Four Past Midnight Read online

  Suddenly they began to clap their hands. They stood and faced him, applauding his arrival. Craig felt a huge, grateful grin begin to stretch his face.

  15

  Dinah had been left alone in first class. Her breathing had become very labored now, and her voice was a strangled choke.

  "Run to them, Craig! Quick! Quick!"

  16

  Craig tumbled off the conveyor, struck the concrete with a bone-rattling thump, and flailed to his feet. The pain no longer mattered. The angel had brought them! Of course she had brought them! Angels were like the ghosts in that story about Mr. Scrooge--they could do anything they wanted! The corona around her had begun to dim and she was fading out, but it didn't matter. She had brought his salvation: a net in which he was finally, blessedly caught.

  Run to them, Craig! Run around the plane! Run away from the plane! Run to them now!

  Craig began to run--a shambling stride that quickly became a crippled sprint. As he ran his head nodded up and down like a sunflower on a broken stalk. He ran toward humorless, unforgiving men who were his salvation, men who might have been fisher-folk standing in a boat beyond an unsuspected silver sky, retrieving their net to see what fabulous thing they had caught.

  17

  The LED readout for the left tank began to slow down when it reached 21,000 pounds, and by the time it topped 22,000 it had almost stopped. Brian understood what was happening and quickly flicked two switches, shutting down the hydraulic pumps. The 727-400 had given them what she had to give: a little over 46,000 pounds of jet-fuel. It would have to be enough.

  "All right," he said, standing up.

  "All right what?" Nick asked, also standing.

  "We're uncoupling and getting the fuck out of here."

  The approaching noise had reached deafening levels. Mixed into the crunching smacking sound and the transmission squeal were falling trees and the dull crump of collapsing buildings. Just before shutting the pumps down he had heard a number of crackling thuds followed by a series of deep splashes. A bridge falling into the river Nick had seen, he imagined.

  "Mr. Toomy!" Bethany screamed suddenly. "It's Mr. Toomy!"

  Nick beat Brian out the door and into first class, but they were both in time to see Craig go shambling and lurching across the taxiway. He ignored the plane completely. His destination appeared to be an empty triangle of grass bounded by a pair of crisscrossing taxiways.

  "What's he doing?" Rudy breathed.

  "Never mind him," Brian said. "We're all out of time. Nick? Go down the ladder ahead of me. Hold me while I uncouple the hose." Brian felt like a man standing naked on a beach as a tidal wave humps up on the horizon and rushes toward the shore.

  Nick followed him down and laid hold of Brian's belt again as Brian leaned out and twisted the nozzle of the hose, unlocking it. A moment later he yanked the hose free and dropped it to the cement, where the nozzle-ring clanged dully. Brian slammed the fuel-port door shut.

  "Come on," he said after Nick had pulled him back. His face was dirty gray. "Let's get out of here."

  But Nick did not move. He was frozen in place, staring to the east. His skin had gone the color of paper. On his face was an expression of dreamlike horror. His upper lip trembled, and in that moment he looked like a dog that is too frightened to snarl.

  Brian turned his head slowly in that direction, hearing the tendons in his neck creak like a rusty spring on an old screen door as he did so. He turned his head and watched as the langoliers finally entered stage left.

  18

  "So you see," Craig said, approaching the empty chair at the head of the table and standing before the men seated around it, "the brokers with whom I did business were not only unscrupulous ; many of them were actually CIA plants whose job it was to contact and fake out just such bankers as myself--men looking to fill up skinny portfolios in a hurry. As far as they are concerned, the end--keeping communism out of South America--justifies any available means."

  "What procedures did you follow to check these fellows out?" a fat man in an expensive blue suit asked. "Did you use a bond-insurance company, or does your bank retain a specific investigation firm in such cases?" Blue Suit's round, jowly face was perfectly shaved; his cheeks glowed with either good health or forty years of Scotch and sodas; his eyes were merciless chips of blue ice. They were wonderful eyes; they were father-eyes.

  Somewhere, far away from this boardroom two floors below the top of the Prudential Center, Craig could hear a hell of a racket going on. Road construction, he supposed. There was always road construction going on in Boston, and he suspected that most of it was unnecessary, that in most cases it was just the old, old story--the unscrupulous taking cheerful advantage of the unwary. It had nothing to do with him. Nothing whatever. His job was to deal with the man in the blue suit, and he couldn't wait to get started.

  "We're waiting, Craig," the president of his own banking institution said. Craig felt momentary surprise--Mr. Parker hadn't been scheduled to attend this meeting--and then the feeling was overwhelmed by happiness.

  "No procedures at all!" he screamed joyfully into their shocked faces. "I just bought and bought and bought! I followed NO ... PROCEDURES ... AT ALL!"

