Disclaimer: Beauty and the Beast and the characters of Vincent and Catherine belong to Republic. After a twelve-year absence, the words have begun anew. I would have wished for something less tragic to get the words flowing but 12 days after it began, this emerged. Please forgive any misspelling or errors of grammar. It came out and I simply wrote it.

Vincent sighed as he picked up "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte. His 9:00 a.m. class had been reading the book for the last few days. Unfortunately for him, while the teenager girls in the class loved the book, the teenage boys did not share those feelings. The girls found it romantic with Cathy and Heathcliffe; the boys yawned their way through it, waiting for something to happen.

As he picked up his cloak, he stopped, head cocked listening intensely to an unfamiliar sound. Despite the distance between Below and Above, Vincent's hearing was quite acute, a byproduct of his uniqueness. Over the years, he had grown accustomed to the weekday morning sound of the world above. Unconsciously, he filtered out the rumbles of the trains, dislodging its hundreds of passengers in the financial district of above. Unconscious as well was the buzz of hundreds of voices ordering coffee and bagels as well as the other fare of a fast breakfast on the way to starting another workday.

Through the years, when his schedule permitted, he would go to the "Whispering Bridge" and simply listen to the shadowy voices of the morning. The voices waffling down would some time make he chuckle---a wife complaining about the messy 'surprise birthday dinner' made by a loving spouse that used every pot in the kitchen or a father's proud boast that his daughter had hit the winning home run in a little league baseball game; acceptance in college by an anxious relative, a promotion that was long overdue that would make a difference in a family or a Broadway play that had captured the audience.

Other times, those voices would make him sad---a marriage or relationship that was over, a promotion that had not been received, a loved one who had been lost to a car accident or cancer. Through the years, he heard the profound that were the benchmarks of life and the frivolous that greased it wheels. Through it all, there had been a comfortable rhythm.

Yet, the sound he heard, the rumbling of a passenger plane, made him uneasy. This was not normal. As the roar of the plane became louder, he knew something was wrong. Of all the sounds he had absolved through the years, this was not one of them. Planes that flew anywhere near this concrete island that was Manhattan, never flew this low or this direct. Their normal path was up the New Jersey side.

As the roaring increased, so did his fear. The book, his total concentration of a moment ago, fell unnoticed from his hand and he began to run only to stop as Catherine's feelings of stunned disbelief washed over him. At the same time, despite the layers between Below and Above, he heard the screams of the impact and knew that his foreboding had been true.

Recovering, he began to run... towards the nightmare that was just beginning.

As his footsteps receded through the tunnels, a book lay forgotten on the tunnel floor-a silent reminder of the moment before.

nightwalker87