No. It didn't matter what Ba wanted in this situation. She had to get them out of here. Now.
She strode through the foyer and opened the front door. With obvious reluctance, the old man and the priest made their exit. On the way out, Mr. Veilleur left a card on the hall table.
"For when you change your mind," he said.
He sounded so sure, she found herself unable to frame a reply. As she slammed the door behind them, she heard the sound of Alan's wheelchair rolling toward her.
"Kind of rough on them, weren't you?"
"You heard them. They're crazy." She stepped to one of the sidelights flanking the front door and watched the old man and the priest stand by their car in the driveway. "They might be dangerous."
"They might be. But neither of them struck me as dangerous. And that old fellow—he knew an awful lot about the Dat-tay-vao. All of it accurate."
"But his end-of-the-world talk…about a time of 'darkness and madness.' That's crazy talk."
"I recall someone who reacted exactly the same way when I told her that I had the power to heal with a touch."
Sylvia remembered how she'd thought Alan had gone off the deep end then. But this was different.
"You weren't talking about doomsday."
The priest and the old man were getting into the car. Thank God.
"True. But something's happening, Sylvia. It's spring, yet the days are getting shorter, and the scientists can't say why. Maybe we are heading for some sort of Armageddon. Maybe we should have listened a little longer. That man knows something."
"He doesn't know anything I care to hear. Certainly not doomsday nonsense."
"That's not what you're afraid of, is it, Sylvia?"
She turned and faced him. Sylvia still wasn't used to seeing Alan in a wheelchair. She refused to become used to it. Because Alan wouldn't be in it forever. The Dat-tay-vao had left him in a coma last summer, but he had fought back. And he was still fighting. That was why she loved him. He was a fighter. His will was as strong as hers. He'd never admit defeat.
"What do you mean?"
She knew exactly what he meant, and because of that she had trouble meeting his gaze.
"We've skirted around this for months now, but we've never really faced it."
"Alan, please." She stepped up beside the wheelchair and ran her fingers gently through his hair, then trailed them down to his neck, hoping to distract him. She didn't want to think about this. "Please don't."
But Alan wasn't going to be put off this time.
"Where's the Dat-tay-vao, Sylvia? Where did it go? We know it transferred from Erskine to me as he died. We know I still had it when it cured Jeffy of his autism. But when I came out of the coma in the hospital, it was gone. I can't cure anymore, Sylvia. The time comes and my touch is no different from anybody else's. So where'd it go? Where's the Dat-tay-vao now?"
"Who knows?" she said, angry that he was pushing her like this, forcing her to face the greatest fear of her life. "Maybe it died. Maybe it just evaporated."
"I don't believe that and neither do you. We've got to face it, Sylvia. When it left me it went to someone else. There were only three other people in the house that night. We know you don't have the Touch, and neither does Ba. That leaves only one other possibility."
She wrapped her hands around his head and pressed his face against her abdomen.
No! Please don't say it!
The possibility had kept her awake far into so many nights, and it skulked through her dreams when she finally did manage to drop off to sleep.
"You saw how Jeffy responded to Mr. Veilleur. He's attuned to him. So am I, I think. I just didn't happen into the living room earlier. I was drawn. And when I saw that old man I felt this burst of warmth inside me. I can only guess at what Jeffy felt."
She heard a noise over by the window and looked.
Jeffy was there, pressing his face and hands against the glass.
"I want to go with him, Mom. I want to Go!"
Bill let the Mercedes' diesel engine idle a bit till it was good and warm. He was disappointed and found it difficult to hide his irritation. This whole trip had been for nothing.
"Well," he said, glancing at Glaeken, "that was a fiasco."
The old man was staring out the side window at the house. He did not turn to Bill as he spoke.
"It didn't go quite as I'd hoped, but I wouldn't say it was a fiasco."
"How could it have gone worse? She kicked us out."
