Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  “You’ll see me,” Kwan objected, with drunken clarity.

  “Never mind me,” the steward said, being severe again. “You’re too important to lose like this.”

  Kwan stared, almost shocked into sobriety. “You recognize me?”

  “Yes, of course.” The steward reached down to grasp Kwan’s arm and yank him upright, surprisingly strong for such a little man.

  “You have a role to play,” he said. “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “A safer way,” the little man said, and led Kwan inside, and down one flight of carpeted stairs and along another corridor to another door. “You can’t use this ever again,” he caudoned Kwan. “Normally it’s locked.”

  ‘Thank you,” Kwan said. “Thank you.” Because he understood through his fog that the litde man had saved his life.

  “Yes, yes,” the litde man said, gesturing Kwan through the doorway. “Just be more careful from now on,” he said, as testy as though Kwan were his personal responsibility.

  Teetering but safe, Kwan made his way down the steep stairs to the kitchens, and along the yellow corridor to his room and his bunk.

  And next day, at the sink, did he pay for it.

  12

  The excitement boiling within her was so great when she actually set foot on the airplane that she wobbled on her new shoes and smiled like a stupid up-country child at the stewardess, who offered a more professional smile as she reached for Pami’s boarding pass; studied it; returned it: “Just down this aisle, in the fourth cabin.”

  “Thank you .” The words came out a whisper. Her clogged throat, full of emotion, wouldn’t even make words. But it didn’t matter; the stewardess’s attention was already on the next passenger.

  Each person has a special seat. Pami understood that, but wasn’t sure just how each person found his special seat. She wandered down the aisle, carrying her new large plastic purse, past people stowing luggage and removing coats and moving back and forth, and when she came to another uniformed stewardess she mutely extended the boarding pass. “Next cabin,” the woman said, pointing. “On your right.”

  Nothing to do but keep going forward. Past the next partition—so probably into the next “cabin”—she went, her heart fluttering, her eyes panic-stricken with the problem of finding the right seat but her mouth still uncontrollably beaming, showing her poor teeth. Arrived in the right cabin, she just stood there in the narrow aisle, bag in one hand and boarding pass in the other, and waited. People pushed past her, unswervingly drawn to their own seats, and she began to hope that eventually there would only be one unoccupied place left along the right here, and it would be hers.

  I’m going away, she thought, and smiled so hard her cheeks hurt. I’m going away. I’m flying.

  The second stewardess reappeared, looked at Pami, assessed the situation, and soothingly said, “Having trouble finding your seat? May I see your boarding pass?”

  Pami showed it. She felt like a litde girl handing a flower to her mama.

  “Oh, yes, you’re right here,” the stewardess said, returning the pass and gendy touching Pami’s elbow to move her on down the aisle. “The middle seat right there, next to that gendeman.”

  Pami’s heart leaped when she saw the blond man in the aisle seat. He looked so like the Danish man! But of course he wasn’t, he couldn’t be, and when the man looked up she saw that he was probably twenty years younger than the Danish man, and was in much better physical condition.

  Oh, could he be the Danish man’s son? That would be so bad, so bad...

  But then the man smiled and got to his feet, saying, “This seat yours?” and he was absolutely an American. And he didn’t really look like the Danish man at all. Just the blond hair and the smooth white face, that’s all, and being tall and big-shouldered.

  Pami took her place, between the blond man on the aisle and a small dark man in a turban in the window seat, and the stewardess went away, satisfied. Pami sat with knees together, plastic bag clutched in her arms, looking straight ahead, and after a minute the blond man said, “Excuse me, but they’ll want you to put your seat belt on.”

  “What?”

  He repeated the statement, then showed her how to fasten the seat belt, demonstrating by unfastening and refastening his own. She watched carefully, found the ends of the two straps somewhere beneath herself, and clicked them together. But apparendy a huge fat person had sat in this seat last; laughing, the blond man showed her how to tighten the belt. Doing so, she confessed, “I never been in a plane before.”

  “Don’t worry, your part is easy,” he assured her. “The pilot has the tough job,”

  He was so pleasant and calm that she began to be calm herself. It didn’t even bother her too much when the stewardess came by again and said she couldn’t keep her bag on her lap during takeoff, but had to put it on the floor under the seat in front of her. She did it because she had to, but she kept her eyes and one foot on the bag, because it contained sixty dollars in green American bills, and eight hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, all that was left of the Danish man’s money.

  The three weeks since the talk on the roof had been frightening, bewildering, exhilarating. At every step, she was unsure what she was about, afraid she’d be caught somehow, that by actually doing something with the Danish man’s money instead of keeping it as a kind of fetish, a magic keepsake, the law would find out and suddenly throw her in jail for murder. She was scared the whole time, every step of the way, but after that talk on the roof she’d known she had to make the try, she couldn’t just go on living as before.

  I don’t want to kill myself, she kept telling herself during that time. I know I won’t live many more years anyway, but I want them, I want every day I got coming. I don’t want my life to get so bad I’ll want to throw it away.