  He was about to go on, to elaborate on this theme, to really expound on it, when a sound stopped him. This sound was not miles away; this sound was close, very close, perhaps in the boardroom itself.

  A whickering chopping sound, like dry hungry teeth.

  Suddenly Craig felt a deep need to tear some paper--any paper would do. He reached for the legal pad in front of his place at the table, but the pad was gone. So was the table. So were the bankers. So was Boston.

  "Where am I?" he asked in a small, perplexed voice, and looked around. Suddenly he realized ... and suddenly he saw them.

  The langoliers had come.

  They had come for him.

  Craig Toomy began to scream.

  19

  Brian could see them, but could not understand what it was he was seeing. In some strange way they seemed to defy seeing, and he sensed his frantic, overstressed mind trying to change the incoming information, to make the shapes which had begun to appear at the east end of Runway 21 into something it could understand.

  At first there were only two shapes, one black, one a dark tomato red.

  Are they balls? his mind asked doubtfully. Could they be balls?

  Something actually seemed to click in the center of his head and they were balls, sort of like beachballs, but balls which rippled and contracted and then expanded again, as if he was seeing them through a heat-haze. They came bowling out of the high dead grass at the end of Runway 21, leaving cut swaths of blackness behind them. They were somehow cutting the grass--

  No, his mind reluctantly denied. They are not just cutting the grass, and you know it. They are cutting a lot more than the grass.

  What they left behind were narrow lines of perfect blackness. And now, as they raced playfully down the white concrete at the end of the runway, they were still leaving narrow dark tracks behind. They glistened like tar.

  No, his mind reluctantly denied. Not tar. You know what that blackness is. It's nothing. Nothing at all. They are eating a lot more than the surface of the runway.

  There was something malignantly joyful about their behavior. They crisscrossed each other's paths, leaving a wavery black X on the outer taxiway. They bounced high in the air, did an exuberant, crisscrossing maneuver, and then raced straight for the plane.

  As they did, Brian screamed and Nick screamed beside him. Faces lurked below the surfaces of the racing balls--monstrous, alien faces. They shimmered and twitched and wavered like faces made of glowing swamp-gas. The eyes were only rudimentary indentations, but the mouths were huge: semicircular caves lined with gnashing, blurring teeth.

  They ate as they came, rolling up narrow strips of the world.

  A Texaco fuel truck was parked on the outer taxiway. The langoliers pounced upon it, high-speed teeth whirrin
g and crunching and bulging out of their blurred bodies. They went through it without pause. One of them burrowed a path directly through the rear tires, and for a moment, before the tires collapsed, Brian could see the shape it had cut--a shape like a cartoon mouse-hole in a cartoon baseboard.

  The other leaped high, disappeared for a moment behind the Texaco truck's boxy tank, and then blasted straight through, leaving a metal-ringed hole from which av-gas sprayed in a dull amber flood. They struck the ground, bounced as if on springs, crisscrossed again, and raced on toward the airplane. Reality peeled away in narrow strips beneath them, peeled away wherever and whatever they touched, and as they neared, Brian realized that they were unzipping more than the world--they were opening all the depths of forever.

  They reached the edge of the tarmac and paused. They jittered uncertainly in place for a moment, looking like the bouncing balls that hopped over the words in old movie-house sing-alongs.

  Then they turned and zipped off in a new direction.

  Zipped off in the direction of Craig Toomy, who stood watching them and screaming into the white day.

  With a huge effort, Brian snapped the paralysis which held him. He elbowed Nick, who was still frozen below him. "Come on!" Nick didn't move and Brian drove his elbow back harder this time, connecting solidly with Nick's forehead. "Come on, I said! Move your ass! We're getting out of here!"

  Now more black and red balls were appearing at the edge of the airport. They bounced, danced, circled ... and then raced toward them.

  20

  You can't get away from them, his father had said, because of their legs. Their fast little legs.

  Craig tried, nevertheless.

  He turned and ran for the terminal, casting horrified, grimacing looks behind him as he did. His shoes rattled on the pavement. He ignored the American Pride 767, which was now cycling up again, and ran for the luggage area instead.

  No, Craig, his father said. You may THINK you're running, but you're not. You know what you're really doing--you're SCAMPERING!

  Behind him the two ball-shapes sped up, closing the gap with effortless, happy speed. They crisscrossed twice, just a pair of daffy showoffs in a dead world, leaving spiky lines of blackness behind them. They rolled after Craig about seven inches apart, creating what looked like negative ski-tracks behind their weird, shimmering bodies. They caught him twenty feet from the luggage conveyor belt and chewed off his feet in a millisecond. At one moment his briskly scampering feet were there. At the next, Craig was three inches shorter; his feet, along with his expensive Bally loafers, had simply ceased to exist. There was no blood; the wounds were cauterized instantly in the langoliers' scorching passage.

