Mysterium

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Linneth was numb with fright.

  He said, “Come in, Miss Stone. Though you hardly need an invitation into your own home. I know this is unexpected. I apologize.”

  She didn’t want to come in. She wanted to bolt. She wanted to run back out into the rainy dark. But she drew a ragged breath and put her raincoat in the closet and stepped into the light of her floor lamp, a sculptured wooden electric lamp which was the nicest of her meager furnishings, but which she hated now, because this man had touched it.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the Proctor said.

  She almost laughed.

  He said, “You are Linneth Stone—are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then sit down. I haven’t come to arrest you.”

  She sat on the edge of her reading chair, as far from the Proctor as possible. Her racing heart had begun to recover its pace, but her body was on full alert. She felt keenly attentive. The room seemed terribly bright, wholly electric.

  “My name is Demarch.” She looked at his pips. He added, “Lieutenant,” pronouncing it the European way, as Proctors did. “Please relax, Miss Stone. I’m here for a consultation. Your department head said you were the person to speak to.”

  So the Bureau had already talked to faculty. This was serious. Demarch wasn’t here to arrest her, he claimed, but who could believe a Proctor?

  She remembered the last time the Proctors had come to her door. Her mother had answered. Linneth had not seen her mother again.

  And there were other stories, always new stories, the knock at the door, the disappeared colleague. Academics had been under scrutiny ever since the Alien and Sedition laws were enacted. With her family background, she could hardly be an exception.

  Demarch hadn’t paid her the courtesy of knocking. He could have come to see her at her office if it was a consultation he wanted. But she supposed a Proctor wouldn’t do that. They were too accustomed to intimidation. It was their way of life, so familiar as to be invisible.

  She said, “Is this about my book?”

  “Pagan Cults of Middle America?”

  “Meso,” she said. “Meso-America. Not ‘middle.’ ”

  The Proctor smiled again. “You’ve spent too much time proofreading. Meso-America. I’ve read the manuscript. Your publishers have been cooperative. It’s a fine scholarly work, insofar as I can judge. The Ideological Branch gave it careful attention, of course. Disseminating falsehoods anti-religio is still a felony. But we do try to be reasonable. Science is science. You don’t strike me as a subversive.”

  “Thank you. Comparative ethnology isn’t advocative. There have been court cases—”

  “I know. This isn’t about your book, in any case, though the book is what qualifies you. We want you to do some work for the Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse.”

  “I have my own work.”

  “Nothing that can’t wait. We’ve arranged a sabbatical—if you choose to take it.”

  “My book—”

  “You must be nearly finished with the proofs.”

  She didn’t deny it. Demarch would know all this. There was a saying: God sees the sparrow fall. The Bureau takes notes.

  He said, “We’ll need you for six months—possibly as much as a year.”

  She was aghast. It was too big an idea to swallow: the Bureau wanted her to work for them, to go away for six months, interrupt her life, such as it was. . . . “For what?”

  “To practice the science of ethnology,” Demarch said. “The thing you’re good at.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It isn’t simple to explain.”

  “I’m not sure I want an explanation. You said I had a choice? I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “I understand. I sympathize, Miss Stone, believe it or not. If it were up to me, I would leave it at that. But I don’t think the Bureau as a whole would be happy with your decision.”

  “But if I have a choice—”

  “You do. So do my superiors. They have the choice of putting in a word with your publishers, say, or talking to the chancellor about your academic qualifications in light of your family history.” He saw her expression and held up his hands. “I won’t say any of this is inevitable. Only that you run a risk if you refuse to cooperate.”

  She didn’t answer, couldn’t find words to answer.

  He added, “We’re not talking about manual labor on some penal farm. This is the work you’re trained to do, after all, and only six months out of a long career. It’s much less than some people have been asked to give up for their country.”

  Please, Linneth thought, don’t start talking about the war, the noble dead. It would be too much. But Demarch seemed to sense her reaction. He fell silent, his eyes fixed on her.

  She said, “What would the Bureau want with an ethnologist?” A woman, at that, she did not add. It seemed out of character.

  “Basically, we want you to write an analysis of a foreign village—its mores and taboos, something of its history.”

  “In six months?”

  “A sketch, not a thesis.”

  “Isn’t that the kind of thing you can look up in a book?”

  “Not in this case, no.”

  “I would be working from the field?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?” It was something to do with the war, she guessed. New Spain, almost certainly.

  Demarch said, “You agree to cooperate?”

  “Rather than losing tenure? Facing a felony charge or some secret trial?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “Under the circumstances, what can I say?”

  Demarch had stopped smiling. “You can say, ‘I agree.’ ”

  The words. He actually wanted the words.

  Linneth gave him a long, defiant look. Demarch didn’t acknowledge it, only gazed passively back. His uniform was crisp and neat and somehow more intimidating because of it. Her own rain-wet clothing smelled of damp wool and defeat.

  She lowered her head. “I agree,” she whispered.

  “Pardon me?” His voice was neutral.

  “I agree.”

  “Yes.” He reached for his attaché case. “Then let me show you some extraordinary photographs.”

