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As the plane passed over him, they felt a bump. It would have felt harmless to the nurses, but Ray knew nothing is harmless in a plane of that size flying at that kind of altitude. He twisted around and looked back through the side window. He saw a figure in a blue uniform falling from the roof of the truck and something the size of a football rolling down the beach towards the sea.
"Christ!" said Ray.
One of the girls started screaming.
The golden sand, the turquoise sea. Rolling and rolling. A line of palm trees, the outermost buildings of the station. Henshaw, eyes wide, mouth hanging open. Another engineer bent double. Over and over. The golden sand, darker now, black, the sea, fringe of white foam, the vast blue sky. The black cross of the Hercules climbing steeply, banking sharply, heading out to sea. The golden sand. A body, damaged, somehow not right, lying on the sand by the supply truck. A quickly spreading pool of blood. The golden sand, line of trees, the vast empty sky, the distant plane, a line of men, men ru
When the Gentlemen Go By by Margaret Ronald
It wasn't a sound that woke her this time, nor the soft slow lights that came dancing through the curtains. She thought in that first wakening haze that it might be a scent, like the "bad air" her mother had talked about, creeping in to a
Not yet.
Laura rolled out of bed, making sure not to disturb Je
At least their father wasn't here.
It was an old bargain, old as the Hollow at least. With bargains you had to uphold your side; she'd learned that early, probably before she even knew about the Gentlemen.
Her bedroom in her parents' house had faced the street, and when she was five the changing shapes of headlights across the far wall had fascinated her. One night she woke to see a block of light against the far wall, flickering in all the colors of frost. When the light stayed put, as if the car that cast it had parked outside, she sat up in bed, then turned to the window.
The light was just outside, on the strip of green that her father liked to call the lawn. She crawled out of bed, dropping the last couple of inches to the floor, and reached for the curtain.
"Don't look."
Laura turned to see her mother standing in the doorway. "Mumma?"
Her mother crossed the room in two strides and took Laura into her arms, cradling her head against her shoulder. "Don't look, baby, don't look."
Obediently, Laura laid her head against her mother's shoulder and listened as something huge or a hundred smaller somethings passed by with a thunderous shussh. Her mother's eyes were closed tight, and she rocked Laura as if she were an infant again, even though Laura had two little brothers and hadn't been rocked since the first one was born. The sleeve of her mother's bathrobe was damp with a thousand tiny droplets.
In the morning, she tried to talk about it. "I had a dream last night-" she said at the breakfast table.
"I expect we all had dreams," her mother said, pouring milk over her Cheerios. "What with all that pizza last night. Bet you had them worst of all, right, Kyle?"
Her brother Kyle, six years old and indeed the one who'd eaten the most, shook his head and began to cough.
The light was stronger in the living room. Soon it would be strong enough for her to read by, if she'd ever had the urge to do so. Laura closed the bedroom door behind her, making sure it latched, and picked her way through the maze of toys that covered the carpet. She watched the blue-edged shadows rise over the edge of the couch and drew a deep breath.
I wonder what they'll bring, she made herself think over the rising dread in the back of her mind. And to whom they'll bring it.
They bring gifts. I have to remember that. They bring gifts too.
It wasn't till she reached second grade, just after Kyle's funeral, that she found a name for them. It was in a book of children's poems, the old kind that usually read as if they'd been dipped in Karo Syrup. But this one, "The Smuggler's Song," wasn't like that at all. It made the room seem darker when she read it, and darker still when she thought about it. Even after she learned that the poet hadn't ever set foot in Brooks' Hollow, she still secretly called them the Gentlemen, after the poem.
Five and twenty ponies / trotting through the dark…
She waited until her father took her remaining brother out to play baseball before talking to her mother about it. "Mumma," she asked as they washed dishes together, "why did Kyle get sick?"
Her mother's hands paused, wrist-deep in sudsy water. "Well," she said after a moment, in that careful voice adults used when they didn't know how to say something, "people in the Hollow get sick sometimes. It's just something in the air."
"Oh."
"You don't need to worry, sweetie. I won't let anything-" She stopped, her lips pressed together, and went on in a different tone. "You know what the pioneers used to say about our land? Good land, bad air. They might have been right about the air, but we had the best farms for miles. Still do. The Hollow's a good place, Laura. I want you to remember that."
Later that evening, after the boys had settled in to watch football, her mother took her by the hand and led her upstairs, where she rummaged in the back of the closet until she found an old cardboard box. "I thought you might want to try this on," she said, and took out a fragile crown, woven out of hair-thin wire and stones like gleaming ice, so delicate it chimed in her hands. She set it on Laura's head and held up a mirror. "Don't you look just like a princess, now."
Laura caught her breath. "I do! Mumma, I do!"
"I thought you might." Her mother smiled.
Laura shivered to remember that crown. It was here somewhere, in the boxes she'd packed up after her mother's death, but she hadn't ever gone looking for it. She sometimes dreamed of wearing it, and woke up with bile in her throat.
She reached up and took down the little blue notebook from its place above the television. It had pages of notes about the sound the Gentlemen made: pines in the wind, highway traffic very far away, heavy rain, but none of them quite caught it. She'd been keeping the notes ever since she could write, first on what it looked like when the Gentlemen went by, then-later, as she grew up and began to understand-the a
And the more she watched the indistinct shapes through the curtain, the more she felt as if her whole life became only watching. Her second brother's death, her graduation, the strikes at the cabinet factory-all images apart from her. Even now, she was at a distance, watching herself sitting huddled wrong-way-round on the couch, a patch of drying formula stiff and sticky under her left forearm.
Sometimes they brought things, she told herself again. A crown, a song, a whisper in someone's ear. And their trail was thick with flowers, even when they passed by late in October.