Nightworld ac-6

by F. Paul Wilson

  "Better be careful, Father."

  The voice jolted him out of the reverie. To his horror he found himself sitting astride the platform railing, readying to swing his other leg over. The depths loomed below. With a convulsive lunge, he hurled himself back onto the platform and squatted there panting, sweating, and shaking. He looked up and saw one of the city workers standing nearby, looking down at him.

  "You okay, Father?"

  "I will be in a minute."

  "Hey, I din't mean t' scare ya, but I mean we built that railing as sturdy as we could, but it ain't gonna hold a guy your size, know what I mean?"

  Bill nodded as he rose shakily to his feet.

  "I realize that. Thanks for the warning." Thanks more than you know.

  The workman waved and ambled off, leaving Bill alone on the platform. He pulled himself together and moved away from the edge.

  What had happened a moment ago? What had he been doing sitting on that railing? Had he actually been readying to jump? What could he have been thinking?

  Or had he been thinking at all? More like reacting—but to what? To the abyss?

  Bill shuddered. Maybe coming down here hadn't been such a good idea. He'd seen the hole up close. He could watch further developments from Glaeken's window or on the tube. He looked around for Nick and saw him walking his way. His expression was troubled.

  "What's wrong, Nick?"

  " 'Technical difficulties,' as they say on TV. We'll have it straightened out in a few minutes."

  Bill watched Nick's face closely. His upper lip was beaded with perspiration.

  "You didn't get the reading you expected, did you."

  "We didn't get any reading. A glitch in the receiver, that's all."

  Bill allowed himself a quick shot of relief. He wanted very much for Nick to find the bottom of that hole. He wanted Glaeken to be wrong, just once. Not out of animosity or envy, but because Glaeken had been right about everything so far, and everything he was predicting was bad. Bill felt he'd be able to rest a little better at night if just once Glaeken was proven wrong.

  And then a thought struck him like an icy wind, carrying off any sense of relief.

  "Wait a minute, Nick. You said you didn't receive any signal. Isn't that what would happen if the hole was bottomless?"

  "It's not bottomless, Fa—"

  "Isn't that what would happen?"

  "Well…yes. But that's not the only reason. There are scores of reasons why we wouldn't get a signal back."

  "But one of them is that the beam didn't find anything to bounce off, and so therefore it never came back. Am I right?"

  Nick sighed. "You're right." Suddenly he sounded tired. "But the hole's not bottomless. It can't be. Nothing's bottomless."

  One of the grad students rushed up to Nick with a green-striped printout. Bill could tell from Nick's expression that he didn't like what he saw there. He handed the slip back to the student.

  "Do it again. And do it right."

  "But we are," the student said, looking offended. "Everything checks out a hundred percent. The beam and the receiver are working perfectly."

  Nick tapped the printout. "Obviously not."

  "Maybe something down there's absorbing the beam."

  "Absorbing the beam," Nick said slowly. He seemed to like the idea. "Let's look into that." He turned to Bill. "I'm going to be tied up for awhile, Father, but hang around. We'll crack this yet." He winked and walked away.

  Bill headed back to the apartment in mid-afternoon to grab a bite and make a pit stop before Nick started his descent.

  He had to hand it to Nick—he was as inventive as he was stubborn. He wouldn't admit defeat. When Nick had heard there was a working diving bell on display down at South Street Seaport, he made a few calls and arranged to rent it. His plan was to get in that thing and ride it as far down into the hole as the cable would allow, then take another laser reading from down there. Bill wanted to be back in time to see him off.

  He had to fight through the crowd on Central Park West. The area around the lower end of the park had become an impromptu street festival. Well, why not? The sun was out and the area was jammed with curious people. Anyone with anything to sell, from hot dogs to shishkebab, to balloons, to knock-off Rolexes was there. The air was redolent of a variety of ethnic foods wide enough to shame the U.N. cafeteria. He spotted someone hawking "I saw the Central Park Hole" tee-shirts, still wet from the silk screener.

  In the apartment he found Glaeken, as expected, at the picture window.

  "What have they decided down there?" the old man said without turning.

  "They've decided that due to various technical glitches they can't figure out how deep it is at this time."

  Even at noon, with the sun shining directly into the hole, they hadn't been able to see the bottom. The blackness had been driven further down, but it was still there, obscuring the bottom.

  Now Glaeken turned. His smile was rueful.

  "They've constructed these fabulous instruments for exact measurements, yet they refuse to believe the data they're receiving. Amazing how the mind resists the truth when the truth conflicts with preconceptions."

  "I can't really blame them. It's not easy to accept the impossible."

  "I suppose. But impossible is a useless word now." He turned back to the window. "What's that they're rigging up?"

  "A derrick. Nick going down into the hole to—"

  Glaeken spun and faced Bill. His eyes wide.

  "You're talking about your young friend? He's going down into the hole?"

