Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  There was no sound now but the steady pumping of the air compressor, the faint rustle of the oxygen tent. Mam's hand seemed, in some subtle way, to relax beneath his, her shoulders to fall. A pinging noise, rhythmic and mechanical, began to emanate from one of the machines beside her bed. Suddenly, almost in that same instant, there was the sound of rubber soles squeaking hurriedly across the floor. The nurse reappeared: “You have to leave, immediately.” Another nurse came up right behind her, pushing a trolley; Jack stood up, moved out of the way. Over her shoulder, the head nurse said to him, “Please leave the I.C.U.” She was yanking the sheet back. Dr. Prescott sped past him. Jack retreated into a patch of shadow, just to one side of the curtained partition. Prescott was bending over the bed, issuing instructions to the two nurses. A second doctor appeared, went to the other side of the bed. Mam was lost, made utterly invisible, by the sudden crush of bodies around her. There was a flurry of activity—urgent conferrals were held, a syringe was filled, administered. More instructions flew back and forth; some sort of device—it looked like the two halves of a cantaloupe—was removed from the trolley and put to use. Heads kept turning, from the bed to the bank of monitors and then back to the bed again. There were bleeps and whirrings, buzzes and gasps from the host of instruments. But after several minutes, the commotion gradually subsided; the mechanical noises began to abate, except for one steady high-pitched whine, and the hands of the doctors and nurses ceased to fly about. It seemed as if they had run out of things to do. Prescott stood up straight again, with his hands pressed to the small of his back. The head nurse still hovered, doing something Jack could not make out; the other nurse began replacing things on the trolley. Even the high-pitched whining stopped. The second doctor said to Prescott, “Sorry, but this one was a long shot to begin with.” None of them realized that Jack was still there, in the shadows to one side of the curtain.

  “I'll leave it to you then,” Prescott said to the head nurse. “I'll go out and tell the Logans.” He turned to leave, and saw Jack. He paused. “Have you been there the whole time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know. Your grandmother has just passed away.”

  Jack said nothing; he stepped forward and around to the side of the bed where he'd originally been sitting. The head nurse looked at Dr. Prescott; he gestured at her to let him be. Jack pulled the chair away from the wall, drew it up to the bed.

  Don't think it's over yet, Mam. I'm coming for you. He took her hand between his own, then bent his head over it. I'm coming. In his mind's eye, he summoned this time, he didn't wait for it to appear, the image with which these journeys usually began—the mountain of sand, the red-steel scaffolding, the hot, bright, summer sun. He turned his inner vision toward that bright and burning sky, and willed himself to travel up toward it. There was a cold, metallic smell in the air, and a faint breeze that slowly turned to wind, a wind that bore him up and carried him toward the light. A vague babble of voices, that he had come to expect, assailed him on all sides. I'm coming, Mean—wait for me. All around him the landscape had faded to a vast, unyielding white; the heat was growing more intense by the second. The very air seemed to pulse, rhythmically, with a huge and invisible energy; out of it, as if suddenly carved from light, Mam appeared. She was facing the other way, but when Jack called to her, she turned, puzzled; her gray hair blew gently about her face, her skin had a kind of hectic flush to it. Though twenty or thirty feet appeared to separate them, Jack extended his hand to her, and in that instant the gap was closed. Mam allowed him to take her hand, but when he said, “Mam, come with me,” and tried to lead her back in the direction she'd just come, she resisted. Her head kept turning toward the bright and beating light that had appeared, and was growing ever closer, in the distance. “Don't look at the light,” Jack told her, but Mam, shaking her head, said, “I must.” Jack tried, with his other hand, to shield her eyes from it, but Mam seemed to be able to look right through him. “Mam, we need you,” Jack said. “Clancy needs you. I need you . . . come with me, Mam . . . come with me.” The light was becoming steadily more intense, the air around them more agitated. Jack himself found it harder and harder to keep his eyes from the light, and at the same time felt a rising surge of fear within him; he did not want to pass through that burning beacon again. He did not want to feel its scouring fire; this tune, he feared, he would not survive it. It would consume him, utterly, and strand his soul in the Other World—just as Nancy had predicted.

