Darkness Falling

by Peter Crowther

  I'll – change that to: We'll – yeah, right. Just one pilot. The other or others had just up and vanished, right back into the magician's hat with all the other rabbits.

  The girl waited for a few seconds, looking around at the debris of interrupted life, and then, her face crumpling under a threatened fresh onslaught of tears, she said, verbally underlining key words, "My mommy. Where is she? She was talking with me and then–" She shook her head. What she was about to say made no sense. She was – what? – eight, nine years old? Even in the world of fairies and Santa Claus, of bogeymen and talking animals, a world she obviously still inhabited, there was nothing could prepare this kid for her mom disappearing from right under her nose when she's sitting right next to her on an airplane.

  When he was just a few feet away from her, having sidestepped bags, pillows, blankets, bottles of water and various other icons of normality, crunching along on a myriad spilled peanuts, Ronnie crouched down and held out his hands sides upwards and palms facing each other, like a cross between going-to-clap and come-over-here-to-daddy. Ronnie knew he wasn't the girl's father but he wanted to do something that might make her feel a little easier.

  "Hey?" he said.

  The girl waited a few seconds, looking at Ronnie between splayed fingers fixed to her face. "Hey."

  "You OK?"

  "My mommy…"

  "I know, I know. Take it easy now. What's your name?" he asked.

  The girl was starting to shake and Ronnie saw a pool of water between her feet. "Angel," she said, her voice soft. "Angel Wurst." Then, "My mommy… where's my–"

  "That's a lovely name," Ronnie said as he reached out a hand to move a curl of hair from her eyes.

  The girl nodded. "Thank you," she said. "My name is really Angela but my daddy said he breathe-iated it to Angel."

  "Well, it's lovely."

  The girl nodded again.

  "And just how old are you, Angel Wurst?"

  "I'm nearly seven," she said, sniffling. "Where's my–"

  Still six years old. Ronnie shook his head at her. So much for his estimate of eight or nine.

  "You know," he said, "I'll bet your mommy's with my wife, Martha." He shook his head and made a tutting sound, looking around conspiratorially. "They're hiding from us. And everyone else is too, come to think of it," he added, whispering now. "They've all snuck off and left us. Like magic."

  "Magic?"

  Ronnie nodded.

  "My mommy wouldn't leave me," Angel Wurst said.

  Ronnie felt himself still nodding. That was surely true. He pulled a blanket from the seat alongside him, dislodging an Annie Proulx novel and sending it clattering to the floor. He held out the blanket.

  "Here," he said. "Come put this on. You look cold."

  The girl shifted from one foot to the other, holding both hands to her face. "My mommy!" she said. "I want my mommy. I don't want a blanket."

  The PA system beeped and the man's voice returned. This time, it didn't sound quite so casual.

  "Hello out there. Can anyone hear me?" It was as though Ronnie and the girl were eavesdropping on the pilot's (was he the pilot? Ronnie hoped so) conversation with the control tower, only Ronnie knew that he wasn't speaking to the control tower. This guy was speaking to the one-time crowded cabin behind him, a cabin from which he was getting no sign of life. Just like, Ronnie imagined, the cockpit of the plane, in which he was suddenly and inexplicably alone.

  "We need to go see the captain," Ronnie said.

  The girl looked around up towards the front of the plane. "The captain?"

  Ronnie nodded. "He sounds scared, doesn't he?"

  This time it was the girl's turn to nod.

  "Well, we need to go see him tell him we're OK. See if he needs any help."

  "What about my mommy? What if she comes back while we're–"

  Ronnie smiled as reassuringly as he was able. He couldn't bring himself to tell her what he thought, couldn't tell her that he didn't think Angel Wurst's mommy was coming back, just as he couldn't bring himself to tell himself that Martha wasn't coming back – Martha, whose guts he had hated just a few minutes ago but whom he would now dearly love to see and take in his arms. Was it only a few minutes ago? Ronnie checked his watch. It was turning two in the morning. They should be back in Denver within just a few minutes. But what would they find there? That was the $64,000 question.

  Oh, and there was a good one just before it: could the owner of the juddery PA voice land them back on the ground in one piece? Time to find out, he thought.

  "Come on," he said to Angel Wurst, and the two of them started down the aisle towards the front of the plane.

  Ronnie could feel her straining at him, pulling back from the door at the end of the aisle. As they approached the stewardesses' compartment just before business class, Ronnie saw trays of prepackaged meals and plastic drink cartons strewn over the floor. He stopped just before they reached the area and hunkered down beside the girl. She was still shaking but she stared up into Ronnie's eyes. Ronnie recognized that look. It was a craving for assurance. She wanted him to say that everything was going to be OK because, even with the limited take on things that six slim years allowed for, she was pretty damn sure things were just about as bad as they could be.

  "Angel?" Ronnie said.

  The girl didn't speak, just nodded, though Ronnie saw her eyes sliding to the side and her head threatening to turn just a little so that she could see what was in the stewardesses' station. Because she sure as hell knew something was there – that was another thing Ronnie could see in the girl's eyes.

