Mysterium (32 page)

The day of the bomb, he didn’t need to add. That was why Luke was here: for talking about the bomb.

That was also why Clifford was here, though no one had told him so—no one had talked to him. The soldiers had just put him in this cage and gone away.

It was too late now to do anything but wait, and he told Luke so.

Thibault called him a little idiot, a criminal, a liar. “They can’t leave me here. Sons of Samael! Even the Proctors wouldn’t do that!”

But the morning ticked on and Luke lapsed into a despairing silence. Clifford knew it was past dawn by the faint light in the vent windows. That was his only clock. The shadowy fluorescent tubes overhead were the only other light—and most of those were burned out.

Clifford gazed at that patch of daylight far up at the margin of the ceiling for a time he could not calculate; it was interrupted only by the sound of Lukas Thibault’s sobbing.

Then there was another sound: gunshots, and not far away.

“Sophia Mother!” Luke cried out.

This was a new threat. Clifford was dismayed: better the bomb, Clifford thought, than a gun. He had read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb washed everything away in a tidal wave of light. The people were gone with only their shadows left behind. He had resigned himself to dying in the bomb blast, but this gunfire was different. It worried him.

The shooting paused, crackled for a time, paused again.

Then the door marked FIRE EXIT swung open, and here was the Proctor Delafleur wide-eyed and with a pistol in his hand.

CHAPTER 27

In the beginning was the Ennoia, and the world was made of light.

Then Sophia, a thought of the Uncreated God, committed the sin of creation. Cast out from the primordial Nous, she fashioned base matter, the
hyle,
and fertilized it with her spiritual principle, the
dynamis,
which is both seed and image of the World of Light.

Thus the world was both created and separated from its origins; it was matter with a kernel of spirit in it, neither
kenoma
nor
pleroma
. It was incomplete, less than whole; it was asymmetric.

Here was the metaphor Stern had found so compelling. It resonated with modern cosmology: pull a linchpin from primordial symmetry and everything cascades forth: quarks, leptons, atomic nuclei, stars; eventually kittens, dung beetles, physicists.

And in all this there is embedded an unquenchable
epignosis,
the memory of that ancient isotropic unity of all things in the uncreated world.

Sophia, abandoned, wanders the infinite shoals of hylic matter with her terrible longing for the light. And yet—

And yet . . . Sophia laughed.

Howard had found the phrase in Stern’s notebook, circled and underlined and crowned with question marks.

Sophia laughed.

Howard calculated that he had to walk a hundred yards across the parking lot of the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory to reach its central building, the collapsed concrete-block structure where—perhaps—Stern had died.

It was not a long distance, ordinarily. But this was no longer an ordinary place. He had passed the boundaries of the ordinary. He was inside the glow.

No snow fell here. The air was suddenly moist and warm; the neat bordered lawns near the workers’ quarters were green, though the grass had not grown since the spring. Did time pass more slowly here? If so, Howard thought, his attempt to reach Stern might be futile; the bomb would detonate between one footstep and the next.

But he could see the snow falling only a few paces behind him, and it was falling at its usual pace. So time didn’t pass especially slowly here, though he supposed it might pass
differently
. . . and he took another step forward.

His vision was obscured. The eye didn’t like this environment. Nor did the other senses; he felt dizzy, awkward, alternately too hot and too cold. Most confusing, though, was this refusal of any solid object to hold still and be seen. Images curved and lost proportion as if the act of seeing them challenged their reality.

Observation, Howard thought, was a kind of quantum guillotine: it sliced uncertainty into
this
or
that,
particle or wave. Here there seemed to be no such effect. The collapsing wavefront, the moment of isness, was imprecise, too fluid, as if he were experiencing time a fraction of a second
before
anything happened. For instance, this asphalt under his feet. Glimpsed briefly, it was the lab parking lot, spaces marked with whitewashed numbers,
26, 27
. Stare too long and it became granite or glass or grains of crystalline sand. And the temptation to stare was immense.

