Linneth Stone followed Dex to the High School and sat at the back of his morning classes, flanked by the sullen Proctors in their brown woolen uniforms. (She called them pions—according to Dex’s French–English dictionary, a “checker” or “pawn,” but she used the word respectfully.) For two days Dex discussed the Civil War while this petite woman in Victorian dress took notes and methodically filed them in a calfskin binder. Each day, attention in the classroom migrated away from Dex and toward these apparitions seated at the rear.
Dex had hoped the situation would improve now that electrical power had been restored, but it didn’t; the fluorescent ceiling lights only made her presence seem more exotic. Today, at lunch, he told her so.
They sat in the staff cafeteria. There was no hot food, but the artificial light dispelled some of the gloom of the cavernous space. Dex had brought a bag lunch. Linneth, flanked by her guards, sat without eating and listened to his complaints.
“I understand the problem,” she said. “I didn’t mean to create a distraction.”
“You have, though. And that isn’t the only problem. It’s not clear to me what you’re hoping to achieve here. Obviously,” a nod at the Proctors, “I can’t stop you from sitting in on classes. But I’d like to know what the purpose of it is.”
She paused a moment, her expression angelic and distracted, collecting her thoughts. “Only to learn from you. Nothing more sinister. To study Two Rivers and—I don’t know what to call it—the place Two Rivers came from. Your Plenum.”
“All right, but to what end? If I cooperate, who am I helping?”
“You’re helping me. But I see what you mean. Mr. Graham, it’s really very simple. I was asked to write a social study of the town—”
“Asked by whom?”
“The Bureau de la Convenance Religieuse. The Proctors. But please remember, I’m a contract employee. I work for the Bureau but I don’t represent the Bureau, not directly. There are several of us in town, civilian workers I mean, mainly academics. For instance, there is a surveyor, an electrical engineer, a documentary photographer, a medical doctor—”
“Each one writing a report?”
“You pose the question with too much malice. If the circumstances were reversed, Mr. Graham, if one of our villages had appeared in your world, wouldn’t your government do the same thing? Compile records, try to understand the miracle that had happened?”
“People have died here. In good conscience, I don’t know if I can cooperate.”
“I can’t speak for your conscience. I can only say that my work isn’t harmful.”
“In your eyes. It’s certainly a nuisance to my work—we’ve already established that.”
“Lieutenant Demarch sent me to you because he thought a teacher of history would have a broader grasp of cultural issues—”
“Did he? My guess is that he was hoping to piss me off.”
She blinked but forged ahead: “I won’t attribute motive. The point is that I can go elsewhere if I’m interfering with the school. I really don’t care to cause trouble.”
Her meekness was maddening. Also deceptive. She was relentless, Dex thought. He looked at her over the trestle table, searching for something in the composition of her features: a glimpse under the porcelain exterior. She came from the world outside Two Rivers, but she wasn’t a Proctor or a soldier—and that made her nearly unique, potentially interesting.
Too, her curiosity seemed genuine. She might or might not be a tool of the Bureau, but there were obviously questions she wanted to ask. Fair enough. He had a few questions of his own.
He said, “Maybe we can compromise.”
“In what way?”
“Well, first of all—you’d be a lot less conspicuous if you lost your bookends.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The gentlemen attached to your elbows.”
Both guards gave Dex a stony glare meant to intimidate him. He smiled back. He was tired of the Proctors. They dressed like Boy Scouts and swaggered like hall monitors: pions, a good word, he thought.
“I will have to talk to Lieutenant Demarch,” she said. “I can’t promise anything.” But the idea seemed to appeal to her.
“You might consider changing the way you dress, too. It draws attention.”
“I have considered that. But I’m new here, Mr. Graham. I’m not sure what would be appropriate, or appropriately modest.”
“You’re staying at the Woodward Bed-and-Breakfast?”
“Nearby. The motor hotel.”
“You’ve met Evelyn Woodward?”
“Briefly.”
“She’s about your size. Maybe she can lend you something. She seems to have a new wardrobe these days.”
“Yes. Well, perhaps. Do you have any other requirements?”
“Certainly. A quid pro quo. I want something for my time.”
