Mysterium

Chapter Eleven

Coming back to the capital, even for a week, was a restorative for Symeon Demarch. No matter what happened here—and he expected nothing good from his scheduled meeting with Bisonette—he would have time to draw at least a few unfettered breaths.

He rode a truck to Fort LeDuc, where a ponderous air transport waited on the military runway. The airplane had been outfitted with a padded wooden bench along its steel inner wall, an instant nuisance to Demarch’s spine, and the four smoky engines with their immense blades rattled the fuselage and deafened the passengers. The most reliable air transportation had gone to the western front months ago. But Demarch forgot his discomfort as soon as the vehicle lifted above a plain of cloud and wheeled away from the setting sun. He was going home.

He let his attention focus on the circular window opposite him and his thoughts drift away. Except when the plane banked into a turn there was only the sky to see, a winter blue turning to ink at the apex.

The electrical heating labored and Demarch turned up the collar of his veston.

It was altogether dark when the aircraft circled down to the capital. The city was invisible except for its lights, but Demarch’s spirits were buoyed by the sight. All that grid of electricity was familiar territory. Parts of it he knew by heart. He picked out the stone pavilions of the Bureau Centrality as the plane lost altitude, a few windows shining in the hierarchs’ buildings and watch lanterns burning in the courtyards. Then a landing field rose to meet the wheels.

He shuffled out of the aircraft with the other passengers, a few enlisted men who watched him guardedly as he crossed the tarmac to a waiting car. The Bureau had sent him a vehicle and driver. The driver spoke no English and his French was deeply accented. A Haitian, Demarch supposed. A number of Haitians had lately been imported to fill menial jobs emptied by conscription.

“Neige,” the driver said. “Bientot, je pense.” Snow soon. No doubt, Demarch told him, and let the conversation languish. He was happy with his own musing as the miles spooled past. There was not much traffic even in the narrow streets where the sacral brothels were. But it was late, and of course there was the gasoline rationing. One saw more horse-drawn vehicles these days than before the war. Dorothea had written him about a sugar shortage, too. Everything was rationed. But the fundamental nature of the countryside hadn’t changed, especially here beyond the city center. Telegraph poles lined the cobbled road, and the smell of burning sod was pungent in the cold air.

He was surprised at the upwelling of pleasure he felt when the car came abreast of the house. It was a small house compared to the rambling compounds of the Censeurs farther west, but spacious enough and respectably old. It had belonged to an uncle of Dorothea’s and still did not properly belong to Demarch; it was an extended loan from the Saussere family during his posting to the capital. But he had lived here for ten years. It was as much a home as any place had ever been. More so.

He thanked the driver and walked briskly up the stone steps to the door. The door opened before he touched it. Dorothea stood in a halo of lamplight, perfect and beckoning. Light twinkled from the silver crucifix pinned to her bodice. He embraced her and she offered her powdered cheek for a kiss.

Christof peeked at him from behind a banister, frowning. Well, Christof had always been shy at reunions. It was hard for him to have a father so often absent. But that was what it meant to be born into a Bureau family.

Dorothea whispered, “Father is here.” And Demarch saw the wheelchair rolling from the study, Armand Saussere seeming to smile but as inscrutable as ever behind his vastly old face.

Demarch closed the door on the night air. The smell of home surrounded him. “Christof, come here,” he said. But Christof kept his wary distance.

The same driver arrived in the morning to take him to town. The temperature had dropped but the sky was cloudless. “Pas de neige,” the driver said. No snow. Not yet.

Demarch let familiar sights lull him until the car passed under the eagle gates of the Bureau Centrality. The Centrality was a town of its own, with its good and bad neighborhoods, its loved and hated citizens. The Censeurs in their black hats and soutanes moved across the courtyard between the Ordinage and Propaganda wings like stalking birds. Demarch felt compromised in his simple lieutenant’s uniform. When he worked here he had seldom crossed the invisible line separating staff officers from the hierarchs’ quarters… unless he was summoned, always a frightening episode. Well, today he had been summoned, too.

He left the Haitian driver and crossed the pebbled yard to the Departement Administratif. The halls inside were marbled and high and supported by half-columns set into the walls. This was the heart of the Centrality, part temple, part government. It was a more powerful government, within its sphere, than the Praesidium a mile away. Clerks and pages called it “the capital’s capital.”

Censeur Bisonette waited in a conference room, a tall room with a mosaic floor and a long oaken table. Bisonette was at ease in a high-backed chair, his angular face composed. He didn’t stand when Demarch entered. Demarch stepped forward and bowed. His footsteps echoed from the high ceiling. Everything here was designed to intimidate. Everything did.

“Sit,” Bisonette croaked. They would speak English. It was a concession, or an insult, or both. “I want you to know our thoughts on the investigation.”

Our thoughts: the Bureau’s new doctrine. The investigation: Two Rivers. Among the hierarchs it was always the investigation, a nebulous enquiry whose object must never be named or defined. Demarch had learned the protocol in those first mad months.

Bisonette said, “The inventory and warehousing should be speeded up. Another military detail has been assigned—they’ll be there when you get back. I want you to report to me on their progress.”

“I will.”

“The technical and academic assessments can proceed apace. How is that going, by the way?”

“A great deal has been written. Ultimately, I don’t know how valuable it will be. Copies have gone to the Ideological Branch, but I can have them forwarded directly to the Departement if you’d prefer.”

“No, never mind. Let the archivists deal with it. There was an explosion, I understand…”

“A fire at a gasoline depot.”

“Accidental or sabotage?”

“Well, we aren’t sure. It seems now as if a militiaman might have neglected to set his hand brake. There was a robbery, but the fire may be coincidental.”

“May be?”

“It’s impossible to know, at this stage.”

“Delafleur insists it was sabotage.”

Wasn’t it Bisonette himself who had called Delafleur “a pompous idiot”? Demarch sensed Bureau politics at work here, a turn of the wheel, probably not to his advantage. “Of course it could have been, but there’s no way to prove it.”

“Personally speaking, though, you have a suspicion?”

“A simple robbery and a careless soldier. But again, I can’t present evidence.”

“Yes, I do understand that. Your bets are covered, Lieutenant Demarch.”

He felt himself blushing.

The Censeur said, “We don’t want to see any more episodes of the kind. But in the end it doesn’t matter, because we’ve advanced our schedule.”

It took a moment for the significance of that to sink in. When it did, Demarch felt faintly dizzy. “The weapon,” he said.

Bisonette nodded, watching him closely. “Progress has been faster than we expected. We’ve already dispatched engineers to erect a test gantry. The prototype should be available within a matter of weeks.”

“I thought—you said the spring.”

“That’s changed. Do you object, Lieutenant Demarch?”

How could he? “No. Although I wonder if it gives us time to extract everything we can from the, ah, enquiry.”

“Oh, I think we’ve extracted a considerable amount. We’ll be mining the archival material for decades, you know, from what I understand. I think that’s enough. We can’t really let the situation stand as it is, Lieutenant. None of us knows what happened in that place and I doubt that any of us ever will—it’s beyond comprehension, which is to say it’s in the nature of a miracle. If we wait to understand it, we’ll be waiting until the end of time. In the meantime there’s a real risk of contagion, both figuratively and literally. You might look at their medical arcana some time. These people may be carrying diseases, and that poses an immediate risk. They’re certainly carrying ideological diseases.” He shook his head. “The site has to be burned, and if I had my choice I would sow the ground with salt—though if this weapon operates as promised, that won’t be necessary.”

Demarch tried to rein in his thoughts. Be practical, he instructed himself. “It might take time to make arrangements. People will be suspicious if we start shipping out soldiers en masse.”

