Black Horizon Read online

  “Return fire!” Jack cried, pointing his black pea-shooting pistol up at Freddy. Though he knew the pellet would never travel that far, he shot anyway, and Freddy, pretending to be hit, clutched at his stomach, then crumpled, hard, to his knees. “Ya got me!” The sand beneath his knees began to run, in tiny rivulets, down the side of the hill. Freddy threw his head back, and groaned theatrically. His helmet tilted backward, held on only by the chin strap. The sand began to stream down the hill now; to Jack, Freddy looked as though he was sinking. “I think you should come down off of there,” he said, but Freddy was too absorbed in his own dramatic finish to hear him. His knees disappeared into the sand heap, and Jack could see, from below, that the whole top of the mountain was shivering, sand cascading down the sides. “Freddy!” he shouted, and Freddy did suddenly stop in the middle of his death throes—that had always been his favorite part of playing war—and fix his helmet on his head. He glanced, a little startled, down at Jack, and tried to get up. More of the sand gave way beneath him. “Hey, Jack,” he said, his voice uncertain. “Hey, Jack.” The whole mountain now appeared to be coming alive, quaking, the dried-up sand on top streaming down the sides, revealing the darker, wetter sand below it. Freddy was still struggling to get to his feet, the sand continually giving way beneath him. He slid, buried almost to his Waist now, a few feet down the hill. His bazooka, which had fallen from his hand, had already been swallowed up. The sand swirled like a whirlpool around him; the harder he scrabbled at it, trying to break free, the faster it whirled—and the deeper he sank. “Jack!” he was screaming. “Help me! Jack! Help me!”

  Jack ran to the foot of the hill; the sand was pouring down around him, over his shoes, spreading across the ground like a dun-colored tide. Freddy was covered up to his chest now, screaming for help; Jack looked frantically around the site, for a rope, or a plank, something to throw him. The sand was tumbling down now in great wet clods, as Freddy was sucked deeper into the hill's heaving vortex. Only his head and shoulders were still visible as he thrashed around: his helmet had slipped forward, over his face, muffling his cries. There was nothing for Jack to throw him—how would Freddy even see it if he did?—and there was no way to climb the crumbling hill. The sand kept falling. Freddy was up to his neck; Jack was knocked backward by another sudden avalanche. When he looked up the hill again, only one hand and the helmet were showing; the hand waved, the helmet twisted, shining like a reflector in the hot summer sunlight. The sand rumbled, and gave off a dank, strong odor . . . the helmet settled flatly into the slope, as if it had suddenly been yanked from below . . . the hand kept waving, back and forth, back and forth, in an ever-diminishing arc . . . back and forth, with less and less vigor . . . waving, it struck Jack, even as he stood horrified and helpless below it, like a windshield wiper on a day with no rain.

  He awoke with a jolt, not knowing where he was. Everything seemed bathed in light; he shut his eyes against it. The waves were still ebbing and flowing over the headphones. Someone was touching his elbow again, more insistently than before. He felt exhausted, utterly drained, and suddenly very cold. He shivered, in one violent paroxysm, and felt the hand abruptly leave his elbow.

  He opened his eyes. Looming above him, in the harsh fluorescent light, was a man—at first all Jack could make out were his steel-rimmed spectacles and a nimbus of frizzy gray hair. He was wearing a white lab coat, like Nancy's—where was she?—and saying something Jack couldn't hear. Hesitantly, his fingers feeling numbed, he slid the headphones away from his ears.

  “—all right? Your skin's quite cold.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I said, are you feeling all right? From the way you jumped when I touched you, you must have been having a nightmare.” He was tall and gaunt, and his eyes behind the spectacles appeared pale and pink-rimmed, like a rabbit's. “Were you?”

  “What?”

  “Having a nightmare.”

  Was he? Jack could hardly remember what he'd been thinking about. He could recall a sensation of flight, and terrific heat, but not much more than that. On awakening, he'd felt cold, and vaguely panicked. Seeing Nancy now, standing to one side, attending to the still clicking machines, he felt a little better.

