Four Past Midnight (16 page)

“Sure,” Albert said.

Brian's interest had a calming effect on the boy ... which was exactly what he had hoped for. He unsnapped the three catches and opened the case. The violin inside was indeed a Gretch, and not from the bottom of that prestigious line, either. Brian guessed you could buy a compact car for the amount of money this had cost.

“Beautiful,” he said, and plucked out four quick notes along the neck:
My dog has fleas.
They rang sweetly and beautifully. Brian closed and latched the case again. “I'll keep it safe. Promise.”

“Thanks.” Albert stood in the doorway, took a deep breath, then let it out again. “Geronimo,” he said in a weak little voice and jumped. He tucked his hands into his armpits as he did so—protecting his hands in any situation where physical damage was possible was so ingrained in him that it had become a reflex. He seat-dropped onto the slide and shot neatly to the bottom.

“Well done!” Nick said.

“Nothing to it,” Ace Kaussner drawled, stepped off, and then nearly tripped over his own feet.

“Albert!” Brian called down. “Catch!” He leaned out, placed the violin case on the center of the slide, and let it go. Albert caught it easily five feet from the bottom, tucked it under his arm, and stood back.

Jenkins shut his eyes as he leaped and came down aslant on one scrawny buttock. Nick stepped nimbly to the left side of the slide and caught the writer just as he fell off, saving him a nasty tumble to the concrete.

“Thank you, young man.”

“Don't mention it, matey.”

Gaffney followed; so did the bald man. Then Laurel and Dinah Bellman stood in the hatchway.

“I'm scared,” Dinah said in a thin, wavery voice.

“You'll be fine, honey,” Brian said. “You don't even have to jump.” He put his hands on Dinah's shoulders and turned her so she was facing him with her back to the slide. “Give me your hands and I'll lower you onto the slide.”

But Dinah put them behind her back. “Not you. I want Laurel to do it.”

Brian looked at the youngish woman with the dark hair. “Would you?”

“Yes,” she said. “If you tell me what to do.”

“Dinah already knows. Lower her onto the slide by her hands. When she's lying on her tummy with her feet pointed straight, she can shoot right down.”

Dinah's hands were cold in Laurel's. “I'm scared,” she repeated.

“Honey, it'll be just like going down a playground slide,” Brian said. “The man with the English accent is waiting at the bottom to catch you. He's got his hands up just like a catcher in a baseball game.” Not, he reflected, that Dinah would know what
that
looked like.

Dinah looked at him as if he were being quite foolish. “Not of
that.
I'm scared of this
place.
It smells funny.”

Laurel, who detected no smell but her own nervous sweat, looked helplessly at Brian.

“Honey,” Brian said, dropping to one knee in front of the little blind girl, “we have to get off the plane. You know that, don't you?”

The lenses of the dark glasses turned toward him. “
Why? Why
do we have to get off the plane? There's no one here.”

Brian and Laurel exchanged a glance.

“Well,” Brian said, “we won't really know that until we check, will we?”

“I know already,” Dinah said. “There's nothing to smell and nothing to hear. But ... but...”

“But what, Dinah?” Laurel asked.

Dinah hesitated. She wanted to make them understand that the way she had to leave the plane was really not what was bothering her. She had gone down slides before, and she trusted Laurel. Laurel would not let go of her hands if it was dangerous. Something was
wrong
here,
wrong,
and that was what she was afraid of—the wrong thing. It wasn't the quiet and it wasn't the emptiness. It might have to do with those things, but it was more than those things.

Something
wrong.

But grownups did not believe children, especially not blind children, even more especially not blind
girl
children. She wanted to tell them they couldn't stay here, that it wasn't
safe
to stay here, that they had to start the plane up and get going again. But what would they say? Okay, sure, Dinah's right, everybody back on the plane? No way.

“Never mind,” she told Laurel. Her voice was low and resigned. “Lower me down.”

Laurel lowered her carefully onto the slide. A moment later Dinah was looking up at her—
except she's not
really
looking,
Laurel thought,
she
can't really
look at all
—with her bare feet splayed out behind her on the orange slide.