  "Yes. As soon as the bell is set up."

  Glaeken grabbed Bill's upper arms. His grip was like iron.

  "Don't let him do it. You've got to stop him. Don't let him go into that hole!"

  The look on his face made Bill afraid for Nick. Very afraid. He turned and ran for the door. Out in the hall, he pressed the elevator button. When the door didn't open immediately, he ran for the stairs. No time to wait for it. He made it down and out to the street in a few minutes, but there his progress came to a grinding halt. The crowd was even thicker. Pressing through them was like wading through taffy.

  He fought a rising panic as he roughly pushed and shoved people aside, leaving an angry wake. He hadn't waited around to ask Glaeken what might happen to Nick down in that hole. The look on the old man's perpetually dead-pan face told him more than he wanted to know. He'd never seen Glaeken react that way.

  As he inched his way toward the Sheep Meadow, he remembered Nick saying how lucky he felt to be here. But Bill couldn't help thinking what had happened to all those other people he cared about.

  His gut writhed with the thought that perhaps luck had nothing to do with it.

  "Lights, camera, action!" Nick said as the diving bell lurched into motion.

  Dr. Dan Buckley gave him a wan smile and gripped one of the hand rungs. Buckley was an older gent, balding, white haired, sixty at least, from Geology. He had his video camcorder hooked up and directed out one of the forward ports; a 35mm Nikon hung from his neck. He was sweating. Nick wondered if Buckley was prone to panic attacks. The bell, named Trident, was the size of a small, low-ceilinged bathroom. Not a happy place for a claustrophobe.

  His stomach did a little spin as the bell swung out over the hole. He'd never liked amusement park rides and this was starting out like one. He looked out the aft port to his right to double-check the laser range-finder mounted there. Everything looked secure. He glanced out the other port toward the crane and the crowd of cops and workers and various city officials and the other members of the teams from the university. He saw Father Bill push his way to the front and start jumping and waving and shouting. He'd been late coming back but at least he'd made it. Nick was glad to have him here to see this. He waved back and gave him a thumbs-up through the glass, then settled down for the ride.

  This was great. This was fabulous. This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him.

  "All set in there?" sai
d a tinny voice from the speaker overhead.

  "All set," Nick said. Buckley echoed the same.

  There came a sick second of freefall, then they were on their way, lowered into the depths on a steel cable. They were soon out of the sunlight and into shadow. The alternating floodlights and spotlights ringing the bell's equator were already on, illuminating the near wall. Buckley was glued to his porthole snapping shot after shot of the passing strata with his Nikon.

  "Can you hear us up there?" Nick said.

  "Loud and clear, Trident," came the reply. "How's it going down there?"

  "Smooth as can be. And fascinating. The city ought to consider buying this rig and making it into an amusement ride. Might keep taxes down."

  He heard appreciative laughter from above and smiled. That sounded pretty cool and collected, didn't it? He hoped so. Cynthia Hayes was up there, watching and waiting with the others from the university. He hoped she'd heard it, hoped she was impressed. This little jaunt was going to make Nicholas Quinn, PhD. into a big name. The press would see to that. A mob of reporters was waiting up top, and he knew as soon as he stepped out of the bell they'd be all over him with a million questions. He'd be on all the news shows tonight, both the early and late. Maybe even the networks. Most guys in his spot would be figuring out how they could parlay this into a major step up in their career—

  Nick could think of three from his own department right off. Nick almost laughed at his own narrow vision. He was wondering how he could parlay it into an opportunity to ask Cynthia out. If he was famous, how could she say no?

  The intercom popped him out of a Cynthia daydream.

  "You're at the half-way mark, Trident. How're you doing?"

  "Fine," Nick said. "Can you still see us?"

  "Yeah, but you're just a little blob of light down there now."

  Halfway. They had ten thousand feet of cable up there. Almost a mile down and still no bottom. This was incredible. What could have caused a hole like this? Could it be natural? Something extra-terrestrial 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, Trident? "

  "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 their light within a few yards of the bulbs. The spots weren't doing much better—shafts of light 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," Nick said. His own voice didn't sound too steady either.

  "They're losing power."

  Nick didn't think so. It was the darkness out there. 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.

  It was pure black out there now. The lights were gone.

  "You got it all, Trident. 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 laser controls and noticed that his hands were trembling. It was suddenly cold in here. 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, Trident," said the speaker in the ceiling. "We've got static on this end."

  Buckley repeated the message but no reply came through the speaker. 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. It was 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 only got so much cable. They can only send us down 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 there was 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. 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 Bi
ll 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 Enemy. The one who was shrinking the daylight, who'd dug this huge worm hole 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. There was no mistaking it. Its sound still echoed through his dreams. The Enemy was in 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!" he cried. "Bring them up now!"

  The scientists and technicians started at the sound of his shouts. They looked at him as if he was 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 grabbed 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 further and further 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?