  “Am I still recording?” Jack asked, blearily.

  The man glanced at the machines. “No, the printout is always just a few minutes behind the actual recording of the data. When I checked five minutes ago, you were fine.”

  “Good to hear,” Jack said, rubbing his eyes—his hands felt like ice on his face—and shivering again. “Is it okay if I get dressed now?”

  “Miss Liu,” Sprague said, and she left the machines, still unfurling their data, and detached the electrodes, the suction cups, the black bands from his ankles. When she'd finished wiping away the traces of Vaseline, the man handed him his shirt.

  “I'm Dr. Sprague, in case you were wondering. Orson Sprague.”

  “Jack Logan.”

  “The angel from God.”

  “Right,” Jack said, hastily pulling on his shirt. “I keep forgetting about that.”

  “I don't.” Sprague gave him a smile that was as icy as Jack's fingers; his teeth were small and gray. He waited till Jack was buttoning his cuffs, then asked again, “So what were you dreaming about?”

  No let-up, Jack thought. More alert now, he remembered thinking about Mam and Clancy, and the beach at Asbury Park. And yes, Freddy Nunemaker. “A friend of mine, from when I was seven or eight years old. We used to play together.”

  “That's what you were thinking about when I disturbed you?”

  “Yes.”

  Sprague wheeled around, clearly no longer interested, and picked up the clipboard Nancy had taken her notes on in the office. She was returning to the machines when Sprague said, “Let them go—I'll look at the printouts later. Go back to the lab and finish staining those Quillerman slides.”

  Jack sensed he was just getting rid of her. Before leaving, she gave him his shoes and socks and, while Sprague was flipping through the sheets on the clipboard, a quick, almost conspiratorial smile. When the door had closed behind her, Sprague, without preface or apology, said, “What did your mother die of?”

  “An auto accident.”

  Sprague made a note of it, and no comment. “And your father, I see, is a total cipher. Who raised you?”

  “My grandparents,” Jack said, lacing up his sneakers.

  “Is there anything this medical history might have missed that I should know about?”

  “I don't think so; I don't know what it is you should know about.”

  “Neither do I, until I hear it.” He had a funny way of speaking—very fast, accusatory, as if he didn't trust words to get at what he wanted anyway. “What's here,” he said, brandishing the clipboard, “is commonplace. What happened outside that theater the other night is not. I need to find the proper avenue into that event.”

  Jack didn't know quite how to help him. “Why don't you ask Zakin?”

  “I plan to, just as soon as his medication decreases enough to assure his lucidity. In the meantime, I have you. And the accounts Miss Liu has taken from that television reporter who was there that night, and the newspaper person she told it to.”

  So that's how the story found its way into the paper, Jack thought.

  “They were both next to useless.” He looked fixedly at Jack; his expression was not very hopeful. “I need to know if there's something unusual about you, Mr. Logan.”

  Jack shrugged. “My hair parts naturally on either side.”

  Sprague ignored it. "Is there something? The routine tests probably wouldn't show it, even if there were. The paranormal tests might.”

  More tests? Jack glanced at the clock on the wall; he'd already been there well over an hour. “Sorry, Doctor, but I've got a show to do. I've got to go.”

  Sprague looked at him blankly. “Now?”

  “Yes.” Jack got off the examining table. He and Sprague were almost exactly the same height -- about six
feet two.

  “Then you'll have to come back again. I haven't got what I want yet.”

  Jack didn't say yes or no; he just pulled on his overcoat, shook hands, and headed for the door. Sprague was standing with the clipboard in his hand. “Miss Liu will call you tomorrow, to set up another appointment.” Jack waved good-bye, still not committing himself, and quickly made for the slowest elevator on the East Side.

  It wasn't until ten o'clock that night that Sprague went back to check the EEG and EKG data. When Logan had left, he'd gone straight to the lab to make sure the Quillerman specimens were completed properly. That, as usual, took longer than expected. And Miss Liu had insisted on leaving at eight-thirty. God damn these assistants; no one wanted to work anymore.

