Mysterium

BEFORE

On a dry inland plain, under a sky the color of agate, a handful of Americans scuffed at a rubble of ancient clay masonry.

The Americans, mainly graduate students doing fieldwork toward their degrees and a few tutelary spirits in the form of faculty members, had arrived three weeks ago. They had driven from Ankara by Land Rover, away from the Kizil Irmak and into the heart of the dry central plateau, where a neolithic Anatolian townsite had lain dormant for almost nine thousand years. They had erected their tents and Porta Potties in the shade of a rocky hill, and in the cool of the morning they worried the soil with wire brushes and whisk brooms.

The site was ancient, but small and not very productive. A graduate student named William Delmonico was nibbling his way through a string grid that had produced only a few flaked stones, the prehistoric equivalent of the cigarette butt, when he uncovered what looked like a shard of polished jade—an anomalous substance, and immensely more interesting than the flints he had already cataloged.

The jade fragment was deeply embedded in the stony earth, however, and no amount of toothbrushing would free it. Delmonico alerted his adviser, a tenured professor of archaeology who welcomed this respite from what had begun to seem like a wasted summer of fruitless and repetitive fieldwork. Delmonico’s nubbin of glass (not jade, certainly, though the resemblance was marked) represented at least an intellectual challenge. He assigned two experienced diggers to the grid but allowed Delmonico his proprietary excitement. Delmonico, a lanky twenty-one-year-old with a shine of sweat on his face, hovered over the site.

Three days later a jagged spar of dull green material the size of a tabletop had been uncovered… and still it remained embedded in the earth.

That was odd. Even more peculiar, it looked as if they would have to call in a materials expert to identify this substance. It was not jade, not glass, not pottery of any kind. It retained its warmth long after sunset—and nights were often brutally cold on this high, arid plain. And it looked strange. Deceptive to the eye. Slippery. From a distance, it seemed almost to shrink—to disappear, if you stood a few yards outside the dig, in a stitch of air and sand.

On the fourth day after his discovery Delmonico was confined to his tent, vomiting every twenty or thirty minutes into a half-gallon mason jar while a wind storm battered the canvas and turned the air to chalk. He had come down with the flu, everyone said. Or common dysentery—he wouldn’t be the first. Delmonico accepted this diagnosis and resigned himself to it.

Then the sores appeared on his hands. The skin blackened and peeled away from his fingers, and the bandages he applied turned yellow with suppuration. Blood appeared in his stools.

His faculty supervisor drove him to Ankara, where an emergency room physician named Celal diagnosed radiation sickness. Celal filed a report with his chief of staff; the chief of staff notified an official of the Ministry of Public Health. The doctor was not surprised, given all this, when the delirious young American was taken from the ward by a military escort and driven into the night. It was a mystery, Celal thought. But there were always mysteries. The world was a mystery.

Delmonico died in a closed ward of a U.S. Air Force medical complex a week later. His companions from the dig were quarantined separately. The two postgrads who had labored over the jade fragment lived another day and a half before dying within an hour of each other.

The rest of the expedition were treated and released. Each was asked to sign a paper acknowledging that the events they had witnessed were classified and that divulging those events to anyone for any reason would be punishable pursuant to the Official Secrets Act. Shaken and at a loss to make any sense of what had happened, all fourteen surviving Americans agreed to sign.

Only one of them broke his oath. Seven years after the death of William Delmonico, Werner Holden, formerly an archaeology major and now an auto parts dealer in Portland, Oregon, confessed to a professional UFO researcher that he had witnessed the recovery of a portion of the hull of a flying saucer from an archaeological site in central Turkey. The UFO researcher listened patiently to Holden’s story and promised to look into it. What he did not tell Holden was that the whole crash-fragment approach had grown unfashionable—his audience expected something more intimate: abductions, metaphysics. A year later, Holden’s account appeared in the researcher’s book as a footnote. No legal action was taken as a consequence. Holden died of a runaway lymphoma in January of 1998.

The Jade Anomaly, as Delmonico had thought of it before his death, was retrieved from the soil of the abandoned archaeological site by a platoon of military men equipped with spades and protective clothing. They worked at night under floodlights so the sun wouldn’t cook them inside their lead-lined suits. Over the course of three nights they succeeded in unearthing a gently curved piece of apparently homogeneous material 10.6 cm thick and irregular in shape. One observer said it looked like a piece of an egg shell, “if you can imagine an egg big enough to hatch a stretch limo.” The fragment was highly radioactive in the wavelengths around 1 nm, but the intensity of the radiation fell away to undetectability at distances greater than a meter or so, an apparent violation of the inverse-square law that no one attempted to explain.

