Mysterium (24 page)

The air outside was damp and cold. The pale sun at noon was just warm enough to melt the skin of the fallen snow and fill the gutters with frigid water. Clifford passed the time during the long walk to the food depot by trying to make perfect footprints in the crusty snow. When he stepped straight down his boots left cookie-cutter outlines behind him.

He carried an empty bag to fill up with food, and another bag—a plastic bag, into which he had placed the radio scanner in its box. He held the bag with the scanner close to his body and hoped no one would pay it any attention.

At the depot he collected the family allowance of bread and cheese. Then he stood across the street under the awning of the Two Rivers Thrift Shop, watching the ration line grow as it hitched forward. The people in the line looked unhappy and too thin. Some of them were sick. The cold week had been hard on people, his mother had told him. He paid attention to the faces of the men in the line. Would he recognize the one he was looking for? He thought so. But it was hard to wait. His toes were numb inside his boots; the cold air made his nose run.

The line lengthened until it was twenty people long; then it began to shrink as the shadows grew. The soldiers dispensing food were tired. They punched notches into ration cards without really looking at them and paused to take off their gloves and blow into their cupped hands. Clifford was about to begin the walk home, disappointed, when he saw the man he was waiting for.

The man looked skinnier than Clifford remembered—and he had been a thin man to begin with—but it was definitely the same one. The man joined the line and waited with no particular expression on his thin face. When he reached the front he offered his ration card for clipping, then opened a dirty cloth bag for the bread and cheese. Then he turned and walked away with his head bent into the wind.

Clifford gathered his own food bag in one hand and the bag with the scanner in the other and followed the man west toward Commercial and River.

After a twisty walk among the slatboard houses of the west end of town, the man went into a shabby house. Clifford hesitated on the sidewalk. A shoal of cloud had hidden the low sun and meltwater was freezing in the gutters. There was a film of ice on the empty road.

He went to the door of the house and knocked.

Howard Poole opened the door and peered in obvious surprise from a dim hallway. The plume of his breath hung like a feather in the air.

Clifford, wanting to be sure, said, “You’re the man on the hill at the defense plant that day. You’re Howard.”

He nodded slowly. “And you’re Clifford. I remember.” He looked around the snowbound yard. “Did you follow me here?”

Clifford said yes.

“But you’re alone, right?”

“Yes.”

“You need something? You need some help?”

“No,” Clifford said. “I brought you something.”

“Well, come in.”

In the barely warm kitchen, Clifford took the radio scanner from its bag and set it on the table. He explained to Howard how it worked and how he was able to hear the soldiers talking on the marine band. He left out what had happened to the gas station. He didn’t want even Howard to know about that.

Howard accepted the gift gravely. He said it would probably be useful, though he wasn’t sure how. “Clifford, you want something to drink? There’s milk powder. Even a little chocolate. I could probably manage cocoa.”

It was tempting, but Clifford shook his head. “I have to get home. But there’s something else. You remember when I told you about Luke?”

“Luke—?”

“The soldier my mother sees.”

“Oh. Yes, I remember.”

“He talked about something they’re doing. He said the Proctors brought in a whole bunch of earth-movers from Fort LeDuc. Band saws, too, and stump cutters. They’re using them all around the town, following the line where, you know, where
our
territory meets
their
territory—that whole circle. They’re cutting down trees and digging up dirt. It’s a big project. From my house, you can hear the noise all the way from Coldwater Road.”

Howard looked very solemn. His eyes were big behind those taped-up glasses. “Clifford, did Luke say
why
they’re doing this?”

“He says he doesn’t know, and the Proctors won’t talk about it . . . but it looks like what they’re cutting is one big firebreak.”

The boy went out into a windy dusk. Howard wanted to pass on this information about the Proctors to Dex, but curfew was too close and a visit might be dangerous in any case. He closed the door. Maybe tomorrow.

The house was dark. After months of hiding here, Howard was still reluctant to use the lights. But a little light was good. For a week the Cantwell house had been cold and dark and even more lonely than it had seemed in the autumn: a strange shore to have washed up on. He still felt like an intruder here.

He climbed the stairs to Paul Cantwell’s study and loaded the last fifty pages of the Buchanan and Bayard counties white pages into the Hewlett-Packard PC. This work had been interrupted, maddeningly, by the week of darkness, and today by the need to pick up rations. He finished it now with more dread than excitement. The experiment for which he had risked so much—his life, his friend Dex’s life—might be exactly as ephemeral as Dex had predicted. He had built an ornate palace of conjecture, and that delicate structure might well collapse under the weight of reality.

The telephone number Stern gave him hadn’t appeared in the first hundred pages of the phone book—unless the optical reader had mistranslated it, or the program he was reading it into had some kind of flaw. But that was unlikely. More likely was that he simply hadn’t found the number yet . . . or that it was unlisted.

Howard finished loading the directory and told the computer to sort for the target number. The disk drive chattered into the silent room.

It didn’t take long. The machine announced success as prosaically as it had announced failure. The number simply appeared highlighted in blue; a name and address appeared at the left.

WINTERMEYER, R. 1230 HALTON ROAD, TWO RIVERS

Less than three blocks from here.

He spent a sleepless night thinking about Stern, his mind crowded with a hundred memories and a single image: Stern, so like his name, fiercely intelligent, eyes dark, lips pursed behind a curly beard. Generous but mysterious. Howard had been talking to Alan Stern for much of his life and every conversation had been a treasured event, but what had he learned about the man in back of the ideas? Only a few clues from his mother. Stern the enigmatic, Stern who was, his mother once said, “trying to secede from the human race.”

