Four Past Midnight (17 page)

“Right, then,” Nick said, trying for briskness and managing only unease. “Let's try the telephones, shall we?”

While he went to the bank of telephones, Albert wandered over to the Budget Rent A Car desk. In the slots on the rear wall he saw folders for BRIGGS, HANDLEFORD, MARCHANT, FENWICK and PESTLEMAN. There was, no doubt, a rental agreement inside each one, along with a map of the central Maine area, and on each map there would be an arrow with the legend YOU ARE HERE on it, pointing at the city of Bangor.

But where are we really?
Albert wondered.
And where are Briggs, Handleford, Marchant, Fenwick, and Pestleman? Have they been transported to another dimension? Maybe it's the Grateful Dead. Maybe the Dead's playing somewhere downstate and everybody left for the show.

There was a dry scratching noise just behind him. Albert nearly jumped out of his skin and whirled around fast, holding his violin case up like a cudgel. Bethany was standing there, just touching a match to the tip of her cigarette.

She raised her eyebrows. “Scare you?”

“A little,” Albert said, lowering the case and offering her a small, embarrassed smile.

“Sorry.” She shook out the match, dropped it on the floor, and drew deeply on her cigarette. “There. At least that's better. I didn't dare to on the plane. I was afraid something might blow up.”

Bob Jenkins strolled over. “You know, I quit those about ten years ago.”

“No lectures, please,” Bethany said. “I've got a feeling that if we get out of this alive and sane, I'm in for about a month of lectures. Solid. Wall-to-wall.”

Jenkins raised his eyebrows but didn't ask for an explanation. “Actually,” he said, “I was going to ask you if I could have one. This seems like an excellent time to renew acquaintance with old habits.”

Bethany smiled and offered him a Marlboro. Jenkins took it and she lit it for him. He inhaled, then coughed out a series of smoke-signal puffs.

“You
have
been away,” she observed matter-of-factly.

Jenkins agreed. “But I'll get used to it again in a hurry. That's the real horror of the habit, I'm afraid. Did you two notice the clock?”

“No,” Albert said.

Jenkins pointed to the wall above the doors of the men's and women's bathrooms. The clock mounted there had stopped at 4:07.

“It fits,” he said. “We knew we had been in the air for awhile when—let's call it The Event, for want of a better term—when The Event took place. 4:07A.M. Eastern Daylight Time is 1:07A.M. PDT. So now we know the when.”

“Gee, that's great,” Bethany said.

“Yes,” Jenkins said, either not noticing or preferring to ignore the light overlay of sarcasm in her voice. “But there's something wrong with it. I only wish the sun was out. Then I could be sure.”

“What do you mean?” Albert asked.

“The clocks—the electric ones, anyway—are no good. There's no juice. But if the sun was out, we could get at least a rough idea of what time it is by the length and direction of our shadows. My watch says it's going on quarter of nine, but I don't trust it. It feels later to me than that. I have no proof for it, and I can't explain it, but it does.”

Albert thought about it. Looked around. Looked back at Jenkins. “You know,” he said, “it
does.
It feels like it's almost lunchtime. Isn't that nuts?”

“It's not nuts,” Bethany said, “it's just jetlag.”

“I disagree,” Jenkins said. “We travelled west to east, young lady. Any temporal dislocation west-east travellers feel goes the other way. They feel it's
earlier
than it should be.”

“I want to ask you about something you said on the plane,” Albert said. “When the captain told us that there must be
some
other people here, you said ‘false logic.' In fact, you said it twice. But it seems straight enough to me. We were all asleep, and
we're
here. And if this thing happened at”—Albert glanced toward the clock—“at 4:07, Bangor time, almost everyone in
town
must have been asleep.”

“Yes,” Jenkins said blandly. “So where are they?”

Albert was nonplussed. “Well ...”

There was a bang as Nick forcibly hung up one of the pay telephones. It was the last in a long line of them; he had tried every one. “It's a washout,” he said. “They're all dead. The coin-fed ones as well as the direct-dials. You can add the sound of no phones ringing to that of no dogs barking, Brian.”

“So what do we do now?” Laurel asked. She heard the forlorn sound of her own voice and it made her feel very small, very lost. Beside her, Dinah was turning in slow circles. She looked like a human radar dish.

“Let's go upstairs,” Baldy proposed. “That's where the restaurant must be.”

They all looked at him. Gaffney snorted. “You got a one-track mind, mister.”

The bald man looked at him from beneath one raised eyebrow. “First, the name is Rudy Warwick, not mister,” he replied. “Second, people think better when their stomachs are full.” He shrugged. “It's just a law of nature.”

“I think Mr. Warwick is quite right,” Jenkins said. “We all
could
use something to eat ... and if we go upstairs, we may find some other clues pointing toward what has happened. In fact, I rather think we will.”

Nick shrugged. He looked suddenly tired and confused. “Why not?” he said. “I'm starting to feel like Mr. Robinson Bloody Crusoe.”

They started toward the escalator, which was also dead, in a straggling little group. Albert, Bethany, and Bob Jenkins walked together, toward the rear.

“You know something, don't you?” Albert asked abruptly. “What is it?”

“I
might
know something,” Jenkins corrected. “I might not. For the time being I'm going to hold my peace ... except for one suggestion.”

“What?”

“It's not for you; it's for the young lady.” He turned to Bethany. “Save your matches. That's my suggestion.”

