The 'Geisters

by David Nickle

  Michael rolled the baggage to one side and paid the driver in U.S. dollars—something that went over well here—and Ann got to her feet. She smiled as Michael met her eye.

  “Well, this time at least you’re awake!” he said. “Might be better asleep once we got on the plane, though. Take a nap once we’ve cleared security, maybe?”

  Ann pulled a bottle of water from her purse and took a swig. “You should have stopped me last night,” she said, and Michael laughed.

  “Nah,” he said. “You needed to unwind. Therapeutic.”

  She swirled another mouthful of water and swallowed. “A lot of unwinding.” They had been out every night in Port-of-Spain. Last night was a club calling itself Zen that was anything but. It was dark, and purple, and throbbing, and Ann felt that way too. She had had rather a lot of rum. Michael had apparently had not so much rum as she had. He’d been up before her, had finished packing, and now he was loading the larger of their bags onto a luggage cart with what looked far too much like enthusiasm.

  They were early for the flight; the Air Canada counter was just opening up when they arrived, and they were second in the queue. Security was nearly as quick; this wasn’t an American airport and neither Michael nor Ann set off a single alarm.

  They didn’t, after all, have a scan for the thing that Ann might be carrying.

  “Do you want coffee?” asked Michael as they found their way to their departure gate and settled down to wait.

  Ann shook her head. “Another bottle of water would be fine,” she said.

  “I’ll bring it with mine,” he said, and hurried off to a coffee shop—it was called Rituals, Ann noted.

  Ha.

  While he was gone, she sat down and closed her eyes, took a breath. Oh yes, she was hungover; maybe even still a little drunk. She listened for her mantra; she descended the spectrum of colour, from red down to violet.

  A row ahead of her, a baby began to fuss. She cracked her eye open, looked over the mother lifting her child above her knee, at the gathering dawn over the tarmac. Their plane was stopped at the gate. A baggage truck approached out of the rising sun.

  Damn.

  She shut her eyes again and ran the sequence of the colours. Red and Orange and Yellow . . .

  No good. It had been no good trying to do this for the past . . . how long? Three days? Four? Longer?

  She recalled the architecture of the fortress, its sheer walls, latticed with capillaries of ivy crawling up from the base. Which of course made no sense; she’d just constructed it a week ago. Ivy grew quickly, but not that fast. She tried to imagine how that might happen; maybe with some amped-up engineered fertilizer from Home Depot. . . .

  Ann smiled and shook her head. Home Depot. There was the problem. She was imagining her fortress, the prison—trying to rationalize it—not seeing it. The baby, who had moved from fussing to a full-on wail, was easier to visualize; she didn’t have to open her eyes to know what was happening two rows over, the mother putting her child close up to her shoulder and patting its back as its little legs gyrated and pushed.

  Or Ian Rickhardt, stretching naked, suspended in the air beyond flames, his face pulled taut in an expression of . . . what?

  Ecstasy?

  “Here. Drink up.”

  Ann opened her eyes. Michael sat down beside her, and handed her a bottle of water, slippery with condensation. The terminal air-conditioning wasn’t keeping up; Michael’s linen shirt was spotting with sweat.

  His sunburn had cleared up a week ago, and he was left with the kind of deep tan that only the fair-haired could really pull off. He smiled, and his teeth flashed.

  This—not the fortress, nor the beach house on fire—was the world she inhabited. In this world, she had a home.

  “You’re a good-looking man,” said Ann.

  “What?”

  “I thought you should know.” She cracked the bottle open and took a swig. The water was icy on her throat.

  “You had more to drink than I thought last night.”

  “I had a lot to drink last night, but that’s neither here nor there,” said Ann. “I just wanted to make a note of it. I’ve been spending a lot of time in my own head these past few days. All stuck in myself.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  “Maybe. But it’s not good for us. You hauled me out of the fire. Got burned.”

  “By the sun.”

  “Details.”

  He laughed. “Well thank you then.”

