Four Past Midnight (33 page)

Brian saw two of the balls zip across the runway ahead of him, peeling back the surface of reality in a pair of parallel tracks which gleamed like polished ebony. It was too late to stop. The 767 shuddered like a dog with a chill as it raced over the empty places, but he was able to hold it on the runway. He shoved his throttles forward, burying them, and watched his ground-speed indicator rise toward the commit point.

Even now he could hear those manic chewing, gobbling sounds ... although he did not know if they were in his ears or only his reeling mind. And did not care.

Leaning over Laurel to look out the window, Nick saw the Bangor International terminal sliced, diced, chopped, and channelled. It tottered in its various jigsaw pieces and then began to tumble into loony chasms of darkness.

Bethany Simms screamed. A black track was speeding along next to the 767, chewing up the edge of the runway. Suddenly it jagged to the right and disappeared underneath the plane.

There was another terrific bump.

“Did it get us?” Nick shouted.
“Did it get us?”

No one answered him. Their pale, terrified faces stared out the windows and no one answered him. Trees rushed by in a gray-green blur. In the cockpit, Brian sat tensely forward in his seat, waiting for one of those balls to bounce up in front of the cockpit window and bullet through. None did.

On his board, the last red lights turned green. Brian hauled back on the yoke and the 767 was airborne again.

In the main cabin, a black-bearded man with bloodshot eyes staggered forward, blinking owlishly at his fellow travellers. “Are we almost in Boston yet?” he inquired at large. “I hope so, because I want to go back to bed. I've got one
bastard
of a headache.”

The plane banked heavily east, throwing the man with the black beard into a row of empty seats three-quarters of the way up the main cabin. He looked around at all the other empty seats with a wide, frightened gaze, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Jesus,” he muttered. “DTs. Fucking DTs. This is the worst they've ever been.” He looked around fearfully. “The bugs come next . . . where's the motherfuckin bugs?”

No bugs,
Albert thought,
but wait till you see the balls. You're going to love those.

“Buckle yourself in, mate,” Nick said, “and shut u—”

He broke off, staring down incredulously at the airport ... or where the airport had been. The main buildings were gone, and the National Guard base at the west end was going. Flight 29 overflew a growing abyss of darkness, an eternal cistern that seemed to have no end.

“Oh dear Jesus, Nick,” Laurel said unsteadily, and suddenly put her hands over her eyes.

As they overflew Runway 33 at 1,500 feet, Nick saw sixty or a hundred parallel lines racing up the concrete, cutting the runway into long strips that sank into emptiness. The strips reminded him of Craig Toomy:

On the other side of the aisle, Bethany pulled down the windowshade beside Albert's seat with a bang.

“Don't you dare open that!” she told him in a scolding, hysterical voice.

“Don't worry,” Albert said, and suddenly remembered that he had left his violin down there. Well . . . it was undoubtedly gone now. He abruptly put his hands over his own face.

Before Brian began to turn west again, he saw what lay east of Bangor. It was nothing. Nothing at all. A titanic river of blackness lay in a still sweep from horizon to horizon under the white dome of the sky. The trees were gone, the city was gone, the earth itself was gone.

This is what it must be like to fly in outer space,
he thought, and he felt his rationality slip a cog, as it had on the trip east. He held onto himself desperately and made himself concentrate on flying the plane.

He brought them up quickly, wanting to be in the clouds, wanting that hellish vision to be blotted out. Then Flight 29 was pointed west again. In the moments before they entered the clouds, he saw the hills and woods and lakes which stretched to the west of the city, saw them being cut ruthlessly apart by thousands of black spiderweb lines. He saw huge swatches of reality go sliding soundlessly into the growing mouth of the abyss, and Brian did something he had never done before while in the cockpit of an airplane.

He closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were in the clouds.

There was almost no turbulence this time; as Bob Jenkins had suggested, the weather patterns appeared to be running down like an old clock. Ten minutes after entering the clouds, Flight 29 emerged into the bright-blue world which began at 18,000 feet. The remaining passengers looked around at each other nervously, then at the speakers as Brian came on the intercom.

“We're up,” he said simply. “You all know what happens now: we go back exactly the way we came, and hope that whatever doorway we came through is still there. If it is, we'll try going through.”

He paused for a moment, then resumed.

“Our return flight is going to take somewhere between four and a half and six hours. I'd like to be more exact, but I can't. Under ordinary circumstances, the flight west usually takes longer than the flight east, because of prevailing wind conditions, but so far as I can tell from my cockpit instruments, there is no wind.” Brian paused for a moment and then added, “There's nothing moving up here but us.” For a moment the intercom stayed on, as if Brian meant to add something else, and then it clicked off.

“What in God's name is going on here?” the man with the black beard asked shakily.

Albert looked at him for a moment and then said, “I don't think you want to know.”

“Am I in the hospital again?” The man with the black beard blinked at Albert fearfully, and Albert felt sudden sympathy for him.

“Well, why don't you believe you are, if it will help?”

The man with the black beard continued to stare at him for a moment in dreadful fascination and then announced, “I'm going back to sleep. Right now.” He reclined his seat and closed his eyes. In less than a minute his chest was moving up and down with deep regularity and he was snoring under his breath.

Albert envied him.

Nick gave Laurel a brief hug, then unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up. “I'm going forward,” he said. “Want to come?”

Laurel shook her head and pointed across the aisle at Dinah. “I'll stay with her.”

“There's nothing you can do, you know,” Nick said. “It's in God's hands now, I'm afraid.”

“I do know that,” she said, “but I want to stay.”

“All right, Laurel.” He brushed at her hair gently with the palm of his hand. “It's such a pretty name. You deserve it.”

She glanced up at him and smiled. “Thank you.”

