Mysterium

In the hallway she passed the department head, Abraham Valcour, who returned her cold stare with an aloof little smile. There were rumors that Valcour had contacts in the War Department, that some of his field expeditions had carried Commissariat spies as part of their luggage. Linneth had reserved judgment, but not any longer; it was Valcour, she was certain, who had sent the Proctors to her door. She imagined the conversation. Speak to this one. She’s intelligent and malleable, wrote a decent book. He could be maddeningly plausible when he wanted to lie. He had never cared for the idea of a woman in his department, though her academic bona fides had been inarguable. Certainly he had never passed up an opportunity to slight her. This was merely the logical next step, giving her to the Proctors like a choice bone to a kennel full of dogs. No doubt he hoped she wouldn’t be back. Linneth vowed that she would be back, if only to erase his maddening smile.

Two Rivers, she thought. The name of the town that had appeared in the deep forest of northern Mille Lacs was Two Rivers.

The page proofs went to her publisher bound in brown waxed paper and tied with string.

Home, she packed her heaviest clothes. Autumn came early in the northern Near West. Winters, she’ had heard, could be very cruel.

She said good-bye to her secretary and to a few graduate students. There was no one else.

CHAPTER THREE

Classes at John F. Kennedy high school started late that year. It was a miracle, Dex thought, that they had started at all. He gave credit to the principal, Bob Hoskins, and a feisty committee of local parents: they had negotiated an agreement with the Proctors, who probably decided it would be safer keeping restless teenagers penned up during the day than to let them run loose.

The problem (well, one problem, in a sea of trouble) was texts. Like every library in Two Rivers, the school library had been sacked. “Indexed,” the Proctors said. The books had gone out in truckloads last August—not to be burned, it was claimed, but into storage, no doubt into some monkish secret archive, some classified dungeon.

The military consul had even offered new texts, and perhaps that was inevitable, if school went on, but Dex had been appalled by the example he’d been shown: a gilt-edged volume that might have passed for a McGuffey’s Reader of the 1890s, full of crude cautionary verses about the dangers of syphilis and distilled liquor, and fragments of history that seemed dubious even in the context of this weirdly twisted rabbit hole into which the town had fallen: Hews and Heresiarchs, Daniel at Ravensbreuck, What Was Won and Lost at the Fields of Flanders. Handing out such documents to a class raised on Super Mario and the Ninja Turtles was more than Dex liked to imagine.

So he taught his classes informally, as he had always taught them: American history from the Revolution to the First World War. He wrote “chapters” and printed them on an ancient spirit duplicator someone had dragged up from the basement. History, of course, was not what it used to be. Not here. But despite the formidable evidence of the last four months, he could not convince himself that this was meaningless work, that he was communicating to his dwindling classes the folk tales of some lost and impossible dreamland. These events had happened. They were formative, they had consequences: the town of Two Rivers, for instance, and everyone in it.

He was teaching real history. Or so he believed. But his students tended to be listless, and today was no exception; he taught without books, electric lights, a heated classroom, or much enthusiasm; and he was relieved, like everyone else, when the day was over.

He walked home through long shadows. Curfew began at six, but the streets were already deserted. Except for military traffic. Over the last three months Dex had trained himself not to look at the boxy patrol cars. They were always the same, a driver in a black beret and a man with a rifle and fixed bayonet riding next to him, both wearing an expression of bland, bored hostility. It was a kind of face you probably saw a lot of in Honduras or Beijing; it was not a face Dex had ever expected to see in Two Rivers.

But as Dorothy Gale might have observed, he wasn’t in Michigan anymore. He had given up trying to guess what the nature of this place truly was. The only words that applied were words he had learned from The Twilight Zone. “Another dimension.” Whatever that meant.