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Angel Fall
A Novel
By Coleman Luck ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2009 Sandstar Corporation
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-310-28398-0
Chapter One
WIND SUNDAY It was the stillness.
That's what they remembered most about the beginning. A stillness that hung like ancient mold in the trees. But who could forget anything about Wind Sunday? The sharp acrylic memories painted themselves on their hearts and refused to dry. And ever after, touching the canvas brought tears.
On Wind Sunday there were secrets to be learned. And the first one was this-that waking periods of light and sleeping periods of darkness have names just like the people who live through them. Who gave them the names, no one can tell. But one thing is certain-when a day has two names, it speaks with a voice that demands to be heard.
And when it's over, it leaves echoes.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
You do if you've lived through one.
Divorce Wednesday.
For the children it was three years ago. A day that crackled with screams and tears and hatred. Since Divorce Wednesday, Alex, Amanda, and Tori had lived with their mother. Ellen Lancaster was not a bad mother. She was just a very brokenhearted and lonely one. Her children, who really weren't children anymore, didn't understand the look in her eyes. The look was there because a voice in her head keptwhispering that she was a failure.
Just look at them.
If you had been a better wife and mother they wouldn't be this way.
There was not a day when the whispers didn't plague her. They were lies and the voice was not her own, but she didn't know that. And the more it whispered, the more desperate she had become.
Something had to change. For their sakes. She loved them more than life, and she was losing them. So something had changed, driven by the unexpected. After much agony and many tears shed alone in her room, the decision had been made. For them. All for them, though they didn't under- stand that.
But on that Sunday the Wind blew all her plans into a darkness beyond the stars.
Warnings about weather come from scientists. Highly respected men and woman check their satellites and computers, then tell the pretty TV weather models what to say. But on Wind Sunday the whole system fell apart. It crumbled because not a single scientist believed that such a wind could be possible. It was outside their frame of reference. Naturally they had logical reasons for their disbelief. A wind larger than a planet would have to come from outside the planet. And outside meant space. But there isn't any air in space. And this was a wind made of air. Without air you can't have wind. So, by definition, it was impossible. That's what the scientists said, and, of course, they were correct. Which created a certain amount of cognitive dissonance since they were both correct and wrong. With all their equipment and equations, they had forgotten something that people long ago had known very well. They had forgotten that the wind of this world, the wind that we can measure with instruments and feel in our hair, is only a shadow of something far greater. But such collective memories, which are beyond scientific observation, had been blotted from their brains.
On that morning Alex Lancaster had gotten up early. But he was pretending it was like any other Sunday morning when he never got up early. At sixteen he had perfected the art of sleeping until noon, but the truth was, last night he hadn't slept much at all. His room looked strange and cold with the posters gone. Only a few days ago the walls had been alive with superheroes, sports stars, and rock stars, silent images loud enough to blow your eardrums out. Now they were neatly rolled and packed into sixteen cardboard mailing tubes. Half the night he had stared at an infinity of plaster.
Haven't you stood in an empty room where the only residue of your existence was nail holes in the walls?
Sunday morning and not a frigging thing to do.
His computer was sealed in a box, and the rest of his electronic junk had been stuffed into a bulging backpack. The last thing he wanted was to dump that mess on the floor. So what was left? TV? Boring. The newspaper? How retro. Did they still get a newspaper? He thought maybe they did because his mother didn't like computers.
Alex peered out the window. There it was, lying on the front lawn soaking up the dew. He hoped it hadn't landed in dog poop. On this street jerks walked their stupid dogs and never cleaned up after themselves.
So go get the thing.
With great stealth Alex began the journey through the house. It was a trick getting past the other bedrooms without waking everybody. The problem wasn't Amanda or his mother. They could snore through a nuclear holocaust. It was Tori. He had considered renting her out as a guard dog. She heard every creak of the floor. And when she woke up, everybody woke up.
Curling his toes so his flip-flops wouldn't flop, he sneaked down the hall and through the living room. At the front door he moved even more cautiously, opening it with excruciating slowness to keep the hinges from squeaking.
The moment he stepped onto the porch, Alex knew that something was wrong. He stared up and down the street. The neighborhood looked like it was going to puke. The edges of everything had softened and the colors seemed to be muddling into a yellow blur. Or maybe it was his eyes. He rubbed them but nothing changed.
After retrieving the newspaper, he went back to his room. But for some reason his favorite chair wasn't comfortable anymore, not even when he propped his feet up on the boxes. And the newspaper-what a bunch of crap. How could people kill trees to print this stuff? Somehow, as he stared at the pages, a blur came into his eyes.
