The intercom popped him out of a Cynthia daydream.
“You’re at the halfway mark, Triton. How’re you doing?”
Halfway. They had ten thousand feet of cable up there. Almost a mile down and still no bottom. This was incredible.
“Fine,” Nick said. “Can you still see us?”
“Yeah, but you’re just a little blob of light down there now.”
What could have caused a hole like this? Could it be natural? Something extraterrestrial maybe? Say, that was a thought. It did seem like an artifact. What if—?
Buckley’s voice drew him back to reality again.
“Can we get these lights any brighter?” he said to the intercom.
“They’re at max. What’s the problem, Triton?”
“The wall’s fading from view.”
“You’re out of sight now. Want to stop?”
Nick looked out his port. Black out there. The beams from the floodlights didn’t seem to be going anywhere; the blackness swallowed the light within a few yards of the bulbs. The spots weren’t doing much better—bright shafts poking a dozen or so feet into the darkness and then disappearing.
No, wait—ten feet into the darkness. No …
Nick swallowed hard. The darkness was edging in on the lights, overcoming, devouring the illumination.
“What’s wrong with the lights?” Buckley said, his voice tremulous.
“I don’t know.” His own voice didn’t sound too steady either.
“They’re losing power.”
Nick didn’t think so. The darkness … something about it was overpowering the light, gobbling it up. Something thick and oily about it. The blackness seemed to move out there beyond the ports, almost seemed alive. Alive and hungry.
He shook himself. What kind of thinking was that?
But this blackness was certainly unusual, and probably the reason the laser signal had never returned. He smiled. Bottomless indeed! This weird old hole was deeper than it had any right to be, but it wasn’t bottomless.
“We need more power to the lights!” Buckley said to the intercom.
Pure black out there now. All illumination was gone.
“You got it all, Triton. If there’s an electrical problem we’ll bring you back up and try again tomorrow.”
“Not till I get at least one reading off the laser,” Nick said.
He started flipping switches on the controls and noticed that his hands were trembling. Had the temperature dropped? He glanced at Buckley as he fastened a flash attachment to his camera.
“You cold?”
Buckley nodded. “Yeah, now that you mention it.” His breath steamed in the air. “You get your reading, I’ll try a couple of flash shots through the ports, then we’ll get back upstairs.”
“You’ve got a deal.”
Nick suddenly wanted very much to be out of this hole and into the sunlight again. He adjusted the laser settings, triggered it, and waited for the readout. And waited.
Nothing.
Buckley tried a few flash photos out his port while Nick rechecked his settings. Everything looked fine.
“This is useless!” Buckley said, irritably snatching his camera away from the glass. “Like black bean soup out there.”
Nick glanced out his port. The blackness seemed to press against the outer glass, as if it wanted to get in.
Nick fired the laser again. And again nothing. Nothing was coming back. Damn! Maybe the laser wasn’t getting through the blackness or maybe the hole was indeed bottomless. Right now he was too cold to care.
“That does it,” Nick said. “I’m through. Let’s get out of here.”
“Take us up!” Buckley shouted.
“Say again, Triton,” said the speaker in the ceiling. “We’ve got static on this end.”
Buckley repeated the message but no reply came through. The bell did not halt its descent.
Nick was frightened now. The walls of the Triton seemed to close in on him. And it was colder. And …
… darker?
“Did the lights just dim?” Buckley said.
Nick could only nod. His tongue felt glued to the roof of his mouth.
“Take us up, goddammit!” Buckley screamed, banging on the steel wall of the bell with his fist. “Up!”
“Okay, Triton,” came the matter-of-fact reply. “Will do.”
But they didn’t stop, didn’t even slow their descent. They continued down, ever downward.
And it was getting darker by the second.
“Oh, my God, Quinn!” Buckley said in a hushed voice teetering on the edge of panic. “What’s happening?”
Finally Nick found his voice. He tried to keep it calm as the cold and the darkness grew … and Buckley began to fade from view.
“I don’t know. But one thing I do know is we’ve got to stay calm. Something’s wrong with the intercom up there. But they’ve got only so much cable. They can send us down just so far, and then they’ll have to bring us up. So let’s just be cool and hang in there and we’ll be okay.”
Darkness had control of the Triton now, within and without. Nick couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. He was losing his sense of direction, of up and down. His stomach threatened to heave.
“Quinn?” Buckley’s voice seemed to come from some point outside the walls of the bell. “You still there?”
Nick forced a laugh. “No. I just stepped outside for a cigarette.”
And suddenly he sensed more than darkness between them. Something solid. An entity, a presence. Beside him, around him, touching him. And it was cold and evil and filled Nick with an unnameable dread that threatened to kick his bowels loose in his pants. He wanted to cry, he wanted Father Bill, he wanted to go home, he wanted the drugged-up mother who’d tried to kick his head in when he was three months old, anything but this!
And then Buckley’s flash went off and they both screamed out their souls when they saw what had moved in to share the bell with them.
