Mysterium

He stood a long time looking at the gantry and the enclosure above it, which might contain the bomb itself, so much destruction to fit in a simple steel box. He half hoped the explosion would happen now; that it would carry him away in one white-hot instant.

But it didn’t.

He thought of the town and all the people in it, all with no future. Including his mother—himself.

Then, suddenly tired, he turned and” headed for home.

∞

Shortly before curfew, he knocked at Howard Poole’s door and told him what he had seen. But Howard had already heard about the bomb.

Clifford said, “Are you still trying to save the town?”

“In my own way.”

“Maybe not much time left,” Clifford said. “Maybe not.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” Then, after a silence, “Or maybe there is. Clifford, this radio scanner.” Howard took it from a kitchen cupboard. “I want you to take it to someone. Dex Graham. I’ll write down his address. Take it to him and show him how it works.”

“Dex Graham,” Clifford repeated.

“And tell him how you and I met. Tell him you need to get out of town, and tell him I said he would help. Can you remember that?”

“Sure,” Clifford said. The prospect of leaving Two Rivers intrigued him; he had not thought it was possible. “But what about you?”

Howard smiled in a strange way. “Don’t worry about me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

John F. Kennedy high school had closed for the holidays and never reopened. The reasons were both political and practical.

Early in January, the words PROCTORS = MURDERERS were spray-painted across the school’s brickwork where it faced La Salle Avenue. A military patrol arrived in the morning to splash whitewash over the slogan, but the words showed through, baleful and ghostly. The Proctors declared the school a property of the Bureau de la Convenance and welded a chain across the doors.

The gesture was largely symbolic. Parents had agreed among themselves that the risk of sending their children to school was not worth taking any longer. Anything might happen to children out of sight; the evidence of that had been ample. Besides, what were they learning? Ancient history. To what end? None.

Evelyn had copied some of Symeon Demarch’s written dispatches in her careful longhand. Dex passed them on to Shepperd in exchange for more information on the planned escape.

The plans were reasonably credible. All the military traffic moved on a north-south route that connected with the highway and led back to Fort LeDuc—obviously not a viable way out. But during the invasion in June a tank battalion had come in from the west along a seldom used corduroy road through the forest. Shepperd’s scouts had established that this largely unguarded road was a logging trail that led to an evacuated timber camp twenty miles southeast. From there, a larger road led west—presumably toward civilization, but avoiding the bottleneck at what used to be the Mackinac Bridge. There was plenty of tree cover and even a large expedition might go undetected, “Provided we get out relatively clean and the weather’s favorable—say, cloudy but not too snowy. If we land on our feet, a lot of folks are talking about heading farther west, maybe what we would have called Oregon or Washington State. It’s supposed to be kind of a frontier out there. The Proctors are less powerful. Homesteading is a possibility, in the long run.”

He told Dex, “We’ll let you know when the times are final. But it’s close, obviously. You’ll need transportation, extra gasoline, snow tires —chains, if you can get ’em; rope, tools, food. Bob Hoskins says he can help you out on that account. And we prefer a fully occupied vehicle; we have more refugees than cars. If you don’t have at least three passengers, come to me; there’s a waiting list. Tell me, you ever do any shooting?”

Dex said, “In the Reserves. But that was years ago.”

“Still handle a weapon?”

“I suppose so.”

“Then take this.” Shepperd pressed a .38 caliber military pistol into his hand and filled the pocket of Dex’s jacket with spare clips. “I trust you won’t have to use it. But I’m a trusting soul.”

∞

Dex Graham went home to Linneth. The Proctors had recently withdrawn their guards from the civilian wing of the Blue View Motel and it was easier now for her to spend the night.

After dark, blinds pulled, she sat beside Dex on the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. The bullet wound was a pink dimple in the meat of his arm. It was only intermittently painful. She touched it with the palm of her hand in a gesture that was probably unconscious but seemed to Dex full of significance, a healing caress she might have learned from her mother. Maybe a token of the strange religion she had grown up with, Hellenic paganism evolved through centuries of Europe. In London, she said, they still allowed temples in the city. Oracles of Apollo in Leicester Square.