Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He had seen enough to make him nervous. He flew home with the sun at his wingtip, trying not to think about any of this; it seemed too fragile to bear the weight of thought. During the long trip back he fretted that he had made some error in his reckoning, or that Two Rivers might have vanished in his absence, that he would be forced to land in the wilderness.

  But he knew this terrain, even without its man-made landmarks, as well as he knew his wife Sarah. The land was family. It didn’t betray him. He was back on the calm surface of Lake Merced before nightfall.

  He told no one what he had seen; not even Sarah. She might have called him crazy, and that would have been unbearable. He thought about talking to someone in authority—the police chief? The mayor? But even if they believed him, what could they do with this kind of information? Nothing, he thought. Nothing at all.

  He decided to repeat the journey, if only to convince himself that it had been real. Monday morning, he refueled at the dock pumps and took off. He charted the same course to the south. But Two Rivers was barely beyond the green line of the horizon when Shepperd turned back, his heart pumping madly and his shirt drenched with sweat.

  Something out there had frightened him. Something in the combination of white pine wilderness and dark, angular city had scared him off. He didn’t want to see it again. He had seen too much already.

  Monday afternoon, a formation of three strange aircraft flew over the town of Two Rivers. The noise drew people into the streets, where they shaded their eyes and stared up into the cloudless June sky. Superficially, the aircraft were conventional enough. Certainly they were old-fashioned: single-engine, propeller-driven, their quilted-metal bodies brilliant in the sunlight. The insignia on their wings were too distant to recognize, but most people assumed the planes were military craft of some kind.

  Calvin Shepperd thought they looked like World War II–vintage P-51’s, and he wondered what had drawn them here. Maybe it was his fault. Maybe he showed up on some radar screen. No telling what alarm he might have triggered.

  But he didn’t like that idea, and like most of his ideas since the accident last Saturday, Shepperd kept it to himself.

  He watched the three strange aircraft circle once more and then wheel away to the south, pale dots on a pale horizon.

  Evelyn Woodward had spent the last of her household money on groceries and a set of fresh batteries for her radio. The batteries were a dangerous luxury—money was scarce, and who knew when the bank might open again?—but she still believed in the radio. It was a lifeline. Once or twice in every long winter a snowstorm would send pine boughs plummeting onto the power lines, and the house would grow cold and dark while the linemen battled the weather. During those times, Evelyn would listen to her radio. The blackout would be announced on WGST; the affected counties would be named. The calm of the announcer was contagious. Listening, you knew the problem was temporary; that there were people out there working on it, mending things in the windy dark.

  Despite what Dex and Howard Poole had said, despite the length of the crisis, so peculiar in this lovely June weather, Evelyn still nurtured her hope that the radio would revive. Perhaps WGST was unavailable, but there had been that other station, that curious fragment of it, surely not as sinister as Dex had made it seem.

  She replaced the batteries and turned up the volume until the kitchen filled with the spit of static, but no voice came through.

  No matter, she thought. Soon.

  The radio was a private thing. She turned it off when anyone came into the kitchen, especially Dex or Howard. She was afraid of seeming stupid or naive. It was too easy to see herself as stupid or naive; she didn’t need anyone’s help. Anyway, time to herself wasn’t hard to find. Evenings, Dex and Howard got together in the front room, where Dex had put the old hurricane lamp, and they talked about the emergency—as if, by talking, they could make it sensible, as if they could bury it under the sheer weight of their words. Evelyn went to the kitchen and sat in the gathering dark with her radio: Sunday night, Monday night.

  Monday was the day the planes had flown over, an event that had cheered her considerably. Dex, of course, put some paranoid interpretation on it. To Evelyn, the meaning of the planes was much simpler. The problem—whatever the problem was—had come to someone’s attention. It was being worked on; it was being fixed.

  That was the evening the radio began to talk again. When Evelyn heard the voices, faint and laced with static, she smiled to herself. Dex was wrong. Normality was not far off.

  She sat at the kitchen table with sunset fading outside her dusty window and the radio close to her ear. She listened to fifteen minutes of a radio play (there were radio plays on this station), about policemen who were religious, or priests who were policemen—she couldn’t tell. The actors all had thick accents. Their accents sounded sometimes French, sometimes English, sometimes just unfamiliar; they used curious words from time to time. It must be a European play, Evelyn thought. Something avant-garde. Then there was an ad for Mueller’s Stone-Pressed White Flour, “our purity is never questioned,” in a similar voice. Then a time check and the news.

  According to the news, there had been a naval battle in the Yucatán Channel with tremendous losses on all sides. The Logos was damaged and limping back to Galveston, but the Spanish Narvaez had sunk with all hands. And the land campaign was meeting stiff resistance in the hills around Cuernavaca.

  At home, the announcer went on, Ascension Day had been marked by fireworks and public celebrations from coast to coast. On an unhappy note, incendiary displays in New York Harbor had inadvertently set fire to a pitch and tar warehouse on the Jersey shore and caused the death of three night watchmen.

  A pacifist demonstration in Montmagny had been broken up by police. Though it was claimed to be a student demonstration, Proctors said the majority of those arrested were either apostates, trade unionists, or Jews.