  The boarding call came just a few minutes later, and when the attendant called their row, they queued up for the last time in Trinidad while outside, the morning sun burned off the last of the mist and the North mountain range resolved itself, a high wall of green between them, and home. Ann took another swig from her water bottle and slipped it into her purse as she handed over her boarding pass.

  iii

  The in-flight movie was on a little LCD screen on the back of the seat in front of her, and there was a touch-screen choice. She scrolled around through the first run movies, Canadian cinema, “silver screen” classics and television, eventually settling on a John le Carré adaptation. Michael smirked a bit.

  “You watch movies like an old man,” he said, and Ann mouthed “fuck off” at him and put in her earbuds.

  She had the window seat, and after a few minutes pulled down the shade—the sun was too bright. The movie started up in a café in Eastern Europe somewhere, a couple of old men meeting over demitasses of coffee. Soon there would be a shooting.

  Michael had put on a science fiction film. It might have been a Terminator movie; might have been a zombie movie. There were a lot of guns going off and some blurry CGI. The seatbelt light switched off. Michael touched her arm. He leaned over and said something in her ear, but she couldn’t quite make it out. She leaned back a little bit, watching through drooped eyelids as the action shifted to London, and a pair of British actors she vaguely recognized had another conversation as they stood in an elevator. And easily, happily, she felt herself doze off.

  She started awake some time later with a lurch—as though she’d lost her breath. The seatbelt light was back on, and the movie had stopped. The time, according to the screen, was shortly after 11 a.m.—they’d been in the air two hours.

  Michael wasn’t beside her.

  The plane lurched again. A baby—maybe the same one that she’d heard in the departure lounge—started to wail. Ann lifted her window shade and looked out. Water was accumulating on the plexiglass, as the plane flew among thunderhead clouds that climbed like gigantic trees around them.

  A bell sounded.

  “Good morning, everyone.” It was the Captain’s voice. “Just letting you know what you’ve probably already figured out. We’re hitting a little turbulence right now. Nothing to worry about; whatever it is, it’s very localized. I’m going to take us higher, to ride over it. Until we get there, please stay in your seats, and please keep your seatbelts fastened.”

  Where the hell was Michael? Ann rubbed her arms; they were suddenly chilled. She looked to the back. The stewards had already strapped themselves in, along with everyone else in the passenger compartment. Michael should be too. Had he gone to the washroom?

  The next lurch was particularly violent; it felt as though the plane had actually struck something mid-air. Lightning flashed outside the window.

  It’s all right. You heard the Captain. We’ll get through this—and in a matter of hours, we’ll land at Pearson Airport and get on with life.

  It’s all right, Ann.

  Ann looked across the aisle to the centre row of seats. A lean young South Asian man was sitting there, arms crossed over his chest, fingers digging into the sleeves of his long black T-shirt. His jaw was set as he looked ahead, wide-eyed, the muscles in his jaw working up the side of his close-shorn scalp. Ann leaned over, couldn’t quite reach to tap his arm, but she got his attention
.

  “Have you seen my husband?” she asked, and pointed to the empty seat. “I fell asleep.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know—maybe in the latrine? You should just stay put.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m just worried—”

  As she spoke, the cabin lurched again, and she felt a sickening rush as she lifted out of her seat for an instant. Somewhere to the front of the plane, something crashed. The bell chimed again, but this time no one came on the intercom. The crying baby made a noise that sounded like a shriek, and Ann felt her ears pop. The rest of the plane was dead quiet. She and the man in the centre aisle didn’t take their eyes off one another.

  “Your husband is in the latrine,” he said.

  “What?”

  “He’s not alone.”

  Ann leaned forward, hand on the aisle-side armrest. “What do you mean, not alone?”

  The man shook his head and reached across the aisle, put his hand on hers. “Easy miss,” he said. “It’s going to be okay. Now sit back, miss. We all got to stay calm.”

