Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He had found Ellen at the roadhouse on the highway not long after the occupation began. The roadhouse had become notorious as the place where a soldier might meet a woman who would barter her virtue for ration coupons. It quickly became a brothel in all but name.

  In a sense, Thibault had rescued Ellen from that. She had worked tables there when the roadhouse was respectable and she had been unhappy with the new clientele: crude farmhands, mostly, dragged unwilling from their provincial pigpens. Thibault, who took pride in his Manhattan pedigree, had saved her from an amorous private who was trying to impress her by showing off his glass eye—“the only one-eyed gunner in the Army of God,” though he was more likely to be found on latrine duty than near the artillery. Samael, what an army they had brought here!—battalions of the halt, the lame, the blind.

  Thibault had driven Ellen home, his first illicit journey through the town of Two Rivers. She had been grateful. Would he stay the night? He would stay the night. Would he come back? He would come back. Would he bring some food? Of course.

  Tonight the boy was away somewhere, which was all right with Thibault. Ellen cooked a desultory supper and advanced directly to the jar of copper-kettle drink-me-down. Her drinking was heavier and faster these winter nights. Too bad. There was something unappetizing about a drunken woman. Not that Thibault was about to turn and leave.

  “Clifford’s staying at a friend’s house,” Ellen said. “We have the place to ourselves.” And she ducked her head in a gesture she probably imagined was coquettish.

  Thibault nodded.

  “That boy,” Ellen said. “His ideas. Luke.” She stroked his cheek. “Are you really going to burn us all up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Digging ditches around the town. He says. To keep in the fire. To keep it from spreading.”

  She stood and leaned against the kitchen counter. Thibault was not really drunk yet, only a little loose in his skin, as the farmers said. His eyes traced the curve of her hip. She wasn’t young enough to be genuinely beautiful . . . but she was pretty enough.

  He was only vaguely alarmed by what she was saying. “A person hears rumors,” he said. “All kinds of rumors . . .”

  “A bomb, Cliffy says.”

  “Bomb?”

  “An atomic bomb.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “To burn us all up.”

  He was genuinely baffled by the word atomic, but otherwise this was old news—though he was surprised it had traveled as far as Ellen. No doubt Two Rivers was going to be razed; the firebreak wasn’t hard to figure out. Perhaps it did involve an “atomic” bomb. Maybe that was what the Proctors had built out in the forest. Anything was possible, Thibault supposed.

  She wanted to be reassured. He said, “I’ll take care of you, Ellen—don’t worry.”

  “Cliffy says you won’t be able to.” She took a long, deliberate drink of the barracks whiskey. “Soldiers get burned up too, Cliffy said.”

  “What?”

  “The Proctors don’t care. They really don’t, you know. They’ll burn up everyone. Even you, lovely Luke. Even you, my charming soldier.”

  He woke the next morning with a headache and a sour stomach. Ellen, unconscious next to him, looked to Thibault like a lump of stale flesh, slightly greasy in the daylight. He glanced at the bedside clock, then moaned. He was late! He was on watchtower duty this morning. Maybe Maroix or Eberhardt had signed on for him. But maybe not. He had the nagging thought that he already owed too many favors.

  He dressed without waking Ellen and drove away into a chilly gray dawn. At quarters, he signed the car back into the motor pool and ran for the barracks. He needed today’s duty chit and a plausible excuse—but all he had was the chit.

  It didn’t matter. Two roster police and a fat Proctor were waiting at the barracks.

  The Proctor was named Delafleur.

  Thibault recognized him. Delafleur had been everywhere lately, fluttering about in his black pardessus and Bureau uniform. The new chief Proctor, people said. The voice of the Centrality.

  Thibault swept his cap off and nodded his head. Delafleur came nearer, his jowly face swinging close to Thibault’s, the expression on his face a mixture of contempt and sorrow. “Things have changed,” he said, “and I think you were caught unawares, Monsieur Thibault.”

  “Patron, I know I’m late—”

  “You spent the night at the house of—” And Delafleur made a show of consulting his notebook. “Madame Ellen Stockton.”