“Everything’s fine. Don’t reel us in yet. Play the cable out to the end.”
Bill heard the voice over the loudspeaker and froze. That wasn’t Nick’s voice. And it wasn’t the other scientist’s either. It was a new voice—different.
He scanned the faces in the control area. No one was reacting. Someone replied, “Okay, Triton. Will do.”
What was wrong with them? It was a different voice! Couldn’t they hear that?
Something familiar about it too. He’d heard it before, but where? The answer was tantalizingly close. And then he heard it again.
“That’s it,” said the loudspeaker in that same voice. “Just keep us going down.”
Suddenly Bill knew. And the realization nearly drove him to his knees.
Rafe! It was Rafe’s voice! Rafe, Jimmy Stevens, Rasalom, whatever his name was, it was him! The one Glaeken called the Adversary. The one who was shrinking the daylight, who’d dug this huge wormhole in the earth. He’d tortured Bill for years in many forms and many voices, and the voice on that speaker was the one he’d used as Rafe Losmara. No mistake. Its sound still echoed through his dreams. Rasalom was controlling that diving bell—and God knew what he was doing to Nick!
Bill forced his wobbly legs into a run toward the control area.
“Bring them up! Bring them up now!”
The scientists and technicians started at the sound of his shouts. They looked at him as if he were crazy.
“Who the hell are you?” someone said.
“A friend of Nick Quinn’s. And that wasn’t his voice just then. Couldn’t you hear that?”
“Of course it was Nick’s voice,” said a thirtyish woman with short brown hair. “I’ve worked with him for years and that was Nick.”
Beside her, an older man with perfectly combed hair nodded in agreement.
“That was Nick, all right.”
“I’m telling you it wasn’t. Reel them back up, dammit! Something’s happening in there! Get them up!”
Someone g
rabbed his arms from behind and he heard a mix of voices talking over and under each other: Who is he?… Get security … Says he’s a friend of Nick’s … I don’t care if he’s Quinn’s mother, get him out of here!
Bill was hustled away from the control area. The security guards were going to take him back to the edge of the Sheep Meadow but he pleaded with them to let him stay near the hole, swore that he wouldn’t say another word or go near the control area again. The Roman collar and cassock paid off again. They let him stay.
But it was torture to stand there and listen to that voice tell them to send the bell deeper and deeper into the hole. Did it sound like Nick to everyone else? Was he the only one who could hear the Rafe voice? Why? Another game being played with his head?
He wanted to scream, to charge the derrick cab and wrest the controls from the operator and drag that bell back up to the light. But he had about as much chance of succeeding in that as he had of leaping to the far side of the hole itself. So he stood among the crowd of privileged onlookers and silently endured the clawed terror that lacerated the inner walls of his heart.
Finally, the cable reached its end. No matter what the voice told them now, the bell could descend no farther.
But the voice was silent.
Bill noticed a flurry of activity in the control area. He sidled in that direction through the crowd. He intercepted a student hurrying away from the area and caught his arm.
“What’s happening?”
“The Triton—they’re not answering!”
Bill let him go and stood there feeling cold and frightened and useless as the derrick reversed its gears and began to reel in the Triton. The rewind seemed to take forever. During the interval an ambulance and an EMS van roared into the Sheep Meadow with their howlers going full blast. Finally the bell hove into view again. When it was swung away from the hole and settled onto the platform near the edge, the people from the control area surged toward it.
Bill pushed his way to the front of the crowd until his belly pressed against one of the blue “Police Line” horses that rimmed the area. He stood next to a dark-haired man in a white suit who carried a walking stick wrapped in some sort of black hide. Together they watched the workers spin the winged lug nuts on the hatch, swing it open, and peer inside.
Somebody screamed. Bill clutched the rough wood of the horse and felt his heart double its already mad pounding. A flurry of activity erupted around the bell, people grabbing their phones, frantically waving the EMS van forward.
Good God, something had happened to Nick! He’d never forgive himself for not getting here in time to stop him.
A pair of EMTs, stethoscopes around their necks, drug boxes and life packs in each hand, rushed forward as a limp figure was eased through the hatch. Bill craned his neck to see through the throng. He sighed with relief when he saw that the injured man was white-haired and balding. Not Nick, thank God. The other one. They stretched him out prone on the platform and began pumping on his chest.
But where was Nick?
Bill spotted more activity around the hatch. They were carrying—no, leading—someone else out. It was Nick. Nick, thank God! He was on his feet, coming out under his own steam.
Then Bill got a look at his face. Red—blood on his face, on his lips, dribbling down his chin. He’d cut his lower lip—looked more like he’d chewed it. But it was Nick’s eyes that drove the air from Bill’s lungs in a cry of horror. They were wide open and utterly vacant. Whatever he’d seen down there, whatever had happened, it had driven away all intelligence and sanity, sent it fleeing into the deepest, most obscure corners of his mind.
“Nick!”
He bent to slip under the barricade but one of the security cops was watching him.
“Stay back there, Father!” he warned. “You come through there an’ I’ll have to toss you in the wagon.”
