Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack)

by F. Paul Wilson

  “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 will help 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, 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 Citi Field as the Mets meet the Phillies. A lot of our listeners are concerned as to how all this will affect the playing season …

  The First Hole

  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 wheeling 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 from the overture to the final curtain.

  “Watch.”

  Rasalom spreads his arms straight out on each side, forming a human cross. The left is truncated, missing the hand, but that is only temporary. He faces his right palm down. 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 …

  … out of sight.

  Yet there is no sound of any of it striking bottom.

  And when the hole has reached half of its intended width, Rasalom allows himself to sink into the abyss. Slowly. Gently.

  “Do you see me, Glaeken? Do you SEE?”

  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 a bearded guy dressed in sackcloth stood holding a placard. Straight out of a New Yorker cartoon. His laboriously hand-printed sign bellowed “REPENT!” in giant letters 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.

  Yeah, the world might be coming to an end, but spring had sprung, and spring meant baseball, and the start of the baseball season meant it was time once again for the annual Repairman Jack Little League Park-a-Thon. Time to stroll Central Park and tempt the muggers out of hiding so they could give to the local Little League equipment fund. Give till it hurt.

  Come to think of it, he’d met Glaeken during last year’s Park-a-Thon.

  As he crossed CPW 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. 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.

  Jack stepped off the path to let them pass.

  “S’up?”

  “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. The quake in 2011 had been a nonevent.

  Half a minute later another guy ran by and said the same thing.

  “Where?” Jack hadn’t felt 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 reached the wide expanse of grass in the lower third of the park called the Sheep Meadow. He’d heard that real sheep used to graze these fifteen acres as late as the 1930s. In the wan starlight he could make out a ragged, broken line of murmuring people rimming the area. And smack 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.

  Tar?

  Jack paused. Something about that black pool raised his hackles. An instinctive fear surged up from the most primitive parts of his being. 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 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, Jack realized it wasn’t a pool at all. A huge sinkhole, a good hundred feet across, had opened in the middle of the meadow.

  He skidded to a halt on the grass.

  A hole …

  He had a bad history with holes in the earth during the past couple of years. One in Monroe had almost swallowed him, and another in Florida had released some nasty creatures into the Everglades. Both had been connected with the Otherness, and now the Otherness was on the march.

  Maybe this was something else, something innocent.

  Yeah, right.

  Two guys there ahead of him stood on the edge, laughing, jostling each other. Jack could see they were young, dressed head to toe in black, with spiky hair. He stopped behind them. No way he wanted to get that close.

  One of the guys on the rim turned and spotted him.

  “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.

  “That’s okay. I can see all I want 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 sod, the topsoil, and the granite bedrock. The edge of the hole was clean.

  He’d seen pictures of sinkholes before on the news, from places like Guatemala 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. Manhattan’s bedrock—he could almost hear his dear, lost Weezy correcting him that it was called “schist”—was near the surface here. Could sinkholes occur in solid granite? Didn’t think so.

  Otherness … definitely the Otherness.

  The two kids were still fooling around, dancing on the edge, playing macho games. Jack was moving to his right, away from them, trying to position the light-bleed from Central Park West behind him for a better look, when he heard a yelp of terror.

  He saw one of the kids leaning forward over the edge, his arms windmilling. Even from Jack’s distance it was plain he was overbalanced and no longer fooling around, but his buddy only stood beside him, laughi
ng at his antics.

  His laughter died with the first kid’s scream as he toppled headfirst into the hole.

  “Jason! Oh, shit! Jason!”

  He lunged for his friend’s foot, missed it, and Jason 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 Jason 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, fuck, Jason! Where are you?” He turned to Jack. “How deep is this fuckin’ thing?”

  Jack didn’t answer. If this one held true to the others he’d seen, it was bottomless.

  He stepped to within half a dozen feet of the kid, got down on his belly, and crawled to the edge. He’d seen light deep down in the others—not a bottom, just light … a hazy violet glow. Maybe he’d see that—

  Vertigo hit him like a gut punch as he peeked over and saw nothing but impenetrable blackness.

  Jack closed his eyes and hung on. And as he did he thought he could still hear Jason screaming down there … way, way down there … fading …

  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. He had a good idea where that might 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. 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 from below. Then the toes of his sneakers found the rocky wall. 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. Jason’s buddy had stayed behind and the edge had given way under him. 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 was halfway done, a huge clump of earth gave way beneath the kid’s hands and he was 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.

  He looked around. The few people who had been scattered around the perimeter of the Sheep Meadow were now fleeing for the streets. Good idea, Jack thought. A fine idea. He broke into a headlong run and followed them.

  And as he ran it occurred to him that a big chunk of Central Park was missing. What was it Glaeken had said last night?

  Will you reconsider if Central Park shrinks?

  Sure, he’d said.

  Jack didn’t remember his high school geometry, so he couldn’t even guess the surface area of that hole, but a helluva lot 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. How had Glaeken known?

