Stephen King

The Night Flier

From the 1988 anthology Prime Evil

Dees didn't really get interested - in spite of his private pilot's license - until the third and fourth murders. Then he smelled blood.

   No pun intended, he told the editor of Inside View, who only looked blank. "Has anyone in the straight press picked up on it yet? The pattern, I mean?"

   The editor, Morrison, bristled. He always bristled when Dees used the phrase, which was one of the reasons he used it. Well, if Morrison wanted to delude himself into believing a weekly rag that headlined stories like MY TWINS ARE ALIENS, RAPED WOMAN CRIES, and WOMAN EATS ABUSING HUBBY was part of the straight press, let him do it. Dees had seen editors come and editors go. He had worked for Inside View long enough to know what it really was: mind-meatloaf that overweight hausfraus bought at the checkout counter and ate in front of the soap operas along with their favorite ice cream.

   But every now and then over his fourteen years at View, he had smelled blood. Real blood, not the fake stuff.

   After the pair of murders in Maryland by the man he had begun to think of as the Night Flier, he thought he caught that unmistakable whiff.

   "If you mean has anyone suggested these may be serial murders, the answer is no," Morrison said stiffly.

   But it won't be long, Dees thought.

   "But it won't be long," Morrison said. "If there's another one-"

   “Gimme the files,” Dees said.

   He read them, this time closely, and what he read blew his mind.

   I didn't see this before, he thought, and then: Why didn't I see this before? He thought Morrison was an asshole. Furthermore, he knew Morrison knew what he thought. Up until today, Dees hadn't cared. After fourteen years on the staff, he was the senior member, tog hog in this particular sty, you might say, and he had been offered - and had turned down - the editorial job twice himself. Morrison was the ninth editor under whom he had served (and one of them, the delectable if inept Melanie Briggs, had often served under him - in a more informal capacity, of course).

   But if Morrison was an asshole, how come it had been Morrison who'd spotted the Night Flier pattern first?

   Briefly - just briefly-the idea that he might be burning out fluttered through his mind. The burnout rate was pretty high in this business, he knew. You could only spend so many years writing about flying saucers carrying off whole Brazilian villages (such stories illustrated, more often than not, by such things as out-of-focus light bulbs dangling from threads against black felt backgrounds) or out-of-work daddies chopping up their kids like kindling wood. It came down to shoveling shit with a typewriter. You got paid a lot, but shit was shit. There came a day when, he had been told, you woke up deciding it was time to look for new work.

   He had heard of it but had never thought it could happen to him.

   And it isn't, his mind insisted, but he was uneasy.

   God, how could he have missed this?

   He flew into Wilmington, North Carolina, a week later - pure hunch.

   Well ... instinct. Call it that, if you wanted.

   Killer instinct.

It was summertime, and down South the living should have been easy and the cotton high - the song said so, anyway - but Dees was unable to get into the small Wilmington airport, which served only one major airline - Piedmont - a few commuter airlines, and a lot of private planes. There were heavy thunderstorms in the area, and Dees was ninety miles from the airfield, jouncing up and down in the unsteady air, looking at his watch and cursing. It was 8:45 P.M. by the time he was given landing clearance, and that was less than forty minutes before official sundown. He didn't know if the Night Flier stuck by the traditional rules, but the smell of blood was stronger than ever.

   He had chosen the right place, found the right Cessna Skymaster.

   He knew it.

   The Night Flier might have picked Virginia Beach, or Charlotte, or Birmingham, or some point even farther south, but the last two murders had been at the mud-hole airport in Maryland, and Dees had called all the airports south of there that seemed right for the Flier's M.O., using his finger on the Touch Tone phone in his Days Inn motel room until it was sore.

   Private planes had landed the night before at all of the most likely airfields, and Cessna Skymaster 337s at all of them. Not surprising, since they were the Toyotas of private aviation. But the Cessna 337 that had landed last night in Wilmington was the one he was looking for. He didn't know how he knew; he just did. That was good for the sake of the story (and he was more and more sure there was a story, maybe one big enough to make the National Enquirer's Belushi-Smith scoop look like a pile of moldy hay), but it was maybe even a better thing to know just for the sake of knowing: there had been no burnout. A lapse, maybe, but that was all. He was still okay.

   So far.

“N471B, vector ILS runway 34,” the radio voice said laconically. “Fly heading 160. Descend and maintain 3000.”

   “Heading 160. Leaving 6 for 3000, roger.”

   “And be aware we still got some nasty weather down here.”

   “Roger,” Dees said, thinking that ole Farmer John, down there in whatever beer barrel passed for air-traffic control in Wilmington, was sure one hell of a sport to tell him that. He knew there was still nasty weather in the area; he could see the thunderheads, some with lightning still going off inside them like giant fireworks, and he had spent the last forty minutes or so circling and feeling more like a man on a pogo stick than one in a twin-engine Beechcraft. Another eight or twelve minutes of that bullshit would have brought on a severe case of the fuel-tank shorts, necessitating a diversion to Charleston. Legit horror stories were hard to come by, but as some great sage or other had (or should have) said, no story, even a real gross-out like the Night Flier, was worth dying for.

   He flicked off the autopilot, which had taken him around and around the same stupid patch of now-you-see-it, now-you-don't North Carolina farmland. No cotton down there, high or otherwise. Just a bunch of used-up tobacco patches now overgrown with kudzu. Dees was happy to point his plane's nose toward Wilmington and start into the steadily descending pattern, monitored by pilot, ATC, and tower, for the ILS approach.

He picked up the microphone, thought about giving ole Farmer John a yell, asking him if there just happened to be anybody dead down there, drained of his or her blood, then put the mike back instead. It was still at least half an hour until sunset - he had verified the official Wilmington time on his way down from Washingtion National. No, if no one had died there last night, they were safe ... at least for a little while.

   Dees believed the Night Flier was a real vampire about as much as he believed it really had been the Tooth Fairy who had put all those quarters under his pillow when he was a kid, but if the guy thought he was a vampire - and this guy, Dees was convinced, really did - that would probably be enough to make him conform to the rules.

   Life, after all, imitates art.

   Count Dracula with a private pilot's license.

   You had to admit, Dees thought, it was elegant.

   The Beech jounced as he passed through a thick membrane of cumulus on his steady downward course. Dees cursed and trimmed the plane, which seemed increasingly unhappy with the weather.

   You and me both, baby, Dees thought.

   When he came into the clear again, he could see the lights of Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach clearly.

   Yes sir, the fatties are gonna love this one, he thought as thunder rumbled on the port side. They're gonna pick up about seventy zillion copies of this baby when they go Krogering.

   But there was more, and he knew it.

   This one could be ... well ... just so goddamn good.

   This one could be legitimate.

   There was a time when a word like that never would have crossed your mind, ole buddy, he thought. Maybe you are burning out.

   INSIDE VIEW REPORTER APPREHENDS CRAZED NIGHT FLIER.

   EXCLUSIVE STORY ON HOW BLOOD-DRINKING NIGHT FLIER WAS FINALLY CAUGHT.

   “NEEDED TO HAVE IT,” DEADLY DRACULA DECLARES.

   It wasn't exactly grand opera - Dees had to admit that but he thought it sang just the same. He thought it sang like a boid.

   He picked up the mike after all and depressed the button. He knew the Flier was still there, just as he knew he wasn't going to be comfortable until he had made absolutely sure.

   “Wilmington, this is N471B. You still got a Skymaster 337 from Duffrey, Maryland, down there on the ramp?”

   Through static: “Looks like it, old hoss. Can't talk just now. I got air traffic.”

   “Has it got red piping?” Dees persisted.

   For a moment he thought he would get no answer, then: “Red piping, yeah. Kick it off, N471 B, if you don't want me to see if I can slap an FCC fine on y'all. I got too many fish to fry tonight, and not enough skillets.”

