Glen Hirshberg's novelette, "The Janus Tree," won the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award, and both of his collections, American Morons and The Two Sams, won the International Horror Guild Award. He is also the author of a novel, The Snowman's Children. His new novel, The Book of Bunk, is due out from Earthling in late 2010. He co-founded, with Dennis Etchison and Peter Atkins, the Rolling Darkness Revue, a traveling ghost story performance troupe that tours the west coast of the United States each October. His fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Inferno, Dark Terrors 6, Trampoline, and Cemetery Dance, and has appeared frequently in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and Best Horror of the Year.
"But the air, out there, so wild, so white . . . "
—Thomas St. John Bartlett, in a letter to Robert Louis Stevenson
from the Orkney Islands in the winter of 1901
Ever notice how Satie, played in the dark at just the right volume, can tilt the whole world? That night, I had Je te Veux on the tinny cockpit stereo, and even before the snow, the pines at the edge of the great north woods just beyond the taxiway appeared to dip and lean, and the white lines disappearing beneath the wheels of our little commuter seemed to weave around and between each other like children at a wedding dance as we made our way to the de-icing station. Then the snow started, white and winking, a drizzle of starlight, and even the air traffic control tower looked ready to lift its arms and step off its foundations and sway.
And then Alex, my junior co-pilot of four months, opened his thermal lunch box. The reek flooded the cabin and set the panel lights wavering in my watering eyes. I swear to God, the iPod gagged. Alex just sat in the steam, eyes half-closed and grinning, as if he were taking a sauna.
"God, you Gorby, tell me that isn't poutine."
"Want some, Old Dude?" said Alex, and lifted the container from the cooler.
Out the front of the plane, the world went on dancing, and the snow whirled through it. But I couldn't stop staring at the mess in Alex's container. A few limp, bloated French fries stuck out of the lava flow of industrial-colored sludge like petrified slugs. Congealed, gray lumps clung to their sides and leaked white pus.
"Is that meat?" I asked. "Cheese?"
Alex grinned wider. "It's your country. You tell me."
"Where'd you even find it? We had, what, three hours? Where does one even find poutine on a three-hour layover in Prince Willows Town, Ontario?"
"If you turn over control of the stereo, I'll put it away for a while."
We'd reached the de-icing station, and I pushed on the brakes and brought the coasting plane to a rolling stop. No matter how many times I did this, I was always surprised by the dark out here. At every other point within two miles of this tiny airport, manmade light flooded and mapped the world. But not here.
I peered through the windscreen and the wavering skeins of snow. It took a few moments, but eventually, my eyes adjusted to the point where I could just make out the de-icer truck parked a few meters off the taxiway in the flat, dead grass. Weirdly, it had its boom already hoisted, as though we were meant to make our way into the fields to get sprayed. I couldn't see either the driver of the truck or the guy on the enclosed platform at the top of the boom, because both were blanketed in shadow. But the platform looked tilted to me, almost chin-to-chest with the rotating metal stand that supported it. It reminded me of one of the dead Martians from War of the Worlds.
We sat and we waited. The truck didn't move.
"Peculiar," I murmured, and Alex passed his poutine container right under my nostrils. My eyes watered, and I turned on him. "What was that for?"
"You were muttering, Old Dude. Just making sure you were conscious. Now about control of that stereo. You ready to deal?"
For answer, I clicked on the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We hope all six of you have settled comfortably in your seats, that your luggage is crammed effectively between your knees and the seat in front of you—" Alex snorted at that—"and we look forward to having virtually no time to serve you during our brief skip-hop to Toronto. We will be cleared for takeoff shortly. In the meantime, sit back, relax, be happy this flight is not bound for Winterpeg, and please pay no attention to the gigantic, alien-shaped creature about to swoop down upon us. It comes in peace, to de-ice the wings. Also, we do apologize for the odor escaping into the cabin under the doors of our cockpit. It came with my co-pilot, and I'm afraid there's little we can do about it. If you need assistance of any kind, please don't hesitate to call on Jamie, our charismatic, experienced, and resourceful in-flight technician, at any time. We should be in the air shortly."
Alex laughed. "Come out with me tonight," he said. "Let's do Hogtown."
"Do it?"