"I expect resistance from the people I must recruit. After all, I'm asking them to believe that human civilization, such as it is, is on the brink of annihilation, and to put their trust in me, a perfect stranger. That's a difficult pill to swallow. Mrs. Nash's dose is doubly bitter."
"I gather you think this Dat-tay-vao is in Jeffy."
"I know it is."
"Well, then, I think you've got a real selling job ahead of you. Because it's pretty clear that not only does that woman not believe it, she doesn't want to believe it."
"She will. As the Change progresses she will have no choice but to believe. And then she will bring me the boy."
"Let's hope she doesn't wait too long."
Glaeken nodded, still staring at the house. "Let's hope that the Dat-tay-vao and the other components are enough to make a difference."
Bill fought the despondency as he felt it return.
"In other words, all this—everything you're trying to do—might be for nothing."
"Yes. It might. But even the trying counts for something. And I met the boy today. Contact with him has helped me locate someone I have been searching for. That was a good thing."
"He took to you like I've rarely seen a child take to a strange adult."
"Oh, that wasn't Jeffy himself responding to me. That was the Dat-tay-vao within him." Glaeken turned from the window and smiled at Bill. "We're old friends, you see."
Over his shoulder, in the window next to the mansion's front door, Bill spotted the little boy's face pressed against the glass, staring at them.
WFAN-AM
Well, for those of you keeping track of it, the sun set early again tonight. Should've gone down at 8:06 but it was gone by 7:35. That means the lights'll come on a little earlier tonight here at Shea Stadium as the Mets meet the Phillies. A lot of our listeners are concerned as to how that's going to affect the playing season…
Rasalom stands on the plot of grass in the heart of the city and looks up at the surrounding buildings. Their lights blot out the ever-changing stars overhead, nearly blot out the rising moon. He stares at the top-floor windows of a particular building in the nearest row to the west. Glaeken's building. Glaeken's windows.
"Do you see me, old man?" he whispers to the night. "Or if your feeble failing eyes can't penetrate the shadows, do you at least sense my presence? I hope so. I began in the sky where all could see. Now I move to the earth. Here. Under your nose. I don't want you to miss a thing, Glaeken. I want you front-row center until the final curtain.
"Watch."
Rasalom spreads his arms straight out on each side, palms down, forming a human cross. With a basso rumble, the ground begins to fall away beneath his feet, plummeting as if dropped from a cliff. But he does not fall. The opening widens beneath him yet he remains suspended in air as more earth, tons of earth crumble and tumble down,
down,
down out of sight.
Yet there is no sound of any of it striking bottom.
And when the hole has reached half of its eventual width, Rasalom allows himself to sink into the abyss. Slowly. Gently. "Do you see me, Glaeken? Do you SEE?"
2 • THE FIRST HOLE
Manhattan
The city was getting nuttier by the minute.
Jack ambled past the darkened Museum of Natural History and headed south on Central Park West. On the corner of 74th there was a bearded guy dressed in sackcloth holding a placard. Straight out of a New Yorker cartoon. His sign was laboriously hand printed with a giant "RE
PENT!" at the top followed by a Biblical quote so long you'd have to stop and read for a good three minutes before you got it all.
So sunset had come even earlier tonight. Big whoop.
Jack was already getting used to the idea of the sun playing tricks with its own schedule; a little discomfiting, maybe, but hardly the end of the world. Things tended eventually to balance out on their own in nature. If the days were getting a little shorter here, they were probably getting a little longer in some other part of the world. The scientists said differently. In fact there'd been one on Nightline tonight just as Jack was leaving his apartment, claiming with barely repressed hysteria that the daylit hours were shrinking all over the globe. But the guy hadn't sounded too stable. The days had to be getting longer somewhere. They just didn't know where yet. Nature always found a balance.
It was people who didn't. People were always knocking things out of kilter. If they weren't, Repairman Jack would be out of work. Because when things got too far out of kilter, past the point of bearable, other people came to Jack to make it right again, to fix it.
But business was a little off at the moment, so Jack had decided to wind up this year's Park-a-thon tonight.
