Nightworld

From the blown-out windows of the top floor, Sylvia watched the pandemonium below with growing alarm. Jeffy had soiled himself and so she and Ba had brought him upstairs for a change of clothes. Now she held onto the sill with one hand and Jeffy with the other as the building shook and creaked and groaned around them.

An earthquake! she thought. She'd never been in one, but this had to be how it felt.

And there, down on the near edge of the Sheep Meadow. The earth was cracking open.

Another hole!

This was it, then. The growing light, the sense of impending victory, the return of the bugs en masse to the original hole—it was all a false hope, an empty promise. A new hole, unafraid of the light, was opening closer to the building. And what new horror was going to issue from that?

The sudden changes could mean only one thing: Glaeken had failed.

The tremors worsened as a deep rumble issued from the first hole in the center of the Sheep Meadow. Clouds of what looked like dust or smoke were spewing from the opening. Sylvia reached for the field glasses and focused on the hole. The edges looked ragged—they seemed to be crumbling, breaking away, sliding into the opening, choking it.

Yes! It was closing! And below—she shifted the glasses—what was happening with the new hole?

But it wasn't a hole yet. Maybe it never would be. More like a depression, a cave-in of some sort.

The tremors stopped.

Then silence. Sylvia lowered the field glasses and paused, listening. Silence like no silence she could ever recall. Not a bird, not an insect, not a breeze was stirring. She could hear the rush of her own blood through her arteries, but nothing else. All the world, all of nature paused, frozen, stunned, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

It lasted one prolonged agonized moment. And then, for the second time tonight, the light began to fade.

The silence was shattered by a burst of cries of renewed terror from below, then the chant began again. She heard Ba begin to repeat the words behind her. Sylvia joined him, whispering the litany as she raised the glasses and scanned the roiling crowd for Carol or Bill or Jack—anyone she knew.

The chant was failing this time. Despite thousands of throats shouting the words at the tops of their lungs, the light continued to fade.

We've lost!

Somehow in the dying light she managed to pick out Carol's familiar figure at the edge of the new hole, or depression, or wherever it was. She wanted to shout down to her to get away from there. That was where the new threat would arise. But Carol was right on the edge, pointing down at the bottom of the depression. She was jumping up and down, hugging Bill, hugging everyone within reach. What—?

Sylvia refocused on the bottom of the pit. Something moving there, struggling in the loose dirt. She strained to see in the last of the light.

A man. A man with red hair.

Glaeken? Alive? But he couldn't be. If he survived down there it could only mean—

Suddenly Ba was at her side, pointing across the Park toward the east side.

"Look, Missus! Look!"

In all their years together, she had never heard such naked excitement in his voice. She looked.

The crowd below couldn't see it yet, but from this elevation there could be no doubt. Sylvia didn't need the field glasses. Straight ahead, down at the far end of one of the concrete canyons, a bright orange glow was firing the sky over the East River.

"The sun, Missus! The sun is rising!"