  "Angel," Ronnie said again, "we're going to have to give a lot of help to the pilot."

  "I dunno how to steer a plane," she said. "My daddy let me steer his car one time, sitting on his knee, but a plane is a lot bigger than my daddy's old-mo-beel."

  Ronnie just stopped himself from correcting her.

  "No, sweetie. You won't have to steer the plane." He jabbed his thumb into his own chest and added, "Heck, I won't have to steer it either."

  He got back to his full height and gently eased Angel past the station while he continued to talk.

  "No, the pilot will do all the steering, but I reckon we'll have to help him."

  The girl looked up the aisle towards the door into the flight cabin and then looked back at Ronnie. "They're gone, aren't they?"

  "Who's that, honey?"

  "The men in the–" She looked up at the cabin door again and then said, "The men in the cockpit."

  Ronnie looked into those two green eyes before nodding slowly. "I think they might be," he said.

  "They're hiding too, right?"

  "They're hiding, too."

  Angel Wurst said, "Where are they hiding? I didn't see that part."

  "I don't know where they're hiding, honey."

  "My daddy calls me honey," she said. Her bottom lip started to quiver.

  "Hey, what am I thinking of! We need to get you to a restroom. Get you cleaned up."

  "Cleaned up?"

  "I thought I saw you'd spilled your drink," Ronnie said, sliding into kindergarten diplomacy. "Didn't you get some on your pants? And down your legs?"

  The girl frowned and then her eyes lit up. "No," she said, "I think I might have done a pee-pee."

  Despite the situation, Ronnie had to smile. No diplomacy needed here, folks. Just tell it right as it is and skip the bullshit: Hey, gramps, I think I pissed myself so will ya get it cleaned up already?

  He sat Angel Wurst in a big comfortable chair in the business class and went back to her seat to retrieve her Little Mermaid bag. Minutes later, with Ronnie looking the other way – "You sure you're not looking? My mommy tol' me never to take my clothes off in front of a stranger." – Angel changed into clean pants. Soon after that, they were rapping on the cabin door.

  "Hey, come open the door," Ronnie shouted.

  There was a whoop! from inside and a clattering of locks being turned and then the door opened.


  A small, jowly man with disheveled hair – and not too much of that – pulled the door wide and peered myopically at Ronnie and the girl. Ronnie half expected him to say, Yeah? What is it? I'm watching TV here and I already gave at the office. Instead, the man started to sob and, raising his hands to his face, he knocked his glasses onto the floor. Angel promptly stepped forward and placed her foot on them. Even in her bare feet, she managed to shatter one of the lenses.

  Jesus Christ! Ronnie thought. "Hey, take it easy," he said, taking hold of the man's shoulders and backing him into the cabin. There was something about the guy that was familiar. But he sure as hell didn't know any airplane pilots.

  The cockpit was small. Just two seats were jammed between, in front of, and beneath a huge range of dials, switches, levers and knobs. Lights flashed and flickered, needles went around and around. And from the two pairs of headphones sitting one on what Ronnie decided to refer to as the dashboard and the other on the left-hand chair, a thin crackle of static sat on the air like the sound of the highway from across the fields where he had grown up in Cuyahoga Falls.

  "They just went," the man said, shaking his head, the mixture of amazement and sheer disbelief still on his face. "Disappeared," he said, accepting the glasses from the little girl and slipping them right back onto his nose. He pulled at his necktie – which was already undone – and undid the top couple of buttons on his shirt.

  "They're all hiding," Angel offered. "But we don't know where because I didn't see that part."

  "Hiding?" The man frowned first at Angel and then at Ronnie, squinting up at him through his broken glasses, the eye behind the smashed lens blinking constantly.

  Ronnie watched him all the way, trying to dispel the image of Piggy in Lord Of The Flies, and flared his eyes as he helped the man into one of the seats. "Yeah, they've done a good job of it, too. There's only us two back there. Everyone else has dis– hidden themselves."

  Ronnie was about to say something else but instead turned to the girl. "Hey, what did you say?" he asked.

  "They're all hi–"

  Ronnie shook his head and hunkered down alongside the girl. "Was it you who screamed? Just before the big light?"

  Angel Wurst nodded her head, blonde ringlets jiggling over her ears.

  "I'm going to get back to the controls." The man in the cockpit shuffled back into the left-hand of two leather seats and took hold of the steering column.

  Ronnie looked around the cockpit, saw all the dials, the blinking lights, the switches and levers. "You OK with all this?"

  "I'm OK," the man said, his voice soft, and he looked down at the girl who was staring through the front window into the swirling clouds. He leaned forward so that his face was almost touching Ronnie's. "So long as I don't have to land." He nodded and flashed his eyes a couple times. "You know what I'm saying here?"

  "Well, we sure as hell can't stay up here forever."

  The man nodded, turned his head and jiggled his eyebrows a couple of times. The jiggles said it all. They were in deep doo doo.

