Nightworld

Nick felt someone tugging at his arm. Reluctantly, he turned away from the hole to face one of the Park cops.

"You Dr. Quinn?" the guy said, shouting over the rattle and roar of the generators.

"Yeah. What's up?"

"Got a priest back in the crowd says you asked him here to say some prayers."

"Priest?" Nick said, baffled. "I didn't ask for any—" And then he knew. He almost laughed in the cop's face. "Oh, yeah. I've been waiting for him. Can you bring him over?"

The cop turned and waved to someone along the barricade. Nick saw a lone figure in black break from the crowd and approach at a quick walk.

He shook Father Bill's hand when he arrived. He'd seen the priest a couple of times since his return from North Carolina but still couldn't get used to how he'd aged during his five years in hiding. Before he disappeared, Nick had got to the point where he'd been calling the priest simply "Bill," but since his return he'd fallen back into the practice of prefixing the name with "Father." He pointed to the cassock and Roman collar.

"I thought you weren't going to wear that anymore."

"So did I. But I've decided the uniform has its uses. Especially when you want special treatment in a crowd."

"So what are you doing here?"

Father Bill smiled. "I came to perform the exorcism," he said in a low voice. "To close this thing up."

"Very funny."

The smile faded. "Seriously, Nick. I would like to get a close-up look at the hole."

"Sure. But stay on the platform. The dirt tends to crumble at the edges."

Nick felt the excitement build all over again as he led Father Bill to the edge. He still couldn't get over it. Something like this—a mysterious two-hundred-foot-wide hole appearing here, practically in his back yard. It was wonderful. He guided him to the railing at the edge of the wooden platform and together they looked down.

He heard Father Bill catch his breath.

"Incredible, isn't it?" Nick said. "I can't believe my luck. And that's all it is. Luck. If I'd been out getting coffee when the boys from Geology had called this morning, someone else might have picked up the phone and they'd be calling the shots here now instead of me. Being in the right place at the right time. That's all it takes."

But Father Bill said nothing. He seemed to be mesmerized by the hole.

Nick knew what the priest was feeling. He'd looked down into that hole a good hundred times since he'd arrived and still couldn't shake how unnatural it seemed.

The walls did it. Too sheer. They didn't look fallen away—more like scooped away. He could see the layers of earth and stone stacked like the cut edge of a trifle. When he'd first looked down he'd expected to see a sort of inverted cone with a rubble-filled bottom. But he couldn't see the bottom. The hole was much deeper than he'd imagined. Half a mile down, he guessed. Maybe deeper. Straight down into darkness. Maybe when the sun got higher they'd be able to see more, but right now it was night down there.

Nick had been to the Grand Canyon last summer and still remembered the vertigo he'd experienced standing at the edge of the look-out for the first time. The giddy, vertical descent of these walls gave him a similar sensation. But he'd been able to see a ribbon of water at the base of the Grand Canyon. Here, with the gentle downdraft flowing around him, he could see only blackness.

The downdraft had bothered him at first. Where could it be going? Then he realized that the air was probably flowing down into the cavity at the edges, and then turning upward and flowing out straight up through the center. That had to be the explanation. It couldn't all be flowing continually downward. There was no place to go.

He straightened up and turned to the priest.

"Well? What do you think of our little sand pit?"

The priest tore his eyes away from the hole and looked at him. He looked frightened.

"How'd it get here, Nick?"

"Don't know. That's for the geology boys to figure out. But already people are making comparisons to those crop circles in England. The tabloids will have a field day. I think The Light has got its whole staff here already."

"Any idea how deep it is?"

"We don't know yet. Geology rigged up a sonic range-finder first thing this morning and pointed it at the bottom, but couldn't get a reading."

"No bottom?" The priest's voice suddenly sounded a little dry.

Nick laughed. "Of course there's a bottom. It's just that echoes from the side walls were interfering with the readings. Geology was stumped, so they called Physics. We could wait till the sun hits zenith and do a sight measurement, but why wait? We've got a new laser that'll bounce a beam off the bottom of that hole and give us a distance reading accurate to within a centimeter."

Father Bill was staring into the hole again as he spoke.

"I have it on good authority that it's bottomless."

"It's deep," Nick said. "But not that deep." And then a thought struck him. "This authority wouldn't be the same one that told you about something happening 'in the heavens' now, would it?"

As Father Bill nodded, Nick felt a cold weight settle between his shoulder blades. He gestured toward the hole.

"Come on, now. Bottomless? You can't really believe that."

"I never believed the sun would be rising progressively later each day in mid-spring either. Did you?"

"No, but…"

Bottomless? That was patently impossible. Everything had a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end. That was the way things were. It couldn't be any other way.

Someone tapped him on his shoulder. He turned and found one of the grad students.

"We're ready to shoot."

"Great." He turned to Father Bill. "The laser's set. Wait here. In a few minutes we'll have a reading from the bottom—wherever it is."