Mysterium (17 page)

“Okay.” Dex stared across the table. “So how does a graduate physics student know so much about Gnosticism?”

“From Stern,” Howard said. “He talked about Gnosticism all the time. He was obsessed with it.”

And they were silent for a while.

They drank Howard’s thick, stale coffee until curfew was less than an hour away. Daylight began to fade from the window; the sky was a gray turmoil. Despite the oven, the kitchen grew colder.

At last Dex pushed his cup away and said, “We have to stop dicking around, Howard. Four, five months, we’ve all been in a walking daze. Begging for scraps of water and electricity. It’s time to wake up. This isn’t a good place we’ve come to. The town isn’t safe, and every day the fences get higher and trucks take away some more people. We need a way out.”

Howard shook his head. “We need a way
home
.”

“You know how unlikely that is.”

“We don’t know anything, Dex. Not until we understand what happened at the lab.”

“Is it really important? Even if we do figure it out, is that a reprieve? I’m not a physicist, but I’d bet what happened at the defense plant was a kind of explosion. Some kind of really weird explosion that blew half of Bayard County into the next universe, but still, an explosion—and even if you
understand
an explosion, you can’t put it back in the bottle. Some things are irreversible. I would guess this is one.”

“It may be. But what’s the alternative? The fences are already up, Dex. The best fence is the forest and the weather. There’s only the one road out, from what I’ve heard, and it leads straight to Fort LeDuc, which is a military town. Sixty miles away. It’s not practical to hike that far.”

“It could be done,” Dex said.

“Maybe, with the right gear and supplies. Then you have the problem of arriving without money or ID or useful skills. And evading the Proctors while you’re at it. And who are we talking about here? You, me, a few able-bodied men? It would still leave most of Two Rivers under martial law.”

“I know. I’m not happy about it. If you have a better idea, tell me.”

“We find Stern.”

“Jesus, Howard.” Dex sighed. “What makes you think he’s alive?”

“His telephone number. He gave me a private number where I could reach him. Mostly evenings, he said. I wrote it down.”

“I don’t see—”

“No, listen. The thing is,
it’s a four-one-six exchange.
Everything at the lab, including the dorms, was a seven-oh-six number. Here in town, most numbers are four-one-five, four-one-six, four-one-seven. The one time I called his private line, a woman answered. Not a switchboard. Just, ‘Hello? Yes?’ So the obvious implication is that he had a town residence, an apartment or a room or maybe a woman he was seeing. He might have been there when the accident happened.”

“More likely he wasn’t. If something was going on at the lab, wouldn’t he have been involved?”

“Well, I don’t know. Not necessarily.”

“But you don’t have any real evidence he’s alive. You haven’t seen him.”

“No—”

“It’s a small town, Howard.”

“He would be hiding. Like me. Maybe somebody picking up rations for him, so he doesn’t have to go out in the street. But no, I have no direct evidence. Just . . .”

“What?”

“A feeling.”

“Pardon me, but that’s not too scientific.”

“A hunch. No, it’s not scientific. But, Dex, doesn’t it seem like there’s something happening here? I won’t say ‘supernatural,’ that’s a stupid word, but something out of the ordinary?”

“That’s a safe bet!”

“Not just the obvious. I mean, subtler things. Dreams. My dreams are different now. Visions. Maybe what I saw in the woods was a vision. I never believed in so-called psychic phenomena. But since the accident at the lab . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t know what I believe. Maybe a hunch is not something to ignore.”

That was logical, Dex thought, but it was a suspicious kind of logic. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “All you have is the number?”

“No address. Stern didn’t like people knowing too much about him—even a favorite nephew.”

“The Proctors hooked up their own phone lines, but they haven’t fixed the exchanges. I don’t know what the hell good a number is.”

“Well, it might be in the phone book.”

“What, under
Stern
?”

“Obviously not. But I keep thinking about the woman who answered. The
way
she answered. Her tone of voice. Casual. Proprietary—it was
her
phone. Probably the number is in the book, but under another name.”

“Great. There must be twenty-five thousand names in the Bayard County phone book. What do you do, leaf through it a page at a time?”

“No. Nor is there any way to get the information from the phone company, or whoever used to be the phone company. That stumped me for a long time. But the man who owned this house, Paul Cantwell, he was a CPA. You know what he has in the bedroom upstairs? A PC with every kind of accounting and data-basing software known to man. Quite capable of sorting the phone book for a number.”

“You can’t type in the text of the phone book. Or does he have that on disk, too?”

“No, but look: we don’t
have
to type it in. You know what an optical reader is?”

“Takes text from a printed page.”

“Right. So we can scan the phone book. Feed it to the computer a page at a time.”

Howard was dangerously enthusiastic about this, Dex thought. “You have an optical reader in the house, too?”

“No. That’s the tricky part. We need to get one. There’s a store on Beacon—”

“Howard, all those stores are roped off. The Proctors are shipping out the contents.”

Howard leaned forward, rattling his empty cup. “I walk down Beacon every time I go to the food depot. There’s a store called Desktop Solutions on Beacon between Oak and Grace. The Bureau inventory is working south from Oak and west from the lakeshore. They haven’t been there yet.”

“Still, it’s behind a rope.”

“I can cross a rope.”

“There are militiamen on every corner.”

“They’re sparser at night,” Howard said.

“Oh,” Dex said. “Oh, no. They’re on a hair trigger out there, Howard. They shoot people.”

“Out the back gate of this house there’s an alleyway that runs to Oak. Across Oak there’s a similar alley in back of the Beacon Street shops. The alleys aren’t well lit and they aren’t patrolled like the main streets.”

“Purely insane. And what are you taking this risk for? A telephone number?”

