Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She said, “Are you staying over tonight?”

  “If you still want me to.”

  “Of course I do.”

  And he put his arm around her waist.

  Later, Dex would wonder about the remark he had made about Chernobyl.

  Did it represent a premonition, like Mrs. Friedel’s dream? Had his body sensed something, some subliminal input his conscious mind failed to grasp?

  And then there was Evelyn’s tabby cat, Roadblock. Roadblock spent the evening in a kind of frenzy, tearing around the bedroom in tight circles until Evelyn lost patience and put her out. Had the cat sensed some tenuous radiation coming across the dark water of the lake?

  Perhaps. Perhaps.

  He woke a little after midnight.

  He hovered a moment on the fragile edge of awareness, dimly conscious of Evelyn beside him, of the way she breathed in her sleep, long delicate sighs. What had woken him? A sound, a motion . . .

  Then it came again, an irregular metallic tapping—a tapping at the window.

  He turned and saw the moonlit silhouette of the cat. Roadblock, out for the night, had climbed onto the garage roof and up the shingled slope to the bedroom window. Now she wanted back in. Claws on the plate glass. Tack-scratch. “Go ’way,” Dex mumbled. Wishful thinking. Tack tack.

  He stood up and pulled on his underwear. The warmth of the day had evaporated; the bedroom was chilly. The cat stood on her hind legs, arched against the windowpane in an eerie stretch. Moonlight fell on Dex, and he turned and saw his reflection in the vanity mirror. He saw the thatch of dark hair across his chest, his large hands loose at his sides. His gaunt face lay half in shadow, eyes wide and bewildered by sleep. He would be forty-one years old in August. Old man.

  He unlatched the window. Roadblock leaped inside and raced across the carpet, more frantic than ever. The cat jumped on the bed and Evelyn stirred in her sleep. “Dex?” she murmured. “What—?” And rolled over, sighing.

  He leaned out into the cool night air.

  The town was silent. Two Rivers closed down after midnight, even on a warm Friday. The sound of traffic had faded. He heard the warble of a loon out on the deeps of Lake Merced. Trees flush with new leaves moved in tides of night air. Somewhere down Beacon Road, a dog barked.

  Then, suddenly, inexplicably, a beam of light flashed across the sky. It came from the east, across the lake, far away in the abandoned Ojibway reserve—from the defense plant, Dex realized. The light cast sudden shadows, like lightning; it flickered on the lake. The bedroom was aglow with it.

  A spotlight? A flare? He couldn’t make sense of it.

  Evelyn sat up in alarm, all the way awake now. “Dex, what’s going on?”

  There was no time to answer. He saw a second beam of light cut the meridian of the sky, and a third, so sharply defined he thought they must be laser beams . . . maybe some kind of weapon being tested out there . . . and then the light expanded like a bubble, seemed to include everything around it, the lake, the town, Evelyn’s bedroom, Dex himself. The room, bathed in light, began abruptly to spin, to tilt on an invisible axis and slide away, until his awareness dwindled to a point, a pulsating singularity in a wilderness of light.

  The town of Two Rivers, Michigan, and the federally funded research project on its outskirts vanished from the earth some hours before dawn on a Saturday morning late in May.

  The fires began not long after.

  The fires were useful when it was time to explain what had happened. The obliteration of a town the size of Two Rivers requires a great deal of explanation, and the existence of the military facility on the abandoned Indian lands had not been a secret (though its purpose had never been revealed). It was the desire of the Defense Department that these awkward truths not be connected. Both the town and the research project were lost in the fire, officials announced. It had not been one fire but several; unseasonal, unexpected, the product perhaps of freakish heat lightning. The fires had surrounded the town and grown with unprecedented speed. There was no defense against such a holocaust. Most of Bayard County was simply incinerated. More lives had been lost than in any natural disaster in American history, tens of thousands of lives. Commissions of inquiry were established and carefully staffed.

