7 Steps to Midnight (12 page)

Fifteen minutes later, he twisted around and looked back toward the rest rooms. He’d read part of the
Times
, finished the crackers, cheese and the second screwdriver and had ordered Chicken Kiev for lunch.

Now he was wondering if something was wrong with Basy.

He looked back at the front and tried to push the feeling away.
Goddamn it, don’t get started again
, he told himself.
As soon as things start clearing up, you insist on muddying the waters again.
Basy was performing his
A.M.
ablutions. He had a stomachache and was hunched over on the john. He’d taken a stewardess in there and was bopping her. Who knows? he thought irritably. He’s fine though. Fine.

Minutes passed. He finished looking through the
Times
and put it down. He looked out the window at the clouds, at the land below. He tried to feel calm.

It didn’t work. Anxiety was trickling slowly through his thoughts. He tried to resist. Relax, he thought. Take it easy. He closed his eyes. Music, he thought. He’d put on the earphones and listen to some classical music.

He looked at his watch. Almost twenty minutes now. He looked toward the back again. A woman was trying to get into
one of the rest rooms but it was locked. Is that where Basy is? he wondered.

He swallowed. Could Basy have gone in back of the plane to consult with some other agent? That didn’t make sense. Two agents to escort him? Christ, he was Chris Barton, not Albert Einstein.

He tapped his fingers on the seat arm. He couldn’t listen to music. Not until Basy was back.
I’m sorry
, he addressed his mind.
He should be back by now. Call me paranoiac if you want to but he should be back by now.

“Aw, no,” he said. It wasn’t going to get bad again, was it? It wasn’t going to be Veering-time again, was it?

“
Mr.
Basy
?
” he imagined the stewardess saying to him. “
I’m sorry, Mr. Barton. There’s no Mr. Basy booked next to you. You’ve been sitting alone since you got on the plane.
”

Chris undid his seat belt and stood abruptly, a hard look on his face. Stepping into the aisle, he walked back to the rest rooms.
Both of them will be empty now
, he thought.
And I’ll start screaming.

One of them was still locked. He stared at the word
Occupied
. By what? he thought.

He stood indecisively. Should he knock on the door and ask Basy how he was? What if that woman answered?
You start screaming
, answered his mind.

The stewardess came up to him. “This other one is free, Mr. Barton,” she said.

“I know. That’s not—”

She looked at him inquiringly.

He swallowed. “Did you… see a man go in here before?” he asked, pointing at the locked door.

“Mr. Basy, yes,” she answered.

Thank God, he thought. His sound of relief was so obvious that the stewardess looked concerned. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes. Yes,” he assured her.
I am now
, he thought.

She smiled and walked away.

He waited for a few moments, then knocked softly on the door.

There was no answer so he knocked again. He leaned in close to ask, “Are you all right, Basy?”

Silence.

Chris shuddered. Oh, God, now what? he thought. He’s had a heart attack? He’s been poisoned? He’s in there, dead?

He hesitated, then knocked more loudly. “Basy?” he asked.

Some people looked around and the stewardess returned. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “This… Mr. Basy was sitting next to me. Then he went to the rest room.” He swallowed again. “This was more than twenty minutes ago. Now…”

“Yes?” she asked.

“He doesn’t answer my knock. I’ve called his name. I—”

“You think something’s wrong.”

There it was. He didn’t want to speak the words. But there was something wrong.

“Do you know if he has any kind of medical condition?” she asked.

“I don’t even
know
the man,” he said, aware that he sounded agitated.

“I see,” she said.

She turned to the door and knocked on it loudly. “Mr. Basy?”

There was no answer.

“Oh, dear,” she said.

“Can’t you open the door?” he asked.

“Well… yes; I can, but… I wouldn’t want to embarrass him—”

“Embarrass?” he broke in. “He’s not answering. There’s
something wrong
.”

He tried to open the door but couldn’t.

“It’s locked,” she said.

Oh, bright, he thought angrily. He was starting to feel dizzy. Was the nightmare starting again?

