by Stephen King
Now more black and red balls were appearing at the edge of the airport. They bounced, danced, circled… and then raced toward them.
20
You can’t get away from them, his father had said, because of their legs. Their fast little legs.
Craig tried, nevertheless.
He turned and ran for the terminal, casting horrified, grimacing looks behind him as he did. His shoes rattled on the pavement. He ignored the American Pride 767, which was now cycling up again, and ran for the luggage area instead.
No, Craig, his father said. You may THINK you’re running, but you’re not. You know what you’re really doing—you’re SCAMPERING!
Behind him the two ball-shapes sped up, closing the gap with effortless, happy speed. They crisscrossed twice, just a pair of daffy showoffs in a dead world, leaving spiky lines of blackness behind them. They rolled after Craig about seven inches apart, creating what looked like negative ski-tracks behind their weird, shimmering bodies. They caught him twenty feet from the luggage conveyor belt and chewed off his feet in a millisecond. At one moment his briskly scampering feet were there. At the next, Craig was three inches shorter; his feet, along with his expensive Bally loafers, had simply ceased to exist. There was no blood; the wounds were cauterized instantly in the langoliers’ scorching passage.
Craig didn’t know his feet had ceased to exist. He scampered on the stumps of his ankles, and as the first pain began to sizzle up his legs, the langoliers banked in a tight turn and came back, rolling up the pavement side by side. Their trails crossed twice this time, creating a crescent of cement bordered in black, like a depiction of the moon in a child’s coloring book. Only this crescent began to sink, not into the earth—for there appeared to be no earth beneath the surface—but into nowhere at all.
This time the langoliers bounced upward in perfect tandem and clipped Craig off at the knees. He came down, still trying to run, and then fell sprawling, waving his stumps. His scampering days were over.
“No!” he screamed. “No, Daddy! No! I’ll be good! Please make them go away! I’ll be good, I SWEAR I’LL BE GOOD FROM NOW ON IF YOU JUST MAKE THEM GO AW—”
Then they rushed at him again, gibbering yammering buzzing whining, and he saw the frozen machine blur of their gnashing teeth and felt the hot bellows of their frantic, blind vitality in the half-instant before they began to cut him apart in random chunks.
His last thought was: How can their little legs be fast? They have no le
21
Scores of the black things had now appeared, and Laurel understood that soon there would be hundreds, thousands, millions, billions. Even with the jet engines screaming through the open forward door as Brian pulled the 767 away from the ladder and the wing of the Delta jet, she could hear their yammering, inhuman cry.
Great looping coils of blackness crisscrossed the end of Runway 21—and then the tracks narrowed toward the terminal, converging as the balls making them rushed toward Craig Toomy.
I guess they don’t get live meat very often, she thought, and suddenly felt like vomiting.
Nick Hopewell slammed the forward door after one final, unbelieving glance and dogged it shut. He began to stagger back down the aisle, swaying from side to side like a drunk as he came. His eyes seemed to fill his whole face. Blood streamed down his chin; he had bitten his lower lip deeply. He put his arms around Laurel and buried his burning face in the hollow where her neck met her shoulder. She put her arms around him and held him tight.
22
In the cockpit, Brian powered up as fast as he dared, and sent the 767 charging along the taxiway at a suicidal rate of speed. The eastern edge of the airport was now black with the invading balls; the end of Runway 21 had completely disappeared and the world beyond it was going. In that direction the white, unmoving sky now arched down over a world of scrawled black lines and fallen trees.
As the plane neared the end of the taxiway, Brian grabbed the microphone and shouted: “Belt in! Belt in! If you’re not belted in, hold on!”
He slowed marginally, then slewed the 767 onto Runway 33. As he did so he saw something which made his mind cringe and wail: huge sections of the world which lay to the east of the runway, huge irregular pieces of reality itself, were falling into the ground like freight elevators, leaving big senseless chunks of emptiness behind.
