by Stephen King
“I suspect it’s both,” Bob Jenkins said. He walked slowly toward the restaurant door and looked out. “We find ourselves in a world which appears to be whole and in reasonably good order, but it is also a world which seems almost exhausted. The carbonated drinks are flat. The food is tasteless. The air is odorless. We still give off scents — I can smell Laurel’s perfume and the captain’s aftershave lotion, for instance — but everything else seems to have lost its smell.”
Albert picked up one of the glasses with beer in it and sniffed deeply. There was a smell, he decided, but it was very, very faint. A flower-petal pressed for many years between the pages of a book might give off the same distant memory of scent.
“The same is true for sounds,” Bob went on. “They are flat, one-dimensional, utterly without resonance.”
Laurel thought of the listless clup-clup sound of her high heels on the cement, and the lack of echo when Captain Engle cupped his hands around his mouth and called up the escalator for Mr Toomy.
“Albert, could I ask you to play something on your violin?” Bob asked.
Albert glanced at Bethany. She smiled and nodded.
“All right. Sure. In fact, I’m sort of curious about how it sounds after.” He glanced at Craig Toomy. “You know.”
He opened the case, grimacing as his fingers touched the latch which had opened the wound in Craig Toomy’s forehead, and drew out his violin. He caressed it briefly, then took the bow in his right hand and tucked the violin under his chin. He stood like that for a moment, thinking. What was the proper sort of music for this strange new world where no phones rang and no dogs barked? Ralph Vaughan Williams? Stravinsky? Mozart? Dvorak, perhaps? No. None of them were right. Then inspiration struck, and he began to play “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah.”
Halfway through the tune the bow faltered to a stop.
“I guess you must have hurt your fiddle after all when you bopped that guy with it,” Don Gaffney said. “It sounds like it’s stuffed full of cotton batting.”
“No,” Albert said slowly. “My violin is perfectly okay. I can tell just by the way it feels, and the action of the strings under my fingers... but there’s something else as well. Come on over here, Mr Gaffney.” Gaffney came over and stood beside Albert. “Now get as close to my violin as you can. No… not that close; I’d put out your eye with the bow. There. Just right. Listen again.”
Albert began to play, singing along in his mind, as he almost always did when he played this corny but endlessly cheerful shitkicking music:
Singing fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh, Fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh-oh-oh-oh, Fee-fi-fiddly-I-oh, Strummin’ on the old banjo.
“Did you hear the difference?” he asked when he had finished.
“It sounds a lot better close up, if that’s what you mean,” Gaffney said. He was looking at Albert with real respect. “You play good, kid.”
Albert smiled at Gaffney, but it was really Bethany Simms he was talking to. “Sometimes, when I’m sure my music teacher isn’t around, I play old Led Zeppelin songs,” he said. “That stuff really cooks on the violin. You’d be surprised.” He looked at Bob. “Anyway, it fits right in with what you were saying. The closer you get, the better the violin sounds. It’s the air that’s wrong, not the instrument. It’s not conducting the sounds the way it should, and so what comes out sounds the way the beer tasted.”
“Flat,” Brian said.
Albert nodded.
“Thank you, Albert,” Bob said.
“Sure. Can I put it away now?”
“Of course.” Bob continued as Albert replaced his violin in its case, and then used a napkin to clean off the fouled latches and his own fingers. “Taste and sound are not the only off-key elements of the situation in which we find ourselves. Take the clouds, for instance.”
“What about them?” Rudy Warwick asked.
“They haven’t moved since we arrived, and I don’t think they’re going to move. I think the weather patterns we’re all used to living with have either stopped or are running down like an old pocket-watch.”
Bob paused for a moment. He suddenly looked old and helpless and frightened.
“As Mr Hopewell would say, let’s not draw it fine. Everything here feels wrong. Dinah, whose senses — including that odd, vague one we call the sixth sense — are more developed than ours, has perhaps felt it the most strongly, but I think we’ve all felt it to some degree. Things here are just wrong.”
