It was a hell flight, and Fat Charlie was sleeping through it.
In Fat Charlie’s dream he was in a huge hall, and he was wearing a morning suit. Next to him was Rosie, wearing a white wedding dress, and on the other side of her on the dais was Rosie’s mother, who was, a little jarringly, also wearing a wedding dress, although this one was covered with dust and with cobwebs. Far away, at the horizon, which was the distant edge of the hall, there were people firing guns and waving white flags.
It’s just the people at Table H, said Rosie’s mother. Don’t pay them no attention.
Fat Charlie turned to Rosie. She smiled at him with her soft, sweet smile, then she licked her lips.
Cake, said Rosie, in his dream.
This was the signal for an orchestra to begin to play. It was a New Orleans jazz band, playing a funeral march.
The chef’s assistant was a police officer. She was holding a pair of handcuffs. The chef wheeled the cake up onto the dais.
Now, said Rosie to Fat Charlie, in his dream. Cut the cake.
The people at Table B—who were not people but cartoon mice and rats and barnyard animals, human-sized, and celebrating—began to sing songs from Disney cartoons. Fat Charlie knew that they wanted him to join in with them. Even asleep he could feel himself panicking at the simple idea of having to sing in public, his limbs becoming numb, his lips prickling.
I can’t sing with you, he told them, desperate for an excuse. I have to cut this cake.
At this, the hall fell into silence. And in the silence, a chef entered, wheeling a little trolley with something on it. The chef wore Grahame Coats’s face, and on the trolley was an extravagant white wedding cake, an ornate, many-tiered confection. A tiny bride and tiny groom perched precariously on the topmost tier of the cake, like two people trying to keep their balance on top of a sugar-frosted Chrysler Building.
Rosie’s mother reached under the table and produced a long, wooden-handled knife—almost a machete—with a rusty blade. She passed it to Rosie, who reached for Fat Charlie’s right hand and placed it over her own, and together they pressed the rusty knife into the thick white icing on the topmost tier of the cake, pushed it in between the groom and the bride. The cake resisted the blade at first, and Fat Charlie pressed harder, putting all his weight on the knife. He felt the cake beginning to give. He pushed harder.
The blade sliced through the topmost tier of the wedding cake. It slipped and sliced down the cake, through every layer and tier, and as it did so, the cake opened…
In his dream, Fat Charlie supposed that the cake was filled with black beads, with beads of black glass or of polished jet, and then, as they tumbled out of the cake, he realized that the beads had legs, each bead had eight clever legs, and they came out the inside of the cake like a black wave. The spiders surged forward and covered the white tablecloth; they covered Rosie’s mother and Rosie herself, turning their white dresses black as ebony; then, as if controlled by some vast and malignant intelligence, they flowed, in their hundreds, toward Fat Charlie. He turned to run, but his legs were trapped in some kind of rubbery tanglefoot, and he tumbled to the floor.
Now they were upon him, their tiny legs crawling over his bare skin; he tried to get up, but he was drowning in spiders.
Fat Charlie wanted to scream, but his mouth was filled with spiders. They covered his eyes, and his world went dark…
Fat Charlie opened his eyes and saw nothing but blackness, and he screamed and he screamed and he screamed. Then he realized the lights were off and the window shades drawn, because people were watching the film.
It was already a flight from hell. Fat Charlie had just made it a little worse for everyone else.
He stood up and tried to get out to the aisle, tripping over people as he went past, then, when he was almost at the gangway, straightening up and banging the overhead locker with his forehead, which knocked open the locker door and tumbled someone’s hand luggage down onto his head.
People nearby, the ones who were watching, laughed. It was an elegant piece of slapstick, and it cheered them all up no end.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IN WHICH FAT CHARLIE GOES A LONG WAY
THE IMMIGRATION OFFICER SQUINTED AT FAT CHARLIE’S American passport as if she were disappointed he was not a foreign national of the kind she could simply stop coming into the country then, with a sigh, she waved him through.
He wondered what he was going to do once he got through customs. Rent a car, he supposed. And eat.
He got off the tram and walked through the security barrier, out into the wide shopping concourse of Orlando Airport, and was nowhere nearly as surprised as he should have been to see Mrs. Higgler standing there, scanning the faces of the arrivals, her enormous mug of coffee clutched in her hand. They saw each other at more or less the same moment, and she headed toward him.
“You hungry?” she asked him.
He nodded.
“Well,” she said, “I hope you like turkey.”