  Craig didn't know his feet had ceased to exist. He scampered on the stumps of his ankles, and as the first pain began to sizzle up his legs, the langoliers banked in a tight turn and came back, rolling up the pavement side by side. Their trails crossed twice this time, creating a crescent of cement bordered in black, like a depiction of the moon in a child's coloring book. Only this crescent began to sink, not into the earth--for there appeared to be no earth beneath the surface--but into nowhere at all.

  This time the langoliers bounced upward in perfect tandem and clipped Craig off at the knees. He came down, still trying to run, and then fell sprawling, waving his stumps. His scampering days were over.

  "No!" he screamed. "No, Daddy! No! I'll be good! Please make them go away! I'll be good, I SWEAR I'LL BE GOOD FROM NOW ON IF YOU JUST MAKE THEM GO AW--"

  Then they rushed at him again, gibbering yammering buzzing whining, and he saw the frozen machine blur of their gnashing teeth and felt the hot bellows of their frantic, blind vitality in the half-instant before they began to cut him apart in random chunks.

  His last thought was: How can their little legs be fast? They have no le

  21

  Scores of the black things had now appeared, and Laurel understood that soon there would be hundreds, thousands, millions, billions. Even with the jet engines screaming through the open forward door as Brian pulled the 767 away from the ladder and the wing of the Delta jet, she could hear their yammering, inhuman cry.

  Great looping coils of blackness crisscrossed the end of Runway 21--and then the tracks narrowed toward the terminal, converging as the balls making them rushed toward Craig Toomy.

  I guess they don't get live meat very often, she thought, and suddenly felt like vomiting.

  Nick Hopewell slammed the forward door after one final, unbelieving glance and dogged it shut. He began to stagger back down the aisle, swaying from side to side like a drunk as he came. His eyes seemed to fill his whole face. Blood streamed down his chin; he had bitten his lower lip deeply. He put his arms around Laurel and buried his burning face in the hollow where her neck met her shoulder. She put her arms around him and held him tight.

  22

  In the cockpit, Brian powered up as fast as he dared, and sent the 767 charging along the taxiway at a suicidal rate of speed. The eastern edge of the airport was now black with the invading balls; the end of Runway 21 had completely disappeared and the world beyond it was going. In that direction the white, unmoving sky now arched down over a world of scrawled black lines and fallen trees.

  As the plane neared the end of the taxiway, Brian grabbed the microphone and shouted: "Belt in! Belt in! If you're not belted in, hold on!"

  He slowed marginally, then slewed the 767 onto Runway 33. As he did so he saw something which made his mind cringe and wail: huge sections of the world which lay to the east of the runway, huge irregular pieces of reality itself, were falling into the ground like freight elevators, leaving big senseless chunks of emptiness behind.

  They are eating the world, he thought. My God, my dear God, they are eating the world.

  Then the entire airfield was turning in front of him and Flight 29 was pointed west again, with Runway 33 lying open and long and deserted before it.

  23

  Overhead compartments burst open when the 767 swerved onto the runway, spraying carry-on luggage across the main cabin in a deadly hail. Bethany, who hadn't had time to fasten her seatbelt, was hurled into Albert Kaussner's lap. Albert noticed neither his lapful of warm girl nor the attache case that caromed off the curved wall three feet in front of his nose. He saw only the dark, speeding shapes rushing across Runway 21 to the left of them, and the glistening dark tracks they left behind. These tracks converged in a giant well of blackness where the luggage-unloading area had been.

  They are being drawn to Mr. Toomy, he thought, or to where Mr. Toomy was. If he hadn't come out of the terminal, they would have chosen the airplane instead. They would have eaten it--and us inside it--from the wheels up.

  Behind him, Bob Jenkins spoke in a trembling, awed voice. "Now we know, don't we?"

  "What?" Laurel screamed in an odd, breathless voice she did not recognize as her own. A duffel-bag landed in her lap; Nick raised his head, let go of her, and batted it absently into the aisle. "What do we know?"

  "Why, what happens to today when it becomes yesterday, what happens to the present when it becomes the past. It waits--dead and empty and deserted. It waits for them. It waits for the time-keepers of eternity, always running along behind, cleaning up the mess in the most efficient way possible ... by eating it."

  "Mr. Toomy knew about them," Dinah said in a clear, dreaming voice. "Mr. Toomy says they are the langoliers." Then the jet engines cycled up to full power and the plane charged down Runway 33.

  24

  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.

  25

  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.

  26

  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."

  CHAPTER NINE

  GOODBYE TO BANGOR. HEADING WEST THROUGH DAYS AND NIGHTS. SEEING THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS. THE ENDLESS GULF. THE RIP. THE WARNING. BRIAN'S DECISION. THE LANDING. SHOOTING STARS ONLY.

  1

  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?"