  The winds around them began to whirl like a maelstrom. Jack released Mam's hand, and clutched her frail shoulders instead. “We love you,” he said, “you don't have to die . . . not yet.” But Mam fixed him with a serious and troubled gaze. “We love you,” he repeated, imploringly.

  “Then let me go,” she said, searching his face as if for the last time. “You have to let me go, Jack.”

  “No—I don't,” he replied, tears springing to his eyes. He sounded, even to himself, like a petulant child. “I love you.”

  “I know you do,” she said, with a sad but radiant smile. “That's why you must let me go. This is not for you to decide, Jack—this is God's will.”

  The light beat, like crashing cymbals, in the air around them.

  “It doesn't have to be,” he said, softly, though he knew the battle was already lost.

  “Yes,” she answered, gently removing his hands from her shoulders, “it does.”

  She turned again toward the great and pounding light, and Jack could not resist looking too. In its shimmering heat mere appeared to be a multitude of beings, all indistinguishable, and a chorus of voices, all unintelligible. Even Mam, confronted with this wonder, hesitated, staring in awe at the boundless light.

  “God will wait,” Jack whispered, just behind her.

  Mam tilted her face, her eyes closed, up and into the blaze . . . but did not move.

  “God will wait.” Was she faltering? Would she return with him, after all? The air around them wildly swirled, hot and dry, like the wind off a desert. “Mam . . .” Jack breathed, lifting his hand to touch her shoulder.

  “Mam,” came the reply, out of the very heart of the light. One shape, out of thousands, had coalesced, one voice became intelligible.

  “Mary . . .”

  Her face floated, long hair streaming, in the boiling light. “Mam, hurry . . . I cannot wait for you here.”

  “Mary, darling . . . yes, I'm coming.” Mam lifted her arms toward the light, and was borne up into it, effortlessly, like an ash rising from a fire. She disappeared into the massive, amorphous light. Mary Elizabeth disappeared too, but not before Jack heard her voice calling out to him, calling him to join them.

  Already, he felt the powerful magnetic pull of the light, and with it the diminishment of his will to resist. Another few seconds and he would willingly give himself over to it, close his eyes and drift, as Mam had done, into the embrace of that terrible brightness. It would be so easy, so very, very easy, to give up the fight and simply let it happen. And he would not be alone there! He'd have Mam now, and his mother, and he would be scoured, inside and out, by that living flame, reduced to cinders, made whole, obliterated, born anew, forgotten, purified, rendered no more nor less than what his heart in life had made him . . .

  The light Was shining directly into his eye; his lid was being held up with one finger.

  “Can you hear me?” Prescott was saying.

  The light shone now in his other eye. It was pitifully feeble compared to the light he'd been looking at.

  “My God, you should feel his skin,” Prescott was saying to someone. “It's like he's turned to ice.”

  “Do you want to give him an injection?”

  “I don't know . . . I thought he'd just fainted.”

  A hand was pressed to the side of his neck.

  “His pulse is a little slow, but otherwise it's all right.”

  Jack rolled his head and managed to say, “I'm all right.”

  He looked up and saw Prescott,
and the head nurse, hovering above him. He was lying on the floor. “What happened?”

  “You fainted, and fell out of the chair,” the nurse replied.

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Cold,” Jack said, “but okay.” With a hand from Prescott, he sat up. His eyes were now level with the mattress on Mam's bed. Her hand, the one he'd been holding, had been tucked under the sheet; it made a little bump, the size of a snowball.

  “Can you stand up?”

  “I think so.” Carefully, testing his balance, he got to his feet. The wires and tubes were no longer attached to Mam; the monitors had been turned off, too.

  “Have you told Clancy?” Jack said to Prescott.

  “Yes. I was with him when you collapsed in here.” He looked Jack up and down. “You seem all right now—are you?”