“And now we come to the very hub of the matter.”
He turned to face them.
“I said not fifteen minutes ago that it felt like lunchtime. It now feels much later than that to me. Three in the afternoon, perhaps four. It isn’t breakfast my stomach is grumbling for right now; it wants high tea. I have a terrible feeling that it may start to get dark outside before our watches tell us it’s quarter to ten in the morning.”
“Get to it, mate,” Nick said.
“I think it’s about time,” Bob said quietly. “Not about dimension, as Albert suggested, but time. Suppose that, every now and then, a hole appears in the time stream? Not a time-warp, but a time-rip. A rip in the temporal fabric.”
“That’s the craziest shit I ever heard!” Don Gaffney exclaimed.
“Amen!” Craig Toomy seconded from the floor.
“No,” Bob replied sharply. “If you want crazy shit, think about how Albert’s violin sounded when you were standing six feet away from it. Or look around you, Mr Gaffney, just look around you. What’s happening to us... what we’re in... that’s crazy shit.”
Don frowned and stuffed his hands deep in his pockets.
“Go on,” Brian said.
“All right. I’m not saying that I’ve got this right; I’m just offering a hypothesis that fits the situation in which we have found ourselves. Let us say that such rips in the fabric of time appear every now and then, but mostly over unpopulated areas — by which I mean the ocean, of course. I can’t say why that would be, but it’s still a logical assumption to make, since that’s where most of these disappearances seem to occur.”
“Weather patterns over water are almost always different from weather patterns over large land-masses,” Brian said. “That could be it.”
Bob nodded. “Right or wrong, it’s a good way to think of it, because it puts it in a context we’re all familiar with. This could be similar to rare weather phenomena which are sometimes reported: upside-down tornadoes, circular rainbows, daytime starlight. These time-rips may appear and disappear at random, or they may move, the way fronts and pressure systems move, but they very rarely appear over land.”
“But a statistician will tell you that sooner or later whatever can happen will happen, so let us say that last night one did appear over land... and we had the bad luck to fly into it. And we know something else. Some unknown rule or property of this fabulous meteorological freak makes it impossible for any living being to travel through unless he or she is fast asleep.”
“Aw, this is a fairy tale,” Gaffney said.
“I agree completely,” Craig said from the floor.
“Shut your cake-hole,” Gaffney growled at him. Craig blinked, then lifted his upper lip in a feeble sneer.
“It feels right,” Bethany said in a low voice. “It feels as if we’re out of step with... with everything.”
“What happened to the crew and the passengers?” Albert asked. He sounded sick. “If the plane came through, and we came through, what happened to the rest of them?”
His imagination provided him with an answer in the form of a sudden indelible image: hundreds of people failing out of the sky, ties and trousers rippling, dresses skating up to reveal garter-belts and underwear, shoes falling off, pens (the ones which weren’t back on the plane, that was) shooting out of pockets; people waving their arms and legs and trying to scream in the thin air; people who had left wallets, purses, pocket-change, and, in at least one case, a pacemaker implant, behind. He saw them hitting the ground like dud bombs, squashin
g bushes flat, kicking up small clouds of stony dust, imprinting the desert floor with the shapes of their bodies.
“My guess is that they were vaporized,” Bob said. “Utterly discorporated.”
Dinah didn’t understand at first; then she thought of Aunt Vicky’s purse with the traveller’s checks still inside and began to cry softly. Laurel crossed her arms over the little blind girl’s shoulders and hugged her. Albert, meanwhile, was fervently thanking God that his mother had changed her mind at the last moment, deciding not to accompany him east after all.
“In many cases their things went with them,” the writer went on. “Those who left wallets and purses may have had them out at the time of The... The Event. It’s hard to say, though. What was taken and what was left behind — I suppose I’m thinking of the wig more than anything else — doesn’t seem to have a lot of rhyme or reason to it.”
