Darkness Falling

by Peter Crowther

  It was just past nine o'clock.

  (11)

  Karl thought he had heard something a couple of times, like people moving around in the plane, sneaking up from standard class into business or first but he figured it was just the bodywork settling. All in all, he guessed he'd been pretty lucky – though, no sooner had Ronnie and Angel left him, he would have given a fortune for a restroom. In the end, he just had to let his muscles relax and pee his pants. He was thankful that, at least at that point, he didn't need to take a dump. But, as he knew all too well, that time would come and he would have to face it like a man.

  The shoulder went into spasms of pain interspersed with bouts of pins and needles, and he didn't have enough room to move himself around in order to alleviate it. After a while – which was what, exactly? an hour? two hours? five hours? – he developed a crick in his neck from trying to keep facing down the aisle into the main cabin, and he just let his head slump forward against the floor. He dozed a little, woke every now and again because he heard people talking around him, people like Gerald, the captain of the flight out of Denver, and Lizbeth, the senior stewardess, Jayson, the co-pilot, and then, after lifting his head, drifted off once more.

  It must have been around midday – because he could feel the sun burning into the back of his leg and could see the light of it spreading across the cabin floor – when he definitely heard voices from outside, one of them shouting to someone else. He tried to call out – Hey, I'm in here! Anybody… Come help… That kind of stuff; but after a few clatters and clanks – they were throwing stuff at the plane? kids, it must be, Karl thought – the voices grew softer and, after a few more minutes, Karl straining to hear any noises at all from outside, the voices faded away so completely that Karl wondered whether he had ever really heard them at all. For didn't one of those voices sound like him, Karl Sjovin, and one of the others his big brother Stanley? But Stanley had been dead now these past 22 years, so…

  He allowed his head to slump forward again against the floor of the cabin, thinking suddenly that it seemed more luxurious than it had been before.

  And then, despite his hunger, his bowels gave a little nudge, the nudge coming in the shape of a winsome fart – You win some and you lose some, his grandmother had always told him: The secret of life is recognizing which is which – the fart drifting out of his ass like a cross between a wandering bee hopping from one pollen-filled flower-head to another and a cartoon trombonist who had inadvertently swallowed the mouthpiece to his instrument. He held on for a while, clenching his buttocks for all he was worth, but then he just had to let go. The only good thing was that he figured the smell would be gone by the time Ronnie and the girl got back.

  Come to think of it, how long had they been gone out there?

  Karl wished he could see his watch. The light had moved up the floor some – it was now sitting in the doorway to the main cabin – and Karl thought he must have been sleeping more than he'd originally figured, because surely it was too early for the sun to have moved so far on.

  But then he went to sleep again.

  He woke up when someone called for him. It was his mother. He turned around and was delighted to discover that he was in his bed, his very own bed back in Cedar Rapids, his mom standing at the door with that mock look of annoyance she always put on, right foot tapping, hands on hip. "Come on there, soldier," she was saying to him, "time to get a move on or you'll be late."

  Then, even before he could respond, "Hey, big guy!" came from the hall, the words all alone as they started out but then, almost immediately, accompanied by his father's wave and a big smile as he walked past Karl's bedroom door.

  "I'm not too good, mom," he explained.

  His mother leaned against the door jamb and nodded, her smile leveling out. "I know, sugar," she said. And his father came back and leaned immediately behind her, him looking the same way, too – kind of sad somehow, and loving. His dad put an arm around his mom and Karl saw the fingers of his dad's hand squeeze.

  He sat bolt upright and–

  –cricked his neck. He wasn't in bed at all. Outside, someone sniggered. Those damn kids again. He rested his head and felt a sudden unimaginably strong sense of profound loss. He had just lost both of his parents again – it was as though those brief seconds in the dream, watching them standing once again at his bedroom door, they had been fully alive, and he had been seven or eight years old, with all the sunlight of youth pouring through his windows and his curtains.

  Karl turned his head to look at the windscreen and felt suddenly very weak. The patch of sky visible above the still lighted sections of Borders bookshop was dark, a few intermittent stars blinking on and off all those millions of miles away, sending their light to him so long ago and yet it arriving only now. He slumped once more and felt humbled.

  "Mom," he barely managed to say. "I don't feel so–"

  (12)

  Inside the restroom at the mall, Angel didn't notice the body immediately: it was the smell that got to her first.

  Boy, someone had dropped a real load in here, as her dad would say, teasing her mom when he followed Sally Wurst into the bathroom back at home. But this time, someone really had done a number. The smell was infinitely worse than anything created by anyone in the Wurst household, or anyone even just paying them a visit. It was a real pungent aroma, though Angel, swinging her doll by her side, didn't know pungent from parsnips. She held her nose and spoke to Samantha.

