Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But he crossed Oak without incident and stopped, a little breathless, in the shadows on the opposite side.

  The silence seemed larger here. He paid attention to it, sorting through wind-sounds for the rumble of a motor. There was nothing. He braced himself against a brick wall and leaned into the street. He looked hard east and west and saw only streetlights, traffic signals, and the icy white sidewalks.

  He located Howard’s silhouette in the alleyway and waved an all-clear.

  Howard jogged toward the meridian of Oak in gawky, birdlike strides. He wore a khaki hunting jacket that came nearly to his knees and a black watch cap too low over his eyes. His duct-taped eyeglasses winked in the artificial light. He looked like a cartoon terrorist, Dex thought, and why the hell didn’t he get a move on? He was a target out there.

  Howard had only just crossed the white line when Dex saw headlights probing the corner of Oak and Beacon.

  He took a half step out of the alley and waved frantically at Howard, trying to hurry him in. Howard saw him and did exactly the wrong thing: froze in place, confused and frightened.

  Dex heard the sound of an approaching motor, probably headed south on Beacon. We are seconds away from being seen, he thought. Shouting was a risk, but unavoidable now. He cupped his hands. “Howard! Get the fuck over here! RUN, YOU DUMB SON OF A BITCH!”

  Howard looked left and saw the headlights reflected in window glass. It seemed to untangle his legs. He began to sprint, and Dex admired the speed with which the physicist covered those final yards of blacktop.

  But the car, a black patrol car, had turned the corner, and there was no way of knowing what the men inside might have seen.

  “Get down,” Dex said. “Down behind the Dumpster. Back against the wall. Draw your knees up.” And he did the same.

  The patrol car had turned and was coming their way along Oak; he could tell by the sound of its engine.

  It growled a lower note. They’ve seen us, Dex thought. He tried to imagine an escape route. South down this alley and maybe out some fire lane to Beacon or one of the suburban streets: get lost in tree shadows or crouch under a porch . . .

  There was a sudden light. Dex watched it sweep the alley. He pictured the patrol car, the driver, the militiaman in the passenger seat with a hand-held spot. He was aware of the sound of Howard’s tortured breathing. “Run,” he whispered. “Run if you have to. You cut left, I’ll cut right.”

  But the alley was suddenly dark again. The engine coughed and tires crunched on cold asphalt.

  Dex heard the sound fade down Oak.

  Howard let out a shuddering breath.

  “Must be they only caught a glimpse,” Dex said, “or they’d be down here after us. Christ, that was a near call.” He stood and helped Howard up. “I vote we get the hell back across Oak and head for home while we can. Pardon me, Howard, but this whole thing was a stupid idea.”

  Howard pulled away and shook his head. “We didn’t get what we came for. We’re not finished. At least, I’m not. You can go home if you want.”

  Dex regarded his friend. “Well, hell,” he said finally. “Look who’s Rambo.”

  Clifford Stockton sat at the top of the high hill at the center of Powell Creek Park with his bicycle beside him and the cold night wind plucking his hair.

  There had already been flurries of snow this season, and it felt like there might soon be more, although the sky tonight had grown crisply, vividly clear. But the cold didn’t bother him. It was exhilarating. He felt completely alive and completely himself, far from the world of his mother and the soldiers and school.

  The town lay at his feet. From this high place it resembled the map he had pinned to his bulletin board back home. It was completely static, a grid of stationary lights, except for the patrol cars performing their slow waltz. The cars moved like a glittering clockwork, pausing a beat at each intersection.

  “Go to hell,” Clifford told them. This was a whisper. A delicious heresy. The wind carried it away. But there was nobody around to hear him. Giddy, Clifford stood up and shouted it. “GO TO HELL!”

  The patrol cars wheeled on, as implacable as the motion of the stars. Clifford laughed but felt near tears.

  It was almost time to go home. He had proved he could do this; all that remained was to prove he could get back safely. He was excited, but the cold air began to seem colder and he thought about his room, his bed, with a first pang of longing.

