Bill fought the despondency as he felt it return.

"In other words, all this—everything you're trying to do—might be for nothing."

"Yes. It might. But even the trying counts for something. And I met the boy today. Contact with him has helped me locate someone I have been searching for. That was a good thing."

"He took to you like I've rarely seen a child take to a strange adult."

"Oh, that wasn't Jeffy himself responding to me. That was the Dat-tay-vao within him." Glaeken turned from the window and smiled at Bill. "We're old friends, you see."

Over his shoulder, in the window next to the mansion's front door, Bill spotted the little boy's face pressed against the glass, staring at them.

WFAN-AM

Well, for those of you keeping track of it, the sun set early again tonight. Should've gone down at 8:06 but it was gone by 7:35. That means the lights'll come on a little earlier tonight here at Shea Stadium as the Mets meet the Phillies. A lot of our listeners are concerned as to how that's going to affect the playing season…

Rasalom stands on the plot of grass in the heart of the city and looks up at the surrounding buildings. Their lights blot out the ever-changing stars overhead, nearly blot out the rising moon. He stares at the top-floor windows of a particular building in the nearest row to the west. Glaeken's building. Glaeken's windows.

"Do you see me, old man?" he whispers to the night. "Or if your feeble failing eyes can't penetrate the shadows, do you at least sense my presence? I hope so. I began in the sky where all could see. Now I move to the earth. Here. Under your nose. I don't want you to miss a thing, Glaeken. I want you front-row center until the final curtain.

"Watch."

Rasalom spreads his arms straight out on each side, palms down, forming a human cross. With a basso rumble, the ground begins to fall away beneath his feet, plummeting as if dropped from a cliff. But he does not fall. The opening widens beneath him yet he remains suspended in air as more earth, tons of earth crumble and tumble down,

down,

down out of sight.

Yet there is no sound of any of it striking bottom.

And when the hole has reached half of its eventual width, Rasalom allows himself to sink into the abyss. Slowly. Gently. "Do you see me, Glaeken? Do you SEE?"

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.