Authors: Coleman Luck
Angel Fall
FALL
ZONDERVAN
Angel Fall
Copyright © 2009 by Sandstar Corporation
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ePub Edition JUNE 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-56023-4
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Luck, Coleman.
Angel fall : a novel : Coleman Luck.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-310-28398-0
1. Children of divorced parents—Fiction. 2. Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks,
etc.—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3612.U256A8 2009
813'.6—dc22 2009005148
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To my children, Cole, Chad, and Cherissa,
who believed in this story from the beginning
and waited so long. This book is dedicated with love to you.
W
hen a book is written over a period of twenty-five years there are many people to thank who gave encouragement along the way. Sadly, the memory dims. If I have forgotten a name please forgive me.
My deepest gratitude…
To the memory of my father, Dr. G. Coleman Luck, who passed away long before this book began, but who laid the foundation for it by reading great stories to me when I was a child.
To the memory of Jim McAdams, Hollywood Executive Producer of the old school, trusted colleague, and dear friend, who, though he was dying of cancer, read the manuscript and offered wonderful encouragement as he had done with all of my writing for over twenty years.
To Heidi Schneider who came with her family to visit and from that moment began reminding me that I had left three young people in a dangerous world and needed to bring them home. Then, with her sister Hannah and brother Roy, organized a little reading group. Together they read the manuscript in the most agonizing way possible, two chapters at a time with big gaps in between. The other members of that group were Nicholas Ganssle, Elizabeth Ganssle, and Erica Weston.
To Rick and Soozie Schneider and Jim and Karen Covell for their support and encouragement not only for this book, but in many ways over many years.
To Amanda Culp Luck, my daughter-in-law, who critiqued the manuscript with the calibrated eye of an attorney and graciously allowed me to use her name.
To Tori Ellsworth, my granddaughter, who read and also let me use her name.
To Slade Wheeler, my son-in-law, for his visual artistry and constant encouragement.
To individuals who took the time to read the unwieldy stack of paper that I handed to them and offer their thoughts and help: Sarah Beach, Mary Reeves Bell, Martha Cotton, Christopher Covell, Paul Karrat, Dan Korem, Amy Luck, Melissa Pollack, Erin Wheeler, Denise Wilkerson, Margo Zych, and the writers’ group of Northridge.
Special thanks to Andy Meisenheimer, my editor at Zondervan, who labored long and patiently and did so much to help this story become what it is.
Most of all, my gratitude goes to Carel, for over forty-two years my wife, lover, and closest friend, who believed in me and my writing since I was seventeen years old. Carel, without you this book would not exist.
FALL
I
t 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 kept whispering 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 understand that.
But on that Sunday the Wind blew all her plans into a darkness beyond the stars.
W
arnings 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.