There was a scary sensation of weightlessness and vertigo, and for a moment he was sure he was going to vomit. This was accompanied by a feeling of drain, as if much of the power he had taken in from Lois was now being siphoned off. He supposed it was. This was a form of teleportation, after all, fabulous science-fiction stuff, and something like that had to use up a lot of energy.
The vertigo passed, but it was replaced by a perception that was even worse-a feeling that he had been split at the neck somehow.
He realized he now had a completely unobstructed view of a whole sprawling section of the world.
Jesus Christ, what’s happened to me? What’s wrong?
His senses reluctantly reported back that there was nothing wrong, exactly, it was just that he had achieved a position which should have been impossible. He was seventy-three inches tall; the cockpit of the plane was sixty inches from floor to ceiling. This meant that any pilot much bigger than Clotho and Lachesis had to slouch his way to his seat. Ralph, however, had entered the plane not only while it was in flight but while he was standing up, and he was still standing up, between and slightly behind the two seats in the cockpit.
The reason his view was unobstructed was both simple and horrible: his head was sticking out of the top of the plane.
Ralph had a nightmare image of his old dog, Rex, who’d liked to ride with his head out the passenger window and his raggedy ears blowing back in the slipstream. He closed his eyes.
What if I fall? If I can stick my head out through the damned roof, what’s to keep me from sliding right down through the floor and falling all the way to the ground? Or maybe through the ground, and then through the very earth itself?
But that wasn’t happening, and nothing like it would happen, not on this level-all he had to do was remember the effortless way they’d risen through the floors of the hospital and the ease with which they’d stood on the roof. If he kept those things in mind, he would be okay.
Ralph tried to center on that idea, and when he felt quite sure he had himself under control, he opened his eyes again.
Sloping out just below him was the plane’s windshield. Beyond it was the nose, tipped with a quicksilver blur of propeller. The nestle of lights he had observed from the door of the Portosan was closer now.
Ralph bent his knees, and his head slid smoothly through the ceiling of the cockpit. For a moment he could taste oil in his mouth and the tiny hairs in his nose seemed to bristle as if with an electric shock, and then he was kneeling between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats.
He didn’t know what he had expected to feel, seeing Ed again after all this time and under such extravagantly weird circumstances, but the pang of regret-not just pity but regret-which came was a surprise. As on the day in the summer of ’92 when Ed had run into the West Side Gardeners truck, he was wearing an old tee-shirt instead of an Oxford or Arrow with buttons up the front and a fruitloop on the back. He had lost a lot of weight-Ralph thought perhaps as much as forty pounds-and it had had an extraordinary effect, making him look not emaciated but somehow heroic, in a gothic/romantic way; Ralph was forcefully reminded of Carolyn’s favorite poem, “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes. Ed’s skin was as pale as paper, his green eyes both dark and light (like emeralds in moonlight, Ralph thought) behind the small round John Lennon spectacles, his lips so red they looked as if they had been rouged.
He had tied the white silk scarf with its red Japanese characters around his forehead so that the fringed ends trailed down his back.
Within the thunderbolt swirls of his aura, Ed’s intelligent, mobile face was filled with terrible regret and fierce determination.
He was beautiful-beautiful-and Ralph felt a sense of deja vu twist through him. Now he knew what he had glimpsed on the day he’d stepped between Ed and the man from West Side Gardeners; he was seeing it again. Looking at Ed, lost inside a typhoon aura from which no balloon-string floated, was like looking at a priceless Ming vase which had been thrown against a wall and shattered.
At least he can’t see me, not on this level. At least, I don’t think he can.
As if in response to this thought, Ed turned and glanced directly at Ralph. His eyes were wide and full of mad caution; the corners of his finely moulded mouth quivered and gleamed with buds of saliva.
Ralph recoiled, momentarily positive that he was being seen, but Ed didn’t react to Ralph’s sudden backward movement.
He threw a suspicious glance into the empty four-seat passenger cabin behind him instead, as if he had heard the stealthy movements of a stowaway. At the same time he reached past Ralph and put his right hand on a cardboard carton which had been seatbelted into the copilot’s chair. The hand caressed the box briefly, then went to his forehead and made some tiny adjustment to the scarf serving him as a headband.
That done, he resumed singing… only this time it was a different song, one that sent a tremor zigzagging up Ralph’s back: “One pill makes you bigger, One pill makes you small, And the ones that Mother gives you Don’t do anything at all.
Right, Ralph thought. Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.
His heart was triphammering in his chest-having Ed suddenly turn around like that had scared him in a way even finding himself riding along at ten thousand feet with his head sticking out of the top of the plane hadn’t been able to do. Ed didn’t see him, Ralph was almost positive of that, but whoever had said that the senses of lunatics were more acute than those of the sane must have known what he was talking about, because Ed sure had an idea that something had changed.
The radio squawked, making both men jump. “This is for the Cherokee over South Haven. You are on the edge of Derry airspace at an altitude which requires a filed flight-plan. Repeat, you are about to enter controlled airspace over a municipal area. Get your hot-dogging butt up to 16,000 feet, Cherokee, and come to 170, that’s one-seven-oh.
While you’re doing it, please identify yourself an"i state-“Ed closed his hand into a fist and began to hammer the radio with it.
Glass flew; soon blood also began to fly. It spattered the instrument panel, the picture of Helen and Natalie, and Ed’s clean gray tee-shirt.
He went on hammering until the voice on the radio first began to fade into a rising roar of static and then quit altogether.
“Good,” he said in the low, sighing voice of a man who talks to himself a lot. “Lots better. I hate all those questions. They just-” He caught sight of his bloody hand and broke off. He held it up, looked at it more closely, and then rolled it into a fist again. A large sliver of glass was sticking out of his pinky just below the third knuckle. Ed pulled it free with his teeth, spat it casually aside, then did something which chilled Ralph’s heart: drew the side of his bloody fist first down his left cheek and then his right, leaving a pair of red marks. He reached into the elasticized pocket built into the wall on his left, pulled out a hand-mirror, and used it to check his makeshift warpaint. What he saw seemed to please him, because he smiled and nodded before returning the mirror to the pocket.
“Just remember what the dormouse said,” Ed advised himself in his low, sighing voice, and then pushed in on the control wheel. The Cherokee’s nose dropped and the altimeter slowly began to unwind.
Ralph could see Derry straight ahead now. The city looked like a handful of opals scattered across dark-blue velvet.
There was a hole in the side of the carton in the copilot’s seat.
Two wires came out of it. They led into the back of a doorbell taped to the arm of Ed’s seat. Ralph supposed that as soon as he had a visual on the Civic Center and actually began his kamikaze run, Ed would settle one finger on the raised white button in the middle of the plastic rectangle. And just before the plane hit, he would push it.