Mysterium (10 page)

The flag was blue with white bars and a red star in the middle. It might have been any country’s flag, Evelyn thought; it was not the American flag but it was not threateningly strange. She had gradually grown accustomed to the idea that Two Rivers had somehow traveled by standing still, that it had arrived in a place where things were substantially foreign. As an idea it was incomprehensible; as a fact of life—one adjusted. Or at least one ought to.

She had adjusted to other changes. Evelyn had been married for three years to a man in Traverse City, a notary public named Patrick Cotter. She had believed
that
would last forever, too, and it hadn’t; her connection to Patrick had been as fragile as the connection between Two Rivers and the United States of America. And her engagement to Dex: that had foundered just as quickly when the lieutenant moved in. The lesson? There was no reliable glue to bind the parts of the world. Nothing was certain except change. The trick was to land on your feet.

Dex had not adjusted; that was his problem. He was still chewing some old bone of self-loathing. It had made him eccentric and stern.

Feliks drove her home. In contrast to the military, the Proctors were relatively few and had chosen a headquarters by the lakeshore. Most of them were bivouacked in the Blue View Motel; civilian employees of the Bureau de la Convenance had a wing to themselves. The highest-ranking Proctors, including the lieutenant and his pions, had lodged at Evelyn’s B&B.

She still liked the way the house looked, three stories of Victorian gingerbread with a view of Lake Merced. She had paid for a great deal of restoration when she bought the building and it was still clean despite a summer of neglect. The white paint hadn’t faded from the siding, or the robin’s egg blue from the trim. She left Feliks to tend his car and hurried inside. It was almost time for lunch. She didn’t serve lunch; there was a kitchen at the Blue View with a gasoline-powered generator and provisions shipped in daily. Most noons, she had the house to herself. She opened a ration can, one of the military rations the lieutenant had brought her, contents nameless but not bad if you were hungry enough, and she heated a kettle of her new water over a Coleman stove on the back porch. Tea bags, her last two, went into the china pot. She added hot water and inhaled the earthy fragrance. Would there ever be more tea?

Yes, she thought, there would. Things would be normalized. She would adjust. There was always a reward for adjusting. Small pleasures. Tea.

She took a careful, precious sip and gazed across the water. Lake Merced was choppy in the autumn wind, empty under a blue sky . . . as empty as Evelyn wished she could be, utterly empty of all thought.

The lieutenant came home at dusk.

She still thought of him as “the lieutenant,” though she knew his full name: Symeon Philip Demarch. Born in Columbia, a town on the Chesapeake River, to an English-speaking family with long-standing Bureau connections. Forty-five years old.
Symeon,
Evelyn thought. It sounded almost like
Simon.
Like the flag of the Republic, his name was strange but not completely foreign. She had adjusted to it.

He came to the kitchen and asked her to brew coffee. He gave her a bag of military-issue ground coffee, almost half a pound, Evelyn guessed, and whispered to her, “Save some for later.”

He finished business with two of his adjutants and sent them out of the room. The house was dark now and Evelyn began rummaging for lamp oil.

“Don’t,” the lieutenant said. (
Symeon.
) She put the bottle back on its high shelf and waited for him to explain.

He smiled and went to the dining room table, where there was a military radiotelephone in a scuffed black case. He took up the receiver, cranked the handle, and said a single word: “Now.”

“Symeon?” She was bewildered. “What—?”

And then a remarkable thing happened. The lights came on.

Clifford Stockton was in his room when the electricity came back.

He had gone to bed early. He went to bed early most nights. What else was there to do? Under the blankets he was at least warm.

But now the ceiling light winked on—tentatively, at first, as if distant turbines were struggling with the load; then brightly, steadily. And Clifford winced at the sudden glare and wondered whether everything had changed again.

He climbed out of bed and went to the window. Most of the town of Two Rivers was hidden behind the near wall of the Carrasco house next door, but the glow in the sky meant that
all
the lights were on, including the downtown signs and the big spotlights in the mall parking lot, all reflecting from a shelf of low cloud that had rolled in with sunset. The corner of town Clifford was able to see looked like a constellation of new stars, a handful of fire scattered over the earth beyond Powell Creek Park. He had forgotten the way it looked. It looked like Christmas, Clifford thought.