“Okay, Dinah?” Laurel asked.

“No,” Dinah said. “
Nothing's
okay here.” And before Laurel could release her, Dinah unlocked her hands from Laurel's and released herself. She slid to the bottom, and Nick caught her.

Laurel went next, dropping neatly onto the slide and holding her skirt primly as she slid to the bottom. That left Brian, the snoozing drunk at the back of the plane, and that fun-loving paper-ripping party animal, Mr. Crew-Neck Jersey.

I'm not going to have any trouble with him,
Brian had said,
because I don't give a crap what he does.
Now he discovered that was not really true. The man was not playing with a full deck. Brian suspected even the little girl knew that, and the little girl was blind. What if they left him behind and the guy decided to go on a rampage? What if, in the course of that rampage, he decided to trash the cockpit?

Still, he didn't like the idea, and not just because the 767 was a multi-million-dollar piece of equipment, either. Perhaps what he felt was a vague echo of what he had seen in Dinah's face as she looked up from the slide. Things here seemed wrong, even wronger than they looked ... and that was scary, because he didn't know how things could be wronger than that. The plane, however, was right. Even with its fuel tanks all but empty, it was a world he knew and understood.

“Your turn, friend,” he said as civilly as he could.

“You know I'm going to report you for this, don't you?” Craig Toomy asked in a queerly gentle voice. “You know I plan to sue this entire airline for thirty million dollars, and that I plan to name you a primary respondent?”

“That's your privilege, Mr.—”

“Toomy. Craig Toomy.”

“Mr. Toomy,” Brian agreed. He hesitated. “Mr. Toomy, are you aware of what has happened to us?”

Craig looked out the open doorway for a moment—looked at the deserted tarmac and the wide, slightly polarized terminal windows on the second level, where no happy friends and relatives stood waiting to embrace arriving passengers, where no impatient travellers waited for their flights to be called.

Of course he knew. It was the langoliers. The langoliers had come for all the foolish, lazy people, just as his father had always said they would.

In that same gentle voice, Craig said: “In the Bond Department of the Desert Sun Banking Corporation, I am known as The Wheelhorse. Did you know that?” He paused for a moment, apparently waiting for Brian to make some response. When Brian didn't, Craig continued. “Of course you didn't. No more than you know how important this meeting at the Prudential Center in Boston is. No more than you care. But let me tell you something, Captain: the economic fate of nations may hinge upon the results of that meeting—that meeting from which I will be absent when the roll is taken.”

“Mr. Toomy, all that's very interesting, but I really don't have time—”

“
Time!
” Craig screamed at him suddenly. “What in the hell do
you
know about time? Ask me! Ask me! I know about time! I know
all about
time! Time is short, sir! Time is
very fucking short
!”

Hell with it, I'm going to push the crazy son of a bitch,
Brian thought, but before he could, Craig Toomy turned and leaped. He did a perfect seat-drop, holding his briefcase to his chest as he did so, and Brian was crazily reminded of that old Hertz ad on TV, the one where O. J. Simpson went flying through airports in a suit and a tie.

“Time is short as hell!
” Craig shouted as he slid down, briefcase over his chest like a shield, pantslegs pulling up to reveal his knee-high dress-for-success black nylon socks.

Brian muttered: “Jesus, what a fucking weirdo.” He paused at the head of the slide, looked around once more at the comforting, known world of his aircraft... and jumped.

Ten people stood in two small groups beneath the giant wing of the 767 with the red-and-blue eagle on the nose. In one group were Brian, Nick, the bald man, Bethany Simms, Albert Kaussner, Robert Jenkins, Dinah, Laurel, and Don Gaffney. Standing slightly apart from them and constituting his own group was Craig Toomy, a.k.a. The Wheelhorse. Craig bent and shook out the creases of his pants with fussy concentration, using his left hand to do it. The right was tightly locked around the handle of his briefcase. Then he simply stood and looked around with wide, disinterested eyes.

