Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) (48 page)

“Three years this coming summer.”

If
summer came.  Word was it might not.

Abe shook his head.  “Like a lifetime it seems.  Anyway, seeing that happen made it abundantly clear that the world is keeping secrets.  Not just the kind I thought it was
– and is.  Currencies and economies and governments are being manipulated, but that’s
gornisht
compared to what’s really going on, right?”

“’Fraid so.  It’s cosmic, dude.”

“Since when you’re a hippy?”

“But it
is
cosmic.”  

“And how do you find this Adversary, as you call him?”

“I hope to pick up his trail tonight.”

“Where?  In the cosmos?”

“Nope.  New Jersey.”

Jersey again?  
The Dark at the End

May

NIGH
TWORLD

This is the end of the Secret History.  Because after
Nightworld
it’s no longer secret.

Nightworld
is an ensemble novel. It’s like Old Home Week with characters from across the Secret History –
The Keep, The Tomb, The Touch, Reborn
, “Tenants,” and so on.  Some live, some die, and some become collateral damage.  No one is unscathed as all scores are settled, all debts are paid.

The novel picks up a couple of months after the horrors of
The Dark at the End
.  The Adversary Cycle and Jack’s tale have merged and this is the grand finale.
Nightworld
ends both narrative tracks, as well as the Secret History itself.  More stories remain to be told, but the timeline stops there. I will set no stories after
Nightworld
.

I have extensively revised
Nightworld
since its initial publication in the early 90s.  Jack’s role has been expanded – he is now a major player – but he remains one of many.  Characters who didn’t exist when I wrote the original must be dealt with.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a scream in the dark…

Check out the first many holes in the earth:

NIGH
TWORLD

(sample)

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 non-event.

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 call “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, laughing 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.

More holes ahead – and they don’t stay empty for long…
Nightworld

TIMELINE

A chronology of births and deaths and major events in the Secret History

THE PAST

Prehistory – "Demonsong"
– Rasalom’s first death

Srem assembles her
Compendium

The Great Cataclysm ends the First Age

1476 – Rasalom trapped in the Keep;

1498 – Torquemada encounters the
Compendium of Srem

1563 – on one of his inspection trips to the keep,

Glaeken seals the
Compedium
and other “forbidden” books there

1890 – Ernst Drexler Sr born

1923-24 – “Aryans and Absinthe”

1926-45 –
Black Wind –
the Gaijin Masamune is damaged at Hiroshima

1927 – Jonah Stevens loses left eye in Great Lower Mississippi Valley Flood

1930 – Jack’s father born

1931 – Jack’s mother born

1941 – early April – Jasmine "Jazzy" Cordeau impregnated with a human clone

1941 – May 3 -
The Keep
– Rasalom killed – invades the clone in Jazzy