Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It was a diffuse light that threw the shadows of trees onto the skin of the tent. The light was dim at first, then brighter. The sun, Howard thought dazedly. It must be dawn.

  But the light was moving too quickly to be the sun. Tree shadows glided over the fabric above him like marching figures. The light, or its source, was traveling through the forest.

  He reached for his eyeglasses and couldn’t find them. He was blind without his glasses. He remembered folding them and laying them down somewhere on the floor of the tent—but which side? He had been sleepy; the memory was dim. He swept his hand in panicky circles. Maybe he had rolled over on them; maybe, God help him, his glasses were broken.

  The frames, when he touched them, felt as cold and fragile as bone china. He hurried them onto his face.

  The light was brighter now.

  A lantern, Howard thought. Someone was out in the woods with a lantern. The tent and fly were a vivid orange and impossible to miss. He would be seen, might already have been seen. He tugged the zipper on the sleeping bag all the way down, wanting to be free of it when they came for him—whoever they were.

  The zipper growled into the silence. Howard shucked off the bag and huddled in the corner of the tent where the flap opened into the cold air outside, ready to bolt.

  But the shadows on the tent reached a noon angle and then grew longer; the light dimmed moment by moment until it was gone.

  Howard waited for what seemed an eternity but might have been four or five minutes. Now the darkness was absolute once more. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, glasses or no.

  He took a deep breath, opened the tent flap, and crawled outside.

  His legs were weak, but he managed to stand.

  He was able to see the dim silhouettes of the trees against an overcast sky faintly alight with the dim glow of Two Rivers. There was nothing threatening out here—at least, nothing obvious. No sign of what had passed except a strange, acrid odor, quickly gone. The air was cold and hazy with ground fog.

  He staggered ten steps from the tent, suddenly aware of the pressure of his bladder, and relieved himself against a tree. So what the fuck had happened here? What exactly had he seen? A lantern, flashlight, headlights on some car? But there had been no sound. Not even footsteps. Well, he thought, people see weird things in the woods. Swamp gas. Ball lightning. Who could say? The important thing was that it was gone, that he hadn’t been seen.

  Probably hadn’t been seen, he amended. But even if he had, there was nothing to do about it. Sleep, he thought, if that was possible, and move on in the morning.

  He had reached a state of tentative calm when a second light began to flicker on the pinetops.

  He felt marginally less threatened this time. This time he could see what was going on. He crouched in the cover of a young maple and watched the sourceless glimmer rising through a foggy thicket some tens of yards away.

  What made it eerie, Howard thought, was its noiselessness: how could something as bright as a spotlight move through these woods without rattling the underbrush? And the smoothness of the motion. A glide. Shadows tall as houses wove among the trees.

  Howard squatted in the dark with one hand buried in the loam to brace himself. He felt aloof now, in a state of fine concentration, only a little frightened.

  The light moved steadily closer. Now, he thought: now it will come around that hillside and I’ll see it. . . .

  And it did—and he gasped in spite of himself, cut by a breathless, helpless awe.

  The light had no source. It was somehow its own source. The light was a thing; the light had dimension. The light was a nebulous shape ten or fifteen feet tall, almost too bright to look at, but not quite, not quite. It was not a sphere; it had a shape that was tenuous but seemed to suggest a human form—head, arms, trunk, legs. But the features weren’t solid; they twined like smoke, were lost to the air, flickered alive. Veins of color pulsed in the brightness.

  It came closer. Closer, it wasn’t easier to see. The edges blurred; it was diffuse. It moved like a flame; Howard was suddenly afraid it might come close enough to burn him.

  Now it paused a few yards away.

  The apparition possessed no visible eyes. Nevertheless, Howard was convinced that it looked directly at him—that it regarded him with some complex, chill intelligence that flowed toward him and into him like a slow current.

  And then it simply moved on: glided past him and away beyond a scrim of trees.