"Paint it. Rock it. Suck it dry. Come on, Old Dude. You keep saying you'll let me show you my Toronto. I say it's time. You told me it's been three years, right? It's—whoa. What was that?"
He had his cap turned backward on his head, the container in his lap, and a gravy-soaked French fry halfway to his lips. For the thousandth time in the past four months—but the first tonight—I remembered how much I liked him.
"I think we just painted Prince Willows Town, Young Polyp. Milked it, licked it, whole works."
"You're babbling again, Old Dude."
"Northern lights, Alex. You've heard of them, maybe."
He shook his head. "Wrong time, right? Also too low."
As usual, he was correct on both counts. I turned back to the windscreen, peering down the tarmac toward the tops of the trees, where we'd both seen a spiraling flash of green, then aquamarine.
But there was nothing now except the snowflakes, settling in their millions onto the branches of the pines as though completing some massive, unmarked winter migration. We watched that a while, and then I glanced again toward the de-icing truck. It sat silent, and the snow shrouded the high platform's window glass.
"The Nimble Men," said Alex, savoring the words.
"What?"
"Is that the coolest name you've ever heard for the aurora, or what?"
"The Nimble Men?"
"It's catchy, no?"
"How many other names do you know, Alex?"
"Well, there's chasmata. That's from Ancient Rome. They thought the lights were cave mouths. For sky caves. Come on, Old Dude. Trump me. What you got?"
I would have smiled if not for the de-icer, hunkered in the dead grass like a junked car on a lawn.
"Well, there's one story . . . " I said.
"That's the Old Dude I know. Lay it on me."
"There are several versions. Usually, it goes that sometime during the Depression, a poor woodsman went out in those woods—"
"Those woods right there?"
"Whichever Ontario woods you happen to be closest to. Didn't anyone ever tell you a ghost story?"
Alex nodded. "Carry on."
"So the woodsman was out." This time I did smile. "Rockin' the forest."
That earned me a salute with a sludgy fry.
"And while he was out, he saw the lights."
"The Nimble Men," said Alex.
I held up a finger. "But not in the sky. In the trees. The woodsman had an inkling. He raced home. When he got there, his wife said their old, sick dog had got out, and their daughter had gotten frantic and gone after him. The dog came back. But the daughter didn't. She was never seen again. The woodsman went looking with his lantern every night for the rest of his life, but he never found so much as a trace. According to some, he's still looking, and those are his lights. Hey, Alex, I don't like this."
He'd been nodding and chewing, but now lowered the cardboard fry-boat back into his lunch box and wiped his hands on his uniform pants. "You're right, Old Dude. Why are we just sitting here?"
I flicked on the radio and called the tower. "This is Northwoods Air 2-8-4."
The response was immediate, the voice so clear it might have come from inside the cabin. "Northwoods 2-8-4, go ahead."
"Bill, that you?"
"What is it, Wayne?"
"We're at the de-icer. The de-icer isn't moving."
I don't know what I expected. We'll wake him up, maybe. Or, How's that? Or, since Bill had a little of Alex's puckishness, Moon him.
Instead, there was a long silence. I was about to repeat myself when Bill's voice came back.
"Sit tight," he said. "Don't move."
"What—" I started, and the link closed. Went off. I tried talking into the communicator again, but it was like yelling into a fist.
"Hey, another one," Alex said, but by the time I turned, there was just the faintest blue streak, a smear on the snow-curtain.
On normal nights, the de-icer springs awake the second a plane rolls to a stop. The truck maneuvers close, and the driver makes contact over the com-link. The pilot shuts down all systems and closes the vents so no fluid gets inside the cabin. Then the platform jockey swoops in with his pod, unfolds its nozzle-arms, and engulfs the wings in a blast of bright purple antifreeze. The whole process takes less than five minutes. Sometimes less than two.
But we'd already been here quite a while. I could make out the platform jockey now, or at least his shadow. He was hunched or slumped in his pod, fifteen meters off the ground. I couldn't see his face, because he had nothing illuminated. I couldn't hear his voice, because the truck hadn't plugged into us and made contact. As far as I could tell, the truck still wasn't running its engine. This time, the glimmer in the trees flashed red, and the redness hung a moment at the very edge of the forest before winking out.
"See, I don't get it," Alex said. "It doesn't make sense."
