The answer was no!
Louis groped for the spade and found it. He raised it over his shoulder and brought it down on the coffin’s latch once, twice, a third time, a fourth. His lips were drawn back in a furious grimace.
Going to break you out, Gage, see if 1 don’t!
The latch had splintered on the first stroke and probably no more were necessary, but he went on, not wanting just to open the coffin but to hurt it. Some kind of sanity finally returned, and he stopped with the spade raised for another blow.
The blade was bent and scratched. He tossed it aside and scrambled out of the grave on legs that felt weak and rubbery. He felt sick to his stomach, and the anger had gone as quickly as it had come. In its place the coldness flooded back in, and never in his life had his mind felt so alone and disconnected; he felt like an astronaut who has floated away from his ship during an EVA and now only drifts in a great blackness, breathing on borrowed time.
Did Bill Baterman feel like this? he wondered.
He lay on the ground, on his back this time, waiting to see if he was under control and ready to proceed. When the rubbery feeling had left his legs, he sat up and slipped back down into the grave.
He shone the flashlight on the latch and saw it was not just broken, but demolished. He had swung the spade in a blind fury, but every blow he had struck had gone directly there, bull’s eye, as if guided.
The wood around it had splintered.
Louis slipped the flashlight into his armpit. He squatted down slightly. His hands groped, like the hands of a catcher in a troupe of circus flyers, waiting to perform his part in a mortal docking.
He found the groove in the lid, and he slipped his fingers into it.
He paused for a moment—one could not rightly call it a hesitation—and then he opened his son’s coffin.
50
Rachel Creed almost made her flight from Boston to Portland.
Almost. Her Chicago plane left on time (a miracle in itself), was cleared straight into LaGuardia (another), and left New York only five minutes behind schedule. It got to the gate in Boston fifteen minutes late—at 11:12 P.M. That left her with thirteen minutes.
She still might have made her connecting flight, but the shuttle bus which makes a circle around the Logan terminals was late. Rachel waited, now in a kind of constant low-grade panic, shifting from foot to foot as if she needed to go to the bathroom, switching the travel bag her mother had loaned her from one shoulder to the other.
When the shuttle still hadn’t come at 11:25, she began to run. Her heels were low but still high enough to cause her problems. One of her ankles buckled painfully, and she paused long enough to take off the shoes. Then she ran on in her pantyhose, past Allegheny and Eastern Airlines, breathing hard now, getting the beginnings of a stitch in her side.
Her breath was hot in her throat, that tuck in her side deeper and more painful. Now she was running past the international terminal, and there, up ahead, was Delta’s triangular sign. She burst in through the doors, almost dropped one shoe, juggled it, caught it. It was 11:37.
One of the two clerks on duty glanced up at her.
“Flight 104,” she panted. “The Portland flight. Has it left?”
The clerk glanced behind him at the monitor. “Still at the gate it says here,” he said, “but they called for final boarding five minutes ago. I’ll call ahead. Bags to check?”
“No,” Rachel gasped, and brushed her sweaty hair out of her eyes.
Her heart was galloping in her chest.
“Then don’t wait for me to call. I will—but I advise you to run very fast.”
Rachel didn’t run very fast—she was no longer able. But she did as well as she could. The escalator had been turned off for the night, and she pounded up the stairs, tasting copper shavings in her mouth. She reached the security checkpoint and almost threw the tote bag at the startled female guard, then waited for it to come through on the conveyor belt, her hands clenching and unclenching. It was barely out of the X-ray chamber before she had snatched it by the strap and ran again, the bag flying out behind her and then banging her on the hip.
She looked up at one of the monitors as she ran.
FLIGHT 104 PORTLAND SCHED 11:25P GATE 31
BOARDING
Gate 31 was at the far end of the concourse—and even as she snatched her glance at the monitor, BOARDING in steady letters changed to DEPARTING, blinking rapidly.
A frustrated cry burst from her. She ran into the gate area just in time to see the gate attendant removing the strips which read: FLIGHT 104 BOSTON–PORTLAND 11:25.
“It’s gone?” she asked incredulously. “It’s really gone?”
The attendant looked at her sympathetically. “It rolled out of the jetway at 11:40. I’m sorry, ma’am. You made a helluva good try, if that’s any consolation.” He pointed out the wide glass windows.
Rachel could see a big 727 with Delta markings, its running lights Christmas-tree bright, starting its takeoff roll.
“Christ, didn’t anyone tell you I was coming?” Rachel cried.
“When they called up here from downstairs, 104 was on an active taxiway. If I’d called her back, she would have gotten caught in the parade going out to Runway 30, and that pilot would have had my bee-hind on a platter. Not to mention the hundred or so passengers on board. I’m very sorry. If you’d been even four minutes sooner—”
She walked away, not listening to the rest. She was halfway back to the security checkpoint when waves of faintness rode over her.
She stumbled into another gate area and sat down until the darkness had passed. Then she slipped her shoes back on, picking a squashed Lark cigarette butt off the tattered sole of one stocking first. My feet are dirty and I don’t give a fuck, she thought disconsolately.
She walked back toward the terminal.
The security guard eyed her sympathetically. “Missed it?”
“I missed it, all right,” Rachel said.
“Where were you headed?”
“Portland. Then Bangor.”
“Well, why don’t you rent a car? If you really have to be there, that is? Ordinarily I’d advise a hotel close to the airport, but if I ever saw a lady who looked like she really had to be there, you are that lady.”
“I’m that lady, all right,” Rachel said. She thought about it. “Yes, I suppose I could do that, couldn’t I? If any of the agencies has a car.”
The security guard laughed. “Oh, they’ll have cars. Only time they don’t have cars at Logan is when the airport’s fogged in. Which is a lot of the time.”
Rachel barely heard her. In her mind she was already trying to calculate it.
She couldn’t get to Portland in time to catch her Bangor flight even if she bulleted up the turnpike at a suicidal pace. So figure driving straight through. How long? That depended on how far. Two hundred and fifty miles, that was the figure which came to mind.
Something Jud had said maybe. It was going to be at least a quarter past twelve before she got going, probably closer to 12:30 A.M. It was all turnpike. She thought that her chances of going the whole distance at sixty-five without getting hauled down for speeding were reasonably good. She ran the figures quickly in her head, dividing sixty-five into two hundred and fifty. Not quite four hours. Well . . . say four even. She would have to stop once and go to the bathroom. And although sleep seemed impossibly distant now, she knew her own resources well enough to believe she would also have to stop for a great big
black coffee. Still she could be back in Ludlow before first light.
Mulling all this over, she started for the stairs—the car rental desks were one level down from the concourses.
“Good luck, honey,” the security guard called. “Take care.”
“Thanks,” Rachel said. She felt that she deserved some good luck.
51
The smell hit him first, and Louis recoiled, gagging. He hung on the edge of the grave, breathing hard, and just when he thought he had his gorge under control, his entire big, tasteless meal came up in a spurt. He threw up on the far side of the grave and then put his
head against the ground, panting. At last the nausea passed. Teeth clamped together, he took the flashlight out of his armpit and shone it down into the open coffin.
A deep horror that was very nearly awe stole over him—it was the sort of feeling usually reserved for the worst nightmares, the ones you can barely remember upon awakening.