Lightfall (19 page)

Three others broke through the line and hurried into the cockpit. The pilot was all alone, except for the sobbing stewardess. He was in radio contact with the FBI. As the three came forward toward the instrument panel, the agents were briefing him lightning-fast, rattling off the guidelines for dealing with terrorists.

The first one lunged against the dials, both palms flat and slipping switches. The second cuffed the pilot's head with his elbow and knocked him off course. The plane swayed left and tilted their stomachs. Then the monk reached down and took the wheel, playing it in and out so they bucked and lifted off their feet. The shell of the plane shrieked against its fastenings. The third monk grabbed the microphone and commenced to chant his mantra.

For a moment things were poised, like a bomb at the end of the world. They were like kids, as they huddled there in a row and toyed at the controls. A horn went off. Then a red light two feet long above the windshield, flashing their arrival at the point of no return. Still, all they did was grin. It didn't seem, with faces blank as that, they could have been touched by the slightest motive. They simply had a game to play.

Des Moines, just below, couldn't figure out what the problem was. Had the terrorists opened fire? An incendiary device, perhaps? The line was still open, spouting the fourth Upanishad, but they wouldn't say if they wanted a runway. The tower could tell from the sweep of its scanner that the plane was losing height. Figures blipped on the screen: 29000, 29000, 26000. It was dropping a mile a minute.

Meanwhile, up in the falling sky, everyone held on. Their lips were pulled back against their teeth. Their bags and books and liqueurs went flying free like shrapnel as the nose tipped down to thirty, forty, forty-five degrees. In the cockpit, one monk lay down on the instrument panel and rocked back and forth, throwing switches with every move he made. His two fellow monks had clawed their way to the forward door and clung there struggling to turn the lock.

There was nothing wrong with the plane at all. Five seconds' expert runaround—spinning the dials and righting the gyres—and they would have been fine. They'd have leveled off a couple of thousand feet above the Iowa grassland. The machine itself was sending every signal it knew how, to try to abort this change of plans. The pilot woke with a blinding pain in his head. Instinctively, he went for the wheel and pulled.

It didn't matter.

Michael rang for half an hour before the first one came: a colorless woman, hungry-looking and with a stoop. She did not speak, just bowed her head, then stepped up to take the bell rope from him. He gladly gave it over, watching with a certain fascination as she crouched and rose to the rhythm of it. She looked about fifty-five. Though her knuckles were puffed and her fingers curled arthritically, she seemed to be steeled to the pain and tolled with a greater skill than he. It almost seemed like music.

Michael didn't realize she'd done such things for the Methodist church every Sunday for thirty years. Without fail, she brought in a basket of flowers for the altar. She stitched all the vestments by hand, dipped her own beeswax candles, and every day—as she had this morning—carried a tray of porridge and scones to the parsonage down the road. For years she had been the first to receive the minister's blessing, as he woke up wheezing and checked the sea for weather. If the old stone church was her vocation, the rector was her ticket to heaven.

Therefore, it was appropriate that she should find the body—with the covers tight under his chin, and his soul flown out the window like a parrot. She cleaned him up automatically, as if he'd been a baby. Then dressed him neat in his starchy whites and laid his hand on an open Bible, turned to the letters of Paul. After that, she waited two hours in her spotless kitchen, hoping for a sign. The sudden bell was the perfect thing. She washed her hair and ironed her plainest dress. She ran to the church like a postulant, trying to think what she still had left to surrender.

She was oddly unsurprised by Michael. Indifferent, he almost would have said, except he could feel the edge of deference in her, simpering and stoic. It filled him with rage. He suddenly wanted to test its limits; see how the meekness played when he put the pressure on. His contempt for the breed was enormous. Yet he had to give her credit: when he happened to look out the window, he was shocked to see a proper little crowd approaching, dressed in their Sunday best. A man and his three scrubbed kids. Then, two by two, various tottering husbands and wives, old as the hills and bearing each other along. Mr. Huck the mayor; beside him, Judith Quinn the doctor's wife. With a thrill of anticipation, Michael turned again to watch her ring, as if to absorb her perfect timing. Whoever she was, she tolled it like a feast day.

