Mysterium

Days Inn on the highway, midway between Two Rivers and the ruins of the Physical Research Laboratory—not far from here.

Howard had pored over a map of the town in the days before the tanks came, and he had a good memory for maps; but these curving roads and culs-de-sac confused him. By the time he found an obscure and plausible way east—following a line of electrical towers where the trees and scrub had been cut back—it was nearly curfew.

He had planned for that. He crossed the highway where it met Boundary Road and followed it a quarter mile north, staying close to the drainage ditch on the left. The shadows were already very long. There were no houses out here, nothing but junk maples and the occasional crumbling gas station. He reached his first objective before dark: a tiny bait and camping gear shop close to the border of the old Ojibway reserve.

He had stopped here with Dex Graham last June. Dex had bought a map and a compass, both long since lost. The store was a tar paper shack with a shingle out front. Uninhabited, as Howard had supposed it would be.

He took a long look up and down the highway. He listened for a time. There was no sound but the rattle of a solitary cricket in the chilly dusk.

A fat, rust-red padlock protected the front door. Howard picked his way through a scatter of bald tires, past the rusting hulk of a ’79 Mercury Cougar to the rear door. This door was also padlocked, but one brisk tug separated the latch from the rotting wood of the frame.

A powerful stench wafted out of the dark interior. Howard hesitated, repulsed. Then he thought: The bait. Jesus! There had been two big freezers full of herring roe and dew worms in here. Over the summer the contents must have fermented.

He stepped inside, breathing through his mouth. The only light was the last blue of the sky through a dusty window. Howard moved cautiously down an aisle of bulk goods.

He selected three items: a frame backpack, a double-insulated sleeping bag, and a one-man tent.

He carried them outside and paused to take three cleansing gasps of air.

Then he stuffed the folded tent into the backpack and tied the sleeping roll underneath. He shouldered the pack and adjusted its straps on his shoulders. Then he walked north along the highway until he found a trail into the woods.

The trail was mossy and overgrown but seemed to take him in approximately the right direction. He walked for twenty minutes into the wooded Ojibway land; then it was too dark to go any farther.

He pitched his tent on stony soil and managed to cover it with a nylon fly as the last light faded. Finally he tossed his bedroll inside and climbed in after it.

It would be cold tonight. Maybe cold enough to snow if the clouds thickened. October snow, he thought. He remembered early snowfalls in New York: those brittle, small flakes. Groundwater frozen into crusts of ice, old leaves crisp as dry paper.

He had chosen the sleeping bag blindly, but it was a good one, a winter bag. He was warm inside it. He had walked a long way, and he fell asleep before the last light was gone from the sky.

?

The dream came as it had come every night for weeks, less a dream than a recurring image that had insinuated itself into his sleep.

It was an image of his uncle, of Alan Stern, but not as Howard remembered him: this Alan Stern was emaciated and translucent, naked, his back to Howard and his spine cruelly visible under the faint, taut flesh.

In the dream he knew that his uncle was bound or connected to an egg of light larger than himself. Howard thought it looked like a nuclear explosion captured by a still camera as the shock wave began to expand, a static moment between nanoseconds of destruction; and Stern was either held by it or holding it, or, somehow, both.

He turned his head to look at Howard. His thin face seemed unutterably ancient, wizened under a wild rabbinical beard. His expression was a combination of agonizing pain and a fierce preoccupation.

Stern, Howard tried to say. I’m here.

But no sound came, and nothing registered on his uncle’s tortured face.

?

Maya, Stern used to tell him. A Hindu word: it meant the world as illusion, reality as a veil of deception. “You have to look behind the maya. That’s your duty as a scientist.”

It came naturally to Stern. For Howard, it was much more difficult.

One summer on a beach in Atlantic City, family vacation: Stern picked up a stone and gave it to Howard and said, “Look at it.”

It was an ancient pebble polished by the sea. Smooth as glass, green as the shadows under water, shot through with veins of rusty red. The pebble was warm where the sun had been on it. Underneath, it was cool in his hand.

“It’s pretty,” Howard had said, idiotically.

Stern shook his head: “Forget pretty. That’s this stone. You have to abstract its essence. Learn to hate the particular, Howard. Love the general. Don’t say ‘pretty.’ Look harder. Gypsum, calcite, quartz? Those are the questions you have to ask. Pretty is maya. ‘Pretty’ is the stupid man’s answer.”

Yes. But he didn’t have Stern’s razor intellect. He put the stone in his pocket. He liked it. Its particular color. Its coolness, its warmth.

?

Howard woke in the deep of the night.

He knew at once it was late—well past midnight, still a long time before morning. He felt breathless and weak in the grip of the sleeping bag. He had slept with his left arm bent under his body and the arm was numb, a useless weight of tissue. But he didn’t move.

Something had woken him.

Howard had gone camping once before, a week-long expedition in the Smoky Mountains with his parents. He knew there were noises in the forest and that any odd sound was liable to wake a sleeper in the dark. He told himself there was nothing to be afraid of: the only real danger was from the soldiers, and they were hardly likely to be out in the woods at this hour.

Still, he was afraid of what he might have heard or sensed, the fear like a door that had opened in some deep chamber of his body. He gazed into the darkness of the tent. There was nothing to see. Nothing to hear, either, except the rattle of wind in the trees. Branches groaning in the cold. It was cold outside. The air was cold in his nostrils.

There was nothing out there, Howard told himself, except maybe a raccoon or a skunk wandering through the brush.

He shifted onto his back and let the blood pump into his dead arm. The pain was at least a distraction. He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them again. Sleep was suddenly closer than he would have guessed possible, cutting through his anxiety like a narcotic. He took a deep, shuddering breath that was almost a yawn.

Then he opened his eyes, one last blink of reassurance, and saw the light.

It was a diffuse light that threw the shadows of trees onto the skin of the tent. The light was dim at first, then brighter. The sun, Howard thought dazedly. It must be dawn.

But the light was moving too quickly to be the sun. Tree shadows glided over the fabric above him like marching figures. The light, or its source, was traveling through the forest.

He reached for his eyeglasses and couldn’t find them. He was blind without his glasses. He remembered folding them and laying them down somewhere on the floor of the tent—but which side? He had been sleepy; the memory was dim. He swept his hand in panicky circles. Maybe he had rolled over on them; maybe, God help him,