And so did Donny. She released her breath with a sob. He was unscathed. The young jerk was fine. He turned to the camera, grinning.
“I can’t hear anything past the ringing in my ears, but let me say that you’ve just seen my personal ‘Fuck you!’ to the Ancient Septimus Fraternal Order. Next on my list: Belgiovene. If he thinks he got away with murdering my brother, he better think again. See you back in the city, Hari. Until then—”
A huge boulder dropped out of nowhere, crushing Donny along with the front of the Tahoe. The video went dead.
Hari screamed.
2
It took her hours and innumerable calls but Hari was finally able to track down someone who knew what had happened. The police in Williamstown, Mass, the town closest to Norum Hill, were totally closemouthed, but she found mention of the explosion on the website of the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, and tracked down the reporter from there.
Her name was Alina Eastridge and she’d managed to get close to Norum Hill after the explosion, which had rattled windows for many miles around. She said the area was crawling with law enforcement types—local cops, FBI, Homeland Security, ATF. Early concern was that it might be a terrorist act, but now they were leaning toward a lone actor who had set off a tremendous explosion that apparently damaged only the mountainside. No indication why. The suspect wasn’t available to explain because he and his vehicle were flattened by a secondary landslide.
Dead?
Yes, very dead.
The vehicle?
Rumor was saying an SUV, a Tahoe.
Hari sat in her office and stared for a long time. A steady stream of employees checked in, asking what was wrong and could they do anything. She waved them off. She didn’t wail or cry or sob. Not her style. After her one scream of shock, she’d made her calls and learned the bad news. Donny was gone. She hadn’t known him long enough to miss him, but still she mourned him in her own way: sitting in silence and staring at the blank windows of the building across the street.
And then she remembered what he’d said about dropping a thumb drive in her bag. Digging through the jumble within she found it and plugged it into her desktop. She scrolled through the contents until she came across contact information on a man known only as Belgiovene—email drops on the dark web, plus contact numbers in the real world.
Donny had done a good thing by blocking the Septimus Order’s access to its hoard. Now she would do something for him.
She called Belgiovene’s number.
BARBARA
“Whatever you do,” Ellie said, “stay off the Sheep Meadow.”
The four of us—Ellie, Hill, Winslow, and I—stood back by the Central park volleyball courts at the eastern edge of the meadow where we faced the Allard. A near-full moon was rising behind us, shedding pale light on the grassy expanse and the buildings lined up across Central Park West.
We’d all spent the day together in Hill’s penthouse apartment while he dismantled and repurposed the wide array of communications equipment clogging the main room. I found Winslow annoying in his insistence on turning any topic of conversation to himself, which might have been fine if he’d had an interesting life, but he hadn’t. Most of his existence had been spent sitting alone in a room typing. His favorite subject seemed to be the supposedly wonderful novella he’d written about his stay in a parallel world, but that, again, was about himself. The only topic he seemed to like more was Hari. He kept asking about her—I sensed he’d developed an instant crush—but the three of us had met her only shortly before he had, so we couldn’t add much. That didn’t stop him from pestering us about her.
To get away from him I spent much of the afternoon watching the cable news channels, desperate for an explanation as to why the sun had risen late, but all I found were talking heads with impressive degrees who offered nothing but spews of empty speculation.
Ellie had immersed herself in Burbank’s—the original Burbank’s—hoard of antiquarian books. She stayed behind when the three of us went out to eat. Hill led us to a cozy bistro he frequented. I grabbed the check and insisted on paying since he was hosting us in his apartment. As the two of us argued about who would pay, Winslow ordered a coffee and Kahlua.
Back at the penthouse we anxiously watched the sun slide down the western sky. Sunset was scheduled for 8:06 but the orange globe was gone by 7:55. A fearful nausea rippled through me and I was afraid I’d lose the shrimp and capellini I’d had for dinner. We’d lost sixteen minutes of daylight today. I had a crawling certainty that tomorrow would be worse. Where would it end?
That was when Ellie had begun herding us down to Central Park to “see the show.” Typically, she refused to say just what that show might be.
So now the four of us waited in silence, lost in our own thoughts. Well, make that three of us.
“The sun rose five minutes late this morning and set eleven minutes early tonight,” Winslow said, restating the obvious. “That’s the kind of stuff I wrote about in Dark Apocalypse, the novel Septimus didn’t want me to publish.”
“You mentioned that before,” I said. “And you say they sent someone to kill you?”
He had to be mistaken. Ellie and I had been to the Septimus Lodge earlier. Although I’d stayed outside, and had no idea what had transpired within, I doubted they or anyone else would have reason to kill this inconsequential man.
“Yep,” he said, hooking his thumbs in his belt and puffing up his chest. “I’m guessing I got just a leeetle too close to the truth about them.”
Hill said, “I think I’m going to head back to the penthouse. I’ve got a good view from there.”
“No, wait,” Ellie said. “It won’t be the same as being—”
“Hey!” Winslow said, pointing toward the Sheep Meadow. “Isn’t that Hari?”
