Mysterium (2 page)

“Amazing,” Dex said, turning his long body lazily under the cotton sheets. “Don’t they have their own quarters out there? I never heard of one of these guys boarding in town.”

“Don’t be so cynical,” Evelyn scolded him. “Howard says there’s a housing problem—too much staff, short accommodation. Musical chairs, I guess, and he was left standing. He’s only here for a week. Anyway, he says he wanted to see the town.”

“Admirable curiosity.”

Evelyn sat up and reached for her panties, vaguely annoyed. Dex possessed a deep, automatic cynicism she had begun to find unattractive. He was forty years old, and sometimes he sounded a little too much like the toothless janitor at his school, the one who was always mumbling about “the government.”

The question was, would Dex give Howard Poole a hard time over dinner?

Evelyn hoped not. She liked Howard well enough. He was young, shy, bespectacled, vulnerable-looking. She was charmed by his accent. Bronx, perhaps, or Queens—places Evelyn knew mainly from her reading. She had never been east of Detroit.

She dressed and left Dex in bed, went downstairs to the kitchen and began to prepare a coq au vin and salad for herself, Dex, and her two boarders, Howard and a woman named Friedel from California. She hummed to herself as she worked, a tuneless little song that seemed to arise from the memory of what she and Dex had done in the bedroom. Sunlight tracked across the linoleum floor, the wooden chopping board.

Dinner went better than she had expected. Mrs. Friedel, a widow, did most of the talking, a gentle monologue about her trip across the country and how much her husband would have enjoyed it. The coq au vin put everyone in a benevolent mood. Or maybe it was just the weather: a fine spring evening, the first warm evening of the year. Howard Poole smiled often but spoke seldom. He sat opposite Evelyn. He ate sparingly but paid attention to the food. The vivid sunset through the dining room window was reflected in his oval glasses, disguising his eyes.

Over dessert, a cinnamon cake, Dex raised the forbidden topic. “I understand you work out at the defense plant, Howard.”

Evelyn tensed. But Howard seemed to take it in stride. He shrugged his bony shoulders. “If you can call it that—a defense plant. I never thought of it that way.”

“Government installation is what they call it in the paper.”

“Yes.”

“What exactly do you do out there?”

“I’m new to the place myself, Mr. Graham. I can’t answer the question.”

“Meaning it’s classified?”

“Meaning I wish I knew.”

Evelyn kicked Dex under the table and said brightly, “Coffee, anyone?”

“Sounds wonderful,” Howard said.

And Dex just smiled and nodded.

Curiously, Mrs. Friedel had packed her bags and announced her intention to leave as soon as dinner was over. Evelyn settled the account but was worried: “You’re driving after dark?”

“I wouldn’t ordinarily,” the widow confided. “And I don’t believe in dreams—I really don’t. But this one was so vivid. I was taking a nap this morning. And in the dream I was talking to Ben.”

“Your husband.”

“Yes. And he told me to pack and leave. He was not upset. Just a little concerned.” Mrs. Friedel was blushing. “I know how this sounds. I’m not such a lunatic, Miss Woodward—you don’t have to stare like that.”

Now Evelyn blushed. “Oh, no. It’s all right, Mrs. Friedel. Go with a hunch, that’s what I always say.”

But it was strange.

She took her evening walk with Dex after the dishes had been washed.

They crossed Beacon and headed for the lakeside. Gnats hovered under the streetlights, but the mosquitoes weren’t a menace yet. The breeze was gentle and the air was only beginning to cool.

She said, “When we’re married, you have to promise not to harass the guests”—more in reference to what
might
have happened than what
had
happened.

And Dex looked apologetic and said, “Of course. I didn’t mean to badger him.”

She admitted that he hadn’t. It was only her apprehension: of his unyielding nature, of the grief he carried deep inside him. “I saw you biting your tongue.”

“Howard seems like a nice enough kid. Bright university grad. Probably drafted by some headhunter. Maybe he really doesn’t know what’s going on out there.”

“Maybe nothing
is
going on out there. Nothing bad, at least.”

“It’s possible.”

“Whatever they do, I’m sure it’s perfectly safe.”

“So was Chernobyl. Until it blew up.”