  Ann slowly pulled her hand away and did as she was told. The man gave her an uneasy smile and settled back into his own seat, hands gripping the armrests tightly as the cabin pitched again. The baby was gasping with terror; the only other human sound in the aircraft was its mother, singing something gentle to her child.

  It’s going to be okay. What a kindly lie, thought Ann. She shut her eyes tight.

  It wasn’t going to be okay. This wasn’t just a storm that you could fly over, or through.

  The Insect was out. Michael was gone. And it’s my fault.

  There was a loud crash to the fore of the aircraft—and a thump, a sound like metal buckling. A man shouted something, and other voices rose up around him. Ann felt a sluice of the old terror. She was in her father’s boat, watching the sky draw the lake to its bosom; she was in the women’s room at Canoe, hiding from the spinning saltshaker; she was in the minivan, and the wind

  rose up . . .

  The Insect was out.

  Ann kept her eyes shut, and drew the spectrum to her mind. Red and Orange and Yellow . . . She swore and opened her eyes.

  She couldn’t even imagine the colours; she was just reciting the words in her mind. She was cut off from the fortress, and everything that Eva had taught her.

  The plane lurched again—this time, seeming to twist, hard, and Ann felt her hips press hard against the buckled seatbelt. Her purse slid up from underneath the seat where she’d stowed it, and emptied on the empty seat beside her as the plane righted. The water bottle rolled out and settled—bisected up the middle by a line of solid ice.

  “Insect,” said Ann, and then louder: “Insect!”

  No one paid her any heed. Another chime sounded, and Ann flinched as an oxygen mask fell in front of her, and rocked back and forth on its tubing like the watch of a hypnotist. She took hold of it and drew it to her mouth, pulled the straps over her head like they’d explained.

  “Where is my husband?” she said into the mask.

  The man across the aisle caught her eye. He pointed to the front of the plane.

  “He is in the latrine,” he said, quietly but clearly—in a way that left no doubt to Ann.

  “Is he safe?” she asked.

  “He is raping me,” replied the man. “Help.”

  The cabin went dark and the plane seemed to spin. Ann was dangling from her seatbelt for a moment, then pushed hard back into her seat. Lightning skittered across the windows behind her, then across the far side as the plane turned hard. The man across from her shouted now, along with a dozen others, as several of the overhead storage compartments popped open and luggage spilled out. He blocked a hard-case carry-on bag with his forearm, and it crashed into the aisle—where Ann saw running lights had turned on. If she were to follow them—if the plane would steady enough that she could follow them—she’d find an emergency exit.

  They would also take her to the latrine—where Michael was holed up. Doing what exactly?

  Raping the Insect?

  A laptop backpack struck the floor and bounced up again as the plane lurched and spun. It felt like a barrel roll.

  Jesus, she thought. We’re going to fucking crash. She looked out—and was relieved at least to see that the wing was intact. There was nothing to see beyond that but soot-coloured cloud. She wondered how near they were to the ocean now. The plane steadied, and the engines whined.

  Ann waited a moment. The aircraft seemed to have steadied. Was it safe now? She would take the chance.

  Ann unbuckled her seatbelt. She took off the oxygen mask, drew a breath and confirmed that the cabin pressure hadn’t dropped that badly. She pushed herself out of her seat, and stumbled into the aisle. Someone shouted at her to get back in her seat. She shook her head.

  “It’s fine,” she shouted, but it wasn’t. The cabin lurched again, and Ann’s feet came off the deck. If she hadn’t been holding onto the side of a seat, she would have fallen.

  Lucky me, she thought, and it seemed to be true.

  The cabin had become a cylinder of flying debris, but none of it came near Ann. It was as though a path was being cleared for her as she forced her way forward. At one point, she floated down the middle, the plane dipping into free fall. Near the first emergency exit, she fell to the ceiling, then floated, then struck the floor on her side. Ann didn’t want to think about what the plane must be doing. She clambered upright and bolted past a flight attendant, strapped in her own seat.

