Mysterium

Rivers? Some kind of power surge, he supposed, or maybe a dead short across those kilovolt lines that had gone in last year. But he had never seen anything like it in his career, that was for sure.

They were quickly out of the crowded part of town, three miles down the highway and then east along the wide dirt road. All the federal money pouring in, couldn’t they have paved the access? Haldane’s kidneys protested this rattling. The woods were dense here, and although he saw the plume of smoke now and again, there was no clear line of sight to the plant itself until the road crossed a ridgeline overlooking the site.

He topped the rise and stood on the brake too hard. Even so, he only just managed to avoid ramming the rear end of the ladder unit. Who was driving? Tom Stubbs, as he recalled. Stubbs, too, was probably transfixed by what he was suddenly able to see.

The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory was a nucleus of low concrete bunkers in an asphalt-paved flatland where the old social hall used to be. At the extreme north of this paved space stood a tall administration building; at the south, a residence that looked like a stucco apartment complex misplaced from some L.A. suburb.

Two of the bunkerlike buildings had been damaged in some kind of explosion. The walls were blackened and the roofs were in a state of partial collapse. From the most central and badly damaged structure, that pall of oily smoke curled into the sky. No open flame was visible.

But that wasn’t the astonishing thing. The astonishing thing, Chief Haldane thought, was the way all of this property was enclosed in a veil of diaphanous blue light.

A few years ago Haldane had taken his vacation time in northern Ontario, along with two guys from the fire hall and a realtor from the west side of town. They went fly fishing in the lake country north of Superior, and for a solid week they had achieved a nearly ideal balance of sport, intoxication, and masculine bullshit. But what Haldane remembered best was a chilly, clear night when he looked up into a sky jammed with stars and saw the aurora borealis dancing on the horizon.

It was this same kind of light. Same elusive haze of color, now here, now there. He had never expected to see it in daylight. Certainly he had never expected to see it enfolding this collection of bunkers and brickwork like some kind of science fiction force field.

It was a smoky, uncertain light. Mostly you could see through it, but it obscured a detail here and there. And Haldane noticed another peculiarity: the longer you stared at something inside that glow, the less you seemed to see of it. He fixed his eyes on the burning building, perhaps a thousand yards down this hill and across the asphalt. It wavered in his sight. After ten seconds, he might have been staring at a blank scrim of color.

He shook his head to clear it.

The radio crackled. It was Stubbs, calling from the truck ahead. Haldane picked up the microphone and said, “You scared the piss out of me, I hope you’re aware of that.”

Stubbs’s voice came crackling out of a deep well of static. He sounded like he was miles away, not a couple of yards. “Chief, what the hell is that? What do we do, turn back?”

“I don’t see anybody fighting the fire.”

“Maybe we should wait for the state cops or somebody.”

“Grow some balls, Tom. Take your foot off the brake.”

The ladder company inched forward.

?

Clifford Stockton, twelve years old, spotted the smoke about the same time Chief Haldane did.

Clifford, who was still called “Cliffy” by his mother and a mob of aunts, saw the smoke from his bedroom window. He stood in his pajamas watching it for a while, not sure whether it was important. He wanted it to be some dire omen, as in the disaster movies he loved—like the flaky pressure gauge nobody notices in The Last Voyage, or the snowstorm that just won’t quit in the first Airport movie.

It was a great beginning for Clifford’s Saturday, cue for any number of Clifford-scripts. He began orchestrating the movie in his head. “Little did anyone suspect,” he said out loud. Little did anyone suspect… what? But he hadn’t figured that out yet.

His mother always slept late Saturday. Clifford pulled on yesterday’s jeans and the first T-shirt in his T-shirt drawer, cleaned his foggy glasses with a Kleenex, and went downstairs to watch TV. Whereupon he discovered the electricity didn’t work. Not just in the living room, either, but in the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom. And for the first time Clifford paused and wondered if it was possible, not in the world of wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if but in the real dailiness of his life … if something really weird might actually be happening.

He remembered being awakened by lightning, a diffuse lightning without thunder; remembered drifting in and out of a confused sleep with light all around him.

He decided to check on his mother. He padded back to the dim upstairs of their rented house and eased open her bedroom door. Clifford’s mother was a thin and not very beautiful woman of thirty-seven years, but he had never looked at her critically and he didn’t do so now. She was only his mother, dangerous if awakened too soon from her Saturday morning sleep-in.

Saturday morning drill was that she was allowed to sleep till ten o’clock, and if Clifford was up early he could do whatever he wanted—get his own breakfast, watch TV, play outside the house if he left a note and was back by noon for lunch. Today was different, obviously, but he guessed the rules still applied. He wrote her a message—I have gone to ride my bike—and stuck it to the refrigerator with a strawberry-shaped magnet.

Then he hurried outside, locked the door, grabbed his bike and pedaled south toward the bridge over Powell Creek.

He was looking for clues. There was a fire on the old Ojibway reserve and the lights didn’t work. A mystery.

Two Rivers seemed too quiet to yield any answers. Then, as he crossed the creek and rolled toward downtown, Clifford wondered if the very quietness was itself a clue. No one was mowing his lawn or washing the car. Houses brooded with their drapes still drawn. The sun shimmered on an empty road.

He heard the sirens when the fire engines went screaming along Beacon and out of town.

It was, he thought, almost too much like a movie.

He stopped at Ryan’s, a corner grocery that had been taken over last year by a Korean family named Sung. Mrs. Sung was behind the counter—a small, round woman with her eyes buried in nets of wrinkles.

Clifford bought a candy bar and a comic book with the money from yesterday’s allowance. Mrs. Sung took his money and made change from a shoebox: “Machine not working,” she said, meaning the cash register.

“How come?” Clifford said. “Do you know?” She only shrugged and frowned.

Clifford rode away. He stopped at the public park overlooking Powell Creek to eat the candy bar. Breakfast. He chose a sunny patch of grass where he could see the north end of town. The town was waking up, but in a slow, lazy way. A few more cars were prowling the streets. More shops had opened their doors. The distant plume of smoke continued to rise, but it was unhurried and unchanged.

Clifford crumpled the paper candy bar wrapper and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. He took the cardboard liner down to the creek and let it float away. It tumbled over a rock and capsized. It was the Titanic in A Night to Remember. The unsinkable ship.

He climbed the embankment and looked again at Two Rivers—the town where nothing much ever happened.

The unsinkable town.

He checked his watch. Twenty after eleven. He rode home, wondering whether his mother was up and had found the note; she might be worried, he thought. He dropped the bike in the driveway and hurried inside.

But she was only just awake, tangle-haired in her pink bathrobe and fumbling over the coffee maker.

“Damn thing doesn’t work,” she said. “Oh, hello, Cliffy.”

?

Between breakfast and lunch, Dex Graham formulated the same idea as Clifford Stockton: he would go out