Nightworld

2 • THE FIRST HOLE

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 there was a bearded guy dressed in sackcloth holding a placard. Straight out of a New Yorker cartoon. His sign was laboriously hand printed with a giant "REPENT!" 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.

So sunset had come even earlier tonight. Big whoop.

Jack was already getting used to the idea of the sun playing tricks with its own schedule; a little discomfiting, maybe, but hardly the end of the world. Things tended eventually to balance out on their own in nature. If the days were getting a little shorter here, they were probably getting a little longer in some other part of the world. The scientists said differently. In fact there'd been one on Nightline tonight just as Jack was leaving his apartment, claiming with barely repressed hysteria that the daylit hours were shrinking all over the globe. But the guy hadn't sounded too stable. The days had to be getting longer somewhere. They just didn't know where yet. Nature always found a balance.

It was people who didn't. People were always knocking things out of kilter. If they weren't, Repairman Jack would be out of work. Because when things got too far out of kilter, past the point of bearable, other people came to Jack to make it right again, to fix it.

But business was a little off at the moment, so Jack had decided to wind up this year's Park-a-thon tonight.

As he crossed Central Park West, 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. He expected to be alone, but was prepared to step off the path for any late runners coming through. As far as Jack was concerned, only an idiot would jog in the Park at night after what happened to that woman banker in '89. But then, joggers were a separate breed. When it came to a choice between risking death and, at the very least, permanent brain damage, or getting in a couple of extra miles before the end of the day, some of those folks had to stop and give the matter some serious thought.

He heard footsteps and heavy breathing ahead, coming his way. As he stopped under a lamp, 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.

"What's up?" Jack said, standing aside to let them pass.

"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.

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

"Where?" Jack said. He didn't feel 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 got to the wide expanse of grass in the lower third of the Park called the Sheep Meadow. In the wan starlight he could make out a ragged, broken line of murmuring people rimming the area. And 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.

Jack paused. Something about that black pool raised the hackles on the back of his neck. An instinctive fear surged up from the most primitive parts of his brain. 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 forward, 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 the edge, Jack realized that it wasn't a pool at all. It was a hole. A huge sink hole, a good hundred feet across, had opened in the middle of the Sheep Meadow. The two guys there ahead of him were standing on the edge, laughing, jostling each other. Jack stopped behind them. He didn't want to get that close. This whole scene made him very uneasy.

One of the guys on the rim turned and spotted Jack. Jack could see that they were young, dressed in black, with spiky hair.

"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. Better to keep his distance from these two.

"That's okay," Jack said. "I can see all I want to 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 granite. The edge of the hole was clean.

Jack had seen pictures of sink holes before on the news, from places like Florida 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. And did sink holes occur in solid granite? He didn't think so.

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

One of the kids was leaning forward over the edge, his arms windmilling. Even from Jack's distance it was plain the kid was over-balanced and no longer fooling around, but his buddy only stood beside him, laughing at his antics.

But his laughter died abruptly with the first kid's scream as he toppled head first into the hole.

"Joey! Oh, shit! Joey!"

He lunged for his friend's foot but missed it, and Joey 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 Joey 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, God, Joey! Where are you?" He turned to Jack. "How deep is this fuckin' thing?"

Jack didn't answer. Instead, he stepped to within half a dozen feet of the hole, got down on his belly, and crawled to the edge. Vertigo hit him like a gut punch as he looked down. There wasn't much to see, only a small section of the perpendicular wall; the rest was impenetrable blackness. But that same old something deep inside him that had reacted to the sight of the hole told him there was no bottom here, or if there was it was too far down to matter, and it wanted him gone from here.

Jack closed his eyes and hung on. And with his eyes closed he thought he could still hear Joey screaming down there. Way, way down there.

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. Where could the other end of something this size 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 of the hole. 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 to him from below. Then the toes of his sneakers found the rocky wall of the hole. 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. Joey's buddy was still back at the edge. 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 reached the last button, a huge clump of earth gave way beneath the kid and he was gone. Just like that. One moment there, the next 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.

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

And as he was running, it occurred to him that a big chunk of Central Park was missing. What was it that old weirdo had said last night?

Will you reconsider if Central Park shrinks?

Sure. Sure he'd reconsider.

Jack didn't remember his high-school geometry, so he didn't know the surface area of that hole in Central Park, but a helluva lot of square feet 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. He hoped he hadn't thrown out that old weirdo's number.