   “Thanks, Wilmington,” Dees said in his most courteous voice. He hung up the mike and then gave it the finger, but he was grinning, barely noticing the jolts as he passed through another membrane of cloud. Skymaster, red piping, and he was willing to bet next year's salary that if the doofus in the tower hadn't been so busy, he would have been able to confirm the tail number as well: N101BL.

   He had found the Night Flier, by Christ. He had found him, it wasn't dark yet, and as impossible as it seemed, there were no police on the scene. If there had been cops, and if they had been there concerning the Cessna, Farmer John almost certainly would have said so, sky jam and bad weather or not. Some things were just too good not to gossip about.

   I want your picture, you bastard, Dees thought. Now he could see the approach lights, flashing white in the dusk. I'll get your story in time, but first, the picture.

   Just one.

   He headed down more steeply, ignoring the descent beep. His face was pale and set. His lips were pulled back slightly, revealing small, gleaming white teeth.

   In the combined light of dusk and the instrument pane Richard Dees looked more than a bit like a vampire himself.

There were many things Inside View was not - literate, for one, overconcerned with the nuances of the stories it covered, for another - but one thing was undeniable: It was exquisitely attuned to horrors. Merton Morrison was a bit of an asshole (although not as much of one as Dees had originally thought), but Dees had to give him one thing-he had remembered the two things that had made Inside View a success. First, buckets of blood. Second, handfuls of guts.

   Oh, there were still pictures of cute babies and psychic predictions and diets that would supposedly work without the dieter having to give up anything (except the things he or she - she, most frequently - didn't like), but Morrison had recognized the change in the temper of the times when he came on board. Dees supposed that was why Morrison had lasted as long as he had (and, maybe, why he himself. was a little jealous of the editor, with his dork's crew cut and teeny, mincing little feet and his cigarette holder). The flower children of '68 had grown into the cannibals of '88. The peace sign had gone the way of the Nehru jacket and the Beatle haircut. The country was into Rambo and Bernhard Goetz. The circulation of Inside View, which had taken a shallow dip in the late seventies and a steeper one in the early eighties, had begun to come up again under the dual administrations of those dual assholes, Ronald Reagan and Merton Morrison.

   Dees had no doubt there was still an audience for All Things Bright and Beautiful, but the one for All Shit Grim and Gory had become a growth stock once again. Those in favor of the former had James Herriott. Those in favor of the latter had Stephen King and Inside View.

   The difference, Dees thought, was King made his stuff up.

   Their stringers had gotten the word six months after Morrison's name went up on the editor's door: By all means, stop and smell the roses on your way to work, but once you get there, spread these nostrils wide and start sniffing for blood.

   And when it came to blood, no one smelled better than Richard Dees.

   Which was why it was Dees, and no one but Dees, who was flying into Wilmington tonight while Gloria Swett went up to Nashville for what looked like the really big story ... with Dee's complete blessing. Because the country and western singer with AIDS was going to look very small compared to this.

   Instinct.

   Instinct that had turned into knowing: knowing that there was a human monster who apparently thought he was a vampire down there, a monster whose name Dees had already picked out but had not mentioned to anyone but Morrison. A name he would coin soon enough. And when he did, it would be plastered across the tabloid display racks of every supermarket checkout counter in America - screaming at the patrons in unignorable sixteen-point type.

   Look out, ladies and sensation seekers, Dees thought. You don't know it, but a very bad man - possibly a woman but almost certainly a man - is coming your way. You'll read his real name and forget it, but that's okay. What you'll remember is my name for him, the name that's going to put him right up there with Jack the Ripper and the Cleveland Torso Murderer and the Black Dahlia.

   THE NIGHT FLIER: COMING SOON TO A CHECKOUT COUNTER NEAR YOU.

   Very soon.

   The exclusive story, the exclusive interview ... but what I want most of all is the exclusive picture.

   He checked his watch again and allowed himself to relax the tiniest bit (which was, really, all Richard Dees could relax; he was one of those men who have only two speeds, totally off and over-drive). He still had almost half an hour till dark. He would be parking next to the white Skymaster with red piping (and N10lBL on the tail in a similar red) in less than fifteen minutes.

   Was the Flier sleeping in town or in some motel on the way into town?

   Dees didn't think so. Dees doubted if all four murders would have taken place at the airfields themselves, had that been the case.

   One of the reasons for the Skymaster 337‘s popularity, besides its relatively low price, was that it was the only plane its size with a belly hold. True, it wasn't much bigger than the trunk of an old VW beetle, but it was roomy enough for three big suitcases or five small ones ... and almost certainly could fit a sleeping or hiding man, provided he wasn't the size of a pro basketball player. The Night Flier could be in the Cessna's belly hold, provided he was (a) sleeping in the fetal position with his knees drawn up to his chin; or (b) crazy enough to think he was a real vampire; or (c) both of the above.

   Dees had his money on (c).

   Did I find anything underneath where that plane was parked? the not exactly sober mechanic at the little airport in Maine had asked, repeating one of Dees's inspired, instinctive questions. He thought it over. Dees didn't press. He knew when to press and when to wait. Instinct again.

   The mechanic had been an old geezer wearing a coverall so stained you could barely read the name Ezra picked out in gold thread on the right breast. The coverall - where it wasn't black with oil - was blue. The cap sitting askew on his head was a fluorescent orange where it wasn't marked with oily prints so clear a New York cop would have admired them. He was stroking a chin that hadn't felt a razor blade in three days, maybe four. His eyes were bloodshot. The only smell stronger than oil or sweat on him when you got up close was sharp and pungent. The geezer either had been rolling in a juniper patch recently or putting away a considerable amount of gin. All in all, Dees had been glad his own plane didn't need any servicing that day.

   Still, he waited, hands stuffed in the pockets of his expensive slacks.

   Now, it's damn funny you should ask that, the mechanic said at last, because I did find sutthin'.

   That was how he said it: sutthin'.

   Big pile of dirt.

   He looked at Dees, who had asked the proper question: That right?

   Oh, ayub. Kicked it with m'boot.

   Pause.

   Nasty stuff.

   Another pause.

   Goddamn stuff was squirmin' witb worms.

   Yet another pause.

   And maggots, the mechanic finished.

                                                           *                   *                   *

Now, with his altimeter winding down from four to three thousand feet, Dees thought: No hotel or motel for you, my friend, am I right? When you play vampire, you're like Frank Sinatra - you do it your way. Know what I think? I think when the belly hold of that plane opens, the first thing I'm gonna see is a shower of graveyard earth (and even if it isn't, you can bet your upper incisors it will be when the story comes out), and then I'm gonna see first one leg in a pair of tuxedo pants, and then the other, because you are gonna be dressed, ain't you? Oh, dear man, I think you are gonna be dressed to the nines, dressed to kill, you might say, and the auto-winder is already on my camera, and when I see that cloak -

   But that was where his thoughts stopped; that was where they broke off as cleanly as a broken branch.

   Because that was when the flashing white lights on both runways went out.

The gin-head mechanic had been one of the employees at the Cumberland County Airport, a dignified-sounding name for a pocket airfield that consisted of two Quonset huts and two crisscrossing runways. One of the runways was actually tarred. Because Dees had never landed on a dirt runway, he requested the tarred one. The bouncing his Beech 55 (for which he was in hock up to his eyebrows and beyond) took when he landed convinced him to try the dirt when he took off again, and he had been amazed and delighted to find it as smooth as a coed's breast.

   Oh, and the field also had a wind sock. Patched like a pair of old dad's underdrawers, but it was there. Technology comes to the boondocks, Dees had thought. Will wonders never cease.

   Cumberland County was itself the most populous in Maine, but the town for which it was named was the apotheosis of Hicksville, U.S.A. It sat between an even smaller (and mostly deserted) town with the unlikely name of Jerusalem's Lot, and the much larger - and plusher-town of Falmouth. A visit to the Falmouth police station to pick up what particulars the local fuzz would part with convinced Dees of two things. The first was that Falmouth cops didn't consider themselves hicks. The second was that they were.

