Stephen King - Insomnia

What he saw, framed by the walls which did remain, was a just-pastsunset sky and a swatch of Maine countryside fading into a bluegray twilight haze. He estimated that he was looking out from a height of about ten thousand feet. He could see glimmering lakes and ponds and vast stretches of dark green woodland scrolling down toward the Portosan’s bench seat and then disappearing. Far ahead-up toward the roof of the toilet cubicle-Ralph could see a glimmering nest of lights. That was probably Derry, now no more than ten minutes away.

In the lower left quadrant of this vision Ralph could see part of an instrument panel. Taped over the altimeter was a small color photograph that stopped his breath. It was Helen, looking impossibly happy and impossibly beautiful. Cradled in her arms was the Exalted amp; Revered Baby, fast asleep and no more than four months old.

He wants them to be the last thing he sees in this world, Ralph thought. He’s been turned into a monster, but I guess even monsters don’t forget how to love.

Something on the instrument panel began to beep. A hand came into view and flicked a switch. Before it disappeared, Ralph could see the white indentation on the third finger of that hand, faint but still visible, where the wedding ring had rested for at least six years.

He saw something else, as well-the aura surrounding the hand was the same as the one which had surrounded the thunderstruck baby in the hospital elevator, a turbulent, rapidly moving membrane that seemed as alien as the atmosphere of a gas giant.

Ralph looked back once and raised his hand. Clotho and Lachesis raised theirs in return. Lois blew him a kiss. Ralph made a catching gesture, then turned and stepped into the Portosan.

He hesitated for a moment, wondering what to do about the bench seat, then remembered the oncoming hospital gurney, which should have crushed their skulls but hadn’t, and walked toward the back of the cubicle. He clenched his teeth, preparing to bark his shinwhat you knew was one thing, what you believed after seventy years of bumping into stuff quite another-and then stepped through the bench seat as if it were made of smoke… or as if he were.

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.