  More news at the turn of the hour, but first: don’t mark another Ascension without a new hat! Millinery to order at Roberge Hats and Yardgoods, a hat for every budget!

  Evelyn snapped off the radio, resisting by a hair her urge to throw it across the room.

  In the absence of television, Clifford Stockton had spent much of the past three days in the company of his bicycle.

  The bicycle was more than transportation. It was his key to the mystery. Clifford was as curious about the events that had overtaken Two Rivers as any adult—maybe more so, since there was no explanation he rejected out of hand. Aliens, monsters, miracles: all fair game as far as Clifford was concerned. He had no theory of his own. He had heard his mother laughing out loud (but nervously) at the idea that angels had been seen flying over the defense plant. Clifford wasn’t keen on the idea of angels himself: he wouldn’t know what to expect from an angel. But he didn’t rule it out. He had tried to get close to the research building on his bike; but the Two Rivers police had posted a car at the access road to turn away the curious, so he couldn’t confirm any of this personally.

  He didn’t really care. The defense plant was a long ride by bike. There were mysteries closer to home.

  For instance, the mystery of Coldwater Road. Coldwater Road ran for a couple of miles northeast past the cement factory. It had been zoned for housing, and water and power lines had been installed—there were fireplugs planted like tropical shrubs in the raw earth of empty lots. But no houses had been built. Hardly anyone went out Coldwater Road (except teenagers at night, he had heard), and that was fine with Clifford: he had few friends and quite a few enemies among the kids his age. Clifford was nearsighted and thin, a reader of books and watcher of television. He liked his own company. Out on Coldwater Road he could spend an afternoon in the scrubby fields and patches of woods without much fear of interruption, and that was good.

  But since Saturday, Coldwater Road had changed. The grid of vacant lots had been cut in half by what looked to Clifford like an old, old forest. It was a mystery of enormous proportions.

  T
he forest was deep and cool. Its floor was loamy and it smelled moist and pungent. It was both inviting and frightening. Clifford didn’t venture far into that dimness.

  Instead, he was fascinated by its perimeter: a straight line bisecting the blank lots, maybe curving a little if you stood at the far end of the cleared land and sighted northeast along the treeline—but only maybe.

  Not every tree was intact. Where the white pines crossed the border, they were neatly cut. The cut trees were eerie, Clifford thought. The heartwood was pale green and bled a sticky yellow sap. On one side: green branches thick with needles. On the other: nothing.

  He tried to imagine some force that could have enclosed Two Rivers, could have drawn it up from the world like the dough in a cookie cutter and deposited it here, wherever here was: a wilderness.

  He had heard the phrase pathless wilderness, and he guessed that was what this was—except, Clifford discovered, it was not entirely pathless.

  If you turned left where Coldwater Road ended, if you followed the line of woods past the vacant lots, over scrubland and a small hill (from which he could see the cement factory and, far beyond it, the tangle of culs-de-sac that contained his own house), and if you left your bike behind and persisted through berry canes and wildflowers and high weeds, then you came to a trail.

  A trail in the new forest, which approached Two Rivers but ended there, as all the town’s roads ended at the forest.

  It was a wide trail where the trees had been cleared and the undergrowth trampled down as if by trucks. A logging road, Clifford would have called it, but maybe it was not that; he made no assumptions.

  He walked a few yards down this path, listening to the sway of the pines around him and smelling the moist pungency of moss. It was like stepping into another world. He didn’t go far. He worried that the connection between this forest and Two Rivers might close behind him; that he would turn back and not be able to find his bike, his house, the town; only more trees and more of this primitive road, its source or destination.

  Monday, riding home along Coldwater Road, he saw three airplanes pass overhead. Another clue, he thought. He didn’t know much about airplanes, but it was obvious to Clifford that these were old-fashioned. They circled, circled, circled, then veered away.

  Somebody’s seen us, he thought. Somebody knows we’re here.

  He spent a day at home with his mother, who was frightened but trying not to show it. They opened cans of Texas-style chili and heated them over wax candles. His mother played the portable radio that night, and for a while there was music, but not anything Clifford or his mother recognized: sad, trilling songs. Then a man’s voice that faded into static.

  “I don’t know this station,” his mother said absently. “I don’t know where it’s from.”

  In the morning Clifford cycled back to the forest road.

  He was there when more planes passed over the town. Bigger planes this time, huge planes, wings bristling with engines. The planes dropped black dots into the June sky: bombs, Clifford thought breathlessly, but the dots grew billowing circles: parachutes, men dangling beneath, a rain of them.

  And he heard a rumbling from the earth under his feet, and he ducked into the shadow of the trees and watched terrified from the margin of the road as a column of armored vehicles roared past in choking shrouds of dust and diesel smoke, the men at their helms in black uniform bearing rifles with bayonets, none of them aware of Clifford watching as they broke from the forest into scrub waste and daylight and rumbled over sunlit empty lots to the gray ribbon of Coldwater Road.

  CHAPTER 2

  Autumn was wet in Boston that year.