“To find out what happened!” Howard was visibly trembling. “To
know,
Dex! Even if we can’t go home. And anyway—Christ, it’s my uncle!” He looked down. “I don’t know anybody in this town except you. I never really lived here. My family was all in New York State. Except Stern.”

“Howard . . . no matter what, the odds are he’s dead.”

“I can’t leave it at that.”

The light in the window had faded. The clouds were heavy. Dex looked at his watch. It was past curfew. He was stuck here for the night.

He looked at Howard: painfully young, a kid in duct-taped glasses. A damn fool.

“Maybe you ought to make some more coffee,” Dex said. “We can’t leave until the moon is down.”

CHAPTER 9

Even at the raw end of autumn, even in the brittle hour after midnight, Two Rivers owned a tenuous warmth.

From its highest point, the hill above Powell Creek Park, the town fell in dark terraces of wood-frame houses, small lawns, and neat brick storefronts to the hidden shore of Lake Merced. Streetlights cut irregular circles into the windy night.

The town faded to black at its border. It was isolated in the hilly northern peninsula of the province of Mille Lacs, a territory of trading posts, lumber towns, iron mines, copper mines. Here, the darkness had a weight.

There were wolves in the forest, and periodically that autumn they had come loping into the outskirts of town, their curiosity aroused by the powerful and unfamiliar mixture of human scents. But the wolves, after a cautious investigation, almost always chose to avoid the paved streets. There was something in this mingled air they didn’t like.

Beyond the westernmost arc of the lake, on what had once been Ojibway treaty land, the ruins of the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory cast a delicate light across the belly of a cloud. Other lights moved unseen among the trees.

In the town itself, along the gridwork of empty streets, the only moving lights were the headlights of the patrol cars; the only sound was the sound of their motors, of their tires gritting on the frost-white asphalt.

Luke was not visiting tonight, and Clifford’s mother had gone to bed at ten o’clock. When she didn’t have company she went to bed early and slept almost till noon. Which was okay with Clifford.

He stayed up much later. He was allowed to sleep in as long as he wanted, and he had learned that when his mother went to bed—braced by stiff doses of the unlabeled distilled whiskey Luke brought her on a weekly basis—the house became his own.

He owned it. From the cavernous, cluttered living room to the dark and scary basement, it was his domain. On nights like this the house seemed immensely large. It was a kingdom, vast and a little eerie, and he was its uneasy ruler.

Tonight Clifford chose to stay in his room with the radio scanner. Since last week he had been spending most of his nights listening to the military radio traffic, the scanner’s speaker disconnected and his Walkman headphones plugged in so his mother wouldn’t hear. He was careful to keep the scanner a private business. He had learned a lot from it.

He had borrowed the folding map of Two Rivers from the kitchen drawer and tacked it up on his bulletin board. (He took it down—a precaution—when Luke was visiting.) For three consecutive nights he had used it to track the military patrol routes through town. He gave each car (there were ten in all) a letter of the alphabet, and he wrote down the time whenever an intersection was called out. He had needed to stay up until four in the morning, with the help of some coffee brewed without permission, but the final product of this systematic eavesdropping was a complete schedule of the nightly curfew patrol: where the cars would be and when.

The last few nights, Clifford had been double-checking his results. They seemed accurate. A car might be late at a checkpoint or call in early, but never by more than a few minutes. There might be a few rogues, visitors like Luke who had made acquaintances among the townspeople, but even Luke was usually careful to observe the curfew; it was a barracks deal involving more of that white corn liquor that allowed him to stay out all night on Friday or Saturday. Clifford had overheard this explanation and took it to be true.

Armed with his notes, Clifford had drawn his own amendment to the map: a pencil-line route connecting his house to Powell Creek Park. Given the right timing, this was the way a person on a bicycle could travel to the park and back without crossing the path of a patrol car.

The idea of a nighttime bicycle jaunt had come to him last week. The scanner made it a practical possibility, but the idea was intrinsically appealing. Curfew had made the night a forbidden zone, but Clifford had always liked the night. He liked summer evenings with their hush and warmth and the lingering smell of trimmed lawns and hot supper; he liked winter nights, so cold the snow squealed under the pressure of his boots. But above all he had liked autumn evenings, smoky and mysterious; and most of this autumn was already gone—had been stolen from him, he thought.

Too, he liked the idea of exercising the secret knowledge the scanner had given him, using it to his own advantage.

He was afraid, of course, but he was powerfully tempted. On a windy night like this the temptation was especially strong. He sat for a time in his room in the dark, listening to the headphones and resting his elbows on the windowsill. The window glass was cold. Wind turned the branches of a leafless oak in the yard next door, and when the high clouds opened, there were stars. It was well after midnight now. All the patrols were on schedule.

He looked at his watch and made a mental calculation. The decision he came to was sudden and wordless. He didn’t even think about it, just moved. He padded downstairs, turned on the hallway light, and found his sneakers; he laced them high and tight.

He put on his padded blue winter jacket and locked the door behind him when he left.

His bike was leaning against the wall of the garage. The handlebars were shockingly cold, and Clifford wondered whether he ought to have worn gloves. But there was no time to go back. He was on the clock now—and the schedule was tight.

The wind tugged his hair as he rolled down the empty street. Every house was dark. The bicycle’s bearings ticked into silence, and the clouds lifted like a curtain on a great show of stars.

What made this dangerous, Dex Graham told himself, was the peculiarity of the empty town. It was too easy to feel alone. Hence safe. Hence careless.

He wanted to say this to Howard, but they had resolved not to talk unless it was absolutely necessary. The sound of their voices might wake someone, and there ought to be no witnesses to this expedition.