“And what would that be?”
“A map of the world. An atlas, if possible. And a good basic history.”
“Your history for mine?”
“Right.”
She surprised him by smiling. “I’ll see what I can do.”
His fever broke the night the lights came back to Two Rivers, and Howard Poole emerged from his sickness feeling fragile but immensely clearheaded. It was as if the disease had starved all confusion from the bone of logic.
He waited a day for Dex to show up, but the schoolteacher didn’t come. That was all right, Howard thought. It wasn’t always easy for Dex to get away; he might have been followed. It didn’t matter. It was time to take some initiative on his own.
At noon, when the ration lines opened and the streets were most crowded, Howard packed some food and bottled water and a camp knife into the ample pockets of a big Navy jacket and stepped out into the biting October air.
Maybe he had been in hiding too long, or maybe it was the autumn weather, but everything he looked at seemed to have been cut from a luminous glass. Sidewalks, windows, the tumbled leaves of the trees, were all thin as ice under a cellophane-blue sky. He wanted to take it all in at once, to hoard these colors against another dark season. He forced himself to walk with his head down. He didn’t dare attract attention.
He was carrying identification, actually Paul Cantwell’s ID. Lucky Paul, Howard thought, on vacation when the roof of the world fell in. It was good documentation, but there was obviously no photo ID; and the cards, if you looked closely, were all out of date—except for the ration card. He might pass muster if the military questioned him. But he might not. He didn’t want to run that risk. It was better not to arouse suspicion.
He crossed the intersection of Oak and Beacon and walked east past lifeless businesses, shop windows shadowy and haunted by ghosts: by cameras, computers, fashionable clothes, big-screen TV sets. No one had stolen these things even in the chaotic first days of the military occupation. Nobody wanted them. They were useless to the natives and frighteningly foreign to the soldiers, the trinkets and ornaments of a lost race.
The town had been in a kind of trance, Howard thought, ever since the tanks rolled down Coldwater Road last June. There had been some gestures of resistance, all futile. A couple of NRA types had taken some ineffectual shots from their upper-story windows. Both men were apprehended and executed publicly and without trial. Two Rivers was a hunting-fishing town, and Howard supposed there were a great many people with their Remingtons still primed and hidden. But what could one rural county do against the weight of a nation? Declare independence?
In a way, they were lucky. As occupations go, this one had not been exceptionally brutal—at least not yet. He remembered reading about Phnom Penh under the Khmer Rouge, where civilians had been shot to death for wearing European eyeglasses, or for no reason at all. There had been no such slaughter here, maybe because the battle had been so one-sided and the prize so peculiar.
So the town had capitulated to its occupation with a dazed shrug. Howard was no exception. He had gone into hiding almost gratefully; hiding was something he was good at. He had grown up fragile and chronically thin. Beaten for his awkwardness, he had learned to take his beatings and go home; he had never complained or even plotted revenge. There had always been the solace of a book.
The name of this behavior, Howard thought, was cowardice. He had stopped denying it long ago, had even acknowledged it as a fundamental component of his character. He knew two essential facts about himself: that he was smart and that he was a coward. It wasn’t the worst draw in life’s lottery.
A memory came wafting up from his childhood. Often during his illness he had been surprised by these gusts of memory, and maybe he was still sick, because here came another: he was ten years old on the porch of the house in Queens, listening to the rumble of his parents’ voices, to one of their winding, pleasantly silly marathons of talk.
“Some people believe,” his father had said, “in reincarnation—that we live again and again, and in each life we have a task. A thing to do or a thing to learn.” He had reached out absently to ruffle his son’s hair. “What about you, Howie? What is it your business to learn this time around?”
Howard had been young enough to take the idea seriously. The question plagued him for days. What was he supposed to learn? Something difficult, he guessed, or else why dedicate a life to it? Something he had resisted in all his other lives; some Everest of knowledge or virtue.
Let it be anything, he thought—the names of all the stars, the origin of the universe, the secrets of time and space. . . . Let it be anything but courage.