I squinted through the dimness and made out her form moving about in the center of the field.
“She shouldn’t be out there,” Ellie said. “Someone get her and bring her back here—now, before it’s too late.”
Too late for what? I wondered as Winslow took off running.
Yes, he did indeed have a crush on Hari.
HARI
Hari stopped dead center on the Sheep Meadow.
What the hell am I doing? she thought. I’ve gone certifiably nuts.
Earlier she’d come out to locate the spot in daylight, then she’d left a marker—a miniature American flag—stuck in the grass. Once night had fallen, she’d had trouble finding the little flag, but she’d managed. And now she claimed her spot.
For what? Revenge on a killer?
Belgiovene’s initial reaction to her call had been shock. Only a very select few had his number. Hari had barreled on before he could hang up. It had taken a lot of cajoling and even threatening to convince him to meet her face to face. After all, the whole idea of operating from the dark net was the anonymity it afforded. But Donny’s painstaking and laser-sharp research had provided her with enough info to convince him that his anonymity was a fiction where she was concerned. She had his phone number, she had his address, she knew of his Septimus connection, and even knew that he’d botched his last assignment against a certain writer.
That had been the clincher. No one was supposed to know about the Winslow hit and it convinced him that Hari had somehow opened a direct line into his life. She neglected to mention she’d heard it from the writer himself.
She convinced Belgiovene she wanted to hire him, but only on a face-to-face basis with payment in old-fashioned cold hard cash.
After much hemming and hawing and ranting and raving, he’d finally agreed, probably thinking no one could pull a fast one on him out here in the wide-open space of the Sheep Meadow. But he’d be standing directly over the Prime Frequency generator, with no idea of what lurked below and what it could do.
At least what Hari had been told it could do.
Hari had survived some horrifying experiences in the past twenty-four hours, yet none so unforgettable as gia
nt spider legs springing from a young girl’s back as she pulled on that subterranean door. What sort of madness had spawned that?
And yet the girl herself seemed unperturbed. A different story with her mother. Barbara had blamed the Prime Frequency for changing Ellie, had even attacked the generator.
But if the Prime Generator could do that to Ellie, what would it do to Belgiovene? Would it do anything?
Crazy.
But not as crazy as meeting a contract killer face to face in Central Park.
Knowing things could go south very suddenly tonight, she’d put her IT gal, Casey, in charge of Pokey, made it her responsibility to feed the crab until she got back. She hadn’t told Casey where she was going, and hadn’t said the real issue wasn’t when Hari got back, but if she got back at all.
Meeting a killer. Really? This wasn’t at all like her. She didn’t get involved.
But Donny had pierced her defenses, slipped under her skin. His sense of right and wrong, his moral outrage at Septimus had reached her. The two of them had been marooned together on another planet—dear God, another fucking planet—and endured an attack by alien slime creatures. Even now, so soon after, those words running through her head sounded insanely absurd. And yet it had all happened. And they’d both survived it together.
Two people can’t experience something like that and not form a bond.
And then this morning they’d made mad passionate love, or had mad hot sex—call it what you will, world, they’d pleasured the hell out of each other and had been planning a return engagement.
But then reality stepped in and changed all that. What was the saying? People make plans and God laughs. The Old Boy must be in hysterics right now.
The weight of it all—seeing Donny die before her eyes contributed no small measure to her madness, she was sure—coupled with the fact that Donny was unable to see this through himself, had spurred Hari to make this grand futile gesture of revenge against the man who’d killed Donny’s brother.
And then the sun had set late, confirming her suspicions that a world of darkness and famine lay ahead. So what did she have to lose?
Hari wasn’t a killer, couldn’t imagine herself in a million years shooting or stabbing someone. But she’d seen what the Prime Frequency generator had done to Ellie. So if she couldn’t kill the killer, she could at least mess him up beyond his wildest nightmares.
Of course, she had no idea this would even work. Maybe Ellie had been a special case. Maybe being in direct line with the Prime signal would do nothing to anyone else. But this was the best she could come up with on such short notice.
She did a slow turn. She had plenty of company in the Sheep Meadow. Scattered groups and solos, little more than shadow shapes, strolled or stood around. Some sat on the grass and smoked and drank, some made out. Belgiovene would be coming alone so she ignored the groups. She’d never seen him—Donny hadn’t been able to find a photo—but his description was a slim man with a black mole on his chin. Not that the mole was much help since she wouldn’t be able to see it until he was in her face.
She spotted a thin figure making purposeful strides straight for her. A sudden urge to forget all about this insanity and run for it nearly overwhelmed her, but she fought it and stood her ground.
He stopped before her. He had close-cropped black hair and the moon rising over the trees cast enough light to reveal the mole on his chin.
“You’re standing in my spot,” he said in a deep voice.
His words caught her off guard. “Your spot?”
“I’m supposed to meet a woman I do not know in the center of the Sheep Meadow tonight.”
Hari found herself at a loss for words. She hadn’t planned this out too well. How to keep him in this spot while she backed off a safe distance. And what was a safe distance?