“What?” Bethany frowned at him.

“You heard me.”

“Yeah, I guess I did, but I don't get what you mean. There's probably a newsstand upstairs, Mr. Jenkins. They'll have lots of matches. Cigarettes and disposable lighters, too.”

“I agree,” Jenkins said. “I still advise you to save your matches.”

He's playing Philo Christie or whoever it was again,
Albert thought.

He was about to point this out and ask Jenkins to please remember that this wasn't one of his novels when Brian Engle stopped at the foot of the escalator, so suddenly that Laurel had to jerk sharply on Dinah's hand to keep the blind girl from running into him.

“Watch where you're going, okay?” Laurel asked. “In case you didn't notice, the kid here can't see.”

Brian ignored her. He was looking around at the little group of refugees. “Where's Mr. Toomy?”

“Who?” the bald man—Warwick—asked.

“The guy with the pressing appointment in Boston.”

“Who cares?” Gaffney asked. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

But Brian was uneasy. He didn't like the idea that Toomy had slipped away and gone off on his own. He didn't know why, but he didn't like that idea at all. He glanced at Nick. Nick shrugged, then shook his head. “Didn't see him go, mate. I was fooling with the phones. Sorry.”

“Toomy!”
Brian shouted.
“Craig Toomy! Where are you?”

There was no response. Only that queer, oppressive silence. And Laurel noticed something then, something that made her skin cold. Brian had cupped his hands and shouted up the escalator. In a high-ceilinged place like this one, there should have been at least some echo.

But there had been none.

No echo at all.

While the others were occupied downstairs—the two teenagers and the old geezer standing by one of the car-rental desks, the others watching the British thug as he tried the phones—Craig Toomy had crept up the stalled escalator as quietly as a mouse. He knew exactly where he wanted to go; he knew exactly what to look for when he got there.

He strode briskly across the large waiting room with his briefcase swinging beside his right knee, ignoring both the empty chairs and an empty bar called The Red Baron. At the far end of the room was a sign hanging over the mouth of a wide, dark corridor. It read

He had almost reached the head of this corridor when he glanced out one of the wide windows at the tarmac again ... and his pace faltered. He approached the glass slowly and looked out.

There was nothing to see but the empty concrete and the moveless white sky, but his eyes began to widen nonetheless and he felt fear begin to steal into his heart.

They're coming,
a dead voice suddenly told him. It was the voice of his father, and it spoke from a small, haunted mausoleum tucked away in a gloomy corner of Craig Toomy's heart.

“No,” he whispered, and the word spun a little blossom of fog on the window in front of his lips. “No one is coming.”

“No!”

“It wasn't my fault,” he muttered. He was gripping the handle of the briefcase with almost painful tightness now. “I was taken against my will. I ... I was shanghaied!”

No reply from that interior voice. Only waves of disapproval. And once again Craig intuited the pressure he was under, the terrible never-ending pressure, the weight of the fathoms. The interior voice did not have to tell him there were no excuses; Craig knew that. He knew it of old.

He knew. The langoliers would be back. They would be back for
him.
He could sense them. He had never seen them, but he knew how horrible they would be. And was he alone in his knowledge? He thought not.

He thought perhaps the little blind girl knew something about the langoliers as well.

But that didn't matter. The only thing which did was getting to Boston—getting to Boston before the langoliers could arrive in Bangor from their terrible, doomish lair to eat him alive and screaming. He had to get to that meeting at the Pru, had to let them know what he had done, and then he would be...

Free.

He would be free.

Craig pulled himself away from the window, away from the emptiness and the stillness, and plunged into the corridor beneath the sign. He passed the empty shops without a glance. Beyond them he came to the door he was looking for. There was a small rectangular plaque mounted on it, just above a bullseye peephole. AIRPORT SECURITY, it said.

He had to get in there. One way or another, he had to get in there.

Craig reached out and touched the doorknob of the Airport Security office. The blank look in his eyes had been replaced by an expression of clear determination.

But he knew what would happen if he didn't.

He would go mad.

Craig tried the doorknob. It did not move beneath his hand, but when he gave it a small, frustrated push, the door swung open. Either it had been left slightly unlatched, or it had unlocked when the power went off and the security systems went dead. Craig didn't care which. The important thing was that he wouldn't need to muss his clothes trying to crawl through an air-conditioning duct or something. He still had every intention of showing up at his meeting before the end of the day, and he didn't want his clothes smeared with dirt and grease when he got there. One of the simple, unexceptioned truths of life was this: guys with dirt on their suits have no credibility.

He pushed the door open and went inside.

Brian and Nick reached the top of the escalator first, and the others gathered around them. This was BIA's central waiting room, a large square box filled with contour plastic seats (some with coin-op TVs bolted to the arms) and dominated by a wall of polarized floor-to-ceiling windows. To their immediate left was the airport newsstand and the security checkpoint which served Gate 1; to their right and all the way across the room were The Red Baron Bar and The Cloud Nine Restaurant. Beyond the restaurant was the corridor leading to the Airport Security office and the International Arrivals Annex.

“Come on—” Nick began, and Dinah said, “Wait.”

She spoke in a strong, urgent voice and they all turned toward her curiously.

Dinah dropped Laurel's hand and raised both of her own. She cupped the thumbs behind her ears and splayed her fingers out like fans. Then she simply stood there, still as a post, in this odd and rather weird listening posture.