Past midtown, the streets were mostly empty. It was harder to be inconspicuous here. He shuffled with his hands in his pockets; where possible he took suburban roads, winding his way through the newer and bleaker housing projects that marked the western extremity of Two Rivers. The military patrols would not likely come this way; there was nothing here to draw them. Still, he had to be careful. The soldiers had made a barracks out of a Days Inn on the highway, midway between Two Rivers and the ruins of the Physical Research Laboratory—not far from here.
Howard had pored over a map of the town in the days before the tanks came, and he had a good memory for maps; but these curving roads and culs-de-sac confused him. By the time he found an obscure and plausible way east—following a line of electrical towers where the trees and scrub had been cut back—it was nearly curfew.
He had planned for that. He crossed the highway where it met Boundary Road and followed it a quarter mile north, staying close to the drainage ditch on the left. The shadows were already very long. There were no houses out here, nothing but junk maples and the occasional crumbling gas station. He reached his first objective before dark: a tiny bait and camping gear shop close to the border of the old Ojibway reserve.
He had stopped here with Dex Graham last June. Dex had bought a map and a compass, both long since lost. The store was a tar paper shack with a shingle out front. Uninhabited, as Howard had supposed it would be.
He took a long look up and down the highway. He listened for a time. There was no sound but the rattle of a solitary cricket in the chilly dusk.
A fat, rust-red padlock protected the front door. Howard picked his way through a scatter of bald tires, past the rusting hulk of a ’79 Mercury Cougar to the rear door. This door was also padlocked, but one brisk tug separated the latch from the rotting wood of the frame.
A powerful stench wafted out of the dark interior. Howard hesitated, repulsed. Then he thought: The bait. Jesus! There had been two big freezers full of herring roe and dew worms in here. Over the summer the contents must have fermented.
He stepped inside, breathing through his mouth. The only light was the last blue of the sky through a dusty window. Howard moved cautiously down an aisle of bulk goods.
He selected three items: a frame backpack, a double-insulated sleeping bag, and a one-man tent.
He carried them outside and paused to take three cleansing gasps of air.
Then he stuffed the folded tent into the backpack and tied the sleeping roll underneath. He shouldered the pack and adjusted its straps on his shoulders. Then he walked north along the highway until he found a trail into the woods.
The trail was mossy and overgrown but seemed to take him in approximately the right direction. He walked for twenty minutes into the wooded Ojibway land; then it was too dark to go any farther.
He pitched his tent on stony soil and managed to cover it with a nylon fly as the last light faded. Finally he tossed his bedroll inside and climbed in after it.
It would be cold tonight. Maybe cold enough to snow if the clouds thickened. October snow, he thought. He remembered early snowfalls in New York: those brittle, small flakes. Groundwater frozen into crusts of ice, old leaves crisp as dry paper.
He had chosen the sleeping bag blindly, but it was a good one, a winter bag. He was warm inside it. He had walked a long way, and he fell asleep before the last light was gone from the sky.
The dream came as it had come every night for weeks, less a dream than a recurring image that had insinuated itself into his sleep.
It was an image of his uncle, of Alan Stern, but not as Howard remembered him: this Alan Stern was emaciated and translucent, naked, his back to Howard and his spine cruelly visible under the faint, taut flesh.
In the dream he knew that his uncle was bound or connected to an egg of light larger than himself. Howard thought it looked like a nuclear explosion captured by a still camera as the shock wave began to expand, a static moment between nanoseconds of destruction; and Stern was either held by it or holding it, or, somehow, both.
He turned his head to look at Howard. His thin face seemed unutterably ancient, wizened under a wild rabbinical beard. His expression was a combination of agonizing pain and a fierce preoccupation.
Stern, Howard tried to say. I’m here.
But no sound came, and nothing registered on his uncle’s tortured face.
Maya, Stern used to tell him. A Hindu word: it meant the world as illusion, reality as a veil of deception. “You have to look behind the maya. That’s your duty as a scientist.”
It came naturally to Stern. For Howard, it was much more difficult.
One summer on a beach in Atlantic City, family vacation: Stern picked up a stone and gave it to Howard and said, “Look at it.”
It was an ancient pebble polished by the sea. Smooth as glass, green as the shadows under water, shot through with veins of rusty red. The pebble was warm where the sun had been on it. Underneath, it was cool in his hand.
