Mysterium (20 page)

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 disoriented, 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.”

The time passed. He sat at the big desk and pretended to grade assignments. The assignments were real, and he kept them in front of him and remembered to turn a page now and again, but the words were unintelligible. The printed or handwritten letters had developed lives of their own; they bobbled over the paper like loose balloons.

The urge to put his head down and sleep was powerfully strong, and by the end of his second class he was afraid he would simply nod off—his head was inclining when the bell rang. Students shuffled out, some looking at him oddly. Shelda Burmeister, a studious girl in high-powered corrective lenses and a torn turquoise sweater, paused at his desk until the others were gone. “Mr. Graham?”

“Yes?” He swiveled the weighty beam of his attention toward her. “What is it, Shelda?”

“I think you cut yourself.” She nodded at the desktop.

He looked down. Blood had traveled down his left arm and pooled just beyond the cuff of his coat. About a tablespoon, he thought.

“I guess I did,” he said. “I mean, cut myself. Thank you, Shelda.”

“Will you be all right?”

“Yes. Go on. I’m fine.”

She left. He stood up. More blood trickled down the wounded arm. Now he was conscious of the distasteful warmth of it. He held the cuff closed and moved to the door. Maybe he could clean up in the staff men’s room, change the bandage. . . .