In the split second it took her pupil to move to it, the shadow was gone.
Lorenza Ruiz, the airport baggage-conveyer operator who had been the first to drive out to the dead airplane, found herself haunted by the experience. Standing in the aircraft's shadow that previous night, Lo couldn't get it out of her mind. She hadn't slept at all, tossing and turning, finally rising to pace. A late-night glass of white wine failed to do the trick. It weighed on her like something she could not let go of. When sunrise finally came, she found herself eyeing the clock-in anticipation, she realized, of returning to work. She found she couldn't wait to get back to JFK. Not out of morbid curiosity. It was the image of that dormant plane, impressed upon her mind like a bright light flashed into her eye. All she knew was that she had to get back to see it again.
Now this eclipse, and for the second time in twenty-four hours, the airport was shut down. This stoppage had been in the planning for months-the FAA had cleared a fifteen-minute window of downtime for airports within the range of the occultation, out of concern for the vision of the pilots, who couldn't very well wear filtered glasses during takeoff or landing-but still, the math struck her as pretty damning and pretty simple:
Dead Airplane + Solar Eclipse = Not Good.
When the moon snuffed out the sun, like a hand covering up a scream, Lo felt the same electric panic as when she had stood on top of the luggage ramp beneath the belly of the darkened 777. The very same impulse to run, this time coupled with the knowledge that there was absolutely no place to go.
Now she was hearing it again. Same noise she'd been hearing since arriving for her shift, only steadier now, louder. A humming. A droning sound, and the weird thing was, she heard it at the same volume whether she wore her protective headphones or not. Headachelike, in that way. Interior. And yet, like a homing beacon, it strengthened in her mind once she returned to work.
With the fifteen minutes of downtime during the eclipse, she decided to set off on foot in search of the source of the tone, following it. Without any sense of surprise, she now found herself looking at the cordoned-off Regis Air maintenance hangar where the dead 777 was being stored.
The noise sounded like no machine she had ever heard. A churning, almost, a rushing sound, like coursing fluid. Or like the murmur of a dozen voices, a hundred different voices, trying to make sense. Maybe she was picking up radar vibrations in her teeth fillings. There was a group of people out in front, officials gazing up at the blocked sun-but no one else like her, lurking there, bothered by or even cognizant of a hum. So she kept it to herself. And yet, for some weird reason, it felt momentous, being right here, this very moment, hearing the noise and wishing-to salve her curiosity, or was it more than that?-that she could get inside the hangar for another look at the plane. As though seeing the plane would somehow resolve the thrumming in her head.
Then suddenly she felt a charge in the atmosphere, like a breeze changing course, and now-yes-it seemed to her that the source of the noise had moved somewhere off to her right. This sudden change startled her, and she followed it under the negative light of the glowing moon, carrying her headphones and protective glasses in her hand. Dumpsters and storage trailers lay ahead, before a few large box containers, and then some scrub brush and hardy, gray, wind-whipped pine trees, their branches full of snagged trash. Then the hurricane fence, beyond which lay hundreds of acres of scrub wilderness.
Voices. It was more like voices to her now. Trying to rise to one single voice, a word...something.
As Lo neared the trailers, an abrupt rustling in the trees, a lifting, made her leap back. Gray-bellied seagulls, apparently spooked by the eclipse, exploded out of the branches and Dumpsters, like winged shards of glass from a smashed window, scattering in all directions.
The droning voices were sharper now, grown almost painful. Calling on her. Like a chorus of the damned, the cacophony rising from a whisper to a roar and back again, struggling to articulate one word, sounding like, as best she could make out:
"...hhrrhhrrhhrrhhrrhhrrHERE."
She set down her headphones on the edge of the tarmac, hanging on to her filtered glasses for when the eclipse ended. She veered away from the Dumpsters and their rank garbage smell, instead going toward the large storage trailers. The sound seemed to be emanating not from inside the trailers, but maybe from behind them.
She walked between two six-foot-tall containers and around an old decaying airplane tire, coming upon another row of older, pale green containers. Now she felt it. Not just heard the thrum but felt it, a nest of voices vibrating in her head and in her chest. Beckoning to her. She placed her hand on the containers but felt no pulsation there, then continued forward, slowing at the corner, leaning out.
Set on top of the blown trash and uncut, sun-bleached grass was a large, ancient-looking, ornately carved black wooden box. She ventured into the small clearing, wondering why someone would throw such an obviously well-maintained antique all the way back here. Theft-organized and otherwise-was a fact of life at the airport; maybe someone had stashed it here, planning to swing by later to pick it up.
Then she noticed the cats. The outer airport was crawling with wild cats. Some of them were pets who had escaped their transport cages. Many had simply been released onto airport property by locals looking to get rid of unwanted pets. Worst of all were the travelers who abandoned their cats at the airport rather than pay high kennel fees. Domestic cats who did not know how to fend for themselves in the wild, and who, if they avoided becoming prey to larger animals and survived, joined the colony of feral cats roaming the hundreds of acres of undeveloped airport property.
The skinny cats all sat on their hindquarters, facing the cabinet. A few dozen of these mangy, dirty felines-until Lo looked at the trash-strewn tree and along the hurricane fence, and saw that there were in fact close to a hundred of these feral cats, sitting and facing the wooden box, paying her no attention.
The box wasn't vibrating, wasn't emitting the noise she had been attuned to. She was mystified, after coming all this way, to discover something this strange here on the outskirts of the airport-and that was not, in fact, the source she was seeking. The thrumming chorus went on. Were the cats tuned in to it as well? No. Their focus was on the closed cabinet.
She was starting to back away when the cats stiffened. The fur along their backs prickled-each of them, all at once. Their scabby heads all turned her way, one hundred pairs of wild cat eyes staring at her in the gloaming night-day. Lo froze, fearing an attack-and then a darkness fell over her, like a second eclipse.