“God, you’re so
paranoid
!”

He laughed at her consternation; then she laughed, too. And they walked a silent distance along the shore of Lake Merced.

Water lapped at wooden docks. The stars were bright. On the way back, Evelyn shivered and buttoned her sweater.

She said, “Are you staying over tonight?”

“If you still want me to.”

“Of course I do.”

And he put his arm around her waist.

Later, Dex would wonder about the remark he had made about Chernobyl.

Did it represent a premonition, like Mrs. Friedel’s dream? Had his body sensed something, some subliminal input his conscious mind failed to grasp?

And then there was Evelyn’s tabby cat, Roadblock. Roadblock spent the evening in a kind of frenzy, tearing around the bedroom in tight circles until Evelyn lost patience and put her out. Had the cat sensed some tenuous radiation coming across the dark water of the lake?

Perhaps. Perhaps.

He woke a little after midnight.

He hovered a moment on the fragile edge of awareness, dimly conscious of Evelyn beside him, of the way she breathed in her sleep, long delicate sighs. What had woken him? A sound, a motion . . .

Then it came again, an irregular metallic tapping—a tapping at the window.

He turned and saw the moonlit silhouette of the cat. Roadblock, out for the night, had climbed onto the garage roof and up the shingled slope to the bedroom window. Now she wanted back in. Claws on the plate glass.
Tack-scratch
. “Go ’way,” Dex mumbled. Wishful thinking.
Tack tack
.

He stood up and pulled on his underwear. The warmth of the day had evaporated; the bedroom was chilly. The cat stood on her hind legs, arched against the windowpane in an eerie stretch. Moonlight fell on Dex, and he turned and saw his reflection in the vanity mirror. He saw the thatch of dark hair across his chest, his large hands loose at his sides. His gaunt face lay half in shadow, eyes wide and bewildered by sleep. He would be forty-one years old in August. Old man.

He unlatched the window. Roadblock leaped inside and raced across the carpet, more frantic than ever. The cat jumped on the bed and Evelyn stirred in her sleep. “Dex?” she murmured. “What—?” And rolled over, sighing.

He leaned out into the cool night air.

The town was silent. Two Rivers closed down after midnight, even on a warm Friday. The sound of traffic had faded. He heard the warble of a loon out on the deeps of Lake Merced. Trees flush with new leaves moved in tides of night air. Somewhere down Beacon Road, a dog barked.

Then, suddenly, inexplicably, a beam of light flashed across the sky. It came from the east, across the lake, far away in the abandoned Ojibway reserve—from the defense plant, Dex realized. The light cast sudden shadows, like lightning; it flickered on the lake. The bedroom was aglow with it.

A spotlight? A flare? He couldn’t make sense of it.

Evelyn sat up in alarm, all the way awake now. “Dex, what’s going on?”

There was no time to answer. He saw a second beam of light cut the meridian of the sky, and a third, so sharply defined he thought they must be laser beams . . . maybe some kind of weapon being tested out there . . . and then the light expanded like a bubble, seemed to include everything around it, the lake, the town, Evelyn’s bedroom, Dex himself. The room, bathed in light, began abruptly to spin, to tilt on an invisible axis and slide away, until his awareness dwindled to a point, a pulsating singularity in a wilderness of light.

The town of Two Rivers, Michigan, and the federally funded research project on its outskirts vanished from the earth some hours before dawn on a Saturday morning late in May.

The fires began not long after.

The fires were useful when it was time to explain what had happened. The obliteration of a town the size of Two Rivers requires a great deal of explanation, and the existence of the military facility on the abandoned Indian lands had not been a secret (though its purpose had never been revealed). It was the desire of the Defense Department that these awkward truths not be connected. Both the town and the research project were lost in the fire, officials announced. It had not been one fire but several; unseasonal, unexpected, the product perhaps of freakish heat lightning. The fires had surrounded the town and grown with unprecedented speed. There was no defense against such a holocaust. Most of Bayard County was simply incinerated. More lives had been lost than in any natural disaster in American history, tens of thousands of lives. Commissions of inquiry were established and carefully staffed.