  Howard kept still. There were more lights now, none so close, but all nearby, each casting its own grid of shadows into and around the weaving trees. The woods were populated with these things, each one marching on some stately orbit. My God, Howard thought. The urge to pray was powerfully strong. My God, my God.

  He watched until each source of this nebulous light had passed and a genuine darkness descended again.

  Then—bone by bone, tendons creaking—he lifted himself and stood erect.

  The cold wind was brisk but the sky seemed less weighty now. It was ink-blue beyond the eastern margin of the forest. Dawn, Howard thought. That bright star might be Venus.

  He stumbled back to the tent bereft of every emotion but a wordless gratitude for the fact of his own survival.

  He woke hours later in cool sunlight filtered through orange nylon. His body felt raw and his thoughts were quick and fragile.

  Time to start thinking like a scientist, Howard scolded himself. Find the center of this problem.

  Or just keep walking: that was the other option. Walk past the ruined research buildings, walk deeper into this forest, south toward Detroit or whatever mutation of Detroit existed here; walk until he found a population to lose himself in, or until he died, whichever came first.

  The fundamental question, almost too sweeping to ask, was simply Why? So many things had happened to Two Rivers, so many enormous, numbing events. All linked, he supposed; all connected in some causal chain, if only he could begin to unravel it. Obviously the town had moved through an unimaginable latitude of time, but why? Had arrived in a world full of archaic technology and perverse religious wars, but why? Why here, of all places? And the night shapes in the forest: what were they?

  What single line could possibly connect all these things?

  He rolled his tent, fielded his pack, and followed the trail eastward.

  Sunlight chased cloud into the hazy east. Howard crossed a brook at its shallowest point, where the water streamed in cool transparency over granite rubble. He wished his thoughts were as lucid. He was out of food; he felt hungry and light-headed.

  It seemed appropriate that he was moving toward the heart of the crisis, through the undeveloped lands of the old Ojibway reserve toward the ruined Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. Through mystery toward revelation. At least, perhaps. Eventually.

  Last night these woods had been haunted. Today, in flickering sunlight, the memory seemed ludicrous. And yet there was a presence here, never seen but often felt, a private visitation. He felt his uncle with him as he walked: Stern as a presiding spirit. He guessed that wasn’t scientific. But that was how it seemed.

  The woods thinned. Howard moved more cautiously here. He came to the logging road that connected the lab with the highway. The road had been widened by military traffic. He waited until a truck rumbled past, its primitive engine loud in the silence. Then he crossed the rutted, wet road and walked parallel to it behind a screen of low pines.

  He reached the hill from which, long ago, he had watched Chief Haldane’s ladder company move beyond a border of blue light. Another trail crossed the road here. It seemed to lead to higher ground along this ridge, and Howard followed it through berry thickets and white pine, sweating under his Navy coat. It was afternoon now and the sunlight was warm.

  He came to the peak of the ridge. The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory lay in the flatland beyond. Howard felt conspicuous in this elevated place. He shrugged off his pack and left it under a tree. The ridge slo
ped steeply here and Howard lay on his belly at the edge of it, looking down an incline of rock and wild grasses.

  The ruined buildings were still enclosed in their dome of iridescent light. They looked much the way Howard remembered them looking in the spring. The central bunker had stopped smoking, but nothing else had changed—the grounds were embalmed in this glaze of illumination. The single elm outside the staff housing had kept all its leaves. There was a breeze, at least here on this escarpment, but the tree was not moving.

  Human activity was restricted to the outside of this perimeter. Obviously, the military had taken an interest in the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. It would have been easy enough to deduce that the lab was at the center of what had happened at Two Rivers, and this persistent skein of light would have captured anyone’s attention. The soldiers had put up a wire fence around the circumference of the property. Tents and a pair of tin sheds had been erected. The contrast was striking, Howard thought. Inside the dome, everything was pristine. Outside, the grass had been trampled into mud, ditches had been turned into latrines, garbage had been heaped in enormous mounds.

