Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Well, thank God,” she said. “Somebody’s doing something at last.”

  “Wait a minute,” Howard said, and there was an expression of sick foreboding on his face.

  “It’s the fire department,” Evelyn told him. “They must be headed for the Indian reserve.”

  “God, no,” Howard said. And Dex watched in perplexity as the younger man stood and ran for the door.

  Dick Haldane struggled out of a confused sleep at eight A.M., and from the front window of his house, with the view overlooking the brickworks and the west end of Lake Merced, he saw smoke rising from the old Ojibway reserve.

  Haldane had the misfortune of being the acting chief of the Two Rivers Volunteer Fire Department. The chief and most of the Fire Board trustees were in Detroit until Monday for a conference on ISO grading policy. And it looked as if an emergency had fallen into his lap in the meantime: the electricity didn’t work and neither did the phones. Perhaps worse, there was no water pressure in the bathroom—the toilet gave a sad last gasp when he flushed it. Two Rivers took its water pressure from a reservoir in the highlands north of the Bayard County line, so this might be a local problem . . . but it might not, and the idea of a major fire without the means to fight it was one of Haldane’s personal bad dreams. Lacking alternatives, he hopped into his aging Pontiac LeMans and drove like hell to the Beacon Road fire hall.

  The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory—obvious source of the smoke—was supposed to have its own fire control team, and certainly no one had told Haldane the facility was inside his response area. Quite the opposite. The Department of Defense had had a long talk with the Municipal Fire Service. They didn’t want volunteer brigades on the property unless they were specifically called for, and according to the DOD’s Man in a Suit, that was about as likely as a 911 call from God Almighty.

  Still that smoke kept on curling into a lazy sky.

  Haldane kept the night shift on duty and waited for the morning crew to arrive. A couple of Honda generators in the basement provided AC for the dispatcher’s radio, but there was nobody talking back. He made a couple of attempts to reach City Hall and the mayor at home, but it was no go. This whole mess was squarely on his back.

  There had been a fire in the National Forest land north of town in 1962, when Haldane was twenty years old, and he had been among the men cutting the firebreak. He had witnessed many fires since, but none as terrifying. He imagined the Ojibway reserve as it had been before the feds moved in: weedy meadowland and tall wild pine, a few shacks where the traditionals still persisted in their old ways. Those shacks had been razed and a perimeter drawn on the county maps: DOD, Enter at Your Own Risk, Here There Be Tygers. But a fire, as Haldane told his troops, observes no limits. A fire goes where it feels like.

  This fire didn’t look all that serious, at least not yet, not from here, but still—he didn’t want anybody saying a forest burned down because Dick Haldane was waiting on a telephone call.

  He kept the engine company at home but dispatched a ladder company to survey the scene. He followed behind in the chief’s car, a red station wagon with a roof light.

  The siren cut the Saturday quiet like a hot, sharp knife. Not that there was much traffic to get in the way. Two Rivers was slow to wake this peculiar morning. He saw a few people on their porches out to stare at the ladder truck, a few kids in their PJs. No doubt they were wondering whether the TV would begin to work pretty soon—or the telephones. Haldane was troubled by the same question. There was no sign of an emergency except that smoke from the federal project, but how could a fire out there, even a bad fire, shut down so much of Two Rivers? Some kind of power surge, he supposed, or maybe a dead short across those kilovolt lines that had gone in last year. But he had never seen anything like it in his career, that was for sure.

  They were quickly out of the crowded part of town, three miles down the highway and then east along the wide dirt road. All the federal money pouring in, couldn’t they have paved the access? Haldane’s kidneys protested this rattling. The woods were dense here, and although he saw the plume of smoke now and again, there was no clear line of sight to the plant itself until the road crossed a ridgeline overlooking the site.

  He topped the rise and stood on the brake too hard. Even so, he only just managed to avoid ramming the rear end of the ladder unit. Who was driving? Tom Stubbs, as he recalled. Stubbs, too, was probably transfixed by what he was suddenly able to see.