They are eating the world, he thought. My God, my dear God, they are eating the world.
Then the entire airfield was turning in front of him and Flight 29 was pointed west again, with Runway 33 lying open and long and deserted before it.
23
Overhead compartments burst open when the 767 swerved onto the runway, spraying carry-on luggage across the main cabin in a deadly hail. Bethany, who hadn’t had time to fasten her seatbelt, was hurled into Albert Kaussner’s lap. Albert noticed neither his lapful of warm girl nor the attaché case that caromed off the curved wall three feet in front of his nose. He saw only the dark, speeding shapes rushing across Runway 21 to the left of them, and the glistening dark tracks they left behind. These tracks converged in a giant well of blackness where the luggage-unloading area had been.
They are being drawn to Mr. Toomy, he thought, or to where Mr. Toomy was. If he hadn’t come out of the terminal, they would have chosen the airplane instead. They would have eaten it—and us inside it—from the wheels up.
Behind him, Bob Jenkins spoke in a trembling, awed voice. “Now we know, don’t we?”
“What?” Laurel screamed in an odd, breathless voice she did not recognize as her own. A duffel-bag landed in her lap; Nick raised his head, let go of her, and batted it absently into the aisle. “What do we know?”
“Why, what happens to today when it becomes yesterday, what happens to the present when it becomes the past. It waits—dead and empty and deserted. It waits for them. It waits for the time-keepers of eternity, always running along behind, cleaning up the mess in the most efficient way possible… by eating it.”
“Mr. Toomy knew about them,” Dinah said in a clear, dreaming voice. “Mr. Toomy says they are the langoliers.” Then the jet engines cycled up to full power and the plane charged down Runway 33.
24
Brian saw two of the balls zip across the runway ahead of him, peeling back the surface of reality in a pair of parallel tracks which gleamed like polished ebony. It was too late to stop. The 767 shuddered like a dog with a chill as it raced over the empty places, but he was able to hold it on the runway. He shoved his throttles forward, burying them, and watched his ground-speed indicator rise toward the commit point.
Even now he could hear those manic chewing, gobbling sounds… although he did not know if they were in his ears or only his reeling mind. And did not care.
25
Leaning over Laurel to look out the window, Nick saw the Bangor International terminal sliced, diced, chopped, and channelled. It tottered in its various jigsaw pieces and then began to tumble into loony chasms of darkness.
Bethany Simms screamed. A black track was speeding along next to the 767, chewing up the edge of the runway. Suddenly it jagged to the right and disappeared underneath the plane.
There was another terrific bump.
“Did it get us?” Nick shouted. “Did it get us?”
No one answered him. Their pale, terrified faces stared out the windows and no one answered him. Trees rushed by in a gray-green blur. In the cockpit, Brian sat tensely forward in his seat, waiting for one of those balls to bounce up in front of the cockpit window and bullet through. None did.
On his board, the last red lights turned green. Brian hauled back on the yoke and the 767 was airborne again.
26
In the main cabin, a black-bearded man with bloodshot eyes staggered forward, blinking owlishly at his fellow travellers. “Are we almost in Boston yet?” he inquired at large. “I hope so, because I want to go back to bed. I’ve got one bastard of a headache.”
CHAPTER NINE GOODBYE TO BANGOR. HEADING WEST THROUG
H DAYS AND NIGHTS. SEEING THROUGH THE EYES OF OTHERS. THE ENDLESS GULF. THE RIP. THE WARNING. BRIAN’S DECISION. THE LANDING. SHOOTING STARS ONLY.
1
The plane banked heavily east, throwing the man with the black beard into a row of empty seats three-quarters of the way up the main cabin. He looked around at all the other empty seats with a wide, frightened gaze, and squeezed his eyes shut. “Jesus,” he muttered. “DTs. Fucking DTs. This is the worst they’ve ever been.” He looked around fearfully. “The bugs come next… where’s the motherfuckin bugs?”
