Black Horizon

by Robert Masello

  “Jackie boy, come and join us.” His mother's voice somehow spoke within his head; her face remained, green eyes glittering, in the seething wave. Other faces beckoned him too—men and women, of all ages, all colors. “Sí—ven con nosotros” suddenly echoed in his head, and he thought he saw, in the tortured blur, the grinning face of Ruben Garcia. “Ven con nosotros.” “Come and join us, Jackie boy.” He couldn't take his eyes from the wave, and in his heart he felt such a killing sadness, he had no desire to. If this was death, if this was oblivion, then why go on? “Come and join us.” If this was what it all came to in the end, how could he find the courage to face another day? Why, if this was waiting, should he try? “What's a month, or a year, or a century, chalked up against eternity?” Despair engulfed him like a billowing, black shroud. He stared, lost and empty, into the endless wave, and the burning green eyes of Eliza; his feet teetered, on the insubstantial edge of the chasm. Having glimpsed eternity, he could not go back. That much he knew. “Come and join us, Jackie boy.” There was only one thing left for him to do, and that one thing was as easy as giving up, as falling forward . . . into that awful canyon that boiled up before him. “Yes,” he sighed, and stepped forward.

  His foot encountered nothing—only air, cold as ice—and the wall suddenly disappeared. In front of him, all he could see was a pale film, gray and translucent.

  “Don't look anymore.”

  The voice was Mam's.

  “It's hell you were looking at—not eternal life.”

  His eyes had been covered by her hand; he could feel the warmth of her palm on his face.

  “Come to us, Jack!” his mother snarled, her voice reverberating in his head.

  "Ven con nosotros!"

  “Close your eyes,” Mam said.

  He did as she told him—he had no more strength left to resist, or even wonder—and felt himself borne helplessly backward, away from the angry wall.

  “Come to us! Come to us, Jackie!”

  Eliza's voice, spitting with fury, echoed still . . . but more faintly.

  He knew, without looking, that he was traveling at an amazing speed; the air was noticeably warmer, the crashing tumult of the wave receding.

  “You mustn't come here again,” Mam was saying. “You mustn't do this, Jack.”

  But he'd had to, he'd had to come—there'd been a reason, a reason he was struggling to remember.

  “You've come too far. You've seen what you never should have.”

  “I had to come,” he whispered, “there was someone here . . .” Nancy, he remembered. He'd come for Nancy.

  He opened his eyes—they were no longer covered by Mam's hand—and in that instant saw, carved from the gray mist, the figure of Nancy. Mam was only a disembodied voice, saying “Take her and go—go now! Jack—you haven't much time!” Her tone was filled with great love and enormous alarm. “Go!”

  He called to Nancy—she turned, naked and bewildered—and on seeing him receded farmer into the mist. “No, Nancy! No—!” The distance between them closed rapidly. There were tears, he could see now, streaming down her face. She put up her hands against him.

  “No!” she cried. “Don't come any closer!”

  “Why? I came here for you!”

  "You put me here! It is because of you that I'm here! I'm dead because of what you do!”

  “But I can save you! I can save us both!”

  She spun around, her body a mix of flesh and vapor, light and shadow. Her shoulders heaved; she wept hysterically. There was no time to reason, or persuade. They'd both been so long in this Other World it might not even be possible to return to the living world anymore. He threw his arms around her, clutching her from behind. “I can save us.” Was it true? “Keep your eyes closed—come with me.”

  With all the strength he had left in him, he held her fast, and concentrated his thoughts. The mist flew past them, the air grew hotter. The light, the beating light—they'd have to go through it. He spread one hand across her face, over her eyes, and braced himself again. A second later, they were swallowed up—immersed in the blazing beacon—then shot out, breathless, into a flat black sea. He was holding her tight, half on top of him; water—rife with salt—sloshed up over his chin, into his mouth. He couldn't breathe, and had to let go of her. She was sputtering, too, her chest heaving; they were lying together, on their backs, in a watery grave.

  The tank.

