Allen hadn't expected to ever open his eyes again.
He'd thought that was the end. When the plane was swallowed by that whirlpool, it was as if his consciousness had been ripped bodily out of him; everything went black, his ears filled with a droning hum, and then there was nothing. But after he didn't know how long, maybe a few seconds, maybe longer, he could suddenly feel his hands again. His fingers were still gripping the armrest, nails sunk into the padding, numb and cold. His eyelids were heavy, as if something had glued them shut, and it took an enormous effort to pry them open a crack.
The world was terrifyingly quiet.
Not an ordinary quiet. A plane should have engine noise, air conditioning, people breathing, children crying. But all of those sounds were gone, as if someone had suddenly hit the mute button and pulled every sound away. Allen could even hear the faint rasp of his eyelids as his eyes moved, a sound so tiny it barely existed.
He slowly raised his head.
All the lights in the cabin were out except the emergency lights. A bluish-white glow seeped up from the edges of the floor, making the whole cabin look as if it had sunk underwater. The people up front were still sitting there with their heads hanging, as if asleep, or as if dead. The man in the aisle still lay there, twisted, unmoving. In the crew seat, the flight attendant who had kept trying to comfort everyone was slumped against the partition, eyes closed, her chest faintly rising and falling. At least she was still alive.
Allen suddenly felt that something was wrong.
Very wrong.
Not the "there's been an accident" kind of wrong... but a physical, deeply immediate sense of dislocation. He felt that he had become very light. Not weightless; weightlessness was your whole body floating up and the blood rushing to your head. What he felt now was that his body was still in the seat, but some part inside it, like his soul, like his consciousness, was drifting out from beneath his skin bit by bit. Like looking at himself through a very thin film of water that could break apart at any moment.
He bit down hard on the tip of his tongue. It hurt... He could still feel pain. Good.
"Granny." He turned to call to the old woman beside him, his throat so dry it felt like grinding sandpaper.
The old woman didn't respond. Her head was tilted to one side, her chest still faintly rising and falling. The old man's hand rested on the back of hers, and his eyes were closed too. Allen called out again, quietly, and still got no response. He wanted to reach out and shake the old man, but the moment his hand left the armrest, he found the motion frighteningly light, like swinging his arm in a dream, with no weight and no resistance. He watched his hand sweep through the air, absurdly slow.
Then he saw what was outside the window.
At some point the window shade had slid back up... The sky outside had changed.
If the clouds before had been gray-purple and black-purple, now all of those colors had drained away. In their place was a deep blue unlike anything Allen had ever seen, almost transparent. Like the bottom of the deepest sea, only emptier. The plane floated in that deep blue as if someone were gently holding it up. No clouds, no lightning, no wind. Nothing at all.
But the sky was cracked...
Allen blinked, then blinked again. He wasn't seeing things. In the middle of that deep blue, just ahead of the plane and a little above it, was a long fissure. It stretched from one end of the sky to the other, as though someone had drawn an invisible blade straight across the heavens. The edges of the crack were bright, bright to the point of white, with a silvery blue tint, like shattered glass catching moonlight. But it wasn't still. Allen could see the crack moving, its edges like melting wax, or like some living, writhing soft tissue, slowly opening and closing.
He wanted to scream, but his throat felt as if it were being strangled, and no sound would come out.
What spilled from that crack was light... Not sunlight, not moonlight, and certainly not lightning. The light was like ribbons, strand after impossibly fine, flowing strand of it drifting out of the fissure, silver, pale blue, and some colors he couldn't name, wisp upon wisp, like the sky's own blood. They didn't illuminate anything. They just drifted there, like some luminous jellyfish in the deep sea.
"The sky... split open."
The voice was very soft and very hoarse, as if drifting in from far away. Allen turned his head and saw that the woman in the row ahead, the one holding the child, had woken at some point. She was staring upward, her mouth slightly open, eyes wide, the reflection of the fissure filling them. Allen saw her face lit a sickly blue by the light, as if she were wearing a very thin mask.
Then sound slowly returned to the cabin.
Not the engines, not the announcements. Human sounds. Sounds squeezed up from deep in people's throats, broken and halting, like talking in their sleep. Someone was crying, crying without making a sound, tears streaming down their face. Someone was trembling, teeth clacking together as if they were freezing. Someone had started murmuring something under their breath, very fast, as if afraid that stopping would let something hear them. The stench of urine hung in the air; someone had wet themselves, and nobody cared.
Allen's hands started shaking again.
