Mysterium

Shepperd came by later with essentially the same information from a source of his own: D-Day was tomorrow; the convoy would begin an hour before dawn. “Bless you if you aren’t ready, but we can’t wait; everybody just head west up what used to be Coldwater Road and pray for luck. And carry that damned pistol! Don’t leave it lying on your kitchen table, for God’s sake.”

Dex offered him the use of the scanner, but Shepperd shook his head. “We have a few. Useful items. Check the marine band, though, if you’re curious, and a signal up around thirteen hundred megahertz— we think that’s coming from the bomb people. Mostly it’s incomprehensible, but you might pick up a clue. Mainly, though, don’t worry-about that. Set out on time is the main thing. I would like us all on that corduroy road westbound by daybreak. You have a car, I gather.”

He did, an aging Ford in a basement lot, the car he used to drive to work on days when the weather made walking a chore. He had already stashed a couple of jerricans of black market gasoline in the trunk.

Shepperd offered his hand. Dex shook it. “Good luck,” he said.

“To us all,” Shepperd told him.

∞

Linneth came before curfew—AWOL, though nobody cared anymore; the guards had been posted elsewhere. There was no question of sleep. She helped Dex carry supplies down to the car; he filled the tank with acrid-smelling American petrol.

Three hours after midnight they ate a final meal in Dex’s kitchen. A granular snow was still gathering and blowing in the street. The wind rattled the casements of the window.

Dex raised a glass of tepid water in a toast.

“To an old world,” he said. “And a new one.”

“Both stranger than we thought.”

They had not finished drinking when they heard the sound of distant gunfire.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Among the Huichol Indians of the Sierra Madre Occidental it was called a nierika: a passageway—and simultaneously a barrier—between the everyday world and the world of the spirits.

The nierika is also a ceremonial disk, both mirror and face of God. It resembles a mandala. The four cardinal directions radiate from the sacred center.

In Huichol paintings, the axis always rests in a field of fire.

∞

Howard reached the highway before dark but was barred from crossing it by an uninterrupted stream of traffic, mainly trucks and automobiles—the Proctors and their possessions, a few military commanders, the last looting of the town; all bound south for Fort LeDuc and safety. It can’t be long now, Howard thought.

He broke into an abandoned shack, off the road and out of the snow, and pulled his sleeping bag around him for warmth while he waited. There was no possibility of sleep and probably no time for it. He rested in an ancient bentwood rocker made brittle by the cold. The windows were choked with dust.

Waiting was the hard part. He was all right while he was moving; there wasn’t time to think beyond the next step. But while he waited he began to grow frightened.

He was as close to death as he had ever been.

For a time, the immediacy of the danger paralyzed him. Fear seemed to fall as inexorably as the snow, in icy crystals from a dark sky. Howard shivered and closed his eyes.

∞

After midnight the sound of the traffic lapsed. He stirred, rose on cold and aching legs, and folded his sleeping bag into his backpack to carry with him.

He jogged across the highway. Multiple tire tracks were already dimming under fresh grains of snow, the asphalt slick and treacherous beneath. The woods on the far side, the old Ojibway land, were black with shadow. Howard used a watchman’s flashlight to find his way along the dirt track eastward among the trees. The trees were tall and he listened to the snow sifting among the pine needles. Each ripple of wind sent snow showers cascading around him and made a flickering ice tunnel of the flashlight beam.

He passed a fork in the road. To the left was the way to the testing ground. Ahead, the way to the ruined lab. He pressed forward, though this road was less traveled, old snow still frozen under the new, a difficult walk.

∞

As he approached the near radius of the lab he saw more of the ethereal forms he had glimpsed in the night last autumn. They were less frightening now, though not less mysterious. They seemed disinterested in him, disinterested in anything but their own stately motion, perhaps a circle around the ruined buildings: restless ghosts, he thought. Chained here.

In fact they were strangely beautiful, nearly human flags of light casting very real shadows among the trees, their reflections glinting from countless prisms of fallen snow. It was as if the trees themselves were moving, performing oddly graceful pirouettes against the blackness of the night. Howard’s eyes blurred with tears at the sight, though he could not say what moved him. He walked for what seemed hours among the shifting shadows. It was hard to remember to follow the road. It was hard to remember anything at all.