  He shook his head. Stupid question.

  Arms limp at his sides, Rasalom floats within a tiny pocket in the bedrock, a pocket he has made. When he descended approximately a hundred feet into the pit, he stopped and hovered as a passage into the stone opened before him. He followed it to this spot.

  Yesterday he began the Change without. Now to begin the Change within.

  He hesitates. This is a step from which there is no return. This is a process that 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 dreads most, the personification of all its nightmares. The deepest fears from the darkest recesses of the fetid primordial swamps of their hindbrains. Everything that causes the hairs at the back of the neck to rise, makes the flesh along the spine crawl, urges the bowels and bladder to empty. He shall be all of them.

  Fear incarnate.

  Rasalom’s body tilts until he is floating horizontally in the tight granite pocket. He spreads his legs and rams his feet against the stone wall. He screams as they fuse with the living rock, screams as all the fears, the angers, the hatreds, hostilities, violence, pain, and grief from the city surge into him. He stretches his arms and fuses his right fist and the stump of his left wrist to the stone, and screams again. A scream of ecstasy as new power surges through him, but a scream of agony as well. For now the Change within has begun.

  He swells. His skin stretches, then splits along his arms and legs, tears from his genitals to his scalp. As he continues to swell, the skin sloughs off and falls to the floor of the stone pocket like a discarded wrapper.

  As the night air caresses his raw flesh, Rasalom screams again with what remains of his mouth.

  FRIDAY

  In Profundis

  WNYW-TV

  —the sun’s behavior continues to baffle astronomers, physicists, and cosmologists. We’ve been informed that it rose at 5:46 this morning, late again, this time by almost nineteen minutes.

  And from Central Park, startling news of a huge hole opening in the Sheep Meadow during the night. We have a camera crew on the scene and you’ll see live footage as soon as it is available …

  Manhattan

  Glaeken stood at the picture window and looked down on the hole. Flashing red lights lit the tardy dawn as police cars and fire trucks ringed the lower end of the park. A barricade had been set up around the entire Sheep Meadow to keep out the curious throngs. Television vans and camera trucks spewed miles of cable and aimed lights that lit the area to noon brightness. Dominating the center of the scene was the hole. It had grown to two hundred feet across and stopped.

  He closed his eyes to shut out the sight of it—just for a moment. He swayed with fatigue. He ached for sleep, but when he lay down it spurned his bidding.

  So tired. He’d thought he’d freed himself from this, escaped the burden of responsibility for this war. But it wouldn’t go away. Only when his successor was empowered would he truly be free.

  Jack was the successor, the Heir. The Lady had known it, and Glaeken had no doubt of it. Even Rasalom knew.

  Under the old rules—when the Ally was still present—the succession would have occurred automatically with Glaeken’s last breath. But now, with the Ally turned away, his death would accomplish nothing.

  He needed the weapon.

  He’d expected some difficulty in reassembling its components, but the task was proving to be more formidable than he’d imagined.

  The weapon would empower Jack and pass the reins to him.

  That was the hope: first the weapon, then the succession, then the battle. A battle that, from the looks of things, would be lost before it was begun. But he had to go through the motions, had to try.

  Behind him he heard Bill hang up the phone and approach the window. Glaeken opened his eyes and rubbed a hand across his face. Had to appear calm and in control at all times. Couldn’t let them see the doubt, the dread, the desperation that nipped at his heels. How could he exhort them to maintain belief in themselves if he didn’t set the example?

  “Finally got through to Nick,” Bill said
, coming up beside him. “He’s on his way down to the park with a team from the university.”

  “What for?”

  “To find out what caused the hole.”

  “I can save him the trip. Rasalom caused the hole.”

  “That’s not going to do it for Nick.” He gazed down at the park. “I guess this is what you meant when you said his next move would be in the earth.”

  Glaeken nodded. “And its placement is not random.”

  “Really? Central Park has some significance for Rasalom?”

  “Only so far as Central Park is located right outside my window.”

  Going to rub my face in it, aren’t you, Rasalom?

  “It doesn’t look real,” Bill said. “I feel like I’m in a movie looking at some sort of computer-generated effect.”

  “It’s quite real, believe me.”

  “I do. They’ve got close-ups on the TV, by the way. Want to take a look?”

  “I’ve seen others like it close up before, although never one this big.”

  “You have? When?”

  “Long ago.” Ages.

  “How deep is that thing?”

  “Bottomless.”

  Bill smiled. “No. Really.”

  Apparently he’d misunderstood, so Glaeken spoke slowly and clearly.

  “There is no bottom to that hole, Bill. It is quite literally bottomless.”

  “But that’s impossible. It would have to go all the way through to China or whatever’s on the other end.”

  “The other end doesn’t open on this world.”

  “Come on. Where then?”

  “Elsewhere.”

  Glaeken watched the priest’s eyes flick back and forth between him and the hole.