Mysterium

Nico Bourgoint felt the glass cut his back and arm. He turned, and dropped his pistol in astonishment at what he saw: the Lord of the Hebdomad rising in a pillar of flame from the opposite side of the street.

∞

Dex did not begin to make sense of events until he was in the alley, his good arm over Howard Poole’s shoulder and his feet moving by some logic of their own.

He looked at Howard, who was breathless and bleeding from what looked like a hundred small cuts. “What,” he said. It was meant to be, What are we doing? But the words evaded his grasp.

Howard gave him a brief look. “Run. If you can run, just do it.”

They jogged together. Each step triggered new fireworks from his shoulder and arm, no longer numb, alas. He didn’t look at the wound. He had never been keen on the sight of blood, his own or anyone else’s, and he couldn’t afford another spell of light-headedness.

He did risk a glance behind him. He saw what appeared to be a large-scale hallucination.

Above the pebbled roofs of the Beacon Street shops, above the rain gutters and the tangled telephone wires, a column of fire had risen into the cloudless night sky. The flames as they ascended became a luminous shade of blue, and in that coruscating substance, it seemed to Dex, there were faces, immense and endlessly shifting.

“God’s sake,” Howard rasped, “don’t stop!”

They crossed Oak and were some yards uphill along the crowded lane when Dex said, “Wait.”

Howard regarded him with a desperate impatience. “We’re leaving a trail,” Dex said. “Look.”

Bright drops of blood had speckled the asphalt. Connect the dots, Dex thought. They’ll find us by morning.

Lights had winked on in all these houses, but there were deep shadows among the alleyside sheds and fences, and all attention must be focused on the fire. They crouched in a tangle of darkness.

“It’s mostly me. Howard, you have to bind this wound. Or apply a tourniquet.”

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

“I’ll tell you how. Put down that box, first of all.” Dex squinted at it. The optical reader. “You stole the damn thing after all, didn’t you? In spite of all this?”

“I had it in my hands when the soldier came in. It’s what we went for.”

“You’re a single-minded son of a bitch, Howard.”

“You learn that in grad school.” He took a breath. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks like the wound is in the fleshy part of your arm. Clear through. It’s bleeding a lot but it’s not, uh, gushing. What do I tie it with?”

“Use your belt for a tourniquet. Tight above the injury. Any kind of cloth to soak up what leaks.”

Howard worked while Dex sat on the cold ground and fixed his attention on the board fence next to him. It had once been painted, but the paint had all peeled away except for a few flakes clinging to the grain. The fence had once been white. Tonight it was gray, mottled by the light of the distant fire.

The pain was enormous and his grip on consciousness a little uncertain. He said, “Howard?”

“Uh?”

“What the hell happened back there?”

“I don’t know. Something blew up. Lucky for us.”

“A coincidence?”

“I suppose so. Synchronicity, at least. I’m about to tighten this.” Dex counted silently to ten. His vision blurred somewhere around seven. Make words, he instructed himself.

“What happened back there … it was strange.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not natural.”

“I guess not.”

“Basically, it was weird.”

“You could say so. There.” A final tug. “Can you stand up?”

“Yeah.” But he was unsteady.

“Can you walk?”

“Oh, yeah. I’d better walk. It’s pretty much walk or die, don’t you think?”

Howard didn’t answer.

∞

Clifford turned and ran when he saw the pillar of blue fire. He was halfway up the block when he remembered his bike. He screwed up his courage and went back, grabbed the bike and straddled it, and cut west on Oak because it was the quickest, if not the least conspicuous, way home.

His view of the events on Beacon Street had been comprehensive, and he understood everything up until the moment of the explosion. It unrolled inside him like a movie, like a videotape spliced into a maddening loop. His anger. The empty patrol car. Working the gear lever. His rising dread when he understood what the consequences would be. And the explosion at the gas pumps, and then—