Arrangements were made with the Turkish government to have the material quietly removed from the country. Blanketed in lead and packed in an unmarked shipping flat, it left a NATO airbase in a Hercules transport bound for an undisclosed destination in the United States.

Alan Stern, a professor of theoretical physics and recent recipient of the Nobel prize, was approached at a conference on inflationary theory at a hotel outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a young man in a three-piece suit—quite an anomaly, Stern thought, among this rabble of thesis-writers, academic hacks, bearded astrophysicists, and balding cosmologists. Stern, both bearded and balding, was intrigued by the younger man’s air of quiet authority, and the two of them adjourned to the bar, where the younger man disappointed Stern by offering him a job.

“I don’t do classified work,” he said. “If I can’t publish it, it’s not science. In any case, defense research is a dead end. The Cold War is over, or hasn’t that news reached your Appropriations Committee?”

The younger man displayed an impenetrable patience. “This isn’t, strictly speaking, a defense project.”

And he explained further.

“My God,” Stern said softly, when the young man had finished. “Can this be true?”

That evening, Stern sat in the audience as a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics read a paper defending the anthropic principle in the language of set theory. Bored by the lecture and still excited by what the young man had told him, Stern took a notebook from his pocket and opened it across his knee.

God is the root of the All, he wrote, the Ineffable One who dwells in the Monad.

He dwells alone, in silence.

The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory was constructed over the course of six months on a parcel of uninhabited land in northern Michigan deeded to the government by an impoverished Ojibway band.

The nearby town of Two Rivers accepted the facility without complaint. Two Rivers had begun life as a mill town, survived as a hunting and fishing town, and had recently become an alternative to the suburbs for white-collar workers who commuted by fax and modem. The main street had been refurbished with imitation brickwork and gas lights, and a gourmet coffee shop had opened up next to the Baskin-Robbins. Lately there had been complaints about water-skiers chasing the ducks out of Lake Merced. Sports fishermen complained and hired charter planes to carry them farther from the encroachments of civilization, but the town was prospering for the first time in thirty years.

The construction of the research facility provoked little comment from the Town Council. Construction crews and equipment came up the highway and approached the site from the west along a corduroy logging road, often at night. There had been some expectation that the project would create employment among the townspeople, but that hope soon flickered and dimmed. Staff were trucked in as quietly as the concrete and cinder blocks; the only local work was temporary and involved the laying of high-capacity water and power lines. Even when the facility was up and running—doing whatever clandestine work it did—its employees stayed away from town. They lived in barracks on federal property; they shopped at a PX. They came into Two Rivers to arrange fishing trips, occasionally, and one or two strangers might stop by the bars or take in a movie at the Cineplex in the highway mall; but as a rule, they didn’t mingle.

One of the few townspeople who expressed any curiosity about the facility was Dexter Graham, a history teacher at John F. Kennedy High School. Graham told his fiancée, Evelyn Woodward, that the installation made no sense. “Defense spending is passé. According to the papers, all the research budgets have been slashed. But there they are. Our own little Manhattan Project.”

Evelyn operated a bed-and-breakfast by the lakeside. The view, particularly from the upper bay windows, was pure postcard. Dex had ducked out of a Friday staff meeting for a session of what Evelyn called “afternoon delight,” and they were savoring the aftermath—cool sheets, curtains twining in long sighs of pine-scented air. It was Evelyn who had turned the conversation to the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. She had a new boarder who worked at the plant, a young man named Howard Poole.

“Amazing,” Dex said, turning his long body lazily under the cotton sheets. “Don’t they have their own quarters out there? I never heard of one of these guys boarding in town.”

“Don’t be so cynical,” Evelyn scolded him. “Howard says there’s a housing problem—too much staff, short accommodation. Musical chairs, I guess, and he was left standing. He’s only here for a week. Anyway, he says he wanted to see the town.”

“Admirable curiosity.”

Evelyn sat up and reached for her panties, vaguely annoyed. Dex possessed a deep, automatic cynicism she had begun to find unattractive. He was forty years old, and sometimes he sounded a little too much like the toothless janitor at his school, the one who was always mumbling about “the government.”

The question was, would Dex give Howard Poole a hard time over dinner?

Evelyn hoped not. She liked Howard well enough. He was young, shy, bespectacled, vulnerable-looking. She was charmed by his accent. Bronx, perhaps, or Queens—places Evelyn knew mainly from her reading. She had never been east of Detroit.

She dressed and left Dex in bed, went downstairs to the kitchen and began to prepare a coq au vin and salad for herself, Dex, and her two boarders, Howard and a woman named Friedel from California. She hummed to herself as she worked, a tuneless little song that seemed to arise from the memory of what she and Dex had done in the bedroom. Sunlight tracked across the linoleum floor, the wooden chopping board.