  She was allowed three days to finish her corrections to the page proofs. Linneth paid scrupulous attention to the work, using it to blot out of her mind the story Lieutenant Demarch had told her. Even after she had seen the photos (the strange town so seemingly real, the shopfronts displaying impossible goods, the signs in a language only approximately English), she still half-believed that it was a hoax, some elaborate ruse the Bureau had devised to trick her into confessing—well, something, anything; that she would end up in prison after all.

  In the hallway she passed the department head, Abraham Valcour, who returned her cold stare with an aloof little smile. There were rumors that Valcour had contacts in the War Department, that some of his field expeditions had carried Commissariat spies as part of their luggage. Linneth had reserved judgment, but not any longer; it was Valcour, she was certain, who had sent the Proctors to her door. She imagined the conversation. Speak to this one. She’s intelligent and malleable, wrote a decent book. He could be maddeningly plausible when he wanted to lie. He had never cared for the idea of a woman in his department, though her academic bona fides had been inarguable. Certainly he had never passed up an opportunity to slight her. This was merely the logical next step, giving her to the Proctors like a choice bone to a kennel full of dogs. No doubt he hoped she wouldn’t be back. Linneth vowed that she would be back, if only to erase his maddening smile.

  Two Rivers, she thought. The name of the town that had appeared in the deep forest of northern Mille Lacs was Two Rivers.

  The page proofs went to her publisher bound in brown waxed paper and tied with string.

  Home, she packed her heaviest clothes. Autumn came early in the northern Near West. Winters, she had heard, could be very cruel.
r />   She said good-bye to her secretary and to a few graduate students. There was no one else.

  CHAPTER 3

  Classes at John F. Kennedy High School started late that year. It was a miracle, Dex thought, that they had started at all. He gave credit to the principal, Bob Hoskins, and a feisty committee of local parents: they had negotiated an agreement with the Proctors, who probably decided it would be safer keeping restless teenagers penned up during the day than to let them run loose.

  The problem (well, one problem, in a sea of trouble) was texts. Like every library in Two Rivers, the school library had been sacked. “Indexed,” the Proctors said. The books had gone out in truckloads last August—not to be burned, it was claimed, but into storage, no doubt into some monkish secret archive, some classified dungeon.

  The military consul had even offered new texts, and perhaps that was inevitable, if school went on, but Dex had been appalled by the example he’d been shown: a gilt-edged volume that might have passed for a McGuffey’s Reader of the 1890s, full of crude cautionary verses about the dangers of syphilis and distilled liquor, and fragments of history that seemed dubious even in the context of this weirdly twisted rabbit hole into which the town had fallen: Heros and Heresiarchs, Daniel at Ravensbreuck, What Was Won and Lost at the Fields of Flanders. Handing out such documents to a class raised on Super Mario and the Ninja Turtles was more than Dex liked to imagine.

  So he taught his classes informally, as he had always taught them: American history from the Revolution to the First World War. He wrote “chapters” and printed them on an ancient spirit duplicator someone had dragged up from the basement. History, of course, was not what it used to be. Not here. But despite the formidable evidence of the last four months, he could not convince himself that this was meaningless work, that he was communicating to his dwindling classes the folk tales of some lost and impossible dreamland. These events had happened. They were formative, they had consequences: the town of Two Rivers, for instance, and everyone in it.

  He was teaching real history. Or so he believed. But his students tended to be listless, and today was no exception; he taught without books, electric lights, a heated classroom, or much enthusiasm; and he was relieved, like everyone else, when the day was over.

  He walked home through long shadows. Curfew began at six, but the streets were already deserted. Except for military traffic. Over the last three months Dex had trained himself not to look at the boxy patrol cars. They were always the same, a driver in a black beret and a man with a rifle and fixed bayonet riding next to him, both wearing an expression of bland, bored hostility. It was a kind of face you probably saw a lot of in Honduras or Beijing; it was not a face Dex had ever expected to see in Two Rivers.

  But as Dorothy Gale might have observed, he wasn’t in Michigan anymore. He had given up trying to guess what the nature of this place truly was. The only words that applied were words he had learned from The Twilight Zone. “Another dimension.” Whatever that meant.

  He climbed the stairs to his apartment. The front room was as dim and cold as it had been all this autumn. The military were supposed to be running in a high-voltage line from the south, but he’d believe that when he saw it. In the meantime it was cold, and the winter would be much colder. Deadly, unless arrangements were made.

  His sofa bed was open and tangled with blankets—every blanket he owned. In that brief impossible time last June, between the accident and the military occupation, he had been clever enough to buy a hurricane lantern and a supply of lamp oil. The lamp gave him an extra half hour or so of light each evening. Enough to read by. The Proctors hadn’t confiscated every book in town; there were still personal libraries, including his own seven shelves of paperbacks. He was rereading Mark Twain, a bracing exercise under the circumstances.

  He ate cold soup out of the can. The Proctors had distributed “ration coupons” mimeographed on rag paper; you redeemed them for food at the dispensary in the IGA parking lot. Dex had used up his coupons early in the week but was sparing with the nonperishable items. Water came from a truck in front of City Hall: you lined up with your old milk jug or a camping thermos or whatever container was handy. The wait was generally about an hour, and the water tasted of gasoline.