The doors opened, and the congregation entered. They made for their regular pews without so much as a glance at Michael. Abruptly, the woman let go of the rope. Now it got so quiet he could almost hear them think. The bell-woman padded across the floor to her usual seat, on the aisle in the final row. She sat like the rest, eyes front, and waited. Nobody spoke a word. They numbered just fifteen.

Strange, how he wasn't prepared. He'd never had a crowd quite like it. He had led them in tents and baseball parks—on acres of folding chairs, while they fanned themselves with the program. His church in Pittsburgh—used to be Catholic—was as big as Seville Cathedral, which it copied down to the coatracks. Still, he had never stood before a village parish, with everyone related far, far back—and not to the likes of him. Some of them had met in this building for longer than he'd been preaching.

Michael had always been the focus for a much more rootless sort, who went from place to place with a horrible, growing longing. Walking up the center aisle, looking straight ahead, he experienced a queer and unexpected dislocation, as if he wasn't really up to it. The feeling gnawed, like a loss of faith. They would all see through him the moment he opened his mouth. He remembered his mother in a gilded coach, off to a ball at a castle. He had stood left out with the crowd of servants, waving in a line on the white stone stairs. She was something sacred. He could not reach her. Only nine years old, and he thought: I have to run.

“This is all a dream. You know that, don't you?”

Turning and glancing across their faces, he avoided every eye. He had learned long since to look into the middle distance, riveting on a point above their heads, so it seemed he was in a spirit state. He didn't really feel safe. They could turn at any time. He wasn't even sure how fast he ought to go.

“You can't escape it,” he declared with smug conviction. “Not until you rid yourselves of everything that's trapped you here.”

They sat there perfectly silent—not exactly hostile, not exactly scared. For a moment they had the air of paying customers. They seemed to want more of a show.

“We must embrace the darkness, you and I,” Michael said. He'd reached a point where he had to have some help. He'd run out of preacherly drive. He almost wished he had a Bible—except he thought he'd better try to court them first without the thunder.

“There's nothing to be afraid of,” he said.

“What are your powers?” called a voice to his right. Before he could fix on which of the stony faces had asked, there came yet another, a few rows back on the left. Like an accusation: “What did you bring us?”

“Peace,” he replied, with a dignified lift of his chin. It wasn't clear which question he was answering. He fell back a couple of steps, till he felt the rim of the altar behind him, touching the knob of a vertebra. If only he could crouch, he thought, and find the door where the money was. Didn't they understand? It was
they
who had to bring to
him.

They looked at him patiently. None made a sign to his neighbor, or whispered a word behind the hand. All they needed was a little mumbo jumbo and a wafer. At the least sign of a ritual, the whole congregation would have lined up single file, ready to take a dose. Eyes all shut. Tongues hanging.

Instinctively Michael patted his pockets, like he'd lost a set of keys. He had never felt such a want of magic, nor so much yearning for a world beyond him. The yearning was in him more than them. He seized on the hunk of pitch in his left side pocket. His body heat had melted the drug so it felt like the sop of an open wound. He slicked his fingers nicely. As he moved toward them again, drawing forth his shiny hand and holding it high in a priestly blessing, he wished more than anything else to be rid of them.

The man with the kids was in the front row. Michael dropped his hand and held it out, as if he had a ring he wanted kissed. The man leaned forward and licked the tip of one finger, very very dryly. Michael could have demanded more, but the will to power had abated some. He sidled left to the children. The first, a girl maybe twelve years old, took the whole forefinger into her mouth, as matter-of-factly as if she were licking clean a chocolate spoon. The two little ones beside her, boys in shorts, snickered as if it were a game. They both crouched over at the same time, sucking two fingers apiece, and grinned at each other.