  The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory was a nucleus of low concrete bunkers in an asphalt-paved flatland where the old social hall used to be. At the extreme north of this paved space stood a tall administration building; at the south, a residence that looked like a stucco apartment complex misplaced from some L.A. suburb.

  Two of the bunkerlike buildings had been damaged in some kind of explosion. The walls were blackened and the roofs were in a state of partial collapse. From the most central and badly damaged structure, that pall of oily smoke curled into the sky. No open flame was visible.

  But that wasn’t the astonishing thing. The astonishing thing, Chief Haldane thought, was the way all of this property was enclosed in a veil of diaphanous blue light.

  A few years ago Haldane had taken his vacation time in northern Ontario, along with two guys from the fire hall and a Realtor from the west side of town. They went fly fishing in the lake country north of Superior, and for a solid week they had achieved a nearly ideal balance of sport, intoxication, and masculine bullshit. But what Haldane remembered best was a chilly, clear night when he looked up into a sky jammed with stars and saw the aurora borealis dancing on the horizon.

  It was this same kind of light. Same elusive haze of color, now here, now there. He had never expected to see it in daylight. Certainly he had never expected to see it enfolding this collection of bunkers and brickwork like some kind of science fiction force field.

  It was a smoky, uncertain light. Mostly you could see through it, but it obscured a detail here and there. And Haldane noticed another peculiarity: the longer you stared at something inside that glow, the less you seemed to see of it. He fixed his eyes on the burning building, perhaps a thousand yards down this hill and across the asphalt. It wavered in his sight. After ten seconds, he might have been staring at a blank scrim of color.

  He shook his head to clear it.

  The radio crackled. It was Stubbs, calling from the truck ahead. Haldane picked up the microphone and said, “You scared the piss out of me, I hope you’re aware of that.”

  Stubbs’s voice came crackling out of a deep well of static. He sounded like he was miles away, not a couple of yards. “Chief, what the hell is that? What do we do, turn back?”

  “I don’t see anybody fighting the fire.”

  “Maybe we should wait for the state cops or somebody.”

  “Grow some balls, Tom. Take your foot off the brake.”

  The ladder company inched forward.

  Clifford Stockton, twelve years old, spotted the smoke about the same time Chief Haldane did.

  Clifford, who was still called “Cliffy” by his mother and a mob of aunts, saw the smoke from his bedroom window. He stood in his pajamas watching it for a while, not sure whether it was important. He wanted it to be some dire omen, as in the disaster movies he loved—like the flaky pressure gauge nobody notices in The Last Voyage, or the snowstorm that just won’t quit in the first Airport movie.

  It was a great beginning for Clifford’s Saturday, cue for any number of Clifford-scripts. He began orchestrating the movie in his head. “Little did anyone suspect,” he said out loud. Little did anyone suspect . . . what? But he hadn’t figured that out yet.

  His mother always slept late Saturday. Clifford pulled on yesterday’s jeans and the first T-shirt in his T-shirt drawer, cleaned his foggy glasses with a Kleenex, and went downstairs to watch TV. Whereupon he discovered the electricity didn’t work. Not just in the living room, either, but in the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom. And for the fi
rst time Clifford paused and wondered if it was possible, not in the world of wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if but in the real dailiness of his life . . . if something really weird might actually be happening.

  He remembered being awakened by lightning, a diffuse lightning without thunder; remembered drifting in and out of a confused sleep with light all around him.

  He decided to check on his mother. He padded back to the dim upstairs of their rented house and eased open her bedroom door. Clifford’s mother was a thin and not very beautiful woman of thirty-seven years, but he had never looked at her critically and he didn’t do so now. She was only his mother, dangerous if awakened too soon from her Saturday morning sleep-in.

  Saturday morning drill was that she was allowed to sleep till ten o’clock, and if Clifford was up early he could do whatever he wanted—get his own breakfast, watch TV, play outside the house if he left a note and was back by noon for lunch. Today was different, obviously, but he guessed the rules still applied. He wrote her a message—I have gone to ride my bike—and stuck it to the refrigerator with a strawberry-shaped magnet.

  Then he hurried outside, locked the door, grabbed his bike and pedaled south toward the bridge over Powell Creek.