“It’s pretty,” Howard had said, idiotically.
Stern shook his head: “Forget pretty. That’s this stone. You have to abstract its essence. Learn to hate the particular, Howard. Love the general. Don’t say ‘pretty.’ Look harder. Gypsum, calcite, quartz? Those are the questions you have to ask. Pretty is maya. ‘Pretty’ is the stupid man’s answer.”
Yes. But he didn’t have Stern’s razor intellect. He put the stone in his pocket. He liked it. Its particular color. Its coolness, its warmth.
Howard woke in the deep of the night.
He knew at once it was late—well past midnight, still a long time before morning. He felt breathless and weak in the grip of the sleeping bag. He had slept with his left arm bent under his body and the arm was numb, a useless weight of tissue. But he didn’t move.
Something had woken him.
Howard had gone camping once before, a week-long expedition in the Smoky Mountains with his parents. He knew there were noises in the forest and that any odd sound was liable to wake a sleeper in the dark. He told himself there was nothing to be afraid of: the only real danger was from the soldiers, and they were hardly likely to be out in the woods at this hour.
Still, he was afraid of what he might have heard or sensed, the fear like a door that had opened in some deep chamber of his body. He gazed into the darkness of the tent. There was nothing to see. Nothing to hear, either, except the rattle of wind in the trees. Branches groaning in the cold. It was cold outside. The air was cold in his nostrils.
There was nothing out there, Howard told himself, except maybe a raccoon or a skunk wandering through the brush.
He shifted onto his back and let the blood pump into his dead arm. The pain was at least a distraction. He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them again. Sleep was suddenly closer than he would have guessed possible, cutting through his anxiety like a narcotic. He took a deep, shuddering breath that was almost a yawn.
Then he opened his eyes, one last blink of reassurance, and saw the light.
It was a diffuse light that threw the shadows of trees onto the skin of the tent. The light was dim at first, then brighter. The sun, Howard thought dazedly. It must be dawn.
But the light was moving too quickly to be the sun. Tree shadows glided over the fabric above him like marching figures. The light, or its source, was traveling through the forest.
He reached for his eyeglasses and couldn’t find them. He was blind without his glasses. He remembered folding them and laying them down somewhere on the floor of the tent—but which side? He had been sleepy; the memory was dim. He swept his hand in panicky circles. Maybe he had rolled over on them; maybe, God help him, his glasses were broken.
The frames, when he touched them, felt as cold and fragile as bone china. He hurried them onto his face.
The light was brighter now.
A lantern, Howard thought. Someone was out in the woods with a lantern. The tent and fly were a vivid orange and impossible to miss. He would be seen, might already have been seen. He tugged the zipper on the sleeping bag all the way down, wanting to be free of it when they came for him—whoever they were.
The zipper growled into the silence. Howard shucked off the bag and huddled in the corner of the tent where the flap opened into the cold air outside, ready to bolt.
But the shadows on the tent reached a noon angle and then grew longer; the light dimmed moment by moment until it was gone.
Howard waited for what seemed an eternity but might have been four or five minutes. Now the darkness was absolute once more. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, glasses or no.
He took a deep breath, opened the tent flap, and crawled outside.
His legs were weak, but he managed to stand.
He was able to see the dim silhouettes of the trees against an overcast sky faintly alight with the dim glow of Two Rivers. There was nothing threatening out here—at least, nothing obvious. No sign of what had passed except a strange, acrid odor, quickly gone. The air was cold and hazy with ground fog.
He staggered ten steps from the tent, suddenly aware of the pressure of his bladder, and relieved himself against a tree. So what the fuck had happened here? What exactly had he seen? A lantern, flashlight, headlights on some car? But there had been no sound. Not even footsteps. Well, he thought, people see weird things in the woods. Swamp gas. Ball lightning. Who could say? The important thing was that it was gone, that he hadn’t been seen.
Probably hadn’t been seen, he amended. But even if he had, there was nothing to do about it. Sleep, he thought, if that was possible, and move on in the morning.
He had reached a state of tentative calm when a second light began to flicker on the pinetops.
