Four Past Midnight

2

Before Brian began to turn west again, he saw what lay east of Bangor. It was nothing. Nothing at all. A titantic 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.

3

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 brightblue 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.

4

'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 the man.

'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.

5

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 Hopewell - 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.

Did you save us, Dinah? Did you do something to Mr Toomy that saved us? Did you make him somehow trade his life for ours?

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.'

6

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