“Cliffy!” That was his mother’s voice as she hurried up the stairs, choked with excitement. She opened the door of his room and stared wide-eyed at him. “Cliffy, isn’t it
wonderful
?”

She looked feverish, he thought, her eyes too bright, skin flushed red—or maybe it was just the sudden light. She waved her hand and he followed her downstairs. He was wearing his pajamas. He hadn’t been downstairs in his pajamas in a long time. It hadn’t seemed safe.

She danced through the kitchen, opened the microwave oven to see the light come on, ran a finger along the gleaming white enamel of the refrigerator. “Coffee!” she said. “I think we have some left. Stale, but who cares? Cliffy, I’m making a pot of coffee!”

“Great,” he said. “Can I watch TV?”

“TV! Yes! Yes! Turn it on!” Then, a soberer thought: “It probably won’t get any stations, though. I don’t think we’re really back home. I think they just hooked up the electricity.”

“We could watch a tape,” Clifford said.

“God, yes! Play a tape! Turn it up loud!”

“What should I play?”

“Anything! Anything!”

He took a dusty tape from the top of the stack by the TV, untouched for months. No label. He plugged it in.

It was the last thing his mother had recorded, and it was nothing special, a Friday installment of
The Tonight Show
she had meant to watch Saturday morning, back in June.

The theme music startled him. It sounded amazingly realistic. He was afraid someone outside the house might hear it—but that was stupid. All over town, people must be playing videotapes or records or CDs or whatever noisy thing they felt like.

The colors on TV were supernaturally vivid. Clifford sat mesmerized by the screen. He didn’t listen to the talk, just relished the sound of the voices. It was all so boisterous, so carelessly happy.

The sound of the TV was like Christmas in a box, and Clifford didn’t understand why it made his mother cry.

Evelyn wore her new dress upstairs and looked at herself in the standing mirror.

She liked the way the new light reflected from the peaks and shadowy valleys of the cloth.

“It looks very well,” Symeon said. Not
good
or
nice
but
well.
She liked the way he talked. He was very courteous. Very old-world.

“Thank you.” She tried to sound demure, not too brazen. “I feel like I haven’t thanked you enough.”

“The dress,” Symeon said. His smile was enigmatic, his eyes obscure.

She said, “The dress—?”

“Take it off.”

“You’ll have to help me with the stays.”

“Of course.”

His hands were large but deft.

CHAPTER 5

Linneth Stone followed Dex to the High School and sat at the back of his morning classes, flanked by the sullen Proctors in their brown woolen uniforms. (She called them
pions
—according to Dex’s French–English dictionary, a “checker” or “pawn,” but she used the word respectfully.) For two days Dex discussed the Civil War while this petite woman in Victorian dress took notes and methodically filed them in a calfskin binder. Each day, attention in the classroom migrated away from Dex and toward these apparitions seated at the rear.

Dex had hoped the situation would improve now that electrical power had been restored, but it didn’t; the fluorescent ceiling lights only made her presence seem more exotic. Today, at lunch, he told her so.

They sat in the staff cafeteria. There was no hot food, but the artificial light dispelled some of the gloom of the cavernous space. Dex had brought a bag lunch. Linneth, flanked by her guards, sat without eating and listened to his complaints.

“I understand the problem,” she said. “I didn’t mean to create a distraction.”

“You have, though. And that isn’t the only problem. It’s not clear to me what you’re hoping to achieve here. Obviously,” a nod at the Proctors, “I can’t stop you from sitting in on classes. But I’d like to know what the purpose of it is.”

She paused a moment, her expression angelic and distracted, collecting her thoughts. “Only to learn from you. Nothing more sinister. To study Two Rivers and—I don’t know what to call it—the place Two Rivers came from. Your Plenum.”

“All right, but to what end? If I cooperate, who am I helping?”

“You’re helping me. But I see what you mean. Mr. Graham, it’s really very simple. I was asked to write a social study of the town—”

“Asked by whom?”

