F. Paul Wilson - Nightworld

Scanned by Mysterytrain.

Proofed by Highroller.

to Forrest J Ackerman

whose Famous Monsters of Filmland exposed a fascinated twelve year old to a gallery of monstrous creatures, demonstrated their wonders while allowing him to laugh at them, and set him on the road toward creating his own monsters as an adult.

Thanks, Forry. This one's for you.

Part I

DAY

Rasalom went to the mountain.

He is calling himself Rasalom these days because it seems he has always called himself Rasalom. It is not his birth name, the one his mother bestowed on him. He discarded that one back in the First Age when it was customary to keep one's True Name a secret. But he has used Rasalom so long it almost seems like his True Name.

From here atop Minya Konka, through a break in the clouds, much of what is now called China spreads out four and a half miles below him in the darkness. His birthplace is not far from here. It is bitterly cold on the mountaintop. Gale-force winds shriek and howl angrily as they swirl the frozen air about his naked body. Rasalom scarcely notices. The power within protects him, the ever-growing power, fed incessantly by the delicious woes of the world below.

The horizon brightens. Dawn does not break at this altitude—it shatters. Rasalom stares at the glint of brightness sliding into view and focuses the power he has been storing since his most recent rebirth. Millennia of frustration fall away as he begins the process to which he has devoted the ages of his existence. No gestures, no incantations, just the power, vomiting out of him, spreading out and up and around, seeping into the planet's crust, billowing into its atmosphere, saturating its locus in the universe.

Soon all of this shall be his. There is no opposition, no power on earth that can stop him.

He drops to his knees, not in prayer but in relief, elation.

At last, after so many ages, it has begun.

Dawn will never be the same.

WEDNESDAY

1• NICHOLAS QUINN, PhD.

Manhattan

On May 17, the sun was late.

Nick Quinn heard the first vague rumors of a delayed sunrise while filling his coffee mug from the urn in the lounge of Columbia University's physics department, but didn't pay them much mind. A screwed-up calculation, a missed observation, a malfunctioning clock. Human error. Had to be. Old Sol never missed appointments. It simply didn't happen.

But the rumor continued to echo through the halls all morning, with no offsetting rumor of explanation. So at lunch break, when Nick had settled his usual roast beef on rye and large cola on his tray in the faculty cafeteria, the first thing he did was hunt up Harvey Sapir from astrophysics.

Nick looked for the hair. Harv's hair was always perfect. It flowed back seamlessly from his forehead in a salt-and-pepper wave, so full and thick it looked like a toupee. But it wasn't. Close up, if you looked carefully, you could catch a glimpse of pink scalp through the mane. A running joke around the physics department was guesstimating how much time and spray Harv invested in his hair each morning.

Nick spotted him at a corner table with Cynthia Hayes. She was from astrophysics too.

Harv's hair was a mess.

Nick found that unsettling.

"Mind if I join you?" Nick said, hovering over the seat next to Cynthia.

The two of them were in deep conversation. Both glanced up and nodded absently, then immediately put their heads back together. Beneath his uncombed hair, Harv's face was haggard. He looked all of his forty-five years and then some. Cynthia, too, looked somewhat disheveled. She was closer to Nick's age—mid-thirties—with short, chestnut hair and glorious skin. Nick liked her. A lot. She was the main reason he'd put aside his coke-bottle lenses and got fitted for contacts. Years ago. Still hadn't found the nerve to ask her out yet. With his pocked skin and weird-shaped head, Nick felt like a warty frog who had no chance ever of changing into a prince, yet still he pined for this princess.

"What's all this I hear about the sun being late?" he said after swallowing the first bite of his sandwich. "How'd a story like that get started?"

They both glanced at him again, then Cynthia leaned back and rubbed her eyes.

"Because it's true," Harv said.

Nick stopped in mid bite and stared at them, looking for a smile, a twist of the lips, a hint of the put-on.

Nothing. Cynthia's expression was as deadpan as Harv's.

"Bullshit," Nick said.

Instantly he regretted it. He never used profanity in front of a woman, even though many of them had no reservations about swearing like sailors in front of him.

"Sunrise was scheduled at five-twenty-one this morning, Nick," Cynthia said. "It rose at five-twenty-six. Five minutes and eight-point-two-two seconds late this morning."

Her husky voice never failed to give him a warm feeling.

Except today. Her words chilled him. She was saying the unthinkable.

"Come on, guys", he said, forcing a laugh. "We set our clocks by the sun, not vice versa. If the clock says the sun is late, then the clock needs to be reset."

"Atomic clocks, Nick?"

"Oh."

That was different. Atomic clocks worked on nuclear decay. They were accurate to a millionth of a second. If they said the sun was late…

"Could be some sort of mechanical failure," Nick said hopefully.

Harv shook his head. "Greenwich reported a late rise too. Five minutes and a fraction late. They called us. I was here at four-thirty a.m., waiting. As Cynthia told you, sunrise was late here by exactly the same interval."

Nick felt a worm of uneasiness begin to work its way up his spine.

"Greenwich too? What about the West Coast?"

"Palo Alto got the same figure," Cynthia said.

"But do you know what you're saying?" Nick said. "Do you know what this means?"

"Of course I know what it means!" Harv said with ill-concealed annoyance. "This is my field, you know. It means the earth either temporarily slowed its rate of spin during the night or it tilted back on its axis."

"But either would mean cataclysm! Why, the effect on tides alone would be—"

"But it didn't slow. Not the slightest variation in axial rotation or axial tilt. Believe me, I've checked. The days are supposed to be getting progressively longer until the equinox in June, but today got shorter—or at least it started out that way."

"Then the clocks are wrong!"

"Atomic clocks? All of them? All experiencing precisely the same level of change in nuclear decay at the same time? I doubt it. No, Nick. The sun rose late this morning."

Nick's field was lasers and particle physics. He was used to uncertainties at the sub-atomic level—Heisenberg had seen to that. But on the celestial plane, things were supposed to go like…clockwork.

"This is all impossible!"

Harv's expression was desolate. And Cynthia's was frightened.

"I know," Harv said in a low voice. "Don't I know."

And then Nick remembered a conversation he'd had with a certain Jesuit a couple of months ago.

It will begin in the heavens…

Father Bill Ryan had returned to the city after five years of hiding in the South, and was still laying low. Only a handful of people knew he was back. After all, he was still wanted by the police.

Poor Father Bill. The years of seclusion had not been kind to him. He looked so much older, and he acted strange. Simultaneously jumpy, irritable, frightened, and angry. And he talked of strange things. No specifics, just cryptic warnings of some sort of approaching Armageddon. But with the Russians acting semi-civilized and the cold war over, that hadn't made much sense.