Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  “What happened,” he repeated, “to you or to Freddy?”

  “There was a mountain of sand,” Jack said. Even his voice, to Nancy's ear, sounded as if it had just dropped a register. “It had rained heavily the night before. The sand was dangerous.”

  “And one of you climbed onto that sand?”

  “Freddy did. He climbed to the top. And the sand gave way.”

  To Nancy's amazement, Jack's skin temperature was dropping before her very eyes—three full degrees already. The blood volume to his extremities was also decreasing. His EEG showed a steady diminishment. She had never seen anything like this.

  “When you say the sand gave way,” Sprague asked, with soft, slow deliberation, “what do you mean? Did Freddy fall off the mountain of sand?”

  “No . . . he was swallowed up by it. He sank in, like quicksand.”

  Unless these machines were going completely haywire, Jack's skin temperature had just dropped another two degrees; he should be shivering like mad. And the EEG was registering only minimal consciousness. Nancy began to grow frightened; she touched Sprague on the shoulder again, but he shrugged her hand away and continued to bore in on Jack.

  “Stay there, Jack. Stay there with Freddy. Stay where you are, and tell me what's happening. Exactly what's happening.”

  Logan looked like a death mask of himself. His voice, when at last he spoke again, was positively sepulchral. “Freddy disappeared . . . under the sand. When the sand stopped moving, I found a board, a long wooden board, and laid it against the sand.”

  Nancy made frantic notes of the plummeting measurements.

  “I shimmied up the board to where he was buried. His helmet still showed. I dug down to his shoulders. I was able to pull him out, after a lot of work . . . “

  “Yes? And then?”

  “ . . . then I pulled him down, headfirst, off the mountain . . . I put him on the ground. He wasn't breathing . . . I put my fingers in his mouth, and took out gobs of sand . . . “

  Nancy didn't know what to make of any of this anymore. His heartbeat was perceptibly slowed, but still regular. As for the other measurements . . . if he weren't right in front of her, talking even, she'd have sworn he was a goner.

  “I blew into his mouth, the way I'd once seen a lifeguard do it. Nothing happened. I kept doing it. He still didn't breathe . . . he still didn't breathe . . . “ There was a long silence, punctuated only by the barely audible clacking of the machines. Jack looked as if rigor mortis were setting in; his body was so stiff his back hardly touched the table anymore. Sprague waited anxiously, afraid to break the silence; he rose from the stool, perspiring, and ran his eyes across Nancy's instruments. He seemed unsurprised by what he saw. He'd expected these results? Nancy thought.

  “You must talk to me, Jack,” Sprague finally said, resuming his seat. “You must tell me where you are right now, and just what's happening.”

  Jack's face remained immobile, his eyes closed, his jaws clenched.

  “Where are you, Jack?”

  “With Freddy.”

  Another long pause; his skin temperature was glacial.

  “Freddy's ahead of me, but I can catch him.” A slight, incongruous smile came to his face. “Because I already know the way . . . “

  “The way where?”

  “Where you go after.”

  Was he just speaking more softly, or had his voice actually grown more distant somehow? Nancy had to strain to hear him.

  “Hold on, Freddy. Hold on.” He was clearly talking to his friend now, reliving the experience. “Let's go back. No one will ever know this happened. Let's go back . . . “

  “But where are you?” Sprague insisted, unable to keep the note of frustration out of his voice.

  Jack's improving spirits were not to be dampened. “Hold on, Freddy. Don't look at the light. You can do it. Hold on.”

  “Jack—tell me where you are.”

  Still smiling, Jack did not reply. Nancy's EEG meter showed next to no electrical brain activity; the printout would undoubtedly reveal a simple, but impossible, flat-line. And though she was probably imagining it, the chill from his skin seemed to have permeated the entire room; she pulled the lapels of her lab coat closed across her chest.

  “Breathe,” Jack was saying now, “breathe, Freddy. Breathe.”

  Sprague had given up, for the moment, trying to reach him.