“I’m sure they would. But most of the soldiers won’t be shipped out.”

“I don’t understand.”

Bisonette shrugged as if to dismiss an annoying triviality. “The town was manned by second-rate troops. They’ve seen more than we want them talking about. They’re disease vectors, at least in the figurative sense. But don’t worry. We’ll extract the people we trust.”

After he left Bisonette he made an unscheduled stop at the small peripheral building marked ENQUETES, where he had once held a desk job. He kept his collar up and walked briskly to the office of Guy Marris, an old friend.

Friendship was important in the Centrality. Friendship governed what gossip you heard, the pivot on which a career might turn. Guy had been a wine friend, in Bureau jargon: someone you trusted enough to get drunk with.

Guy’s office was a small room—a closet, compared to Bisonette’s conference chamber. Guy, a bespectacled man with more gray hair than Demarch remembered, looked up from a stack of requisition forms. “Symeon!”

Demarch nodded and they talked for a time, the usual what-are-you-doing-back-in-town and what-about-the-family. But this wasn’t entirely a social visit, and Demarch began to drop hints to that effect, until Guy said, “You want a document—is that it?”

“I need a set of identification papers. Really just the basics. Enough for someone to show at checkpoints or to an employer.”

Guy studied his face for a long moment and then said, “Come with me.”

They walked to the courtyard, a standard maneuver if you wanted privacy. Demarch wondered why, after all these years, the hierarchs had never found a way to eavesdrop on this windy common. Or maybe they had. Or maybe they knew about it and still permitted a sliver of secrecy: no machine runs efficiently without a little grease.

Guy Marris shivered at the frigid air. He took a Victoire cigarette from the package in his breast pocket and lit it with a match. “I think this is unofficial work you’re talking about.”

“Yes,” Demarch admitted.

“Well … tell me the essentials. I don’t promise anything.”

“A woman. Mid-thirties. Make her thirty-five. Dark hair. Height, five foot eight. Weight, say ten stone.”

“She sounds intriguing.”

“You still write documents, I hope.” There were times when Bureau operatives needed manufactured identification, and Enquetes was the department they came to—at least, that was how it was done when Demarch worked here.

“Oh, we do documents,” Guy said, “that hasn’t changed, but an unauthorized requisition…” He shook his head. “I suppose I could attribute it to someone else. But everything is signed for, Symeon. My name ends up on the paperwork one way or another. Mind you, if it reaches the file room, it’s as good as lost.” He smiled. “Have you seen Records? We call it the Library of Babel. But in the meantime, if anyone asks questions …”

Demarch nodded. He already felt guilty about asking. About jeopardizing a friend.

“Forgive me,” Guy said, “but you never struck me as the type. A liaison is a liaison, but you never let it get between you and the Bureau. Is this a special woman?”

“I don’t mean to bring her home to Dorothea. Only to save her life.”

Which was true. His feeling about Evelyn Woodward was that she didn’t deserve to die. It didn’t go deeper than that, because he wouldn’t allow it to.

His father-in-law had once warned him to beware of women. They’re dangerous, he had said, grinning lewdly. They make your soft parts hard. And your hard parts soft.

Briefly, Demarch wondered what hardness inside him Evelyn Woodward had somehow managed to thaw.

The wind was cold and Guy was beginning to seem nervous. The tip of his Victoire flared as he drew on it, and the tobacco crackled in the chill air. “How long can you wait?”

“A week.”

“That’s not much.”

“I know.”

Guy Marris took a last draw on the cigarette and crushed it under the heel of a dress shoe. “Come see me before you leave.”

“Thank you,” Demarch said.

“No, don’t thank me yet.”

He gave Christof a toy he had brought from Two Rivers: it was called a Rubik’s Cube, Evelyn had said, and Christof was delighted with the unexpected way it turned and twisted in his hands. He insisted on taking it to bed. Dorothea led him upstairs, and Demarch sipped an evening brandy with his beau-pere, his father-in-law Armand. They sat in the library under the eye of more than five hundred books, property of the Saussere family—mainly bound collections of sermons, some of them older than Armand himself. Demarch had never liked this room.

Armand sat brooding in his wheelchair. Five years ago he had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right leg and removed him from active Bureau duty. His mind was unaffected, the doctors said, but since the stroke he had seemed more withdrawn, less apt to share himself.

Tonight the brandy seemed to loosen him. He turned his head slowly and fixed Demarch with a birdlike one-eyed gaze. “Symeon… this hasn’t been an easy posting for you, has it?”

“You mean the enquiry?”

“Yes. The ‘enquiry.’ We’re so shy of words. Plain words are dangerous. But make allowances for me. I’m short of wind. Tempted to brevity. It must be difficult for you.”

“Well, I think I’ve done a respectable job.”

“Hard for a man to preside over such strangeness.”

You don’t know the half of it, Demarch thought. But Armand still cultivated his Bureau contacts: he obviously knew more than Demarch would have guessed. He said, “Of course…”

“And so many deaths.”

“Actually, there haven’t been many.”

“But there will be. And you know it.”

“Yes.” He shrugged. “I don’t think about it.”

“But you do, you know. One always thinks about it. And if you don’t think about it, you dream about it.” Armand lowered his voice until it was a rumble from the deep barrel of his chest. Demarch leaned forward to listen. “I was at the Mandan River,” Armand said, “after the Lakota rebellion. They don’t tell you about that in the Academie, do they? No, nor in any other sort of school, except to say that a menace was disposed of. Careful words. Discreet. They don’t tell you what the camps looked like with their watchtowers overlooking the prairie sloughs. How the grass goes on for miles and miles. They don’t tell you how muddy it was that spring. Or how the smell from the furnaces lingered when the bodies were burned. The bodies of men and women and children—I know one isn’t supposed to call them that, but that’s what they were, or seemed to be, whatever the condition of their souls. I suppose their souls went up with the smoke. A body is some ounces lighter when it dies … I read that somewhere.” His eyes seemed to glaze. “Everything is a test, Symeon, in our line of work.”

“Am I being tested?”

“We’re always being tested.” Armand sipped his brandy. “We’re all subordinated, not just the ones we kill. There are no victims. You have to remember that. We’re all in the service of something larger than ourselves, and the difference between us and those corpses is that we are its willing servants. That’s all. That’s all. We’re spared because we put our bodies on the altar every day, and not just our bodies, but our minds and our wills. Remember the vow you took when you joined the Bureau. Incipit vita nova. A new life begins. You leave your priggish little intellect behind.”

The brandy made him reckless. He said, “And our conscience?”

“That was never yours,” Armand said. “Don’t be absurd.”

He turned out the lights after Armand wheeled himself away. The fire had burned down to embers. He finished his brandy in the dark and then moved upstairs.

The old man’s words seemed to follow him in stuttering echoes through the chilly house. We put our bodies on the altar every day. But for what? Something larger than ourselves. The Bureau, the Church, the Protennoia? Something more, surely. Some idea or vision of the good, a republic of permissible relations, a step up from the barbarism of the Lakota and all the countless other slaughtered aboriginals.

But the corpses pile higher every day, and need to be burned.

Dorothea was asleep when he joined her in bed. Her long hair lay across the pillow like a black wing. She reminded him of a temple, serene and pale even in sleep.

He stood a moment watching the snow that had begun to fall beyond the double panes of the bedroom window. He thought about Christof. Christof still acted like a stranger. The way he looks at me, Demarch thought. As if he’s seeing something alien, something that makes him afraid.

Bisonette telephoned after five days. “We think you should go back tomorrow,” the Censeur said. “I’m sorry to cut short your time with your family, but the arrangements have already been made.”