Soon the remaining Lancasters were up and about. Amanda and Tori wandered down to the living room, but neither seemed interested in their favorite Sunday morning pastime: arguing over the TV. Strangest of all, this morning neither girl tried to irritate Alex. Which proved that everything was screwed.
Breakfast. Scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, doughnuts, and hot chocolate. Enough carbs to stoke a football team. Comfort food that brought no comfort. Alex glanced at his watch. An hour before the cab would arrive. He wished the time would go faster. He was sticking a doughnut into his face when the stillness outside was broken. From somewhere within the blur came a high whistling call just beyond the range of human hearing. Around the world scientific instruments measured it, but only the dogs understood what it meant. Untold millions of them began howling their lungs out.
Soon, like all prophets, they would be beaten to silence.
While the dogs howled, experts in large cities debated about what was happening. Most of their debates disintegrated into raging arguments. Finally political sensibilities prevailed and an explanation was negotiated. The explanation was purely speculative, which is another way of saying bogus, but that didn't matter. What mattered was coming up with a consoling statement for TV viewers. In times of crisis TV viewers won't sit still for bogus speculation unless it's easy to understand and delivered as though it were ironclad truth. On both counts they were obliged. Not to worry; the odd stillness and the visual distortions were the result of capricious sunspots-unimportant disturbances with little effect beyond the messing up of cell phones and satellite signals. Rest assured they will pass.
Now, precisely how sunspots could generate high frequency whistling was not explained because the whistling was never mentioned. Why bother telling people about things they can't hear? For the cameras, all questions were answered quickly and authoritatively by an axe-faced spokeswoman from the National Weather Service who displayed a series of incomprehensible but sleekly designed charts, plastered with unintelligible nonsense. Since the spokeswoman looked exactly like a scientific spokeswoman should, when she was finished everyone was satisfied. There was even an ounce of truth in what she had told them. Yes, there were sunspots, but they weren't minor. They were the largest in recorded history. And she didn't talk about the most disturbing facts, because her minders had forbidden it. The trifling problem of the visual distortions had nothing to do with sunspots. They appeared to represent a fundamental shift in the equations of reality. And the whistling was getting louder.
Apart from that, everything was fine.
Chapter Two
MALLEUS It had taken Alex, Amanda, and Tori months to pack for their trip, but finally everything they owned had been distilled into a collection of suitcases and shipping crates. Their rooms stood empty. It had been an agonizing process. Now it was done, and the only thing left to do was leave.
The family gathered in the living room, if "gathering" was what you could call it. Ellen and Tori were at one end of the couch, Amanda at the other, while Alex slouched by the door. And no one was talking.
Amanda stared down at her shoes. They were new and black and boxy. She had bought them yesterday at the mall. Alex had told her they were ugly, which made her like them even more. Most important, they weren't what a child would wear. Because she wasn't a child. Thirteen going on thirty, that's what the psychologist had said, and he was right.
Amanda glanced at her sister, but a glance was all she could bear. They were completely different, but that didn't keep them from understanding each other. Their understanding came from many nights of crying-sometimes together, but mostly alone.
It was hard for strangers to believe that Amanda and Tori were related. Tori, with her light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, was beautiful. While Amanda had given up the dream of being beautiful. Mirrors do not lie. She looked like their father. Brown hair without a wave or luster in it, a chin too large to be considered delicate. Dark, sensitive eyes often kept averted. Not that she was ugly. She just wasn't anything at all. At least, that's the way she viewed herself.
Of course, her mother had told her that with a little effort she could be very pretty. Which made her want to throw up. She hated lies. Amanda had accepted her looks and knew her place within the family. Tori was the doll- like child, her mother's favorite, while she was the smart one, the lover of books who used to get straight A's. Used to. Tori was all bubbles and laughter and light, while Amanda was the one who could stare at nothing for hours, drifting in a place where no one else could come. Her therapist had tried to reach that place and had failed. The twilight room of her heart was locked tight.
At the other end of the couch Tori laid her head on her mother's shoulder -in one way, the youngest Lancaster was very much like her sister. Both were proficient at dancing the family minuet. At nine Tori was an expert at the game that kept them all alive. Each child had an unconscious role to play. Hers was to remain a happy Barbie doll. She hated Barbies, but that didn't matter. To perform her role, Tori carefully pretended to love her mother's collection. The game had started out fun, but she had grown tired of it. Not that being tired meant it could end. The game must never end. It had to go on because it made her mother happy. And when her mother was happy, everything was fine.
The closing moments in the living room were very painful. Ellen moved down the couch so that she and Tori could be close to Amanda. Which made Amanda hug her corner even more tightly. And then the whispering began.