   The Cumberland field existed mostly on the landing fees paid by rich summer residents who found it easier and quicker to get in there than at the Portland Jetport, where the air traffic grew more congested each year. Falmouth, hick town or not, had some nice stretches of beach ... and a great golf course.

   Also, the landing fees at Cumberland County Airport were roughly twenty-five percent of those at the Portland Jetport.

   When Dees arrived, it was high summer and the place was as busy as it ever got - which meant it had awakened from deep hibernation to a light doze. At this, the bustling height of its season, it employed a mind-dazzling array of four employees: two mechanics and two ground controllers (the ground controllers also sold chips, cigarettes, and sodas; further, the gin-head told Dees, the murdered night controller, Claire Bowie, had made a damn decent cheeseburger). Mechanics and controllers also served as pump jockeys and janitors. It wasn't unusual for the controller to have to rush back from the bathroom, where he was swabbing out the john with Janitor-In-A-Drum, to give landing clearance and assign a runway from the maze of two at his disposal.

   All this was so challenging that the night controller at CCA sometimes only got six hours' sleep a night.

   Shortly before dawn on the morning of July 9, a Cessna 337, tail number N101BL, had radioed Claire Bowie for landing clearance. Bowie was a bachelor who had been working the night shift at the airfield since 1954, when pilots sometimes had to abort their approaches (which, in those days, was known simply as “pulling up”) because of the cows that sometimes wandered onto what was then the single runway.

   Bowie got the radio call from the Skymaster at 4:32 A.M. and gave the requested clearance at 4:36. The time of landing he noted as 4:49 A.M.; he further recorded the pilot's name as Dwight Renfield, and the point of N101BL's origination as Bangor, Maine. The times were undoubtedly correct. The rest was bullshit.

   Bowie had no flight plan filed for a Cessna N101BL departing Bangor or anyplace else, but he simply assumed it had been misfiled by the day controller (or maybe used to wipe up a spilled cup of coffee), and he made no effort to check with Bangor.

   At CCA, the atmosphere was loose, and a landing fee was a landing fee.

   Dees had checked Bangor, and as far as they were concerned, N101BL had flown out of nowhere.

   As for the pilot's name, it was a bizarre joke. Dwight just happened to be the first name of an actor named Dwight Frye, and Dwight Frye had just happened to play, among a plethora of other parts, the role of Renfield, a slavering lunatic whose idol had been the most famous vampire of all time.

   But, Dees supposed, radioing UNICOM and asking for landing clearance in the name of Count Dracula might have raised suspicion even in a sleepy little place like this.

   Might.

   He wasn't really sure.

   After all, as the ginny had said, a landing fee was a landing fee.

Landing fees or no landing fees (and “Dwight Renfield” had paid his promptly, in cash, as he had also paid to top off his tanks, and judging from the amount of money found in Claire Bowie's wallet, he also must have tipped in currency of the realm ... and lavishly), Dees was astonished by the casual treatment N101BL had received. This was, after all, the era of drug paranoia, and most of the shit came into small harbors in small boats, or into small airports in small planes ... planes like ole Dwight Renfield's Cessna Skymaster, for instance. Bowie should have been suspicious and followed up on the missing flight plan, if only to keep his own skirts clean.

   That was what he should have done, but he hadn't. Had Bowie been bribed as well as tipped? If so, it hadn't been in his pockets. The police report specified a total cash amount of ninety dollars. You didn't bribe anyone-not even a hick-to cover for a plane whose belly hold just might be full of toot for the old snoot, with ninety bucks.

   Try this, though: “Renfield” bribes Claire Bowie. Bowie takes his windfall home to his bachelor pad and sticks it under his underwear or something. The next night, “Renfield,” maybe coked to the gills and so paranoid that he's got a permanent charley horse in his neck from looking behind him, decides to kill Bowie. Then the cops come along, and in the course of the investigation one of them finds the cash in one of Bowie's bureau drawers. The cop sticks the wad in his own pocket. Deppity Dawg's ship just came in. Pennies from heaven.

   But it didn't hold water and Dees knew it. Bowie had a reputation for honesty. Dees had never met an honest man in his life, except maybe for a psychic - maybe the only real psychic Dees had ever tried to recruit for Inside View - named Johnny Smith, who had kicked Dees off his porch and threatened to shotgun him. And since Smith had later tried to assassinate a member of the House of Representatives - not the president or even a fa-chrissakes senator but a fucking representative from New Hampshire - Dees felt that Smith's uncharacteristic honesty could be chalked up to insanity and safely forgiven. But Claire Bowie seemed to have no vices demanding enough to justify the risk a bribe would have entailed.

   But even if he had taken one, which had later disappeared into some cop's pocket, what about the rest of the Cumberland County Airport staff? There weren't many of them, but enough so that maybe all four had spent the day walking around the white Skymaster with the red piping. If “Renfield” needed to bribe one, he needed to bribe all ... and Dees knew he hadn't, because he had asked point-blank and had accepted the denials (heated denials, by and large) calmly and at face value.

   This bunch of Yankee clodhoppers was too dumb to lie. Simple as that.

   Dees supposed he could understand the ginny's lack of interest in the plane easily enough. The ginny, who had provided most of his information, looked like he might be able to find his way from the airport's one hangar to the gas pumps without a map, but probably not much farther.

   Also, he was the. only one of the bunch to answer Dee's question about the bribe with regret rather than anger.

   But what about the others?

   Christ only knew. Some of it was doubtlessly the fault of the mass deregulation that had come into vogue with the Carter administration, overpopulating the skies and understaffing the smaller fields, when the commuter carriers suddenly discovered there was no FAA strong enough to keep them out of the bigger ones (like the Portland Jetport) anymore. In lieu of anything better, he supposed he had to chalk the rest up to that unspoken small-town credo of you-mind-your-business-and-I'll-mind-mine.

   But it wasn't like a Lucky Strike. It didn't satisfy. It didn't quite ring true.

   Also; let's face it, gang: The possible negligence of a bunch of small-town air mechanics and controllers wasn't the sort of stuff Inside View readers really went boolsheet for, anyway. The New Republic or Atlantic Monthly could have that one, if they wanted; Dees wanted the Night Flier.

   The gin-soaked mechanic looked surprised when Dees asked how he thought “Renfield” had left the airport.

   “Musta taken a cab, I guess,” he said.

   “Did Claire Bowie say anything about a cab the next day?”

   The ginny scratched his whiskery chin. “Nope. Not that I recollect.”

   Dees made a mental note to call the cab companies in the area first thing. At that time he was going on what seemed like the perfectly reasonable assumption that the guy slept in a bed like everyone else. But Dees wasn't going to trust this mechanic, who appeared to have come to a stage in his life where the things he didn't recollect outnumbered the ones he did roughly three to one.

   “What about a limo?”

   “Nope,” the ginny said more positively. “Claire didn't say nothing about no limbo, and he woulda mentioned that.”

   Dees nodded and made a mental note to call the limo company, or companies, in Falmouth, if there were any, second thing. He would also question the rest of the staff, but he expected no light to dawn there; the ginny said that he had had a cup of coffee with Claire before Claire left, and another with Claire when Claire came back on duty, and he, the ginny, was going off (except, Dees guessed, I bet your cup of coffee looked quite a bit like a glass of gin, didn't it, old-timer?), but that he was pretty sure none of the day people had talked to Claire.

   There was a night mechanic, but he had called in sick earlier that day, and his story checked out. Bowie had been alone when he was killed. Except for the Night Flier, of course.

   It all looked like a dead end.

   He was about to thank the ginny and walk away when he said: “He did say one funny thing, ole Claire did.” He scratched open the left pocket of his coverall, removed a pack of Chesterfields, offered it to Dees for nearly half a second, and then took one himself. While he lit up, he looked at Dees from beneath the wrinkled and folded lids of his bloodshot eyes with an expression of half-baked craftiness. “Might not mean nothing, but it sure musta struck Claire perculyer, I guess, because ole Claire, you know, most times ole Clair wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful.”

