Nightworld ac-6

by F. Paul Wilson

  It hadn't been Bakersfield, actually, but a small airstrip just outside it. Frank seemed to know everybody in sight; there weren't too many of those, but they all were impressed that he was still on the job. Especially impressed that he was making arrangements to get refueled here on his return flight.

  "Yer gonna be fly'n' inna dark comin' back, y'know," the old guy who ran the place had said as the wing tanks were filling.

  He was the one who'd pocketed a stack of Glaeken's gold coins for the fuel. He was wrinkled and grizzled and looked old enough to have been Billy Rickenbacker's wingman in the Lafayette Escadrille.

  "I know," Frank said from the pilot seat. He had his Walkman earphones slung around his neck and was playing with one of the drooping ends of his mustache.

  Jack sat beside Frank in the pilot's cabin—he'd called it the "cockpit" earlier and had been corrected—while Ba sat in the passenger compartment, adding more teeth to his billy clubs.

  "Lotsa planes disappearin' inna dark these days, Frankie. Go up, neva come down."

  "So I've heard."

  "Some are even disappearin' inna day. Inna dayl So nobody's flyin'—nobody with any sense, that is. Scared to get off the ground. 'Fraid they won't come back. Don't want you t' be one a thems that don't come back, Frankie."

  "Thanks, Pops," Frank said. "Neither do I."

  "Where's Joe?"

  "On his way to Bucharest."

  "Hungary?"

  "No. Rumania."

  "Same difference. Shit! What's the matter with you two? You need the money that bad? Hell, I can lend you—"

  "Hey, Pops," Frank said. "It's not the bread. I'm a pilot, man. I fly folks places. That's what I do. I ain't changing that, okay? Not for any body or any bugs. Besides, we once like promised this here dude that any time he really needed to get somewhere, we'd take him. You can dig that, can't you?"

  "No, I can't dig nothin' of the sort. Where y'goin'?"

  "He says he's got to get to Maui and back real bad."

  Pops stared past Frank at Jack like he was looking at a lunatic. Jack smiled and gave him an Oliver Hardy wave.

  "Got to see my girl. It's her birthday."

  Pops rolled his eyes and started to turn away.

  "Real weird kind of weather you got around here," Frank said, glancing up at the lid of gray overhead.

  "All that shit from Hawaii." Pops wiped his finger along the fuselage and held it up to demonstrate the coating of gray ash. "Just like your name, Frankie. And you're headed straight into it. Tops off at twenny thou, though. Watch yer intakes."

  "Will do."

  Pops went back to check on the refueling. A few minutes later they were air-borne. Jack sniffed the air that leaked into the cabin at the lower altitude.

  "Smells burnt."

  "It is," Frank said. "It's vog—a mixture of like water vapor, smoke, and fine, fine, super-fine volcanic ash. Under normal conditions it would give us awesome sunsets all over the world. But now…hey, who knows? We don't seem to get real sunsets anymore."

  Jack felt closed in, trapped by the formless grayness pressing against the windows of the jet. It was difficult even to tell if they were headed up. He'd have to trust Frank on that.

  Which was probably one of the reasons he didn't like to fly. He liked to be in control of a situation. Up here he was at Frank's mercy. He didn't know which way they were headed, and if something should happen to Frank, Jack didn't have the faintest idea of how to get them down safely. It had scared the hell out of him when Frank had put the controls on autopilot over Denver and made a trip back to the head. He'd returned soon, but it hadn't been anywhere near soon enough for Jack.

  Suddenly the grayness darkened as if a curtain had been drawn, and the jet wobbled.

  "What's up?" Jack said as calmly as he could.

  "Don't rightly know," Frank said.

  "Those are three little words I do not want to hear from my pilot."

  Jack held on to his seats arm rests and knew if he looked down at his hands he'd see two sets of white knuckles.

  "We'll be okay," Frank said.

  "Good. A much better choice of three words."

  "Be cool, Jack. Some weird air currents out of nowhere, that's all."