  Questions were inevitable, of course. An American town the size of Two Rivers represents a substantial deposit of stone, asphalt, concrete, and steel—it can’t simply burn to the ground. Where were the foundations, the chimneys, the stonework, the bricks? Where, in fact, were the roads? Barricades had been thrown up before the fire was extinguished, and they stayed in place long after. Battalions of federal bulldozers had moved in immediately—to clear the highway, officials said; but one retired civil engineer who lived east of the fireline said it looked to him like they were rebuilding that road.

  And there were other mysteries: the sighting of curious lights; the interruption of phone service to and from Two Rivers long before the fire could have grown to threatening size; the fifteen civilian witnesses who claimed they had approached the town from the east or west and found the highway cut cleanly, as if by some enormous knife, and nothing on the other side but trees and wilderness. Power lines had been severed just as neatly, and it was the loose lines, some said, that were the real cause of the fire.

  But these were clues that defied interpretation, and they were soon forgotten, except by the fringe element who collected stories of ghosts, rains of stones, and the spontaneous combustion of human bodies.

  Never officially connected with the Two Rivers disaster was the case of Wim Pender, who was found wandering in a dazed condition along the grassy verge of Highway 75. Pender claimed he had been on a fishing/camping expedition in “the north of the Province of Mille Lacs” with two companions, from whom he had been separated when there was “a blast of light and flames to the south of us late one night.”

  Pender gave as his home address a number on a nonexistent Boston street. His wallet and identification had been lost in his flight from the fire. His pack contained only an empty canteen, two cans of something labeled THON PALE EN MORCEAUX (tuna fish, it turned out), and an apocryphal testament of the Bible entitled The Secret Booke of James in the English Tongue, printed on rice paper and bound in imitation leather.

  When Pender’s claims grew even more fantastic—including the accusation that both the Forest Service and the Michigan Department of Welfare were “Mohammedans or servants of Samael or worse”—he was remanded for psychiatric evaluation to a facility in Lansing.

  Mr. Pender was deemed not to be a danger to himself or others and was released on June 23. He made his way to Detroit, where he spent the summer in a shelter for the homeless.

  November was cold that year, and during an early snowfall Pender left his bed and spent his last money on a city bus, because the buses were heated. The bus carried him downriver to Southgate, where he got off in front of a bankrupt and abandoned retail lumber outlet. In the upper story of that building he tied his belt into a crude loop and hanged himself from a rafter.

  Pinned to his shirt was a note:

  THE KYNGDOM OF DEATH BELONGS TO THOSE

  WHO PUT THEM SELVES TO DEATH.

  JAMES THE APOSTLE.

  I AM NOT INSANE.

  SIGNED, WIM PENDER OF BOSTON

  MYSTERIUM

  PART ONE

  The void that precedes the creation of the universe is an imponderable, unknowing emptiness—lacking matter, vacuum, time, motion, number, or logic. And yet the universe derives from it according to some law not yet understood—a law which, governing nothingness, yields everything!

  Call it Nous. Perfect Mind. Call it the Protennoia. The Uncreated God.

  —from the secret journal of Alan Stern

  CHAPTER 1

  Dex Graham woke with the sun in his eyes and the weave of Evelyn Woodward’s bedroom carpet printed on the side of his face. He was cold and his body was stiff and knotted with aches.

  He sat up, wondering what had caused him to
spend the night on the floor. He hadn’t slept on a floor since college. The morning after some nightmarish frat party blowout, drunk on the floor of a dorm room and wondering what happened to the strawberry blond grad student who had offered him a ride in her Mustang. Vanished in the haze. Like so much else.

  A breath of cool air made him shiver. The bay window was wide open. Had he done that? The curtains tossed fitfully and the sky was as blue as china glaze. It was a quiet morning; there was no sound louder than the honking of Canada geese in the shallow water under the docks.

  He stood up, a slow operation, and looked at Evelyn. She was awkwardly asleep under a tangle of cotton sheets. One arm was flung out and Roadblock lay stretched at her feet.

  Had he been drunk? Was that possible? He felt the way he remembered feeling after a drunk—the same sensation of bad news hovering just out of reach, the night’s ill omens about to unreel in his head.