“The Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse. The Proctors. But please remember, I’m a contract employee. I work for the Bureau but I don’t
represent
the Bureau, not directly. There are several of us in town, civilian workers I mean, mainly academics. For instance, there is a surveyor, an electrical engineer, a documentary photographer, a medical doctor—”

“Each one writing a report?”

“You pose the question with too much malice. If the circumstances were reversed, Mr. Graham, if one of our villages had appeared in
your
world, wouldn’t your government do the same thing? Compile records, try to understand the miracle that had happened?”

“People have died here. In good conscience, I don’t know if I can cooperate.”

“I can’t speak for your conscience. I can only say that my work isn’t harmful.”

“In your eyes. It’s certainly a nuisance to
my
work—we’ve already established that.”

“Lieutenant Demarch sent me to you because he thought a teacher of history would have a broader grasp of cultural issues—”

“Did he? My guess is that he was hoping to piss me off.”

She blinked but forged ahead: “I won’t attribute motive. The point is that I can go elsewhere if I’m interfering with the school. I really don’t care to cause trouble.”

Her meekness was maddening. Also deceptive. She was relentless, Dex thought. He looked at her over the trestle table, searching for something in the composition of her features: a glimpse under the porcelain exterior. She came from the world outside Two Rivers, but she wasn’t a Proctor or a soldier—and that made her nearly unique, potentially interesting.

Too, her curiosity seemed genuine. She might or might not be a tool of the Bureau, but there were obviously questions she wanted to ask. Fair enough. He had a few questions of his own.

He said, “Maybe we can compromise.”

“In what way?”

“Well, first of all—you’d be a lot less conspicuous if you lost your bookends.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The gentlemen attached to your elbows.”

Both guards gave Dex a stony glare meant to intimidate him. He smiled back. He was tired of the Proctors. They dressed like Boy Scouts and swaggered like hall monitors:
pions,
a good word, he thought.

“I will have to talk to Lieutenant Demarch,” she said. “I can’t promise anything.” But the idea seemed to appeal to her.

“You might consider changing the way you dress, too. It draws attention.”

“I have considered that. But I’m new here, Mr. Graham. I’m not sure what would be appropriate, or appropriately modest.”

“You’re staying at the Woodward Bed-and-Breakfast?”

“Nearby. The motor hotel.”

“You’ve met Evelyn Woodward?”

“Briefly.”

“She’s about your size. Maybe she can lend you something. She seems to have a new wardrobe these days.”

“Yes. Well, perhaps. Do you have any other requirements?”

“Certainly. A quid pro quo. I want something for my time.”

“And what would that be?”

“A map of the world. An atlas, if possible. And a good basic history.”

“Your history for mine?”

“Right.”

She surprised him by smiling. “I’ll see what I can do.”

His fever broke the night the lights came back to Two Rivers, and Howard Poole emerged from his sickness feeling fragile but immensely clearheaded. It was as if the disease had starved all confusion from the bone of logic.

He waited a day for Dex to show up, but the schoolteacher didn’t come. That was all right, Howard thought. It wasn’t always easy for Dex to get away; he might have been followed. It didn’t matter. It was time to take some initiative on his own.

At noon, when the ration lines opened and the streets were most crowded, Howard packed some food and bottled water and a camp knife into the ample pockets of a big Navy jacket and stepped out into the biting October air.

Maybe he had been in hiding too long, or maybe it was the autumn weather, but everything he looked at seemed to have been cut from a luminous glass. Sidewalks, windows, the tumbled leaves of the trees, were all thin as ice under a cellophane-blue sky. He wanted to take it all in at once, to hoard these colors against another dark season. He forced himself to walk with his head down. He didn’t dare attract attention.

He was carrying identification, actually Paul Cantwell’s ID. Lucky Paul, Howard thought, on vacation when the roof of the world fell in. It was good documentation, but there was obviously no photo ID; and the cards, if you looked closely, were all out of date—except for the ration card. He might pass muster if the military questioned him. But he might not. He didn’t want to run that risk. It was better not to arouse suspicion.