  He picked up his bike. Down the brick path to Cleveland Avenue and west toward home. That should be easy enough.

  But something caught his eye.

  The hilly part of Powell Creek Park overlooked the business district. Clifford enjoyed an unobstructed view down to the intersection of Oak and Beacon. He saw the twin red taillights of a patrol car as it reached the corner—on schedule.

  But the car turned west on Oak . . . and shouldn’t it have gone east?

  And now the car slowed, and that was strange, too. Its spotlight probed an alleyway behind Beacon Street. Clifford crouched on the grass, watching. He felt suddenly vulnerable, too obvious. He wished he had his scanner; maybe he could listen in.

  The spotlight winked out and the patrol car moved on along Oak and turned a corner. It disappeared from Clifford’s view behind the stores on Knight, but he was able to track the glow of its headlights. Down Knight to Promontory, farther from the park. Then east again. Then, mysteriously, back onto Beacon.

  Circling, Clifford thought.

  And now slowing, now stopping.

  The headlights winked off.

  Something was happening, Clifford thought. Something was happening or was about to happen on Beacon Street.

  Far off along Commercial Street he saw a second car coming fast, probably summoned by the first. A call must have gone out by radio. All the patrol cars were converging on Beacon.

  Which meant the schedule was messed up. . . .

  Which meant he wasn’t safe here.

  He ran for his bike.

  Dex Graham worked the point of the crowbar between the frame and the rear door of Desktop Solutions and leaned on it. The lock came away from the wood with a sound like a gunshot. Howard winced.

  The door sprang open. Dex said, “Be my guest.”

  Howard pulled a long watchman’s flashlight out of the deeps of his jacket and entered the store.

  Dex stayed outside, watching the alley. He calculated that this trip from the Cantwell house to the computer store had taken no more than twenty minutes, though it seemed like much longer. Thank God, the deed was nearly done. Here we are, he thought, two of the least likely break-and-enter artists ever to jimmy a lock in the town of Two Rivers. And the least competent.

  Now that the adrenaline rush had faded, he was cold. He rubbed his hands together and warmed them with a breath. Alone here, he was uncomfortably aware of the perilous distance between himself and safety. Until the close call with the patrol car there had been an edge of excitement to this trip; that was gone, replaced by a sour anxiety.

  The wind rattled a loose doorway down the alley. Winter at the heels of a wind like that, Dex thought. When he came here five years ago he had been startled by the severity of the northern Michigan winter. He wondered how much of Two Rivers would survive the season and what would be left of it by spring. The question was unanswerable but the possibilities were mainly bleak.

  He heard a percussive rattle and whirled to face it, but the culprit was only a dog, a hound nosing a trash barrel overturned by the wind. The dog looked at Dex with an expression of rheumy indifference and shivered from the neck down. I know how you feel, Dex thought.

  He looked at his watch, then peered into the dim interior of the store. “Hey, Howard, how you doing in there?”

  No answer. But Dex could see the beam of Howard’s flashlight poking around—a little too vigorously, Dex thought. He took a step inside. “Howard?”

  Nothing.

  “Howard, it’s cold out here! Bag your loot and let’s get go
ing, all right?”

  He felt something touch his leg. Overcome by a sudden sense of unreality, Dex looked down. Here was Howard: crouched behind the cash counter with sweat beading on his pale forehead. Howard had grabbed Dex’s ankle and was waving some panicked, indecipherable signal.

  Dex guessed this ought to be frightening, but for a long moment it was only confusing. He said out loud, “What the hell?”

  And the flashlight beam continued to probe the darkness—but not Howard’s flashlight.

  Another presence loomed in this dark arcade of shelves and desks, suddenly visible as Dex’s eyesight adjusted to the dark. He turned to face the rear door just as the beam of light pinned his shadow to the wall. He saw his shadow ride up toward the ceiling, as loose-jointed and comical as a marionette. Then there was a flash and a deafening bang, a pressure and a pain that knocked him off his feet.

