Mysterium

  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.

  Clifford turned and ran when he saw the pillar of blue fire. He was halfway up the block when he remembered his bike. He screwed up his courage and went back, grabbed the bike and straddled it, and cut west on Oak because it was the quickest, if not the least conspicuous, way home.

  His view of the events on Beacon Street had been comprehensive, and he understood everything up until the moment of the explosion. It unrolled inside him like a movie, like a videotape spliced into a maddening loop. His anger. The empty patrol car. Working the gear lever. His rising dread when he understood what the consequences would be. And the explosion at the gas pumps, and then—

  But that part made no sense. In his tape-loop memory, it looked like this: the gas pumps detonated in a ball of fire . . . and then something, something like a vast ethereal blue spark, had come down from the sky to touch the fireball; and the spark had coalesced into a cobalt-colored snake about as wide as the Gulf station and twisting up into the night sky as far as the eye could reach. It seemed to Clifford that the column had curved a little to the west, but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t been looking at it with scientific detachment. With panic, if anything. In that terrible moment it had occurred to him that he might somehow have caused the end of the world itself, because the blue light had not been merely light; it had been full of faces and forms—human faces and forms. One in particular. A grim, bearded face. God or the devil, Clifford thought.

  His bike flew through the November
darkness like a wild bullet. His legs pumped in a ceaseless fury that would have startled him if he had been aware of it. His only thought was of home; his house, his room, his bed.

  He slowed when he reached the suburban part of town. He had to; his breathing was so labored it hurt his lungs, and he had a painful stitch in his side. He let the bike drift to a stop and put one leg down to steady himself. Reluctantly, fearfully, he turned and looked back at Two Rivers.

  The pillar of blue flame was gone, to Clifford’s immense relief. Maybe he had only imagined it. He must have. But the ordinary fire burned on; he could see the glow of it reflected from houses on the high ground near Powell Creek Park. What pained him now was the knowledge that none of this could be taken back, not ever—for the rest of his life he would be responsible for blowing up the Gulf station (and please God, Clifford thought, let no one have been inside it). . . . The memory was part of his permanent luggage, and worse, it would have to remain a secret. This was something he could never be caught at or confess to, not in Two Rivers under the rule of the soldiers. There was no juvenile court in Two Rivers anymore; there was only the executioner.

  He pedaled the rest of the way home unaware of the tears on his face. Home, he parked his bike out of sight; he unlocked the door, stepped inside, locked it behind him; unlaced his sneakers and put them in the hall closet; padded upstairs to his room. The sight of the bed made him instantly, staggeringly tired. But there was work yet to do.

  He stripped his torn and dirty clothes and took them to the bathroom. He wedged them into the dirty-clothes hamper, down toward the bottom; his mother was lax about the wash these days and she probably wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary—his clothes were often dirty and many of them had been torn since June.

  Then he turned on the taps, hoping the sound of running water wouldn’t wake his mother. He stood in the tub and used a washcloth to soak the dirt off his face and sponge the clotted blood from his hands and elbows. When he seemed clean, front and back, he wiped down the tub, then rinsed the cloth and stuffed it into the hamper with everything else.

  He turned off the water and the light and tiptoed back to his room. He put on pajamas: his old ones, a little too tight nowadays, flannel with blue and white stripes. Then, only then, he allowed himself the bed.

  The sheets were as cool and welcoming as absolution and the blanket contained him like a prayer. He meant to plan his excuses if anyone questioned him tomorrow, but his thoughts quickly turned to nonsense and a tide of sleep carried him far away.

  Tom Stubbs was asleep at the fire hall when he heard the Gulf station blow. He sounded the alarm and made sure his crew was out of their cots, but the truth was he couldn’t do much until the telephone rang.

  Mr. Demarch had made it quite clear last July. The Two Rivers Volunteer Fire Department performed a valuable service, and they would be supplied and maintained—but if they left the station after curfew and before this newly installed radiotelephone rang, they’d be shot like any civilian.

  Two pumpers and the ladder company were waiting when the call finally came. Tom acknowledged it hastily and ran to the lead truck, which rolled at once.

  He knew as soon as they turned onto the slope of Beacon Street that this was no ordinary fire. The Gulf station was indeed burning; the underground tank had recently been filled with that leaded diesel the military cars ran on, and it looked like one of the topside pumps had not only caught fire but gone gusher. But that wasn’t all. Like the fire at the defense plant so many months ago, this fire had a frightening aspect. A tower of blue light rose from the flames to the sky . . . and maybe arched a little, Tom thought, as if its rainbow trajectory might bring it down somewhere over Ojibway land. But it faded before that. It was a vein of light with, if you looked long enough, faces in it—and that was terrifying.

  The fire at the defense plant had been terrifying too, but that had not stopped Chief Haldane from attempting to fight it, and the chief remained an idol in Tom’s eyes even after his untimely death this past summer. With that in mind, Tom drove as close as he could to the Gulf station, supervised his men as they connected at the mains, and did his level best to end the conflagration.

  The column of strange light faded to nothing in the steam, and that was fine with Tom. It made him nervous to work with the Devil looking on.