He pounded on the door with the side of a fist. “Basy!” he shouted.

“Please, Mr. Barton,” the stewardess said.

“Well, damn it,
open
it then,” he told her.

She stared at him uncertainly.
Goddamn it, open the fucking door!
he wanted to shout.
If you’d been through what I have in the past day, you’d goddamn
kick
it in!

The stewardess moved quickly to an overhead bin. Reaching in, she took out an odd-looking tool and brought it back. She used it on the door and reached out to open it. She won’t be able to do it, he suddenly thought. Basy’s dead body will block the way.

The stewardess opened the door.

“Oh, well, this is peculiar,” she said.

Chris felt himself weaving back and forth. He’d never fainted in his life. He felt sure that he was going to faint now.

The rest room was empty.

“I don’t understand this,” the stewardess murmured.

You
don’t understand it
… Chris thought. “You…
saw
him go in,” he said in a shaky voice.

“
Yes.
” She was staring into the empty rest room. “I
did
.”

“Is it possible to lock the door from the outside?”

She looked confused.

“I mean could he have come out, closed the door and locked it from out here?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen it done.”

She stepped into the rest room and looked around. She started as though an electric shock had struck her.

Chris stepped in to see what she was looking at. There was something scrawled on the mirror with a Magic Marker. Chris could just make out the writing in the dim light.

7 steps to midnight.

He tried not to think as he walked through the terminal. He asked one question: where were the taxis? The man he asked directed him and he went outside. He looked around for the closest cab, then found it unnecessary to signal as one of the small, square black taxis curved in and stopped in front of him, the driver opening the door.

Chris got inside and fell back on the seat. “Park Court Hotel,” he said.

“Right away, guv’nor,” the driver said. Closing the door, he pulled the cab away from the curb. “American?” he asked.

Chris smiled tiredly. “How d’ya know?” he asked.

“Not difficult,” the driver said.

Chris’s responding chuckle was barely audible. He put the overnight bag on the floor, stretched out his legs and, groaning softly, closed his eyes. He wished he had a sleeping pill. He’d like to sleep for about a day and a half.

He’d given up the hope that he would wake up in his house and, grinning to himself, think,
Good Jesus, was
that
ever a dream
.

It was all reality, he knew that now. Demented, disjointed, distorted reality but reality nonetheless.

He hadn’t slept at all on the flight. Despite exhaustion, his brain would simply not relinquish consciousness. How could it? On top of every other madness he’d been exposed to was Basy’s disappearance.

It had been assumed, at first, that Basy was in some other part of the plane. What else could they assume? He’d left the lavatory without being seen and, in leaving, accidentally locked the door
behind him. He was no phantom. The stewardess had seen him enter the plane, had spoken to him, had seen him take his place beside Chris. She’d seen him rise and enter the lavatory.

That was the last she saw of him.

Basy wasn’t in the plane. It was that simple fact that jarred Chris the most. He’d spoken with the man. Basy was as real as he was. Then he’d vanished into thin air, leaving behind a note scrawled on a mirror.

7 steps to midnight.

“Oh, God,” Chris murmured. He shifted uncomfortably on the seat. Problems all had solutions; he’d lived by that tenet, it had never betrayed him. No matter what the problem was, eventually he’d found an answer to it.

Until now.

While they were checking over the plane, he’d sat and waited. What had bothered him most was the continuation of banal details all around him. The serving of the meal. The showing of the movie. The murmuring of people as they spoke. The constant din of the engines. All reality. And, in the midst of it, him, an island of impending madness.

When the stewardess, looking pale, had finally returned to tell him that, no, they were terribly sorry but Mr. Basy was nowhere to be found, Chris had thanked her quietly and politely, then sat staring at the film without seeing or hearing a moment of it.

After a while he’d picked up Basy’s overnight bag and checked the contents.

What he found comforted and shocked him simultaneously.

A reservation order in his name for a hotel named the Park Court. An envelope of British money: a half-inch-thick packet of five-pound and one-pound notes. A passport.