As he moved to the old folk, Michael rooted in his pocket again and scooped out a double spoonful. It was like pudding, iridescent, liver-colored. Though he'd floated all night long on a dram of it, Michael had no craving of his own now. He preferred to put them under—thus to build a wall of glass, with him on the outside looking in. Their ravening astonished him. A bald and jowling man gripped his arm to the elbow, slavering at the custard like a dog. His wife made a sudden seething sound. She pulled him back by the collar and lunged to take his place, for fear he hadn't left her any.

They would have eaten poison, just as willy-nilly. This knowledge calmed him and made him almost gentle. By the time he reached the next two, he was balling bits of it up in his hand like pellets of bread. Now he bent down and actually fed them. Already the children lilted about the room, enamored of their shadows. Judith Quinn fell to her knees, tipped her head back, let her mouth go slack. Michael, as he rubbed it on her gums, began to mumble words he didn't even know.

They were all so ready, he was done in a few short minutes. He ended up at the bell-woman, who shrank a little back as if she wasn't worthy. Her he gave a whole mouthful, and she nearly gagged trying to get it down. Then Michael went to the open door and breathed a little air. The church was full of an awful smell, like a burned sweet cake. His tolerance was fairly high, but he was determined to be icy-clear and avoid all traces of the phantom life. He felt superior, convinced he had found the regimen that would let him go on forever. He was hard as the sun on the winter meadow.

And the meadow rose in a gentle slope to a line of houses along the crescent. The site of things was as fine as he remembered. He suddenly realized: nothing prevented him
staying
here. Once the others were gone, and the town was leveled and the boats sunk, he could live on the cliffs in splendid isolation. Maybe come in here when it rained.

He turned around with an easy smile, like a man playing hide-and-seek with his kids. In the moment that he was focused out the door, they'd all left their seats. They strolled about the aisles in a queer slow motion. Whenever the flow of traffic brought them face to face, they laughed in a tight-cheeked, soundless way. It was as if they'd escaped some awful danger. The high-beamed church, with the deep-set pointed windows and seats in rows, suddenly seemed alive with bustle, rather like a depot. These people were on the move. They were only waiting to make connections.

“Listen now,” he announced, in the singsong tone of a keeper. “Here is what you do: go home and throw out everything. If you can, try to get a fire going. Burn every scrap of paper with your name. Then the personal things—you're to bury them out in the yard. Or even better, take them into the woods. Make sure you get lost coming home. That way, you won't be tempted to dig anything up.”

Lost was no problem at all. They had only the faintest notion who they were. If they could have put it into words, they would have said they were people in a story they once heard.

They required no further prodding. They broke the ranks of the promenade and quickly moved to evacuate the building. Michael followed behind, one hand raised waist-high in a sort of herding motion. He stopped to watch from the door as they fanned out on their separate missions. The task he'd assigned was only a warm-up. The thing was to get inside their houses and see them one by one. He had darker business to transact.

The next hour he spent in the graveyard. He wandered beneath the wind-racked firs, peering about at the graves. They cluttered the cliffside grove at every turn, receding deeper and deeper, year by violent year. As Michael groped his way, he began to get quite agitated. It was as if he could not tolerate any link to the past beyond himself. The unbroken line of stones mocked his own brief presence here, as if to say he was only one of hundreds, all lost.

He crouched and began to scratch the moss from the surface of a faded square of marble. The stone was grainy, like a slice of bread, but the date was visible still. He traced it with a finger: 1895. Then he hooked his fingernails along one edge and rocked the stone in the spongy earth till he could pry it up. It was only a couple of inches thick. He lifted it out like a trapdoor, as if there were some kind of treasure there. Then he heaved it up in his arms as he stood, and the last cling of weeds fell away. It was heavier than he'd bargained for. As he staggered left toward the cliff edge, it almost seemed he carried the year itself.

He stood in a clump of purple daisies and tossed it over the side. He watched it plummet a hundred feet, then break on a jagged outcrop halfway down. The stone flew into smithereens, and the cliff face blew like a hand grenade. The shower of rubble went spraying down till it hit the water in a sudden splash. For half a second, the noise tore the air like a swarm of bees. Then silence.