  Thibault flushed. Which of these pig farmers had betrayed him? His head throbbed mercilessly. He couldn’t force himself to raise his eyes to meet Delafleur’s. He felt the Proctor’s breath on his face—the man was that close.

  “Tell me what you talk about with the woman.”

  “Nothing of any consequence,” Thibault said, grimly aware that he was begging now. He tried to smile. “I wasn’t there to talk!”

  “That won’t do. You don’t understand, Monsieur Thibault. The town is on the verge of panic. We want to prevent lies from spreading. Two infantrymen were attacked in their car on night patrol while you were in bed with this woman—did you know that? You’re lucky you weren’t killed yourself.” He shook his head as if he had been personally insulted. “Worse, there are rumors being repeated even in the barracks. Which could have tragic consequences. This isn’t an ordinary offense.”

  In the end Thibault told him what Ellen had said about the bomb—the “atomic” bomb—but he was careful to defend her honor: Ellen didn’t really know anything about this, he said; it all came from the boy, from Clifford, who behaved oddly, who was often out of the house. And Delafleur nodded, making notes.

  Thibault had never liked the boy, anyway. The boy would not be a loss.

  The Proctors took him to the makeshift stockade in the City Hall basement and locked him in a cell there.

  Thibault, who hated confinement, paced his cage and remembered what Ellen had said.

  They’ll burn up everyone, she had said. Even you.

  Was that possible? It was true, there had been some muttering in the barracks and at mess hall—Thibault had never taken such things seriously. But there was the firebreak. That was real enough. And the tower in the forest. And his imprisonment.

  Lukas Thibault’s head felt as if it had been cracked like a walnut. He wished he could see the sky.

  Even you, my charming soldier.

  CHAPTER 22

  Work at the test site peaked and ebbed. Many of the civilian workers had been sent back to Fort LeDuc. A battalion of physicists and engineers remained behind to initiate the bomb sequence and study the results. The stillness of completion had descended on the circle of cleared land; the air was cold and tense.

  Clearly, Demarch thought, these were the final hours. Censeur Bisonette had flown in from the capital for a one-day tour: Two Rivers, before the end. Demarch stood on the snowy margin of the test grounds while Bisonette marched about with his press of Bureau personnel, Delafleur unctuously proclaiming each tedious landmark. This was followed by a lunch in one of the freshly emptied tin sheds, trestle tables stocked with the only decent food ever to be trucked into town: breads, meats, fresh cheeses, leek and potato soup in steaming bouilloires.

  Demarch sat at the Censeur’s left, Delafleur to his right. Despite this ostensible equity, conversation flowed mainly between Bisonette and the Ideological Branch attaché. More evidence of a shift of patronage, Demarch thought, or an even deeper movement in the geology of the Bureau de la Convenance. He felt left out but was too numb to care. The wine helped. Red wine from what had once been Spanish cellars in California. Spoils of war.

  After the meal he had Bisonette’s attention exclusively, which was really no improvement. Demarch rode in the Censeur’s car during what was meant to be a tour of the town itself, though it was difficult to see much beyond the bustle of security cars on every side. The procession wound eastward from the fragmentary highway, over roads ful
l of potholes, past drab businesses and gray houses under a sunless sky. The wealth of the town and its impoverishment were both much in evidence.

  Bisonette was unimpressed. “I notice there are no public buildings.”

  “Only the school, the courthouse—City Hall.”

  “Not much civic spirit.”

  “Well, this wasn’t a city of any proportion, Censeur. You might say the same of Montmagny or Sur-Mer.”

  “At least at Montmagny there are temples.”

  “The churches here—”

  “Aggrandized peasant huts. Their theology is impoverished, too. Like a line drawing of Christianity, all the details left out.”

  Well, Demarch had thought as much himself. He nodded.

  The cavalcade wound through Beacon Street and back to the motor hotel the Bureau had appropriated as headquarters. The chauffeur parked and stood outside without offering to open the doors. Demarch moved to get out, but Bisonette touched his arm. “A moment.”