His.

He hadn’t been able to control the tremor of his hands as he opened it. He’d never had a passport in his life, never dreamed that he would ever have the time to travel overseas. And the photograph. It was undoubtedly him but he couldn’t recall ever having it taken.

His head had felt numb as he’d leafed through the pages of the
passport. Ah, good, he’d thought dazedly as he looked at the stamps. Chris Barton was obviously a world traveler. Tahiti. Fiji. New Caledonia. Australia. China.
I hope I had a good time
, he’d thought.

He’d closed his eyes abruptly. Jesus Christ. How much more could be endure? Was
anything
what it seemed to be?

For a short while, he’d really entertained the idea that something in his work had caused him to sideslip into an alternate reality. He’d read about it often enough. Was it an actual possibility? Thought lay behind all physical events. Wilbur and Orville thought
flight
and an airplane resulted. Tesla dreamed of alternating current and the world had electricity. Einstein thought
E
=
Mc
²
and Hiroshima was obliterated.

Had something in his work created this nightmare?

“Oh, shut up,” he muttered. He opened his eyes and looked around. The cab was chugging along an entry road toward a freeway. Do they call them freeways here? he wondered. Expressways? Highways?

He clenched his teeth for a moment and closed his eyes again, determined not to succumb to destructive thinking. There were solid details here; it wasn’t all an evanescent mystery. There was the passport; that was real. The money. The hotel reservation. The flight ticket. The overnight bag with clothes and toilet articles, with
medication
for Christ’s sake. And the pistol. How real could you get? These were items you could deal with. Items that led one to believe that the mysteries—however inexplicable they seemed at the moment—would eventually be solved.

He had just finished putting the hotel reservation, passport and money into his overnight bag and put Basy’s bag back under the seat next to him when a flight officer had shown up to speak to him. One of the pilots? The navigator? There’d been no way of knowing. His name was Captain Blake.

He’d asked Chris questions in a quiet, reassuring voice. Chris imagined that voice over the loudspeaker system, dulcetly informing the passengers that “
This is Captain Blake. We are now plummeting toward the ocean at a horrendous speed and in a few moments, we will all be dead as doornails. Enjoy your flight.
”

Blake had asked him what he knew about Basy.
Not much
, Chris had told him.
We spoke a few minutes, nothing specific; then he’d gone to the lavatory to vanish from the face of the earth
—or the face of the sky.

Captain Blake had soon departed, taking Basy’s bag with him.
Thank God I looked inside it first
, Chris had thought….

“Here on vacation, guv’?” the driver asked.

Chris’s legs retracted and he opened his eyes. “I’m sorry?” he asked.

“Just askin’ if you’re on vacation,” the driver replied.

“Oh,” Chris looked blank. “Yes,” he said then. “A vacation.”

The driver smiled. “Have a nice time.”

“Thank you,” Chris murmured.
I’ll have a lovely time
, he thought.
So far it’s been just grand.

He closed his eyes again, wishing he could sleep. Granted, he was accustomed to minimal sleep at home but he had to have
something
.

Home, he thought. Was the other Chris Barton sleeping there at this moment? With Mrs. Barton asleep next to him?
Maureen?

He grimaced and angrily looked around before closing his eyes once more.
The other Chris Barton my ass
, he thought.
There’s only one Chris Barton and it’s me.
What name was in the passport, Donald Duck?

***

He jolted, gasping, as a hand shook his shoulder. Jerking open his eyes, he stared at the man looking at him. It was the taxi driver. “Park Court, guv’nor,” he said.

Chris looked around and saw the entrance to the hotel. There was a man in a uniform and top hat waiting on the curb. He rubbed his face and picked up the overnight bag, getting out of the taxi.

“Take your bag, sir?” the doorman asked. He had a bushy mustache and looked like another character from Dickens. Here, it fit.

“That’s all right,” Chris answered. He had no intention of letting the reality of its contents out of his hands.

He looked at the driver. “How much?” he asked. The man told him.