"That's what I'm—"
"Your story. I mean, what's the deal, Old Dude? The lights came to warn him? Or they're his daughter's soul at the moment of her death? Or a presentiment of his future as the Wood-Wandering Lantern Guy? You've got to get more specific, here."
The lack of movement on the taxiway was really starting to get to me. I almost clicked on the intercom and called Jamie in to take a look. But that would only have triggered a new round of Alex-hits-on-Jamie. Not that Jamie seemed to mind.
"It's not my story. And the lights were probably all of those things, depending on the telling," I said. "You know how those stories work."
"I know that one could work better."
"What does he mean, sit tight, don't move?"
"Let's go see," Alex said, unhooked himself from his belts and stood.
That at least drew my gaze from the taxiway to his face. "Go where?"
"Out. Tell me you've never wanted to go out there. You ever done it? We've got a perfect excuse."
"We can't go out there."
"Why not?"
I thought about that. "Aren't there regulations? There've got to be regulations."
"And yet there you are, already unhooking your belt." His grin was an eight year-old's, and lit him all the way to his moppy curls. And there I was, unhooking my belt. "Old Dude," he said approvingly. Then he threw open the cockpit door and marched into the tiny cabin of our commuter plane, chanting, "Oh, Jamie . . . "
By the time I emerged, he was standing as if onstage with his arm around our blond, too-thin flight attendant, who was without doubt closer to my age than his, and facing our six passengers. All of them were apparently traveling alone, since they'd each claimed their own row—we called them rows, though they were really only sets of single seats on either side of a narrow aisle—leaving only the front empty.
"What's going on?" called an exhausted-looking grad-school type in a green McGill sweatshirt from a couple rows back.
"Who's up for hide and seek? Come on, I'll count ten," Alex said, and Jamie dropped her head and shook it and laughed.
"Excuse him, ladies and gentlemen," I said. "He's American, he's just eaten his first poutine, and it's made him punchy."
"Avez-vous poutine?" said a white-haired woman three rows back, perking up as though she thought we might offer her a plateful with her complimentary ice water.
"Je l'ai fini," Alex said, patting his non-existent gut. I couldn't see his face, but I was sure he'd winked.
I moved to the door, unlocked it, and Jamie swung toward me in surprise.
"Wayne?"
I made a waving gesture, casual as I could make it. "We're just . . . "
"Checking something," Alex said. "Right back, y'all."
"Checking," I said quietly to Jamie. "It's not the plane. Not to worry."
Before she could ask, and before I had time to reconsider, Alex pushed the door outward. Frigid, resin-scented air gushed into the cabin, sweeping tendrils of snow around our ankles as the folding stair lowered itself to the ground.
Jamie took an immediate step back. Because of the cold, I realized, only the cold. But Alex hesitated, too, just momentarily. In thirty-one years as a pilot, I'd never once left my plane except at a gate. Certainly not on a taxiway or runway. I stared into the blackness, the snow cocooning the world. A high, industrial whine rode the air-currents, seeming to burrow uncomfortably into my ear canals.
I glanced over my shoulder. The only passenger not watching was the chubby, middle-aged guy in the seat closest to the open door. He had his head against the window, his tie still knotted tight at this throat, his eyes closed too tightly to be sleeping. At least, that's how it seemed to me. His skin looked pale and wet as the window-glass.
"He okay?" I murmured to Jamie.
She shrugged. "He's been like that since we boarded. I don't think he's having a heart attack or anything, if that's what you're asking. Are you okay, Wayne? This doesn't seem . . . "
"You're right," I said. "Hey, Alex, why don't we just go check in with Bill again."
"Because, Old Dude," he said. "We're the Nimble Men." And with his hands artfully tucked in the pockets of his ridiculous thrift-store bomber jacket, he strolled out of the plane, down the steps to the tarmac.
Why did I go? I've wondered that ever since. Because the lifeless de-icer bothered me, sure. Because Alex's enthusiasm for everything had stirred the embers of my own, dead not so long then. But there was something else. A need. Sudden. Overpowering. Was it mine? I still don't know.
I went down the steps. Behind me, I heard a single, saw-edged gasp or sigh from the not-sleeping guy. I heard another sound, too, or thought I did. That high, electrical whine, though we were the only plane out here.
When I reached Alex's side, he smiled. "One small step for Nimble Men . . . "
To my surprise, I smiled back. "See, now you're doing it."