  And he turned to the window and thought: Ah, God, yes—the defense plant.

  He remembered the beams of light stabbing the sky, the way the bedroom had begun to pinwheel around him.

  Beyond the window, Lake Merced was calm. The docks shimmered under a gloss of hazy sunlight. The masts of pleasure boats bobbed randomly, listlessly. And due east—beyond the pines that crowded the far margin of the lake—a plume of smoke rose from the old Ojibway reservation.

  He stared for a time, trying to sort out the implications. The memory of Chernobyl came again. Obviously, there had been an accident at the Two Rivers plant. He had no way of knowing what kind of accident. What he had seen had not looked like a nuclear explosion but might have been something just as catastrophic, a meltdown, say. He watched the smoke make a lazy spindle in the cool air. The breeze was brisk and from the west; if there was fallout it wouldn’t travel into town—at least not today.

  But what happened last night had been more than an explosion. Something had rendered him unconscious for most of six or seven hours. And he wasn’t the only one. Look at Beacon Road, empty except for a scatter of starlings. The docks and boat ramps were naked in the sunlight. No boaters or dawn fishermen had taken to Lake Merced.

  He turned to the bed, suddenly frightened. “Evelyn? Ev, are you awake?”

  To his enormous relief, she stirred and sighed. Her eyes opened and she winced at the light.

  “Dex,” she said. “Oh-um.” She yawned. “Pull the drapes.”

  “Time to get up, Evie.”

  “Um?” She raised herself on an elbow and squinted at the alarm clock. “Oh my God! Breakfast!” She stood up, a little unsteady on her feet, and pulled on a housecoat. “I know I set that alarm! People must be starving!”

  The alarm was an ancient windup model. Maybe she had set it, Dex thought. Maybe it went off smack at seven, and maybe it rang until it ran down.

  He thought: We might already be dying of radiation poisoning. How would we know? Do we start to vomit? But he felt all right. He felt like he’d slept on the floor, not like he’d been poisoned.

  Evelyn hurried into the en suite bathroom and came back looking puzzled. “The light’s out in there.”

  He tried the wall switch. The bedroom light didn’t work, either.

  “House fuse,” she pondered, “or it might be a power failure . . . Dex, why do you look so funny?” Her frown deepened. “You were at the window last night, weren’t you? I remember now. You let Roadblock in. . . .”

  He nodded.

  “And there was lightning. An electric storm? Maybe that’s why the power is out. Lightning could have hit the transformer over by City Hall. Last time that happened we were in the dark for six hours.”

  By way of an answer he took her hand and led her to the window. She shaded her eyes and looked across the lake. “That smoke is the defense plant,” he said. “Something must have happened there last night. It wasn’t lightning, Ev. Some kind of explosion, I think.”

  “Is that why there’s no electricity?” Now her voice took on a timorous note and he felt her grip tighten on his hand.

  He said, “I don’t know. Maybe. The smoke is blowing away from us, anyway. I think that’s good.”

  “I don’t hear any sirens. If there’s a fire, shouldn’t there be sirens?”

  “Fire company may be there already.”

  “I didn’t hear any sirens during the night. The fire hall’s just down on Armory. It always wakes me up when they run the sirens at night. Did you hear anything?”

  He admitted he hadn’t.

  “Dex, it’s way too quiet. It’s a little scary.”

  He said, “Let’s do something about breakfast. Maybe we can run that little battery radio in the kitchen, find out what’s going on.”

  It seemed as if she weighed the suggestion and found it weak but adequate. “Everybody needs to eat, I guess. All right. Let me finish dressing.”

  It was the off-season, of course, and with Mrs. Friedel gone, Howard Poole was the sole remaining guest—and Howard hadn’t come down to breakfast.

  The stove was electric. Evelyn rummaged in the warming refrigerator. “I think we’re reduced to cereal,” she said. “Until the milk spoils, anyway.”

  Dex opened the utility cupboard and found Evelyn’s Panasonic radio. The batteries weren’t fresh, but they might still hold a charge. He put the radio on the kitchen table, pulled its antenna to full length, and switched it on.