He ground his teeth in frustration but straightened up behind the barricade. He’d be no help to Nick in jail. And Nick was going to need him.
“Do you know him?” the white-suited man next to him said with a slight German accent.
Bill only nodded and stood quietly as they led the stumbling, drooling young man to the waiting ambulance. Those mad, empty eyes. What had he seen down there?
And then, as Nick came even with him, his eyes suddenly focused. He turned his head to stare at Bill. Then he grinned—a wide, bloody-mouthed rictus, totally devoid of humor.
Bill started in horror, pressing back against the people behind him. And then as suddenly as it had appeared, the grimace was gone. The light faded from Nick’s eyes and he stumbled away toward the waiting ambulance.
“Most entertaining,” said the man in the white suit, then turned and walked away.
Bill fought an urge to take a swing at him. Instead, he watched, weak, trembling, as they loaded Nick in the back of an ambulance. Then he fought through the crowd and began to follow the rig on foot as it headed east across the grass. Finally he saw the name on its side: Columbia-Presbyterian. He ran for Fifth Avenue, looking for a cab to take him to the hospital, all the while fighting the feeling that he’d lived through this horror once already. He didn’t know if he could survive a second round.
WFPW-FM
FREDDY: Bad news from Central Park, folks. Those two guys who went down into that big hole in a diving bell ran into some trouble.
JO: Yeah. One of them had a heart attack and the other got pretty sick. They’re saying they think there was some problem with the air supply. We’ll let you know more about it as soon as we hear.
FREDDY: Right. Meanwhile, here’s a classic Beatles tune for all those people working out there in the Sheep Meadow.
“When’s this other guy arriving?”
“I’m not sure,” Glaeken said.
He looked up from the couch to where Jack stood at the picture window staring out at the park. Everyone who came to this apartment was drawn to that window, including Glaeken himself. The vista had always been breathtaking. With that hole in the Sheep Meadow now, it had become captivating.
Jack wore slightly wrinkled beige slacks and a lightweight Jets shirt hanging down to the tops of his thighs—loose, Glaeken knew, to hide the pistol holstered in the small of his back. Average height, brown hair with a low hairline, and deceptively mild brown eyes. You would not pick him out of a crowd; in fact his manner of dress, his whole demeanor was geared toward unobtrusiveness. This man could dog your steps all day long and you’d never notice him.
Glaeken liked Jack. More than liked. He’d known him only a year or so but felt a rapport with him on a very fundamental level. Perhaps because Jack reminded him of himself in another era, another epoch, when he was that age. A warrior. He sensed the strength coiled within the man; not mere physical strength, although he knew plenty of that hid in his wiry muscles, but inner toughness, a resolve to see a task through to the end. He had the strength, too, to question himself, to examine his motives and actions and wonder at the wisdom, the sanity of the life he had chosen for himself.
The Heir.
But he saw a downside to Jack taking his place. He was unruly and untamed. He recognized no master, no authority over himself. He followed his own code. And he was angry. Too angry, perhaps. At times the cold fire of his rage fairly lit the room.
Still, Glaeken desperately needed his services. Jack was the only one in this world who had any chance of retrieving the ancient necklaces. Glaeken knew he had to be at his most convincing here.
“How long are we going to wait for him?” Jack said, turning from the window.
“He should be here. I have a feeling he might have been delayed by a sick friend.”
Glaeken had watched on TV as the diving bell returned from the depths. It continually amazed him how much one could experience through television without ever leaving the living room. When the first footprints were stamped into the surface of the moon, he had been there watching via television, just as he had b
een watching an hour or so ago when Bill’s friend and the other scientist had been removed from the bell. The other man, a Dr. Buckley, was dead of cardiac arrest, and Dr. Quinn had been rushed to an emergency room in shock. Glaeken assumed that Bill had followed.
Too bad—for Bill’s friend, and because Glaeken had wanted Bill present.
Jack dropped into a chair opposite Glaeken.
“Let’s get on with it. You mentioned the necklaces again. You’re not still set on getting hold of them, are you?”
“Yes. I’m afraid they’re an absolute necessity.”
Jack jumped from the chair and stepped to the window again.
“Well, the damn park is smaller, isn’t it? I mean, it’s lost whatever amount of surface area that hole swallowed, so it has shrunk, just like you said.” He turned and stared at Glaeken. “How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
“Yeah. Right. But you’re going to need more than a lucky guess to find Kolabati and those necklaces.”
“I’ve learned exactly where she is.”
Jack sat down again.
“Where?”
“She’s living on Maui, on the northwest slope of Haleakala, above Kula. And she has both necklaces with her.”
He shook his head. “Too far.”
“You can make the round trip in two days. The sooner you leave, the sooner you can be back.”
He drummed his fingers on his thighs. “I don’t know…”
“Jack—”
“How’d you find out? Two nights ago you hadn’t the faintest idea where she was.”
“I ran into an old acquaintance who happened to know.”
The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) Page 195