He felt marginally less threatened this time. This time he could see what was going on. He crouched in the cover of a young maple and watched the sourceless glimmer rising through a foggy thicket some tens of yards away.
What made it eerie, Howard thought, was its noiselessness: how could something as bright as a spotlight move through these woods without rattling the underbrush? And the smoothness of the motion. A glide. Shadows tall as houses wove among the trees.
Howard squatted in the dark with one hand buried in the loam to brace himself. He felt aloof now, in a state of fine concentration, only a little frightened.
The light moved steadily closer. Now, he thought: now it will come around that hillside and I’ll see it. . . .
And it did—and he gasped in spite of himself, cut by a breathless, helpless awe.
The light had no source. It was somehow its own source. The light was a thing; the light had dimension. The light was a nebulous shape ten or fifteen feet tall, almost too bright to look at, but not quite, not quite. It was not a sphere; it had a shape that was tenuous but seemed to suggest a human form—head, arms, trunk, legs. But the features weren’t solid; they twined like smoke, were lost to the air, flickered alive. Veins of color pulsed in the brightness.
It came closer. Closer, it wasn’t easier to see. The edges blurred; it was diffuse. It moved like a flame; Howard was suddenly afraid it might come close enough to burn him.
Now it paused a few yards away.
The apparition possessed no visible eyes. Nevertheless, Howard was convinced that it looked directly at him—that it regarded him with some complex, chill intelligence that flowed toward him and into him like a slow current.
And then it simply moved on: glided past him and away beyond a scrim of trees.
Howard kept still. There were more lights now, none so close, but all nearby, each casting its own grid of shadows into and around the weaving trees. The woods were populated with these things, each one marching on some stately orbit. My God, Howard thought. The urge to pray was powerfully strong. My God, my God.
He watched until each source of this nebulous light had passed and a genuine darkness descended again.
Then—bone by bone, tendons creaking—he lifted himself and stood erect.
The cold wind was brisk but the sky seemed less weighty now. It was ink-blue beyond the eastern margin of the forest. Dawn, Howard thought. That bright star might be Venus.
He stumbled back to the tent bereft of every emotion but a wordless gratitude for the fact of his own survival.
He woke hours later in cool sunlight filtered through orange nylon. His body felt raw and his thoughts were quick and fragile.
Time to start thinking like a scientist, Howard scolded himself. Find the center of this problem.
Or just keep walking: that was the other option. Walk past the ruined research buildings, walk deeper into this forest, south toward Detroit or whatever mutation of Detroit existed here; walk until he found a population to lose himself in, or until he died, whichever came first.
The fundamental question, almost too sweeping to ask, was simply Why? So many things had happened to Two Rivers, so many enormous, numbing events. All linked, he supposed; all connected in some causal chain, if only he could begin to unravel it. Obviously the town had moved through an unimaginable latitude of time, but why? Had arrived in a world full of archaic technology and perverse religious wars, but why? Why here, of all places? And the night shapes in the forest: what were they?
What single line could possibly connect all these things?
He rolled his tent, fielded his pack, and followed the trail eastward.
Sunlight chased cloud into the hazy east. Howard crossed a brook at its shallowest point, where the water streamed in cool transparency over granite rubble. He wished his thoughts were as lucid. He was out of food; he felt hungry and light-headed.
It seemed appropriate that he was moving toward the heart of the crisis, through the undeveloped lands of the old Ojibway reserve toward the ruined Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. Through mystery toward revelation. At least, perhaps. Eventually.
Last night these woods had been haunted. Today, in flickering sunlight, the memory seemed ludicrous. And yet there was a presence here, never seen but often felt, a private visitation. He felt his uncle with him as he walked: Stern as a presiding spirit. He guessed that wasn’t scientific. But that was how it seemed.
The woods thinned. Howard moved more cautiously here. He came to the logging road that connected the lab with the highway. The road had been widened by military traffic. He waited until a truck rumbled past, its primitive engine loud in the silence. Then he crossed the rutted, wet road and walked parallel to it behind a screen of low pines.