"Doing what?"
"Are the lights the Nimble Men? Are we?"
"You know you're the coolest pilot I'm ever going to work with in my life, right, Old Dude? You know you've ruined cockpit chatter for me forever."
"Why, thank you, Alex. Sometimes, I feel the same."
"When we get back inside, could we at least put on a Gymnopedie? One of the Gnossiennes?"
Now I stared at him. "You know Satie, too?"
"I know Je te Veux makes you morose."
"For a punk kid, you know a hell of a lot of things, Alex."
"That's what things are for. Right?"
"Some things," I said, and immediately wished I hadn't.
"Hey, man," Alex said.
Ignoring him, trying to ignore myself, I looked across the tarmac at the de-icer. There really didn't seem to be anybody in the truck. There was someone on the platform up there, alright, but as far as I could make out, he still hadn't even noticed us. Unless the driver had left his keys in the ignition, or we could find a good stone to throw, we were going to have a hard time getting the platform jockey's attention. The whining was louder out here, too. Or, not louder. Closer. More shrill. If it hadn't been January, I'd have thought there were gnats in my ears.
Jamie's low-heeled shoes clicked on the folding staircase, and she appeared between us. Alex put his arm around her. Lights blossomed in the closest treetops, a scatter of turquoise and Kelly green and deep pink, as though someone had scattered a handful of marbles up there. The branches rippled with the color, then swallowed it.
"Jesus," said Jamie.
Alex put an arm around her waist. "Wacky north woods beautifulness. My favorite kind."
"Is that ice, do you think? Airport lights reflecting in the branches?"
Of course, that was right. Why hadn't I thought of it? I gestured back toward the plane. "Seriously, is that guy alright?" I asked. "The passenger in 2B?"
"I think mostly he's crying," said Jamie. "I've got my eye on him."
"I know you do."
"We shouldn't be out here, Wayne." She touched my hand.
"Go inside. We'll be right back."
More lights. A royal-blue flurry this time, concentrated in the pines nearest the taxiway, maybe thirty meters away. Up in the platform pod, I could see the jockey's shadow just a little more clearly through the snow. He was turned toward the forest. I still didn't think he'd seen us.
Unease flickered through me again. It felt almost good. It filled the emptiness, or at least colored it.
As if sensing that thought, Jamie squeezed my hand. I'd worked with her a long time. I squeezed back. "Go on inside. We're coming."
"You can offer White-hair in there the rest of my poutine," Alex said. "I didn't actually finish it all. Although it's kind of cold, now."
"Bleah," said Jamie, and turned for the plane. I saw her look backward at the woods as she climbed up. Maybe she was hoping for another light show. But I had the idea she was hoping the opposite. Maybe that was just me.
The whining swelled still more. Underneath the shrillness, I could hear another sound, now. A sort of low grinding. Then that faded. I lifted my hands over my head, waved them at the de-icer platform. Next, I tried jumping up and down.
"See?" said Alex. "You're still nimble. You know she digs you, right?"
I stopped jumping. "What?"
"Jamie. She's just waiting for you to say the word. She's been waiting a long time."
"What are you talking about? She told you this?"
"She didn't have to tell me. I know. It's one of those things Alex knows."
"Let's get that guy's attention and get out of here," I said.
"I'm just telling you. She's waiting for you to say you're ready. I say it's been three years, Old Dude. And no disrespect. But I say three years is plenty. I say you're ready. Shit."
It came from nowhere, wasn't anything, vanished just as quickly. A flash of green-yellow right over our heads, like lightning stabbing into the ground. Or eyes blinking.
"Did you hear that?"
"Hear it? You have ears in your eyes, Old Dude?"
"Hey," I said. Our breath plumed in front of us. "He moved."
Both of us craned our necks back, trying to see. The guy up there had moved. I was sure of it. But he'd stopped now. And he was still staring straight at the woods. The whining was creeping deeper into my ears again. And there was yet another sound, this one more familiar. But several blank seconds passed before I realized what it was.
"That truck is on," I said.
"Well," said Alex, and for the first time, I heard doubt in his voice, too. Just a flicker. But that rattled me more than anything else out here. "If it won't come to us . . . I guess we just go get it."