  Jack's mind sprang awake; they were back in the lab, they were both alive. Did Sprague know it yet? He must; he undoubtedly had the intercom on. “Nancy,” Jack gasped, “are you all right?”

  She coughed, said, “I think so.”

  “Then you've got to get out, quickly. Get out of the tank.”

  “I can't . . . my hands, they're tied behind me.”

  Jack slipped his hands under her, found her wrists; they were bound together, with what felt like one of the electrode wires. He tried desperately to undo the knot, but in the dark, underwater, it was impossible to get untied. The air in the tank was so hot and heavy, it was almost as hard to breathe as to move. And even under their loud and labored breathing, he thought he could hear—yes, it was getting louder all the time—that fearful howling of the damned.

  “Hold your breath,” he said. “I'm going to turn you over.”

  He took hold of one elbow, and flipped her facefirst into the water. He fumbled again at the knot; then, forcing her wrists even more tightly together, he dragged the wire, with sheer force, over and off of her hands. She jerked her head up into the air, banging it hard against the top of the tank.

  “Get out! Get out!”

  The howling echoed, like a pack of baying hounds, in his head.

  She struggled to her feet, still gasping for breath, and clambered out of the tank. As soon as her feet had cleared the hatchway, Jack sat up himself, threw his arms out of the tank. He was halfway out, when he felt his foot snatched from below by an icy hand.

  “Come to us, Jackie!” he heard from inside the tank.

  He looked in horror back into the water, where Eliza's face—still mangled and bloody—beamed up at him, green eyes shining. He jerked his foot away, then smashed it down, into that wide and smiling mouth. He felt nothing but the slippery bottom of the tank. Spilling out of the hatchway, he landed on his hands, next to the overturned chair and Nancy's scattered clothes. There was a pale red glow in the room, emanating from the poles, and from the control booth where Sprague was still sitting. Nancy was at the glass door, naked, struggling to pull it open.

  “Knew you'd do it,” Sprague said, over the intercom, when he saw Jack scrambling to his feet, “though you certainly took your time.”

  “Jack! Help me with this,” Nancy cried.

  He staggered across the room to her, his sopping clothes stuck to his limbs. The door, he could see, was bolted at both the top and bottom. “Open it up!” he shouted, and Sprague laughed.

  “In the middle of an experiment?”

  “The experiment's over!”

  “Hardly,” Sprague countered. “I had a deal, with your very own mother; I keep you coming back, she gives me all the proof I need to confirm my discoveries.”

  Jack slumped against the bolted door; Nancy had dropped in a heap beside it. The air in the room was becoming strangely agitated; Jack could feel a cool breeze ruffling his hair, making the wet sleeves of his shirt snap and billow around his arms. He knelt down next to Nancy; drew her, shaking, into the protection of his embrace. Against his back, he could feel the cold hard steel of the pole Sprague had installed there. In his head he heard, again, that plaintive howling, that unearthly tumult, growing louder; then Nancy raised her head, as if she had heard it too.

  “What's that?” she moaned.

  He drew her closer. “Hold on to me, no matter what.”

  The noise, like the breeze, was emanating from the tank; it echoed and reverberated, like a monstrous choir clattering up from the bottom of a well. The tank itself shook and shivered, boomed as if sledge
hammers were being swung against its interior. The breeze became a wind, cold and metallic, pouring forth from the open hatchway and gusting, in slow, powerful circles, around the room. Hell is coming after me, Jack thought. He looped one arm around the steel pole—was that a camera mounted on it, above his head?—then back around Nancy; he locked his legs around her too.

  “Your mother's as good as her word,” Sprague said, his head bent over the panel, his hands flying to various controls. “The dead you can do business with.”

