Four Past Midnight Read online

  Every seat she investigated was empty.

  This can't be, she thought wildly. It just can't be! They were all around us when we got on! I heard them! I felt them! I smelled them! Where have they all gone?

  She didn't know, but they were gone: she was becoming steadily more sure of that.

  At some point, while she slept, her aunt and everyone else on Flight 29 had disappeared.

  No! The rational part of her mind clamored in the voice of Miss Lee. No, that's impossible, Dinah! If everyone's gone, who is flying the plane?

  She began to move forward faster now, hands gripping the edges of the seats, her blind eyes wide open behind her dark glasses, the hem of her pink travelling dress fluttering. She had lost count, but in her greater distress over the continuing silence, this did not matter much to her.

  She stopped again, and reached her groping hands into the seat on her right. This time she touched hair ... but its location was all wrong. The hair was on the seat--how could that be?

  Her hands closed around it ... and lifted it. Realization, sudden and terrible, came to her.

  It's hair, but the man it belongs to is gone. It's a scalp. I'm holding a dead man's scalp.

  That was when Dinah Bellman opened her mouth and began to give voice to the shrieks which pulled Brian Engle from his dream.

  6

  Albert Kaussner was belly up to the bar, drinking Branding Iron Whiskey. The Earp brothers, Wyatt and Virgil, were on his right, and Doc Holliday was on his left. He was just lifting his glass to offer a toast when a man with a peg leg ran-hopped into the Sergio Leone Saloon.

  "It's the Dalton Gang!" he screamed. "The Daltons have just rid into Dodge!"

  Wyatt turned to face him calmly. His face was narrow, tanned, and handsome. He looked a great deal like Hugh O'Brian. "This here is Tombstone, Muffin," he said. "You got to get yore stinky ole shit together."

  "Well, they're ridin in, wherever we are!" Muffin exclaimed. "And they look maaad, Wyatt! They look reeely reeely maaaaaaad!"

  As if to prove this, guns began to fire in the street outside--the heavy thunder of Army .44s (probably stolen) mixed in with the higher whipcrack explosions of Garand rifles.

  "Don't get your panties all up in a bunch, Muffy," Doc Holliday said, and tipped his hat back. Albert was not terribly surprised to see that Doc looked like Robert De Niro. He had always believed that if anyone was absolutely right to play the consumptive dentist, De Niro was the one.

  "What do you say, boys?" Virgil Earp asked, looking around. Virgil didn't look like much of anyone.

  "Let's go," Wyatt said. "I've had enough of these damned Clantons to last me a lifetime."

  "It's the Daltons, Wyatt," Albert said quietly.

  "I don't care if it's John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd!" Wyatt exclaimed. "Are you with us or not, Ace?"

  "I'm with you," Albert Kaussner said, speaking in the soft but menacing tones of the born killer. He dropped one hand to the butt of his long-barrelled Buntline Special and put the other to his head for a moment to make sure his yarmulke was on solidly. It was.

  "Okay, boys," Doc said. "Let's go cut some Dalton butt."

  They strode out together, four abreast through the batwing doors, just as the bell in the Tombstone Baptist Church began to toll high noon.

  The Daltons were coming down Main Street at a full gallop, shooting holes in plate-glass windows and false fronts. They turned the waterbarrel in front of Duke's Mercantile and Reliable Gun Repair into a fountain.

  Ike Dalton was the first to see the four men standing in the dusty street, their frock coats pulled back to free the handles of their guns. Ike reined his horse in savagely and it rose on its rear legs, squealing, foam splattering in thick curds around the bit. Ike Dalton looked quite a bit like Rutger Hauer.

  "Look what we have got here," he sneered. "It is Wyatt Earp and his pansy brother, Virgil."

  Emmett Dalton (who looked like Donald Sutherland after a month of hard nights) pulled up beside Ike. "And their faggot dentist friend, too," he snarled. "Who else wants--" Then he looked at Albert and paled. The thin sneer faltered on his lips.

  Paw Dalton pulled up beside his two sons. Paw bore a strong resemblance to Slim Pickens.

  "Christ," Paw whispered. "It's Ace Kaussner!"

  Now Frank James pulled his mount into line next to Paw. His face was the color of dirty parchment. "What the hell, boys!" Frank cried. "I don't mind hoorawin a town or two on a dull day, but nobody told me The Arizona Jew was gonna be here!"

