Mysterium

She undressed in the dim light with a combination of modesty and glee that was half Puritan, half pagan. In spite of all the hardship—the arrest of her parents, three years in a gray nunnery in Utica, her long and arduous education—she still owned this hidden liveliness. It ran through her veins like blood.

And it struck a similar chord in Dex. Strange to realize, so close to what was liable to be his death, how much of himself he had lost. Invisibly. He was accustomed to the idea that he had seen the boundaries of the world and that he was lingering here by default, neglected by death for reasons he couldn’t fathom. That belief had made him brave … or at least insolent, careless, grim.

But it was an addictive sort of courage. Teflon courage. He had glided through time, adhering nowhere. It was a courage, in any case, not much exercised. He had never been called on to face down a tank, like the murdered students of Tiananmen Square. He was an American and it was still possible, even at the ragged end of the twentieth century, to live a life insulated from evil—any evil but his own.

He had occasionally wondered what evil looked like. It was easy enough to find it on CNN, the bodies in the pits, the death squads in their dusty pickup trucks. But evil face to face: would he cower before it? Or would it have the same stale odor as his own guilt?

But now he had seen it. The small bodies hanging outside City Hall were its frank signature. What else to call it but evil? There was nothing to exonerate the hangman, no extenuating circumstances or plausible excuses; only a contrived, practiced cruelty.

And it was not frightening. It was offensive, banal, repellent, crude, tragic—everything hut frightening. It could hurt him, certainly. Kill him. Probably it would. But its face was only the face of the Proctors, self-aggrandizing and completely superficial.

And here was Linneth, its opposite. Her smile repudiated oppression and her touch brought martyrs back to life. Prisons opened with every breath she took.

There was nothing complicated here, he thought, only a doorway with daylight beyond it and an opportunity after all these dry years to step forward and pass through, pass through.

∞

Linneth was with Dex in the morning when the boy came to the apartment.

The boy was an ordinary-seeming child, large eyes under a cascade of unkempt blond hair, but Linneth thought she noticed a hint of recognition from Dex. Odd, because the boy was clearly a stranger: he had come with a strange sort of radio and instruction for its use from Howard Poole.

The boy must be twelve years old or so, Linneth thought. Blue-eyed, like Dex. He looked almost like a relative. Or a son. Ah.

How many agonizing times had that spark of recognition leaped to strangers? It must be terribly hard for him, she thought.

The boy said Howard had promised that Dex would help him when it was time to leave Two Rivers.

“Of course,” Dex said.

“And my mother,” Clifford said. “There’s just the two of us. We have a car, if you need a car. A Honda. There’s even some gas in it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dex said. “We have room for two.”

But a darker thought had occurred to Linneth. She said, “Clifford, when did you talk to Howard?”

“Yesterday—just before curfew.”

“You told him about the tower in the forest, you said?”

“The bomb. He already knew about it.”

“And he gave you the radio and told you to come here?”

“Yes.”

“That sounds very final. Clifford … do you think he was getting ready to go somewhere?”

Clifford seemed to think it over. “Maybe. He had a big winter coat by the door. A backpack next to it. He could have been getting ready to go somewhere.”

And Linneth looked at Dex, who knew at once what this meant.

∞

Dex hurried to the house, but it was empty. The light had been turned off, the kitchen cleaned—a futile but typical gesture—and Howard’s sleeping roll was missing from the basement where Dex had seen it last.

“I didn’t think he would really do this,” Dex said. “It’s suicide. He knows that.”

“Perhaps he didn’t feel he had much to lose. Or perhaps he really thought it was a way out.” Linneth shrugged unhappily. “I didn’t know Howard well. But he seemed like a very religious man.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Because it was Friday night, Lukas Thibault borrowed a car from the motor pool and drove across town to Ellen’s. It was easier nowadays to borrow a vehicle and find someone to cover for him in the evenings. Not that it wasn’t still dangerous: Nico Bourgoint, newly recovered from his flying-glass injuries at the gas depot explosion, had been stockaded for laying over with a woman from the roadhouse crowd. But Nico had few friends; no one would cover for him. It was a matter of protocol, really. The purely mechanical aspects of an assignation—vehicles, duty rosters—had lately been less problematic. All the commanding officers seemed distracted.