  Totally, uncontrollably, out of his mind. Jack watched as at first a fine tendril, and then a denser coil, of gray vapor slipped from the hatchway of the tank. It rose, as smoke would do, up to the ceiling of the lab, but instead of hitting the ceiling and then thinning out, it seemed to continue, inexorably, to rise, dissolving all sign of the ceiling itself. More and more of the mist followed, moving in sluggish circles all around the perimeter of the room, gradually obscuring those dimensions, too. There were lights—flashbulbs?—popping at frequent intervals, photographing, if anything, nothing Jack could see. Before his eyes, the walls and ceiling of the lab had virtually disappeared, replaced, he now could tell, by that vacant gray terrain of the Other World. Sprague would be seeing it—the place Jack went on his journeys—for himself at last. Jack glanced up and to his left, where the booth had been.

  Sprague was sitting, slack-jawed, in a pool of violet light. The observation window shimmered, like a screen suspended in midair, in front of him.

  “Is this the deal you made,” Jack shouted, “to be swallowed up alive?”

  Sprague, still riveted, said in a monotone, “What is this?”

  “The Other World, Sprague! Don't you recognize it? It's come to see you!” Nancy huddled closer in his arms, twisting her face against his chest.

  “The Other World,” Sprague slowly repeated, awed, almost mesmerized. The back wall of the booth had disappeared, too . . . and in its place, Jack could dimly make out a distant but roiling bank of clouds.

  “And this,” Sprague intoned, as if to himself, “is where the soul goes after death.”

  “No,” replied a woman's voice, young and taunting, “this j is Disneyland.”

  His mother was hovering, only partially visible, somewhere between the tank and the observation window. The outlines of her body faded in and out of view, etched in red by the ultraviolet lights. “You wanted proof. Now you've got it . . . all you could ever want.”

  The wind in the room had gathered speed, and the black wall behind Sprague had grown perceptibly higher . . . and closer.

  “Jackie here doesn't seem to like it.” Her head turned toward Jack and Nancy. “He keeps leaving us.” She gave him a sad, reproachful smile. Even in the sunken holes of her skull, her green eyes glittered brightly. “You know the way too well, Jackie . . . I think you'll keep leaving us as long as you have a living body to return to.”

  Jack stared back at her mangled face, her long hair streaming in the wind.

  “But that won't last forever,” she said, teasingly, and turning her gaze back toward Sprague. “Nothing does . . . except, of course, eternity.”

  Behind him, the boiling black wave had surged even closer; Sprague seemed to sense it at last, and tearing his eyes away from Eliza, turned slowly in his chair. The wall spread itself above him like a vast, black waterfall, growing higher and wider all the time.

  “See anyone you know?” she said to Sprague, and in that instant the face of Garcia, and then Tulley—Tulley!—materialized in the midst of the seething wall. Their hands lashed out, with half a dozen others, to clutch at his arms, his legs, the hanging tails of his lab coat. He clung frantically to the sides of his chair, screaming, “Logan—help me! Help me, Logan!”

  “Glad to,” Eliza replied, and moving effortlessly through the glass of the observation window, pried his fingers from the arms of the chair. “Logan!” he screamed again, flailing wildly, as the greedy hands from within the wall dragged him into their embrace. “Logan!”

  Jack watched in horror, his arms wrapped fiercely around Nancy, as Sprague was tossed, turned, and finally, as if being dunked by an irresistible force, utterly submerged in the cascading wave. Eliza turned in place, smiling widely through her broken teeth, and said, “Nothing lasts forever, Jack . . .” Laughing now, she threw out her arms and was sucked backward into the swirling blackness. As she was, the wind rose to a deafening roar; the observation window shivered, and just as Jack ducked his head on top of Nancy's, it exploded into a thousand pieces, sending shards of glass whistling past them, into the mist. When he dared to look up again, the wave was gone, and the gray vapors that had filled the room were thinning out, shimmering like heat waves . . . evaporating. The walls and ceiling of the room reappeared. The wind abruptly died down. Nancy cautiously raised her head to look around.

  “Is it over?” she asked, in a small voice.

  Her clothes, and the overturned chair, lay scattered across the wrestling mats.

  “It's over.”

  “And we're alive?”

  Jack laughed softly. “We're alive.”

  Her body gradually unclenched itself. She surveyed the entire lab. “Where's Sprague?”