  The grayness lightened as abruptly as it had darkened. Jack began to breath easier. He was leaning against his window, staring out into the unrelieved grayness, when the plane passed through a brief break in the vog. His throat closed and his hands renewed their chokehold on his armrests. Directly below the wings he saw a broad flat surface, smooth and black as new asphalt, spanning off in all directions until it disappeared into the gray. He was about to shout to Frank that they were going to crash when he saw the eye: Far off to his right, perhaps a quarter-mile away, cathedral-sized, huge and yellow with a slit pupil, it sat embedded in the black surface, staring back at him like a lab tech eying a microbe.

  Jack slammed back in his seat, gasping for breath.

  "My God, Frank!" he said, his voice a croak. "What is that?"

  Frank glanced past him. "What's what?"

  Jack took another look. The vog had closed in again. Nothing there now but gray.

  "Nothing."

  Jack remembered Glaeken mentioning winged leviathans big as towns cruising the skies, but he'd said they'd keep to the nightside. Looked like he was wrong. At least one of them had made itself at home in the dense vog from Hawaii. Maybe more than one.

  His mouth was dry. "How long till we get above this junk?"

  "Any minute now."

  Sure enough, two minutes later they broke into clear air. But no sign of the sun. The whole sky was now some sort of tinted filter, a ground-glass lens that wouldn't allow direct sunlight through. Right now, Jack didn't care. They were out of the vog, out of reach of that thing in the clouds falling away beneath them.

  He looked down. As far as he could see, nothing but a smooth dome of gray cloud. Plenty of room for a bunch of leviathans down there. Frank said they were over the Pacific; for all Jack knew they could be headed back toward New York.

  The pilot's cabin suddenly seemed too small. Jack decided to head back and see what Ba was up to. He slapped Frank on the shoulder.

  "Get you anything?"

  "A hefty J would be super right about now. I've got a lid of bodacious—"

  "Frank, don't even kid about that."

  "Who's kidding, man? It's the only way to fly. Hell, I recall the time I jumped the Himalayas and coasted into Kathmandu totally wrecked. It was—"

  "Please, Frank. Not on this trip."

  Six miles above the Central Pacific with a blitzed pilot. Not Jack's idea of Friendly Skies.

  Frank grinned. "Okay, man. Another coffee'd be good."

  "Not getting sleepy, are you?"

  "Not yet. I'll let you know when. Then you can take over the controls."

  "Two coffees coming right up! An urn, already!"

  Jack spent a few hours with Ba, trying to get to know him. It wasn't easy. He did learn a few things about Sylvia Nash which cast her in a different light—about her dead husband, Greg—"the Sergeant", as Ba called him—a Special Forces non-com who'd made it through Nam in one piece only to go out one night for a pack of cigarettes and get killed by an armed robber when he tried to break up a 7-11 heist.

  He learned about Jeffy, the once autistic kid, and about the Dat-tay-vao that had inhabited Dr. Bulmer for a while and left him a cripple, and now lay dormant in Jeffy, waiting. He learned about the powerful love between Sylvia and Doc Bulmer, how they were soulmates who locked horns and butted heads on a regular basis but whose karmas were so intertwined that one could not imagine life without the other.

  Jack learned all that, but he learned very little about Ba, other than the fact that he grew up in a poor Vietnamese fishing village and was intensely devoted to the Sergeant's wife—referred to simply as "the Missus"—and how that devotion extended to anyone who mattered to her.

  When Jack ran out of questions, they sat in silence, and
Nick Quinn's words to Alan Bulmer came back to him. Only three of you will return. He brushed the words away. Nick may have met this mysterious Rasalom down in that hole, but he'd yet to prove that he had any powers of prediction. He talked in riddles anyway.

  When Jack noticed the plane banking to its left, he headed back up front to see what was going on.

  "We almost there?" he said as he stepped into the pilot's cabin.

  Frank was bouncing around in his seat, listening to his earphones. The volume was so high Jack could recognize "Statesboro Blues" from where he stood. He sniffed the air. No trace of herbal-smelling smoke. He tapped Frank on the shoulder and repeated his question when Frank pulled off the headphones.

  "We're past it," Frank said. "Got to come around to make our approach from the west."

  Jack strapped himself in the co-pilot's seat and peered out the window. The vog was gone. The air was clear all the way to the pristine blue of the Pacific below. Off the upturned tip of the right wing an irregular patch of lush green, spiked with mountains and rimmed with white sand and surf, floated amid the blue.