Dinner went better than she had expected. Mrs. Friedel, a widow, did most of the talking, a gentle monologue about her trip across the country and how much her husband would have enjoyed it. The coq au vin put everyone in a benevolent mood. Or maybe it was just the weather: a fine spring evening, the first warm evening of the year. Howard Poole smiled often but spoke seldom. He sat opposite Evelyn. He ate sparingly but paid attention to the food. The vivid sunset through the dining room window was reflected in his oval glasses, disguising his eyes.

Over dessert, a cinnamon cake, Dex raised the forbidden topic. “I understand you work out at the defense plant, Howard.”

Evelyn tensed. But Howard seemed to take it in stride. He shrugged his bony shoulders. “If you can call it that—a defense plant. I never thought of it that way.”

“Government installation is what they call it in the paper.”

“Yes.”

“What exactly do you do out there?”

“I’m new to the place myself, Mr. Graham. I can’t answer the question.”

“Meaning it’s classified?”

“Meaning I wish I knew.”

Evelyn kicked Dex under the table and said brightly, “Coffee, anyone?”

“Sounds wonderful,” Howard said. And Dex just smiled and nodded.

Curiously, Mrs. Friedel had packed her bags and announced her intention to leave as soon as dinner was over. Evelyn settled the account but was worried: “You’re driving after dark?”

“I wouldn’t ordinarily,” the widow confided. “And I don’t believe in dreams—I really don’t. But this one was so vivid. I was taking a nap this morning. And in the dream I was talking to Ben.”

“Your husband.”

“Yes. And he told me to pack and leave. He was not upset. Just a little concerned.” Mrs. Friedel was blushing. “I know how this sounds. I’m not such a lunatic, Miss Woodward—you don’t have to stare like that.”

Now Evelyn blushed. “Oh, no. It’s all right, Mrs. Friedel. Go with a hunch, that’s what I always say.” But it was strange.

She took her evening walk with Dex after the dishes had been washed.

They crossed Beacon and headed for the lakeside. Gnats hovered under the streetlights, but the mosquitoes weren’t a menace yet. The breeze was gentle and the air was only beginning to cool.

She said, “When we’re married, you have to promise not to harass the guests”—more in reference to what might have happened than what had happened.

And Dex looked apologetic and said, “Of course. I didn’t mean to badger him.”

She admitted that he hadn’t. It was only her apprehension: of his unyielding nature, of the grief he carried deep inside him. “I saw you biting your tongue.”

“Howard seems like a nice enough kid. Bright university grad. Probably drafted by some headhunter. Maybe he really doesn’t know what’s going on out there.”

“Maybe nothing is going on out there. Nothing bad, at least.”

“It’s possible.”

“Whatever they do, I’m sure it’s perfectly safe.”

“So was Chernobyl. Until it blew up.”

“God, you’re so paranoid!”

He laughed at her consternation; then she laughed, too. And they walked a silent distance along the shore of Lake Merced.

Water lapped at wooden docks. The stars were bright. On the way back, Evelyn shivered and buttoned her sweater.

She said, “Are you staying over tonight?”

“If you still want me to.”

“Of course I do.”

And he put his arm around her waist.

Later, Dex would wonder about the remark he had made about Chernobyl.

Did it represent a premonition, like Mrs. Friedel’s dream? Had his body sensed something, some subliminal input his conscious mind failed to grasp?

And then there was Evelyn’s tabby cat, Roadblock. Roadblock spent the evening in a kind of frenzy, tearing around the bedroom in tight circles until Evelyn lost patience and put her out. Had the cat sensed some tenuous radiation coming across the dark water of the lake?

Perhaps. Perhaps.

He woke a little after midnight.

He hovered a moment on the fragile edge of awareness, dimly conscious of Evelyn beside him, of the way she breathed in her sleep, long delicate sighs. What had woken him? A sound, a motion…

Then it came again, an irregular metallic tapping—a tapping at the window.

He turned and saw the moonlit silhouette of the cat. Roadblock, out for the night, had climbed onto the garage roof and up the shingled slope to the bedroom window. Now she wanted back in. Claws on the plate glass. Tack-scratch. “Go ’way,” Dex mumbled. Wishful thinking. Tack tack.

He stood up and pulled on his underwear. The warmth of the day had evaporated; the bedroom was chilly. The cat stood on her hind legs, arched against the windowpane in an eerie stretch. Moonlight fell on Dex, and he turned and saw his reflection in the vanity mirror. He saw the thatch of dark hair across his chest, his large hands loose at his sides. His gaunt face lay half in shadow, eyes wide and bewildered by sleep. He would be forty-one years old in August. Old man.