He reached the hill from which, long ago, he had watched Chief Haldane’s ladder company move beyond a border of blue light. Another trail crossed the road here. It seemed to lead to higher ground along this ridge, and Howard followed it through berry thickets and white pine, sweating under his Navy coat. It was afternoon now and the sunlight was warm.
He came to the peak of the ridge. The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory lay in the flatland beyond. Howard felt conspicuous in this elevated place. He shrugged off his pack and left it under a tree. The ridge sloped steeply here and Howard lay on his belly at the edge of it, looking down an incline of rock and wild grasses.
The ruined buildings were still enclosed in their dome of iridescent light. They looked much the way Howard remembered them looking in the spring. The central bunker had stopped smoking, but nothing else had changed—the grounds were embalmed in this glaze of illumination. The single elm outside the staff housing had kept all its leaves. There was a breeze, at least here on this escarpment, but the tree was not moving.
Human activity was restricted to the outside of this perimeter. Obviously, the military had taken an interest in the Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. It would have been easy enough to deduce that the lab was at the center of what had happened at Two Rivers, and this persistent skein of light would have captured anyone’s attention. The soldiers had put up a wire fence around the circumference of the property. Tents and a pair of tin sheds had been erected. The contrast was striking, Howard thought. Inside the dome, everything was pristine. Outside, the grass had been trampled into mud, ditches had been turned into latrines, garbage had been heaped in enormous mounds.
His attention was focused so closely on the lab that he didn’t hear the footsteps behind him until they were too close. He rolled onto his back and sat up, ready to bolt for the trees.
Clifford Stockton regarded him through magnifying-lens eyeglasses. The boy blinked twice. Then he held out a wrinkled paper bag.
“My lunch,” he said. “You can have some if you want.”
Howard said, “How did you know I wasn’t a soldier?”
They sat in the shade some yards away from the edge of the escarpment.
“You don’t look like a soldier,” the boy said.
“How can you tell?”
“The way you’re dressed.”
“I might be out of uniform. I might be in disguise.”
The boy inspected him more closely. He shook his head: “It’s not just your clothes.”
“Okay. Still—you should be careful.”
Clifford nodded.
The boy had left his bicycle inclined against a tree. He offered Howard half a sandwich wrapped in brown paper and a drink from a thermos of cold water. Howard had brought his own water on this expedition, two Coke bottles tucked into the deep pockets of his jacket, but most of that was gone. He drank from the thermos and said, “Thanks.”
“My name is Clifford.”
“Thank you, Clifford. I’m Howard.”
The boy offered his hand and Howard shook it.
Then, briefly, they worked at the food. It wasn’t much of a sandwich, Howard thought, but it was better than most of what he’d been eating lately. Some kind of coarse-ground bread, some meat, probably military rations, not bad if you were hungry. He discovered he was very hungry indeed.
He finished the sandwich and licked the pale grease from his fingers. “Have you been here before, Clifford?”
“A few times.”
“Long ride out from town, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Howard felt at ease with the boy. Maybe it was his obvious myopia or his solemn style, but he felt an echo of his own childhood here. One look at Clifford and you knew he was the kind of kid who kept a collection of coins or bugs or comics; that he watched too much TV, read too many books.
His eyes were pinched and cautious, but Howard supposed that was natural; everyone was cautious nowadays.
He said, “How safe is it up here?”
“It’s a long hike up from the valley. I’ve never seen a soldier here. Mostly they stay near the trucks.”
“How often do you come here?”
“Maybe once a week or so. Like you said—it’s a long ride.”
“So why come at all?”
“Find out what’s happening.” The boy gave Howard a thoughtful stare. “Why are you here?”
“Same reason.”
“You walked from town?”
Howard nodded.
“Long walk.”
“Yup.”
“First time?”
“Yes,” Howard said. “At least, since the tanks came.”
“It’s quiet today.”
“Isn’t it always?”
“No,” the boy said. “Sometimes there are more soldiers or more Proctors.”
Howard was instantly curious, but he didn’t want to intimidate the boy. He ordered his thoughts. “Clifford, can you tell me what they do here? This might be important.”
Clifford frowned. He balled up his sandwich wrapper and tossed it into the dark of the woods. “It’s hard to tell. You can’t see much without binoculars. Sometimes they take pictures. A couple of times I saw them sending soldiers in.”