  "Maui?" Jack said.

  Frank shook his head. "Oahu. Pearl Harbor's down there in that notch. Hang on. We're coming around toward Maui now." A moment later the plane leveled off and three islands swung into view. "There. That's Molokai on the left, Lanai on the right, and Maui's dead ahead."

  Jack had been studying the maps Glaeken had given him. They were approaching from the northwest. Molokai looked okay, and the resort hotels along Maui's Ka'anapali Bay were intact but deserted. Inland, the tops of the western mountains were tucked away within a wreath of rain clouds.

  But as Frank banked southward, Jack saw that there was nothing left of the old whaling town of Lahaina—everything burned, blackened, flattened. To their right the whole southern flank of Lanai was scorched and smoking. And then Jack's stomach lurched, not so much from the movement of the plane as from what he saw ahead of them. He felt as if he'd been thrown into any one of a dozen prehistoric island movies of the Lost Continent/Land That Time Forgot type.

  Maui looked swaybacked from here, as green as Oahu but with mountains at each end and a broad flat valley between. But the big mountain that took up most of the eastern end, Haleakala, was belching fire and pouring gray-black smoke into the air. The old volcano's sides, however—at least from Jack's vantage—were still lush and green.

  And somewhere on the slope of that chimney flue to hell dwelt Kolabati and her necklaces.

  Jack studied the scene, wondering what the hell he'd got himself into. Maui looked so fragile, like it could blow any minute. Just like Hawaii on its far side.

  "Frank," he said, "can we swing around the island? I'd like to get the lay of the land before we touch down."

  "I don't know, Jack. It's getting late. And we'd have to fly low to see anything. Air currents could be tricky on the far side. I mean, with the wide temperature variants between the ocean and the lava and the vog, we could hit some weird thermals. I don't like to do that when I'm straight."

  "Okay," Jack said casually. "If you don't think you can hack it, I'll find somebody at the airport to take me up after we land."

  Frank grinned. "You're a rotten, despicable, evil dude, Jack, and I hate you very, very much. May your karma turn black and fall into the void. Hang on."

  Frank swung the jet out and banked around the western flank of the reactivated Haleakala to the south end of the island. The scenery changed abruptly from lush green to scorched black, as if a giant flame thrower had been played over the terrain. The eastern slope, however, was a scene from Dante's Inferno. Molten lava streamed down the broken-out side of the cone, cooling black crusts rode inexorably downward on the crests of crimson flame-waves, throwing up immense clouds of salty steam as they wiped out in the sea.

  Frank skirted the turbulent clouds for a few miles. On the right was the immense bubbling, boiling cauldron of ocean where the Big Island of Hawaii had once stood, the source of the lid of vog that covered much of the Eastern Pacific.

  Frank turned to Jack. "You sure you want to go all the way around?"

  Jack nodded. "All the way."

  "Okay. Strap in and don't say I didn't warn you."

  He banked a sharp left and gunned the jet into the roiling steam. Water sluiced off the windshields like rain as the craft was buffeted about by updrafts and downdrafts and mini-vortices of air, but Frank guided her through with a clenched jaw and steely-eyed determination. When they broke free into the light again, Frank relaxed his grip on the controls and half-turned to Jack.

  "Awright! Far freaking out! Let's try that again. Maybe we can—Jesus H. Christ!"

  Jack had already seen it. His stomach was fluttering in awe. The news reports had mentioned it and he'd seen photos, but nothing had prepared him for the reality of it.

  A whirlpool. A maelstrom. A swirling, pinwheeling, ten-mile-wide mass of water, spread out below him like the planet's navel. Its perimeter moved slowly where it edged into Kahului Bay, but quickly picked up speed as the water progressed inexorably toward the whirling center where it funneled down into a black hole somewhere far below in the ocean floor.

  Both Jack and Frank stared dumbly through their windows on the first two passes, then Jack began noticing details.

  "Frank!" Jack said, staring down on the third pass. "It looks like—"

  He grabbed the binocs from the clamp in the ceiling panel and focused in on the colorful specs he'd spotted below, riding the rim of the maelstrom, then darting in toward its swirling heart and out again.

  "What's doing?" Frank said.

  "Windsurfers! There's a bunch of nuts down there windsurfing along the edge of the whirlpool!"