   “What was that?”

   “Don't quite remember,” the ginny said. “Sometimes, you know, when I forget things, a picture of Andrew Jackson sorta refreshes my memory.”

   “How about one of Alexander Hamilton?” Dees asked dryly.

   After a moment's consideration (a short moment), the ginny agreed that sometimes Hamilton did the trick, and a ten changed hands. Dees thought that a portrait of Ben Franklin - hell, maybe even one of George Washington - might have done it, but he was only an impatient man, not a totally mean one.

   “Claire said the guy looked like he must be goin' to one hell of a fancy party,” the ginny said.

   “Oh?” Dees said, thinking that if this was all there was, maybe it should have been Franklin, after all. “Did he say why he thought that?”

   “Said the guy was dressed to the nines. Tuxedo, silk tie, all that stuff.” The ginny paused. “Claire said the guy was even wearin' a big cloak. Red as a fire engine inside, black as a woodchuck's asshole outside.

   “Said when it spread out behind him, it looked like a goddamn bat's wing, it did.”

It was not just the throat-ripping that had intrigued Morrison; in a society where large doses of cocaine had given subnormal clods the ability to imagine (and the insanity to carry out) what amounted to ritual acts of vengeance, throat-rippings were just not unique enough to titillate Inside View readers. The fact that almost every drop of Claire Bowie's blood had been gone was, however.

   Maybe Morrison was an asshole when it came to his illusions that there was any real dignity or importance about the job he was doing, but he was no dummy. He knew a good VAMPIRE STALKS SMALL MAINE TOWN story when he saw it as quickly as he knew a good “BIGFOOT STOLE MY BABY!” ANGUISHED MOTHER CRIES story, or Morrison's own personal favorite: OVER HALF OF RUSSIAN POLIT-BURO INFECTED WITH AIDS, DEFECTOR CONFIDES IN TOP-SECRET CIA MEMO.

   On a slow week he would have used it as the “second shouter” below the main head, but Bowie had not been killed during a slow week, and this had pleased Morrison. He had his good instincts, all right, better than Dees had at first thought, and now they were telling him they had a potential top headline-in-the-making here.

   His instincts told him the guy might do it again.

   Sure enough, three weeks later the guy did. In Alderton, New York.

One of the things that surprised Dees about the case of the Night Flier (and considering what he had seen of human nature and human behavior, it might really have been the only thing) was that Alderton had been the Flier's only one-night stand ... and he still hadn't been caught.

   The Alderton airport was even smaller than the one in Cumberland - one single dirt runway and a combined Ops/UNICOM that was no more than a shed with a fresh coat of paint. There was no instrument approach; there was, however, a large satellite dish so none of the flying farmers who worked here would have to miss Dallas or Wheel of Fortune or anything really important like that.

   One thing: The dirt was just as silky-smooth as the runway in Maine had been. Dees thought: I could get used to this. No big thuds over asphalt patches, no potholes that want to ground-loop you after you come in ... yeah, I could get used to this real easy.

   At Alderton, nobody had asked for pictures of Hamilton, Jackson, or anyone else. At Alderton, the whole town-a community of just under a thousand souls-was in shock, not merely the few part-timers who had run the tiny airport almost as a charity (and certainly in the red), along with the late Buck Kendall. There was no one to do any talking to, anyway, be it for pay or for free. No one had been there that night but Buck Kendall, no one had seen anything but Buck Kendall ... and Buck Kendall was dead.

   “Must have been one mighty man,” one of the part-timers told Dees. “Ole Buck, he went two-twenty, and he was easy most of the time, but if you got him riled, he made you sorry. Seen him box down a fella in a carny show that came through P'keepsie two years ago. That kind of fightin' ain't legal, of course, but Buck was short a payment on that little Piper Cub of his, so he boxed down that carny fighter. Collected two hunded dollars and got it to the loan comp'ny about two days before they was gonna send out someone to repo it, I guess.” The part-timer paused. This guy knew a hell of a lot less than the gin-head, but Dees liked him better. He looked genuinely concerned, genuinely sorry. “Guy musta tooken him from behind,” he said. “That's the only way I can figger it.”

   Dees didn't know from which direction Gerard “Buck” Kendall had been taken, but he knew that this time the victim's throat had not been ripped out. This time there were holes, holes from which “Dwight Renfield” had presumably sucked his victim's blood. Except, according to the coroner's report, the holes were on opposite sides of the neck, one in the jugular vein and the other in the carotid artery. Neither were they the discreet little bite marks of the Bela Lugosi era or the slightly gorier ones of the Christopher Lee flicks. The coroner's report spoke in dry centimeters, but Dees and Morrison both could translate well enough; from the size of the wounds, the killer either had teeth the size of one of View's beloved Bigfeet, or he had made them in a much more prosaic fashion: with a spike.

   Spiked him and drank his blood.

   The Night Flier had requested permission to land at Alderton Field shortly after 10:30 P.M. Kendall had granted permission and he had noted the number, which Morrison had at that time almost memorized: N101BL. He had noted “name of pilot” as “Dwite Renfeild” and the “make and model of aircraft” as “Cessna Skymaster 337.” No mention of the red piping, no mention of the sweeping bat-wing cloak that was as red as a fire engine on the inside and as black as a woodchuck's asshole on the outside, but Morrison felt they had enough.

   The Night Flier - who had flown into Alderton shortly after 10:30 on the night of July 19, killed that strapping fellow Buck Kendall, drank his blood, and flown out again in his little Cessna 337  sometime before Jenna Kendall came by at 5:00 A.M. to give her husband a fresh-made waffle and discovered his exsanguinated corpse instead - had, in Morrison's mind, just gone to the head of the class.

   In other words, he was ready to make the Flier a first shouter.

   At the time Dees remembered thinking that if you gave blood, all you got was a cup of orange juice. If you took it, however - sucked it, to be perfectly specific - you got headlines.

   There had been occasions when it had occurred to Dees - just in passing, mind you - that God's hand might have shook just a tiny bit when He was finishing off the supposed masterwork of His new creative empire.

The Night Flier would have been the shouter with Dees's passive approval (and without Dees's inventive moniker; Morrison was a good editor but a creative slouch, and he would have been perfectly happy to stick with the adequate, but humdrum, modern-day Dracula, as if there hadn't been thirty of those and forty modern-day Jack the Rippers in the last century or so) and without his byline, because Morrison hadn't been able to interest him. Dees flipped through the reports, saw the connection, figured the guy for a nut with a fetish that had been worked to death (at least in the tabs) already, and who would be caught the next time out. As far as Dees had been concerned then, the only thing about the case that was even halfway interesting was the fact that this might be the first homicidal maniac in history who flew to his victims.

   Morrison asked him why he thought Drac, which was what Morrison was then calling him, would be caught the next time.

   “Because he's a doofus, like all of them,” Dees had said, and tapped the Skymaster's tail number. “If you were going to rob banks, would you do it in the same car with the same license number every time?”

   “Oh!” Morrison said, looking surprised. “But ... that makes it even a little weirder, doesn't it, Rick?”

   Dees didn't show it, but inside he bristled. There was a disc jockey named Rick Dees. The man was an idiot. If there was anything he hated more than being called Rick, it was a girl or a story that wouldn't put out.

   Although he didn't know it, any chance Morrison had of interesting Dees (who was the closest thing to a star reporter Inside View could boast) in the Night Flier, at least then, disappeared. Dees's mind closed with a snap.

   “I don't think so,” he said.

   “Oh.” Morrison looked disappointed. “Well, I'm gonna run it as a shouter, anyhow.”

   “Fine,” he said, and walked out of the office.