“What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

“Only Clement Delafleur getting a little overzealous in your absence. I’m given to understand he’s hanging children in the public square.”

He kissed Dorothea good-bye. Christof was presented for a kiss and consented to it. Probably he had been coached.

He told the Haitian driver to stop at the Bureau Centrality on the way to the airport.

Guy Marris was in his office. Demarch said he was stopping to say good-bye; he had been summoned back to duty.

His friend wished him luck and shook his hand. At the door, he tucked a sheaf of papers into the pocket of Demarch’s veston. Neither man spoke of it.

It had snowed a little, the Haitian driver said, but it would snow much more before long.

Chapter Twelve

Linneth arranged with the school’s principal to take Dexter Graham back to his apartment, as inconspicuously as possible, in the principal’s automobile, which he still drove from time to time although his hoard of gasoline was almost exhausted. Mr. Hoskins was wary of her intentions but understood the urgency of the situation. She was aware of the way he watched her in the rear-view mirror. The distrust was mutual, but there was nothing to be done about that.

Fresh snow had fallen, and the rear tires slipped each time they turned a corner. No one spoke during the drive. When the car stopped, Linneth helped Dex out of the rear seat. His blood, she saw, had stained the upholstery. The principal pulled away quickly and left them alone, in the twining veils of snow.

Linneth guided Dex up the steps to his apartment. He was lucid enough to use his door key but he passed out again when he reached the blood-stained bed.

Linneth had learned emergency aid during her three years with the Christian Renunciates. She stripped his shirt and unwound the sodden, dirty bandage from his arm. Dex moaned but didn’t wake. The injury under the bandage leaked blood and suppuration in lazy pulses. Linneth cleaned it with water and a cloth, as gently as possible, but the pain was unavoidable; Dex screamed and twisted away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But this has to be done.”

“Get me something. The aspirin.”

“The what?”

“In the bottle on the kitchen counter.”

She fetched the small tubule of pills and peered at its label. The fragmented English defied interpretation. “Is it a narcotic?”

“A painkiller. And it’ll bring the fever down.”

She shook out four tablets at his instruction and he swallowed them with water. She said, “Do you have a disinfectant, too?”

“No. Uh, wait, there’s some Bactine in the medicine cabinet…”

“For cleaning wounds?” She didn’t like the way his eyes wandered. He might not be coherent.

“For cuts,” he said. “You spray it on cuts.”

She found the Bactine and experimented until she understood the operation of the aerosol bottle. When she came back to the bed Dex had closed his eyes again. He didn’t rouse until she bathed his injury with the disinfectant; then he screamed until she gave him a wadded pillowcase to bite on.

The wound was patently a bullet wound. The missile had passed through the fleshy part of his upper arm. She would have liked to close the injury with stitches, but there was no needle or thread at hand. He did have sterile cotton in a bag in the bathroom medicine cabinet, and she used some of that to pack the wound and a clean linen bandage to wrap it. But his fever was very high.

She pulled a kitchen chair near to the bed and watched him. Within an hour the fever had subsided, at least to her touch, and he seemed to be sleeping peacefully. That was the effect of the antipyretics, Linneth supposed. Still, she didn’t like the way his wound had looked—or smelled.

The light from the window was thin and gray. The snowy afternoon had begun to wane. She called his name until he opened his eyes.

“Dex, I have to go. I’ll be back. If possible, before curfew. You’ll stay here, won’t you?”

He squinted as if to bring her into focus. “Where the hell would I go?”

“Out to make more trouble, I don’t doubt.” She put a second blanket on him. The room was cold and he owned no fireplace or gas jets.

She hurried through torrents of dry, granular snow to the town’s medical clinic.

The town of Two Rivers lacked a hospital. This building was the nearest thing: a cube of consulting rooms with windows of tinted glass and a wide tiled lobby. Dr. Eichorn would be here today, if her luck held. She identified herself to the soldier at the door and asked where she could find him. “First office left off the lobby,” he said, “last time I saw him, Miss.”

Dr. Eichorn was the medical archivist who had been called in, like Linneth, by the Proctors. He was a tall, hairless, patrician Southerner, a teaching physician with a degree in natural history. She found him at a desk in a consulting room. He was wrapped in two woolen sweaters and a scarf, frowning over the pages of a medical journal, eyeglasses thick as jeweler’s loupes riding the end of his nose. She tapped the open door. He looked up and his eyes narrowed in some combination of suspicion and annoyance. “Miss, is it, Stone? We met in the commissary—didn’t we?”

“Yes…” Now that she was here, she didn’t know how to begin.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

“Yes, there is.” Forge ahead, she thought. “Dr. Eichorn, I need a course of sulfa drugs.”

“You mean, you’re sick?”

“No. It’s for a friend.”

He was like a muddy pond. It took time for things to sink in. Eichorn pushed the journal aside and leaned back in his chair. “You’re that woman anthropologist from Boston.”

“I am.”

“I didn’t know you were also a medical prodigy.”

“Sir, I’m not. But I was trained by the Christian Renunciates and I know how to administer drugs.”

“And how to prescribe them?”

“The object is to ward off infection in a wound.”

“A wound, you say.”

“Yes.”

“One of your anthropological subjects?” The question was awkward, but Linneth nodded. “I see. Well, maybe the best thing would be if the patient came to me directly.”

“That would be difficult.”

“Or if you took me to the patient.”

“It isn’t necessary.” She worked to keep any hint of desperation out of her voice. “I know your time is valuable. I’m asking this favor as a colleague, Dr. Eichorn.”

“As a colleague? Am I the colleague of a woman who studies savages?” He shook his bald head ponderously. “Sulfanilamide. Well, that’s problematic. There was trouble last night—you may have heard of it.”

“Only rumors.”

“Shooting in the main street.”

“I see.”

“A fire.”

“If you say so.”

Eichorn studied her from his turgid depths. Linneth waited for his verdict. She counted silently to ten and was careful not to lower her gaze.

“In this building,” Eichorn said, “there are antibiotics the like of which I’ve never seen. I don’t know where this town came from or where it may be going, but there were some clever people here. We’ll be reaping the rewards for decades. We owe someone a debt, Miss Stone. I don’t know who.” He rubbed his scalp with a bony hand. “No one will miss a bottle of pills. But let’s keep this between us, yes?”

Linneth knew that something inside her had changed, but the change had been gradual and she couldn’t be sure of its nature or degree. It was as if she had opened a familiar door and found a strange new landscape beyond it.

Maybe the change had begun when the Proctor Symeon Demarch invaded her home in Boston, or when she arrived in this impossible town. But the axis and emblem of that change was surely Dexter Graham—not only the man but the qualities she had espied in him: skepticism, courage, defiance.

She thought at first his virtues might be common American virtues, but the evidence for that was scant. Linneth had sampled the magazines and newspapers of his world and found them brash but often vulgar and concerned above all else with fashion: fashions in politics as much as fashions in dress; and fashion, Linneth thought, was only that drab whore Conformity in gaudier paint. Dexter Graham defied convention. He seemed to weigh everything—everything she said to him, her words, her presence—on an invisible scale. He had the bearing of a judge, but there was nothing imperious or awful in it. He did not exempt himself from judgment. She sensed that he had long ago passed some verdict on himself, and the verdict was far from favorable.