  "Can we do something to help? Hey, this is Angel, by the way."

  The girl nodded sheepishly and looked down at her Little Mermaid bag.

  "I'm Karl," the man said, and he adjusted his glasses, still squinting a little at the broken lens.

  "Ronnie," said Ronnie. He slapped Karl on the shoulder a couple of times and then reached over and tousled Angel's hair.

  "Hey," he said, "we never finished, did we?"

  Angel frowned.

  "You said something before?" He let his voice drift off and when the girl still looked puzzled, Ronnie added, "You said something about not seeing that part?"

  She nodded.

  "What did you mean?"

  She shrugged.

  "Did you see something? Is that why you screamed?"

  She looked down at her bag.

  Ronnie glanced sideways at Karl, who had turned in his chair, and then looked back at the girl. "Angel, if you saw something that might help–"

  Then, right out of the blue, she said, "I saw it in my head."

  (4)

  The light had come around two hours into the Songs for Sleepers section that ran from one am until five. The show was a mixture of mood music, Melanie Grisham's sultry voiceovers and intros, and occasional phoned-in calls from folks either unable or unwilling to sleep, for whatever reason.

  Some of them might be nursing bad relationships, some might be holding down nightshift jobs at the packing plant over at Carlisle, across the hills, or the trucking depot down at Dawson or even propping up the counter at Martha McNeil's Diner down the road in Jesman's Bend – affectionately known locally as the one-horse town to end them all ("…and even that one is lame," was how Rick usually ended those discussions). And one or two of them had some kind of psychological disorder, but Melanie didn't mind that. She reckoned they posed less of a problem to the world phoning her in the middle of the night – telling her they wanted to get into her pants and asking her about her pussy (Melanie's 15-second tape delay always kept such remarks off the air but she always managed to tell them she didn't own a cat) – than if they were out there roaming the streets, drinking their cocktails of oblivion and strength out of brown paper bags and talking to the moon… unless someone happened along they could talk to instead, someone who would be better off home and wrapped up in bed.

  The light flashed and then disappeared. Just like that.

  At a little after 3.15, the whole world had turned white, just for an instant, and then everything had gone back to normal.

  Melanie was cueing up a CD of Perry Como's greatest hits – her mother's favorite – flicking forward to track 11, 'Magic Moments', when, suddenly everything in front of her had turned white. It wasn't just a glare from outside – like the headlights of an approaching car washing across the windows, except there weren't any windows connecting to the outside world in the studio – it was everything in the room, including the air itself: all definition had disappeared, a momentary white blindness, and then back the way it had been just seconds before.

  "Jesus Christ!" Melanie hissed, yanking her hand back from the track button on the CD rig like the rig was a hot stove and she'd just touched it. "What the hell was that?"

  Geoff rushed out of the sound booth and stood in the center of the room, looking around at the equipment, a copy of Men's Journal hanging from his hand. "You OK?" he asked when he was satisfied that nothing had blown.

  Melanie nodded. The Sinatra song was coming to an end. She waved Geoff quiet and pulled the mic boom across to her. "Yeah, nobody told those stories like Old Blue Eyes," she said into the gauze, her voice smoky and just the right side of hoarse. She pressed the play button on the CD player. "We're gonna leap right on now with one of my mother's favorites. I'll be back to talk to you after this – a few 'Magic Moments' from Mr. Perry Como." As the first orchestral strains cut in, Melanie said, "And anyone out there needs someone to talk to in these lonely hours, just give me a call – you know the number." She pushed the boom away and wound up the volume.

  She leaned back on her chair and held her hands straight out in front of her. They were shaking. She looked across at her husband and took a deep breath. "What was it?"

  Geoff shrugged. "Nothing in here, that's for sure."

  He ran a hand through his thatch of sandy hair and breathed deeply.

  "So where was it, if it wasn't in here?" Melanie pointed across to the wood-paneled sidings that went all around the room. "Can't even see outside."

  Rick appeared in the sound booth and started waving. Geoff waved him to come inside.

  "There's a car, truck maybe, out on the forest road," Rick said as he came into the studio. "On fire."

  "That must've been it," Geoff said. "Don't see how we could see it in here, though."

  Rick looked from Geoff's face to Melanie's. "That must've been what?"

  Melanie shook a Marlboro from a pack on the console and lit it. "Some kind of light," she said, bl
owing out smoke in the thin stream, watching it curl up below the light. She placed the cigarette on the lip of a Coca-Cola ashtray and flicked through a CD rack.

  Rick frowned and thought back to sitting out there on the deck at the back of the station, remembered the dream and waking up from it. "No, the light came first."

  Geoff walked across and shook himself a cigarette out of Melanie's pack. "Before the truck?"

  "I don't know for sure it's a truck. Could be a car. But it's burning."

  Melanie seemed to have found what she was looking for. She flipped open a CD case and slipped the CD into the second player, cueing a particular track. "You boys want to talk about it in the booth? I've got a show to do?"