  He had not had a hot shower since June. It was possible, Dex had established, to keep himself clean with a cloth rag and a little soap and a jug of water at room temperature, but there was no pleasure in it. He had begun to dream about showers.

  He read by the fading daylight until it was too dark, then put the book aside and watched nightfall through his narrow window. A rack of cloud had moved in and the wind was gusting. The street was full of tumbling leaves. Nobody had raked or burned their leaves this year. The town seemed tatty, seemed gone to seed.

  Tonight he didn’t light the hurricane lamp. When the room was dark, when the streets were dark, he changed into a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and a navy blue overcoat. He put a can of soup in one pocket, two cans of orange soda in the other. After a moment’s thought, he added a bottle of aspirin.

  In Dex’s experience, everybody obeyed the curfew. There had been a few exceptions. In July, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Seagram had been shot when he tried to cross town after dark to visit his girlfriend. The body had been on display in the City Hall courtyard for three ghastly days.

  The patrols had eased somewhat since then, but Dex was still careful stepping out the front door of his building into the windy street.

  The wind was an asset. The tossing of the trees, the rattle of all these dry leaves, disguised any sound he was likely to make. There were no streetlights, only the occasional flicker of candlelight from curtained windows; that was good, too. He followed a line of hedges to Beacon Road and took a good long look before jogging across the intersection to the corner of Powell Creek Park. The park was fine cover but hazardous in the cloudy dark. He followed the faint shine of a footpath.

  He ducked behind a willow tree as a military patrol rounded the corner from Oak behind the lightless brick primary school, tires crackling on dry leaf. The soldier in the shotgun seat scanned the sidewalks with a high-intensity lamp. Dex crouched motionless, taking shallow breaths until the engine sound and the flickering light faded.

  Then he crossed the street to a small wood-frame house, over a lawn grown wild, to the back, down a short span of concrete steps to a basement door. He had memorized the route; in the dark he could see almost nothing. A tree hissed in the black space of the yard. Drops of rain spattered his coat and the air on his lips was cold and moist.

  He opened the door without knocking. When it was firmly closed behind him, he struck a match and touched it to the wick of a candle.

  This basement room was windowless. The floor was concrete. There were stacks of blankets, food cans (most empty), a few books, a Primus stove.

  There was a mattress on the floor; and on the mattress, Howard Poole. His eyes were closed, his forehead beaded with sweat.

  Dex sighed and emptied cans from the pockets of his coat. At the sound, Howard turned his head and looked up.

  “Just me,” Dex said.

  The younger man nodded. “Thirsty,” he said.

  Dex popped a can of soda and pressed two aspirin into Howard’s hand. The hand was hot, but maybe not as hot as it had been yesterday.

  Howard was suffering from a flu that had been threatening to turn into pneumonia. Dex believed the crisis had passed, but nothing was certain anymore.

  Howard turned his wristwatch to catch the candlelight, then sat up in a slow, pained motion. “It’s after curfew.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Kind of risky, coming here.”

  “I didn’t want to be followed.”

  “You thought you might be?”

  “A couple of Proctors came to the door this morning. They know your name, they know you worked at the plant, and they know you were rooming at Evelyn’s. They were civilized. No pushing. But a guy followed me to work. I thought it woul
d be better to come here in the dark.”

  “Jesus.” Howard rolled to one side.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds. I didn’t get the feeling they were hunting you down—just putting some hooks in the water.”

  Howard sighed. He looked tired of it all, Dex thought: worn out by the sickness, the cold, the hiding.

  It was not more than ten days after the tanks rolled into Two Rivers that the military had announced their desire to interview employees of the Two Rivers Physical Research Lab. Howard had refrained from volunteering. Then a lieutenant of the Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse, a man named Symeon Demarch, took over Evelyn’s bed-and-breakfast and turned it into his headquarters. And Howard had gone into hiding.

  The house they were in was ostensibly empty. It had belonged to Paul Cantwell, a CPA who had been in Florida with his family when the accident happened.

  Howard had lifted an expired Michigan driver’s license from a desk upstairs and used it to pass as Paul Cantwell at the ration lineups. When he came down with the flu (some variant germ that rode in with the tanks: half the people in town had caught it), Dex used the ID to pick up double rations—a risky business, since hoarding was a punishable offense and ID fraud a capital crime under military law.

  Howard said vaguely, “I was having a dream when you came in. Something about Stern. He was in a building, a building all covered with jewels. But I don’t remember . . .” The words trailed off.

  Stern again, Dex thought. Since the fever set in, Howard had often talked about his uncle Alan Stern—who had been the moving force behind the Two Rivers Physical Research Lab; who had died, presumably, in the accident. The fever seemed to have revived him in Howard’s mind.

  “A woman,” Howard said faintly, deliriously. “A woman answered the phone.”

  Dex opened a can of soup and put a spoon into the younger man’s hand. Howard’s fingers closed on it in a spasm that was almost reflexive.

  “When I phoned him in Two Rivers,” Howard was saying. “A woman . . .”