No bugs, Albert thought, but wait till you see the balls. You’re going to love those.
“Buckle yourself in, mate,” Nick said, “and shut u—”
He broke off, staring down incredulously at the airport… or where the airport had been. The main buildings were gone, and the National Guard base at the west end was going. Flight 29 overflew a growing abyss of darkness, an eternal cistern that seemed to have no end.
“Oh dear Jesus, Nick,” Laurel said unsteadily, and suddenly put her hands over her eyes.
As they overflew Runway 33 at 1,500 feet, Nick saw sixty or a hundred parallel lines racing up the concrete, cutting the runway into long strips that sank into emptiness. The strips reminded him of Craig Toomy:
Rii-ip.
On the other side of the aisle, Bethany pulled down the windowshade beside Albert’s seat with a bang.
“Don’t you dare open that!” she told him in a scolding, hysterical voice.
“Don’t worry,” Albert said, and suddenly remembered that he had left his violin down there. Well… it was undoubtedly gone now. He abruptly put his hands over his own face.
2
Before Brian began to turn west again, he saw what lay east of Bangor. It was nothing. Nothing at all. A titanic river of blackness lay in a still sweep from horizon to horizon under the white dome of the sky. The trees were gone, the city was gone, the earth itself was gone.
This is what it must be like to fly in outer space, he thought, and he felt his rationality slip a cog, as it had on the trip east. He held onto himself desperately and made himself concentrate on flying the plane.
He brought them up quickly, wanting to be in the clouds, wanting that hellish vision to be blotted out. Then Flight 29 was pointed west again. In the moments before they entered the clouds, he saw the hills and woods and lakes which stretched to the west of the city, saw them being cut ruthlessly apart by thousands of black spiderweb lines. He saw huge swatches of reality go sliding soundlessly into the growing mouth of the abyss, and Brian did something he had never done before while in the cockpit of an airplane.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them again they were in the clouds.
3
There was almost no turbulence this time; as Bob Jenkins had suggested, the weather patterns appeared to be running down like an old clock. Ten minutes after entering the clouds, Flight 29 emerged into the bright-blue world which began at 18,000 feet. The remaining passengers looked around at each other nervously, then at the speakers as Brian came on the intercom.
“We’re up,” he said simply. “You all know what happens now: we go back exactly the way we came, and hope that whatever doorway we came through is still there. If it is, we’ll try going through.”
He paused for a moment, then resumed.
“Our return flight is going to take somewhere between four and a half and six hours. I’d like to be more exact, but I can’t. Under ordinary circumstances, the flight west usually takes longer than the flight east, because of prevailing wind conditions, but so far as I can tell from my cockpit instruments, there is no wind.” Brian paused for a moment and then added, “There’s nothing moving up here but us.” For a moment the intercom stayed on, as if Brian meant to add something else, and then it clicked off.
4
“What in God’s name is going on here?” the man with the black beard asked shakily.
Albert looked at him for a moment and then said, “I don’t think you want to know.”
“Am I in the hospital again?” The man with the black beard blinked at Albert fearfully, and Albert felt sudden sympathy for him.
“Well, why don’t you believe you are, if it will help?”
The man with the black beard continued to stare at him for a moment in dreadful fascination and then announced, “I’m going back to sleep. Right now.” He reclined his seat and closed his eyes. In less than a minute his chest was moving up and down with deep regularity and he was snoring under his breath.
Albert envied him.
5
Nick gave Laurel a brief hug, then unbuckled his seatbelt and stood up. “I’m going forward,” he said. “Want to come?”
Laurel shook her head and pointed across the aisle at Dinah. “I’ll stay with her.”
“There’s nothing you can do, you know,” Nick said. “It’s in God’s hands now, I’m afraid.”
“I do know that,” she said, “but I want to stay.”
“All right, Laurel.” He brushed at her hair gently with the palm of his hand. “It’s such a pretty name. You deserve it.”
