Mysterium

He had come too far and was too exposed. He lay in the grass considering his options. He didn’t think he was in danger, at least not yet. He was fascinated, almost hypnotized, by his proximity to something potentially important, something somber and hidden.

Then Clifford heard a bang like a firecracker and saw a simultaneous flash of light. Someone had fired a gun, he thought, and the implication of that simple event seemed to wake him from a daze. The soldiers were shooting at someone—the soldiers were quite possibly killing someone.

And maybe it should have scared him… but mostly it made him angry.

He thought again of the dead bodies outside City Hall. That had angered him, too, though it had been too awful to absorb all at once; the anger was subtle, it lingered, it had no outlet. This was more immediate, and Clifford’s anger focused to a fine point. The soldiers had no business here, no business telling people what to do and certainly no business shooting them.

He wanted to do something about it, take some retaliation, and he looked around helplessly—and saw the patrol car parked a few feet away.

The canvas roof was closed against the weather but the door might not be locked. Clifford crossed the sidewalk and grasped the unfamiliar handle. It opened easily. He leaned inside, distantly amazed at his own audacity. The interior of the car smelled of worn leather and cigarette smoke. The air was stale and still warm. He leaned across the bench seat wondering what sabotage he might be able to perform. His eyes fixed on the knobbed lever projecting from the floor. A gear shift, he guessed. He remembered his mother explaining the gears on her Honda. Experimentally, Clifford grasped the handle and twisted it. Left and down. Left and down.

He didn’t know what kind of gear mechanism this automobile might have; there was no reason to expect it to work like the cars he was accustomed to. But it did possess a neutral gear and Clifford knew at once when he found it. The car inched forward, its tires crackling on the cold street.

He sat up in alarm. The patrol car was rolling at an angle across Beacon, which was useless; it would only fetch up undamaged in the drainage ditch. He needed to get out… but first he twisted the oddly shaped steering wheel until the car was pointed more or less directly down the slope of Beacon, a steep enough incline to get some real momentum going.

Which happened more quickly than he expected. Clifford scrambled back across the bench to the open door and found the pavement scrolling past at a surprising speed. He closed his eyes and jumped, an awkward leap; he hit the sidewalk with feet, hips, shoulders. He tore his shirt and scraped his palms bloody. He would have to explain this to his mother, come the morning. If he ever reached home.

He hurried back to the shadow of the tree to watch the empty car, which had already rolled a considerable distance. Its motion was stately at first, then alarming. Its speed increased until it seemed to Clifford as if the car had been launched from some enormous slingshot. It rattled over every bump in the road, took small but perilous leaps; now, well across Oak and down the empty avenue of Beacon, it tilted perilously on two wheels and then righted itself. The slope of the street declined past Oak but the runaway car seemed to take no notice.

He tried to figure out where it would impact. The hardware store, he thought, or, no, it was veering right; the barber shop, the bookstore —the gas station.

Clifford gasped and held his breath.

He felt a sudden awe at the enormity of the events he had triggered. He understood that there was going to be more damage than he’d imagined—damage on a huge scale, damage that made his knees weak with anticipation.

He couldn’t guess at the speed of the patrol car as it left the road, but he thought it might be going faster than any car had ever gone on Beacon Street. The tires came up over the lip of the curb and the whole car seemed to levitate above the air-and-water dispenser at the Gulf station. It rotated as it moved, the back end rising as the nose dipped, and when Clifford realized it was going to collide with the self-serve gas pumps he instinctively covered his ears.

A grinding crash echoed up the empty road. Clifford watched through eyes squeezed nearly shut. He saw the patrol car sheer off a pump unit before it came to a full stop. There was a last rattle, a fading hiss, then silence, and Clifford dared to take a breath.

Then the patrol car’s damaged battery shorted itself into a spreading pool of gasoline, and it looked as if the sun itself had risen over the rooftops of Beacon Street.

∞

Nicodemus Bourgoint, a line soldier of the Fifth Athabasca Infantry, had been due for shipment to the Mexican front when he was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer and transferred to domestic duty in the otherworldly town of Two Rivers. Given a choice, he would have preferred the front.