Conspircaies

Then let go of the root.

"Jeez!" Jack said as the two of them plummeted into the depths.

The creature let out a howl—Jack couldn't tell if it was rage or frustration or both, but it was loud—then leaped back onto the fallen trunk.

Together they watched the maelstrom catch the pair and spin them downward until they vanished.

Now what? He thought, gazing into the swirling, flashing abyss.

Suddenly he sensed a change in the gateway. The flashing stopped as a bright speck of fire appeared in its suddenly darkened depths. The spot grew and swelled, rushing upward.

Jack knew—just knew he shouldn't be here. The dog-monkey was still raging and howling as Jack turned and ran as fast as his injured knee would let him. He was maybe a dozen feet away when a blast hurled him face-first to the ground. He rolled over and saw a column of fiery white light shoot into the sky, engulfing the tree trunk and the monkey thing. He watched it rip the flesh from the creature, then vaporize its bones along with the center of the trunk. The light shot toward the stars, poised for a heartbeat, then faded.

And now…silence. Real silence. The sucking downdraft had stopped, and the flashes along with it.

Jack staggered once more to the rim…just a cavity in the earth now, maybe fifteen feet deep. An excavation for a foundation…with the charred ends of a fallen oak on either side. The men in black, the dog-monkey thing—all gone. Only one loose end remained…

Roma.

He looked toward the sidewalk, but Roma was gone.

Jack made a quick turn but he was nowhere to be seen. Where the—?

Sirens began to wail in the distance. House lights were on up and down the street and people were begi

Jack kept his headlights off as he eased away.

10

Off to his left, the night sky began to pale as Jack drove toward the expressway. As much as he ached to floor the gas pedal, he kept to the limit. Last thing he needed now was to run across a cop and be stopped for speeding.

He had the windows closed and the heater cranked to maximum, not so much against the cold outside as the marrow-deep chill within as Frayne Canfield's words—he'd spoken them only hours ago, but it seemed like eons—pursued him down Glen Cove Road.

You are involved. . . more deeply than you can possibly imagine. . . .

No…he wanted no involvement with anything even remotely like what he'd just encountered. But the worst of it was he still wasn't sure just what he'd encountered. His life already was complicated enough. He didn't need to be involved as some sort of pawn in a cosmic conflict.

Cosmic conflict…jeez. Got to stop talking like that.

Already the events of the last hour were begi

And maybe I shouldn't try to kid myself.

It had happened. Something was going on, something big …an eternal war behind the scenery.

Suddenly dizzy and a little sick, Jack stopped the car and got out to gasp some cool fresh air. He looked around at the trees, the towns flanking the highway, the fading stars…and shivered.

Scenery? Was that all that this was? Nothing more than scenery?

He couldn't live like that. It made his day-to-day life so…insignificant. He had to believe that what he did mattered, at least to him. Otherwise…why bother?

Jack shook his head. He'd hired on to this gig to answer one simple question: Where's Melanie Ehler? He'd answered that one, but now he was carrying around dozens more. With no way to answer even one of them.

All right—what did he know for sure?

He forced a smile. Okay, first off, he was still owed the second half of his fee for finding Melanie Ehler, and he knew for damn sure he wasn't ever going to collect it.

And betting on Roma's murderous monkey monster being dead seemed a sure thing.

Beyond those two, though, everything else was pretty much up for grabs.

He could assume that Zaleski and Kenway and Lew were dead on the far side of that hole, but did "dead" mean the same thing over there?

Melanie and Canfield were in that same Other place as well—but without their "ticket." Jack hoped they were slow roasting over what passed for a fire in the Otherness.

And what about Olive? What had happened to her corpse? Sent into the Otherness too? Or would it turn up in some alley next week?

Those two black-eyed goons…Jack had assumed they were working for the Otherness, and that they'd killed and mutilated Olive. But now he wasn't so sure. At the end they seemed to be working against the Otherness.

Does that mean they were on my side?

But they'd wanted to chuck him into the hole—came damn close to succeeding. Hadn't seemed to care one way or the other about him, they simply wanted to close the gateway, by any means necessary. They thought he would do it, so he'd immediately become expendable.

With allies like that, who needed enemies?

But as it worked out—they'd closed the gateway. When they hit bottom or reached the Otherness or wherever they ended up, they caused some sort of titanic explosion, a blast of light that must have been visible for miles.

Visible for miles…like the Tunguska explosion Kenway and Zaleski talked about tonight. Hadn't Kenway said one theory held that it was caused by an antimatter meteor striking the earth?

Maybe that was what those two guys had been—antimatter meteors of a sort, striking the Otherness's matter. Or more likely, matter meteors striking the Otherness's antimatter. Because the Otherness seemed anti-everything.

And finally, what about Sal Roma—"The One," as Melanie had called him? Had he been for real—some sort of ageless Otherness superhybrid born in Monroe and waiting to take over? And where was he now? Had he been so closely linked to the monkey thing that when it went up in smoke, so did he?

Jack doubted that. Some primitive part of him sensed The One still out there, prowling around, looking for a new way to create a world-changing cataclysm that would usher in the age of Otherness.

And he knew beyond all reason and all doubt that someday they would meet again.

But even more disturbing was the final look Number One had given him before he'd let go of that root. Jack kept seeing those black eyes, so cold and expressionless, and yet…a nebulous feeling that some sort of torch was being passed.

Not to me, thank you.

But like it or not, want it or not, had he come too close and seen too much, and because of that been drafted into some sort of shadow army?

The idea gave him the cold shakes.

He started as he sensed something dark moving above, blotting out the stars. He ducked into a crouch and looked up.

Nothing…an empty sky.

He straightened and slid back into the car. No, he couldn't live like this. Had to shake it off. He'd be a paranoid basket case if he didn't.

He'd handle it…give him a few days and he'd be back to normal. He'd go on living his life as before, taking on fix-it jobs, kibitzing with Abe, hanging at Julio's, playing with Vicky, loving Gia. Not your normal everyday life, but one firmly grounded in reality—the only reality he knew or wanted to know. He'd put the episode in Monroe behind him and never look back. This page was turned, this chapter closed.

But as he shifted into gear and drove on, Canfield's words seemed to whisper through the heater vents.

You are involved…more deeply than you can possibly imagine…