  Albert "Ace" Kaussner, known from Sedalia to Steamboat Springs as The Arizona Jew, took a step forward. His hand hovered over the butt of his Buntline. He spat a stream of tobacco to one side, never taking his chilly gray eyes from the hardcases mounted twenty feet in front of him.

  "Go on and make your moves, boys," said The Arizona Jew. "By my count, hell ain't half full."

  The Dalton Gang slapped leather just as the clock in the tower of the Tombstone Baptist Church beat the last stroke of noon into the hot desert air. Ace went for his own gun, his draw as fast as blue blazes, and as he began to fan the hammer with the flat of his left hand, sending a spray of .45-caliber death into the Dalton Gang, a little girl standing outside The Longhorn Hotel began to scream.

  Somebody make that brat stop yowling, Ace thought. What's the matter with her, anyway? I got this under control. They don't call me the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi for nothing.

  But the scream went on, ripping across the air, darkening it as it came, and everything began to break up.

  For a moment Albert was nowhere at all--lost in a darkness through which fragments of his dream tumbled and spun in a whirlpool. The only constant was that terrible scream; it sounded like the shriek of an overloaded teakettle.

  He opened his eyes and looked around. He was in his seat toward the front of Flight 29's main cabin. Coming up the aisle from the rear of the plane was a girl of about ten or twelve, wearing a pink dress and a pair of ditty-bop shades.

  What is she, a movie star or something? he thought, but he was badly frightened, all the same. It was a bad way to exit his favorite dream.

  "Hey!" he cried--but softly, so as not to wake the other passengers. "Hey, kid! What's the deal?"

  The little girl whiplashed her head toward the sound of his voice. Her body turned a moment later, and she collided with one of the seats which ran down the center of the cabin in four-across rows. She struck it with her thighs, rebounded, and tumbled backward over the armrest of a portside seat. She fell into it with her legs up.

  "Where is everybody?" she was screaming. "Help me! Help me!"

  "Hey, stewardess!" Albert yelled, concerned, and unbuckled his seatbelt. He stood up, slipped out of his seat, turned toward the screaming little girl ... and stopped. He was now facing fully toward the back of the plane, and what he saw froze him in place.

  The first thought to cross his mind was, I guess I don't have to worry about waking up the other passengers, after all.

  To Albert it looked like the entire main cabin of the 767 was empty.

  7

  Brian Engle was almost to the partition separating Flight 29's first-class and business-class sections when he realized that first class was now entirely empty. He stopped for just a moment, then got moving again. The others had left their seats to see what all the screaming was about, perhaps.

  Of course he knew this was not the case; he had been flying passengers long enough to know a good bit about their group psychology. When a passenger freaked out, few if any of the others ever moved. Most air travellers meekly surrendered their option to take individual action when they entered the bird, sat down, and buckled their seatbelts around them. Once those few simple things were accomplished, all problem-solving tasks became the crew's responsibility. Airline personnel called them geese, but they were really sheep ... an attitude most flight crews liked just fine. It made the nervous ones easier to handle.

  But, since it was the only thing that m
ade even remote sense, Brian ignored what he knew and plunged on. The rags of his own dream were still wrapped around him, and a part of his mind was convinced that it was Anne who was screaming, that he would find her halfway down the main cabin with her hand plastered against a crack in the body of the airliner, a crack located beneath a sign which read SHOOTING STARS ONLY.

  There was only one passenger in the business section, an older man in a brown three-piece suit. His bald head gleamed mellowly in the glow thrown by his reading lamp. His arthritis-swollen hands were folded neatly over the buckle of his seatbelt. He was fast asleep and snoring loudly, ignoring the whole ruckus.

  Brian burst through into the main cabin and there his forward motion was finally checked by utter stunned disbelief. He saw a teenaged boy standing near a little girl who had fallen into a seat on the port side about a quarter of the way down the cabin. The boy was not looking at her, however; he was staring toward the rear of the plane, with his jaw hanging almost all the way to the round collar of his Hard Rock Cafe tee-shirt.

  Brian's first reaction was about the same as Albert Kaussner's: My God, the whole plane is empty!

  Then he saw a woman on the starboard side of the airplane stand up and walk into the aisle to see what was happening. She had the dazed, puffy look of someone who has just been jerked out of a sound sleep. Halfway down, in the center aisle, a young man in a crew-necked jersey was craning his neck toward the little girl and staring with flat, incurious eyes. Another man, this one about sixty, got up from a seat close to Brian and stood there indecisively. He was dressed in a red flannel shirt and he looked utterly bewildered. His hair was fluffed up around his head in untidy mad-scientist corkscrews.