As he crossed Central Park West, he heard a deep rumble. Thunder? The sky was clear. Maybe a storm was gathering over Jersey.
He entered the Park at 72nd Street, got on the jogging path, and continued south. He expected to be alone, but was prepared to step off the path for any late runners coming through. As far as Jack was concerned, only an idiot would jog in the Park at night after what happened to that woman banker in '89. But then, joggers were a separate breed. When it came to a choice between risking death and, at the very least, permanent brain damage, or getting in a couple of extra miles before the end of the day, some of those folks had to stop and give the matter some serious thought.
He heard footsteps and heavy breathing ahead, coming his way. As he stopped under a lamp, a young teenage couple, certainly not seventeen yet, appeared, faces pale and strained, running like the girl's father was after them. They weren't joggers—weren't dressed for it. In fact, they seemed to be buttoning up their clothing as they ran.
"What's up?" Jack said, standing aside to let them pass.
"Earthquake!" the boy said, his voice a breathless whisper.
Jack walked on. He'd heard of making the earth move—he'd had it move for him a couple of times—but it was nothing to panic over.
Half a minute later another guy ran by and said the same thing.
"Where?" Jack said. He didn't feel anything.
"Sheep Meadow!"
"But what—?"
The guy was gone, running like a madman.
Curious now, Jack broke into a loping run and cut off the jogging path. He skirted the Lake until he got to the wide expanse of grass in the lower third of the Park called the Sheep Meadow. In the wan starlight he could make out a ragged, broken line of murmuring people rimming the area. And in the center of the meadow, what looked like a pool of inky liquid. But nothing reflected off its surface. A huge circle of empty blackness.
Jack paused. Something about that black pool raised the hackles on the back of his neck. An instinctive fear surged up from the most primitive parts of his brain. He'd experienced something similar when he'd seen his first rakosh. But this was different. This was a hell of a lot bigger.
He forced his feet to move, to carry him forward, toward the pool. He could make out the figures of a couple of people at the edge and they seemed all right, so he guessed it was safe.
As he neared the edge, Jack realized that it wasn't a pool at all. It was a hole. A huge sink hole, a good hundred feet across, had opened in the middle of the Sheep Meadow. The two guys there ahead of him were standing on the edge, laughing, jostling each other. Jack stopped behind them. He didn't want to get that close. This whole scene made him very uneasy.
One of the guys on the rim turned and spotted Jack. Jack could see that they were young, dressed in black, with spiky hair.
"Hey, dude, c'mon up here. You gotta see this. It's fuckin' awesome, man!"
"Yeah!" said the other. "The mother of all potholes!"
They started laughing and elbowing each other again.
Wrecked. Better to keep his distance from these two.
"That's okay," Jack said. "I can see all I want to from here."
Which was mostly true. In the wash of light from the tall buildings ringing the lower end of the Park, Jack could make out a sheer wall on the far side of the hole leading straight down through the granite. The edge of the hole was clean.
Jack had seen pictures of sink holes before on the news, from places like Florida where the underground water had been tapped out. But he'd never seen one so perfectly round. This looked like it had been made with a King Kong cookie cutter. And did sink holes occur in solid granite? He didn't think so.
The two kids on the edge were still fooling around, dancing on the edge, playing macho games. Jack was moving to his right, away from them, trying to get the light-bleed from Central Park South behind him for a better look into the hole, when he heard a yelp of terror.
One of the kids was leaning forward over the edge, his arms windmilling. Even from Jack's distance it was plain the kid was over-balanced and no longer fooling around, but his buddy only stood beside him, laughing at his antics.
But his laughter died abruptly with the first kid's scream as he toppled head first into the hole.
"Joey! Oh, shit! Joey!"
He lunged for his friend's foot but missed it, and Joey disappeared into the blackness. His scream was awful to hear, not merely for the blood-chilling terror it carried, but for its length. The cry seemed to go on forever, echoing up endlessly from below as Joey plummeted into the depths. It never really ended. It simply…faded…out…
His friend was on his hands and knees at the edge, looking down into the blackness.
