Mysterium

He spent a day at home with his mother, who was frightened but trying not to show it. They opened cans of Texas-style chili and heated them over wax candles. His mother played the portable radio that night, and for a while there was music, but not anything Clifford or his mother recognized: sad, trilling songs. Then a man’s voice that faded into static.

“I don’t know this station,” his mother said absently. “I don’t know where it’s from.”

∞

In the morning Clifford cycled back to the forest road.

He was there when more planes passed over the town. Bigger planes this time, huge planes, wings bristling with engines. The planes dropped black dots into the June sky: bombs, Clifford thought breathlessly, but the dots grew billowing circles: parachutes, men dangling beneath, a rain of them.

And he heard a rumbling from the earth under his feet, and he ducked into the shadow of the trees and watched terrified from the margin of the road as a column of armored vehicles roared past in choking shrouds of dust and diesel smoke, the men at their helms in black uniform bearing rifles with bayonets, none of them aware of Clifford watching as they broke from the forest into scrub waste and daylight and rumbled over sunlit empty lots to the gray ribbon of Coldwater Road.

CHAPTER TWO

Autumn was wet in Boston that year.

The rain began in mid-September and continued for three weeks without surcease—or so it seemed to Linneth Stone, who had spent most of that time cloistered in the humanities wing of Sethian College, correcting page proofs and double-checking footnotes, pausing at odd moments to watch the rain sluice down the high windows and cascade from the rain gutters and over the casements of the library across the square.

Pagan Cults of Meso-America was the first tangible fruit of her long struggle for tenure. It both consolidated and justified her career. She was proud of the book. She loved the solid look of the typeset words, invested with an authority the manuscript had lacked. But she had been struggling with the book for half a decade, and what she didn’t like to admit was that the work—her life—had begun to border on tedium. Hours of minutiae, days of solitary page-turning, relieved by… nothing much. And the rain went on and on.

It was, in its way, not a bad kind of tedium. Her chamber was cosy enough. She was warm against the weather, and there was coffee from the hallway urn, and the periodic clanking of the radiator, like the complaining of some gruff but dependable old friend. The time passed in neat packets of hours and days. But it was repetitious time, and it was often lonely. Few of the senior academics in her department knew what to make of a woman with tenure, especially a relatively young woman: she had turned thirty-four in August. Young, at least, compared to those bearded venerables who had been haunting the stacks and carrels since the Titans walked the earth. They stared at her the way they might stare at a talking dung beetle, or a chimp that had been trained to smoke cigars.

And each night she hurried home to her tiny apartment on Theodotus Street, through the leaf-tumble and autumn air, past rattling motorcarriages and bored dray horses, from warmth to warmth: the warmth of her hot plate and her quilted blankets. This is success, she told herself. This is my career. This is how I mean to spend the rest of my life.

But each night the memory came of her field expedition three summers ago in the Sierra Mazateca with her guides and two graduate students: a time when she had often been frightened for her life, when she had been dirty, uncomfortable, and too often helpless in the arms of fate. Now she would lie in bed reliving those months. And as terrifying as that time had often been, Linneth thought … it had not been tedious.

Certainly she didn’t want to go back to New Spain. That part of her research was finished. In any case, the entire area was a war zone. But she wondered if the trip had not changed something inside her, had not ignited an unsuspected appetite for—what? Adventure? Surely not. But for something to happen. Another milestone. Something that would matter in her life.

Some nights it was almost a prayer. She remembered her mother murmuring prayers at night: ostensibly to Apollo, since Daddy was a paidonomos in that cult, but more likely to the land around their house in rural New York, away from city lights, where the stars were vivid on summer nights and the forest hummed with life. A prayer to the local gods, who went nameless in the New World, at least since the aboriginals had been exterminated or driven west; whose sybils had fallen silent or never spoken from their meadows. “We live in a breathless place,” Linneth’s mother had once told her. “Without pneuma. No inspiration. No wonder the hierarchs are so powerful here.”