Hari was about to comment when a voice started calling out her name behind her.

“Hari! Hari!”

She turned to see the writer guy, Winslow, trotting toward her. Of all people. Talk about bad timing. She was about to tell him to get the hell out of here when he skidded to a halt.

“You!” Winslow cried, staring past her.

“Is this a setup?” Belgiovene said.

And just then the ground started vibrating. That could only mean the signal was about to fire. She didn’t want to be here when it did. She’d just taken her first running step when the earth gave way beneath her feet.

Suddenly nothing lay beneath Hari’s feet. She twisted frantically as she began to fall along with Winslow and Belgiovene and the make-out couple and the drinkers and smokers—everyone except the naked man, now above her, floating over the emptiness.

She screamed as down she went, and down and down and down…

BARBARA

“Oh, my God!” I cried. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

Horror engulfed me as I clapped a hand over my mouth to seal off my broken-record cries.

Next to me, Tier Hill muttered, “What the—?” He tugged on our arms. “Get back! Back!”

“It’s all right,” Ellie said, as if something like this happened every day. “We’re safe here.”

The moonlight shone on a perfect circle of black emptiness where the ground had fallen away, vanishing from sight and taking Hari and Winslow and everyone else within its two-hundred-foot perimeter with it.

“A giant sinkhole?” I managed after catching my breath.

Hill shook his head. “Can’t be. The park rests on solid schist. No place for the ground to sink to.”

“Then how—?”

“He knows,” Ellie said, pointing at the hole.

And there, in the empty space where the center of the Sheep Meadow had been, floated a naked man with outstretched arms that gave him the shape of a cross.

Floated!

Ellie added: “He did it.”

“But who…?”

“That’s the One. His time has come.”

As I watched, he slowly sank into the black depths.

“Where’s Hari?” I said, my throat tightening. I’d only just met her but I’d liked her forthrightness. “Is there any chance…? I mean, how deep is that hole?”

“No chance,” Ellie said with a note of dreadful finality. “The hole has no bottom.”

I didn’t bother asking her how she knew, I simply trusted she did.

But Hill snorted. “You can’t really believe that!”

Ellie didn’t respond, didn’t seem to think it worth an argument.

The hole wasn’t finished, it kept growing, more and more of the meadow crumbling into the abyss as people ran for their lives.

I heard a terrified cry and looked in time to see one of two inebriated young men who had stepped to the edge for a better look tumble into the pit. More ground gave way, taking the second. A passerby almost lost his own life in a futile attempt to save the latter.

“Maybe we’d better back up,” I said, eyeing the volleyball courts behind us.