Nightworld

  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 farther down, but it remained, 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’s 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 doors didn’t open immediately, he ran for the stairs. No time to wait. He made it down and out to the street in a few minutes, but there his progress came to a grinding halt. The crowd had grown 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 deadpan face told him more than he wanted to know. He’d never seen Glaeken react that way.

  As he inched toward the Sheep Meadow he remembered Nick saying how lucky he felt to be here. But Bill couldn’t help thinking about the awful fates that had befallen 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 from geology, balding, white-haired, sixty at least. He had his camcorder hooked up and directed out one of the forward ports; a digital Nikon hung from his neck. He was sweating. Nick wondered if Buckley was prone to panic attacks. The bell, named Triton, 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 peered through 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, workers, 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?” said a tinny voice from the speaker overhead.

  “All set,” Nick said. Buckley echoed the same.

  A sick second of free fall, then they were on their way, sinking into the depths on a steel cable. The sunlight changed to shadow. The alternating floodlights and spotlights ringing the bell’s equator were already on, illuminating the near wall. Buckley pressed his camera against his porthole, snapping shot after shot of the passing strata with his Nikon.

  “Can you hear us up there?” Nick said.

  “Loud and clear, Triton,” came the reply. “How’s it going?”

  “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 department. He hoped she’d heard it, hoped she was impressed.

  This little jaunt was going to make a name for Nicholas Quinn, Ph.D. 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—Nick could think of three from his own department right off—would be figuring out how they could parlay this into a major step up in their career. He almost laughed at his own narrow vision. He was wondering how to 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 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 por
t 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 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 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 a
ctivity 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.