  He was looking for clues. There was a fire on the old Ojibway reserve and the lights didn’t work. A mystery.

  Two Rivers seemed too quiet to yield any answers. Then, as he crossed the creek and rolled toward downtown, Clifford wondered if the very quietness was itself a clue. No one was mowing his lawn or washing the car. Houses brooded with their drapes still drawn. The sun shimmered on an empty road.

  He heard the sirens when the fire engines went screaming along Beacon and out of town.

  It was, he thought, almost too much like a movie.

  He stopped at Ryan’s, a corner grocery that had been taken over last year by a Korean family named Sung. Mrs. Sung was behind the counter—a small, round woman with her eyes buried in nets of wrinkles.

  Clifford bought a candy bar and a comic book with the money from yesterday’s allowance. Mrs. Sung took his money and made change from a shoebox: “Machine not working,” she said, meaning the cash register.

  “How come?” Clifford said. “Do you know?”

  She only shrugged and frowned.

  Clifford rode away. He stopped at the public park overlooking Powell Creek to eat the candy bar. Breakfast. He chose a sunny patch of grass where he could see the north end of town. The town was waking up, but in a slow, lazy way. A few more cars were prowling the streets. More shops had opened their doors. The distant plume of smoke continued to rise, but it was unhurried and unchanged.

  Clifford crumpled the paper candy bar wrapper and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. He took the cardboard liner down to the creek and let it float away. It tumbled over a rock and capsized. It was the Titanic in A Night to Remember. The unsinkable ship.

  He climbed the embankment and looked again at Two Rivers—the town where nothing much ever happened.

  The unsinkable town.

  He checked his watch. Twenty after eleven. He rode home, wondering whether his mother was up and had found the note; she might be worried, he thought. He dropped the bike in the driveway and hurried inside.

  But she was only just awake, tangle-haired in her pink bathrobe and fumbling over the coffee maker.

  “Damn thing doesn’t work,” she said. “Oh, hello, Cliffy.”

  Between breakfast and lunch, Dex Graham formulated the same idea as Clifford Stockton: he would go out and survey the town.

  He left Evelyn in the kitchen and promised he’d be back by noon.

  He drove west on Beacon to his own apartment, one bedroom in a thirty-year-old building, sparsely furnished. He owned a sofa bed, a fourteen-inch TV set, and a desk where last week’s history papers waited to be graded. Yesterday’s breakfast dishes were stacked in the drainer. It was a collation of postponed chores, not a home. He checked to see whether his lights were working. They weren’t. So the problem wasn’t confined to Evelyn’s house or street—it wasn’t only local. Somehow, he had doubted that it would be.

  He picked up the phone, thought about calling somebody from the school—but his phone was as dead as Evelyn’s had been.

  Back to reconnaissance, he thought. He locked the door behind him.

  He drove downtown. The streets were still too empty, the town sluggish for a Saturday morning, but at least a few people were moving around. He supposed the blackout had kept a lot of people home. The big stores were closed by the power outage, but some of the smaller businesses had managed to open—Tilson’s Grocery was open, illuminated by daylight through the broad glass front windows and a couple of battery-powered lanterns in the dim corner where the freezer was. Dex stopped to pick up some groceries. Evelyn had asked for canned goods, anything nonperishable, and he thought that was a good idea; there was no way to predict how long this crisis might last or what its nature might turn out to be.

  He filled a handbasket with canned vegetables and was about to pick up a bottle of distilled water when a man shoved in front of him and took two jugs. “Hey,” Dex said.

  The stranger was a big man in a hunting jacket and a John Deere cap. He gave Dex a blank look and took the bottled water to the checkout counter, where he added it to a formidable stack of canned goods—the same sort of thing Dex had come for, but more of it.

  The girl behind the counter was Meg Tilson, who had graduated from Dex’s history class last year. She said, “Are you sure you want all this?”

  The man was sweating and a little breathless. “All of it. How much?”