  "That's Ho'okipa Bay, Jack. Windsurfing capital of the world. Those dudes live for that shit. I know where they're comin' from. So do you, I reckon."

  "Yeah, I can dig it," Jack said, nodding slowly. Jeez, I'm starting to sound like Frank. "But one little slip and you're gone."

  "Yeah, but what a way to go!" Frank said dreamily. "If I've gotta go, I want it to be in right here, strapped into my jet. Stoked to the eyeballs and Mach one straight down into the earth so's after we hit me and the plane are so tangled and twisted up they can't tell Frank Ashe from Frank Ashe's plane and so they bury us together. Or better yet, straight down into one of those holes until I run into something or run out of fuel. Whatta trip that'd be! Might even try that one straight. Whatcha think?"

  "Drop me off first," Jack said. "It's getting late. I think it's time to land."

  Frank grinned. "Aw. And just when we was starting to have some fun."

  He radioed down to Kahului airport for clearance; they told him the winds were out of the west and that they'd cleaned off the runway. All was clear and he'd better land fast because once it was dark, the hangers would be locked and wouldn't be opened for anyone.

  " 'Cleaned off the runway?'" Frank said to Jack as he started his approach. "What's that mean?"

  They found out after they landed and opened the hatches. From off to the east came a dull roar, the low, gurgling rumble of uncountable tons of water being sucked down through the ocean depths. Looming behind them, Haleakala smoked and thundered. The steady breeze was warm and wet, and it stunk.

  "Sheesh!" Jack said as he stepped down onto the tarmac. The ripe, putrid odor clogged his nose and throat. He shifted the strap of his duffel bag on his shoulder and glanced around at the deserted runways and empty buildings, searching for the source. "What is that?"

  "Dead fish," said Ba, debarking behind him. "I know that smell from village where I grew."

  "You get used to the pilau after a while," said the tractor driver who'd come out to tow their jet into a nearby hangar.

  "Don't tell me Hawaii always smells like this."

  "Hell no. Didn't they tell you? It's been raining fish for the past two nights."

  "Fish?"

  "Yeah. You name it: tuna, squid, crabs, blues, mahi mahi, everything. Even a few dolph
in. Raining out of the sky. And first thing every morning I've got to go out with the plow and clear them off the runways. Don't know why. Nobody's flying much these days anyway since all the tourists upped and went home."

  "But raining fish?"

  "It's the puka moana. It backs up at night."

  With that he jumped on his tractor and started towing the jet toward the hanger, leaving Jack wondering how a whirlpool could back up. It wasn't as if it was a toilet. Or was it?

  Frank led them toward the terminal building.

  "Let's see what we can do about getting you guys a car."

  The main terminal building looked like an Atlantean relic raised from the sea. Its windows and skylights were smashed, rotting fish and seaweed draped its roof and walls. Inside it was worse.

  "Shee-it!" Frank said, waving his hand before his face. "Smells like a fish market that's run out of ice."

  They trooped through the gloomy, deserted building, looking for someone, anyone. Finally they ran across a dark, middle-aged fat guy squeezing into a wrinkled sports jacket as he hurried toward them down a ramp. His badge read "Fred" and he looked part Hawaiian.

  Jack waved him down. "Where are the car rentals?"

  "There ain't. All closed up. Nobody to rent to."

  "We need a car."

  "You're outta luck, I'm afraid."

  Jack looked at Ba. "Looks like we'll have to wait till morning, Ba. What do you say?"

  Ba shook his head. "Too long away from the Missus."

  Jack nodded. He knew Ba was feeling the time pressure as much as he; maybe more. He grabbed the guy's arm as he tried to squeeze by.

  "You don't understand, Fred. We really need a car."

  Fred tried to pull away but Jack tightened his grip on his flabby upper arm. Ba stepped closer and looked down at him.

  "I can't help you, Mister," Fred said, wincing. "Now let me go. It's after five. It'll be getting dark in half an hour. I've got to get home."

  "Fine," Jack said. "But we're new around here and you're not. And since you seem to be the only one around here, we've elected you to find us a car. And if you can't help us out, we'll be forced to take yours. We'll pay you a generous rental price before we take it, but we will take it. So where do they keep the cars around here?"