Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) (8 page)

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.

“Elsewhere? Where’s elsewhere?”

“The place has no name. We call it the Otherness, but I don’t believe there’s any way to describe in human terms what the other end of that hole is like.”

“I believe I’ll change and go down there for a closer look.”

“No need to rush. The hole isn’t going anywhere. And it’s only the first.”

“You mean there’s going to be more?”

“Many. All over the world. But Rasalom has honored me by opening the first outside my front door.”

“I’ll see if I can hook up with Nick down there and find out what he knows.”

“Just be sure to be back before dark.”

Bill smiled. “Okay, Dad.”

“I’m quite serious.”

His smile faded. “Yeah. I guess you are. Okay. Back before dark.”

Glaeken watched Bill hurry to his room. He was fond of the man. He couldn’t ask for a better houseguest. Always willing to help around the apartment or with Magda when the nurse wasn’t around.

As if sensing her name within his thoughts, Magda called from the bedroom.

“Hello? Is anybody there? Have I been left alone to die?”

“Coming, dear.”

He took one final look at the hole, then headed down the hall.

He found Magda sitting up in her bed. She’d been losing weight and her eyes were starting to retreat into her skull. Her face was as lined as his, her hair as white. But her brown eyes were bright with anger.

“Who are you?” she said, switching to her native Hungarian tongue.

“I’m your husband, Magda.”

“No, you’re not!” She spat the words. “I wouldn’t marry such an old man like you! Why, you’re old enough to be my father! Where’s Glenn?”

“Right here. I’m Glenn.”

“No! Glenn’s young and strong with red hair!”

He took her hands in his. “Magda, it’s me. Glenn.”

Terror flashed across her face, then her features softened. She smiled.

“Oh, yes. Glenn. How could I have forgotten? Where have you been?”

“Right in the next room.”

Her expression hardened as her eyes narrowed.

“No you weren’t! You’ve been out seeing other women! Don’t deny it! You’re out with that nurse! Don’t think I don’t know what the two of you are up to when you think I’m asleep!”

Glaeken held her hands and let her ramble on. He wanted to cry. After two years he’d have thought he could have adapted to anything, but he couldn’t get used to Magda’s dementia. None of her ravings were true, yet Magda fully believed the delusions floating through the expanding vacuum of her mind, truly meant the hurtful things she said as she spoke them. They never failed to cut him deeply.

Oh, Magda, my Magda, where have you gone?

Glaeken closed his eyes and recalled her as she had been when they’d met in 1941. Her soft, even features, her fresh pale skin, glossy chestnut hair, and wide dark eyes filled with love, tenderness, and intelligence. It was the love, tenderness, and intelligence he mourned for most now. Even after her physical beauty had faded, his love for her had not. For she had remained Magda the poet, Magda the singer, Magda the mandolin player, Magda the scholar who so loved art and music and literature. Her compendium of Romanian Gypsy music,
Songs of the Rom,
was still in print, still gracing the shelves of finer bookstores.

Three years ago she started to slip away, infiltrated and irreversibly replaced by this mad, incoherent stranger. Her mental status deteriorated first, but soon she became physically enfeebled as well. She could not get out of bed by herself now. That made caring for her easier in a way because she could no longer wander at night. In the early stages of her decline Glaeken had found her searching the street below, calling for their pet cat, dead since 1962. After that he’d had to deadbolt the apartment door and remove the knobs from the stove to prevent her from cooking “dinner” at two in the morning.

The old, buried Magda occasionally flickered back to life. She couldn’t remember what she had for breakfast—or if she’d even
had
breakfast—yet now and then she’d recall an incident in their life together from thirty or forty years ago as if it were yesterday. But instead of buoying Glaeken, the brief lapses in her dementia only deepened his despair.

It wasn’t fair.

Glaeken had known and loved so many women through the ages, yet each relationship had ended in bitterness. Each love had, in her own way, ended up hating him as she grew old while he stayed young. Finally he had found Magda, the one woman in his seemingly endless life that he’d be allowed to grow old with. And they’d had a glorious life, a love that could not be tainted even by the pain of these past few years.