“You got that right,” Albert said. “The surgical pins, for instance. I doubt if the guy they belonged to took them out of his shoulder or knee to play with because he got bored.”
“I agree,” Rudy Warwick said. “It was too early in the flight to get that bored.”
Bethany looked at him, startled, then burst out laughing.
“I’m originally from Kansas,” Bob said, “and the element of caprice makes me think of the twisters we used to sometimes get in the summer. They’d totally obliterate a farmhouse and leave the privy standing, or they’d rip away a barn without pulling so much as a shingle from the silo standing right next to it.”
“Get to the bottom line, mate,” Nick said. “Whatever time it is we’re in, I can’t help feeling that it’s very late in the day.”
Brian thought of Craig Toomy, Old Mr I’ve-Got-to-Get-to-Boston, standing at the head of the emergency slide and screaming: Time is short! Time is very fucking short!
“All right,” Bob said. “The bottom line. Let’s suppose there are such things as time-rips, and we’ve gone through one. I think we’ve gone into the past and discovered the unlovely truth of time-travel: you can’t appear in the Texas Book Depository on November 22, 1963, and put a stop to the Kennedy assassination; you can’t watch the building of the pyramids or the sack of Rome; you can’t investigate the Age of the Dinosaurs at first hand.”
He raised his arms, hands outstretched, as if to encompass the whole silent world in which they found themselves.
“Take a good look around you, fellow time-travellers. This is the past. It is empty; it is silent. It is a world — perhaps a universe — with all the sense and meaning of a discarded paint-can. I believe we may have hopped an absurdly short distance in time, perhaps as little as fifteen minutes... at least initially. But the world is clearly unwinding around us. Sensory input is disappearing. Electricity has already disappeared. The weather is what the weather was when we made the jump into the past. But it seems to me that as the world winds down, time itself is winding up in a kind of spiral crowding in on itself.”
“Couldn’t this be the future?” Albert asked cautiously.
Bob Jenkins shrugged. He suddenly looked very tired. “I don’t know for sure, of course — how could I? — but I don’t think so. This place we’re in feels old and stupid and feeble and meaningless. It feels I don’t know.”
Dinah spoke then. They all looked toward her.
“It feels over,” she said softly.
“Yes,” Bob said. “Thank you, dear. That’s the word I was looking for.”
“Mr Jenkins?”
“Yes?”
“The sound I told you about before? I can hear it again.” She paused. “It’s getting closer.”
8
They all fell silent, their faces long and listening. Brian thought he heard something, then decided it was the sound of his own heart. Or simply imagination.
“I want to go out by the windows again,” Nick said abruptly. He stepped over Craig’s prone body without so much as a glance down and strode from the restaurant without another word.
“Hey!” Bethany cried. “Hey, I want to come, too!”
Albert followed her; most of the others trailed after. “What about you two?” Brian asked Laurel and Dinah.
“I don’t want to go,” Dinah said. “I can hear it as well as I want to from here.” She paused and added: “But I’m going to hear it better, I think, if we don’t get out of here soon.”
Brian glanced at Laurel Stevenson.
“I’ll stay here with Dinah,” she said quietly.
“All right,” Brian said. “Keep away from Mr Toomy.”
“Keep away from Mr Toomy.” Craig mimicked savagely from his place on the floor. He turned his head with an effort and rolled his eyes in their sockets to look at Brian. “You really can’t get away with this, Captain Engle. I don’t know what game you and your Limey friend think you’re playing, but you can’t get away with it. Your next piloting job will probably be running cocaine in from Colombia after dark. At least you won’t be lying when you tell your friends all about what a crack pilot you are.”
Brian started to reply, then thought better of it. Nick said this man was at least temporarily insane, and Brian thought Nick was right. Trying to reason with a madman was both useless and time-consuming.
“We’ll keep our distance, don’t worry,” Laurel said. She drew Dinah over to one of the small tables and sat down with her. “And we’ll be fine.”