   Rick, he thought. Rick, for chrissake. The man really was an asshole. Let him have his week. Two weeks from now he'll get himself a picture of some walleyed kid and he'll have to crop the picture because the kid will have wet his pants, and that'll be the end of his modern-day Dracula.

   Later that day, one of the country's biggest country and western stars tearfully announced that she had contracted AIDS from her equally famous country and western star husband. Hubby had supposedly died of cancer late the year before, and the folks at View, including Morrison and Dees, had had their doubts about that little story (“I got four guys in Nashville,” Dees told Morrison, “willing to sign affidavits that swear old Mr. Down Home America was twangin' one whole hell of a lot more than his guitar”), but they'd had to back off. After examining the affidavits Dees had collected, the lawyers representing the company that provided Inside View's libel insurance - a company that could have given Morrison's vampire all sorts of lessons about even more efficient ways of putting the bite on people, at least in the humble opinion of Richard Dees - had decided they didn't have quite enough hard evidence, and so they'd had to back off. Not this time.

   The Night Flier ended up as a two-column item near the back of the following week's paper. Morrison spent most of his time in his office with the door closed, talking and smoking himself hoarse, finally emerging with a smile like that of a new father. He announced to Dees and everyone else within earshot that he had just made a deal for the dying nightingale's memoirs, as told to an Inside View reporter (Dees himself, they had all thought then), for three million dollars.

   “Poor bitch said he'd whored away most of the dough, what he hadn't spent on cars" - Morrison chortled - "and she had to have something to leave her kids. They had eight.”

   “Jesus Christ, that guy really must have been AC/DC,” Dees marveled, and then they both exploded into laughter.

   But that was the night Morrison's Dracula and Dees's Night Flier struck again, this time killing two. He had flown into Duffrey Airport in Maryland, same Cessna 337, same number ... but he had flown in the night before. As in the first slaying, the plane had spent a whole day sitting undisturbed and unreported on the ramp before dark fell and the killing - not to mention the blood drinking - began.

   When Dees asked Morrison if he could look over the files again, and when he later asked Morrison if Morrison could send Gloria Swett (a two-hundred-pounder referred to by many staffers, male and female alike, as Gloria Suet) to Nashville instead, Morrison had at first looked dumbfounded ... then gratified.

   “Why? What was it that finally got to you?”

   Dees considered and rejected half a dozen answers. Instinct. That was all. It always came down to that. Just instinct that this was going to end up being the bigger story.

   But because he supposed Morrison needed something, he said, “I guess it's just barely possible a guy could rob three banks in the same car with the same license number. But are you going to tell me he could park all day in front of the third bank in that car before pulling the job? There's something very screwy here. I want to find out what it is.”

And now, four miles west of Wilmington Airport and three thousand feet above the ground, things had just gotten a lot screwier.

   It wasn't just the runway lights that had gone out; half of the fucking town had gone black.

   The ILS was still there, but when Dees snatched the mike and screamed, “What the fuck's going on down there?” he got nothing back but a screech of static in which a few voices babbled like distant ghosts.

   He jammed the mike back, missing the prong. It thudded to the cockpit floor at the end of its curled wire, and Dees forgot it. The grab and the yell had been pure pilot's instinct and no more. He knew what had happened as surely as he knew the sun set in the west ... and it would do that soon now. Very soon. A stroke of lightning must have scored a direct hit on a power substation near the airport. The question was whether or not to go in, anyway.

   “You had clearance,” one voice said. Another immediately (and correctly) replied that that was so much bullshit rationalization. You learned what you were supposed to do in a situation like this when you were still the equivalent of a student driver. Logic and the book tell you to head for your alternate and try to contact ATC.

   Landing now could cost him a violation and a hefty fine.

   On the other hand, not landing now - right now - could lose him the Night Flier. It might also cost someone (or several someones, considering the murders of Ray and Ellen Sarch in Duffrey) his life; but Dees considered this of almost no importance at all ... until an idea went off like a flashbulb in his mind, an inspiration that occurred, as most of his inspirations did, in huge type:

   HEROIC REPORTER SAVES (fill in a number, as large as possible, which was pretty large, given the amazingly generous borders that mark the range of human credulity) FROM CRAZED NIGHT FLIER.

   Eat that, guys, Dees thought, and continued his descent toward Runway 34.

   The runway lights down there suddenly pulsed alight again, as if approving his decision, then went out again, leaving blue afterimages on his eyes that turned the sick green of spoiled avocados a moment later. At the same moment the weird static coming from the radio cleared and Farmer John's voice screamed: “Haul port, N471 B: Pied-mont, haul starboard. Jesus, ob, Jesus, midair, I think we got a midair--”

   Dees's self-preservation instincts were every bit as well honed as those which smelled blood in the bush. He never even saw the Piedmont Airlines 727‘s strobe lights. He was too busy banking as tightly to port as the Beech could bank - which was as tight as a virgin's cooze, and Dees would be happy to testify to that fact if he got out of this shitstorm alive - as soon as the second word was out of Farmer John's mouth. He had a momentary sight/sense of something that seemed only inches above him, something as big as the wing of a prehistoric bird, and then the Beech 55 was taking a beating that made the previous rough air seem like glass. His cigarettes flew out of his breast pocket and streamed everywhere. The half-dark Wilmington skyline was crazily tilted. It felt as if his stomach were trying to squeeze his heart out of existence. Spit ran up one cheek like a kid whizzing along a greased slide. Maps flew like birds. The air outside now raved with jet thunder as well as the kind nature made. One of the windows in the four-seat passenger compartment imploded, and an asthmatic wind whooped in, skirling everything not tied down back there into a tornado.

   “Resume your previous altitude assignment, N471B!” Farmer John was screaming. Dees was coldly aware that he'd just ruined a two-hunded-dollar pair of pants by spraying about a pint of hot piss into them, but he was partially soothed by a strong feeling that old Farmer John had just loaded his Jockey shorts with a truckload or so of fresh Mars Bars. Sounded that way, anyhow.

   Dees carried a Swiss Army knife. He took it from his right pants pocket and, holding the wheel with his left hand, cut through his shirt just above the left elbow, bringing blood. Then with no pause

   (instinct)

   he made another cut, shallow, just below his left eye. He folded the knife shut and stuffed it into the elasticized map pocket in the pilot's door. Gotta clean it later, he thought. Do it or you could be in deep shit. But considering the things the Night Flier had gotten away with, he thought he'd be okay.

   The runway lights came on again, this time for good, he hoped, although their pulsing quality told him they were being powered by a generator. He homed the Beech in again on Runway 34. Blood ran down his left cheek to the corner of his mouth. He sucked some in and then spat a pink mixture of blood and spit onto his IVSI. Never miss a trick. Instinct.

   He looked at his watch. Sunset - only fourteen minutes away now. This was cutting it much too close to the bone.

   “Pull up, Beech!” Farmer John yelled. “Are you deaf or on something?”

   Dees groped for the mike's kinked wire without ever taking his eyes from the runway lights. He pulled the wire through his fingers until he got to the mike itself. He palmed it and depressed the send button.

   “Listen to me, you chicken-fried son of a bitch,” he said, and now his lips were pulled all the way back to the gum line. “I missed getting turned into strawbery jam by that 727 because your shit genny didn't kick in when it was supposed to; as a result I had no ATC comm. I don't know how many people on the airliner just missed getting turned into strawberry jam, but I bet you do, and I know the cockpit crew does. The only reason those guys are still alive is because the captain of that boat was bright enough to allemande right, and I was bright enough to do-si-do, but I have sustained both structural and physical damage. If you don't give me a landing clearance right now, I'm going to land, anyway. The only difference is that if I have to land without clearance, I'm going to have you up in front of an FAA hearing. But first I will personally see to it that your head and your asshole change places. Have you got that, hoss?”

   A long, static-filled silence. Then a very small voice, utterly unlike Farmer John's previous hearty “Hey bo'!” delivery, said, “You're cleared to land Runway 34, N471B.”

   Dees smiled and homed in on the runway.