Alex tried not to hear what his mother was saying, but he couldn't help it. And the words made him furious. They were the same words he had heard from his earliest childhood, meaningless promises about the wonderful days ahead and how very much she loved them all. Soon Tori was crying. He swore under his breath. He couldn't stand it when his sisters cried. When they did it late at night, he would slap on his headphones and crank up the volume. He was about to search for the headphones in his backpack, when salvation arrived in the form of a honking wheeze.
Alex got up and opened the front door. Squatting in their driveway was a decrepit rust-red limousine that looked like an escapee from a demolition derby. From bumper to bumper it was battered and bashed as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to it-except for the windows which were shiny and clean and tinted metallic blue.
The wheeze came again from under the hood. Definitely an attempt at a horn. Smirking, Alex turned to his mother. "I think the cab's here. If the pile of junk on the driveway is what you called for us." Grabbing their suitcases, he lumbered outside.
The others followed. On the porch they entered the stillness. Everything was so quiet and the air was thick with a smothering blur. For a moment none of them moved. Then slowly, with a tortured scream of metal, the limousine door creaked open and out stepped the driver. In front of them stood a gangling old man in a ragged chauffeur's uniform.
"You folks ready to travel?"
He was even more decrepit than his car. A shock of white hair stuck out from under a threadbare cap. Plastered beneath his nose was a straggling mustache that made him look like a malnourished walrus. Alex's smirk widened into a deathly grin. Excellent. Their driver was a homeless bum. Just the sort of derelict to take them to the airport. He loved it because he knew it would drive his mother insane.
"Are you ... from Central Cab?" Ellen's voice quavered as she stared first at the man and then at his vehicle.
"Sure am, lady. Jerry's all full up. Told me to come and get you. He's got calls runnin' out the nose. A lot of cars aren't startin' today. 'Course, I don't have no trouble with ol' Malleus here."
"Malleus?" Alex snickered.
"Now, I know we aren't what you was expectin' ..." The man pulled out a set of keys and walked to the trunk. "But this here ol' boat knows his way to the airport better'n anybody. That's where this crew's headin', aren't it?" With a metallic shriek, the trunk opened.
Ellen gulped. "Uhh, yes, but ... I was thinking ... maybe I should drive them myself."
"Not the day to drive, ma'am. Take my word for it. I know we aren't pretty, but we're safe."
"So those dents must have come from hitting air pockets," Alex said.
"Half of 'em came from air pockets and the other half just flat-out old age. Sorta like metal wrinkles. That's what happens when your odometer tops a million."
Alex glanced at his mother expecting to see her fall apart. But to his shock, she was smiling. So was Tori. Even Amanda's eyes had a twinkle in them.
"Yeah, ol' Malleus an' me got some miles on us, but these young people are gonna be safe, ma'am. You kin bet your stars on it. How about it? You want to ride in my ol' junker?"
"Yeah!" Tori's tears were gone.
Alex couldn't believe what he was hearing. She was gonna let them do it-ride with a bum in a car that would fall apart if it ever reached twenty miles an hour. Instantly his rage returned. There you go, just another example of how little she cared about them. Clear proof of how much she wanted them out of her life. Well, fine. The sooner they were gone the better.
But in his rage he hadn't noticed something. While he had been staring at the dents in the car, his mother had been looking into the old man's eyes, and as she looked, all her fears had vanished. Somehow, beyond words, she knew that her children would be safe with him, safer than anywhere else in the world.
But then Ellen looked at her son and her fear returned. "You ... you do think it's all right, don't you? I mean ... if you'd rather, I could take you myself."
"Hey, forget it. We'll be fine." Utterly disgusted, Alex picked up their luggage and stalked to the trunk. He saw the tears she fought back and didn't care.
But then the old man approached and spoke gently to Ellen. "Don't you worry none about your boy, ma'am. You done the best you could, and that's all that matters. Now, you listen to what I'm sayin'. When all's said and done, he's gonna be fine." Such strange words from a cabby. But when he said them, they brought great comfort. Then the lines in his face crinkled into a smile. "Hey, will you look up at that sky? We got a touch o' weather comin'. Now you take my advice. Go inside an' shut your windows an' doors. Then get a little rest. Nothin' like sleepin' with rain on a roof to wash the sorrows away." The man picked up the remaining luggage and loaded it in the trunk. "All right, now ... you lovely ladies climb in the back an' this young gent can ride shotgun next to me. How's that for a plan?"
The last moment was the most painful of all as Ellen kissed and hugged each of her children, hugged them as though she might never see them again. When Alex's turn came he stiffened, but she kissed him anyway. His coldness only deepened when she whispered, "I love you."
Their eyes didn't meet because he wouldn't let them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Angel Fall by Coleman Luck Copyright © 2009 by Sandstar Corporation. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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