  “Yes, yes, I'm okay.” Folding both arms around himself to warm up, he walked slowly past the semicircular counter of the nursing station, and out into the hall. Clancy was waiting for him.

  “They told me you—”

  “I fainted,” Jack said. “I'm sorry. I'm all right now.”

  Clancy, clearly overcome by it all, stood silently, rooted to the spot. There was some small commotion down the hall, at the general nurses’ station.

  “I think we should go home now. There's nothing else we can do here.” Jack took him gently by the arm, and led him away from the I.C.U. As they passed the nurses’ desk, he heard the name “Logan” repeated twice, insistently, as if someone were trying to find them.

  “We're the Logans,” he said, stopping.

  A man with thinning hair and an ascot wheeled around. “Remember me? They're telling me your grandmother just died in Intensive Care.”

  Mansfield.

  “Can that be?” he went on, in his clipped British tones. “I mean, with you here to save her?”

  Jack slugged him in the face so hard he was carried halfway over the nurses’ desk, before slipping back down again, unconscious, in a heap on the floor. His legs stuck straight out, like stilts.

  “If he wants to press charges,” Logan said to the two stunned young nurses, “you know where to find me.”

  Then he led the bewildered Clancy over to the row of elevators, and took the first one back down.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  "THAT MUST BE them over there.”

  “You want me to get closer?”

  “No, just pull up to that bend, and park.”

  Tulley maneuvered the old Chevy Cavalier to the spot Sprague had indicated, and stopped. About a hundred yards away, on a slight rise, ten or twelve people were gathered at an open gravesite. A priest, bareheaded, in a long, black overcoat, was saying some words. The sky, gray and thick with clouds, threatened snow any moment.

  Sprague, also sitting in the front seat, had to look past Tulley's barrel chest in order to see anything. “Push your seat back,” he said. Tulley fumbled for the catch, then reclined. Now Sprague could see Jack, in the same tweedy overcoat he always wore to the institute, standing at the foot of the grave, head bowed, hands clasped. Sprague felt like a hunter who'd successfully tracked his quarry. It hadn't been easy.

  For one thing, his home phone number had been changed, and though Nancy no doubt had the new one, she was away for the holidays at some damned relative's. Sprague had then called the theater where Steamroller was still running, found out Jack was back in the band, and had left a message for him with someone backstage. Logan had either not gotten it, or not bothered to reply. Sprague was at his wits’ end when that Prescott character had called him from St. John's Hospital. He said he'd found out Dr. Mehta's forwarding address in India, “if you still want it, that is.”

  “Yes, of course I do,” Sprague had replied, “though I seem to have lost track of the patient in the meantime.”

  “You mean Logan? He was out here just three days ago.” And then he'd explained about Jack's grandmother. “In fact, I thought you should know he took it rather hard.” He told Sprague that Jack had clutched his dead grandmother's hand, mumbling intensely to himself, and a minute later had fallen in a faint to the floor. “He was stone-cold, too, if you can believe that. I've never felt anyone—anyone alive, I mean—who was that cold.”

  “And what about his grandmother?” Sprague shot back. “Did she revive?”

  “What?”

  “Did she revive, come back to life? What happened to her?”

  “What do you mean, what happened to her? She was dead. She stayed that way.” Prescott had sounded unsure of Sprague's sanity now.

  “Oh . . . yes,” Sprague had replied, getting control of himself again. “I'd only thought . . .” The hell with it, how could he ever explain it away? “And Jack Logan—he recovered his senses?”

  “Yes, completely, as far as I can tell.” He still sounded uncertain about Sprague. “Can I give you that address for Dr. Mehta?”

  Sprague had taken it down and thanked him; then before hanging up, he'd asked if Prescott had any idea where to find Logan.

  “No idea,” Prescott had said. “I expect he's been helping his grandfather with the funeral arrangements and all that. There's only the two of them.”

  It had taken Tulley a half hour on the phone to track down the funeral parlor, and get the time and place of the actual ceremony. It now looked to be drawing to a close.