Obviously, she should have turned him over to the soldiers as soon as she saw his wound. But when she thought about it she remembered a passage in the book he had given her, Huckleberry Finn, by Mr. Mark Twain. Much of the book had been hard to decipher, but there was a pivotal moment when Huck debated whether he ought to turn over his friend, the Negro Jim, to authorities. By the standards of his time, giving up Jim was the right thing to do. Huckleberry Finn had been told he would go to Hell and suffer unspeakable torment if he abetted an escaped slave. Nevertheless, Huck helped his friend. If it meant going to Hell, then he’d go to Hell.

I’ll go to Hell, then, Linneth thought.

The sulfa pills rattled in her coat pocket as she paced through snowy gloom. Because the electricity had been turned off to punish the townspeople, there would be no streetlights tonight. The military patrols had been redoubled but the snow would slow them down.

She was allowed to come and go as she wished from the civilians’ wing of the Blue View Motel. She ate dinner at the commissary in order not to arouse suspicion. The dinner was a stew of beef in watery broth and slices of dense bread buttered with suet. She told the pions who patrolled the hallway that she would be working on a paper tonight and didn’t want to be disturbed. She left a lamp burning in her room and pulled the curtains. When the pions adjourned to the lobby to smoke their noxious pipes, she went out a side door into the windy dark. She fell twice, hurrying along the empty streets. The church bell was tolling curfew when she reached Dexter Graham’s apartment.

She fed him sulfanilamide and aspirin and sat with him through the night. When Dex slept, she slept on the sofa across the room. When he woke, often raving or thrashing, she bathed his forehead with a damp cloth.

She was aware of the danger of being here and of the danger Dex was in. The Proctors were like poisonous insects—harmless enough if allowed to toil undisturbed in their nests; lethal if aroused. She remembered the day the Proctors came to arrest her mother, before she was sent to the Renunciates, and that ancient fear rose like flood water from the culverts of memory.

While she cooled his forehead she admired Dexter Graham’s face. He was handsome. She seldom thought of the men she knew as handsome or unhandsome; they were threats or opportunities, seldom friends or lovers. The word lover sounded lewd even when she pronounced it in the privacy of her thoughts. Her last “lover,” if he could be called that, was the boy Campo. That was in the old days when she was very young and before the idolatry laws were enacted. Her father had taken the family to the annual civic service in Rome, where the Temple of Apollo was festooned with garlands and the Bishop of Rome himself rendered the oracles of the Prophetess in Latin hexameter. Linneth was bored by the ritual and sickened by the sacrifice of the animals. She avoided services and stayed in the paradeisos where foreign visitors lodged—or at least, she promised to. In fact she escaped each morning and taught herself to ride the buses and elevated trains; and she met Campo, an Egyptian boy who had come to the shrines with his family as Linneth had come with hers. They spent their meager allowances together on the trams, at the zoo, in the cafes. He told her about Alexandria. She told him about New York. In secret, in his small room in the paradeisos, they undressed one another. Her first and last lover, Campo. On the great passenger steamer Sardinia, bound for New York Harbor after the rites were finished, Linneth’s mother interpreted her silences and frowns. “Sometimes we meet Pan in unexpected places,” she said, smiling obliquely. “Linneth, weren’t the fountains lovely?” She supposed so. “And the choirs in the shrine?” Oh yes. “And the flowers, and the perfume, and the priestess on the axon?” Yes. “And that African boy we saw you with?” Linneth supposed he was lovely too.

She remembered the sunny days on the steamship with the Atlantic Ocean churning behind. She had seen distant mountains of ice, blue as summer air, floating off the Grand Banks. At night, constellations turned like mill wheels in the sky.

After that her life had changed. The Proctors took her to finish her schooling with the Christian Renunciates at their gray stone retraite in snowy Utica (New York, not Greece). She had worn gray dresses that swept the floor and she had learned the Christian panoply of gods, Archons, Demiurges, and dour apostles. And there had not been a lover since Campo, whose skin had smelled wonderfully of cinnamon and cedar.

When she was little her mother told her, “The god who lives in the forest lives in your belly and in your heart.” She wondered if her fierce scholasticism, her invasion of the masculine strongholds of library and carrel, had really been a search for that outcast god: in whose myths, villages, meadows, sacred places? Campo and Pan and the Golden Bough, she thought; everything we worshiped or should have worshiped or neglected to worship.

She tended Dexter Graham through his fever as the snow fell from the dark sky.

After a day he woke and was able to drink a bowl of soup, which Linneth heated over a wax candle. He was thin under the many blankets (she bathed him with a sponge and changed his bandage often), and she saw that the wound and the fever had drawn heavily on his stores of life and strength.

She thought he might have lost some of his distrust of her, and that was good, although his eyes still followed her—if not suspiciously, at least curiously—as she moved about the room.

She was away often enough to establish her presence in the civilians’ compound. In the evenings she came back. When Dex was awake, she talked to him. She asked him questions about the book, Huckleberry Finn.

The decision Huck Finn makes about Jim, she explained, represents a well-known heresy. To say Well, then, I’ll go to Hell … to imply that there exists some moral standard higher than Church and Law, and that this standard is accessible even to an ignorant peasant boy… that Huck Finn might have a firmer grasp of good and evil than, for instance, a Proctor of the Bureau… well, people had burned for less.

Dex said, “Do you think it’s a heresy?”

“Of course it is. Do you mean, do I think it’s true?” She lowered her voice and eyes. “Of course it’s true. That’s why I’m here.”

A week passed. The snow mounted on the sill of the window and the talk between Linneth and Dex gathered a similar weight. She brought a paraffin heater to make his small rooms bearably warm, though she still had to wrap herself in sweaters and Dex in blankets. And she brought food: pails of stew, or bread with crumbling wedges of cheese.

Linneth talked about herself as the snow sifted against the window glass with a sound that made her think of feathers and diamonds. She told him about her childhood, when the forests near the family’s stone house had seemed enchanted during the icebound winter days; about mugs of mulled wine, devotions in mysterious Latin, storybooks wrapped in red paper and imported from the pagan states of southern Europe and Byzantium. Her father was bearded, devout, aloof, and learned. Her mother told secrets. Something lives in everything, her mother said, if only you look for it.

When the idolatry laws were passed and the Proctors came to take her father away, he went wordlessly. A month later they came back for Linneth’s mother, who screamed all the way down the drive to the boxy black truck. The Proctors took Linneth, too, and sent her to the Renunciates, until a Christian aunt in Boston bought her free and arranged for her education, the best education money could buy.

Dex Graham talked about a wholly different childhood: suburban, fast-paced, suffused by the glow of television. It was a freer existence than Linneth could imagine; but narrow, too, in its way. Where Dex came from, no one talked much about life or death or good or evil—except, Linneth pointed out, Mr. Mark Twain; but he was of an older tradition. Was it possible, she wondered, to suffocate in triviality? In Dex’s world one could spend one’s entire life in a blaze of the most florid triviality. It blinds you, he said, but it doesn’t keep you warm.

She asked if he had been married. He said yes, his wife had been Abigail and his son had been David. They were dead. They died in a fire. Their house had burned down.

“Were you there when it happened?”

Dex looked at the ceiling. After a long time he said, “No.”

Then: “No, that’s a lie. I was there. I was in the house when it caught fire.” She had to lean closer to hear him. “I used to drink. Sometimes I drank to excess. So one night I came home late. I went to sleep on the sofa because I didn’t want to disturb Abby. When I woke up a couple of hours later the air was full of smoke. There were flames running up the stairs. Abby and David were up there. I tried to go after them but I couldn’t get through. Burned the hair off my face. The fire was too hot. Or I was too scared of it. Neighbors called the fire department and a guy with an oxygen mask dragged me out of the house. But the question is—in the end, nobody could say what started the fire. The insurance people investigated but it was inconclusive. So I keep thinking, did I knock over a lamp? Leave a cigarette burning? The kind of thing a drunk does.” He shook his head. “I still don’t know whether I killed them.”