   He depressed the mike button and said, “I got mean and yelling. I'm sorry. It only happens when I almost die.”

   No response from the ground.

   Dees headed in, resisting the impulse to look at his watch again.

Duffrey was what had convinced him, although even before then, Dees had begun to wonder if he hadn't made a serious mistake.

   In Duffrey, the Night Flier's Cessna had spent another entire day on the ramp. It was the blood the readers would care about, of course, and that was how it should be (world without end, amen, amen); it was the elderly married couple who should have died in each other's arms but had not, and who should have been found in pools of blood but had not, because there was no blood left in their bodies; it was for them that the readers should and would care (the following month would have seen their golden wedding anniversary, sob-sob, choke-choke), but it was that failure to report an aircraft already involved in two previous murders that convinced Dees there was a real story here, and maybe a very big one.

   He had landed at Washington National and rented a car to take him the sixty miles to Duffrey, because without Ray Sarch and his wife, Ellen, there was no Sarch/Duffrey Airfield. Aside from Ellen's sister, Raylene, who was a pretty fair mechanic, the two of them had been the whole shebang. There was a single oiled dirt runway (oiled both to lay the dust and to discourage the growth of weeds) and a control booth not much bigger than a closet attached to the Jet-Aire trailer where the Sarch couple lived. They were both retired, both reputedly as tough as nails, both fliers, each devoted to the other.

   Further, Dees learned in those few harum-scarum days before his flight into Wilmington that the Sarches put drug dealers and child abusers in about the same category. Their only son had died in the Florida Everglades, trying to land in what looked like a clear stretch of water with better than a ton of Acapulco Gold packed into a stolen Beech 18. The water had been clear ... except for a single stump, that was. The Beech 18 had exploded. Douglas Sarch had been thrown clear, his body smoking and singed but probably still alive, as little as his grieving parents would want to believe such a thing. Doug Sarch had been eaten by gators deep in the ‘Glades, and all that remained of him when the DEA guys finally found him a week later was a dismembered skeleton whose few remaining shreds of flesh seethed with maggots; a charred pair of Calvin Klein jeans; a white silk shirt; and a sport coat from Bijan New York, which contained the son's wallet ... and two ounces of nearly pure cocaine.

   “It was drugs and the motherfuckers who run ‘em killed my boy,” Ray Sarch had said on several occasions, and Ellen Sarch was willing to double and redouble on that one. Her hatred of drugs and drug dealers, Dees was told again and again (he was amused by the nearly unanimous feeling in Duffrey that the murder of the elderly Duffreys had been a “gangland hit”), was only exceeded by her grief and bewilderment over the seduction of her son by those very people.

   Dees could, and would, use all of this stuff, of course - although not right away. A story like this was like Maxwell House Coffee: good to the last drop. But you started with the equivalent of a violent shriek of brass. Later on, after the initial slavering interest had been sated - How did he kill them? Did he really drink their blood? Was he able to keep it down after he drank it or did he puke? Did he torture them? Did they scream? - there would be a caesura. Then, after two weeks or so, the brass would be replaced by the sobbing violins.

   Following the death of their son, the Sarches had kept their eyes peeled for anything or anyone who looked even remotely like a drug transporter. They had brought the Maryland State Police out to the field four times on false alarms, but the state Bears hadn't minded because the Sarches had also blown the whistle on three small transporters and two very big ones. The last had been carrying twenty-seven pounds of pure Bolivian cocaine. That was the kind of bust that made you forget a few false alarms, the sort of bust that made promotions.

   So on July 27, in had come this Cessna Skymaster with a number and description that had gone out to every airfield and airport in America, including the one in Duffrey; a Cessna whose pilot had identified himself as Dwight Renfield, point of origination, Wilmington, Delaware, an airfield that had never heard of “Renfield” or a Skymaster with tail number N 101 BL; the plane of a man who was almost surely a murderer.

   “If he'd flown in here, he'd be in the stir now,” one of the Delaware controllers had told Dees over the phone, but Dees wondered.

   The Night Flier had landed in Duffrey just before midnight on the twenty-seventh, and “Dwight Renfield” had not only signed the Sarches' logbook but also had accepted Ray Sarch's invitation to come into the trailer, have a beer, and watch a rerun of Gunsmoke on the CBN cable network. Ellen Sarch had told all of this to a friend at the Duffrey Beauty Shoppe the following day. The friend was a woman named Selida McCammon, and when Dees asked how Ellen Sarch had seemed, Selida had paused and then said, “Dreamy, somehow. Like a high-school girl with a crush, almost seventy years old or not. Her color was so high, I thought it was makeup, until I started in on her perm. Then I saw that she was just ... you know . . .” Selida McCammon shrugged. She knew what she meant but not how to say it.

   “Het up,” Dees suggested, and that made Selida McCammon laugh and clap her hands.

   “Het up! That's it! You're a writer, all right!”

   “Oh, I write like a boid,” Dees said, and offered a smile he hoped looked good-humored and warm. This was an expression he had once practiced almost constantly and continued to practice with fair regularity in the bedroom mirror of the New York apartment he called his home, and in the mirrors of the hotels and motels that were really his home (for he spent much more time in places where the drinking glasses came sealed in plastic containers than he did in the place to which his bills and bank statements came - Dees was not the sort of man who got much personal mail, and that was the way he liked it, oh-ho, uh-huh). It seemed to work, for the woman's own smile broadened, but the truth was that Richard Dees had never felt good-humored and warm in his life. He had, as a kid and as a teenager, believed that these emotions did not exist at all; it was simply a masquerade, a social convention like the one that made girls say, “Oh, please, don't touch me there,” when what they really wanted was for you not only to touch them there but fill “there” with about eight inches of blue steel. Later he had decided such feelings - and, perhaps, even love (although on that subject he continued to be an agnostic) - were real. He simply couldn't feel them. Well, maybe that wasn't so bad. There were quadriplegics out there. People with cancer out there. People with memory spans of twenty minutes or so out there.

   The loss of a few emotions wasn't much beside stuff like that, was it? Dees thought not.

   As long as you could stretch the muscles in your face the right way, you were all right.

   It was no easier or harder than learning to wiggle your ears. And it didn't hurt. Once in a while there was a voice inside that asked him what he wanted, what his own inside view was, but Dees didn't want an inside view. Dees didn't want to be good-humored and warm, let alone love or to be in love. He wanted only four things:

   1. To not want wanting.

   2. Photographs.

   He was better at writing, he knew that, but he liked the photographs better just the same. He liked to touch them. Two dimensions.

   3. Dirt. Filth. Horror.

   4. To uncover them before anyone else.

   Richard Dees was a humble man with humble wants.

   So the Night Flier had come into the little mom-and-pop operation that was the Duffrey Airfield. On one wall of the little office in which the Sarches had worked together, there had been a red-bordered FAA notice suggesting there was a fellow driving a Cessna Skymaster 337, tail number N101BL, who might have murdered two men. This man, the notice said, might or might not be an individual who called himself Dwight Renfield. The plane had landed. “Dwight Renfield” had almost surely spent much of that night and all the following day in the belly hold of his plane: a sitting duck who had not been potted.

   The Sarches, so vigilant that they were willing to hit the fire alarm if they even smelled smoke, let alone saw fire, had done nothing. Ray, in fact, had invited the guy in for a beer and a touch of the tube. Had treated him like an old friend instead of a suspicious character. His wife had made an appointment at the Duffrey Beauty Shoppe, which Selida McCammon had found surprising; the Sarch woman's visits were usually as regular as clockwork, and this one was at least two weeks before she should have been in. Her instructions had been unusually explicit; she had not wanted just the usual perm but also a cut ... and a little coloring as well.

   “She wanted to look younger,” Selida McCammon had said, more bemused than amused, which wasn't unusual, Dees supposed, in light of the result.

   Ray Sarch?