“What now, Captain?” Nick asked briskly.

“You tell me. Us.”

Nick looked at him for a moment, one eyebrow slightly raised, as if to ask Brian if he really meant it. Brian inclined his head half an inch. It was enough.

“Well, inside the terminal will do for a start, I reckon,” Nick said. “What would be the quickest way to get there? Any idea?”

Brian nodded toward a line of baggage trains parked beneath the overhang of the main terminal. “I'd guess the quickest way in without a jetway would be the luggage conveyor.”

“All right; let's hike on over, ladies and gentlemen, shall we?”

It was a short walk, but Laurel, who walked hand-in-hand with Dinah, thought it was the strangest one she had ever taken in her life. She could see them as if from above, less than a dozen dots trundling slowly across a wide concrete plain. There was no breeze. No birds sang. No motors revved in the distance, and no human voice broke the unnatural quiet. Even their footfalls seemed wrong to her. She was wearing a pair of high heels, but instead of the brisk click she was used to, she seemed to hear only small, dull thuds.

Seemed,
she thought.
That's the key word. Because the situation is so strange, everything begins to seem strange. It's the concrete, that's all. High heels sound different on concrete.

But she had walked on concrete in high heels before. She didn't remember ever hearing a sound precisely like this. It was ... pallid, somehow. Strengthless.

They reached the parked luggage trains. Nick wove between them, leading the line, and stopped at a dead conveyor belt which emerged from a hole lined with hanging strips of rubber. The conveyor made a wide circle on the apron where the handlers normally stood to unload the flatties, then re-entered the terminal through another hole hung with rubber strips.

“What are those pieces of rubber for?” Bethany asked nervously.

“To keep out the draft in cold weather, I imagine,” Nick said. “Just let me poke my head through and have a look. No fear; won't be a moment.” And before anyone could reply, he had boosted himself onto the conveyor belt and was walking bent-over down to one of the holes cut into the building. When he got there, he dropped to his knees and poked his head through the rubber strips.

We're going to hear a whistle and then a thud,
Albert thought wildly,
and when we pull him back, his head will be gone.

There was no whistle, no thud. When Nick withdrew, his head was still firmly attached to his neck, and his face wore a thoughtful expression. “Coast's clear,” he said, and to Albert his cheery tone now sounded manufactured. “Come on through, friends. When a body meet a body, and all that.”

Bethany held back. “Are there bodies? Mister, are there dead people in there?”

“Not that I saw, miss,” Nick said, and now he had dropped any attempt at lightness. “I was misquoting old Bobby Burns in an attempt to be funny. I'm afraid I achieved tastelessness instead of humor. The fact is, I didn't see anyone at all. But that's pretty much what we expected, isn't it?”

It was... but it struck heavily at their hearts just the same. Nick's as well, from his tone.

One after the other they climbed onto the conveyor belt and crawled after him through the hanging rubber strips.

Dinah paused just outside the entrance hole and turned her head back toward Laurel. Hazy light flashed across her dark glasses, turning them to momentary mirrors.

“It's really wrong here,” she repeated, and pushed through to the other side.

One by one they emerged into the main terminal of Bangor International Airport, exotic baggage crawling along a stalled conveyor belt. Albert helped Dinah off and then they all stood there, looking around in silent wonder.

The shocked amazement at waking to a plane which had been magically emptied of people had worn off; now dislocation had taken the place of wonder. None of them had ever been in an airport terminal which was utterly empty. The rental-car stalls were deserted. The ARRIVALS/DEPARTURES monitors were dark and dead. No one stood at the bank of counters serving Delta, United, Northwest Air-Link, or Mid-Coast Airways. The huge tank in the middle of the floor with the BUY MAINE LOBSTERS banner stretched over it was full of water, but there were no lobsters in it. The overhead fluorescents were off, and the small amount of light entering through the doors on the far side of the large room petered out halfway across the floor, leaving the little group from Flight 29 huddled together in an unpleasant nest of shadows.