  “Ma’am!” the woman shouted, and reached out to grab Ann’s arm. Ann slipped away and ran past.

  Near the front of the plane, she stopped, gripping onto a low silver handrail before entering first class. The restroom was opposite her; it was closed, and marked OCCUPIED.

  “Michael!” She had to shout—the whine of the engines, the crashing luggage—the screaming—was all deafening. She tried to open the door, but of course it was locked. She looked around for something to pry it with—there was a kitchen just beyond. Maybe . . .

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around. It was the flight attendant. She leaned close: “You’ve got to sit down!”

  Ann shook her head and pounded on the door. “My husband’s in there!” she said.

  The attendant was having none of it. “He’s safer there than coming out,” said the attendant. “There’s oxygen in there. The cabin’s depressurizing. You need to return to your seat.”

  Ann tried to pull away, but the attendant’s grip was strong. “You have to obey my instructions ma’am. It’s for everyone’s safety—”

  She didn’t finish. There was a bright flash as she spoke, sending spears of lightning in from both rows of windows—and it illuminated a bright silver briefcase, shooting through the air up the aisle.

  The case hit the attendant in the back of the head. She collapsed into Ann. She stepped back and let the attendant fall to the floor. She bent down—on the attendant’s skirt, there was a plastic spring and a set of simple keys. Ann stretched it out, and found one that matched a keyhole underneath the handle of the restroom. The plane lurched then, and the floor tilted sharply. Ann held tight until the plane righted. She inserted the key and clicked the sign to VACANT. She let the keys snap back to the attendant and slid open the door.

  The electricity seemed to be working fine in there; the lights inside the restroom flickered, occasionally flashing as bright as the lightning outside the plane. It played across a sight that at first Ann couldn’t fathom.

  It was Michael. His pants were around his ankles and his linen shirt was unbuttoned, pulled back over his shoulders so it hung tight around his elbows. His head was cricked back, tendons taut under his chin. His penis was hard—and it swayed back in forth in front of him, as his hands made claws to clutch at the air. His head swung around to look at her, but it was as though he couldn’t see her; in the light, his pupils had shrunk
to pinpricks. And around him—toilet paper floated, draping in the air in what seemed like a cage. Droplets of blue fluid hung in the air. Gravity had been utterly suspended in that tiny room.

  He began to turn away from her, toward the little mirror over the sink—rotating in the air, unfettered to the deck. The muscles in his still-pale ass tensed as he looked in the mirror—looked at something, Ann saw, that was not precisely his own reflection.

  The thing in the mirror made its face into a rictus—of anger, maybe, or something else. But Ann peered around at Michael’s face, and thought it far less ambivalent.

  He was smiling.

  And he was hard. More than hard. He was engorged.

  There was a popping sound then, as the light in the restroom shattered, and it was all dark again. Ann tried to reach in—to stop him—but she heard a shout, and the floor shifted beneath her again, and there was a flash of silver as the briefcase that had taken down the flight attendant leapt up from the floor and struck Ann hard in the side of the head.

  She crumpled.

  iv

  And she was on some kind of bench.

  It seemed to be made of wooden planks—not finished, not even sanded. She smelled woodsmoke. Or maybe not, not woodsmoke. The smoke of burning dung? What made her think of that? It was pungent, not unpleasant—but dung? Why would she think

  of that?

  She sighed and opened her eyes. She had thought of that because she’d invented it. The dung of cave bats was what the tribe who was charged with guarding the Insect burned in their cooking braziers. It was more plentiful than wood, and burned hot and long through the nights. And sure enough, that’s what was providing the light in this place . . . a small windowless room, halfway up the tower where the Insect was to have dwelt.

  She sat up, put her bare feet down on the thick pine floor. She was wearing a long dress of velvet, a deep blue, with sleeves that fitted her arms tightly and extended just past her wrists. It was the sort of dress that an out-of-favour royal might wear in the Tower of London at various times in history.