   He had called the FAA at Washington National to tell them to issue a NOTAM to remove Duffrey as an active airfield, barring a major incident - he was, in other words, closing shop.

   He said he thought he was coming down with the flu.

   That night, the two vigilant fire wardens had, in effect, burned to death. Ray Sarch was found in the little control room, his head torn off and cast into the far corner, where it sat on a ragged stump of neck in a pool of congealed blood, staring into the corner with wide, glazed eyes, as if there were actually something there to see.

   His wife had been found in the bedroom of the Sarch trailer. She was in bed. She was dressed in a peignoir so new, it might never have been worn before that night. She was old, a deputy had told Dees (at twenty-five dollars he was a more expensive fuck than the Maine gin-head, but still worth it), but when you saw them that way, the look was unmistakable: She had been dressed for a lover, not a killer. Those huge, spike-sized holes were driven into her neck, one in the carotid, the other in the jugular. Her face was composed, her eyes closed, her hands on her bosom.

   Although she had lost almost every drop of blood in her body, there were only spots on the pillows beneath her, and a few more spots on the book, which lay open on her stomach: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice.

   The Night Flier?

   Sometime before midnight on the twenty-eighth, during the early hours of the twenty-ninth, he had simply flown away.

   Just like a boid.

   Or a bat.

   Richard Dees touched down in Wilmington seven minutes before official sunset. While he was throttling back, still spitting blood out of his mouth from the cut below his eye, he saw lightning strike down with blue-white fire so intense that it imprinted itself on his retinas for nearly a minute, revolving through half a rainbow of sickish, fading colors. On the heels of the bolt came the most deafening thunderclap he had ever heard; his subjective opinion of the blast's sonic power was confirmed when one of the windows in the passenger compartment, which had been stellated by the near miss with the Piedmont 727, coughed inward in a spray of junk-shop diamonds.

   In the brilliant glare he saw a squat, cubelike building on the port side of Runway 34 impaled by the bolt. It exploded, exclaiming fire into the sky in a pyre that, although brilliant, did not even come close to the power of the bolt that had ignited it.

   Like lighting a stick of dynamite with a baby nuke, Dees thought confusedly, and then: The genny. That was the genny.

   The lights - all of them, the white lights that marked the edges of the runway and the bright red bulbs that. marked its end - were suddenly gone, as if they had been no more than candles puffed out by a strong gust of wind. All at once, Dees was suddenly rushing at better than eighty miles an hour from dark into dark.

   The blast of the explosion struck the Beech like a fist - did more than strike it, hammered it like a looping haymaker. The Beech, still hardly knowing it had become a ground-bound creature again, skittered affrightedly to starboard, rose, and came down with the right wheel pogoing up and down over something - somethings - that Dees vaguely realized were landing lights.

   Go port! his mind screamed. Go port, you asshole!

   He almost did before his colder mind asserted itself. If he hauled the wheel to port at this speed, he would ground-loop. Probably wouldn't explode, considering how little fuel was left in the tanks, but it was possible. Or the Beech might simply twist apart, leaving Richard Dees from the gut on down twitching in his seat, while Richard Dees from the gut on up went in a different direction, trailing severed intestines like wire and dropping his kidneys like a couple of oversize chunks of birdshit.

   Ride it out! he screamed at himself. Ride it out, you son of a bitch, ride it out!

   Something - the genny's secondary LP tanks, he guessed when had time for guessing - exploded then, buffeting the Beech even farther to starboard; but that was okay, it got him off the dead landing lights, and all at once he was running with relative smoothness again, port wheel on the edge of Runway 34, starboard wheel on the spooky verge between the lights and the ditch he had observed on the right of the runway. The Beech was still shuddering, but not badly, and he understood that he was running on one flat, the starboard tire shredded by the landing lights it had crushed.

   But he was slowing, slowing; the Beech was understanding that it had become a different thing, a thing that belonged to the land once again. It was seventy ... it was sixty ... and Dees was relaxing when he saw the big Learjet looming ahead of him, parked insanely across the runway where the pilot had stopped on his taxi out to Runway 5.

   He bore down on it, saw lighted windows, saw faces staring out at him with the gape of idiots in an asylum watching a magic trick, and then, without thinking, he pushed full right rudder, bouncing the Beech off the runway, into the ditch, missing the tail of what looked like a Lear 25 by approximately an inch and a half. He was aware he was screaming, whizzing more hot water gaily into his pants, but really aware of nothing but the now exploding in front of him as the Beech tried to become a thing of the air again, helpless to do so with the flaps down and the engines dropping revs but trying, anyway; there was a leap like a giant burp in the dying light of the secondary explosion, and then he was skidding across a taxiway, seeing the General Aviation Terminal for a moment with its corners lit by emergency lights that ran on storage batteries, seeing the parked planes - one of them almost surely the Night Flier's Skymaster - as dark crepe-paper silhouettes against a baleful orange light that was the sunset, now revealed by the parting thunderheads.

   I'm going over! he screamed to himself, and the Beech did try to roll; the port wing struck a fountain of sparks from the taxiway nearest the terminal, and its tip broke free, wheeling off into the scrub where friction-heat awoke as a dim fire in the wet weeds.

   Then the Beech was still, and the only sounds were the snowy roar of static from the radio, the sound of broken bottles dripping and fizzing their contents onto the carpet of the passenger compartment, and the frenzied hammering of Dees's own heart.

   He had slammed the pop release on his harness and was on his feet, headed for the pressurized hatch even before he was totally sure he was alive.

   What happened later he remembered with eidetic clarity. But from the moment the Beech skidded to a stop on the taxiway, ass-end to the Lear and tilted to one side, to the moment he heard the first screams from the terminal, all he remembered was having to get his camera, needing his camera. It was a Nikon. He'd bought it in a Toledo hockshop when he was seventeen and he'd kept it with him ever since. He had added lenses, but the basic box, scratched and dented in a couple of places, was exactly the same. The Nikon was the closest thing Dees had to a wife. It was in the elasticized pocket behind his seat. He remembered pulling it out and seeing that it was intact: he remembered that. It had survived the landing safe and unbroken, so maybe there was a God, after all.

   Dees threw the hatch lever, jumped down, almost fell, and caught his camera before it could strike the concrete of the taxiway and shatter.

   He looped the narrow leather strap twice around his neck like a noose and began sprinting for the terminal. Hearing a thunder-grumble. Almost falling, catching the camera before it could strike the concrete of the taxiway and shatter. There was a breeze. It was on his face, but he felt it more clearly around his groin, because his pants were wet.

   Then a thin, drilling shriek came from the General Aviation Terminal - a scream of mingled agony and horror. It was as if someone had slapped Dees across the face. He came back to himself. He centered on his goal again. He looked at his watch. It wasn't working. Either the concussion had broken it or it had stopped. It was one of those amusing antiques you had to wind up, and he couldn't remember when he had last done it.

   Was it sunset? Was it?

   Another scream came - no, not a scream, a screech - and the sound of breaking glass.

   Sunset didn't matter. He ran.

More screams.

   More breaking glass.

   Dees ran faster, vaguely aware that the genny's auxiliary tanks were still burning. He could smell gas in the air. He was keenly aware of wet cloth clinging to his privates. He seemed to be running in cement. The terminal was getting closer, but not very fast. Not fast enough.

   “Please, no! Please no! PLEASE NO PLEASE NO PLEASEPLEASE NO NO NONO-”

   This scream, spiraling up and up, and suddenly he heard a howl that was either laughter or contempt, a sound an animal would make, a sound that was almost human all the same.

   He saw something dark and flailing shatter more glass in the wall of the terminal that faced the parking area - that wall was almost entirely glass - and saw the bright blinks of glass in the emergency lights on the corners of the building. The dark shape stopped flailing. It landed on the ramp with a soggy thud, rolled, and Dees saw it was a man.

