Mysterium

He didn’t want to see anyone, didn’t want to speak to anyone. What mattered was that he was beyond the border of blue light, that he had found his way back into the world of sanity. His relief was immense. He took deep, cleansing gulps of air. Pretty soon he would be back in his sane house in the sane town of Two Rivers and this nightmare would be over. All these buildings could burn to the ground as far as he was concerned—the better if they did.

“Chief?”

He spat on the ground to clear the taste of puke from his mouth. Then he looked up. Standing before him in blue jeans and a pressed cotton shirt was a civilian, presumably the man from the automobile— more like a boy, though, Haldane thought, with his pink skin and his bug-eye glasses. Haldane didn’t speak, only waited for this apparition to justify its presence.

“I’m Howard Poole,” the civilian said. “I work at the facility. Or I was supposed to—I would be, if this hadn’t happened. I came because I thought, if you were fighting the fire, you might not know—there might be some radioactivity in there, some particulate matter in the smoke.”

Poole seemed exquisitely uneasy. “Particulate matter,” Haldane said. “Well, thank you, Mr. Poole, but I don’t believe particulate matter is our problem right now.”

“I saw you turn back.”

“Yessir,” Haldane said. “That we did.”

“May I ask why?”

Some of the firefighters had shaken off their queasiness and gathered behind Poole. Chris Shank was there, and Tom Stubbs, both looking demoralized and numb under their helmets and scuffed turnout coats. Haldane said, “You work here, you know more about it than me.”

Poole said, “No—I don’t understand any of this.”

“It’s like we crossed a line,” Chris Shank volunteered. Good old Chris, Haldane thought, never failed to open his mouth when he could just as well keep it shut. “We were heading down to size up the hazard, and it was weird, you know, with all this light and everything, but then we crossed some kind of line and suddenly it was—I mean, you couldn’t tell where you were going or coming from.” He shook his head.

“There are things in there,” Tom Stubbs added.

Haldane frowned. That had been his own perception, true enough. Things in there. But he hadn’t wanted to come out and say it. From here, the space between himself and the defense plant looked empty. Odd, in some shimmery way, but clearly deserted. So he had seen… what? A hallucination?

But Chris Shank was nodding vigorously. “That’s it,” he said. “I saw…”

“Tell the man,” Haldane said. If they were going to talk about this, they might as well speak plainly.

Shank lowered his head. Awe and shame played over his face like light and shadow.

“Angels,” he said finally. “That’s what I saw in there. All kinds of angels.”

Haldane stared at him.

Tom Stubbs was shaking his head vigorously. “Not angels! Nossir! Mister, it was Jesus Christ Himself in there!”

Poole glanced between the two men without comprehension, and the Saturday silence seemed louder now. A crow screeched in the still air.

“You’re both fucked up,” Chief Haldane said.

He looked back into the no-man’s-land of the research facility, so thick with light that it seemed as if a piece of the sky had fallen onto it. He knew what he’d seen. It was quite clear in his mind, despite the nausea, the sense of no-direction that had overtaken him. He remembered it. He remembered it vividly. He would remember it forever.

He said, “There’s no angels in there, and there sure as hell ain’t Jesus Christ. The only thing in there is monsters.”

“Monsters?” Poole said.

Haldane spat into the dry earth a second time, weary of all this. “You heard me.”

∞

What spread through the town that day was not panic but a deep, abiding unease. Rumors passed from backyard to main street to gatepost. By sunset, everyone had heard about the miraculous barricades of virgin forest north and south on the highway. Several had also heard about Chris Shank’s assertion that there were angels flying around the Two Rivers Physical Research. Laboratory. Some few even gave credence to Tom Stubbs’s claim that it was the Second Coming; that Jesus Christ, two hundred fifty feet tall and dressed in Resurrection white, was about to come striding into town—a point of view condemned Sunday morning at nearly every church service in town. That Sunday, all the churches were full.

The weekend rolled on without electrical power, phone service, or adequate explanation. Most people stayed near their families and told each other it would all come clear soon, that the lights would flicker back and the TV would make sense of things. Food stocks began to run low at the few grocery stores open for business. The big supermarket at the Riverview Mall remained closed, and without power for refrigeration, some said, it was just as well—after two days of warm spring weather it must stink like sin in there.