She glanced up at him and smiled. “Thank you.”
“We have a dinner date—you haven’t forgotten, have you?”
“No,” she said, still smiling. “I haven’t and I won’t.”
He bent down and brushed a kiss lightly across her mouth. “Good,” he said. “Neither will I.”
He went forward and she pressed her fingers lightly against her mouth, as if to hold his kiss there, where it belonged. Dinner with Nick Hopewell—a dark, mysterious stranger. Maybe with candles and a good bottle of wine. More kisses afterward—real kisses. It all seemed like something which might happen in one of the Harlequin romances she sometimes read. So what? They were pleasant stories, full of sweet and harmless dreams. It didn’t hurt to dream a little, did it?
Of course not. But why did she feel the dream was so unlikely to come true?
She unbuckled her own seatbelt, crossed the aisle, and put her hand on the girl’s forehead. The hectic heat she had felt before was gone; Dinah’s skin was now waxy-cool.
I think she’s going, Rudy had said shortly before they started their headlong take-off charge. Now the words recurred to Laurel and rang in her head with sickening validity. Dinah was taking air in shallow sips, her chest barely rising and falling beneath the strap which cinched the tablecloth pad tight over her wound.
Laurel brushed the girl’s hair off her forehead with infinite tenderness and thought of that strange moment in the restaurant, when Dinah had reached out and grasped the cuff of Nick’s jeans. Don’t you kill him… we need him.
Did you save us, Dinah? Did you do something to Mr. Toomy that saved us? Did you make him somehow trade his life for ours?
She thought that perhaps something like that had happened… and reflected that, if it was true, this little girl, blind and badly wounded, had made a dreadful decision inside her darkness.
She leaned forward and kissed each of Dinah’s cool, closed lids. “Hold on,” she whispered. “Please hold on, Dinah.”
6
Bethany turned to Albert, grasped both of his hands in hers, and asked: “What happens if the fuel goes bad?”
Albert looked at her seriously and kindly. “You know the answer to that, Bethany.”
“You can call me Beth, if you want.”
“Okay.”
She fumbled out her cigarettes, looked up at the NO SMOKING light, and put them away again. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. We crash. End of story. And do you know what?”
He shook his head, smiling a little.
“If we can’t find that hole again, I hope Captain Engle won’t even try to land the plane. I hope he just picks out a nice high mountain and crashes us into the top of it. Did you see what happened to that crazy guy? I don’t want that to happen to me.”
She shuddered, and Albert put an arm around her. She looked up at him frankly. “Would you like to kiss
me?”
“Yes,” Albert said.
“Well, you better go ahead, then. The later it gets, the later it gets.”
Albert went ahead. It was only the third time in his life that the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi had kissed a girl, and it was great. He could spend the whole trip back in a lip-lock with this girl and never worry about a thing.
“Thank you,” she said, and put her head on his shoulder. “I needed that.”
“Well, if you need it again, just ask,” Albert said.
She looked up at him, amused. “Do you need me to ask, Albert?”
“I reckon not,” drawled The Arizona Jew, and went back to work.
7
Nick had stopped on his way to the cockpit to speak to Bob Jenkins—an extremely nasty idea had occurred to him, and he wanted to ask the writer about it.
“Do you think there could be any of those things up here?”
Bob thought it over for a moment. “Judging from what we saw back at Bangor, I would think not. But it’s hard to tell, isn’t it? In a thing like this, all bets are off.”
“Yes. I suppose so. All bets are off.” Nick thought this over for a moment. “What about this time-rip of yours? Would you like to give odds on us finding it again?”
Bob Jenkins slowly shook his head.
Rudy Warwick spoke up from behind them, startling them both. “You didn’t ask me, but I’ll give you my opinion just the same. I put them at one in a thousand.”
Nick thought this over. After a moment a rare, radiant smile burst across his face. “Not bad odds at all,” he said. “Not when you consider the alternative.”