“Are you that woman?” Belgiovene said. “Because if you—” He broke into a harsh laugh as he looked to his left. “You see everything in Central Park, especially after dark.”
Hari followed his gaze to the west where a naked man stood with his back to them, looking up at the buildings along Central Park West.
Hari was about to comment when a voice started calling out her name behind her.
“Hari! Hari!”
She turned to see the writer guy, Winslow, trotting toward her. Of all people. Talk about bad timing. She was about to tell him to get the hell out of here when he skidded to a halt.
“You!” Winslow cried, staring past her.
“Is this a setup?” Belgiovene said.
And just then the ground started vibrating. That could only mean the signal was about to fire. She didn’t want to be here when it did. She’d just taken her first running step when the earth gave way beneath her feet.
Suddenly nothing lay beneath Hari’s feet. She twisted frantically as she began to fall along with Winslow and Belgiovene and the make-out couple and the drinkers and smokers—everyone except the naked man, now above her, floating over the emptiness.
She screamed as down she went, and down and down and down…
BARBARA
“Oh, my God!” I cried. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
Horror engulfed me as I clapped a hand over my mouth to seal off my broken-record cries.
Next to me, Tier Hill muttered, “What the—?” He tugged on our arms. “Get back! Back!”
“It’s all right,” Ellie said, as if something like this happened every day. “We’re safe here.”
The moonlight shone on a perfect circle of black emptiness where the ground had fallen away, vanishing from sight and taking Hari and Winslow and everyone else within its two-hundred-foot perimeter with it.
“A giant sinkhole?” I managed after catching my breath.
Hill shook his head. “Can’t be. The park rests on solid schist. No place for the ground to sink to.”
“Then how—?”
“He knows,” Ellie said, pointing at the hole.
And there, in the empty space where the center of the Sheep Meadow had been, floated a naked man with outstretched arms that gave him the shape of a cross.
Floated!
Ellie added: “He did it.”
“But who…?”
“That’s the One. His time has come.”
As I watched, he slowly sank into the black depths.
“Where’s Hari?” I said, my throat tightening. I’d only just met her but I’d liked her forthrightness. “Is there any chance…? I mean, how deep is that hole?”
“No chance,” Ellie said with a note of dreadful finality. “The hole has no bottom.”
I didn’t bother asking her how she knew, I simply trusted she did.
But Hill snorted. “You can’t really believe that!”
Ellie didn’t respond, didn’t seem to think it worth an argument.
The hole wasn’t finished, it kept growing, more and more of the meadow crumbling into the abyss as people ran for their lives.
I heard a terrified cry and looked in time to see one of two inebriated young men who had stepped to the edge for a better look tumble into the pit. More ground gave way, taking the second. A passerby almost lost his own life in a futile attempt to save the latter.
“Maybe we’d better back up,” I said, eyeing the volleyball courts behind us.
The hole had expanded to three hundred feet and was still growing.
“It will stop soon,” Ellie said.
And she was right. The diameter reached four hundred feet or so and stopped.
“Come to the edge,” Ellie said.
I hesitated, then followed. Hill stayed a couple of feet behind me. Ellie stood on the very precipice. Hill and I halted a few paces back. I felt a breeze against my nape. Air was flowing down into the massive hole. I saw no sign of the floating man whom Ellie had called “the One.”
“I don’t get it,” Hill said, indicating the emptiness stretching before us. “What’s the point?”
Ellie stared into the depths as she spoke. �
�This is the first of many. Wherever a signal strikes the Earth, a hole like this will soon appear.”
“But again,” Hill said, “what’s the point?”
“They will unleash the Change.” With that, she turned to me. “This is where I leave you, Mother.”
“What? No!”
“Neither of us can stay here, but for different reasons.”
I knew I’d been in denial. I’d sensed this coming all along, but hadn’t been able to face it. Still, I was stunned speechless.
“You have to gather up Bess and go home,” she said. “First thing tomorrow you two must be out of town and on your way back to Missouri. There will be no safe place on Earth, but that storm shelter Dad built might give you a chance.”
We’d all laughed at Ray when he dug that shelter and filled it with survival supplies.
I found my voice. “What are you saying? The shelter should be our home now?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“But—”
“The daylight hours will shrink to nothing, Mother, and I won’t be there to help you in the nightworld that’s coming.”
Nightworld…how could one word carry such menace?
“You’re staying here?”
“No.” She pointed into the abyss. “I’m going down there.”
“You can’t!” I said through a sob.
“There’s no place for us here.”
“Us?”
Just as I said that, those things, the little horrors she called her “kiddlies,” ran down the back of her legs and scurried toward the hole where they crowded along the edge.
Hill recoiled, muttering, “Jesus!”
I couldn’t help it, I began to cry, huge wracking sobs from the deepest part of me.
“Oh, Mom!” Ellie cried as she threw her arms around me, and right then I knew—I knew she was Ellie again, the real Ellie, my lost child. “Don’t cry!”
I crushed her against me and cried harder.
“It’s got to be this way,” she whispered. “I have no choice. It’s out of my hands.”
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