Mysterium (19 page)

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 Two 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.

The son of Samael was
grinning
.

“Take your pistol out of its pouch for once,” Mueller said. “Demonstrate some testicles, Nico.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Good for you. Go on.”

But he
was
afraid. He hated these shops, with their windows full of incomprehensible goods. One of the stupider infantrymen, a huge man named Seth, was forever proclaiming his idea that Two Rivers was actually a settlement on the outskirts of Hell; that these truncated roads had once run straight to the Temple of the Lord of the Hebdomad, the Father of Grief.

The idea was childish but sometimes annoyingly plausible. For instance, tonight. Nico, moving as slowly as his pride permitted, approached the door of a building called Desktop Solutions. The sign, in its odd graceless English script, was confounding. Like so many of the inscriptions on these stores, it made no sense; the words had no comprehensible connection to one another. Just like Unisex Hair or Circuit City, it seemed to promise the impossible or the absurd. The shapes in the window were only gray boxes, small items like miniature television sets, plain and uninviting.

He drew his pistol. A sense of unreality overtook him as he pushed open the door—thank God, it wasn’t locked—and braced himself in a shooter’s stance, pistol in his right hand, flashlight in his left. This might be a dream, he thought. He might be in the barracks sleeping. He hoped he was.

He saw a gaunt figure duck behind a desk, and his attention focused instantly. He stepped closer, wishing someone had come with him, even Mueller, but surely Mueller and his reinforcements would be here soon; he came close enough to see the man huddled on the floor without a weapon, and he was about to order the man to stand when a second figure approached from the rear with a crowbar in his hand. Nico aimed his flashlight at this new apparition. The man blinked and turned.

Nico’s finger tightened on the pistol and it bucked in his hand—he wasn’t even certain he had meant to fire; only that it happened almost without his volition, an event to which he was an accessory but not the main cause. The man was wounded. The man fell. Nico took another bewildered step forward. The shot man was unconscious and his friend huddled over him, eyes wide on Nico.

“Don’t move,” Nico said.

“Don’t shoot,” the other man pleaded. Nico held the pistol trembling but level and wondered where Mueller was. Surely he had heard the shot? What was keeping him?

Then there was a thunderous crash from
behind
him, and a light so bright it seemed to drain the color out of everything. And the window glass came hurtling inward in a thousand fragments.

Nico Bourgoint felt the glass cut his back and arm. He turned, and dropped his pistol in astonishment at what he saw: the Lord of the Hebdomad rising in a pillar of flame from the opposite side of the street.

Dex did not begin to make sense of events until he was in the alley, his good arm over Howard Poole’s shoulder and his feet moving by some logic of their own.

He looked at Howard, who was breathless and bleeding from what looked like a hundred small cuts. “What,” he said. It was meant to be,
What are we doing?
But the words evaded his grasp.

Howard gave him a brief look. “Run. If you can run, just do it.”

They jogged together. Each step triggered new fireworks from his shoulder and arm, no longer numb, alas. He didn’t look at the wound. He had never been keen on the sight of blood, his own or anyone else’s, and he couldn’t afford another spell of light-headedness.

He did risk a glance behind him. He saw what appeared to be a large-scale hallucination.

Above the pebbled roofs of the Beacon Street shops, above the rain gutters and the tangled telephone wires, a column of fire had risen into the cloudless night sky. The flames as they ascended became a luminous shade of blue, and in that coruscating substance, it seemed to Dex, there were faces, immense and endlessly shifting.

“God’s sake,” Howard rasped, “don’t
stop
!”

They crossed Oak and were some yards uphill along the crowded lane when Dex said, “Wait.”

Howard regarded him with a desperate impatience.

“We’re leaving a trail,” Dex said. “Look.”

Bright drops of blood had speckled the asphalt. Connect the dots, Dex thought. They’ll find us by morning.

Lights had winked on in all these houses, but there were deep shadows among the alleyside sheds and fences, and all attention must be focused on the fire. They crouched in a tangle of darkness.

“It’s mostly me. Howard, you have to bind this wound. Or apply a tourniquet.”

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

“I’ll tell you how. Put down that box, first of all.” Dex squinted at it. The optical reader. “You stole the damn thing after all, didn’t you? In spite of all this?”

“I had it in my hands when the soldier came in. It’s what we went for.”

“You’re a single-minded son of a bitch, Howard.”

“You learn that in grad school.” He took a breath. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks like the wound is in the fleshy part of your arm. Clear through. It’s bleeding a lot but it’s not, uh, gushing. What do I tie it with?”

“Use your belt for a tourniquet. Tight above the injury. Any kind of cloth to soak up what leaks.”

Howard worked while Dex sat on the cold ground and fixed his attention on the board fence next to him. It had once been painted, but the paint had all peeled away except for a few flakes clinging to the grain. The fence had once been white. Tonight it was gray, mottled by the light of the distant fire.

The pain was enormous and his grip on consciousness a little uncertain. He said, “Howard?”

“Uh?”

“What the hell happened back there?”

“I don’t know. Something blew up. Lucky for us.”

“A coincidence?”

“I suppose so. Synchronicity, at least. I’m about to tighten this.”

Dex counted silently to ten. His vision blurred somewhere around seven. Make words, he instructed himself.

“What happened back there . . . it was strange.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not natural.”

“I guess not.”

“Basically, it was weird.”

“You could say so.
There
.” A final tug. “Can you stand up?”

“Yeah.” But he was unsteady.

“Can you walk?”

“Oh, yeah. I’d better walk. It’s pretty much walk or die, don’t you think?”

Howard didn’t answer.