David Nickle - The 'Geisters

She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around. It was the flight attendant. She leaned close: “You’ve got to sit down!”

Ann shook her head and pounded on the door. “My husband’s in there!” she said.

The attendant was having none of it. “He’s safer there than coming out,” said the attendant. “There’s oxygen in there. The cabin’s depressurizing. You need to return to your seat.”

Ann tried to pull away, but the attendant’s grip was strong. “You have to obey my instructions ma’am. It’s for everyone’s safety—”

She didn’t finish. There was a bright flash as she spoke, sending spears of lightning in from both rows of windows—and it illuminated a bright silver briefcase, shooting through the air up the aisle.

The case hit the attendant in the back of the head. She collapsed into Ann. She stepped back and let the attendant fall to the floor. She bent down—on the attendant’s skirt, there was a plastic spring and a set of simple keys. Ann stretched it out, and found one that matched a keyhole underneath the handle of the restroom. The plane lurched then, and the floor tilted sharply. Ann held tight until the plane righted. She inserted the key and clicked the sign to VACANT. She let the keys snap back to the attendant and slid open the door.

The electricity seemed to be working fine in there; the lights inside the restroom flickered, occasionally flashing as bright as the lightning outside the plane. It played across a sight that at first Ann couldn’t fathom.

It was Michael. His pants were around his ankles and his linen shirt was unbuttoned, pulled back over his shoulders so it hung tight around his elbows. His head was cricked back, tendons taut under his chin. His penis was hard—and it swayed back in forth in front of him, as his hands made claws to clutch at the air. His head swung around to look at her, but it was as though he couldn’t see her; in the light, his pupils had shrunk to pinpricks. And around him—toilet paper floated, draping in the air in what seemed like a cage. Droplets of blue fluid hung in the air. Gravity had been utterly suspended in that tiny room.

He began to turn away from her, toward the little mirror over the sink—rotating in the air, unfettered to the deck. The muscles in his still-pale ass tensed as he looked in the mirror—looked at something, Ann saw, that was not precisely his own reflection.

The thing in the mirror made its face into a rictus—of anger, maybe, or something else. But Ann peered around at Michael’s face, and thought it far less ambivalent.

He was smiling.

And he was hard. More than hard. He was engorged.

There was a popping sound then, as the light in the restroom shattered, and it was all dark again. Ann tried to reach in—to stop him—but she heard a shout, and the floor shifted beneath her again, and there was a flash of silver as the briefcase that had taken down the flight attendant leapt up from the floor and struck Ann hard in the side of the head.

She crumpled.

And she was on some kind of bench.

It seemed to be made of wooden planks—not finished, not even sanded. She smelled woodsmoke. Or maybe not, not wood smoke. The smoke of burning dung? What made her think of that? It was pungent, not unpleasant—but dung? Why would she think of that?

She sighed and opened her eyes. She had thought of that because she’d invented it. The dung of cave bats was what the tribe who was charged with guarding the Insect burned in their cooking braziers. It was more plentiful than wood, and burned hot and long through the nights. And sure enough, that’s what was providing the light in this place… a small windowless room, halfway up the tower where the Insect was to have dwelt.

She sat up, put her bare feet down on the thick pine floor. She was wearing a long dress of velvet, a deep blue, with sleeves that fitted her arms tightly and extended just past her wrists. It was the sort of dress that an out-of-favour royal might wear in the Tower of London at various times in history.

The light came from two braziers that hung from chains hooked into ceiling joists. There was a door, made of thick planks of maple. There was a small barred slit at eye level. The door was, of course, barred from the other side. Although she couldn’t see it from here, Ann knew it was a stout bar. She had put it there herself, just as she’d invented the dung and the bench and the wood.

“A prison of my own design.” She stood on toes to peer out the slit. A rusted iron cover was drawn across the other side. She tapped on it. There would be a guard there. He would be careful, draw the cover open with the haft of his spear perhaps.

The cover drew aside.

“Hello, Miss.” The guard was not standing too close to the slit, so Ann could get a look at him in the dim firelight.

“You were on the plane,” she said. The guard rubbed his fingers through close-cut hair. He smiled. Ann had not seen him smile when he was sitting in the row next to hers, telling her to calm down. He stepped closer to the door, until their eyes were only inches apart.

“Not anymore,” he said. “Your husband still is though.”

“What?”

“He ain’t going anywhere, miss.”

And she was on a mattress. There were linens. It smelled of ammonia. A machine was beeping. It was hard to focus her eyes on the dim light sources, the odd shapes in the space that she now occupied. She lifted her arm. There was a bracelet around her wrist. She touched her head; there was a bandage taped to her forehead, and it stung, deep, when her fingers brushed it.

It was oh-so-mysterious, but only for a few seconds.

Ann was no fool.

She wasn’t on the plane anymore. She was in a hospital, somewhere. They had bandaged her forehead where the case had struck it. The bracelet on one wrist was a hospital bracelet.

She inferred from this that the plane had not exploded, had not fallen into the sea, had landed in some way.

Okay , she thought.

Everything’s good.

It wasn’t good.

Here is what had happened according to the representative from Air Canada, who met with Ann after the doctors had pronounced her fit for visitors. There was turbulence, and it wasn’t expected, and it did some damage to the aircraft. The damage was serious. It had nearly brought the aircraft down in the ocean, the damage was so serious. But the pilots were able to regain control at 1,000 feet, and fly with only one engine all the way to Miami, Florida, where they made an emergency landing.

There was more, but Ann didn’t absorb much of that, because the representative, whose name was Carolyn something-or-other and was just about Ann’s age but seemed so much older, had already told her the most important thing.

Michael had not survived the landing.

Ann was a widow.

Were there tears?

When she came to her senses next, Ann was sure there must have been—even as she felt nothing but iron in the middle of herself. Her husband, Michael Voors, had died in the air, after…

After…

She must have cried herself to paralysis.

She had fallen in with a bad crowd in junior high school. That was how Ann’s mother would put it. Ann didn’t agree. They weren’t bad, really. Just odd.

There were five of them—three boys: Luke, Ryan and Bruce. The girls: Courtney and Leah. They were all in the gifted program, like Ann, and they were all underachievers, like Ann.

They were, as Ann’s father put it one night over dinner at the Lake House, slaves to the dice. Philip thought that was a good joke, and in Ann’s defence, told both their parents that the pastime was “a better form of birth control than the Pill.” But that didn’t get much of a laugh. Their mother quietly pointed out that spending time drawing up mazes populated with monsters and devils was walking a bit too close to the line for a girl with Ann’s history.