   The storm was moving away, but heat lightning flickered, and as Dees ran into the parking area, panting now, he saw it, finally saw it: the Night Flier's plane, N101BL painted boldly on the tail. The letters and numbers looked black in this light, but he knew they were red and it didn't matter, anyway. The camera was loaded with black-and-white. It was armed with fast film and a smart flash, which would fire only when the light was too low for the film's speed.

   The Skymaster's belly hold hung open like the mouth of a corpse. Below it was a clot of earth in which things squirmed and moved.

   Dees skidded to a stop. Tried to bring the camera up. Almost strangled himself. Cursed. Unwound the strap. Aimed.

   From the terminal came a long, high, drilling shriek - that of a woman or a child. Dees barely noticed. The thought that there was a slaughter going on in there was followed by the thought that slaughter would only fatten the story, and then both thoughts were gone as he snapped three quick shots of the Cessna, making sure to get the gaping belly hold and the number on the tail. The auto-winder hummed.

   Dees ran on. More glass smashed. There was another thud as another body was thrown out onto the cement like a human rag doll. Dees looked, saw confused movement, the billowing of something that might have been a cape ... but he was too far to tell. He turned. Snapped two more of the plane, these shots dead-on. The gaping belly hold and the pile of earth would be stark and undeniable in the print.

   Then he whirled and ran for the terminal.

   The fact that he was armed with only an old Nikon never crossed his mind.

Dees stopped ten yards away. Three bodies out here, two clearly adults, one of each sex, one that might have been either a small woman or a girl of thirteen or so. It was hard to tell, because her head was gone.

   Dees aimed the camera and fired off six quick shots, the flash flickering its own white lightning, the auto-winder making its contented little whizzing sound.

   His mind never lost count. He was loaded with thirty-six shots. He had taken eleven. That left twenty-five. There was more film stuffed into the deep pockets of his slacks, and that was great ... if he got a chance to reload.

   Dees reached the terminal and yanked open the door.

He thought he had seen everything there was to see, but he had never seen anything like this. Never.

   How many? his mind yammered. How many? Six? Eight?

   The place was a butcher shop.

   Bodies and parts of bodies lay everywhere. He saw a leg; shot it. A ragged torso; shot it. Here was a man who was still alive, a man in a mechanic's coverall and for a weird moment he thought it was the gin-head from Maine, but this guy was bald. His face appeared to be split open from forehead to chin. His nose lay in open halves.

   Dees shot it.

   His gut was heaving up and down, high waves in a gale. How many? How many shots? he screamed at himself.

   For the first time in seventeen years he had lost count.

   Blood was splashed up the walls. Blood lay in pools on the worn linoleum. The bulletin board - where, undoubtedly, an FAA warning about N101BL was tacked up - was splattered and dripping like a shower someone hadn't quite turned off.

   There was a desk, and beside it was a snack rack.

   Stuck to a bag of Cheez-Doodles was a staring blue eyball. Dees shot it.

   And that was all.

   All he could take.

   He saw the sign: REST ROOMS. An arrow below. He ran for it, the camera flapping.

   The first one was marked with a human shape, and since it didn't have a triangle superimposed on its torso, that made it the men's room. Dees didn't care if it was the aliens' room. He was weeping, weeping in great, harsh, hoarse sobs. He didn't know they were coming from him. It had been years since he had wept. He hadn't wept since he was a kid.

   He slammed through the door, skidded like a skier almost out of control, and grabbed the edge of the second basin in line.

   He leaned over it, and everything came out in a rich and stinking flood, some of it splattering back onto his face, some landing in brownish clots on the mirror. He smelled the chicken Creole he'd eaten for lunch and threw up again, making a huge grating sound like overstressed machinery about to strip its gears.

   Jesus, he thought, oh, my Jesus, he isn't a man, can't be a man-

   That was when he heard the sound.

   It was a sound he had heard a thousand times before, or maybe ten thousand, a sound that was commonplace in any American man's life ... but now it filled him with a dread and a creeping terror beyond all his experience or belief.

   It was the sound of a man voiding into a urinal.

   There were three urinals. He could see them in the vomit-splattered mirror.

   There was no one at any of the urinals.

   Dees thought: Vampires. They. Don't. Cast. Reflec-

   Then he saw reddish liquid striking the porcelain of the center urinal, saw it running down that porcelain, saw it swirling into the geometric arrangement of holes.

   There was no stream in the air.

   He saw it only when it struck the dead porcelain.

   That was when it became visible.

   When it struck the lifeless porcelain.

   He was frozen. He stood, hands on the edge of the basin, his mouth and throat and nose and sinuses thick with the taste and smell of chicken Creole, and watched some invisible creature void its invisible and inhuman bladder.

   I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss. Somewhere sirens were warbling, coming closer.

   It seemed that the bloody urine went on striking the porcelain, becoming visible, and swirling down the curved surface of the urinal to the holes forever.

   Dees didn't move. I'm dead, he thought.

   In the mirror he saw the chromed handle go down by itself. Water roared.

   Dees heard a rustle and flap and knew it was a cape, just as he knew that if he turned around, his life would end.

   He remained frozen where he was, his hands biting the edge of the basin.

   A low, ageless voice said, “Don't come after me. I know you. I know all about you.”

   Dees moaned. More water ran into his pants. “Open your camera,” the ageless voice said.

   My film! part of Dees cried. My film! All I've got! All I've got! My Pictures! My-

   Another dry, batlike flap of the cape. Although Dees could see nothing he sensed the Night Flier was closer.

   "Now. "

   His film wasn't all he had.

   There was his life.

   Such as it was.

   Or might be.

   He saw himself whirling, seeing the Night Flier, a creature that was more bat than human, a grotesque Thing splattered with blood and torn hair; saw himself snapping shot after shot while the auto-winder hummed ... but there would be nothing.

   Nothing at all.

   Because you couldn't take their pictures, either.

   “You're real,” he croaked, never moving, his hands on the edge of the basin, blood now beginning to run from the palms.

   “So are you,” the ageless voice rasped, and now Dees felt the breath of the Night Flier stir the hackles on the back of his neck, smelled the crypts that were the Night Flier's breath. “For now . . .

   “Last chance. Open your camera.”

   With hands that seemed totally numb, Dees opened his Nikon. Air slashed past his face; it felt like moving razor blades. For a moment he saw a long white hand, streaked with blood; saw long, ragged nails silted with filth.

   Then his film parted and spooled spinelessly out of his camera. There was another dry flap. Another stinking breath. For a moment he thought the Night Flier would kill him, anyway. Then he saw the door of the men's room open by itself.

   He must have eaten very well tonight, Dees thought, and immediately threw up again, this time directly onto the reflection of his own staring face.

   The door wheezed shut.

   Dees stayed right where he was for perhaps three minutes after the door had wheezed shut.

   He stayed there until the sirens were almost on top of the terminal.

   He stayed there until he heard the cough and roar of airplane engines.

   A Cessna Skymaster 337.

   Then he walked out of the bathroom on legs like stilts, struck the far wall, rebounded, and walked back into the terminal. He slid in a pool of blood and almost fell.

   “Hold it, mister!” a cop screamed behind him. “Hold it right there! One move and you're dead!”

   Dees didn't even turn around.

   “Press, dickface,” Dees said, and went to one of the shattered windows. With exposed film still straggling from his camera like long strips of brown confetti, he stood there and watched the Cessna accelerate down Runway 5. For a moment it was a black shape against the bellowing fire of the genny and the auxiliary tanks, a shape like a bat, and then it was up, it was gone, and the cop was slamming Dees up against the wall hard enough to make his nose bleed and he didn't care, he didn't care about anything, and when the sobs began to tear their way out of his chest again, he closed his eyes, and still he saw the Night Flier's bloody urine striking the curved procelain, becoming visible, and swirling down the drain.

   He thought he would see it forever.

Stephen King's The Night Flier v1.0

Scanned , OCR & proofed 09/25/2001 by JunkyardCat.

If you find any errors, please correct them and re-release,

incrementing the version number by .1.