  His attention was focused so closely on the lab that he didn’t hear the footsteps behind him until they were too close. He rolled onto his back and sat up, ready to bolt for the trees.

  Clifford Stockton regarded him through magnifying-lens eyeglasses. The boy blinked twice. Then he held out a wrinkled paper bag.

  “My lunch,” he said. “You can have some if you want.”

  Howard said, “How did you know I wasn’t a soldier?”

  They sat in the shade some yards away from the edge of the escarpment.

  “You don’t look like a soldier,” the boy said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “The way you’re dressed.”

  “I might be out of uniform. I might be in disguise.”

  The boy inspected him more closely. He shook his head: “It’s not just your clothes.”

  “Okay. Still—you should be careful.”

  Clifford nodded.

  The boy had left his bicycle inclined against a tree. He offered Howard half a sandwich wrapped in brown paper and a drink from a thermos of cold water. Howard had brought his own water on this expedition, two Coke bottles tucked into the deep pockets of his jacket, but most of that was gone. He drank from the thermos and said, “Thanks.”

  “My name is Clifford.”

  “Thank you, Clifford. I’m Howard.”

  The boy offered his hand and Howard shook it.

  Then, briefly, they worked at the food. It wasn’t much of a sandwich, Howard thought, but it was better than most of what he’d been eating lately. Some kind of coarse-ground bread, some meat, probably military rations, not bad if you were hungry. He discovered he was very hungry indeed.

  He finished the sandwich and licked the pale grease from his fingers. “Have you been here before, Clifford?”

  “A few times.”

  “Long ride out from town, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Howard felt at ease with the boy. Maybe it was his obvious myopia or his solemn style, but he felt an echo of his own childhood here. One look at Clifford and you knew he was the kind of kid who kept a collection of coins or bugs or comics; that he watched too much TV, read too many books.

  His eyes were pinched and cautious, but Howard supposed that was natural; everyone was cautious nowadays.

  He said, “How safe is it up here?”

  “It’s a long hike up from the valley. I’ve never seen a soldier here. Mostly they stay near the trucks.”

  “How often do you come here?”

  “Maybe once a week or so. Like you said—it’s a long ride.”

  “So why come at all?”

  “Find out what’s happening.” The boy gave Howard a thoughtful stare. “Why are you here?”

  “Same reason.”

  “You walked from town?”

  Howard nodded.

  “Long walk.”

  “Yup.”

  “First time?”

  “Yes,” Howard said. “At least, since the tanks came.”

  “It’s quiet today.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “No,” the boy said. “Sometimes there are more soldiers or more Proctors.”

  Howard was instantly curious, but he didn’t want to intimidate the boy. He ordered his thoughts. “Clifford, can you tell me what they do here? This might be important.”

  Clifford frowned. He balled up his sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the dark of the woods. “It’s hard to tell. You can’t see much without binoculars. Sometimes they take pictures. A couple of times I saw them sending soldiers in.”

  “What—into the lab?”

  “Into one of the buildings.”

  “Show me which one.”

  They crept to the edge of the escarpment. The boy pointed to a tall structure at the near perimeter of the parking lot: the administration building.

  Howard remembered Chief Haldane and his firefighters on the first Saturday after the transition. They had ventured a few yards into that radius and had come out babbling about monsters and angels . . . and sick, Howard remembered, perhaps sicker than they knew. Haldane had died this September, of symptoms that sounded like a runaway leukemia. “I’m surprised they can go in there.”

  “They wore special clothes,” Clifford said, “like diving suits, with helmets. They went in and they came out.”

  “Carrying anything?”

  “Boxes, filing cabinets. Books. Sometimes bodies.”

  Bodies, Howard thought. The installation wasn’t as empty as it seemed. Of course not. People had died here . . . died in their beds, most of them, neatly out of sight.