He forced himself to look at the fissure... It was still widening, not tearing open sideways, but expanding from the inside out, as though something inside the sky were pushing its way through. The ribbons of light grew more numerous and more tightly packed, like countless fine threads slowly reaching out of the crack, probing, feeling their way forward. One of the ribbons drifted up beside the plane and brushed past along the wing. Allen heard a hum, as if someone had plucked an incredibly thin metal wire right beside his ear.
The back of his neck went numb, as if his whole body had been given a light electric shock.
"Don't look out the window!"
It was the old man's voice. Hoarse, but strong. Allen turned his head and saw that the old man was awake, gripping the old woman's hand tightly with one hand and raising the other to shield his eyes. He didn't look outside, only spoke in a low voice.
"Nobody look. Close your eyes. That's... something unclean."
Allen didn't know what he meant by "unclean." To hear words like that from an old man who had lived sixty or seventy years chilled him even more than that split-open sky outside. But Allen still pulled his gaze back. He lowered his head and looked at his hands. Ten fingers, pale and slender. Because he'd been gripping so hard, his nails had dug several deep red marks into his palms.
He suddenly couldn't remember what his hands used to look like. Had they been a bit broader? A bit darker? He couldn't remember.
The plane began to move.
This time it wasn't turbulence, and it wasn't falling. It was as if something had given the plane a gentle push from behind, and it glided forward, extremely slowly and extremely steadily. The metal of the fuselage let out a long, low "Hmmm—" as though it were humming a tune. The air in the cabin began to move, very cool, slipping in through every gap and carrying a faint smell he couldn't identify. A little like rust, a little like the earthy smell of a summer evening just before a downpour, and a very, very faint sweetness. Allen sniffed at it and felt that the smell didn't seem to be coming from outside. It seemed more like it was welling up from inside his own body.
He wasn't sure he was still sitting where he had been.
Because he felt his hands growing lighter... Not the hands themselves, but his sense of his own body growing thinner, like a sheet of paper gone soft in water, its edges already starting to dissolve. He clutched the armrest hard, but it didn't feel like metal, or leather. It felt like a thick bank of fog. He watched his fingers sink into that fog and slowly pass right through it.
"No... no..."
He heard himself speaking, his voice small and scattered. It didn't sound like his. It sounded as if it came out of someone else's throat and then traveled into his ears.
The other sounds in the cabin had changed too; the crying grew far away, as distant as if it came from another room. Someone got up from their seat, looking as if they were struggling, as if they were dancing. Allen saw a figure slowly drifting toward the back of the plane. Yes, drifting. The feet never left the floor, yet the whole person slid backward out of control, like a paper doll with all its weight drawn out. He tried to see who it was, but everyone's faces had gone blurry, as if submerged in water.
He wanted to get up, to grab hold of the old man and the old woman... With every ounce of strength he had, he turned his head.
The old man was still sitting there. His eyes were closed. One hand held the old woman's, and the other slowly lifted and swept through the air, as if trying to catch hold of something. The old woman leaned against his shoulder, and both of them seemed wrapped in a very faint layer of light. Allen saw the old man's lips move, once, and then again... He couldn't hear a sound. But he could clearly read the shape of the words.
"Don't look... Close your eyes."
Allen closed his eyes.
But closing his eyes didn't help. The light seemed to have already bored through his eyelids, and it kept flowing through his vision. He saw the fissure, saw the lightning that looked like writing, saw that utterly black hole at the center of the whirlpool. He saw his own hands dissolve in the fog, come back together, dissolve again. He saw the sky split down the middle, and inside the crack, layer upon layer, like countless worlds pressed together.
Then he felt himself falling.
Very slowly... Like rolling off the edge of a bed, like sinking through warm water. He reached out, but there was nothing to catch hold of. There was no wind around him, and no light, only that smell of rust and rain, growing stronger and stronger. He wanted to shout, but his mouth felt as if it had been sewn shut. His mind was still there; he could think, he could be afraid, he could feel his heart beating. But he simply couldn't move. As if something very, very heavy were pinning him in place, so that he couldn't even blink.
The last image he "saw" was the old man's hand. That bony, vein-roped hand, gripping the old woman's hand with all its strength, with all its strength. So tight the knuckles went white, so tight it seemed it would crush the two of them together into a single set of bones.
That was the last thing he remembered.
Then everything sank into darkness... Not the darkness of closing your eyes. It was an emptiness in which even the color "black" had been pulled out of his mind. He no longer knew who he was, no longer knew where he was. He was nothing at all anymore.
Only, far, far away, something was watching him. Something red, glowing through the darkness, staring at him without ever blinking.
He didn't know what it was. All he knew was that the thing was waiting for him...