He understood why the firefighters had beat such a hasty retreat: too much exposure to this would surely affect more than the senses. Madness must look like this, Howard thought.

But he took another step and another after that.

The light around him was bright but sourceless. It wasn’t daylight. It pervaded everything; everything was lit up from within. Colors were divided, split as if by a prism into countless bands. Every motion was a blur.

He took another step and another, though his stomach was churning. There was a turbulence all around him. The air itself seemed to solidify and take form, as if translucent bodies were moving through it. More ghosts, he supposed. Maybe they really
were
ghosts, the restless remains of the men and women who had died in these bunkers the night of the explosion.

But Howard doubted it. There was something purposive in the way they crossed his path, circling the laboratory buildings as if they were trapped here, and perhaps they were: maybe these were the creators of the fragment, still attached to it, orbiting it a helpless half step out of time.

He shook his head. Too much speculation: that had been Stern’s downfall.

Stern, who was calling him onward. Set aside the rationalization and that was why he was here: Stern had called him. And Stern was calling him yet.

You might be as smart as your uncle,
Howard’s mother used to say. It was a compliment, a suspicion, a fear.

Stern had always loomed over him like a monument, stony and unapproachable. In Howard’s family no one talked much about the important things. But Stern always came with a baggage of big ideas and he always shared them with Howard. Teased him with them: You like this morsel? Then how about this? And
this
?

Howard remembered his uncle leaning forward from the cane chair on the porch, on a summer evening alight with stars and fireflies, his voice obscuring the faint rattle of china dishes on a faraway table: “Your dog sees the same world we do, Howard. Your dog sees those stars. But we know what they are. Because we can ask the right questions. And that’s knowledge the dog can never share. By his nature: never. So, then, Howard—do you suppose there are questions even
we
can’t ask?”

Fireflies here, too: sparks in his vision.

He was approaching the central building. Its roof had collapsed, but the concrete-block frame was intact. A crack ran through the steel door. On closer inspection, the brickwork was filleted with jewels; diamonds clung like barnacles to every wall. There was something seductive about these faceted surfaces and Howard was careful not to stare too long. There were other horizons here, not his own.

He touched the door. It was hot. This was real heat, and he was probably close enough to the core event that he was being bathed with real radiation. Enough to kill him, probably, but that was of no concern any longer.

He had used the word
awestruck
in the past without knowing what it meant, but now he understood it. He was stricken by awe, consumed by it; it obliterated even his fear.

This was the place where his uncle had crossed the border of the world.

If Stern had brought them all here, did that make Stern a Demiurge?

Had he found this world or actually
made
it? Constructed it, consciously or unconsciously, with the aid of the Turkish fragment, from his own fears and hopes?

If so . . . then, like Sophia, he had made an imperfect thing.

Everything he had wanted from his ancient books, a key to the pain and the longing he felt, a cosmogony beyond physics, here in the world of the Proctors it was all transmuted into something base: a lifeless dogma. Everything noble in it had grown calcified and oppressive.

Maybe Stern was lost, Howard thought. Trapped in his own creation and helpless to redeem it.

Am I prepared to face a god?

He shuddered at the thought.

But he opened the cracked and jeweled door.

CHAPTER 28

With daylight, the town surrendered to panic.

Fire broke out in the Beacon Street business district and there was no one to control it; Tom Stubbs had headed west, along with most of the Volunteer Fire Department. Flames swept through the Emily Dee Large-Size Fashion Shop, the New Day Bookstore, and an empty corner property with boarded windows on which the faint words COMING SOON! ANOTHER FRY CASTLE FAMILY RESTAURANT were still faintly legible.

Refugees approaching Coldwater Road encountered a roadblock manned by a detachment of soldiers—word of the escape attempt had leaked—but the lead cars, including Calvin Shepperd’s, each carried three sharpshooters and the cream of Virgil Wilson’s collection of semiautomatic rifles. The gunfire began before dawn and continued sporadically through the morning.

Three truckloads of soldiers, turned back from the road to Fort LeDuc by steel gabions and a skirmish line of tanks, passed through town at high speed.