He started that way, and I followed, and the driver in the cab finally sat up. He looked astonished to see us. Then he started flinging his hands wildly in front of his face, as though he had bees in there.
"What the fuck?" Alex mumbled, still moving, and I grabbed his wrist.
The driver was waving more wildly. But not at anything in the cabin. He was also shouting, but he had the windows rolled up tight, and all I could hear was that he was shouting. Not what he was saying.
And overhead, that sound had returned, not so much louder as higher, almost a shriek. The grinding was back, too. Alex and I were halfway between the de-icer truck and our open plane, right at the edge of the tarmac.
It didn't actually sound like grinding, I realized. It seemed too deeply lodged inside my own head for that. It sounded like teeth gnashing.
The lights didn't exactly erupt from the trees. They just slid from behind them, as though they'd been hiding there all along. They hovered at the edge of the forest, coagulating like snow-melt on a windowpane. Forming.
I didn't have to warn Alex. He was already running.
Of course he was decades younger, much faster. Maybe he didn't even see what the lights became, the thing with wings. Or the million smaller things, all of them shining.
They came like a blizzard on a glacier, all at once and from everywhere. I was flat-out sprinting, but knew I wouldn't make it. They were in my hair, ears, eyes, and they ached. It was useless to swipe at or fight them, but I was still running anyway, until the first blast from the de-icer blew me straight off my feet. The de-icer didn't stop. It went on pummeling me with fluid, and I started to scream, then shut my mouth tight for fear of what I'd swallow, liquid or light, and tried scrambling back upright. Then I gave that up and crawled.
The lights were screaming. Or I was. Or Alex and Jamie were from the doorway of the plane, both of them soaked, dripping, waving, shouting. I reached the steps, and the gnashing got louder, seemed to clamp down on my spine and chew straight through it, and I sagged bonelessly sideways, feeling light, so light. Then Alex yanked me inside and slammed the door tight.
For one long moment, there was only darkness and silence. Because I hadn't opened my eyes, I realized. Because I was too terrified to open my mouth. I felt a towel on my face, Jamie's gentle hand against the back of my neck. I opened my eyes to find Alex, dripping purple droplets everywhere like a freshly bathed poodle.
"Okay?" he said.
I nodded, trembling. "I think. You?"
He started to laugh. "Holy shit," he said. "Holy crazy Canadian shit."
It wasn't funny. But with Alex there, you couldn't help smiling anyway. Jamie was doing it, too, while pointlessly patting over and over at my face. I took her hand to stop her. Then I just held onto that.
We were back in our seats, our heads wrapped in scratchy airline towels, ears still ringing, hands still shaking but settled firmly on the controls that would guide us either safely back to the terminal or up in the air and as far from Prince Willows Town as this plane's pathetic fuel tanks could carry us, when the cockpit door opened. Alex was the one who turned. Then he said, "Wayne."
I turned, too. Jamie stood in the doorway, face waxy, eyes blank. "He's gone," she said.
"What?" I asked.
"The guy in 2B. The crying guy. He's not on the plane. He didn't go out past me either. He's nowhere."
I stood up, shaking my head. "That's ridiculous. He must have—"
"Wayne," Jamie said, and her eyes filled with tears. "He's gone."
It happened only occasionally, Bill told me once, years later, over one final round of Molsons, before both of us left the flying game for good. Only in the dead of winter, on the coldest nights. Mostly not even then. No one really knew when or how the realization had been made about the de-icing fluid. But that seemed to help. Sometimes. To keep them back. Sometimes.
"Always so sad," Bill had said. "Always, always, always."
At least, that's what I thought he'd said. It wasn't until that night, back in my hotel, pouring a drink, that my hands started to shake, and I realized I'd heard him wrong. Not so sad. The sad. Always the sad.
Was it grief that drew them? Or reacted with something else in that air, in those woods, and created them? Had my grief drawn or created them? If so, it wasn't the anti-freeze that saved me. It was the sobbing man. His was fresher.
Had they swallowed him? I like to think he was one of them, now, instead. Reunited, maybe, with what he'd lost. Or at least in company, with the Nimble Men. Sometimes, that thought comforts me.
You can't fly to Prince Willows Town, any more. Not long after that night, they closed the facility, redirecting all traffic to the bigger, better-serviced airport at Sudbury, where the light-towers are numerous and brighter, and the trees keep their distance.