He looked at her as if he regretted saying it, or feared what she might say; so she didn’t speak, only took his hand and touched a cooling cloth to his forehead.

She came to the apartment every day, even when his recovery made it obvious she wasn’t needed. She liked being here.

The room Dex Graham occupied was sparsely furnished but oddly pleasant, especially now that the punitive week had passed and the lights were back on. It was a cloistered space, a bubble of warmth in the snow that seemed never to stop falling. Dex tolerated her presence and even appeared to welcome it, though he was often subdued, often quiet. There was a dimple of pink flesh where the bullet had entered his arm.

The wound still hurt him. He favored the arm. She had to mind the injury when she came into bed with him.

This was a sin, she reckoned, by some lights; but not a sin of the forest or the belly or the heart. The Renunciates would call it a sin. So would that Bureau ideologue, Delafleur. Let them, Linneth thought. It doesn’t matter. Let them call it what they want. I’ll go to Hell.

Chapter Thirteen

On the first night of that cold week, when the windows grew opaque with ice and the street was crowded with soldiers, Clifford tore up his maps and notes and flushed them down the toilet. The maps were evidence of his guilt. They might not prove anything, but they would surely get him into trouble if Luke, for instance, found them.

He couldn’t dispose of the radio scanner as easily. He buried it under a stack of encyclopedias of science at the back of his bedroom closet—but only until he could think of a more permanent solution.

His mood alternated between boredom and panic. In those first days after the fire, wild rumors circulated. Clifford’s mother passed them on, absentmindedly but in meticulous detail, over the meager dinners she made him sit down to. (She kept perishables in the snow on the back step since the refrigerator wasn’t working. Mostly there was bread and cheese on the table, and not much of that.)

People had seen peculiar things, his mother said. Some people claimed they saw God that night, or maybe it was the Devil—though what either one of them would want with the Beacon Street filling station was beyond her. According to Mrs. Fraser, some soldiers had died in the explosion. According to someone else it was a Proctor who had been killed, and God help us all if that was true. Mr. Kingsley next door said it was some new experiment at the defense plant that caused the explosion… but Joe Kingsley hadn’t been in his right mind since his wife died last August; you could tell because he never washed his clothes anymore.

And so on. On Friday, Clifford picked up a single-sheet edition of the Two Rivers Crier from the stack at the corner of Beacon and Arbutus. The newspaper reported “hooliganism on the main street” but said no one had been seriously hurt, and Clifford decided to believe that, although you couldn’t be sure of what they printed in the Crier anymore. The town’s punishment had been fairly mild, considering what was possible, and the number of soldiers on the street declined over the course of the week; so it was probably true that no one had been killed. If a soldier or a Proctor had died, Clifford thought, things would be much worse.

It was good to think he hadn’t hurt anyone. Still, the presence of the scanner in his closet continued to make him nervous. He lost sleep, thinking about it. His mother said, “Cliffy, are you sick? Your eyes are all puffy.”

Friday night, Luke came to the house again. He brought rice and a half pound of fatty ground beef, plus the inevitable quart jar of barracks whiskey. Clifford’s mother cooked the meat and rice for dinner, all of it at once. The whiskey she placed at the back of the counter next to the microwave oven, handling the bottle as reverently as if it were a piece of the True Cross.

Clifford ate a good share of food, although the conversation at the table was strained and halting. As usual, the talk picked up after he departed for his room. They always sent him to his room after dinner. Clifford only went as far as the halfway point on the stairs—close enough to the kitchen to hear what was being said; close enough to the bedroom to make good his escape when they left the table. What his mother said to Luke, or the soldier to his mother, sometimes bewildered him and sometimes made him blush. His mother seemed like a different person, a stranger with a hidden history and a new vocabulary. The soldier called her Ellen. That made him uneasy. Clifford had never thought of his mother as “Ellen.” As she drank, she used more dirty words. She said, “No shit!” or “Well, fuck!” And Clifford always winced when this happened.

Luke drank, too, and in the long pauses between drinking he would talk about his work. It was this talk Clifford particularly wanted to hear. The disaster on Beacon Street should have cured him of eavesdropping, he thought. Eavesdropping with the scanner had almost gotten him killed. But he went on listening to Luke. It seemed important. He couldn’t say why.

Tonight was a good example. Tonight Luke talked about all the bulldozers that had come in from Fort LeDuc, and what the bulldozers were doing on the edge of town.

Tuesday was the first food depot day after the electricity came back on and Clifford volunteered to make the trip to pick up rations. His mother agreed. Which was no surprise. She seldom left the house if she could help it. Some days she didn’t even leave her room.

The air outside was damp and cold. The pale sun at noon was just warm enough to melt the skin of the fallen snow and fill the gutters with frigid water. Clifford passed the time during the long walk to the food depot by trying to make perfect footprints in the crusty snow. When he stepped straight down his boots left cookie-cutter outlines behind him.

He carried an empty bag to fill up with food, and another bag—a plastic bag, into which he had placed the radio scanner in its box. He held the bag with the scanner close to his body and hoped no one would pay it any attention.

At the depot he collected the family-allowance of bread and cheese. Then he stood across the street under the awning of the Two Rivers Thrift Shop, watching the ration line grow as it hitched forward. The people in the line looked unhappy and too thin. Some of them were sick. The cold week had been hard on people, his mother had told him. He paid attention to the faces of the men in the line. Would he recognize the one he was looking for? He thought so. But it was hard to wait. His toes were numb inside his boots; the cold air made his nose run.

The line lengthened until it was twenty people long; then it began to shrink as the shadows grew. The soldiers dispensing food were tired. They punched notches into ration cards without really looking at them and paused to take off their gloves and blow into their cupped hands. Clifford was about to begin the walk home, disappointed, when he saw the man he was waiting for.

The man looked skinnier than Clifford remembered—and he had been a thin man to begin with—but it was definitely the same one. The man joined the line and waited with no particular expression on his thin face. When he reached the front he offered his ration card for clipping, then opened a dirty cloth bag for the bread and cheese. Then he turned and walked away with his head bent into the wind.

Clifford gathered his own food bag in one hand and the bag with the scanner in the other and followed the man west toward Commercial and River.

After a twisty walk among the slatboard houses of the west end of town, the man went into a shabby house. Clifford hesitated on the sidewalk. A shoal of cloud had hidden the low sun and meltwater was freezing in the gutters. There was a film of ice on the empty road.

He went to the door of the house and knocked.

Howard Poole opened the door and peered in obvious surprise from a dim hallway. The plume of his breath hung like a feather in the air.

Clifford, wanting to be sure, said, “You’re the man on the hill at the defense plant that day. You’re Howard.”

He nodded slowly. “And you’re Clifford. I remember.” He looked around the snowbound yard. “Did you follow me here?”

Clifford said yes.

“But you’re alone, right?”

“Yes.”

“You need something? You need some help?”

“No,” Clifford said. “I brought you something.”

“Well, come in.”

In the barely warm kitchen, Clifford took the radio scanner from its bag and set it on the table. He explained to Howard how it worked and how he was able to hear the soldiers talking on the marine band. He left out what had happened to the gas station. He didn’t want even Howard to know about that.

Howard accepted the gift gravely. He said it would probably be useful, though he wasn’t sure how. “Clifford, you want something to drink? There’s milk powder. Even a little chocolate. I could probably manage cocoa.”

It was tempting, but Clifford shook his head. “I have to get home. But there’s something else. You remember when I told you about Luke?”

“Luke—?”