  He tensed now, waiting.

  “News from the capital,” Bisonette said. “Your friend Guy Marris has left the Bureau.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. With three fingers missing.”

  Demarch stiffened. Three fingers was the traditional penalty for stealing Bureau property. Or lying to a hierarch.

  Bisonette said, “I understand the two of you were close.”

  Nauseated, weightless, Demarch could only nod.

  “Fortunately you have other friends. Your father-in-law, for instance. He’s fondly remembered. Though very old. No one would want to insult him or his family. Not while he’s alive.” Bisonette paused to let this wisdom sink in. “Lieutenant, I assume you want to keep your fingers.”

  He nodded again.

  “You have the forged papers Guy Marris gave you?”

  They were in his breast pocket. Demarch said nothing, but his hand strayed there.

  “Give them to me. No more need be said. At least for now.”

  Demarch caught and held the Censeur’s eyes. His eyes were a mild blue, the color of a hazy sky. Demarch had wanted to find something there, the apospasma theion, or its opposite, the antimimon pneuma, a visible absence of the soul. But he was disappointed.

  He took Evelyn’s pass papers from his breast pocket and put them in the Censeur’s ancient hand.

  CHAPTER 23

  Bisonette’s visit was more troublesome than Delafleur had expected. It distracted his attention from the situation developing in the military barracks.

  Two militiamen had been caught trying to bluff past the checkpoints out of town. Questioned, they admitted that they had heard the town would be burned with the soldiers still in it; that the Proctors had decided they were expendable.

  Which was true but not for public consumption. It was a dangerous rumor and needed to be stopped. Today three more militiamen had disappeared on routine patrol: perhaps killed or captured by townspeople, more likely on the run.

  All this would be taken care of in less than twenty-four hours, but a lot could happen in that time. If the soldiers rioted it would make everything problematic. Delafleur had taken over City Hall as his quartier général and made the basement storage rooms into a kind of stockade; Lukas Thibault was down there, but Lukas was not the only font of this poisoned water.

  Delafleur moved restlessly through what had once been the office of the mayor, with its commanding view of the town. The town was deceptively still. Motionless, except for the wind and the falling snow. The trouble was subterranean, but for how long? And the weather was a problem in itself. Would snow postpone the bomb test? He listened to the chatter on the radio monitor the military men had installed for him, but it was only technical caquetage. The countdown hadn’t begun.

  Delafleur wished he could hurry time onward, push the hours until they tumbled over.

  There was a knock at the door. Delafleur said, “Come in!” And turned to see a soldier waiting.

  “The woman you wanted us to pick up was out, Censeur,” the man said.

  “I’m not a Censeur,” Delafleur said irritably. “Call me Patron. It’s in your handbook, for God’s sake.”

  The soldier ducked his head. “Yes, Patron. But the boy. We found the boy.”

  Delafleur looked past the soldier and saw the boy in the waiting room: a nothing-in-particular marmot wearing spectacles and a rag of a shirt. So this was Clifford Stockton, Lukas Thibault’s nemesis.

  “Lock him downstairs,” Delafleur said.

  Perhaps the rumors could no longer be contained. Maybe it was too late for that. But it couldn’t hurt to try.

  He shooed out the soldier. Then he picked up the telephone and called the military commander, Corporal Trebach, and told him to keep his troops confined to quarters today. There had been gunfire from the townspeople, he said, and he didn’t want anyone hurt. It was a lie, of course. Two lies: no gunfire, at least not yet, and he didn’t care who got hurt. Whether Trebach was fooled . . . who could say?

  It was strange work, Delafleur thought, like plugging holes in a dike until the dike can be destroyed.

  “It’s tomorrow,” Evelyn Woodward said. “I don’t know what time. Probably around noon. I heard him talking to Delafleur on the phone. There are some problems with the soldiers, so no one wants to wait.”

  Dex nodded. Evelyn had shown up at his door for what he supposed was the last time, bearing this final nugget of information. She looked cold, he thought; gaunt, though there was no doubt plenty to eat while she was under Demarch’s wing. Her eyes took in the room without expression; she never smiled—but why should she?