  The rain began in mid-September and continued for three weeks without surcease—or so it seemed to Linneth Stone, who had spent most of that time cloistered in the humanities wing of Sethian College, correcting page proofs and double-checking footnotes, pausing at odd moments to watch the rain sluice down the high windows and cascade from the rain gutters and over the casements of the library across the square.

  Pagan Cults of Meso-America was the first tangible fruit of her long struggle for tenure. It both consolidated and justified her career. She was proud of the book. She loved the solid look of the typeset words, invested with an authority the manuscript had lacked. But she had been struggling with the book for half a decade, and what she didn’t like to admit was that the work—her life—had begun to border on tedium. Hours of minutiae, days of solitary page-turning, relieved by . . . nothing much. And the rain went on and on.

  It was, in its way, not a bad kind of tedium. Her chamber was cozy enough. She was warm against the weather, and there was coffee from the hallway urn, and the periodic clanking of the radiator, like the complaining of some gruff but dependable old friend. The time passed in neat packets of hours and days. But it was repetitious time, and it was often lonely. Few of the senior academics in her department knew what to make of a woman with tenure, especially a relatively young woman: she had turned thirty-four in August. Young, at least, compared to those bearded venerables who had been haunting the stacks and carrels since the Titans walked the earth. They stared at her the way they might stare at a talking dung beetle, or a chimp that had been trained to smoke cigars.

  And each night she hurried home to her tiny apartment on Theodotus Street, through the leaf-tumble and autumn air, past rattling motorcarriages and bored dray horses, from warmth to warmth: the warmth of her hot plate and her quilted blankets. This is success, she told herself. This is my career. This is how I mean to spend the rest of my life.

  But each night the memory came of her field expedition three summers ago in the Sierra Mazateca with her guides and two graduate students: a time when she had often been frightened for her life, when she had been dirty, uncomfortable, and too often helpless in the arms of fate. Now she would lie in bed reliving those months. And as terrifying as that time had often been, Linneth thought . . . it had not been tedious.

  Certainly she didn’t want to go back to New Spain. That part of her research was finished. In any case, the entire area was a war zone. But she wondered if the trip had not changed something inside her, had not ignited an unsuspected appetite for—what? Adventure? Surely not. But for something to happen. Another milestone. Something that would matter in her life.

  Some nights it was almost a prayer. She remembered her mother murmuring prayers at night: ostensibly to Apollo, since Daddy was a paidonomos in that cult, but more likely to the land around their house in rural New York, away from city lights, where the stars were vivid on summer nights and the forest hummed with life. A prayer to the local gods, who went nameless in the New World, at least since the aboriginals had been exterminated or driven west; whose sybils had fallen silent or never spoken from their meadows. “We live in a breathless place,” Linneth’s mother had once told her. “Without pneuma. No inspiration. No wonder the hierarchs are so powerful here.”

  More powerful than she had guessed, Linneth thought. For her mother, the bad times had come all too soon.

  Still, she allowed herself a small heretical prayer. Deliver me from this lonely sameness, she thought. And this damned rain!

  But the gods, her mother would have reminded her, are capricious. Linneth’s deliverance came in an abrupt and unpleasant form. And the rain went on for days.

  She shook her raincoat off in the chipped tile lobby of her walk-up building, carried it dripping upstairs past two landings decorated with circular framed mirrors, the bane of her life, always giving back reflections at the least flattering hours: dawn or dusk. Her hair was wet despite the rain cap and she looked small in the glare of the incandescent lamps. Small nose, small round face, compressed pale lips reluctant to offer a smile. When she first moved in, she had always smiled at herself in these mirrors. She no longer bothered. “Wet mouse,” she whispered. “Linneth, you are a wet mouse.”

  Her wardrobe was conventionally black, a black blouse and black floorsweeper, buttonhooks tarnished with wear; underneath
she wore a modest bustle and corset that contorted her into the shape of, she supposed, an acceptable female don, though there were not many guiding examples.

  Linneth took a longer look at herself in the mirror at the second-floor landing. Women with careers were supposed to be hard. She didn’t look hard. Only weary. There were smudges under her eyes. She had stayed up late last night listening to the radio, a program of war songs, lonesome songs about separated lovers. She tried to imagine what it must be like to have a lover at the front—in Cuernavaca, say, where all those lovely white adobe buildings were being shelled. She thought it must be terrible.

  She walked down the hallway to her door, which was ajar.

  She stopped and looked at it.

  Had she left it open? Impossible. She was compulsive about locking her door. There had been robberies in the neighborhood.

  Perhaps she had been robbed. The thought of it made her sick with apprehension. She pushed on the door and it glided open. There was a light on inside. She was suddenly aware of the sound of her breathing and the rattle of rain on the frame of this old building. She stepped through the tiny entranceway, past the coat closet and into the sitting room.

  There was a man inside. He sat calmly in her large chair with one long leg cocked over the other. He seemed to expect her.

  He wore the brown uniform of a senior Proctor. He was a middle-aged man, but trim. His hair was thick and black; his eyes were pale and patient. He smiled at her.