  He heard Howard shouting something: it might have been Don’t shoot! or God damn! And he felt his left arm twitch in a useless, distant fashion, and the wet warmth of blood.

  And then footsteps.

  And then a sudden, second light—the brightest yet.

  Clifford decided to ride home by way of Powell Road, which crossed Beacon north and uphill from the business district.

  It was a short ride down the park path and out the gate onto Powell. Home from the park was a gravity-assist all the way. The bicycle bearings shrilled into the dark and Clifford felt the wind on his face like a barrage of needles. The big houses near the park blurred past on each side of him, fading behind him like an elegant dream.

  He leaned on the hand brakes at the corner of Beacon and came to a stop beside a tall privet hedge.

  Curiosity and prudence had begun a pitched battle in the pit of Clifford’s stomach. Curiosity had the advantage. He peered around the hedge, downhill toward the shops south of Oak.

  There was not much to see from this distance; only a distant light, a headlight, which winked out when he looked at it: another patrol car.

  Would it be dangerous to try to get closer? Well, obviously it would. No doubt about that. He had seen the bodies on that wooden cart outside City Hall last June, and the memory put a jog into his heartbeat. People had been killed for what he was doing right now.

  But it was night and he was agile and he could always hide or run . . . and anyway, it wasn’t him they were after.

  He wheeled down Beacon almost all the way to Oak, keeping close to the trees and hedges of these big lawns, most of which had grown high and weedy over the summer.

  At Oak, Clifford pulled up next to a dark automobile parked at the curb and noticed with a sudden shock of fear that it was a military patrol car and that he had come abreast of it with the idiotic boldness of a four-year-old. He dropped his bike and was about to run for the cover of a leafless willow tree when he saw the car was unoccupied; both soldiers must have crossed Oak and gone down Beacon, where he could dimly see a motion, a commando-style jog from storefront to storefront; and the dance of several flashlight beams.

  He had come too far and was too exposed. He lay in the grass considering his options. He didn’t think he was in danger, at least not yet. He was fascinated, almost hypnotized, by his proximity to something potentially important, something somber and hidden.

  Then Clifford heard a bang like a firecracker and saw a simultaneous flash of light. Someone had fired a gun, he thought, and the implication of that simple event seemed to wake him from a daze. The soldiers were shooting at someone—the soldiers were quite possibly killing someone.

  And maybe it should have scared him . . . but mostly it made him angry.

  He thought again of the dead bodies outside City Hall. That had angered him, too, though it had been too awful to absorb all at once; the anger was subtle, it lingered, it had no outlet. This was more immediate, and Clifford’s anger focused to a fine point. The soldiers had no business here, no business telling people what to do and certainly no business shooting them.

  He wanted to do something about it, take some retaliation, and he looked around helplessly—and saw the patrol car parked a few feet away.

  The canvas roof was closed against the weather but the door might not be locked. Clifford crossed the sidewalk and grasped the unfamiliar handle. It opened easily. He leaned inside, distantly amazed at his own audacity. The interior of the car smelled of worn leather and cigarette smoke. The air was stale and still warm. He leaned across the bench seat wondering what sabotage he might be able to perform. His eyes fixed on the knobbed lever projecting from the floor. A gear shift, he guessed. He remembered his mother explaining the gears on her Honda. Experimentally, Clifford grasped the handle and twisted it. Left and down. Left and down.

  He didn’t know what kind of gear mechanism this automobile might have; there was no reason to expect it to work like the cars he was accustomed to. But it did possess a neutral gear and Clifford knew at once when he found it. The car inched forward, its tires crackling on the cold street.

  He sat up in alarm. The patrol car was rolling at an angle across Beacon, which was useless; it would only fetch up undamaged in the drainage ditch. He needed to get out . . . but first he twisted the oddly shaped steering wheel until the car was pointed more or less directly down the slope of Beacon, a steep enough incline to get some real momentum going.

  Which happened more quickly than he expected. Clifford scrambled back across the bench to the open door and found the pavement scrolling past at a surprising speed. He closed his eyes and jumped, an awkward leap; he hit the sidewalk with feet, hips, shoulders. He tore his shirt and scraped his palms bloody. He would have to explain this to his mother, come the morning. If he ever reached home.