  "Who's screaming?" he asked Brian. "Is the plane in trouble, mister? You don't think we're goin down, do you?"

  The little girl stopped screaming. She struggled up from the seat she had fallen into, and then almost tumbled forward in the other direction. The kid caught her just in time; he was moving with dazed slowness.

  Where have they gone? Brian thought. My dear God, where have they all gone?

  But his feet were moving toward the teenager and the little girl now. As he went, he passed another passenger who was still sleeping, this one a girl of about seventeen. Her mouth was open in an unlovely yawp and she was breathing in long, dry inhalations.

  He reached the teenager and the girl with the pink dress.

  "Where are they, man?" Albert Kaussner asked. He had an arm around the shoulders of the sobbing child, but he wasn't looking at her; his eyes slipped relentlessly back and forth across the almost deserted main cabin. "Did we land someplace while I was asleep and let them off?"

  "My aunt's gone!" the little girl sobbed. "My Aunt Vicky! I thought the plane was empty! I thought I was the only one! Where's my aunt, please? I want my aunt!"

  Brian knelt beside her for a moment, so they were at approximately the same level. He noticed the sunglasses and remembered seeing her get on with the blonde woman.

  "You're all right," he said. "You're all right, young lady. What's your name?"

  "Dinah," she sobbed. "I can't find my aunt. I'm blind and I can't see her. I woke up and the seat was empty--"

  "What's going on?" the young man in the crew-neck jersey asked. He was talking over Brian's head, ignoring both Brian and Dinah, speaking to the boy in the Hard Rock tee-shirt and the older man in the flannel shirt. "Where's everybody else?"

  "You're all right, Dinah," Brian repeated. "There are other people here. Can you hear them?"

  "Y-yes. I can hear them. But where's Aunt Vicky? And who's been killed?"

  "Killed?" a woman asked sharply. It was the one from the starboard side. Brian glanced up briefly and saw she was young, dark-haired, pretty. "Has someone been killed? Have we been hijacked?"

  "No one's been killed," Brian said. It was, at least, something to say. His mind felt weird: like a boat which has slipped its moorings. "Calm down, honey."

  "I felt his hair!" Dinah insisted. "Someone cut off his HAIR!"

  This was just too odd to deal with on top of everything else, and Brian dismissed it. Dinah's earlier thought suddenly struck home to him with chilly intensity--who the fuck was flying the plane?

  He stood up and turned to the older man in the red shirt. "I have to go forward," he said. "Stay with the little girl."

  "All right," the man in the red shirt said. "But what's happening?"

  They were joined by a man of about thirty-five who was wearing pressed blue-jeans and an oxford shirt. Unlike the others, he looked utterly calm. He took a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles from his pocket, shook them out by one bow, and put them on. "We seem a few passengers short, don't we?" he said. His British accent was almost as crisp as his shirt. "What about crew? Anybody know?"

  "That's what I'm going to find out," Brian said, and started forward again. At the head of the main cabin he turned back and counted quickly. Two more passengers had joined the huddle around the girl in the dark glasses. One was the teenaged girl who had been sleeping so heavily; she swayed on her feet as if she were either drunk or stoned. The other was an elderly gent in a fraying sport-coat. Eight people in all. To those he added himself and the guy in business class, who was, at least so far, sleeping through it all.

  Ten people.

  For the love of God, where are the rest of them?

  But this was not the time to worry about it--there were bigger problems at hand. Brian hurried forward, barely glancing at the old bald fellow snoozing in business class.

  8

  The service area squeezed behind the movie screen and between the two first-class heads was empty. So was the galley, but there Brian saw something which was extremely troubling: the beverage trolley was parked kitty-corner by the starboard bathroom. There were a number of used glasses on its bottom shelf.

  They were just getting ready to serve drinks, he thought. When it happened--whatever "it" was--they'd just taken out the trolley. Those used glasses are the ones that were collected before the roll-out. So whatever happened must have happened within half an hour of take-off, maybe a little longer--weren't there turbulence reports over the desert? I think so. And that weird shit about the aurora borealis--

  For a moment Brian was almost convinced that last was a part of his dream--it was certainly odd enough--but further reflection convinced him that Melanie Trevor, the flight attendant, had actually said it.