  "Gee, Sabadtha, dat reardy shticks!" Angel said, her fingers gripped tightly on her nose. She was pleased to see that Samantha seemed oblivious to the whole thing but, just to be safe, she pressed the doll's face against her chest and, grimacing, checked the cubicles to see which one the offending smell was coming from.

  That was when she saw the body.

  The woman was lying on the tiled floor over by the washbasins around the corner from the cubicles. Angel saw the woman's foot first, just the one foot, the leg attached to it sprawled out and crooked at the knee.

  Angel gasped and then moved sideways to the wall, which she leaned against before edging slowly forwards, watching as more of the unfortunate woman came into view.

  By Angel Wurst's reckoning, the woman was maybe around one hundred years old and had skin that looked like her grandma's dark brown leather sofa, all wrinkled and, in some places, worn into a different color altogether.

  "Hello?" Angel said, her voice soft and nervous. She half expected the woman to wake up suddenly, shaking her head – Hey, how about that, sweetie, I done fallen sound asleep and fell right on my ass in the restroom!

  But as she moved a little further forward so that she was almost to the washbasins, she saw that it was unlikely that the woman was going to move anywhere at all. There was a thick, deep red pool – so deep red, in fact, it was almost black – spread around her head like some kind of fancy hat, or a peacock's tail feathers, all fanned out like a halo. And there was a puddle of what Angel hoped might be pee between the woman's legs, though from the smell, the color and the consistency, she thought it was likely that the woman had pooped her pants.

  Moving away from the wall, Angel stepped closer to the woman's body, one tiny step at a time, heel to toe, heel to toe. As she got nearer, she saw the woman's face. It was all twisted up, either in pain or surprise. No, that wasn't surprise: it was absolute fear. She had seen something, something that had struck terror into her. Angel turned around and looked at the line of washbasins. That's when she saw the bags.

  One was a small valise with the outline of a cat embroidered or crocheted on the side. That one was standing on the shelf above one of the washbasins. When she glanced into the basin, Angel saw that it was filled with water and there was a thin film of soap in there, too.

  The other bag was a briefcase kind of affair, like the one Angel's daddy took with him when he went into the office each morning. It was standing on the floor, leaning against the wall beneath another basin. This basin was empty but there was a mas
cara pencil lying on the floor, its end broken off. Like it had been dropped – dropped when the person who had been holding it had suddenly – pop! – up and disappeared right out of the restroom along with the other woman, the one using the washbasin.

  Angel closed her eyes and saw it happen. There was a flash, a real blinder, the place filling with whiteness that seemed to last for ages. In the middle of the whiteness, two women over by the washbasins – not just the one with the pencil, there was a second one – seemed to flare up and then just disappear, as though they had never been there. The other woman – the woman on the floor, Angel saw now – clutched at her chest and screamed out. It wasn't a high-pitched scream, more like an anguished groan. Just that and then the woman hit the floor, shaking from head to foot for a few seconds as the whiteness subsided, and then she was still.

  Angel opened her eyes and looked around at the cubicles: all the doors were partly open except for one. She bent down and looked along the floor beneath the door but couldn't see anything except for the toilet pedestal. She guessed that the door would be locked if she tried it.

  She looked back at the old woman on the floor and saw that she was still clutching her sweater with her left hand. Wasn't that the side that your heart was on? Angel thought that it was. That meant that she'd had a heart attack. (The very idea of a person being attacked by their own heart was something Angel would have to try tackling a little farther down the pike, because, right now anyway, it just seemed plain foolish.)

  The woman's eyes were wide open, real wide, wide like the eyeballs might just fall right out onto her cheeks, and she was frowning, too. Angel leaned over and looked down into the eyes and she saw, right then and there, the difference between alive people and dead people. This woman had nothing inside her. She was like one of those dummies in the store windows – the ones where the shape was right and everything but there was no life in their faces. There was no life in this woman's face either.

  But no, it was more than that: it was more than simply no life – there was no person either. Fleetingly, Angel wondered what the woman's name was – or should that be had been? No, she reckoned not: the woman shouldn't lose her name just because she was dead.

  Then she wondered about the woman's family, about what she was doing here in this big mall with the cheesy music playing all day every day. Angel moved her head slowly to the right, keeping watching those eyes, and then moved it over to the left, still watching the eyes, waiting for them to give the game away and follow her.

  Nah, Big Girl, she's dead, Samantha the doll whispered in the back of Angel's head. But what if the someone who made her dead, the same person who made the Big Light, what if that someone is still here someplace; what if that someone is still here, hiding in that locked cubicle over there…

  Angel looked up from the body and stared at the cubicles. "Hello? Is anyone here?"

  She half imagined a pair of feet appearing on the other side of the cubicle door – maybe bare feet, covered with hair and maybe with long nails and all dirty – the feet slowly lowering themselves down onto the floor in there, and the sound of the cubicle bolt being pushed back across, and then the door opening, and whoever – whatever – was in there suddenly standing between Angel and the outer door.