“The soldier my mother sees.”

“Oh. Yes, I remember.”

“He talked about something they’re doing. He said the Proctors brought in a whole bunch of earth-movers from Fort LeDuc. Band saws, too, and stump cutters. They’re using them all around the town, following the line where, you know, where our territory meets their territory—that whole circle. They’re cutting down trees and digging up dirt. It’s a big project. From my house, you can hear the noise all the way from Coldwater Road.”

Howard looked very solemn. His eyes were big behind those taped-up glasses. “Clifford, did Luke say why they’re doing this?”

“He says he doesn’t know, and the Proctors won’t talk about it… but it looks like what they’re cutting is one big firebreak.”

The boy went out into a windy dusk. Howard wanted to pass on this information about the Proctors to Dex, but curfew was too close and a visit might be dangerous in any case. He closed the door. Maybe tomorrow.

The house was dark. After months of hiding here, Howard was still reluctant to use the lights. But a little light was good. For a week the Cantwell house had been cold and dark and even more lonely than it had seemed in the autumn: a strange shore to have washed up on. He still felt like an intruder here.

He climbed the stairs to Paul Cantwell’s study and loaded the last fifty pages of the Buchanan and Bayard counties white pages into the Hewlett-Packard PC. This work had been interrupted, maddeningly, by the week of darkness, and today by the need to pick up rations. He finished it now with more dread than excitement. The experiment for which he had risked so much—his life, his friend Dex’s life—might be exactly as ephemeral as Dex had predicted. He had built an ornate palace of conjecture, and that delicate structure might well collapse under the weight of reality.

The telephone number Stern gave him hadn’t appeared in the first hundred pages of the phone book—unless the optical reader had mistranslated it, or the program he was reading it into had some kind of flaw. But that was unlikely. More likely was that he simply hadn’t found the number yet… or that it was unlisted.

Howard finished loading the directory and told the computer to sort for the target number. The disk drive chattered into the silent room.

It didn’t take long. The machine announced success as prosaically as it had announced failure. The number simply appeared highlighted in blue; a name and address appeared at the left.

WINTERMEYER, R. 1230 HALTON ROAD, TWO RIVERS

Less than three blocks from here.

He spent a sleepless night thinking about Stern, his mind crowded with a hundred memories and a single image: Stern, so like his name, fiercely intelligent, eyes dark, lips pursed behind a curly beard. Generous but mysterious. Howard had been talking to Alan Stern for much of his life and every conversation had been a treasured event, but what had he learned about the man in back of the ideas? Only a few clues from his mother. Stern the enigmatic, Stern who was, his mother once said, “trying to secede from the human race.”

Howard walked to the Halton Road address in the morning in a dizzy mixture of anticipation and dread.

The house itself was nothing special: an old two-story row house faced with pink aluminum siding. The tiny lawn and the narrow pass-way at the side were obscured by snow; a tin trash can peeked out from a drift. A path snaked to the front door. There was a light in a downstairs window.

Howard pushed the doorbell and heard the buzzer ring inside.

A woman answered the door. She was in her fifties, Howard guessed; slim, small-boned, her gray hair long and loose. She looked at him warily, but that was how everyone looked at strangers nowadays.

He said, “Are you R. Wintermeyer?”

“Ruth. ‘R’ only to my tax form.” She narrowed her eyes. “You look a little familiar. But only a little.”

“I’m Howard Poole. I’m Alan Stern’s nephew.”

Her eyes widened and she took a step back. “Oh my God. I think you really are. You even look like him. He talked about you, of course, but I thought—”

“What?”

“You know. I thought you must have been killed at the lab.”

“No. I wasn’t there. They didn’t have a place for me—I stayed in town that night.” He looked past her into the dim interior of the house.

She said, “Well, please come in.”

Warm air embraced him. He tried to restrain his curiosity but his eyes searched for evidence of Stern. The furniture in the sitting room—a sofa, side table, bookcases—was casual but clean. A book was splayed open on an easy chair but he couldn’t read the title.

Howard said, “Is my uncle here?”

Ruth looked at him for a time. “Is that what you thought?”

“He gave me the telephone number but not the address. It took me a long time to find you.”

“Howard… your uncle is dead. He died at the lab that night with everybody else. I’m sorry. I thought you would have assumed … I mean, he did spend most of his nights here, but there was something going on, some kind of work… Did you really think he might be here after all this time?”

Howard felt breathless. “I was sure of it.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It was a feeling.”

She gave him another, longer look. Then she said, “I have that feeling, too. Sit down, please, Howard. Would you like coffee? I think we have a lot to talk about.”

Chapter Fourteen

The clergy of Two Rivers had responded to the events of the summer by putting together what they called the Ad Hoc Ecumenical Council, a group of pastors representing the town’s seven Christian churches and two synagogues. The group met in Brad Congreve’s basement twice a month.

Congreve, an ordained Lutheran minister, was proud of his work. He had assembled a delegation from every religious group in town except for the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Vedanta Buddhist Temple, which in any case was only Annie Stoller and some of her New Age friends sitting cross-legged in the back of Annie’s self-help store. The churches had not always been on friendly terms, and it was still a chore to keep the Baptists talking to the Unitarians, for instance, but they all faced a common danger in this peculiar new world.

Certainly they had all shared a trial of faith. Congreve often felt the way he supposed the Incas must have felt when Pizarro marched into town with banners flying—doomed, that is, at least in the long run. There was a Christianity here but it was like no Christian doctrine Congreve had ever imagined—it was not even monotheistic! The God of the Proctors presided over a cosmogony as crowded as the Super Bowl, Jesus being only one of the major players. Worse, these faux Christians were numerous and well armed.

Symeon Demarch had allowed the churches to carry on with services, which had been a morale booster, but it was Congreve’s private conviction that the writing was on the wall. He might not go to his death a martyr, but he would probably go down as one of the last living Lutherans. There was not even history to sustain him. History had been erased, somehow.

The only thing that had not been challenged was his belief in miracles.

In the meantime he drew together the Christian community in Two Rivers and tried to set a dignified tone. There was argument tonight about the explosion at the filling station and the curious phenomena some people had seen there. Signs and wonders. Congreve shunted that aside when he called the meeting to order. It was not the kind of issue they could resolve; it only fostered disagreement.

Instead, he raised the more immediate and practical question of Christmas decorations. The electrical power would be restored by the beginning of next week, and it was already the first of December—although it felt more like January with all this snow. His youth group wanted to string Christmas lights on the church lawn. A few lights would make everybody feel better, Congreve supposed. But Christmas lights were a religious display and according to Demarch all such displays needed prior approval by the Proctors. That was where the problem arose. Symeon Demarch was out of town; the man in charge was an unpleasant bureaucrat named Clement Delafleur. Father Gregory of the Catholic church had already spoken to Delafleur and the meeting had not been a happy one; Delafleur had expressed a desire to close down the churches altogether and had called Father Gregory “an idolator and an alien.”

But Christmas decorations were a secular tradition, too, and no doubt some of the private citizens in Two Rivers would be moved to dig out their strings of lights—so why not the churches?

A plausible argument, Congreve thought, but the Proctors might disagree. He counseled a prudent caution. Reverend Lockheed of the Mission Baptist said his young people were also anxious to do something to mark the season, so how about decorating the big pine in the Civic Gardens outside City Hall—as a kind of test case? If the Proctors objected, the lights could be unstrung. (Though not without vocal objections, if Congreve knew Terry Lockheed.)

Lockheed made it a formal motion. Congreve would have preferred to hold over the entire issue until Demarch was back. Why court trouble? But the show of hands overruled him.