  Never mind that; what did happen? In God's name, what?

  He didn't know, but he did know that looking at the abandoned drinks trolley put an enormous feeling of terror and superstitious dread into his guts. For just a moment he thought that this was what the first boarders of the Mary Celeste must have felt like, coming upon a totally abandoned ship where all the sail was neatly laid on, where the captain's table had been set for dinner, where all ropes were neatly coiled and some sailor's pipe was still smoldering away the last of its tobacco on the foredeck ...

  Brian shook these paralyzing thoughts off with a tremendous effort and went to the door between the service area and the cockpit. He knocked. As he had feared, there was no response. And although he knew it was useless to do so, he curled his fist up and hammered on it.

  Nothing.

  He tried the doorknob. It didn't move. That was SOP in the age of unscheduled side-trips to Havana, Lebanon, and Tehran. Only the pilots could open it. Brian could fly this plane ... but not from out here.

  "Hey!" he shouted. "Hey, you guys! Open the door!"

  Except he knew better. The flight attendants were gone; almost all the passengers were gone; Brian Engle was willing to bet the 767's two-man cockpit crew was also gone.

  He believed Flight 29 was heading east on automatic pilot.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DARKNESS AND MOUNTAINS. THE TREASURETROVE. CREW-NECK'S NOSE. THE SOUND OF No DOGS BARKING. PANIC IS NOT ALLOWED. A CHANGE OF DESTINATION.

  1

  Brian had asked the older man in the red shirt to look after Dinah
, but as soon as Dinah heard the woman from the starboard side--the one with the pretty young voice--she imprinted on her with scary intensity, crowding next to her and reaching with a timid sort of determination for her hand. After the years spent with Miss Lee, Dinah knew a teacher's voice when she heard one. The dark-haired woman took her hand willingly enough.

  "Did you say your name was Dinah, honey?"

  "Yes," Dinah said. "I'm blind, but after my operation in Boston, I'll be able to see again. Probably be able to see. The doctors say there's a seventy per cent chance I'll get some vision, and a forty per cent chance I'll get all of it. What's your name?"

  "Laurel Stevenson," the dark-haired woman said. Her eyes were still conning the main cabin, and her face seemed unable to break out of its initial expression: dazed disbelief.

  "Laurel, that's a flower, isn't it?" Dinah asked. She spoke with feverish vivacity.

  "Uh-huh," Laurel said.

  "Pardon me," the man with the horn-rimmed glasses and the British accent said. "I'm going forward to join our friend."

  "I'll come along," the older man in the red shirt said.

  "I want to know what's going on here!" the man in the crew-neck jersey exclaimed abruptly. His face was dead pale except for two spots of color, as bright as rouge, on his cheeks. "I want to know what's going on right now."

  "Nor am I a bit surprised," the Brit said, and then began walking forward. The man in the red shirt trailed after him. The teenaged girl with the dopey look drifted along behind them for awhile and then stopped at the partition between the main cabin and the business section, as if unsure of where she was.

  The elderly gent in the fraying sport-coat went to a portside window, leaned over, and peered out.

  "What do you see?" Laurel Stevenson asked.

  "Darkness and mountains," the man in the sport-coat said.

  "The Rockies?" Albert asked.

  The man in the frayed sport-coat nodded. "I believe so, young man."

  Albert decided to go forward himself. He was seventeen, fiercely bright, and this evening's Bonus Mystery Question had also occurred to him: who was flying the plane?

  Then he decided it didn't matter ... at least for the moment. They were moving smoothly along, so presumably someone was, and even if someone turned out to be something --the autopilot, in other words--there wasn't a thing he could do about it. As Albert Kaussner he was a talented violinist--not quite a prodigy--on his way to study at The Berklee College of Music. As Ace Kaussner he was (in his dreams, at least) the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi, a bounty hunter who took it easy on Saturdays, was careful to keep his shoes off the bed, and always kept one eye out for the main chance and the other for a good kosher cafe somewhere along the dusty trail. Ace was, he supposed, his way of sheltering himself from loving parents who hadn't allowed him to play Little League baseball because he might damage his talented hands and who had believed, in their hearts, that every sniffle signalled the onset of pneumonia. He was a gunslinging viotinist--an interesting combination--but he didn't know a thing about flying planes. And the little girl had said something which had simultaneously intrigued him and curdled his blood. I felt his hair! she had said. Someone cut off his HAIR!