Mysterium

People had seen peculiar things, his mother said. Some people claimed they saw God that night, or maybe it was the Devil—though what either one of them would want with the Beacon Street filling station was beyond her. According to Mrs. Fraser, some soldiers had died in the explosion. According to someone else it was a Proctor who had been killed, and God help us all if that was true. Mr. Kingsley next door said it was some new experiment at the defense plant that caused the explosion… but Joe Kingsley hadn’t been in his right mind since his wife died last August; you could tell because he never washed his clothes anymore.

And so on. On Friday, Clifford picked up a single-sheet edition of the Two Rivers Crier from the stack at the corner of Beacon and Arbutus. The newspaper reported “hooliganism on the main street” but said no one had been seriously hurt, and Clifford decided to believe that, although you couldn’t be sure of what they printed in the Crier anymore. The town’s punishment had been fairly mild, considering what was possible, and the number of soldiers on the street declined over the course of the week; so it was probably true that no one had been killed. If a soldier or a Proctor had died, Clifford thought, things would be much worse.

It was good to think he hadn’t hurt anyone. Still, the presence of the sca

Friday night, Luke came to the house again. He brought rice and a half pound of fatty ground beef, plus the inevitable quart jar of barracks whiskey. Clifford’s mother cooked the meat and rice for di

Clifford ate a good share of food, although the conversation at the table was strained and halting. As usual, the talk picked up after he departed for his room. They always sent him to his room after di

Luke drank, too, and in the long pauses between drinking he would talk about his work. It was this talk Clifford particularly wanted to hear. The disaster on Beacon Street should have cured him of eavesdropping, he thought. Eavesdropping with the sca

Tonight was a good example. Tonight Luke talked about all the bulldozers that had come in from Fort LeDuc, and what the bulldozers were doing on the edge of town.

Tuesday was the first food depot day after the electricity came back on and Clifford volunteered to make the trip to pick up rations. His mother agreed. Which was no surprise. She seldom left the house if she could help it. Some days she didn’t even leave her room.

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 sca

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 ski

Clifford gathered his own food bag in one hand and the bag with the sca

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 sca

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?”