Out of Such Darkness Read Online Free Page A

him.
    They’re toast, Jay. And you’re down here instead of up there with them.
    Jay feels the people around him tense. There’s an explosion in the South Tower. It shudders and a cloud of smoke and dust erupts from the top floors. The twist of debris spirals into the sky but it’s not the building growing. Seconds pass as they try to resolve the image. Then it becomes clear; the building is disappearing. It sinks and settles on its haunches like a stricken zebra resigned to a lion’s final throat-ripping snarl. A collective groan sounds its death-cry.
    ‘What the fu–’ UPS-man says.
    The commentator screams that the building is collapsing and the view cuts away to street level where people are running, running, looking over their shoulders as a monster clad in a billowing cloak of white chases them down the street.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ Jay says. ‘What’s happening?’
    The voice – this new unwanted voice – speaks.
It
’s death. Death is loose on the streets of Manhattan.
    A woman answers this time. ‘They say there are twenty planes in the sky unaccounted for. They’re bombing us with our own planes.’
    ‘Who?’
    She sounds tired. ‘They don’t know. Terrorists? They hit the Pentagon with another one. But the World Trade Center – well you just saw it.’
    The TV cuts away to a camera on Staten Island. There is an absence, the imagined outline of a space filled with sky. ‘Did they get out?’ someone whispers.
    ‘Who knows?’ It’s somebody else. ‘You have to pray …’
    A ticker tape at the bottom of the screen mentions a man called Usama Bin Laden. His terrorist organisation has been boasting of making an attack like this. Jay looks at the North Tower, still standing. He tries to count floors from the top but there is so much smoke and the angle switches too often. Is his office above or below?
    They continue to watch as the pictures switch between views of the tower in Manhattan and the hole in the ground alongside the Pentagon. Jay turns to the window from time to time to see whether Rachel has arrived.
    By the time he sees the gold 4×4 draw up, Jay has assimilated what has happened but he still doesn’t know how bad it has been for Straub, DuCheyne. He leaves the coffee shop and crosses the road. There’s a delay while Rachel unbuckles her belt and grapples with the door before she jumps down from the driver’s side and runs round. She throws herself at him, sobbing. ‘I thought you were dead.’ Her voice is distorted and if she had said anything else he wouldn’t have understood.
    He holds her close. Her fists beat against his back. He pulls away and uses his thumbs to wipe the tears from her cheeks. She looks up at him, her eyes brimming and her top lip crumples. ‘Oh, Jay. It’s your floor. They flew into your floor. None of them can have lived through that. We have to go home – to England. Can we go home?’
     
    Rachel’s driving along Route 22. Jay’s sitting in the passenger seat. The silence invites the presence in Jay’s mind to intensify his torment.
Choose a scene
, it suggests.
Which one makes you shudder most?
    The camera is following a woman as she falls. Her hands are tight to her sides to stop her skirt from billowing. She’s concerned for her modesty even as she plunges to her death. Jay looks closer at her right hand. She holds it awkwardly and he can make out a pair of shoes with high heels.
    Did she think she was going to need them when she reached the ground?
    Jay tries to remember the formula for computing the speed of a falling object. The phrase ‘32 feet per second per second’ surfaces from the swamp of his grammar school education. What does it mean? The building has a hundred floors. So, 15 feet per floor, that is 1500 feet. How long does it take to fall 1500 feet? At 32 feet per second, rounded down, it’s 50 seconds. Nearly a minute? It can’t be right. The rate of fall: per second per second. It means there’s acceleration but it