  The priest had closed his book, and the onlookers had stepped back from the sides of the grave. The casket was being lowered, slowly, into the hard, ice-covered ground. Must have been hell, Sprague thought, on the gravediggers.

  “You gonna get out?” Tulley asked.

  “Not yet,” Sprague said, “not until it's over.”

  When the casket tested at the bottom of the grave, Jack stepped forward, after Clancy, and Mam's only sister, to toss a flower on top of the polished mahogany lid. All through the ceremony, he'd been carrying on an imaginary conversation with Mam, telling her how much he loved her, telling her that he would do his best to look after Clancy, telling her, most importantly, that he understood what she had said, and silently revealed to him, in the Other World—that death was neither to be feared, nor tampered with. That it was God's will, and not his. That his powers, however great, and wherever they'd come from, were at best a form of meddling, and at worst a contravention of some Divine plan. It was all, at last, settled in his mind, and it felt right. The questions he'd been wrestling with for weeks had been answered, and the fears that had steadily been gathering strength within him had been eased. Now, as his own flower came to rest with the others, he said his last good-bye.

  Clancy was standing, staring into the grave, as if asleep on his feet. He'd been that way ever since the hospital; Jack had been commuting between Weehawken and New York the whole time. With the funeral costs and everything else to contend with, Jack had decided to stay with the show as long as it lasted; he was in no position to pass up a weekly paycheck. (Burt had sworn not to pull any more fast ones.) The priest had put a hand on Clancy's shoulder and was talking to him in a low voice. The others were quietly dispersing. Jack took the opportunity to step away from the grave and look around. That same car he'd noticed earlier, the old Chevy, was still parked in the gravel drive. As he watched, the passenger door on the far side opened, and a tall man got out and turned around. Jack could hardly believe his eyes—it was Sprague. And now Tulley, from the driver's side. They saw that he had spotted them, and waited there. Jack looked over to see that Clancy was still being taken care of—Mam's sister, Irene, was with him too—then cautiously descended the slippery hill, balancing himself with the gravestones as he went.

  Sprague came around to the back of the car, a rolled-up newspaper in his hands. Tulley leaned, arms folded, against the driver's door.

  “We came to pay our respects,” Sprague said as Jack approached.

  Tell me another one, Jack thought.

  “We appear to have arrived a little late.”

  “Yes,” Jack said, “the funeral's over.” />
  “So we see . . . so we see.”

  “What did you come for?”

  Sprague paused, rapping the newspaper in the palm of his black leather glove. “You're not an easy man to reach these days. Did you get the message I left for you at the theater?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Ah . . . then why didn't you come to the institute?”

  “Because,” Jack replied, “it's over.”

  “What is?”

  “All of it . . . the experiments, the hypnosis, the cardiographs, the tank. I can't do it anymore.”

  “You mean because you failed to save your grandmother?”

  Jack caught himself before answering. “What do you know about that?”

  “Everything,” Sprague said, smugly. “Dr. Prescott and I have been in constant communication.”

  “Then you know that I tried, and failed,” Jack said, seeing a perfect way out.

  “Yes. You failed—once. That doesn't mean you won't succeed the next time.”

  “There won't be a next time,” Jack said, shaking his head. “I'm telling you, it's over.”

  “And I'm telling you,” Sprague said, stepping closer and lowering his voice, “it's not. You think I came this far, only to stop short on the very threshold of confirming my discovery? You think I'm going to throw away a lifetime of work, all because you haven't got the guts to see it through?” He rapped the newspaper harder against his glove. “You know what I think, Logan? I think you're trying to cut me out of this. I think you're trying to run the whole show by yourself now.” He snapped the newspaper open and showed the front page to Jack. “Did you think I wouldn't see this?”

  It was a copy of the Investigator. Under a headline that read “Miracle in the Making?” there was a picture of Jack, on a park bench, pressing his hands to the bared head of a man in a down coat.