Mysterium

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Evelyn snapped off the radio, resisting by a hair her urge to throw it across the room.

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In the absence of television, Clifford Stockton had spent much of the past three days in the company of his bicycle.

The bicycle was more than transportation. It was his key to the mystery. Clifford was as curious about the events that had overtaken Two Rivers as any adult—maybe more so, since there was no explanation he rejected out of hand. Aliens, monsters, miracles: all fair game as far as Clifford was concerned. He had no theory of his own. He had heard his mother laughing out loud (but nervously) at the idea that angels had been seen flying over the defense plant. Clifford wasn’t keen on the idea of angels himself: he wouldn’t know what to expect from an angel. But he didn’t rule it out. He had tried to get close to the research building on his bike; but the Two Rivers police had posted a car at the access road to turn away the curious, so he couldn’t confirm any of this personally.

He didn’t really care. The defense plant was a long ride by bike. There were mysteries closer to home,.

For instance, the mystery of Coldwater Road. Coldwater Road ran for a couple of miles northeast past the cement factory. It had been zoned for housing, and water and power lines had been installed— there were fireplugs planted like tropical shrubs in the raw earth of empty lots. But no houses had been built. Hardly anyone went out Coldwater Road (except teenagers at night, he had heard), and that was fine with Clifford: he had few friends and quite a few enemies among the kids his age. Clifford was nearsighted and thin, a reader of books and watcher of television. He liked his own company. Out on Coldwater Road he could spend an afternoon in the scrubby fields and patches of woods without much fear of interruption, and that was good.

But since Saturday, Coldwater Road had changed. The grid of vacant lots had been cut in half by what looked to Clifford like an old, old forest. It was a mystery of enormous proportions.

The forest was deep and cool. Its floor was loamy and it smelled moist and pungent. It was both inviting and frightening. Clifford didn’t venture far into that dimness.

Instead, he was fascinated by its perimeter: a straight line bisecting the blank lots, maybe curving a little if you stood at the far end of the cleared land and sighted northeast along the treeline—but only maybe.

Not every tree was intact. Where the white pines crossed the border, they were neatly cut. The cut trees were eerie, Clifford thought. The heartwood was pale green and bled a sticky yellow sap. On one side: green branches thick with needles. On the other: nothing.

He tried to imagine some force that could have enclosed Two Rivers, could have drawn it up from the world like the dough in a cookie cutter and deposited it here, wherever here was: a wilderness.

He had heard the phrase pathless wilderness, and he guessed that was what this was—except, Clifford discovered, it was not entirely pathless.

If you turned left where Coldwater Road ended, if you followed the line of woods past the vacant lots, over scrubland and a small hill (from which he could see the cement factory and, far beyond it, the tangle of culs-de-sac that contained his own house), and if you left your bike behind and persisted through berry canes and wildflowers and high weeds, then you came to a trail.

A trail in the new forest, which approached Two Rivers but ended there, as all the town’s roads ended at the forest.

It was a wide trail where the trees had been cleared and the undergrowth trampled down as if by trucks. A logging road, Clifford would have called it, but maybe it was not that; he made no assumptions.

He walked a few yards down this path, listening to the sway of the pines around him and smelling the moist pungency of moss. It was like stepping into another world. He didn’t go far. He worried that the connection between this forest and Two Rivers might close behind him; that he would turn back and not be able to find his bike, his house, the town; only more trees and more of this primitive road, its source or destination.

Monday, riding home along Coldwater Road, he saw three airplanes pass overhead. Another clue, he thought. He didn’t know much about airplanes, but it was obvious to Clifford that these were old-fashioned. They circled, circled, circled, then veered away.

Somebody’s seen us, he thought. Somebody knows we’re here.

∞