“What—into the lab?”
“Into one of the buildings.”
“Show me which one.”
They crept to the edge of the escarpment. The boy pointed to a tall structure at the near perimeter of the parking lot: the administration building.
Howard remembered Chief Haldane and his firefighters on the first Saturday after the transition. They had ventured a few yards into that radius and had come out babbling about monsters and angels . . . and sick, Howard remembered, perhaps sicker than they knew. Haldane had died this September, of symptoms that sounded like a runaway leukemia. “I’m surprised they can go in there.”
“They wore special clothes,” Clifford said, “like diving suits, with helmets. They went in and they came out.”
“Carrying anything?”
“Boxes, filing cabinets. Books. Sometimes bodies.”
Bodies, Howard thought. The installation wasn’t as empty as it seemed. Of course not. People had died here . . . died in their beds, most of them, neatly out of sight.
“They’re really well preserved,” the boy added.
“What?”
“The bodies.”
“Clifford—from this distance, how can you tell?”
The boy was silent for a time. Some nerve had been touched, some delicate truth. The boy avoided Howard’s eyes when he finally spoke: “My mom has a friend. A soldier. Who comes over. That’s how we get bread for sandwiches. Chocolate bars sometimes.” Clifford shrugged uncomfortably. “He’s not a bad guy.”
“I see.” Howard kept his voice carefully neutral. “But he talks sometimes?”
The boy nodded. “At breakfast mostly. He brags.”
“He’s been here?”
“He was on duty when they brought out a body. He said it was like it only just died. It hadn’t decomposed.” Another shrug. “If he’s telling the truth.”
“Clifford, this could be the most important part yet. Do you remember anything else he said? Anything about what they’re looking for here, or what they found?”
The boy settled on a granite shelf away from the lip of the escarpment. “He didn’t say too much. I don’t think he’s supposed to. He said people come out of there, even the ones in suits, talking about the weird things they’ve seen. They can’t stay inside too long or go too far. It makes them sick. Some of the first people who went in, died.”
Howard thought again of Chief Haldane’s leukemia.
“And at night,” the boy continued, “everybody leaves. Nobody stays out here at night. It gets strange.”
The boy shrugged. “That’s all I remember. Luke doesn’t really talk that much. Mostly he complains about the Proctors. He hates them. Most of the soldiers do. It’s the Proctors who keep bringing people out here; the soldiers just follow orders. Luke says the soldiers have to take all these risks because the Proctors decided this place is important.” The boy paused, seemed to hold the thought a moment. “But it is important, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”
“Yes,” Howard said. “That’s why I’m here.”
The boy turned away. He looked small against the blue sweep of the sky. A wind came up the escarpment.
The boy said, “So much has happened. No one knows where we really are—where the whole town is. It just seems like such a long way back home.” He turned to Howard, frowning fiercely. “I don’t know what happened out here, but it’s hard to believe anybody could fix something like that.”
Howard looked at the forest beyond the ruined buildings, at the Ojibway land blending seamlessly into ancient white pine wilderness. The hills rolled to a horizon lost in autumn haze. It would be so easy to walk into that vastness. Die or find a new life. Leave.
“Maybe it can be fixed,” he said. “I mean to try.”
He learned what he could from Clifford, and when the boy took his bike and cycled away Howard sketched a crude map of the compound, estimating distances and the rough circumference of the dome of light.
He crossed the highway before dark and spent another night in the woods nearer to town; nothing disturbed his sleep.
He left his camping gear wrapped in the tent fly and buried under a mound of leaves—he might find his way back here someday—and hiked home through town. He stank of his own sweat and he was desperately thirsty, but he made it back to his basement before curfew without arousing suspicion.
Howard had brought very few possessions into this new world. They were all contained in his single canvas shoulder bag, stashed behind the water heater in the Cantwell house. He brought the bag out and opened it. There was not much inside. Some notebooks, journal extracts he had planned to read, his birth certificate, his lab credentials . . . and this.
Howard took it out of the bag and examined it under a light.
A single sheet of canary-yellow paper torn from a notepad.
On the paper was written, Stern.
And a telephone number.