One truck made it nearly to Coldwater Road before a rear guard of armed civilians caught it in a crossfire. The driver was killed instantly and spared the knowledge that his last act had been to steer the vehicle over a barricade and down a vertical embankment into the shallow ice of Powell Creek.

The second truck headed north in a vain attempt to cross the firebreak and reach safety; it broke an axle in a snowy hydroelectric right-of-way. Twenty-five soldiers without winter clothes or adequate supplies formed a line and marched into the dark woods, hoping to outrun the angel Tartarouchis.

The third truck turned over in front of City Hall, spilling a cargo of angry draftees who fanned out and began to empty their rifles into the unblinking facades of these alien houses, in this town on the edge of the Abyss, this Temple of Grief.

Dex started a turn onto Municipal Avenue when he saw the soldiers among the trees on the City Hall promenade—and the soldiers saw him.

Taken by surprise, he twisted the steering wheel hard right. The road surface was too slick for traction. The car slid at a skewed angle toward the sidewalk and Dex fought to keep the wheels out of a drainage ditch. Something
ping
ed from the hood: he saw the new dent and a gleam of steel where the paint had been scoured by a bullet.

He told Linneth to get down. “And keep
her
down, too!”—Ellen Stockton, who was gawking at the soldiers with boozy incomprehension.

The car stopped shy of the ditch. Dex threw it into reverse and stepped on the gas with as much restraint as he could muster—but the wheels only raced on a slick of compressed snow.

He worked the gear shift, rocking the car forward and back. When he spared a glance down the street he saw a soldier maybe a hundred yards away—a kid, it looked like, barely voting age, aiming a big blue-barreled rifle at him. It was a mesmerizing sight. The soldier’s aim wobbled and then seemed to steady. Dex hunkered down and goosed the gas pedal again.

A bullet popped two of their windows—back seat, left and right. The safety glass fell away in a rain of white powder. Linneth emitted a stifled scream. Dex stomped the accelerator; the car roared and leaped forward in a cloud of blue exhaust.

He worked the vehicle into a turn and steered away from the soldiers. He heard more bullets strike the trunk and bumper, harmless
ping
s and
thunk
s—unless one of them happened to find the gas tank.

He steered left on Oak, still fighting the wheel. The car danced but moved approximately north.

He was two blocks gone and around another corner before he dared slow down.

“Christ Jesus!” Ellen Stockton said suddenly, as if all this had only just registered.
“What are they doing to Cliffy!”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Stockton,” Dex said. He looked at Linneth. She was pale with anxiety, but she nodded at him. “They don’t seem to have any particular interest in the municipal building. We’ll just have to go in from the back.”

Time was a precious commodity, and worse, there was no way to know exactly how precious it really was. Nevertheless, he waited in the car until the sound of the soldiers’ sporadic gunfire had moved away.

He was two streets beyond City Hall, in a quiet residential neighborhood—quieter than ever, except for the pop and echo of the gunshots. The road was flanked on either side by tall row houses, old buildings but carefully preserved. Some of these houses were empty; some, undoubtedly, were still occupied, but the occupants weren’t showing themselves. The snow fell in gentle gusts. On some distant porch, a wind chime tinkled.

It was cold, Ellen Stockton said, with the wind coming in these shot-out windows.

“Get under the blanket,” Dex said. “I want you to stay here while we’re gone. Can you do that?”

“You’re going to get Cliffy?”

“I mean to try.” Though it looked more and more like a futile effort, or worse, a gesture. City Hall had been evacuated. Clifford Stockton, in all likelihood, had been killed or carried off to Fort LeDuc.

He told Linneth, “Maybe you should stay here with Ellen.”

“I’m sure she’ll be all right.” She looked at him steadily. “It’s a misplaced chivalry. I’m not baggage, Dex. I want to find him, too.”

He nodded. “We should go on foot. It’s less conspicuous.”

“A good idea. And don’t forget about that pistol in your jacket.”