Mysterium

In Dex’s experience, everybody obeyed the curfew. There had been a few exceptions. In July, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Seagram had been shot when he tried to cross town after dark to visit his girlfriend. The body had been on display in the City Hall courtyard for three ghastly days.

The patrols had eased somewhat since then, but Dex was still careful stepping out the front door of his building into the windy street.

The wind was an asset. The tossing of the trees, the rattle of all these dry leaves, disguised any sound he was likely to make. There were no streetlights, only the occasional flicker of candlelight from curtained windows; that was good, too. He followed a line of hedges to Beacon Road and took a good long look before jogging across the intersection to the corner of Powell Creek Park. The park was fine cover but hazardous in the cloudy dark. He followed the faint shine of a footpath.

He ducked behind a willow tree as a military patrol rounded the corner from Oak behind the lightless brick primary school, tires crackling on dry leaf. The soldier in the shotgun seat sca

Then he crossed the street to a small wood-frame house, over a lawn grown wild, to the back, down a short span of concrete steps to a basement door. He had memorized the route; in the dark he could see almost nothing. A tree hissed in the black space of the yard. Drops of rain spattered his coat and the air on his lips was cold and moist.

He opened the door without knocking. When it was firmly closed behind him, he struck a match and touched it to the wick of a candle.

This basement room was windowless. The floor was concrete. There were stacks of blankets, food cans (most empty), a few books, a Primus stove.

There was a mattress on the floor; and on the mattress, Howard Poole. His eyes were closed, his forehead beaded with sweat.

Dex sighed and emptied cans from the pockets of his coat. At the sound, Howard turned his head and looked up.

“Just me,” Dex said.

The younger man nodded. “Thirsty,” he said.

Dex popped a can of soda and pressed two aspirin into Howard’s hand. The hand was hot, but maybe not as hot as it had been yesterday.

Howard was suffering from a flu that had been threatening to turn into pneumonia. Dex believed the crisis had passed, but nothing was certain anymore.

Howard turned his wristwatch to catch the candlelight, then sat up in a slow, pained motion. “It’s after curfew.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Kind of risky, coming here.”

“I didn’t want to be followed.”

“You thought you might be?”

“A couple of Proctors came to the door this morning. They know your name, they know you worked at the plant, and they know you were rooming at Evelyn’s. They were civilized. No pushing. But a guy followed me to work. I thought it would be better to come here in the dark.”

“Jesus.” Howard rolled to one side.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. I didn’t get the feeling they were hunting you down—just putting some hooks in the water.”

Howard sighed. He looked tired of it all, Dex thought: worn out by the sickness, the cold, the hiding.

It was not more than ten days after the tanks rolled into Two Rivers that the military had a

The house they were in was ostensibly empty. It had belonged to Paul Cantwell, a CPA who had been in Florida with his family when the accident happened.

Howard had lifted an expired Michigan driver’s license from a desk upstairs and used it to pass as Paul Cantwell at the ration lineups. When he came down with the flu (some variant germ that rode in with the tanks: half the people in town had caught it), Dex used the ID to pick up double rations—a risky business, since hoarding was a punishable offense and ID fraud a capital crime under military law.

Howard said vaguely, “I was having a dream when you came in. Something about Stern. He was in a building, a building all covered with jewels. But I don’t remember…” The words trailed off.

Stern again, Dex thought. Since the fever set in Howard had often talked about his uncle Alan Stern—who had been the moving force behind the Two Rivers Physical Research Lab; who had died, presumably, in the accident. The fever seemed to have revived him in Howard’s mind.

“A woman,” Howard said faintly, deliriously. “A woman answered the phone.”

Dex opened a can of soup and put a spoon into the younger man’s hand. Howard’s fingers closed on it in a spasm that was almost reflexive.

“When I phoned him in Two Rivers,” Howard was saying. “A woman …”

“Is this important?”

The question seemed to clear a shadow. He gave Dex a guilty, odd smile. “I don’t know. Maybe.” He put the spoon in his mouth. “Cold soup.”

“It’s good for you. How do you feel, by the way?”

“A little better. I’ve been awake more often. At least, I think so. It’s kind of timeless down here.” And he took another spoonful. “Not so many trips to the shitter. I’ve even been a little bit hungry.”

“Good.”

He ate in silence for a time. It seemed to Dex that the soup and the aspirin were working a slow transformation in him. It was heartening to see.

They listened as the rain picked up its pace, rattling on a tin awning out back.

Howard put down the empty can and licked the spoon a last time. “I was talking about my uncle. This isn’t just raving, Dex. I know I haven’t been too coherent. But he was the key to this whole event. Maybe our key to understanding it.”

“You think we have a chance of understanding it?”

“I don’t know. Yes, maybe.”

Maybe Howard could figure out what had happened at the research lab. Dex surely couldn’t. He had a hard time understanding the Bohr model of the atom, much less a physical process so catastrophic that it could somehow rewrite history. What had happened here was not Physics 1-A—it wasn’t on any curriculum Dex had ever heard of. He shook his head: “You’re talking to a humanities major, bucko.”

“Maybe we have to understand it.”

“Do we?”

“I thought about it a lot. You lie here in the dark, you do a lot of thinking. It’s our only choice, Dex. We understand it and do something about it, or we just… what? Go on like this? Get killed, or imprisoned, or best case, get assimilated?”

Dex had had these thoughts, too, and so, probably, had most of the citizens of Two Rivers. But no one ever talked about it. It was the great unspoken truce. We will not discuss the future.

Howard had broken the rule.

“You are feverish.”

“Don’t brush me off.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t humor me, either. I’m not that sick.”

“I’m sorry. If I knew where to begin—”

“I keep thinking about Stern. I dreamed about him. With the fever—there were times I thought he was here, I mean here in the room. Very real.” Howard shook his head and sank back into the mattress. “It all seemed so logical. It made more sense in dreams.”

Dex went home after midnight. The weather sheltered him from view and kept military patrols to a minimum, but his clothes were heavy with cold rain and he was shivering helplessly by the time he came within sight of his walkup apartment building. Maybe Howard was right, he thought. Maybe it all made more sense in dreams.

Maybe dreaming was the only way to approach something so incomprehensible. Dex had coped better than most, because his own life had passed into the territory of dreams long ago. He had been sleepwalking since the fire took Abigail and David away from him. His life since then had been a kind of shadowy anticlimax in which even the events of the last few months had been hardly more than a recapitulation, his own bereavement somehow woven into the fabric of the larger world. He supposed Evelyn had sensed this about him, that even the tenderness that had passed between them—and it had been a real tenderness—was nevertheless eclipsed by something darker. He supposed that was why she had elected to stay in the boarding house with the Proctor Demarch. She had been afraid, of course, but not only afraid. She had known about Dex: what he had been, what he had lost.