Howard walked to the Halton Road address in the morning in a dizzy mixture of anticipation and dread.

The house itself was nothing special: an old two-story row house faced with pink aluminum siding. The tiny lawn and the narrow pass-way at the side were obscured by snow; a tin trash can peeked out from a drift. A path snaked to the front door. There was a light in a downstairs window.

Howard pushed the doorbell and heard the buzzer ring inside.

A woman answered the door. She was in her fifties, Howard guessed; slim, small-boned, her gray hair long and loose. She looked at him warily, but that was how everyone looked at strangers nowadays.

He said, “Are you R. Wintermeyer?”

“Ruth. ‘R’ only to my tax form.” She narrowed her eyes. “You look a little familiar. But only a little.”

“I’m Howard Poole. I’m Alan Stern’s nephew.”

Her eyes widened and she took a step back. “Oh my God. I think you really
are
. You even look like him. He talked about you, of course, but I thought—”

“What?”

“You know. I thought you must have been killed at the lab.”

“No. I wasn’t there. They didn’t have a place for me—I stayed in town that night.” He looked past her into the dim interior of the house.

She said, “Well, please come in.”

Warm air embraced him. He tried to restrain his curiosity but his eyes searched for evidence of Stern. The furniture in the sitting room—a sofa, side table, bookcases—was casual but clean. A book was splayed open on an easy chair but he couldn’t read the title.

Howard said, “Is my uncle here?”

Ruth looked at him for a time. “Is that what you thought?”

“He gave me the telephone number but not the address. It took me a long time to find you.”

“Howard . . . your uncle is dead. He died at the lab that night with everybody else. I’m sorry. I thought you would have assumed . . . I mean, he did spend most of his nights here, but there was something going on, some kind of work. . . . Did you really think he might be here after all this time?”

Howard felt breathless. “I was sure of it.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It was a feeling.”

She gave him another, longer look. Then she said, “I have that feeling, too. Sit down, please, Howard. Would you like coffee? I think we have a lot to talk about.”

CHAPTER 14

The clergy of Two Rivers had responded to the events of the summer by putting together what they called the Ad Hoc Ecumenical Council, a group of pastors representing the town’s seven Christian churches and two synagogues. The group met in Brad Congreve’s basement twice a month.

Congreve, an ordained Lutheran minister, was proud of his work. He had assembled a delegation from every religious group in town except for the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Vedanta Buddhist Temple, which in any case was only Annie Stoller and some of her New Age friends sitting cross-legged in the back of Annie’s self-help store. The churches had not always been on friendly terms, and it was still a chore to keep the Baptists talking to the Unitarians, for instance, but they all faced a common danger in this peculiar new world.

Certainly they had all shared a trial of faith. Congreve often felt the way he supposed the Incas must have felt when Pizarro marched into town with banners flying—doomed, that is, at least in the long run. There was a Christianity here but it was like no Christian doctrine Congreve had ever imagined—it was not even monotheistic! The God of the Proctors presided over a cosmogony as crowded as the Super Bowl, Jesus being only one of the major players. Worse, these
faux
Christians were numerous and well armed.

Symeon Demarch had allowed the churches to carry on with services, which had been a morale booster, but it was Congreve’s private conviction that the writing was on the wall. He might not go to his death a martyr, but he would probably go down as one of the last living Lutherans. There was not even history to sustain him. History had been erased, somehow.

The only thing that had not been challenged was his belief in miracles.

In the meantime he drew together the Christian community in Two Rivers and tried to set a dignified tone. There was argument tonight about the explosion at the filling station and the curious phenomena some people had seen there. Signs and wonders. Congreve shunted that aside when he called the meeting to order. It was not the kind of issue they could resolve; it only fostered disagreement.

Instead, he raised the more immediate and practical question of Christmas decorations. The electrical power would be restored by the beginning of next week, and it was already the first of December—although it felt more like January with all this snow. His youth group wanted to string Christmas lights on the church lawn. A few lights would make everybody feel better, Congreve supposed. But Christmas lights were a religious display and according to Demarch all such displays needed prior approval by the Proctors. That was where the problem arose. Symeon Demarch was out of town; the man in charge was an unpleasant bureaucrat named Clement Delafleur. Father Gregory of the Catholic church had already spoken to Delafleur and the meeting had not been a happy one; Delafleur had expressed a desire to close down the churches altogether and had called Father Gregory “an idolator and an alien.”

But Christmas decorations were a secular tradition, too, and no doubt some of the private citizens in Two Rivers would be moved to dig out their strings of lights—so why not the churches?

A plausible argument, Congreve thought, but the Proctors might disagree. He counseled a prudent caution. Reverend Lockheed of the Mission Baptist said his young people were also anxious to do something to mark the season, so how about decorating the big pine in the Civic Gardens outside City Hall—as a kind of test case? If the Proctors objected, the lights could be unstrung. (Though not without vocal objections, if Congreve knew Terry Lockheed.)

Lockheed made it a formal motion. Congreve would have preferred to hold over the entire issue until Demarch was back. Why court trouble? But the show of hands overruled him.

The combined Lutheran and Baptist youth groups, plus interested parties from the Episcopalians and Catholics—about seventy-five young people in all—converged on the Civic Gardens east of City Hall the next Saturday morning.

Electrical power was still interdicted at the source, so no one brought lights—those could be added later. Instead there were ribbons, balls, colored string; spun-glass angels, gold and silver coronets; tinsel, brocade, and popcorn chains by the yard. A morning snow fell gently and there was room for everything among the capacious, snowy branches of the tree. Reverend Lockheed showed up with a cherry-picking ladder so that even the peaks of the big pine were not neglected.