  He hurried back to the shadow of the tree to watch the empty car, which had already rolled a considerable distance. Its motion was stately at first, then alarming. Its speed increased until it seemed to Clifford as if the car had been launched from some enormous slingshot. It rattled over every bump in the road, took small but perilous leaps; now, well across Oak and down the empty avenue of Beacon, it tilted perilously on two wheels and then righted itself. The slope of the street declined past Oak but the runaway car seemed to take no notice.

  He tried to figure out where it would impact. The hardware store, he thought, or, no, it was veering right; the barbershop, the bookstore—the gas station.

  Clifford gasped and held his breath.

  He felt a sudden awe at the enormity of the events he had triggered. He understood that there was going to be more damage than he’d imagined—damage on a huge scale, damage that made his knees weak with anticipation.

  He couldn’t guess at the speed of the patrol car as it left the road, but he thought it might be going faster than any car had ever gone on Beacon Street. The tires came up over the lip of the curb and the whole car seemed to levitate above the air-and-water dispenser at the Gulf station. It rotated as it moved, the back end rising as the nose dipped, and when Clifford realized it was going to collide with the self-serve gas pumps he instinctively covered his ears.

  A grinding crash echoed up the empty road. Clifford watched through eyes squeezed nearly shut. He saw the patrol car sheer off a pump unit before it came to a full stop. There was a last rattle, a fading hiss, then silence, and Clifford dared to take a breath.

  Then the patrol car’s damaged battery shorted itself into a spreading pool of gasoline, and it looked as if the sun itself had risen over the rooftops of Beacon Street.

  Nicodemus Bourgoint, a line soldier of the Fifth Athabasca Infantry, had been due for shipment to the Mexican front when he was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer and transferred to domestic duty in the otherworldly town of Two Rivers. Given a choice, he would have preferred the front.

  There, the dangers were predictable. War didn’t frighten him. Getting shot or blown up, that was a human thing. It was a fate anyone might come to.

  But Two Rivers frightened him. It had frightened him from the beginning. The soldiers detailed to T
wo Rivers had been offered no explanation of the existence of the place, barring some aphorisms from a Bureau attaché about the bountiful mysteries of God. The Genetrix Mundi was endlessly fecund, Nico supposed, and there might well be an occasional wrinkle in the Pleroma, but that was small consolation when one was condemned to endlessly patrolling the vacant streets of this terrifyingly strange place. Not only that, but the accommodations were crowded, the duties were tedious and repetitive, and the food was bad. The mess sergeant had been promising roast beef since August; it never arrived.

  He longed for home. He had been raised on a cattle ranch in the northern province of Athabasca and he felt confined by these wooded hills, these leafless trees, the alien village. Never more so than tonight. He had been assigned night patrol with Filo Mueller, who liked to torture him with campfire stories about headless corpses and one-legged ghosts, and as much as Nico tried to conceal the uneasiness this caused in him, some evidence of it always showed on his face—much to Mueller’s amusement. Such things simply weren’t funny, Nico thought. Not in this place.

  Of course, when they turned the corner of Oak and Beacon and saw the figure disappearing down the alleyway, all frivolity ceased. Nico wanted to stop and give chase; but Mueller, a devious sort, argued for calling in reinforcements and circling the block. “Let our trespasser think we gave up. If we chase him, we’ll lose him. You’re not a hunter, are you, Nico?”

  “My uncles hunt buck in the mountains,” Nico said defensively.

  “But you never went with them. You’re not the type.”

  They circled the block. Mueller radioed for another car, and Nico was all in favor of waiting for it to arrive. But Mueller spotted the glint of someone’s flashlight in a store window and fixed his serpentine stare on Nico. “You go in,” he said.

  Mueller was Nico’s superior by a degree of rank and technically entitled to give the order, but Nico assumed he was joking. It was the look on Mueller’s face that convinced him otherwise.