"Oh, God, Joey! Where are you?" He turned to Jack. "How deep is this fuckin' thing?"
Jack didn't answer. Instead, he stepped to within half a dozen feet of the hole, got down on his belly, and crawled to the edge. Vertigo hit him like a gut punch as he looked down. There wasn't much to see, only a small section of the perpendicular wall; the rest was impenetrable blackness. But that same old something deep inside him that had reacted to the sight of the hole told him there was no bottom here, or if there was it was too far down to matter, and it wanted him gone from here.
Jack closed his eyes and hung on. And with his eyes closed he thought he could still hear Joey screaming down there. Way, way down there.
He felt a slight breeze against the back of his neck. Air was flowing into the hole. Into the hole. That meant it had to go somewhere, be open at the other end. Where could the other end of something this size be?
And then the earth began to slide away beneath his fingers, beneath his wrists, his forearms. Christ! The rim was giving way!
Jack rolled to his left and back, away from the edge, but he wasn't fast enough. A Cadillac-sized wedge of earth gave way and crumbled beneath him. He slid downward toward the black maw of the hole. With a desperate, panicky lunge he managed to grab a fistful of turf and hang on. His feet kicked empty air and for one breathless moment he felt eternity beckoning to him from below. Then the toes of his sneakers found the rocky wall of the hole. He levered himself up to ground level and scrambled away from the edge as fast as his rubbery knees would carry him.
When he'd gone a good fifty feet he heard a terrified cry and risked a look back. Joey's buddy was still back at the edge. Most of his body had dropped into the hole. Jack could see his head, see his arms and hands tearing at the grass in a losing effort to hold on.
"Help me, man!" he cried in a voice all tears and terror. "God, please!
Jack started to unbutton his shirt, thinking he might be able to use it as a rope. But before he reached the last button, a huge clump of earth gave way beneath the kid and he was gone. Just like that. One moment ther
e, the next gone, leaving behind only a fading high-pitched wail.
More earth sloughed off and fell away, narrowing the distance between Jack and the edge. The damn hole was getting bigger.
Jack looked around. The few people who had been scattered around the perimeter of the Sheep Meadow were now fleeing for the streets. A good idea, Jack thought. A fine idea. He broke into a headlong run and followed them.
And as he was running, it occurred to him that a big chunk of Central Park was missing. What was it that old weirdo had said last night?
Will you reconsider if Central Park shrinks?
Sure. Sure he'd reconsider.
Jack didn't remember his high-school geometry, so he didn't know the surface area of that hole in Central Park, but a helluva lot of square feet of the Sheep Meadow was missing. Which meant the Park was smaller by that many square feet.
…if Central Park shrinks…
Jack picked up his pace. He hoped he hadn't thrown out that old weirdo's number.
Arms limp at his sides, Rasalom floats within a tiny pocket in the granite, a pocket he has made. When he descended approximately a hundred feet into the pit, he stopped and hovered as a passage into the bedrock opened before him. He floated into the passage and followed it to this spot.
Yesterday he began the Change above. Now it is time to begin the Change within.
He hesitates. This is a step from which there is no return. This is a process which once begun cannot be reversed, cannot be halted. When it is complete he will have a new form, one he will wear into eternity.
He will be magnificent.
Still he hesitates. For the shape of his new form will not be of his own choosing. Those above—those puny, frightened creatures milling on the surface—will determine his countenance. He shall be an amalgam of all that they fear. For as their fear feeds him, so shall it shape him. His form shall be the common denominator of all that humanity loathes and fears most, the personification of all its nightmares. The deepest fears, from the darkest recesses of the fetid primordial swamps of their hindbrains. All the things that cause the hairs at the back of the neck to rise, make the flesh along the spine crawl, urge the bowels and bladder to empty. He shall be all of them.
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