  So she had to make the attempt. She had to at least try. And the thing was, every place she went, to a dress store, or a suitcase store, or a bank, or the American embassy on Wabera Street, everywhere, somebody always turned up that was helpful, that knew the ropes and could give her advice or keep her from making stupid up-country mistakes. It was as though somebody was watching over her, holding her hand as she went about doing all these things. She believed in the spirits of the air and the spirits of the water and the spirits of the trees, and one of these spirits must be near her, protecting her, that’s what it had to be. Maybe the Danish man had been a very evil man, and when she killed him she made a spirit happy, and it was repaying her. Or maybe some relative from home had died and was now a spirit, and was seeing the world through her. Something was with her now on her journey through life, something that had never been there before. She could feel it.

  When the plane began to move, she became extremely nervous and felt she had to relieve herself right away, but she was hemmed in by the blond man and the man with the turban, and the seat belt was around her middle, and nobody was supposed to stand up in the airplane at this time, and she was still afraid of drawing attention to herself. She clenched all her muscles, she held everything in, and the plane moved, stopped, moved, stopped, moved, rushed, and took off! Openmouthed, she stared past the sullen-looking man in the turban and watched the tan ground fall away, and then saw nothing but sky. “Ohhhh,” she said, and lost her nervousness, and didn’t have to relieve herself any more.

  After a while, wonderful food was brought around, a separate tray for everybody. Far too much food for Pami to eat; she did her best, and then put in her bag the cake wrapped in clear plastic. Then she napped a litde while, coming down off the high of three weeks of tension, and when she woke up, feeling a little stiff and cramped, there was a movie starting to be shown on the front wall of the cabin. It was called Angels Unawares, and you could buy earphones to listen to it, but Pami didn’t need to listen to it. She watched the people move on the wall, and dozed, and felt Kenya fall away behind her. All up over Africa the plane would fly, and sail high above the Mediterranean Sea, and soar ove
r France, and glide, and turn, and come down at Heathrow Airport in London in England. There she would get on another plane that would take her over the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. Great huge strides across the world!

  The movie ended, and she slept some more, and awoke because something was wrong. Something tense was in the air, near her. She looked around, tasting the badness in her mouth, and beside her the blond man was frowning, gripping the armrests, looking surprised and angry. “So that’s it,” he said.

  Pami looked up at him like a mouse peering out of a grainsack. “What? Mister?”

  He didn’t answer; he was waiting for something. She waited, too, and suddenly from somewhere near the front of the plane came a burst of screams, men and women screaming. Wideeyed, Pami cowered in her seat. The screams stopped abrupdy, as though a switch had been turned off, and then a voice came over the loudspeaker:

  “Ladies and gendemen, this is Captain Cathcart again. I’m instructed to inform you that this aircraft is now in the control of representatives of the International League of the Oppressed. I’m instructed to inform you that all passengers should remain quiedy in their seats and no harm will befall them.”

  The pilot’s voice went on, sounding flat, all emotion rigidly suppressed, and Pami saw the man come striding down the aisle. His head and face were wrapped in an olive-and-black- patterned scarf, and he wore dark sunglasses as well. He was dressed in boots and blue jeans and a black shirt and a brown leather jacket, and he carried a machine pistol. He looked exacdy like the photos on the magazine covers, showing the terrorists.

  The pilot went on with two or three more sentences of what he had been instructed to say, and the terrorist came down the aisle and stopped next to the blond man. Ignoring the blond man, holding the machine pistol with its barrel aimed upward, he pointed with his other hand at Pami and said, “You come with me.”

  Pami shrank back into the seat, smaller and smaller. The blond man, sounding very strong, said, “You can’t have her.”

  The terrorist looked at him with scorn: “Do you know who I am?”

  “I know what you are,” the blond man said.

  X

  I don’t have to explain myself.

  The instant I saw it there, sitting with the woman, I knew what it was. The stench of God was all over it, like dried roots, like stored apples. Laughing! And a servant.

  I am not a servant. We are not servants. He Who We Serve is not our master, but our lover. We act from our will, no others. Could this... thing say as much? Or any of its swooping, tending, message-bearing ilk?

  And did its master really think he could sweep away this compost heap without the knowledge of He Who We Serve? We love this world! How it seethes, how it struggles, how it howls in pain, what colors there are in its agony! It is our greatest joy, the human race. We cannot see it removed, like game pieces from a table at the end of the day, simply because he’s bored.

  Don’t be afraid, you wretched vermin. We will save you.

  Ananayel

  There is a language which is no language, which we of the empyrean understand, and which these fallen creatures still remember. While my human mouth made words, and his human mouth made words, we spoke to one another:

  “You have no place here,” I told him, which was simply the truth.

  He snarled at me. It is so hard to believe these were once angels as well; how thoroughly they've forgotten their former grace. He said, “This is more my place than yours. I am not here to destroy it.”

  So his master knew what was going to happen, did he? And, having learned nothing over the millennia about the futility of opposing the desires of God, the master of this creature has sent his minions into the field yet again, to do batde against God’s commandments. I rose and said, “Don’t you know that the triumphs of Evil are always transitory? God’s Will will be done.” “Not today,” he said. “We want the woman.”