  Angel started to back up towards the door she came in by until she finally came right up against it.

  Then the door pushed open and she screamed.

  "Jesus Christ!" Ronnie shouted and he backed straight out of the restroom again, dropping the brown bag containing the sandwiches, potato chips and mineral water he'd picked up for Karl. He was retrieving them from the floor when Angel appeared out of the restroom.

  "I'm sorry about that," Ronnie said. "You'd been a long–"

  "There's a woman."

  Ronnie was crouched down dusting off the bottle and he jerked his head up. "In there?" He nodded at the restroom door.

  Angel nodded back enthusiastically. "She's dead."

  "She's dead?"

  Another nod. "Pooped herself, I think," Angel added, explaining the cause of death succinctly.

  Ronnie handed over the brown bag – "You stay here, and don't go anyplace until I get back," – and disappeared into the restroom.

  The music system was now playing another song that Angel recognized, this time with singers. They were singing about leaving on a jet plane, and the fact that they didn't know when they'd be coming home again. They sounded sad.

  Outside it was getting darker.

  Angel hugged Samantha tight and told her everything was going to be OK. She hoped the doll would believe her.

  "You still need to go?"

  That was the first thing Ronnie said to Angel when he emerged from the women's restroom a few minutes later. And truth to tell, Angel had forgotten about the whole reason for going in there in the first place. But now that she had been reminded…

  Angel nodded her head enthusiastically. "I didn't go in there," she said, nodding to the women's restroom.

  "Then go use the men's," he said, pointing to the door just a few yards along the corridor.

  Angel laughed incredulously, old beyond her years. "You want me to go pee pee in the men's room?"

  "Angel, it'll be fine," Ronnie reasoned to the girl. "There are no men around," he added.

  Angel looked across at the door with its little stick-man icon. "No bodies?" she asked.

  Ronnie shook his head. "Uh uh. I went in there myself and it's completely clear."

  "You're sure no bodies… like in the stalls?"

  Ronnie wasn't sure whether he needed to address his response to the girl or the doll she was holding, seeing as how the girl's question had been delivered in a somewhat squawky voice and had been accompanied by much head and arm movement from the doll. So he did both, shifting his eye level from one to the other the way he might do in any conversation with two people. "There are no bodies in there at all. It's completely body-free."

  Angel ran along and disappeared – albeit cautiously – into the men's restroom.

  She came out a few minutes later looking much more relaxed.

  "That was my first dead body," she announced when the two of them started walking off back to the Mall's main walkway. "I wasn't scared," she added. "Not really." "Me, either," said the squawky voice, before Ronnie could say anything in response. Just as well, he thought, because any additional comment from him could fall well short of being optimistic.

  Back in the mall it was becoming dusky now. They had to get back to the plane but Ronnie had no idea where to get the equipment he needed. Then he saw a metal door with JANITORS stenciled on it standing partly open along a tiny alleyway.

  They went through the door, Angel Wurst hanging tightly onto Ronnie's shirt flap as though her life depended on it – and who could say that it didn't – to find a spacious storage area with benches and lockers. It was clear that no expense had been spared for the mall's employees – the muzak played even in here, though Ronnie was not sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. Particularly when "The Boxer" came around again. Maybe it was some kind of indoctrination or brainwashing. He imagined shift changes in here, with the employees changing their clothes, thinking about breaking free of the drudgery but always–

  I am leaving, I am leaving… but the fighter still remains…

  –turning in the following day.

  Ronnie found various tools, a whole collection of saws, hammers and chisels hanging on the wall from special plugs fixed on by what appeared to be masonry nails. He considered taking a couple of them but decided he probably wouldn't achieve much with them – sawing through wooden flooring in such an awkward position. He tried not to think about what condition Karl was going to be in when – if – they managed to set him free. That shoulder of his had taken a lot of punishment.

  "There are some more cabinets around here." Angel's voice was immediately followed by a brief run of clanging and banging as she tried various doors, obviously without much success.
<
br />   "I'll come around," Ronnie shouted.

  There were four cabinets, all big jobs, standing around eight feet off the ground and double-locked top and bottom. Ronnie went back to the wall tools and selected a thick-handled hammer and a couple of heavy-looking chisels. A few minutes later, he had forced the locks on all four of the big cabinets.

  "They look a mess now," Angel observed.

  "Had to be done," Ronnie said. He rummaged around inside the first one – there were two big rolls of insulation, a few more tools, a battery-powered drill (Ronnie couldn't see any attachments of drill-heads but he guessed they might be in one of the other cabinets), a battery-powered sander, a full-length floor polisher and a box of sanding pads. There was also a pile of wiring reels with a plug on one end and a socket on the other – he lifted a couple out and stood them on one of the benches.

  "Why you getting the ones with the big doo-dads–" Angel pointed to the battery attachments for each of the tools. "–instead of those?" Now she pointed to the pure electrical versions, each considerably more compact.