  The register was down, of course, so Meg began to total everything on a pocket calculator. Dex lined up behind the man. “You seem to be in a hurry.” Another blank look. The man was dazed, Dex thought. He persisted: “So you know something we don’t know?”

  The man in the John Deere cap turned away as if the question frightened him, but then seemed to relent: “Shit,” he said, “I’m sorry if I got in your way. I’m just . . .”

  “Stocking up?”

  “You bet.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “A hundred seventy-six eighty,” Meg announced. “At least I think so.”

  The man pulled two hundred-dollar bills out of his pocket while Meg, stunned, rummaged in a shoebox for change.

  “I was supposed to drive to Detroit this morning,” the man said. “For my sister’s wedding. I wake up late, so I throw the tux in the back seat and I drive out Beacon and turn south on the highway, right? But I only get about a mile and a quarter past the city limits.”

  “The road’s blocked?”

  The man laughed. “The road’s not blocked. The road just ain’t there. It stops. It’s like somebody cut it with a knife. It ends in trees. I mean old growth. There’s not even a trail through there.” He looked at Dex. “How the hell could that happen?”

  Dex shook his head.

  Meg put the groceries in two boxes and gave the man his change. Her eyes were wide and frightened.

  “I think we’re in for a long siege,” said the man in the John Deere cap. “I think that’s pretty fucking obvious.”

  Meg toted up Dex’s bill, all the while casting nervous glances at the man as he loaded his boxes into the back of an old Chevy van. “Mr. Graham? Is what he said true?”

  “I don’t know, Meg. It doesn’t seem likely.”

  “But the electricity doesn’t work. Or the phones. So maybe—”

  “Anything’s possible, but let’s not jump to conclusions.”

  She looked at his collection of canned goods and bottled water, not too different from the previous order. “Should we all be—you know, stocking up?”

  “I don’t honestly know. Is your father around?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Maybe you should tell him what happened. If any of this is true, or even if rumors start flying, there might be a crowd in here by this afternoon.”

  “I’ll do that,” Meg said.
“Here’s your change, Mr. Graham.”

  He put the groceries in the trunk of the car. It might have been wiser to go straight back to Evelyn’s, but he couldn’t let the matter rest. He drove past the house on Beacon, connected with the highway and turned south.

  He passed a couple of cars headed in the opposite direction. Through traffic, Dex wondered? Or had they hit the mysterious barrier and turned back? He decided he didn’t believe the John Deere man’s story; it was simply too implausible . . . but something might have turned the man around, perhaps something connected with the power failure and the explosion on the old reserve.

  The state highway wound through low pine punctuated with back roads where tar paper shacks and ancient cabins crumbled in the noon heat. He saw the city limits sign, LEAVING TWO RIVERS; a billboard ad for a Stuckey’s ahead where the state road met the interstate; LEAVING BAYARD COUNTY. Then he rounded a tight curve and almost rammed the back end of a Honda Civic parked with one wheel in the breakdown lane. He stomped the brake and steered hard left.

  When the car came to a stop he let it idle a few minutes. Then, when it occurred to him to do so, he put it in park and switched off the muttering engine.

  Everything the man had said was true.

  Three vehicles had arrived here before him: the Civic, a blue Pinto with a roof rack, and a tall diesel cab without a trailer. All three were motionless. Their owners stood at the end of the road, huddled in confusion: a woman with a toddler, a man in a business suit, and the truck driver. They looked at Dex as he climbed out of his car.

  Dex went to the place where the road ended. He wanted to make a careful observation; wanted to be able to describe this with scientific accuracy to Howard Poole, the graduate physics student back at Evelyn’s. It seemed important, in this senseless moment, to register every detail.

  The highway simply stopped. It was as if someone had drawn a surveyor’s line across it. On this side, two-lane blacktop; on that side—old-growth forest.

  The road seemed to have been cut by something much finer than a knife. Only a few particles of asphalt had crumbled. The graded road was lower than the forest floor on the other side. A hump of loamy soil rose above the road surface and had dropped crumbs of moss and composted pine needles onto it. The smell of the soil was rich and strong. Dex picked up a handful. It was moist and compacted easily in his fist. It had been here a long, long time.