  The paper sheet on the examining table still showed the wrinkles Jack had left on it. Sprague ripped it off and tossed it into the wastebasket. The printouts from the two machines had curled all the way to the floor; Sprague recovered them without much enthusiasm. This was all going to be another exercise in futility—he was going to interview all these people, and conduct all these tests, and wind up knowing nothing more than he had to begin with. Logan, he felt, was a young buffoon; he was as likely as Tulley, the petty criminal downstairs, to have extraordinary powers.

  Since he'd already reviewed the early portions of each printout while Logan was still being monitored, he skipped to the last three or four minutes’ worth of data. He pulled the narrow strip of the electrocardiogram through his fingers; the heartbeat was regular, regular, then perhaps a bit faster, but nothing out of the ordinary, nothing too far beyond the normal range. When, Sprague wondered, was he going to find a subject worthy of his attention?

  He dropped the EKG sheet on the examination table, and took up the EEG data. Again, he looked at only the last few minutes, the moments that it had recorded before he had touched Logan on the elbow and made him jump like that. And suddenly his heart sank. With all the other problems attending his research, now this: the electroencephalograph had apparently broken down. Three or four minutes before the end of the printout, the line, which until then had recorded all the usual brain-wave variations, had suddenly dipped precipitously and then flattened out altogether. It couldn't have been a power shortage, because both machines drew from the same source and the EKG had worked perfectly the whole time.

  What would this cost to repair? Sprague thought; his funding was already low. Maybe, he prayed, it was something he could fix on his own, some minor glitch that just needed adjusting. Quickly he fastened two electrodes to his own forehead, and turned on the machine. He let it run for a minute, then waited for the printout to complete itself. The data that appeared looked, to his surprise and relief, fine. The machine was working fine.

  But what about this Logan stuff then? He studied the earlier printout again, with greater concentration. At the very end, yes, after the flat-line there was a slight upturn. Was that the moment he'd touched Logan for the first time, while telling Liu to shut off the recording mechanism? And wouldn't that indicate that the machine had been functioning correctly all along, right up until that second?

  But it couldn't have been, it simply couldn't. Because the flat-line that preceded the upturn, and lasted for what had to have been a space of two or three minutes, indicated one thing and one thing only: the person being monitored had suffered a sudden and sustained brain death. Sprague felt his breath catch in his throat. Either the machine had malfunctioned, which seemed increasingly unlikely, or Jack Logan, who'd walked out of this very room only hours before, looking like just another of the cocky young fools who jostled Sprague on the street everyday, had been for several minutes—and the very thought made Sprague's heart surge with unaccustomed hope —a dead man.

  Chapter Eight

  ALL THROUGH THE show that night, Jack was thinking about his session at the institute, and his meeting with Sprague. Would he go back again, to get his paranormal abilities tested? What would that entail? What would it prove? Would Nancy Liu be the one to conduct the tests?

  After the last round of tepid applause—when he stood up in the pit, Jack could make out a lot of empty seats in the balcony—he took the subway up to the Olympia Coffee Shop, a Greek diner a few blocks from his apartment. Vinnie and Haywood came along, which was not unusual, and so did the flautist Veronica Berghoffer, which was. She'd heard them agree to go, and asked if she could come along. “My roommate defrosted the fridge without telling me, and my yogurt was more fermented than it's supposed to be. I'm starved.”

  “Sure,” Jack had said. “But just don't try to order anything healthy at the Olympia. They'll get offended.”

  They took their usual booth, with the red vinyl seats, in back; it commanded the best view of the dessert carousel, packed with lemon meringue pies, blueberry cheesecakes, cream puffs, and eclairs. “The amazing thing,” observed Vinnie, “is how they can get that stuff to look so good, and taste so bad.”

  “What are you gonna have tonight?” Haywood asked.

  “Lemon meringue.”

  Jack ordered the cheeseburger deluxe; Haywood said make it two “but extra grease with mine, please” and Veronica, her pale blond head bent over the menu, looked stumped. The waiter, pencil poised, waited.