  “They’re really well preserved,” the boy added.

  “What?”

  “The bodies.”

  “Clifford—from this distance, how can you tell?”

  The boy was silent for a time. Some nerve had been touched, some delicate truth. The boy avoided Howard’s eyes when he finally spoke: “My mom has a friend. A soldier. Who comes over. That’s how we get bread for sandwiches. Chocolate bars sometimes.” Clifford shrugged uncomfortably. “He’s not a bad guy.”

  “I see.” Howard kept his voice carefully neutral. “But he talks sometimes?”

  The boy nodded. “At breakfast mostly. He brags.”

  “He’s been here?”

  “He was on duty when they brought out a body. He said it was like it only just died. It hadn’t decomposed.” Another shrug. “If he’s telling the truth.”

  “Clifford, this could be the most important part yet. Do you remember anything else he said? Anything about what they’re looking for here, or what they found?”

  The boy settled on a granite shelf away from the lip of the escarpment. “He didn’t say too much. I don’t think he’s supposed to. He said people come out of there, even the ones in suits, talking about the weird things they’ve seen. They can’t stay inside too long or go too far. It makes them sick. Some of the first people who went in, died.”

  Howard thought again of Chief Haldane’s leukemia.

  “And at night,” the boy continued, “everybody leaves. Nobody stays out here at night. It gets strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  The boy shrugged. “That’s all I remember. Luke doesn’t really talk that much. Mostly he complains about the Proctors. He hates them. Most of the soldiers do. It’s the Proctors who keep bringing people out here; the soldiers just follow orders. Luke says the soldiers have to take all these risks because the Proctors decided this place is important.” The boy paused, seemed to hold the thought a moment. “But it is important, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”

  “Yes,” Howard said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  The boy turned away. He looked small against the blue sweep of the sky. A wind came up the escarpment.

  The boy said, “So much has happened. No one knows where we really are
—where the whole town is. It just seems like such a long way back home.” He turned to Howard, frowning fiercely. “I don’t know what happened out here, but it’s hard to believe anybody could fix something like that.”

  Howard looked at the forest beyond the ruined buildings, at the Ojibway land blending seamlessly into ancient white pine wilderness. The hills rolled to a horizon lost in autumn haze. It would be so easy to walk into that vastness. Die or find a new life. Leave.

  “Maybe it can be fixed,” he said. “I mean to try.”

  He learned what he could from Clifford, and when the boy took his bike and cycled away Howard sketched a crude map of the compound, estimating distances and the rough circumference of the dome of light.

  He crossed the highway before dark and spent another night in the woods nearer to town; nothing disturbed his sleep.

  He left his camping gear wrapped in the tent fly and buried under a mound of leaves—he might find his way back here someday—and hiked home through town. He stank of his own sweat and he was desperately thirsty, but he made it back to his basement before curfew without arousing suspicion.

  Howard had brought very few possessions into this new world. They were all contained in his single canvas shoulder bag, stashed behind the water heater in the Cantwell house. He brought the bag out and opened it. There was not much inside. Some notebooks, journal extracts he had planned to read, his birth certificate, his lab credentials . . . and this.

  Howard took it out of the bag and examined it under a light.

  A single sheet of canary-yellow paper torn from a notepad.

  On the paper was written, Stern.

  And a telephone number.

  CHAPTER 6

  Milos Fabrikant was the eldest of the battalion of scientists assigned to the work of constructing a nucleic bomb.

  Each day, weather permitting, he bicycled from his home—a dreary bunker full of dreary male physicists—to his place of work, an office in one of five enormous buildings occupying a bleak, flat hinterland of northern Laurentia.

  Each day, he was drawn to the same observation: everything here was too large. The landscape, the sky, the works of man. Indeed, here was the largest structure the human race had ever created, a huge box-shaped building full of air-evacuated calutrons—he cycled past it on a plain of smooth, black asphalt, under a sky threatening rain.