Questions were inevitable, of course. An American town the size of Two Rivers represents a substantial deposit of stone, asphalt, concrete, and steel—it can’t simply burn to the ground. Where were the foundations, the chimneys, the stonework, the bricks? Where, in fact, were the
roads
? Barricades had been thrown up before the fire was extinguished, and they stayed in place long after. Battalions of federal bulldozers had moved in immediately—to clear the highway, officials said; but one retired civil engineer who lived east of the fireline said it looked to him like they were
rebuilding
that road.

And there were other mysteries: the sighting of curious lights; the interruption of phone service to and from Two Rivers long before the fire could have grown to threatening size; the fifteen civilian witnesses who claimed they had approached the town from the east or west and found the highway cut cleanly, as if by some enormous knife, and nothing on the other side but trees and wilderness. Power lines had been severed just as neatly, and it was the loose lines, some said, that were the real cause of the fire.

But these were clues that defied interpretation, and they were soon forgotten, except by the fringe element who collected stories of ghosts, rains of stones, and the spontaneous combustion of human bodies.

Never officially connected with the Two Rivers disaster was the case of Wim Pender, who was found wandering in a dazed condition along the grassy verge of Highway 75. Pender claimed he had been on a fishing/camping expedition in “the north of the Province of Mille Lacs” with two companions, from whom he had been separated when there was “a blast of light and flames to the south of us late one night.”

Pender gave as his home address a number on a nonexistent Boston street. His wallet and identification had been lost in his flight from the fire. His pack contained only an empty canteen, two cans of something labeled THON PALE EN MORCEAUX (tuna fish, it turned out), and an apocryphal testament of the Bible entitled
The Secret Booke of James in the English Tongue
, printed on rice paper and bound in imitation leather.

When Pender’s claims grew even more fantastic—including the accusation that both the Forest Service and the Michigan Department of Welfare were “Mohammedans or servants of Samael or worse”—he was remanded for psychiatric evaluation to a facility in Lansing.

Mr. Pender was deemed not to be a danger to himself or others and was released on June 23. He made his way to Detroit, where he spent the summer in a shelter for the homeless.

November was cold that year, and during an early snowfall Pender left his bed and spent his last money on a city bus, because the buses were heated. The bus carried him downriver to Southgate, where he got off in front of a bankrupt and abandoned retail lumber outlet. In the upper story of that building he tied his belt into a crude loop and hanged himself from a rafter.

Pinned to his shirt was a note:

THE KYNGDOM OF DEATH BELONGS TO THOSE
WHO PUT THEM SELVES TO DEATH.
JAMES THE APOSTLE.
I AM NOT INSANE.
SIGNED, WIM PENDER OF BOSTON

MYSTERIUM

PART ONE

The void that precedes the creation of the universe is an imponderable, unknowing emptiness—lacking matter, vacuum, time, motion, number, or logic. And yet the universe derives from it according to some law not yet understood—a law which, governing nothingness, yields everything!

Call it Nous. Perfect Mind. Call it the Protennoia. The Uncreated God.

—from the secret journal of Alan Stern

CHAPTER 1

Dex Graham woke with the sun in his eyes and the weave of Evelyn Woodward’s bedroom carpet printed on the side of his face. He was cold and his body was stiff and knotted with aches.

He sat up, wondering what had caused him to spend the night on the floor. He hadn’t slept on a floor since college. The morning after some nightmarish frat party blowout, drunk on the floor of a dorm room and wondering what happened to the strawberry blond grad student who had offered him a ride in her Mustang. Vanished in the haze. Like so much else.

A breath of cool air made him shiver. The bay window was wide open. Had he done that? The curtains tossed fitfully and the sky was as blue as china glaze. It was a quiet morning; there was no sound louder than the honking of Canada geese in the shallow water under the docks.

He stood up, a slow operation, and looked at Evelyn. She was awkwardly asleep under a tangle of cotton sheets. One arm was flung out and Roadblock lay stretched at her feet.

Had he been drunk? Was that possible? He felt the way he remembered feeling after a drunk—the same sensation of bad news hovering just out of reach, the night’s ill omens about to unreel in his head.

And he turned to the window and thought:
Ah, God, yes—the defense plant
.

He remembered the beams of light stabbing the sky, the way the bedroom had begun to pinwheel around him.