Conspiracies

Time was running out. With the rim of the hole still expanding, the tree and all its roots would be hopping on the Otherness Express in a minute or so. Every cell in his body was urging him to get the hell out of here, but he needed answers, damn it.

"I'll make you a deal," Jack shouted over the roar. "We call a truce, and you tell me who sent you and why you've been following me. That happens, I'll pull you up and—"

A screech startled him as Roma's monkey leaped onto the tree-trunk and began jumping about.

And then it shouted at him—in English.

"Save them! Don't let them fall!"

Stunned, Jack stared at the monkey, then glanced over his shoulder. Roma stood back on the sidewalk, watching.

"Quickly!" the monkey screeched as it danced back and forth on the straddling trunk. "Help them up! Don't let the Twins fall! The gateway isn't big enough yet! They'll ruin everything!"

Jack glanced at it—yeah, right—then peered back into the hole.

"Damn you!" said another voice, lower and coarser.

Jack looked up in time to see Roma's organ grinder monkey swell into the red-eyed dog-monkey that had attacked him in the basement.

"Holy—"

He rolled away as the thing hurled itself at him with a bellowing roar.

But it wasn't after him. It crouched in the spot Jack had vacated and leaned over the edge of the hole, reaching for the men in black.

"Hang on," it shouted. "I'll pull you up."

Jack peeked over the edge and saw that the monster had grabbed the upper end of the root and was hauling it up.

He watched Number One stare up at the creature a moment, then look down at Number Two. Number Two shook his head. Number One looked back up, this time at Jack, as if trying to speak to him with his eyes. He shook his head.

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 beginning to wander out into their yards to find out what all the ruckus was about. He limped to his car—time to get out of here.

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 beginning to take on an unreal feel. Maybe none of it had really happened. Maybe he'd been drugged or something ...

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?