about to help open, "these guys claim you can learn to do this at will."

NINETEEN

Will slammed the door of his Chevy pickup, hiked his jacket over his head, and ran across the parking lot to the gym entrance door. A cold October rain was falling, promising an early winter, and Will was glad he'd put the Buick up on blocks the weekend before. Weather like this was hell on the chrome.

He jerked the door open and slipped inside. The corridor was empty, but he could hear tinny music in the distance, and the echoey shouts of kids. He grinned. He hadn't been in a high school gymnasium in sixteen years. He let himself in through a door marked girls' entrance and took a seat in the stands. Kelly stood with her back to him on the opposite side of the gym, her fanny packed prettily into spandex tights, and Will felt a familiar tug of excitement. God, she looked good.

The music stopped, and the ten members of the senior girls' Dance Club stood shaking their arms, breathing hard. They were practicing a jazz routine they were scheduled to perform at the Grand Theatre in early December. They were to be the opening act for the Osmond Family Christmas special, and even now the air of anticipation was palpable.

A new piece started on the deck, which rested on the sill of the gym office window, and the activity picked up again. Will recognized the tune; he'd heard it at least a dozen times over at Kelly's: Herbie Hancock's "Rockit."

"Okay, girls. Let's try the break-dancing sequence."

This was met with squeals of approval, and the students dropped immediately into spinning contortions on the floor. Watching them, Will had to smile. Kelly was always so worried about how she was doing at work, whether the kids liked and respected her, and whether she was having any positive impact on their lives. It was obvious to him that they loved her. They were having fun, and their eyes were bright with admiration for Kelly.

Will didn't know that much about it, but he guessed this first year of teaching must be the toughest. It must be hard to appear confident in front of twenty-five or thirty teenagers, all of them strangers and a goodly proportion of them anxious to see just how much they could get away with. "Don't smile until December," Kelly had said to him one night. "That's my motto for the term." Well, Will thought, if these kids were any indication, all her worries were for naught.

But there was more to Kelly's unease about her job than that; Will sensed this with an unerring instinct. This was her old high school, and although she claimed that she'd enjoyed her time as a student here, Will knew she was hiding something. Something big. Something that haunted her even now. Coming back here to teach had opened some old wound. . . but that was all he could piece together. On some subjects Kelly was pretty close-mouthed, and Will didn't like to push her. If she wanted him to know about her past, she would tell him in her own good time.

Will glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to five. They had dinner reservations at Marconi's for six o'clock; then they were off to see a stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at the Sudbury Theatre Center.

It was October 14, Kelly's birthday.

"All right, girls," Kelly shouted, still unaware of Will's presence. "Let's concentrate. Candace, what are you grinning at?"

Kelly turned, following her student's gaze. . . and then she saw him. She waved and blew him a kiss, and Will felt his face bake with pride. Kelly held up two open hands, mouthed the words "ten minutes," then returned her attention to the girls.

"Okay, gang. One more time and then we're out of here." She crossed to the gym office window, rewound the tape to the top of the Hancock tune, and put the kids through their paces again.

They went to Will's place after the play. He rented the top half of a duplex in the Flour Mill area. As she mounted the steps, it occurred to Kelly that this would be the first time she had seen Will's apartment. She hadn't been avoiding coming over; it just seemed that they always ended up at her place. "It's cozier," Will often said. He liked the fireplace and the panoramic view of the lake.

The play had been a riot. Kelly hadn't read Ken Kesey's book, but she'd seen the movie at least a dozen times. Her favorite line was the one McMurphy drawled when they escorted him back to the ward from shock therapy: "The next woman that takes me on's gonna light up like a pinball machine and pay off in silver dollars." In the movie, Jack Nicholson had played R. P. McMurphy, and Peter had had that line down pat. Kelly had waited for it to come up in the play and was disappointed when the actor didn't use it.

She was surprised to find Will's living quarters sober and neat, almost austere, with old but well-kept furniture, gleaming hardwood floors, and lots of uncurtained windows hung with plants. There were posters of classic automobiles in plain metal frames, a sturdy rack of bookshelves stocked mostly with adventure novels and westerns, and in the spare bedroom, a bench and a set of weights. The mirror in Will's bedroom, like the one in Kelly's own room, was crammed with favorite Kodachromes. Will was the fourth in a family of eight, five boys and three girls, and he kept cherished photos of each of them.