  “What'll it be?” Vinnie prompted her.

  “I don't know,” she said, biting her lip. Jack wondered if she'd ever worn any lipstick. “What's the soup du jour?”

  Haywood laughed, and Vinnie rolled his eyes.

  “Vegetable barley, Manhattan clam.” He started to turn away.

  “Vegetable barley,” she said quickly.

  “Cup or bowl?” He was already halfway to the kitchen.

  “Bowl.”

  “That a way,” Vinnie said. “Go for it.”

  “You guys eat here all the time?” Veronica asked, neatly replacing her menu in the metal clip on the edge of the table.

  “No more than once a day,” Vinnie said.

  “That's how come we always look so good,” Haywood added.

  “I knew there was some secret.” She was smiling, and looking directly across the table at Jack. This is a big night for her, he thought—three guys, even if they are all just friends. She looked very happy to be there; she had a nice smile. Jack asked what she'd heard about the show's advance sale.

  “I heard it's all right, but not great. At least they won't be posting the notice for a while.”

  “Posting the notice” was what musicians dreaded; it was the announcement from the producers, usually tacked without warning to the locker room bulletin board, advising that the show would be closed in fourteen, and sometimes fewer, days.

  “I heard they're planning to make a TV commercial,” Vinnie said, “to show in the ‘burbs, to try to get the bridge-and-tunnel traffic coming in. Very low budget.”

  “I don't care how low budget it is,” Haywood said. “If they use music—and they're gonna have to use music—we ought to be cut in for something.” He looked to Jack for confirmation.

  “Probably,” Jack said. “If you want, I'll talk to Burt about it tomorrow.”

  “You do that. ‘Cause you're the most diplomatic person we've got.”

  When the food came, it came all at once, a jumble of plates and bowls and glasses that there wasn't really enough room for. Veronica delicately crumbled one saltine into her soup, and left the other in the pack.

  “You sure you're not gonna overeat?” Vinnie asked.

  “Why,” Haywood interjected, “you want her other cracker?”

  “Who you calling a cracker?”

  “Oh, excuse me,” Haywood replied, shaking the salt and pepper with one hand over his french fries. “Guinea.”

  “That's better. Spook.”

  “No problem, wop.”

  Veronica looked baffled, and a little appalled.

  “Racial slurs are a form of male bonding,” Jack explained.

  “You got it, mick,” said Vinnie, with a mouthful of lemon pie.

  Aroun
d one o'clock, Vinnie said his wife was expecting him home early that night, and caught a cab across Eighty-sixth Street. Haywood, who lived twenty-five blocks farther uptown, took a bus.

  “You're over on West End, right?” Jack asked Veronica.

  “Yes,” she said, “at Ninety-third.”

  “Come on, I'll walk you home.”

  Even at that hour, and on a cold night, the street was fairly busy—the Korean grocers were still polishing their fruit, the bars were crowded, the panhandlers were hustling change. Veronica walked close to Jack's side, clutching her thin cloth coat around her.

  “You cold?”

  “A little,” she admitted.

  He put his arm around her in a companionable way, and rubbed her arm.

  “I just figured out what's wrong,” she said, fitting herself neatly under his arm.

  “What?”

  “Where's your guitar?”

  For one split second, even Jack panicked—then he remembered. “My Fender's at home; I'm using it to do some demos. I'm playing one of my back-up guitars in the show this week, so I left it in the locker room.”

  She laughed. “I just don't think I've ever seen you without it.”

  “Yeah. Have guitar, will travel.”

  Her building was one of the huge, gray prewar slabs that take up half a city block. Jack waited while she unlocked the door to the deserted lobby—"The doorman's off after midnight,” she said—and then walked to the elevators with her.

  “Jesus, it's cold out tonight,” he said, readjusting his scarf. Veronica appeared to be studying her shoes. “I think the apartment's a mess, but if you'd like to come up for a minute to warm up, I could offer you coffee, or some brandy.”