  There was a crackle of static where WQBX used to be. So the batteries were good, Dex thought, but there was no broadcast coming out of Coby, some fifty miles west, where the relay tower was. The nearest actual radio station was in Port Auburn, and neither Dex nor Evelyn cared for its round-the-clock country-and-western music. But it would do, he thought, and he turned the dial clockwise.

  Nothing.

  Evelyn said, “There must be something wrong with it.”

  Maybe. It seemed unlikely to Dex, but what other explanation made sense? Ten years ago he might have guessed there’d been some kind of nuclear war, the doomsday scenario everybody used to dread, that it had wiped out everything beyond the horizon. But that possibility was slim. Even if some Russian had pushed some antiquated red button, it wouldn’t have destroyed the entire civilized world. Surely it wouldn’t have wiped out Port Auburn or even closed down the radio station there.

  An explosion at the Two Rivers plant and a radio with a dead transistor. He wanted to make a logical connection between the two, but could not.

  He was still turning the dial when Howard Poole came into the kitchen. Howard was wearing a white T-shirt, Saturday jeans with a rip starting at the left knee, and an expression of sleepy bewilderment. “Must have missed breakfast,” he said.

  “Nope. Cold cereal,” Evelyn said briskly, “and we haven’t really started yet. The power’s off, you may have noticed.”

  “Trouble at the defense plant,” Dex put in.

  Howard’s attention perked up instantly. “What kind of trouble?”

  “Some kind of explosion during the night, from what I could see upstairs. There’s smoke coming off it now. The town’s pretty much still asleep. And I can’t find anything on the radio.”

  Howard sat down at the table. He seemed to have trouble absorbing the information. “Jesus,” he said. “Fire at the research facility?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Jesus.”

  Now Dex caught something on the radio. It was a voice, a masculine rumble distorted by static, too faint to decipher. He turned up the volume but the intelligibility didn’t improve.

  “Put the radio on top of the refrigerator,” Evelyn said. “It always works better up there.”

  He did so. The reception was marginally better, but the station faded in and out. Nevertheless, the three of them strained to hear what they could.

  And for a time, the broadcast was quite clear.

  Moments later it faded altogether. Dex took the radio down and switched it off.

  Evelyn said, “Did anyone understand any of that?”

  �
�It sounded like a newscast,” Howard said cautiously.

  “Or a radio play,” Evelyn said. “That’s what I thought of.”

  Dex shook his head. “There hasn’t been a radio play on the air since 1950. Howard’s right. It was a news broadcast.”

  “But I thought—” Evelyn gave a small, puzzled laugh. “I thought the announcer said something about ‘the Spaniards.’ A war with the Spaniards.”

  “He did,” Dex said.

  For a few moments, the announcer’s bored voice had risen from the rattle of noise and distance into rough intelligibility. Issued was the first word Dex had understood.

  . . . issued reports of great successes along the Jalisco front in the war with the Spaniards. Casualties were light and the cities of Colima and Manzanillo are under Allied control. In the Bahia, amphibian landings—

  Then the swell of electronic noise buried the voice.

  “Pardon me,” Howard said, “but what the hell kind of accent was that? Guy sounds like a Norwegian funeral director on Quaaludes. And excuse me, but Spaniards? It’s like the news from 1898. It has to be a joke. Or, Evelyn’s right, some kind of radio drama.”

  “Like last Halloween,” Evelyn put in, “when they played a tape of the old Orson Welles War of the Worlds.”

  “It’s not Halloween,” Dex said.

  She gave him an angry glare. “So what are you saying, that it’s legitimate? We’re suddenly at war with Spain?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t understand it. I don’t know what the hell it’s about, Evie. But let’s not make up an explanation when we don’t have one.”

  “Is that what you think I’m doing?” She raised her voice, and it might have become an argument—not a real argument, Dex thought, but one of those peevish debates with more of fear than hostility in it—but she was interrupted by the keening of the Two Rivers Volunteer Fire Department, both trucks rolling out of the Armory Street fire hall and speeding past on Beacon Road.