  Jack let his legs stretch out before him. Where was Sprague? He expected to find his body on the floor of the control booth, below the shattered glass. His soul? He hoped never to see that again, as long as he lived . . . and longer.

  “He's gone,” he said, stroking Nancy's hair. “We're safe now. Everything's okay.”

  Epilogue

  DOWN THE BEACH, she could hear children laughing while they played in the surf. Twice the lifeguard had warned someone on a raft to come in closer to shore. Discreetly, Nancy reached under herself and adjusted the bottom of her bathing suit.

  This was the tiniest bikini she'd ever, under any circumstances, dared to wear; Jack was the one who had spotted it, in the window of a boutique in the hotel lobby. Half an hour later, he'd given it to her, wrapped in tissue paper, on the balcony of their room.

  “You must be kidding,” she'd said.

  “When in the islands . . .”

  “In that case, I should go topless.”

  “Just be sure to wear plenty of sunblock.”

  Smiling, she rolled over onto her stomach, and looked out to sea. The water was deep blue, dappled with whitecaps; the sky, except on the horizon, bright and untroubled. On the horizon, there was a faint line of clouds, and even from here she could see that rain was falling. Something about it made her stop smiling and want to look away; she did.

  The beach, a broad arc of white sand, was sparsely populated. There was a rocky promontory at one end, dotted with tidal pools, and several kids were busily exploring it. She wondered what had happened to Jack.

  She crossed her forearms and laid her head down on them.

  The smell of hot sand and suntan oil . . . there was nothing like it, she thought, for sheer relaxation. It was almost enough to make her forget for a little while what had happened to her back in New York. Almost . . . but not quite. Nothing, she reflected, would ever do that completely. Though Jack, God knows, was making a valiant attempt.

  It had been his idea to blow the money from the Investigator on this trip. Steamroller had closed, to no one's surprise, and Nancy, of course, was without a job; even her classes were still on holiday break. After they'd arranged to sell their story to Mansfield, Jack had said, “Leave the rest to me,” and the next thing she knew, he had two tickets to St. Thomas.

  As far as her family knew, she was there with her friend Amy, from NYU. (Her sister, she was sure, hadn't fallen for it.) She was due back in just two more days, and dreaded the thought.

  She felt some sand kicked up onto her shins and heard Jack whistle and say, “Hey, baby, where'd you get that Band-Aid you're wearing?”

  “An old boyfriend bought it for me—don't let it worry you.”

  He flopped down next to her on the beach towel. In his hand, he had a rolled-up newspaper.
<
br />   “You got it?”

  “Fresh from the mainland.”

  She slipped on her sunglasses and quickly flattened out the paper. The top headline was something about an extraterrestrial's New Year's resolutions, but below that it read “Investigator Exclusive: False Messiah Causes Bizarre Death of World-Famous Doctor.”

  “I didn't cause it,” Jack observed.

  “Don't be so modest.”

  There was a grainy photo of Jack, clearly cropped from the pictures that had been taken on the park bench with Adam Baldwin, and a smaller snapshot of Sprague, taken from one of the institute catalogues. The story, written in Mansfield's inimitable overheated style, went on to describe how “Jack Logan, a Broadway strummer who once laid claims to extraordinary powers of healing and even resurrection (see the December 27 issue)” had inadvertently, “but tragically nonetheless, brought about the deaths of a security guard, one Randall Tulley, and the world-renowned brain specialist and staff member of New York's prestigious Institute of Abnormal Psychology, Dr. Orson Sprague.”

  “He'd have liked his buildup,” Nancy said.

  “Wait'll you see how I wind up.”

  “I can't wait.”

  While Jack idly brushed the sand from the back of her thighs and traced the line of her bikini bottom with one finger, Nancy flipped to the inside page where the story continued. There was another photo, of a big black tank that bore no resemblance to the one in the lab, and a caption that read “The sensory-deprivation tank which led to the bizarre and untimely death of neuropsychologist Dr. Orson Sprague.”