He got his bag. He got his jacket. The door to the jetway had been opened, and people were already moving up the aisle. The door to the cockpit was open, and here was the Captain, also smiling . . . but also looking at the passengers in first class who were still getting their things together, spotting him--no, targeting him--and then looking away again, nodding to someone, tousling a youngster's head.
He was cold now. Not cold turkey, just cold. He didn't need the voice in his head to make him cold. Cold--sometimes that was okay. You just had to be careful you didn't get so cold you froze.
Eddie moved forward, reached the point where a left turn would take him into the jetway--and then suddenly put his hand to his mouth.
"I don't feel well," he murmured. "Excuse me." He moved the door to the cockpit, which slightly blocked the door to the first class head, and opened the bathroom door on the right.
"I'm afraid you'll have to exit the plane," the pilot said sharply as Eddie opened the bathroom door. "It's--"
"I believe I'm going to vomit, and I don't want to do it on your shoes," Eddie said, "or mine, either."
A second later he was in with the door locked. The Captain was saying something. Eddie couldn't make it out, didn't want to make it out. The important thing was that it was just talk, not yelling, he had been right, no one was going to start yelling with maybe two hundred and fifty passengers still waiting to deplane from the single forward door. He was in, he was temporarily safe . . . but what good was it going to do him?
If you're there, he thought, you better do something very quick, whoever you are.
For a terrible moment there was nothing at all. That was a short moment, but in Eddie Dean's head it seemed to stretch out almost forever, like the Bonomo's Turkish Taffy Henry had sometimes bought him in the summer when they were kids; if he were bad, Henry beat the shit out of him, if he were good, Henry bought him Turkish Taffy. That was the way Henry handled his heightened responsibilities during summer vacation.
God, oh Christ, I imagined it all, oh Jesus, how crazy could I have b--
Get ready, a grim voice said. I can't do it alone. I can COME FORWARD but I can't make you COME THROUGH. You have to do it with me. Turn around.
Eddie was suddenly seeing through two pairs of eyes, feeling with two sets of nerves (but not all the nerves of this other person were here; parts of the other were gone, freshly gone, screaming with pain), sensing with ten senses, thinking with two brains, his blood beating with two hearts.
He turned around. There was a hole in the side of the bathroom, a hole that looked like a doorway. Through it he could see a gray, grainy beach and waves the color of old athletic socks breaking upon it.
He could hear the waves.
He could smell salt, a smell as bitter as tears in his nose.
Go through.
Someone was thumping on the door to the bathroom, telling him to come out, that he must deplane at once.
Go through, damn you!
Eddie, moaning, stepped toward the doorway . . . stumbled . . . and fell into another world.
13
He got slowly to his feet, aware that he had cut his right palm on an edge of shell. He looked stupidly at the blood welling across his lifeline, then saw another man rising slowly to his feet on his right.
Eddie recoiled, his feelings of disorientation and dreamy dislocation suddenly supplanted by sharp terror; this man was dead and didn't know it. His face was gaunt, the skin stretched over the bones of his face like strips of cloth wound around slim angles of metal almost to the point where the cloth must tear itself open. The man's skin was livid save for hectic spots of red high on each cheekbone, on the neck below the angle of jaw on either side, and a single circular mark between the eyes like a child's effort to replicate a Hindu caste symbol.
Yet his eyes--blue, steady, sane--were alive and full of terrible and tenacious vitality. He wore dark clothes of some homespun material; the shirt, its sleeves rolled up, was a black faded almost to gray, the pants something that looked like bluejeans. Gunbelts crisscrossed his hips, but the loops were almost all empty. The holsters held guns that looked like .45s--but .45s of an incredibly antique vintage. The smooth wood of their handgrips seemed to glow with their own inner light.
Eddie, who didn't know he had any intention of speaking--anything to say--heard himself saying something nevertheless. "Are you a ghost?"
"Not yet," the man with the guns croaked. "The devil-weed. Cocaine. Whatever you call it. Take off your shirt."