The combined Lutheran and Baptist youth groups, plus interested parties from the Episcopalians and Catholics—about seventy-five young people in all—converged on the Civic Gardens east of City Hall the next Saturday morning.

Electrical power was still interdicted at the source, so no one brought lights—those could be added later. Instead there were ribbons, balls, colored string; spun-glass angels, gold and silver coronets; tinsel, brocade, and popcorn chains by the yard. A morning snow fell gently and there was room for everything among the capacious, snowy branches of the tree. Reverend Lockheed showed up with a cherry-picking ladder so that even the peaks of the big pine were not neglected.

Work went on for more than two hours despite the cold. When the last ornament was installed, Pastor Congreve handed out songsheets printed on the Methodists’ hand-crank mimeograph: Silent Night, to be followed by O Come All Ye Faithful.

Midway through the first carol, a military vehicle pulled up across the road and a single soldier emerged. The militiaman stood looking on without expression. Congreve wondered if he understood the purpose of the display.

The soldier watched, arms folded across his chest, but didn’t interfere. Across the square, a crowd of townspeople had been watching the tree-trimming. They ignored the militiaman and clapped for the carolers.

Terry Lockheed looked at the soldier, then at Congreve, a mute enquiry: Should we carry on? Why not, Congreve thought. One more song. If this was a crisis, they were already well in it. He nodded his head. The faithful, the joyful, the triumphant were duly summoned.

Then, suddenly, there was nothing left of the morning. The young people adjourned to Tucker’s Restaurant for hot milk. The crowd melted away. Before long the Civic Gardens were empty save for the soldier, the tree, and the falling snow.

The tree disappeared that night.

Sometime before dawn it was cut, thrown into the back of a military transport, and burned on the perpetual trash fire in the parking lot of the highway 7-Eleven. Only the stump remained, a snow-covered hummock by the dim light of morning.

The news traveled fast.

It was never clear who initiated the Youth Club picket. Forced to guess, Brad Congreve would have picked the thick-set Burmeister girl, Shelda—the one who wore bottle-glass lenses and quoted Gandhi during Sunday Discussion. It was exactly the sort of febrile notion Shelda would have taken into her head.

She was certainly one of the twelve young people who had set up a picket line around the Civic Gardens, carrying stick-and-cardboard signs with such legends as

and

This time there was no pastoral guidance and no approving crowd of strangers. This wasn’t fun or familiar. This was patently dangerous. Pedestrians who saw the picket line stared a moment, then turned away.

When the soldiers came, Shelda and her eleven compatriots filed submissively into the back of a dung-green transport truck. In best Gandhian fashion, they were willing to be arrested. Calmly, they appealed to the consciences of the soldiers. The soldiers, grim as stones, said nothing at all.

The trouble with being close to a man, Evelyn Woodward thought, is that you find out his secrets.

From hints and silences, from phone calls half-overheard and words half-pronounced and documents glimpsed as they crossed his desk, she had learned one of Symeon Demarch’s secrets—a secret too terrible to contain and impossible to share.

It was a secret about what was going to happen to Two Rivers. No. Worse than that. Let’s not be coy, Evelyn thought. It was a secret about the last thing that would happen to Two Rivers.

It was a secret about an atomic bomb. No one called it that; but she had discerned words like nucleic and megaton among the veiled discussion of what would be done with the town, the vexing and impossible town of Two Rivers.

Now, with Symeon away and the house empty and all this snow coming so relentlessly from a woolen sky, the secret was an awkward weight inside her. It was like having a terminal disease: no matter how hard she tried not to think about it, her thoughts came circling back.

Her only consolation was that Symeon had not originated the idea and even seemed to despise it. He hadn’t argued when he talked to his superiors, but she heard the unhappiness in his voice. And when he told her she would be safe, he seemed to mean it. He would take her away. He might not live with her; he had a wife and child in the capital; but he would find a place for her out of harm’s way. Maybe she would go on being his mistress.

But that left everybody else. Her neighbors, she thought, Dex Graham, the grocer, the schoolkids—everybody. How do you imagine so many deaths? If you went to Hiroshima before the bomb fell, and you told those people what was going to happen to them, they wouldn’t believe you—not because it wasn’t plausible but because the human mind can’t contain such things.

There was plenty of food, and she dealt with the cold by burying herself in sweaters and blankets and lighting the propane stove Symeon had left. But she couldn’t keep out the dark, and in the dark her thoughts were loudest. Sleep didn’t help. One night she dreamed she was Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter, but the A on her breast stood for Atom, not Adultery.

She was gratified when, at the end of that unendurable week, the electricity came back. She woke up to a wave of new heat. The blankets were superfluous. The room was warm. The windows ran wet with condensation. She ate a hot breakfast and sat by the stove until it was time for a hot lunch. And then a hot dinner. And bright lights to batten out the night.

The morning after that she felt both restless and celebratory. She decided she would take a walk: not in any of the fine dresses Symeon had given her, which would mark her for abuse, but in her old clothes, her old jeans, her shabby blouse and heavy winter jacket.

Dressing in these things was like putting on a discarded skin. Old clothes have old memories inside. Briefly, she wondered what Dex was doing now. But Dex had moved out when the lieutenant came (Evelyn had chosen to stay in the house); Dex had been threatened by the Proctors; worst of all, Dex was going to die in the bomb blast (damn that hideous, unstoppable thought).

She walked along Beacon past Commercial until she reached the woody corner of Powell Creek Park, which was quite far enough: her cheeks were ruddy and her feet were cold.

The exercise helped to empty her mind. Evelyn hummed to herself from deep in her throat. There was not much traffic on the streets and it was better that way. She decided to go home by way of City Hall, a walk she had always enjoyed in winter when the skating rink was open. She didn’t skate but she used to like seeing the people glide in looping curves, like beings from a better world, light as angels.

Of course the skating rink was closed. The Civic Gardens looked barren, too. City Hall itself was stony gray, and there was something odd about the lampposts lining the avenue.

When she saw the dead children she didn’t understand what she was looking at. The bodies were stiff inside frozen clothing; they moved in the wind, but not like anything human. The ropes had been thrown over the angle brackets of the streetlights and knotted in timeless fashion around the children’s necks. The children’s hands had been tied behind their backs and their faces were hidden under shapeless hemp sacks.

Evelyn came closer without really meaning to, shocked beyond reason. The shock was purely physical, like putting your finger in a wall socket. She felt it in her arms and legs. Somebody went and hung their laundry from the lampposts, she thought, and then the world became suddenly much uglier: No… those are children. Those are dead children.

She stopped and stood for a long time looking at the dead children hanging from the lampposts outside City Hall. A delicate snow began to float down from the sky. The flakes of snow were large and perfect and they landed on the humped, frozen clothing of the dead children until the dead children were clothed all in white, a perfect unsullied purity.

A patrol car passed on the snowy street. Evelyn turned to look at the soldier who was driving, but he was hidden in the shadow of the car and had turned his head away: away from Evelyn, or away from what Evelyn had seen.

She walked without a destination and after a bleak passage found herself peering up through veils of snow to the window of Dex Graham’s apartment. His light was on. The window was a yellow punctuation in the snow-scabbed brick wall. She went inside, walked up the stairs, knocked on his door.

Dex opened the door and looked at her with unconcealed surprise. Maybe he had been expecting someone else. That was natural, after so much time apart. But, seeing him, she was overwhelmed with memories that seemed terribly immediate: of his voice, his touch, his smell. There was that catalog of intimate knowledge still between them. She wasn’t entitled to it but couldn’t put if away.

He said, “Evelyn? Evelyn, what is it—are you all right?”