“All right,” Brian said. “Yell if he starts trying to get loose.”
Laurel smiled wanly. “You can count on it.”
Brian bent, checked the tablecloth with which Nick had bound Craig’s hands, then walked across the waiting room to join the others, who were standing in a line at the floor-to-ceiling windows.
9
He began to hear it before he was halfway across the waiting room, and by the time he had joined the others, it was impossible to believe it was an auditory hallucination.
That girl’s hearing is really remarkable, Brian thought.
The sound was very faint — to him, at least — but it was there, and it did seem to be coming from the east. Dinah had said it sounded like Rice Krispies after you poured milk over it. To Brian it sounded more like radio static — the exceptionally rough static you got sometimes during periods of high sunspot activity. He agreed with Dinah about one thing, though; it sounded bad.
He could feel the hairs on the nape of his neck stiffening in response to that sound. He looked at the others and saw identical expressions of frightened dismay on every face. Nick was controlling himself the best and the young girl who had almost balked at using the slide — Bethany — looked the most deeply scared, but they all heard the same thing in the sound.
Bad.
Something bad on the way. Hurrying.
Nick turned toward him. “What do you make of it, Brian? Any ideas?”
“No,” Brian said. “Not even a little one. All I know is that it’s the only sound in town.”
“It’s not in town yet,” Don said, “but it’s going to be, I think. I only wish I knew how long it was going to take.”
They were quiet again, listening to the steady hissing crackle from the east. And Brian thought: I almost know the sound, I think. Not cereal in milk, not radio static, but... what? If only it wasn’t so faint...
But he didn’t want to know. He suddenly realized that, and very strongly. He didn’t want to know at all. The sound filled him with a bone-deep loathing.
“We do have to get out of here!” Bethany said. Her voice was loud and wavery. Albert put an arm around her waist and she gripped his hand in both of hers. Gripped it with panicky tightness. “We have to get out of here right now!”
“Yes,” Bob Jenkins said. “She’s right. That sound — I don’t know what it is, but it’s awful. We have to get out of here.”
They were all looking at Brian and he thought, It looks like I’m the captain again. But not for long. Because they didn’t understand. Not even Jenkins understood, sharp as some of his other deduct
ions might have been, that they weren’t going anywhere.
Whatever was making that sound was on its way, and it didn’t matter, because they would still be here when it arrived. There was no way out of that. He understood the reason why it was so, even if none of the others did... and Brian Engle suddenly understood how an animal caught in a trap must feel as it hears the steady thud of the hunter’s approaching boots.
Chapter 6
Stranded. Bethany’s Matches. Two-Way Traffic Ahead. Albert’s Experiment. Nightfall. The Dark and the Blade.
1
Brian turned to look at the writer. “You say we have to get out of here, right?”
“Yes. I think we must do that just as soon as we possibly—”
“And where do you suggest we go? Atlantic City? Miami Beach? Club Med?”
“You are suggesting, Captain Engle, that there’s no place we can go. I think — I hope — that you’re wrong about that. I have an idea.”
“Which is?”
“In a moment. First, answer one question for me. Can you refuel the airplane? Can you do that even if there’s no power?”
“I think so, yes. Let’s say that, with the help of a few able-bodied men, I could. Then what?”
“Then we take off again,” Bob said. Little beads of sweat stood out on his deeply lined face. They looked like droplets of clear oil. “That sound — that crunchy sound — is coming from the east. The time-rip was several thousand miles west of here. If we retraced our original course... could you do that?”
“Yes,” Brian said. He had left the auxiliary power units running, and that meant the INS computer’s program was still intact. That program was an exact log of the trip they had just made, from the moment Flight 29 had left the ground in southern California until the moment it had set down in central Maine. One touch of a button would instruct the computer to simply reverse that course; the touch of another button, once in the air, would put the autopilot to work flying it. The Teledyne inertial navigation system would re-create the trip down to the smallest degree deviations. “I could do that, but why?”