  He promised he would pass on the news. Then he said, “You can come with us, Evie—there’s room in the car.”

  He had told her about Linneth, about his escape plans. She had not seemed jealous and Dex supposed she didn’t have the emotional capacity for it, after so much else. She had only looked at him a little wistfully. As she looked at him now.

  She shook her head. “I’ll go with the lieutenant,” she said. “It’s safer.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Thank you, Dex. I mean, really—thank you.” She touched his arm. “You’ve changed, you know.”

  He watched from the window as she walked into the falling snow.

  Shepperd came by later with essentially the same information from a source of his own: D-Day was tomorrow; the convoy would begin an hour before dawn. “Bless you if you aren’t ready, but we can’t wait; everybody just head west up what used to be Coldwater Road and pray for luck. And carry that damned pistol! Don’t leave it lying on your kitchen table, for God’s sake.”

  Dex offered him the use of the scanner, but Shepperd shook his head. “We have a few. Useful items. Check the marine band, though, if you’re curious, and a signal up around thirteen hundred megahertz—we think that’s coming from the bomb people. Mostly it’s incomprehensible, but you might pick up a clue. Mainly, though, don’t worry about that. Set out on time is the main thing. I would like us all on that corduroy road westbound by daybreak. You have a car, I gather.”

  He did, an aging Ford in a basement lot, the car he used to drive to work on days when the weather made walking a chore. He had already stashed a couple of jerricans of black market gasoline in the trunk.

  Shepperd offered his hand. Dex shook it. “Good luck,” he said.

  “To us all,” Shepperd told him.

  Linneth came before curfew—AWOL, though nobody cared anymore; the guards had been posted elsewhere. There was no question of sleep. She helped Dex carry supplies down to the car; he filled the tank with acrid-smelling American petrol.

  Three hours after midnight they ate a final meal in Dex’s kitchen. A granular snow was still gathering and blowing in the street. The wind rattled the casements of the window.

  Dex raised a glass of tepid water in a toast.

  “To an old world,” he said. “And a new one.”

  “Both stranger than we thought.”

  They had
not finished drinking when they heard the sound of distant gunfire.

  CHAPTER 24

  Among the Huichol Indians of the Sierra Madre Occidental it was called a nierika: a passageway—and simultaneously a barrier—between the everyday world and the world of the spirits.

  The nierika is also a ceremonial disk, both mirror and face of God. It resembles a mandala. The four cardinal directions radiate from the sacred center.

  In Huichol paintings, the axis always rests in a field of fire.

  Howard reached the highway before dark but was barred from crossing it by an uninterrupted stream of traffic, mainly trucks and automobiles—the Proctors and their possessions, a few military commanders, the last looting of the town; all bound south for Fort LeDuc and safety. It can’t be long now, Howard thought.

  He broke into an abandoned shack, off the road and out of the snow, and pulled his sleeping bag around him for warmth while he waited. There was no possibility of sleep and probably no time for it. He rested in an ancient bentwood rocker made brittle by the cold. The windows were choked with dust.

  Waiting was the hard part. He was all right while he was moving; there wasn’t time to think beyond the next step. But while he waited he began to grow frightened.

  He was as close to death as he had ever been.

  For a time, the immediacy of the danger paralyzed him. Fear seemed to fall as inexorably as the snow, in icy crystals from a dark sky. Howard shivered and closed his eyes.

  After midnight the sound of the traffic lapsed. He stirred, rose on cold and aching legs, and folded his sleeping bag into his backpack to carry with him.

  He jogged across the highway. Multiple tire tracks were already dimming under fresh grains of snow, the asphalt slick and treacherous beneath. The woods on the far side, the old Ojibway land, were black with shadow. Howard used a watchman’s flashlight to find his way along the dirt track eastward among the trees. The trees were tall and he listened to the snow sifting among the pine needles. Each ripple of wind sent snow showers cascading around him and made a flickering ice tunnel of the flashlight beam.