He unlatched the window. Roadblock leaped inside and raced across the carpet, more frantic than ever. The cat jumped on the bed and Evelyn stirred in her sleep. “Dex?” she murmured. “What—?” And rolled over, sighing.

He leaned out into the cool night air.

The town was silent. Two Rivers closed down after midnight, even on a warm Friday. The sound of traffic had faded. He heard the warble of a loon out on the deeps of Lake Merced. Trees flush with new leaves moved in tides of night air. Somewhere down Beacon Road, a dog barked.

Then, suddenly, inexplicably, a beam of light flashed across the sky. It came from the east, across the lake, far away in the abandoned Ojibway reserve—from the defense plant, Dex realized. The light cast sudden shadows, like lightning; it flickered on the lake. The bedroom was aglow with it.

A spotlight? A flare? He couldn’t make sense of it.

Evelyn sat up in alarm, all the way awake now. “Dex, what’s going on?”

There was no time to answer. He saw a second beam of light cut the meridian of the sky, and a third, so sharply defined he thought they must be laser beams… maybe some kind of weapon being tested out there… and then the light expanded like a bubble, seemed to include everything around it, the lake, the town, Evelyn’s bedroom, Dex himself. The room, bathed in light, began abruptly to spin, to tilt on an invisible axis and slide away, until his awareness dwindled to a point, a pulsating singularity in a wilderness of light.

The town of Two Rivers, Michigan, and the federally funded research project on its outskirts vanished from the earth some hours before dawn on a Saturday morning late in May.

The fires began not long after.

The fires were useful when it was time to explain what had happened. The obliteration of a town the size of Two Rivers requires a great deal of explanation, and the existence of the military facility on the abandoned Indian lands had not been a secret (though its purpose had never been revealed). It was the desire of the Defense Department that these awkward truths not be connected. Both the town and the research project were lost in the fire, officials announced. It had not been one fire but several; unseasonal, unexpected, the product perhaps of freakish heat lightning. The fires had surrounded the town and grown with unprecedented speed. There was no defense against such a holocaust. Most of Bayard County was simply incinerated. More lives had been lost than in any natural disaster in American history, tens of thousands of lives. Commissions of inquiry were established and carefully staffed.

Questions were inevitable, of course. An American town the size of Two Rivers represents a substantial deposit of stone, asphalt, concrete, and steel—it can’t simply burn to the ground. Where were the foundations, the chimneys, the stonework, the bricks? Where, in fact, were the roads? Barricades had been thrown up before the fire was extinguished, and they stayed in place long after. Battalions of federal bulldozers had moved in immediately—to clear the highway, officials said; but one retired civil engineer who lived east of the fireline said it looked to him like they were rebuilding that road.

And there were other mysteries: the sighting of curious lights; the interruption of phone service to and from Two Rivers long before the fire could have grown to threatening size; the fifteen civilian witnesses who claimed they had approached the town from the east or west and found the highway cut cleanly, as if by some enormous knife, and nothing on the other side but trees and wilderness. Power lines had been severed just as neatly, and it was the loose lines, some said, that were the real cause of the fire.

But these were clues that defied interpretation, and they were soon forgotten, except by the fringe element who collected stories of ghosts, rains of stones, and the spontaneous combustion of human bodies.

Never officially connected with the Two Rivers disaster was the case of Wim Pender, who was found wandering in a dazed condition along the grassy verge of Highway 75. Pender claimed he had been on a fishing/camping expedition in “the north of the Province of Mille Lacs” with two companions, from whom he had been separated when there was “a blast of light and flames to the south of us late one night.”

Pender gave as his home address a number on a nonexistent Boston street. His wallet and identification had been lost in his flight from the fire. His pack contained only an empty canteen, two cans of something labeled THON PALE EN MORCEAUX (tuna fish, it turned out), and an apocryphal testament of the Bible entitled The Secret Booke of James in the English Tongue, printed on rice paper and bound in imitation leather.

When Pender’s claims grew even more fantastic—including the accusation that both the Forest Service and the Michigan Department of Welfare were “Mohammedans or servants of Samael or worse”—he was remanded for psychiatric evaluation to a facility in Lansing.

Mr. Pender was deemed not to be a danger to himself or others and was released on June 23. He made his way to Detroit, where he spent the summer in a shelter for the homeless.

November was cold that year, and during an early snowfall Pender left his bed and spent his last money on a city bus, because the buses were heated. The bus carried him downriver to Southgate, where he got off in front of a bankrupt and abandoned retail lumber outlet. In the upper story of that building he tied his belt into a crude loop and hanged himself from a rafter.

Pinned to his shirt was a note: