Robert Wilson - Mysterium

He was about to march back up the steps of City Hall when a black van came roaring around the corner past the Civic Gardens, and for a moment Delafleur felt a blossoming hope: somehow, they had come for him already! But the van had taken the corner too quickly; it wavered drunkenly from side to side and finally skidded off its wheels and over the curb.

Delafleur stared. The van was silent a moment, then armed men began to leap from the outflung doors like ants from a disturbed nest. They were soldiers, and they were obviously drunk and dangerous.

One man aimed a rifle at a streetlight, fired a single shot and sent a flurry of shattered glass to join the falling snow. The others began to shout incoherently. Not just drunken, they were also terrified. They know what’s about to happen, Delafleur thought. They know they’re doomed.

He thought: And they know who to blame.

A window shattered somewhere over his head. Had he been seen, here in the shadow of City Hall? Perhaps not. Delafleur ran back inside and barred the big door behind him.

Dex didn’t like the idea of driving into gunfire, but Shepperd’s plan was the only real option: make for the logging road and pray for confusion. The snow was deep enough now to be a real impediment, bad enough on the streets of Two Rivers and certain to be worse on a one-lane track through the forest. But he would worry about that later. His first task was to pick up Clifford Stockton and his mother, and his second was to put distance between himself and the fission weapon in the Ojibway land.

Linneth sat beside him with her attention focused on the predawn gloom beyond the windows. The streetlights burned pale amber overhead. There were lights in many of these houses, as if the buildings themselves had been startled awake. Dex wondered how much of the population had been warned about the escape. Lots of the parents had been contacted, Shepperd had said. Getting kids out was a priority, and school staff had been generous with names. The black community around Hart Avenue had been nervous ever since the Proctors forced them to register as “Negroes or Mulattos” on the town rolls; that was another substantial fraction of the convoy.

But Two Rivers was too big for a genuine mass evacuation. Word had spread rapidly in the last couple of days, but there must be many who simply hadn’t heard. Dex saw them peering cautiously from the draped windows of their houses, no doubt wondering at the sound of gunfire and all the unaccustomed traffic. Dex’s car was not the only one on the road. Several sped past him, too panicked for caution, and at least one ended up in the ditch beside La Salle Avenue with its wheels spinning vainly.

Dex pulled over at the address Clifford had given him, a house not far from Coldwater Road, and left the motor running as he ran to the door. He knocked, waited, knocked again. No answer. Was it possible that Clifford and his mother had somehow slept late? Or left early? In desperation he pounded his fist on the door.

Ellen Stockton opened it. She wore a housecoat and her eyes were red with weeping. She held in one hand what appeared to be a mason jar of oily water—but it smelled like bathtub hooch.

Dex said, “Mrs. Stockton, I need you and Clifford in the car right away. We really don’t have time to wait.”

“They took him,” she said.

The falling snow clung to her dark hair. Her eyes were red and unfocused. Dex said, “I don’t understand—you’re talking about Clifford? Who took him?”

“The soldiers! The soldiers took him. So go away. Fuck you. We don’t need you. We’re not going anywhere.”

Linneth helped get the drunken woman dressed and into the car. Despite the occasional obscenity, Mrs. Stockton was too tired to fight and too intoxicated to offer more than a token objection. In the back seat she became a malleable object under a woolen blanket.

Dex sat at the wheel of the car. It was fully morning now. There were plumes of smoke all over town, Linneth saw, and still that sporadic crack-crack of gunfire—sometimes distant, sometimes much too close.

She said, “The boy is probably at City Hall. They have a makeshift prison there.” Unless he was dead. Which was possible, even likely. But Dex must surely know that, and Linneth didn’t want to say more in front of the mother.

The Stockton woman said something about a neighbor who had seen the soldiers taking her boy into City Hall—so at least Clifford had been there, not long ago.

Dex said slowly, “There may not be much of a guard. All the Proctors are gone by now. Soldiers, though, maybe.” He looked at Linneth.

She thought, He wants me to decide. Then: No … he wants my permission.

Because it was her life at risk, too, not just his own.

She thought, But we might die. But surely that was true no matter what. People were already dying. More would die very soon, and she would probably be among that unfortunate majority—and so what?

The Renunciates had taught her that if she died outside the Church she would be scourged by the angel Tartarouchis with whips of fire, forever. So be it, Linneth thought. No doubt Tartarouchis would be busy, with the war and all.

City Hall was five blocks behind them. She told Dex, “We should hurry,” wanting to get the words out before her courage failed.

He smiled as he turned the car around.

Symeon Demarch sat braced against the plushly upholstered rear bench of the Bureau car as his chauffeur mumbled to himself and drove at a dangerous clip east toward the highway.

Demarch had stopped thinking about Evelyn. He had stopped thinking about Dorothea, or Christof, or Guy Marris, or the Bureau de la Convenance … he wasn’t really thinking at all, only gazing from this sheltered space at the pine-green and cloud-gray shape of the exterior world. He faced the window, where each flake of snow that lighted would cling a moment before it slid into wind-driven dew.

“Some trouble at the military barracks,” the chauffeur said. The chauffeur was a young man with pomaded hair and a Nahanni drawl: a civilian employee, not a pion. Demarch saw the nervous way his eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror.

They turned onto the highway heading south. This road connected with the route to Fort LeDuc, but it also passed the motor hotel that had been commandeered as a military garrison. Demarch said, “Is that a threat to us?”

“I don’t know, Lieutenant, but it may be. See that smoke up ahead?”

Demarch peered forward and saw nothing but snow, the same snow that sent the wheels askew whenever the car turned a corner. “Must you go so quickly?”

“Sir, if I slow down we might end up spinning our wheels for traction. I prefer a little momentum.”

“Do what you think best.”

A few moments later the driver said: “God and Samael!” And the car lurched sickeningly as he pressed the brake.

Ahead, on the left-hand side of the road, the military barracks was burning. It was a strange sight in the falling snow and Demarch was mute, marveling at it. Black smoke billowed from the many windows of what had once been the Days Inn. The flames rising from the embrasures looked almost like faces.

The road was blackened with soot but passable. “Don’t stop,” Demarch said. “Not here, for God’s sake!”

Then a window shattered. It was the front window, driver’s side. The chauffeur jerked and turned as if to look back, but his visible eye was full of blood. His foot convulsed against the gasoline pedal and the car bucked sharply as he slid away from the wheel.

The car rolled into a mile marker. Demarch was thrown forward by the sudden stop, and before he could right himself he saw the chauffeur’s bullet-cracked skull staining the upholstery with slurries of blood. A cold wind came through the broken window. Demarch looked past the clinging tines of glass to the pine woods opposite the burning motel, where soldiers were emerging through flags of smoke. They carried rifles. Most of their rifles were aimed at the car.