He leapt down the grand staircase, three steps at a time. The last eight stairs bubbled and foamed away before he could get to them, and he hit and stumbled and was laid out, sliding through cloud like a kid dumped off his sled at high speed and eating snow.
Then he was up and moving again, leaping over deformities scattered across the floor of the entry hall. The slagged bodies of phantom lovers reached for him with grasping claws. Heads bobbed out of the milky soup of the floor, ruined faces set in expressions of panic. He stepped on at least one face as he ran for the gate.
It did occur to him that the bridge across the moat might be gone. He slapped through the limp threads of the dissolving portcullis. It was like passing face-first into a cool, dew-damp cobweb. He was through it and running full-out when he saw that the high arch of the bridge had collapsed at the center. Not only that—it was shriveling at either end, quickly shrinking back into the sides of the moat. His heart rose in his chest like a hot-air balloon surging away from the world below. He did not think or slow down. He sped up. One step, two, out onto the last slender, decayed stub of the bridge, and he leapt.
He cleared the hole with a yard to spare, stumbled, and went down. As he picked himself up, he threw a wild glance back, just in time to see the palace drop, flattening like a magnificent pavilion caving in on itself. He flickered back to a memory of lying in bed at the age of seven, body clenched tight with pleasure, as his father snapped a sheet into the air and let it float gently down over him, like a parachute.
The parachute—those folds of silk that had once been a hot-air balloon—remained on the coatrack, although the rack itself was beginning to buckle under the weight. Beyond it the bed had lost all sense of itself and now looked like the world’s largest melted marshmallow.
Aubrey snatched up his jump harness and stepped into it, cinching it tight over his balls, pulling it on over his jumpsuit. He was just shrugging the straps over his shoulders when he heard the cry. It was a blast of noise, a cross between an air horn and a subway thundering through a tunnel. The entire cloud seemed to shudder. He thought of that huge, horrible, monstrous face and was gripped by a terrified, terrible idea: Awake! The giant is awake! Down the beanstalk!
He grabbed the pile of silks just as the coatrack went noodle-soft and collapsed. He began to run toward the edge of the cloud. As he went, he discovered he was sinking. In a moment he was up to his knees.
Aubrey found the neat bundle of ropes, and as he struggled toward the blue sky beyond the shores of the cloud, he began to clip old, rusted D-rings to the carabiners on his harness. What he was about to do amounted to little more than suicide, was a frantic act of lunacy, sure to fail. So why, he wondered, was some part of him quivering with the effort to restrain hysterical laughter?
The antique D-rings were a dozen in all. He clipped four to the front of the harness and four to the back and let the rest dangle loose. He still clutched the silk to his chest. When he looked up, he discovered his Harriet of the sky standing between him and the very edge of the cloud. She clutched the stuffed, dirty Junicorn in her arms as if it were their child, as if to block her faithless lover from leaving them both.
He lowered his head and plowed right through her. In two more steps, he was off the edge of the cloud.
Aubrey dropped like a brick.
24
HE FELL IN A STRAIGHT line, feetfirst. He hurtled eight hundred feet before he thought to let go of the bundle of silk in his arms. He had no idea how to release it and just threw it out from his body.
And he fell and fell and fell. Down he went in a wild corkscrew, dragging a long, tangled rope of silk behind.
The earth spun around and around below him: rectangles of pretty cultivated green, the humped mounds of forested hills, the flattened-squid shape of a small hamlet. He saw three white steeples, quite clearly, finely wrought spears of bone marking churches. In the distance he saw a wide horizon of filmy blue. It took him several moments to recognize it as either one of the Great Lakes or, maybe, the Atlantic Ocean.
The wind snatched his breath away from him. The very skin of his face rippled on his skull. He dropped faster and faster. Cords made loud popping sounds as they were pulled taut. The wind rattled and shook the knotted mess of silk trailing hilariously after him. How mad it had been to imagine it would catch his fall, that a balloonist of a hundred fifty years ago had left him a way off that lonely island in the sky.
Yet however worthless his half-assed antique quilt of old silk might be, he felt himself opening like a parachute—felt a steadily widening sense of joy. He let himself tip forward, spreading his arms and legs in the posture his jumpmaster had called aerobraking.
Cal. That was the guy’s name. It popped into Aubrey’s head all at once: cool Cal, the one and only. How had he forgotten?
He stopped spinning and fell toward the lush green earth below. If he weren’t sure to die from the impact, he thought he might just about die from the glory of it all. Tears streamed from his eyes, and Aubrey Griffin began to smile.
25
HE WAS AT SIX THOUSAND feet when the long rope of silk trailing him came unwound and filled. The envelope erupted with a shocking bang—billowing wide, like a waiter tossing a tablecloth into the air. Aubrey was jerked upward, actually rose almost fifty feet, leaving his stomach behind, before his descent resumed—but slower now, with a sudden feeling of calm. He felt he was floating like a dandelion seed on a soft August breeze. He was warm again: sun on his face, gently roasting him in his jumpsuit.
He tipped his head back and saw a spreading dome of red and blue silk, scattered with enormous white stars. The sun shone through the thin places, wide patches where the fabric was just threads.
The ground rose up toward him. He saw a yellowing pasture almost directly below, pine trees at the back of it. To the east the field was bordered by a black strip of two-lane highway. Aubrey watched a red pickup glide along it, a black-and-white collie in the flatbed. The dog saw him and barked, his yaps flat and small and coming from a long way off. A farmhouse stood to the north, a dusty yard out back, a decrepit-looking barn nearby. Aubrey shut his eyes, smelling golden pollen, dry earth, hot tar.
When he opened his eyes, the meadow was rushing up at him. It occurred to him that landing might not be as peaceful as the slow fall to earth. Then he hit, heels first, a hard slam of impact that went up into his tailbone with a painful shock.