  “You already have her,” I said, glancing down at the poor diseased malevolent bitch. “But you can’t take her with you just yet.”

  “I want her now. I’ll take her now.”

  It would of course be possible to start again, to assemble another team, perhaps lingually linked in French this time, shifting the basic scene from New York to Lyons, but I refused to do it. This creature and his master must not be permitted even the most temporary successes. So I resisted. Leaning closer to him, gazing through those dark sunglass lenses into the red depth of his borrowed eyes, I said, “Do you really want an exchange of miracles, here in a Boeing 747? Do you really want to give these humans an array of anomalies to decipher?”

  “All I want is the woman.” He was trying to be implacable with me. Me!

  “She is part of the plan.”

  “That’s why I want her.”

  “That’s why you can’t have her.”

  He turned those eyes on the woman, smoking burning eyes, and spoke to her in the human way: “Get up from there.”

  “God Almighty,” I prayed, “grant me a crumb of Your power.” The response lifted me gently into the air, my feet no more than an inch from the industrial carpet. His attention swiveled from the woman to me, his eyes showed alarm, then understanding. He raised a hand—

  I stopped time.

  Everything. It stopped. In all the corporal universe, everything was rigid, unmoving, unfeeling, made of stone. Energy was not employed, matter did not decay Nothing was kinetic, everything was inert. In all of that vast silent stillness, flat and dead, without even an echo, only that devil and I, in the clumsy airplane suspended in unmoving air over the unturning Earth, continued to move, act, think, struggle.

  His raised hand pointed at me, and my body filled with leprous organisms, my eyes were clouded by cataracts, my throat clogged with open sores. Toads sprang from my mouth. Every sense was confounded, every thought distracted, every pain and woe at his command was flung at me, to grapple and clamp me, addle my powers, deflect my intentions, absorb me in self-defense while he got on about his prideful business.

  I fought back. I swept away everything he hurled at me, killing, searing, wiping clean, purifying as rapidly as he befouled, until there came an instant of total freedom from his onslaught. Then I looked at him. I looked at him with my real eyes.

  That body he was wearing was burned to a crisp. The body was reduced to ashes, the ashes to molecules in the ambient air, till there was nothing left but a tiny, buzzing, furious black fly, a black streak, a smear, a smudge, flashing back and forth in front of me, shrieking its defiance. I was ready to destroy that manifestation as well, but it fled away into business class, and I felt myself near the end of my borrowed power. I had to restore the situation to what it had been.

  I reconstructed the body the demon had used, or a near enough facsimile, and inhabited it. The previous body I carefully lowered until its shoes touched carpet once more, then left it simple instructions that would carry it until I could return.

  I released time.

  The woman had been looking at my former self, as though for help and rescue, and now she blinked and looked confused. No doubt she’d seen that body appear to rise, then blur, then all at once be back where it had been. But she would assume the error was in her eyes, perhaps some manifestation of her terror, or of her disease. Already, she was looking away from the old me toward the new me, afraid to obey my order and afraid not to.

  “Never mind,” I told her. This voice was more guttural, this body more uncomfortable. I looked—almost with envy—at my roomy former self. “Sit down,” I told it.

  It sat. The expression on its face remained stern. Its movements were only faintly off, only slightly in the direction of the cumbersome.

  “You both wait there,” I ordered, waving the machine pistol with obvious menace. “I’ll get back to you. We’ll see who you can defy.” And I turned away and marched toward the front of the aircraft, to deal with my fellow hijackers. They were human, and would be no trouble.

  13

  Pam
i watched the terrorist stride away, beyond the partition and out of sight. What happened there? Her vision was briefly blurred, her stomach and all of her insides were roiled and loose, her mouth was as dry as the desert in which she’d grown up, her arms and feet twitched uncontrollably.

  But he didn’t take her when he went away. The blond man had stood up and talked back to the terrorist, arguing with him, saying not-to-pick-on-women-take-him-instead-and-this-and-that, and the terrorist snarled and argued and was of course not going to pay any attention to such stuff. And then he went away.

  Pami peered sidelong, in awe and fear and relief, at her rescuer. The blond man still looked stern. He sat there with his big hands placed slackly on the armrests, feet planted, gazing forward toward where the terrorist had disappeared. Pami whispered, ccWill he come back?”

  ccWe’ll just wait here,” he said. Tension showed in how woodenly he sat and spoke, how he kept facing forward as he talked. ccWe won’t make any moves, won’t attract attention to ourselves.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  She dared to reach out and touch the back of his hand for just an instant, and it was surprisingly cold. How much effort it must have taken for him to stand up and defy an armed terrorist!

  This was the only man in Pami’s entire life toward whom she had ever had any reason to feel grateful. She didn’t know what to do with the feeling, with the obligation. There was no way to repay him, nothing she could give him or do for him. That would be some expression of gratitude, wouldn’t it, to infect him with slim! A faint smile touched her small, secret, twisted face, and she turned away to see the turbanned man on her other side all scrunched up, eyes tight closed as he moved a set of wooden beads through his trembling fingers. His heavy lips moved without sound. Somebody’s religion, it must be.