“We have a dinner date—you haven't forgotten, have you?”

“No,” she said, still smiling. “I haven't and I won't.”

He bent down and brushed a kiss lightly across her mouth. “Good, he said. ”Neither will I.”

He went forward and she pressed her fingers lightly against her mouth, as if to hold his kiss there, where it belonged. Dinner with Nick Hopewett—a dark, mysterious stranger. Maybe with candles and a good bottle of wine. More kisses afterward—real kisses. It all seemed like something which might happen in one of the Harlequin romances she sometimes read. So what? They were pleasant stories, full of sweet and harmless dreams. It didn't hurt to dream a little, did it?

Of course not. But why did she feel the dream was so unlikely to come true?

She unbuckled her own seatbelt, crossed the aisle, and put her hand on the girl's forehead. The hectic heat she had felt before was gone; Dinah's skin was now waxy-cool.

I think she's going,
Rudy had said shortly before they started their headlong take-off charge. Now the words recurred to Laurel and rang in her head with sickening validity. Dinah was taking air in shallow sips, her chest barely rising and falling beneath the strap which cinched the tablecloth pad tight over her wound.

Laurel brushed the girl's hair off her forehead with infinite tenderness and thought of that strange moment in the restaurant, when Dinah had reached out and grasped the cuff of Nick's jeans.
Don't you kill him . . . we need him.

She thought that perhaps something like that had happened ... and reflected that, if it was true, this little girl, blind and badly wounded, had made a dreadful decision inside her darkness.

She leaned forward and kissed each of Dinah's cool, closed lids. “Hold on,” she whispered. “Please hold on, Dinah.”

Bethany turned to Albert, grasped both of his hands in hers, and asked: “What happens if the fuel goes bad?”

Albert looked at her seriously and kindly. “You know the answer to that, Bethany.”

“You can call me Beth, if you want.”

“Okay.”

She fumbled out her cigarettes, looked up at the NO SMOKING light, and put them away again. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. We crash. End of story. And do you know what?”

He shook his head, smiling a little.

“If we can't find that hole again, I hope Captain Engle won't even try to land the plane. I hope he just picks out a nice high mountain and crashes us into the top of it. Did you see what happened to that crazy guy? I don't want that to happen to me.”

She shuddered, and Albert put an arm around her. She looked up at him frankly. “Would you like to kiss me?”

“Yes,” Albert said.

“Well, you better go ahead, then. The later it gets, the later it gets.”

Albert went ahead. It was only the third time in his life that the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi had kissed a girl, and it was great. He could spend the whole trip back in a lip-lock with this girl and never worry about a thing.

“Thank you,” she said, and put her head on his shoulder. “I needed that.”

“Well, if you need it again, just ask,” Albert said.

She looked up at him, amused. “Do you
need
me to ask, Albert?”

“I reckon not,” drawled The Arizona Jew, and went back to work.

Nick had stopped on his way to the cockpit to speak to Bob Jenkins—an extremely nasty idea had occurred to him, and he wanted to ask the writer about it.

“Do you think there could be any of those things up here?”

Bob thought it over for a moment. “Judging from what we saw back at Bangor, I would think not. But it's hard to tell, isn't it? In a thing like this, all bets are off.”

“Yes. I suppose so. All bets are off.” Nick thought this over for a moment. “What about this time-rip of yours? Would you like to give odds on us finding it again?”

Bob Jenkins slowly shook his head.

Rudy Warwick spoke up from behind them, startling them both. “You didn't ask me, but I'll give you my opinion just the same. I put them at one in a thousand.”

Nick thought this over. After a moment a rare, radiant smile burst across his face. “Not bad odds at all,” he said. “Not when you consider the alternative.”

Less than forty minutes later, the blue sky through which Flight 29 moved began to deepen in color. It cycled slowly to indigo, and then to deep purple. Sitting in the cockpit, monitoring his instruments and wishing for a cup of coffee, Brian thought of an old song:
When the deep purple falls . . . over sleepy garden walls
...

No garden walls up here, but he could see the first ice-chip stars gleaming in the firmament. There was something reassuring and calming about the old constellations appearing, one by one, in their old places. He did not know how they could be the same when so many other things were so badly out of joint, but he was very glad they were.

“It's going faster, isn't it?” Nick said from behind him.

Brian turned in his seat to face him. “Yes. It is. After awhile the ‘days' and ‛nights' will be passing as fast as a camera shutter can click, I think.”

Nick sighed. “And now we do the hardest thing of all, don't we? We wait to see what happens. And pray a little bit, I suppose.”

“It couldn't hurt.” Brian took a long, measuring look at Nick Hopewell. “I was on my way to Boston because my ex-wife died in a stupid fire. Dinah was going because a bunch of doctors promised her a new pair of eyes. Bob was going to a convention, Albert to music school, Laurel on vacation. Why were you going to Boston, Nick? 'Fess up. The hour groweth late.”

Nick looked at him thoughtfully for a long time and then laughed. “Well, why not?” he asked, but Brian was not so foolish as to believe this question was directed at him. “What does a Most Secret classification mean when you've just seen a bunch of killer fuzzballs rolling up the world like an old rug?”

He laughed again.

“The United States hasn't exactly cornered the market on dirty tricks and covert operations,” he told Brian. “We Limeys have forgotten more nasty mischief than you johnnies ever knew. We've cut capers in India, South Africa, China, and the part of Palestine which became Israel. We certainly got into a pissing contest with the wrong fellows that time, didn't we? Nevertheless, we British are great believers in cloak and dagger, and the fabled MI5 isn't where it ends but only where it begins. I spent eighteen years in the armed services, Brian—the last five of them in Special Operations. Since then I've done various odd jobs, some innocuous, some fabulously nasty.”