Four Past Midnight

window. Then she slowly reached out until her fingers touched the glass. They looked like black starfish outlined against the white sky. She let out a small, unhappy Murmur.

'The glass is wrong, too,' she said in that dreaming voice.

'Dinah -' Laurel began.

'Shhh . . .'she whispered without turning round. She stood at the window like a little girl waiting for her father to come home from work. 'I hear something.'

These whispered words sent a wordless, thoughtless horror through Albert Kaussner's mind. He felt pressure on his shoulders and looked down to see he had crossed his arms across his chest and was clutching himself hard.

Brian listened with all his concentration. He heard his own breathing, and the breathing of the others ... but he heard nothing else. It's her imagination, he thought. That's all it is.

But he wondered.

'What?' Laurel asked urgently. 'What do you hear, Dinah?'

'I don't know,' she said without turning from the window. 'It's very faint. I thought I heard it when we got off the airplane, and then I decided it was just my imagination. Now I can hear it better. I can hear it even through the glass. It sounds ... a little like Rice Krispies after you pour in the milk.'

Brian turned to Nick and spoke in a low voice. 'Do you hear anything?'

'Not a bloody thing,' Nick said, matching Brian's tone. 'But she's blind. She's used to making her ears do double duty.'

'I think it's hysteria,' Brian said. He was whispering now, his lips almost touching Nick's ear.

Dinah turned from the window.

''Do you hear anything?'' she mimicked. ''Not a bloody thing. But she's blind. She's used to making her ears do double duty.'' She paused, then added: ''I think it's hysteria.''

'Dinah, what are you talking about?' Laurel asked, perplexed and frightened. She had not heard Brian and Nick's muttered conversation, although she had been standing much closer to them than Dinah was.

'Ask them,' Dinah said. Her voice was trembling. 'I'm not crazy! I'm blind, but I'm not crazy!'

'All right,' Brian said, shaken. 'All right, Dinah.' And to Laurel he said: 'I was talking to Nick. She heard us. From over there by the windows, she heard us.'

You've got great ears, hon,' Bethany said.

I hear what I hear,' Dinah said. 'And I hear something out there. In that direction.' She pointed due east through the glass. Her unseeing eyes swept them. 'And it's bad. It's an awful sound, a scary sound.'

Don Gaffney said hesitantly: 'If you knew what it was, little miss, that would help, maybe.'

'I don't,' Dinah said. 'But I know that it's closer than it was.' She put her dark glasses back on with a hand that was trembling. 'We have to get out of here. And we have to get out soon. Because something is coming. The bad something making the cereal noise.'

'Dinah,' Brian said, 'the plane we came in is almost out of fuel.'

'Then you have to put some more in it!' Dinah screamed shrilly at him. 'It's coming, don't you understand? It's coming, and if we haven't gone when it gets here, we're going to die! We're all going to die!'

Her voice cracked and she began to sob. She was not a sibyl or a medium but only a little girl forced to live her terror in a darkness which was almost complete. She staggered toward them, her self-possession utterly gone. Laurel grabbed her before she could stumble over one of the guide-ropes which marked the way to the security checkpoint and hugged her tight. She tried to soothe the girl, but those last words echoed and rang in Laurel's confused, shocked mind: If we haven't gone when it gets here, we're going to die.

We're all going to die.

12

Craig Toomy heard the brat begin to caterwaul back there someplace and ignored it. He had found what he was looking for in the third locker he opened, the one with the name MARKEY Dymotaped to the front. Mr Markey's lunch - a sub sandwich poking out of a brown paper bag - was on the top shelf. Mr Markey's street shoes were placed neatly side by side on the bottom shelf. Hanging in between, from the same hook, were a plain white shirt and a gunbelt. Protruding from the holster was the butt of Mr Markey's service revolver.

Craig unsnapped the safety strap and took the gun out. He didn't know much about guns - this could have been a .32, a .38, or even a .45, for all of him - but he was not stupid, and after a few moments of fumbling he was able to roll the cylinder. All six chambers were loaded. He pushed the cylinder back in, nodding slightly when he heard it click home, and then inspected the hammer area and both sides of the grip. He was looking for a safety catch, but there didn't appear to be one. He put his finger on the trigger and tightened until he saw both the hammer and the cylinder move slightly. Craig nodded, satisfied.

He turned around and without warning the most intense loneliness of his adult life struck him. The gun seemed to take on weight and the hand holding it sagged. Now he stood with his shoulders slumped, the briefcase dangling from his right hand, the security guard's pistol dangling from his left. On his face was an expression of utter, abject misery. And suddenly a memory recurred to him, something he hadn't thought of in years: Craig Toomy, twelve years old, lying in bed and shivering as hot tears ran down his face. In the other room the stereo was turned up loud and his mother was singing along with Merrilee Rush in her droning off-key drunk's voice: 'Just call me angel ... of the morn-ing, bay-bee ... just touch my cheek ... before you leave me, bay-bee . . .'

Lying there in bed. Shaking. Crying. Not making a sound. And thinking: Why can't you love me and leave me alone, Momma? Why can't you just love me and leave me alone?

'I don't want to hurt anyone,' Craig Toomy muttered through his tears. 'I don't want to, but this ... this is intolerable.'

Across the room was a bank of TV monitors, all blank. For a moment, as he looked at them, the truth of what had happened, what was still happening, tried to crowd in on him. For a moment it almost broke through his complex system of neurotic shields and into the air-raid shelter where he lived his life.

Everyone is gone, Craiggy-weggy. The whole world is gone except for you and the people who were on that plane.

'No,' he moaned, and collapsed into one of the chairs standing around the Formica-topped kitchen table in the center of the room. 'No, that's not so. That's just not so. I refute that idea. I refute it utterly.'

The langoliers were here, and they will be back, his father said. It overrode the voice of his mother, as it always had. You better be gone when they get here . . . or you know what will happen.

He knew, all right. They would eat him. The langoliers would eat him up.

'But I don't want to hurt anyone,' he repeated in a dreary, distraught voice. There was a mimeographed duty roster lying on the table. Craig let go of his briefcase and laid the gun on the table beside him. Then he picked up the duty roster, looked at it for a moment with unseeing eyes, and began to tear a long strip from the lefthand side.

Rii-ip.

Soon he was hypnotized as a pile of thin strips - maybe the thinnest ever! - began to flutter down onto the table.