Manchester Airport, England — 1997
"SOMETHING ABOUT A disturbance at Heathrow," the man said. "They've had to divert us to Manchester. Bloody idiots, I don't know, they can't do anything right nowadays, always something causing problems, leaves on the runway or bloody air traffic controllers on strike. Don't know their arses from their elbows. I've got a meeting to go to, you know?"
Me too, Abby thought. She had just woken from a deep slumber to find the guy next to her blathering on. "What sort of disturbance?" she asked.
"I don't know, maybe a luggage cart broke down or something. Please excuse my Britishness, young lady. We're the country where everything grinds to a halt at the slightest provocation. An inch of snow in winter? Close the schools, panic, buy bread and milk, barricade yourself in your house. Really, you'd think we were under siege by the rest of the world."
Maybe you will be soon, she thought, but saying it would have achieved little. "I'm sure they have their reasons."
"Whatever." The man had turned on his mobile phone, and his annoyance found new direction when a flight attendant requested that he turn it off until they landed.
Abby turned and looked out the small window at her side. She had a view of the wing and the green landscape down below, fluffy clouds passing by here and there, roads and rivers meandering across the surface of this country she was coming to for the very first time. I'm not that far from Paris, she thought. Maybe that's where Abe will think I'm going. The thought of her friend was depressing, because she was betraying all the faith and hope he had developed in her over the years. But at the same time there were reasons, there was rhyme. When the time eventually came for him to discover the truth, she hoped he would understand. "Understand," she said. Her breath misted the window and then faded away.
A dream came back to her, sudden and hard. She was alone in the dark, except that the darkness itself was not barren and neutral as it should have been. But neither was it alive. It watched her without eyes, listened without ears, and spoke without breath, and though she could not recall the words that had been whispered to her, she knew that they were all bad.
Awake now, an unbearable sense of unease had settled over her. She looked out at the aircraft's wing and hoped it would not break off. She looked down to the ground a mile below and hoped the landing gear would lock down correctly. Her dreams had always affected her intensely, and mostly she put it down to having been born of a memory herself. She supposed dreaming was her way of thinking back to the time before Blake had brought her into this world, her own memory of the Memory. Her recent brief foray back there had revealed that great, conscious darkness to her once more.
But this dream was different. It had felt intentional, not random, as if something had come into her mind to present it, instead of her mind presenting itself. She shivered and closed her eyes.
Full moon tonight, she thought. I've set myself free to murder. She hated thinking about what would happen when she changed. She had all but ignored it since fleeing Baltimore, dismissed the thought with some vague idea of locking herself away or being able to hunt animals, not people. But she could sense the blood flowing around her, smell the meat, and even through the staleness of the confined atmosphere, the smells were good. Her mouth watered. She hated that, but she could not control it.
"Stupid bitch," the man next to her said, staring after the flight attendant. He flipped out his phone again and switched it on.
"That can interfere with communications," Abby said.