"Your arms--" Eddie had seen them. The arms of the man who looked like the extravagant sort of gunslinger one would only see in a spaghetti western were glowing with lines of bright, baleful red. Eddie knew well enough what lines like that meant. They meant blood-poisoning. They meant the devil was doing more than breathing up your ass; he was already crawling up the sewers that led to your pump.
"Never mind my fucking arms!" the pallid apparition told him.
"Take off your shirt and get rid of it!"
He heard waves; he heard the lonely hoot of a wind that knew no obstruction; he saw this mad dying man and nothing else but desolation; yet from behind him he heard the murmuring voices of deplaning passengers and a steady muffled pounding.
"Mr. Dean!" That voice, he thought, is in another world. Not really doubting it; just trying to pound it through his head the way you'd pound a nail through a thick piece of mahogany. "You'll really have to--"
"You can leave it, pick it up later," the gunslinger croaked. "Gods, don't you understand I have to talk here? It hurts! And there is no time, you idiot!"
There were men Eddie would have killed for using such a word . . . but he had an idea that he might have a job killing this man, even though the man looked like killing might do him good.
Yet he sensed the truth in those blue eyes; all questions were canceled in their mad glare.
Eddie began to unbutton his shirt. His first impulse was to simply tear it off, like Clark Kent while Lois Lane was tied to a railroad track or something, but that was no good in real life; sooner or later you had to explain those missing buttons. So he slipped them through the loops while the pounding behind him went on.
He yanked the shirt out of his jeans, pulled it off, and dropped it, revealing the strapping tape across his chest. He looked like a man in the last stages of recovery from badly fractured ribs.
He snapped a glance behind him and saw an open door . . . its bottom jamb had dragged a fan shape in the gray grit of the beach when someone--the dying man, presumably--had opened it. Through the doorway he saw the first-class head, the basin, the mirror . . . and in it his own desperate face, black hair spilled across his brow and over his hazel eyes. In the background he saw
the gunslinger, the beach, and soaring seabirds that screeched and squabbled over God knew what.
He pawed at the tape, wondering how to start, how to find a loose end, and a dazed sort of hopelessness settled over him. This was the way a deer or a rabbit must feel when it got halfway across a country road and turned its head only to be fixated by the oncoming glare of headlights.
It had taken William Wilson, the man whose name Poe had made famous, twenty minutes to strap him up. They would have the door to the first-class bathroom open in five, seven at most.
"I can't get this shit off," he told the swaying man in front of him. "I don't know who you are or where I am, but I'm telling you there's too much tape and too little time."
14
Deere, the co-pilot, suggested Captain McDonald ought to lay off pounding on the door when McDonald, in his frustration at 3A's lack of response, began to do so.
"Where's he going to go?" Deere asked. "What's he going to do? Flush himself down the john? He's too big."
"But if he's carrying--" McDonald began.
Deere, who had himself used cocaine on more than a few occasions, said: "If he's carrying, he's carrying heavy. He can't get rid of it."
"Turn off the water," McDonald snapped suddenly.
"Already have," the navigator (who had also tooted more than his flute on occasion) said. "But I don't think it matters. You can dissolve what goes into the holding tanks but you can't make it not there." They were clustered around the bathroom door, with its OCCUPIED sign glowing jeerily, all of them speaking in low tones. "The DEA guys drain it, draw off a sample, and the guy's hung."
"He could always say someone came in before him and dumped it," McDonald replied. His voice was gaining a raw edge. He didn't want to be talking about this; he wanted to be doing something about it, even though he was acutely aware that the geese were still filing out, many looking with more than ordinary curiosity at the flight-deck crew and stewardesses gathered around the bathroom door. For their part, the crew were acutely aware that an act that was--well, overly overt--could provoke the terrorist boogeyman that now lurked in the back of every air-traveller's mind. McDonald knew his navigator and flight engineer were right, he knew that the stuff was apt to be in plastic bags with the scuzzball's prints on them, and yet he felt alarm bells going off in his mind. Something was not right about this. Something inside of him kept screaming Fast one! Fast one! as if the fellow from 3A were a riverboat gambler with palmed aces he was all ready to play.