“I have to tell you a secret,” she said.

Chapter Fifteen

“We met at a bar,” Ruth Wintermeyer said. “Sounds tacky, doesn’t it? But really, we met because he’d read my book.”

She lit a cigarette, drew the smoke into her lungs, and closed her eyes a moment. After the accident at the lab, Ruth said, she had driven to the local grocery and filled a bag with cartons of cigarettes. Lately she had weaned herself to one cigarette a day—“Just a little taste of better times.” She had two packs left.

Howard Poole sat in an easy chair opposite her, too warm in his jacket but cold without it. Like everyone else, Ruth Wintermeyer was cautious about turning up her heat—as if electricity could be hoarded, too.

She said, “I’m a member of the Historical Society. I wrote a book of Peninsula history from colonial times to the Civil War. Strictly amateur scholarship. My degrees are thirty years old and my publisher doesn’t distribute east of the Great Lakes. But I guess in Two Rivers that makes me an intellectual.

“Your uncle called on the phone and we got together. He was interested in the history of the town. In a way, I think he was adopting it. He refused to live in government housing—when I met him he was renting a room at the Blue View. Very unorthodox. The government wanted him inside perimeters, but Stern wouldn’t hear of it. He was a kind of scientific celebrity and he could get away with a little prima donna behavior. I think the price of having Stern was indulging Stern.” She paused. “Not that the security people weren’t busy. When he started seeing me, suddenly there were these, you know, little men, these guys in three-piece suits parked outside the house or asking questions at the bank, checking my credit record and so forth. I guess I passed the test. I’m not much of a security risk.”

“You two were dating?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“No. It’s just that I never saw much of his personal life. To be honest, I wasn’t sure he had one.”

“A private life?”

“A romantic life. I guess I imagined he was all intellect.”

“I know what you mean. He didn’t do intimacy very well. Part of him was always detached. Howard, have you always called him Stern?”

“Everybody in the family called him Stern. Except my mother, when they were together, and even then—she called him Alan, but I didn’t sense a real connection. She said he always stood apart even as a child. The Sterns were a big family. Had a big house on Long Island. Not rich, but certainly not poor. There was some inherited money, I think.”

Ruth said, “A religious family?”

“Agnostic at best.”

“Because he talked a lot about religion.”

“He had some odd ideas.”

Ruth stubbed out her cigarette and cleared her throat. “Maybe we should talk about those odd ideas,” she said.

The conversation wound into the afternoon. Ruth fed him sandwiches and coffee for lunch. (“Ground coffee from the Pine Street depot. It’s stale, and there’s more than a little chicory in it. But it’s hot.”) And as curfew approached and a new snow dappled the windows, a picture of Stern began to emerge.

Alan Stern, the outsider. The one who stood apart even in childhood. Stern the seeker. His religiosity wasn’t so mysterious, Howard thought. It was not an uncommon motivation among the scientists Howard knew, though few of them would admit it. One of the things that drew people to cosmology was the promise that the universe might yield up a secret or two… maybe even the secret; a glimpse into the hidden order of things.

But the best science is always tentative, a grope into the darkness. “That was never enough for Stern. He wanted more. He was always playing with the grand systems. In his own field, he paid attention to people like Guth and Linde, the fearless theoreticians; or else it was Hegel, Platonism, the Gnostics—”

“Oh, Gnosticism—he loved to talk about Hellenic and Christian Gnosticism. And it was genuinely interesting. I borrowed some of his books…”

“But it wasn’t just a hobby. He saw something in it.”

“Himself,” Ruth said promptly. “He saw himself in it. What would you call the basic Gnostic idea, Howard? I think it’s that there’s a secret world, that it’s hidden from us, but we can find our way to it—or hack to it, because we’re imperfect reflections of perfect souls, embedded in an imperfect world.”

“Cast out from the Pleroma,” Howard supplied. “The World of Light.”

“Yes. The Gnostics said, ‘You can find your way to this, because you’re part of it. You long for it. It’s your original true home.’ ”

Howard pictured Stern as a lonely child, perhaps too aware of his own awkwardness and great intelligence. He must have felt it keenly, that lost imperium from which he had dropped into humble matter.

“And we do live in an unholy world,” Ruth said. “He was always conscious of that. When he watched the news on TV, the wars and the starving children, he looked like he was in pain.”

Howard said, “It became an obsession.”

“Oh, at least.”

“More than that? Ruth, are you questioning his sanity?”

“I don’t want to judge. I knew him for a little more than a year, Howard. We were close. I loved him. Or I thought I did. All I can say is, during that time, he changed. Maybe something at the lab affected him. He started spending more time with his books. He picked up religious arguments everybody else abandoned centuries ago. Worse, he wanted to have these arguments with me.” She held up her hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t have any particular faith in God. I don’t know if evil is a creative force. I worry about, you know, shopping. Or the national debt, if I’m ambitious. Not theology.”

The room was silent for a moment. Howard listened to the ticking of snow on a windowpane. He sipped coffee.

Ruth toyed with her cigarette pack but didn’t light one.

He said, “It’s hard not to make the connection.”

She nodded at once. “I’ve thought of that. It’s a neat little scenario: Stern is obsessed with Gnosticism. He runs the Two Rivers Research Lab. Something happens out there, God knows what, and we’re transplanted into a place where there’s a powerful church that professes a version of Gnostic Christianity.”

“I wasn’t sure you knew about that.”

“I’ve heard the soldiers at the food depot swearing by Samael and Sophia Achamoth. I don’t know the details.”

“If it’s a meaningful connection,” Howard said, “what are we saying? That Stern, somehow, brought us here?”

“Somehow. Yes, that’s the implication. I can’t imagine what it means in practical terms.”

“Whatever happened at the lab may still be happening. There was that incident on Beacon Street.”

“God in a pillar of blue light?”

“God or someone.” Howard hesitated. “You know, I truly thought he would be here. Ruth, I had—I still have—a powerful feeling that Stern is alive.”

“Yes. So do I.”

They regarded one another.

“But if he’s alive,” Ruth said finally, “I don’t know where he can be except at the lab, and I thought the lab had been destroyed.”

Maybe not, Howard thought. He recalled the buildings trapped in light; the luminous forms roaming the old Ojibway land.

Ruth stood up. “Howard, it’s getting late. Things being what they are, you shouldn’t cut it too close to curfew. But before you go, there’s something I want you to see.”

She led him up the stairs to a door at the end of a dim corridor. “It used to be a spare bedroom,” Ruth said. “He made it into his study.”

The door opened on a tiny room crowded with bookcases, the bookcases overflowing with volumes Howard supposed had been his uncle’s. There were physics journals shelved with religious esoterica, philology texts next to photo reproductions of Aramaic codices. Had Stern taught himself to read Aramaic? It was unlikely, Howard thought, but far from impossible.

The room was obviously Stern’s. There was a sweater hanging from the back of the wooden chair that faced an oak desk, an electric typewriter—no computer.

The room even smelled like Stern, a musty echo of pipe tobacco and crumbling paper. Howard felt dizzy with the memories it evoked.

“I never went in here much,” Ruth said. “He didn’t like me to. I didn’t even clean. Even now, I don’t go in here very often. It feels funny. But I’ve looked at a few things.” She picked up a thick bundle of typewritten pages bound with a rubber band. “He left this.”

Howard took the manuscript from her. “What is it?”

“His diary,” she said. “The one he never showed the people at the lab.”

The single word JOURNAL was typed on the top page. Howard regarded it with wide eyes. He said, “Have you read it?”

“Only a little. It’s technical. I don’t understand it.” She looked at him solemnly. “Maybe you will.”