  “That's right—good.” Jack laughed, tilting his head back; the electrode wires stretched and shivered around his face. “Yes, it's me, it's me, Freddy. Yes.” He laughed again, as if with enormous relief. “Yes.”

  His whole body seemed suddenly to relax, his chin coming forward again, his arms dangling loosely at his sides. The three fingers encased in the silver thimbles, part of the thermistor apparatus, rattled against the side of the examination table. Nancy glanced again at the instruments in front of her: the skin temperature and blood volume measurements were rapidly returning to the usual range. His heartbeat had increased again, to what it should have been all along. The brain-wave scan had jumped from nil to normal, in a matter of no more than seconds. None of it made any sense at all to her. Sprague would have to figure it out later; she simply made notes of all the changes.

  “Jack . . . do you hear me? It's Dr. Sprague.”

  “I hear you.”

  Even the room seemed to be getting warmer.

  “Jack, I want to bring you out of the trance state now. I want you to do exactly as I say, as I say it. All right?”

  “Yes.”

  Sprague repeated the procedure he had used to put Jack under, only this time in reverse order; first, he had Jack deeply inhale and lift his eyes under closed lids, then lower them again while exhaling. “When you feel me stroke the back of your left hand,” he said, “you will slowly open your eyes, and feel fully awake and aware. Do you understand?”

  Jack nodded, as if he were already almost there, and Sprague touched the back of his hand. His eyes opened, staring straight ahead, then slowly shifted to his left, where Sprague was sitting with Nancy right behind him. He shivered, suddenly, and said, “Whew! You got a draft in here?”

  Sprague said nothing, but Nancy came around the machines to remove the various probes. She handed Jack his shirt, while Sprague sedulously cleaned his glasses with the hem of his lab coat. Jack, not sure how he'd done, asked Sprague if it all had been a wash.

  “No,” Sprague admitted. “Not at all.” Slipping his steel-rimmed spectacles back on, he looked Jack in the eye. “You remember nothing, I assume, of what transpired in the trance state?”

  “Should I?”

  “No. It's just as well that you don't . . . for the time being.”

  Still wondering what had happened, Jack looked to Nancy for help. But after all that she'd just seen, she didn't know what to think, or how to deal with him, either. She gave him his socks and shoes, and after Sprague had abruptly left the room, escorted him as far as the elevator.

  To her own surprise, this time she was vaguely relieved to see him go.

  Part Two

  Chapter Twelve

  SPRAGUE HAD TULLEY bring the car around. It was a Chevy Cavalier, the two-door model, and since Sprague was too tall to sit comfortably in back, he had to share the front with Tulley. It was annoying, but not as much of a problem as it might have been—Tulley had no more interest in talking to Sprague than Sprague did in talking to Tulley. They drove down the FDR Drive in perfect, sullen silence.

  Traffic, as usual, was lousy. Sprague sat with his battered leather satchel—crammed with drugs, papers, and medical instruments—wedged between his legs. He was on his way to another routine, court-appointed psychiatric evaluation; one Ruben Garcia, on trial for the murder of his wife and her putative lover, and under a twenty-four-hour suicide watch since he was found trying to swallow a plastic spoon in a holding cell. Sprague's job was to ascertain, among other things, how sincere the attempt had been.

  But Garcia wasn't what Sprague was thinking about;
Logan was. Logan was all he'd thought about for the past three days. Ever since he'd conducted the second battery of tests, he'd been obsessed with the results. The baffling, and in several ways impossible, results. Whether he was aware of it or not, this Logan creature was able to defy the physiological laws; he was able to do something Sprague could not yet fathom—though he had his suspicions. And if those suspicions were correct, Jack Logan could be the key to unlocking the greatest single mystery of life.

  But how, Sprague wondered yet again, could Logan have come by such powers? And how could they be properly tested, verified, and documented?

  Tulley, his jaw set like a boxer's, blasted the horn, and a Volkswagen bug inched away from the curb.

  “How long?” Tulley said, pulling into the empty spot.

  “An hour, maybe more.”

  “You want me to wait?”

  “Yes. I want you to wait.” Gratitude, Sprague thought; every week I keep the parole officer off his back, and still I get an argument.

  Clipping the I.D. badge to his collar, Sprague got out of the car and walked past the guard house to the hospital annex; inside, the city and state housed their ill, or insane, criminal suspects until they could be tried and shipped off to the proper jail or asylum. An outside camera picked him up as he approached the door, and another picked him up as he entered the building. The nurse at the front desk recognized him, checked her log, and handed over a green folder with what Sprague was sure would be the same information he'd already been sent.

  “I'll have Garcia sent to the consulting room,” she said, picking up her phone.

  Sprague passed through the electronic security check, and allowed the cop on duty to inspect his satchel for firearms, explosives, and God knows what else. Only Sprague knew the extraordinary damage that his little stoppered vials could inflict if properly—or improperly—administered. The cop closed the bag and buzzed him through the steel-plated doors.

  The consulting room was no more than a barren room with a Formica table, half a dozen chairs, and foam padding on all the walls. Five minutes after Sprague sat down, a cop brought in Garcia, his hands cuffed in front of him. In all his years of professional practice, Sprague still hadn't gotten over how placid, how seemingly harmless his murderers, rapists, arsonists, could appear when removed from opportunity, or the source of their rage. Garcia was a spindly little man, in his late forties, unshaven, wearing the standard-issue gray shirt and sweat pants. He alighted on the chair that the cop pulled out for him as if he had already left this earth, saying nothing, staring into space. When the cop had left them alone together, Sprague offered him a cigarette—he didn't smoke himself, but had learned his subjects invariably did. Garcia nodded, and Sprague put the cigarette between his lips, then lighted it.

  While Garcia smoked, holding the cigarette between the fingers of his manacled left hand, Sprague explained who he was and why he was there. He slapped his leather case onto the table, and removed the examination forms. Garcia never looked at him, but through squinted eyes studied the interior of the case. The bottles, vials, and instruments appeared to interest him, Sprague noted.

  “I want to ask you to answer some questions for me, Mr. Garcia. There aren't any right or wrong answers. There is only what you think, and what you want to say.” Garcia listened to the rest of the instructions without saying anything, or even giving any indication he understood. Tulley looked gregarious by comparison. But when Sprague began the actual tests, Garcia complied, and answered each question as it was put to him. If it hadn't already been obvious to Sprague, it soon became quite clear that Garcia was a genuinely suicidal man—clinically depressed, despairing, without hope or the will to go on. In the blot tests, he described, in English that was heavily accented but better than Sprague expected, only scenes of dismemberment and disjunction; in free-association, he revealed enormous guilt and self-loathing; in the personal interview/analysis, his detachment from daily life was exceeded only by his compelling desire for obscurity and annihilation. He was a man biding his time, patiently awaiting a suitable means to his own self-destruction.

  His eyes, when he thought Sprague was unaware, repeatedly flicked to the leather satchel and its store of stoppered vials.

  “When you say that you like things to be very, very quiet, do you mean also that you like there to be no other people around? That you like to be left entirely alone?”

  “Yes. Alone. Nobody else.” He dropped his cigarette butt, the third, into the blue foil ashtray at his elbow.

  “You must find it very hard here, with people around, doctors and nurses and policemen, all the time.”

  Garcia let the statement stand.

  Sprague asked a few follow-up questions, not because he really needed to know anything more, but because he needed time to consider something that had occurred to him about halfway through the session. It was just after he'd written “disassociative: suicidal” on one of the district attorney's forms that the thought had first come to him; he'd immediately rejected it, but it had returned moments later. Here was Garcia, a man who wanted to die, whom no one would miss, whose best prospect was a lifetime of incarceration in a state facility for the criminally insane. And here was Jack Logan, a man who possessed—assuming, of course, that Sprague was right—a gift that was at once an untold boon to all mankind, and virtually untestable under the usual rules of scientific inquiry and experimentation. If, Sprague told himself, he was clever enough, he could gamble, with almost total impunity, an otherwise irredeemable burden on the tax rolls—and Garcia looked to have at least another fifteen or twenty years in him—for a discovery the likes of which the world had never seen.

  Garcia was sitting back in his chair now, his manacled hands resting in his lap.

  Sprague leaned forward, to speak in lowered tones. “Will you believe me,” he said, “if I tell you I want to help you? That I know what you want—what you truly want—and that I can help you to achieve it?”

  Garcia studied him, not sure what he was getting at.

  With his elbow, Sprague nudged the open satchel closer to Garcia.

  “But you will have to do exactly what I say, exactly the way that I tell you to. Entiende, amigo?"

  Garcia nodded, slowly, his eyes darting to the plastic vials, then listened closely to Sprague's instructions.

  Chapter Thirteen

  IN THE PAPER that morning, Nancy had seen another of those full-page Saks Fifth Avenue ads counting down the shopping days till Christmas. Just eighteen of them left, and she hadn't bought a single present yet. At five-fifteen, she told Sprague she had a class downtown—he never kept track of her actual schedule—and set off in the direction of Blooming-dale's.

  She wasn't more than a block from the institute when she heard footsteps hurrying up behind her. She glanced over her shoulder, instinctively clutching her purse with both hands, and saw Jack Logan, flipping up his collar against the wind and smiling tentatively.

  “I thought I'd get lucky,” he said, drawing up alongside her. “Where are you headed?”

  “Bloomie's.” Where had he come from? “This is lucky?”

  “Yes. I've been standing in that pizza joint across from the institute for the last forty-five minutes, waiting for you to come out.”

  “Why didn't you come in?”

  “I didn't want to see Dr. Sprague. I wanted to see you.” He gestured down the street. “I can walk and talk at the same time, and I don't want to hold you up.”

  They turned down York Avenue. As Jack said nothing further, Nancy asked, “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” he replied, then said, “No, not exactly.” He looked over at her as they walked. “I'm not exactly fine.”

  “What's wrong?” Nancy could think of several things herself, such as the bizarre results of the last lab session. Even now, she wasn't sure how she felt about being in his company; he'd seemed like a nice enough guy, and she did like those dark green eyes of his, but ever since that session, she'd been a little, well
, leery of him.

  “Something's been off for a couple of weeks now,” he said, “ever since opening night of the show. That was the night that thing happened with Zakin.”

  As if she didn't know.

  “Coming to the institute is making it worse. Or else it's just getting worse on its own, and the institute has nothing to do with it. I really don't know anymore.” He did indeed sound very confused.

  “What is the ‘it’ you're referring to? You don't feel well?”

  “Physically I'm okay. I'm not running a fever or anything.” They stopped to wait for the light. “But I feel like something's happened to me, or is still happening. I can't sleep at night anymore,” he said, knowing he had to offer her something specific. “I go to bed late, after the show, but I was always able to sleep like a log. Now I feel like I never really go under, never really dream; it's as if something is holding me back. Some defense mechanism.”

  “Why wouldn't your body want you to get a good night's sleep?”

  The light changed and they crossed.

  “Beats me. Why would my body, or I guess I should say my nose, want me to smell something like cold metal off and on during the day?”

  Nancy looked up at him now. Olfactory hallucinations sometimes preceded things like epileptic seizures. Was Jack the victim of some rare seizure disorder?

  He noticed her intense expression, and laughed self-consciously. “I know it sounds weird. And I can hardly describe what cold metal smells like. But every once in a while, I get this whiff of it, right out of nowhere.”

  “At any particular time?”

  He glanced into the window of a liquor store, strung with colored Christmas-tree bulbs. “When the spotlights suddenly go on at the opening of the show. And once in this Greek coffee shop I go to.”

  “Watch it.” A delivery man pushed a dolly, crated with Jack Daniel's, between them.