‘Yes … but . . .’
‘Good. Laurel, thank you.’ He put his left hand against the nape of her neck, pulled her face to his, and kissed her. His mouth was cold, and she tasted fear on his breath.
A moment later he was gone.
26
‘Are we going to feel like we’re … you know, choking?’ Bethany asked. ‘Suffocating?’
‘No,’ Brian said. He had gotten up to see if Nick was coming; now, as Nick reappeared with a very shaken Laurel Stevenson behind him, Brian dropped back into his seat. ‘You’ll feel a little giddy … swimmy in the head … then, nothing.’ He glanced at Nick. ‘Until we all wake up.’
‘Right!’ Nick said cheerily. ‘And who knows? I may still be right here. Bad pennies have a way of turning up, you know. Don’t they, Brian?’
‘Anything’s possible, I guess,’ Brian said. He pushed the throttle forward slightly. The sky was growing bright again. The rip lay dead ahead. ‘Sit down, folks. Nick, right up here beside me. I’m going to show you what to do … and when to do it.’
‘One second, please,’ Laurel said. She had regained some of her color and self-possession. She stood on tiptoe and planted a kiss on Nick’s mouth.
‘Thank you,’ Nick said gravely.
‘You were going to quit it. You’d made up your mind. And if he won’t listen, I’m to remind him of the day you brought the daisies. Have I got it right?’
He grinned. ‘Letter-perfect, my love. Letter-perfect.’ He encircled her with his left arm and kissed her again, long and hard. When he let her go, there was a gentle, thoughtful smile on his mouth. ‘That’s the one to go on,’ he said. ‘Right enough.’
27
Three minutes later, Brian opened the intercom. ‘I’m starting to decrease pressure now. Check your belts everyone.’
They did so. Albert waited tensely for some sound – the hiss of escaping air, perhaps – but there was only the steady, droning mumble of the jet engines. He felt more wide awake than ever.
‘Albert?’ Bethany said in a small, scared voice. ‘Would you hold me, please?’
‘Yes,’ Albert said. ‘If you’ll hold me.’
Behind them, Rudy Warwick was telling his rosary again. Across the aisle, Laurel Stevenson gripped the arms of her seat. She could still feel the warm print of Nick Hopewell’s lips on her mouth. She raised her head, looked at the overhead compartment, and began to take deep, slow breaths. She was waiting for the masks to fall … and ninety seconds or so later, they did.
Remember about the day in Belfast, too, she thought. Behind the church. An act of atonement, he said. An act …
In the middle of that thought, her mind drifted away.
28
‘You know … what to do?’ Brian asked again. He spoke in a dreamy, furry voice. Ahead of them, the time-rip was once more swelling in the cockpit windows, spreading across the sky. It was now lit with dawn, and a fantastic new array of colors coiled, swam, and then streamed away into its queer depths.
‘I know,’ Nick said. He was standing beside Brian and his words were muffled by the oxygen mask he wore. Above the rubber seal, his eyes were calm and clear. ‘No fear, Brian. All’s safe as houses. Off to sleep you go. Sweet dreams, and all that.’
Brian was fading now. He could feel himself going … and yet he hung on, staring at the vast fault in the fabric of reality. It seemed to be swelling toward the cockpit windows, reaching for the plane. It’s so beautiful, he thought. God, it’s so beautiful!
He felt that invisible hand seize the plane and draw it forward again. No turning back this time.
‘Nick,’ he said. It now took a tremendous effort to speak; he felt as if his mouth was a hundred miles away from his brain. He held his hand up. It seemed to stretch away from him at the end of a long taffy arm.
‘Go to sleep,’ Nick said, taking his hand. ‘Don’t fight it, unless you want to go with me. It won’t be long now.’
‘I just wanted to say … thank you.’
Nick smiled and gave Brian’s hand a squeeze. ‘You’re welcome, mate. It’s been a flight to remember. Even without the movie and the free mimosas.’
Brian looked back into the rip. A river of gorgeous colors flowed into it now. They spiralled … mixed …
and seemed to form words before his dazed, wondering eyes:
SHOOTING STARS ONLY
‘Is that … what we are?’ he asked curiously, and now his voice came to him from some distant universe.
The darkness swallowed him.
29
Nick was alone now; the only person awake on Flight 29 was a man who had once gunned down three boys behind a church in Belfast, three boys who had been chucking potatoes painted dark gray to look like grenades. Why had they done such a thing? Had it been some mad sort of dare? He had never found out.
He was not afraid, but an intense loneliness filled him. The feeling wasn’t a new one. This was not the first watch he had stood alone, with the lives of others in his hands.
Ahead of him, the rip neared. He dropped his hand to the rheostat which controlled the cabin pressure.
It’s gorgeous, he thought. It seemed to him that the colors that now blazed out of the rip were the antithesis of everything which they had experienced in the last few hours; he was looking into a crucible of new life and new motion.
Why shouldn’t it be beautiful? This is the place where life – all life, maybe – begins. The place where life is freshly minted every second of every day; the cradle of creation and the wellspring of time. No langoliers allowed beyond this point.
Colors ran across his cheeks and brows in a fountain-spray of hues: jungle green was overthrown by lava orange; lava orange was replaced by yellow-white tropical sunshine; sunshine was supplanted by the chilly blue of Northern oceans. The roar of the jet engines seemed muted and distant. he looked down and was not surprised to see that Brian Engle’s slumped. sleeping form was being consumed by color, his form and features overthrown in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of brightness. He had become a fabulous ghost.
Nor was Nick surprised to see that his own hands and arms were as colorless as clay. Brian’s not the ghost; I am.
The rip loomed.
Now the sound of the jets was lost entirely in a new sound; the 767 seemed to be rushing through a windtunnel filled with feathers. Suddenly, directly ahead of the airliner’s nose, a vast nova of light exploded like a heavenly firework; in it, Nick Hopewell saw colors no man had ever imagined. It did not just fill the time-rip; it filled his mind, his nerves, his muscles, his very bones in a gigantic, coruscating fireflash.
‘Oh my God, so BEAUTIFUL!’ he cried, and as Flight 29 plunged into the rip, he twisted the cabin-pressure rheostat back up to full.
A split-second later the fillings from Nick’s teeth pattered onto the cockpit floor. There was a small thump as the Teflon disc which had been in his knee – souvenir of a conflict marginally more honorable than the one in Northern Ireland – joined them. That was all.
Nick Hopewell had ceased to exist.
30
The first things Brian was aware of were that his shirt was wet and his headache had returned.
He sat up slowly in his seat, wincing at the bolt of pain in his head, and tried to remember who he was, where he was, and why he felt such a vast and urgent need to wake up quickly. What had he been doing that was so important?
The leak, his mind whispered. There’s a leak in the main cabin. and if it isn’t stabilized, there’s going to be big tr-
No, that wasn’t right. The leak had been stabilized – or had in some mysterious way stabilized itself – and he had landed Flight 7 safely at LAX. Then the man in the green blazer had come, and
It’s Anne’s funeral! My God, I’ve overslept!
His eyes flew open, but he was in neither a motel room nor the spare bedroom at Anne’s brother’s house in Revere. He was looking through a cockpit window at a sky filled with stars.
Suddenly it came back to him … everything.
He sat up all the way, too quickly. His head screamed a sickly hungover protest. Blood flew from his nose and splattered on the center control console. He looked down and saw the front of his shirt was soaked with it. There had been a leak, all right. In him.
Of course, he thought. Depressurization often does that. I should have warned the passengers … How many passengers do I have left, by the way?