F. Paul Wilson - Nightworld

This morning she had awakened to find everything changed. Glaeken had both necklaces and the original plan was back in motion.

Sylvia had been preparing herself for this moment all day but she wasn't close to ready. How could she ever be ready for this?

She sensed Ba looming behind her and didn't have to look to know that whatever she decided he would be with her one hundred percent. But the rest of them…she glanced around the room. Carol, Bill, Jack, Glaeken—their eyes were intent upon her.

How could they ask her to do this? She'd already lost Alan. How could they ask her to risk Jeffy?

But they could. And they were. And considering all that was at stake, how could they not ask?

Jeffy, too, seemed to notice their stares. He drew his eyes away from the hilt—he'd been fixated on it since Bill had unwrapped it—and turned to Sylvia.

"Why are they all looking at us, Mom?" he whispered.

Sylvia tried to speak but no sound came out. She cleared her throat and tried again.

"They want you to do something, Jeffy."

He looked around at the expectant faces. "What?"

"They want you to—" She looked up at Glaeken. "What does he have to do?"

"Just touch it," Glaeken said. "That, is all it will take."

"They want you to touch that cross," she told Jeffy. "It will—"

"Oh, sure!"

Jeffy pulled away from her, eager to get his hands on the shiny object. Sylvia hauled him back.

"Wait, honey. You should know…it might hurt you."

"It didn't hurt that man," he said, pointing to Bill.

"True. But it will be different for you. The cross will take something from you, and after you lose that something you…you might not be the same."

He gave her a puzzled look.

"You may be like you were before, in the time you can't remember." How did you explain autism to a nine-year-old? "You didn't speak then; you barely knew your name. I…don't want you to be like that again."

His smile was bright, almost blinding. "Don't worry, Mommy. I'll be okay."

Sylvia wished she could share even a fraction of his confidence, but she had a dreadful feeling about this. Yet if she held him back, didn't let him near the hilt, then what had Alan died for? He'd gone to his death protecting Jeffy and her. How could she hold Jeffy back now and condemn him—condemn everyone—to a short life and a brutal death in a world of eternal darkness.

Yet the risk was Jeffy losing the light of intelligence in those eyes and living on as an autistic child.

Certain darkness without, a chance of darkness within.

What do I do?

She forced her hands to release him and she spoke before she had a chance to change her mind.

"Go, Jeffy. Do it. Touch it."

He lurched away from her, anxious to get to the bright metal thing on the table. He covered the distance in seconds, reached out and, without hesitation, curled his tiny fingers around the grip of the hilt.

For an instant his hand seemed to glow, then he cried out in a high-pitched voice. A violent shudder passed through him, then he was still.

What is that?

Something disturbs Rasalom. An aberrant ripple races across his consciousness, disrupting the seething perfection of the ambient fear and agony.

Something has happened.

Rasalom searches the upper reaches, sensing out the cause. There is only one possible place it could have originated—Glaeken's building.

And there he finds the source.

The weapon. Glaeken has managed to reassemble it. He has actually recharged it. That is what Rasalom felt.

But even now the sensation is fading.

Such hope concentrated in that room now, an unbearable amount. Yet exquisite misery is incipient there. How wonderful it will be to catch the falling flakes of that hope as it crystallizes in the cold blast of fear and terror when they realize they have failed utterly.

For it is too late for them. Far, far too late. This world is sealed away from Glaeken's ally force. Let him assemble a hundred such weapons, a thousand. It will not matter. The endless night is upon the world. A dark, impenetrable barrier. There can be no contact, no reunion of Glaeken with the opposing force.

Let him try. Let his pathetic circle hope. It will make their final failure all the more painful.

There now. The disturbing ripple is gone, swallowed by the thick insulating layers of night that surround it like a shroud.

Rasalom returns to his repose and awaits the undawn.

"Jeffy?"

Her little boy stood stone still with his hand on the hilt, staring at it. Sylvia had jumped to her feet and rushed to his side at his cry of pain. Now she hovered over him, almost afraid to touch him.

"Jeffy, are you all right?"

He did not move, did not speak.

Sylvia felt a rime of fear crystallize along the chambers of her heart.

No! Please, God, no! Don't let this happen!

She grabbed him by the shoulders and twisted him toward her, caught his chin with her thumb and forefinger and turned it up. She stared into his eyes.

And his eyes…

"Jeffy!" she cried, barely able to keep her voice under control. "Jeffy, say something! Do you know who I am? Who am I, Jeffy? Who am I?"

Jeffy's gaze wandered off her face to a spot over her shoulder, held there for a few seconds, then drifted on. His eyes were empty. Empty.

She knew that face. She fought off the encroaching blackness that her mind hungered to escape to. She'd lived with that vacant expression for too many years not to know it now. Autism. Jeffy was back to the way he used to be.

"Oh, no!" Sylvia moaned as she slipped her arms around him and pulled him close. "Oh, no…oh, no…oh, no!"

This can't be! she thought, holding his unresisting, disinterested body tight against her. First Alan and now Jeffy…I can't lose them both! I can't!

She glared across the room at Glaeken who stood watching her with a stricken expression. She had never felt so lost, so alone, so utterly miserable in her life, and it was all his fault.

"Is this the way it has to be?" she cried. "Is this it? Am I to lose everything? Why? Why me? Why Jeffy?"

She gathered Jeffy up in her arms and carried him from the room, hurling one final question at Glaeken and everyone else there as she left.

"Why not you?"

The heaviness in Glaeken's chest grew as he stood at the far end of the living room and watched poor Sylvia flee with her relapsed child.

Because this is war, he thought in answer to her parting question. And every war exacts its price, on victors and vanquished alike.

Even in the unlikely event we win this, we will all be changed forever. None of us will come through unscathed.

That knowledge did not make him grieve any less for the loss of that poor boy's mind.

A single sob burst from Carol and echoed like a shot in the mortuary silence. Bill slipped his arms around her. Jack stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at the floor. And Ba looked simply…lost. And tortured. Anything that hurt his mistress hurt him doubly. His pain-filled eyes reflected the war within—torn between following Sylvia or staying with the others.

"Please don't go yet, Ba," Glaeken said. "We may need you." He turned to the others. "We are ready."

"How can you be so cold?" Carol said.

"I am not immune to their torment," Glaeken told her. "I ache for that child, and even more for his mother. He may have lost his awareness and his ability to respond to the world around him, but he has lost his perspective as well—he doesn't know what he has lost. Sylvia does. She bears the pain for both of them. But there is no time to grieve. If the price the child has paid is to have meaning, we must take the final step."

"Okay," Jack said. "What do we do?"

"Put the hilt and the blade together."

"That's it? Then it's done?"