Mysterium

Evelyn began rummaging for lamp oil.

“Don’t,” the lieutenant said. (Symeon.) She put the bottle back on its high shelf and waited for him to explain.

He smiled and went to the dining room table, where there was a military radiotelephone in a scuffed black case. He took up the receiver, cranked the handle, and said a single word: “Now.”

“Symeon?” She was bewildered. “What—?”

And then a remarkable thing happened. The lights came on.

?

Clifford Stockton was in his room when the electricity came back.

He had gone to bed early. He went to bed early most nights. What else was there to do? Under the blankets he was at least warm.

But now the ceiling light winked on—tentatively, at first, as if distant turbines were struggling with the load; then brightly, steadily. And Clifford winced at the sudden glare and wondered whether everything had changed again.

He climbed out of bed and went to the window. Most of the town of Two Rivers was hidden behind the near wall of the Carrasco house next door, but the glow in the sky meant that all the lights were on, including the downtown signs and the big spotlights in the mall parking lot, all reflecting from a shelf of low cloud that had rolled in with sunset. The corner of town Clifford was able to see looked like a constellation of new stars, a handful of fire scattered over the earth beyond Powell Creek Park. He had forgotten the way it looked. It looked like Christmas, Clifford thought.

“Cliffy!” That was his mother’s voice as she hurried up the stairs, choked with excitement. She opened the door of his room and stared wide-eyed at him. “Cliffy, isn’t it wonderful?”

She looked feverish, he thought, her eyes too bright, skin flushed red—or maybe it was just the sudden light. She waved her hand and he followed her downstairs. He was wearing his pajamas. He hadn’t been downstairs in his pajamas in a long time. It hadn’t seemed safe.

She danced through the kitchen, opened the microwave oven to see the light come on, ran a finger along the gleaming white enamel of the refrigerator. “Coffee!” she said. “I think we have some left. Stale, but who cares? Cliffy, I’m making a pot of coffee!”

“Great,” he said. “Can I watch TV?”

“TV! Yes! Yes! Turn it on!” Then, a soberer thought: “It probably won’t get any stations, though. I don’t think we’re really back home. I think they just hooked up the electricity.”

“We could watch a tape,” Clifford said.

“God, yes! Play a tape! Turn it up loud!”

“What should I play?”

“Anything! Anything!”

He took a dusty tape from the top of the stack by the TV, untouched for months. No label. He plugged it in.

It was the last thing his mother had recorded, and it was nothing special, a Friday installment of The Tonight Show she had meant to watch Saturday morning, back in June.

The theme music startled him. It sounded amazingly realistic. He was afraid someone outside the house might hear it—but that was stupid. All over town, people must be playing videotapes or records or CDs or whatever noisy thing they felt like.

The colors on TV were supernaturally vivid. Clifford sat mesmerized by the screen. He didn’t listen to the talk, just relished the sound of the voices. It was all so boisterous, so carelessly happy.

The sound of the TV was like Christmas in a box, and Clifford didn’t understand why it made his mother cry.

?

Evelyn wore her new dress upstairs and looked at herself in the standing mirror.

She liked the way the new light reflected from the peaks and shadowy valleys of the cloth.

“It looks very well,” Symeon said. Not good or nice but well. She liked the way he talked. He was very courteous. Very old-world.

“Thank you.” She tried to sound demure, not too brazen. “I feel like I haven’t thanked you enough.”

“The dress,” Symeon said. His smile was enigmatic, his eyes obscure.

She said, “The dress—?”

“Take it off.”

“You’ll have to help me with the stays.”

“Of course.”

His hands were large but deft.

CHAPTER FIVE

Linneth Stone followed Dex to the high school and sat at the back of his morning classes, flanked by the sullen Proctors in their brown woolen uniforms. (She called them pions—according to Dex’s French-English dictionary, a “checker” or “pawn,” but she used the word respectfully.) For two days Dex discussed the Civil War while this petite woman in Victorian dress took notes and methodically filed them in a calfskin binder. Each day, attention in the classroom migrated away from Dex and toward these apparitions seated at the rear.

Dex had hoped the situation would improve now that electrical power had been restored, but it didn’t; the fluorescent ceiling lights only made her presence seem more exotic. Today, at lunch, he told her so.

They sat in the staff cafeteria. There was no hot food, but the artificial light dispelled some of the gloom of the cavernous space. Dex had brought a bag lunch. Linneth, flanked by her guards, sat without eating and listened to his complaints.

“I understand the problem,” she said. “I didn’t mean to create a distraction.”

“You have, though. And that isn’t the only problem. It’s not clear to me what you’re hoping to achieve here. Obviously,” a nod at the Proctors, “I can’t stop you from sitting in on classes. But I’d like to know what the purpose of it is.”

She paused a moment, her expression angelic and distracted, collecting her thoughts. “Only to learn from you. Nothing more sinister. To study Two Rivers and-—I don’t know what to call it—the place Two Rivers came from. Your Plenum.”

“All right, but to what end? If I cooperate, who am I helping?”

“You’re helping me. But I see what you mean. Mr. Graham, it’s really very simple. I was asked to write a social study of the town—”

“Asked by whom?”

“The Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse. The Proctors. But please remember, I’m a contract employee. I work for the Bureau but I don’t represent the Bureau, not directly. There are several of us in town, civilian workers I mean, mainly academics. For instance, there is a surveyor, an electrical engineer, a documentary photographer, a medical doctor—”

“Each one writing a report?”

“You pose the question with too much malice. If the circumstances were reversed, Mr. Graham, if one of our villages had appeared in your world, wouldn’t your government do the same thing? Compile records, try to understand the miracle that had happened?”

“People have died here. In good conscience, I don’t know if I can cooperate.”

“I can’t speak for your conscience. I can only say that my work isn’t harmful.”