  Dex Graham left Howard at the Cantwell house and made his own way home, over the younger man’s protests. “Makes sense,” he told Howard. “Right now there’s chaos. In the morning there’ll be soldiers everywhere, and they might be curious about a wounded man.”

  “You can make it?”

  “Yes.”

  At least he thought he could. He took it street by street. Pain, and the dizziness that rode with it, came in tidal movements of ebb and flood. He was only dimly aware of the sound of sirens, the distant flicker of firelight.

  He reached his apartment after an eternity of footsteps. The stairs seemed at a steeper angle than he remembered; he whispered small encouragements to himself as he climbed.

  He locked his apartment door behind him and left the lights off. Now you can rest, he thought, and reached for the bed as darkness took him.

  Among those who had witnessed the strange phenomenon above the burning Gulf station, reports were mixed.

  Soldiers reported seeing what they described variously as Ialdaboath, Samael, a Demiurge, or the Father of Grief.

  Civilian witnesses in the neighboring houses claimed they had seen God or, like Tom Stubbs, the Devil.

  Only Howard Poole connected that visitation in the sky with Alan Stern, and Howard didn’t file a report.

  By morning, everything east of Oak stank of smoke and diesel fuel.

  CHAPTER 10

  Dex woke with the sun in his eyes and the knowledge that time had passed—too little or too much time, he wasn’t sure which. The events of the night had been large and significant and he dreaded the returning memory. He tried to roll onto his side but a starburst of pain prevented him. He tried again, more slowly, and discovered he was stuck to the bed.

  He peeled away the bloody sheet from the shirttail bandage Howard had wound for him and managed to sit up. He didn’t remember loosening the tourniquet, but he must have done so. That instinct had saved him a close encounter with gangrene, he thought—at least, so far. He was thirsty, feverish, and appallingly weak.

  He went to the sink in a drunkard’s stumble. He poured a glass of water. Sip it, he thought. From the medicine cupboard, four aspirin. One two three four.

  He was scheduled to hold classes between ten and twelve and it seemed to Dex he really ought to try to be there, as impossible as it might seem at the moment. The soldiers or the Bureau could be keeping an eye on his movements; he didn’t want to draw attention to himself by staying home. The Proctors might be looking for a wounded man. Better not to appear wounded. The trick would be to avoid collapsing in the street.

  He examined himself in the bathroom mirror. When the storefront window blew in he had been turned away from it; his face wasn’t cut, though his back, when he worked his shirt loose, seemed to have been flayed nearly skinless. The cuts weren’t as bad as they looked, fortunately; only a lacework of shallow lacerations after he sponged the scabbed blood away. But not pleasant.

  His arm . . .

  Well, he was able to move it, though the effort cost him dearly. Wait until the aspirin takes hold, he told himself. The aspirin would help, at least a little . . . though a mere four Bayers, under the circumstances, might be a spit in the wind. As for the wound itself, he didn’t want to risk disturbing the makeshift bandage. He didn’t want to bleed again. Of course, it would have to be changed; it might already be infected. But later. This afternoon, say. When he could faint at leisure.

  He put on plausible work clothes a cautious step at a time. The bandage bulked conspicuously under a clean shirt, but the sport coat disguised it.

  Could he walk the five blocks to JFK High? He guessed so. He felt disor
iented, but it was probably no worse than the disorientation of a bad case of the flu. The aspirin might at least take the fever down. Two classes: he could handle that.

  The walk passed in a series of curiously static tableaux. Here was the front door of the apartment block, open on a cold November morning. Here was the sidewalk arrayed before him like a flickering alabaster river. Here, the soldier on the corner with his high-collared black uniform and expressionless face, eyes tracking Dex as he passed.

  Here, much later, the school. Ancient brick Victoriana. Small high windows. The big door.

  The corridors were dirty and smelled of sour milk. They were abandoned nowadays except for a few stalwarts, student and faculty. Dex felt more lucid here, soothed by the bleak familiarity of the building. The aspirin had not done much for the pain or the fever but seemed to allow him to rise a distance above these things. He nodded at Emmy Jackson, who was still manning the reception desk. The principal, Bob Hoskins, hailed him as he approached his classroom.

  “Damn cold,” Hoskins said. “The power’s off again. As you no doubt noticed. Some idiot blew up the Gulf station last night and the Proctors are so PO’d they cut the electricity. For a full week, somebody said. If you can imagine anything so petty.”

  Dex said, “Have they caught anyone?”

  “No. Which is precisely what’s bothering them, in my opinion. If they had some poor soul to hang I’m sure they’d be delighted.” He squinted at Dex. “Are you all right?”

  “Flu.”

  “Well, there’s plenty of it going around. You sure you can manage? You look awfully pale.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “Well. Knock off early if you have to.” Hoskins sighed. “I don’t know how much longer we’ll be here anyway. It’s like minding an empty store. Sad but true.”

  The classroom was as cold as the rest of the building. Dex had left his notes at home and doubted his ability to lecture coherently for forty minutes. When his first students shuffled in, wrapped in shabby winter coats, he declared a study session and assigned them a chapter to read—three hectographed pages on America in World War I. “When you’re done you can talk among yourselves.”