Mysterium Read Online Free PDF Page A

piss out of me, I hope you’re aware of that.”
    Stubbs’s voice came crackling out of a deep well of static. He sounded like he was miles away, not a couple of yards. “Chief, what the hell is that? What do we do, turn back?”
    “I don’t see anybody fighting the fire.”
    “Maybe we should wait for the state cops or somebody.”
    “Grow some balls, Tom. Take your foot off the brake.”
    The ladder company inched forward.
    Clifford Stockton, twelve years old, spotted the smoke about the same time Chief Haldane did.
    Clifford, who was still called “Cliffy” by his mother and a mob of aunts, saw the smoke from his bedroom window. He stood in his pajamas watching it for a while, not sure whether it was important. He wanted it to be some dire omen, as in the disaster movies he loved—like the flaky pressure gauge nobody notices in The Last Voyage, or the snowstorm that just won’t quit in the first Airport movie.
    It was a great beginning for Clifford’s Saturday, cue for any number of Clifford-scripts. He began orchestrating the movie in his head. “Little did anyone suspect,” he said out loud. Little did anyone suspect . . . what? But he hadn’t figured that out yet.
    His mother always slept late Saturday. Clifford pulled on yesterday’s jeans and the first T-shirt in his T-shirt drawer, cleaned his foggy glasses with a Kleenex, and went downstairs to watch TV. Whereupon he discovered the electricity didn’t work. Not just in the living room, either, but in the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom. And for the first time Clifford paused and wondered if it was possible, not in the world of wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if but in the real dailiness of his life . . . if something really weird might actually be happening.
    He remembered being awakened by lightning, a diffuse lightning without thunder; remembered drifting in and out of a confused sleep with light all around him.
    He decided to check on his mother. He padded back to the dim upstairs of their rented house and eased open her bedroom door. Clifford’s mother was a thin and not very beautiful woman of thirty-seven years, but he had never looked at her critically and he didn’t do so now. She was only his mother, dangerous if awakened too soon from her Saturday morning sleep-in.
    Saturday morning drill was that she was allowed to sleep till ten o’clock, and if Clifford was up early he could do whatever he wanted—get his own breakfast, watch TV, play outside the house if he left a note and was back by noon for lunch. Today was different, obviously, but he guessed the rules still applied. He wrote her a message— I have gone to ride my bike —and stuck it to the refrigerator with a strawberry-shaped magnet.
    Then he hurried outside, locked the door, grabbed his bike and pedaled south toward the bridge over Powell Creek.
    He was looking for clues. There was a fire on the old Ojibway reserve and the lights didn’t work. A mystery.
    Two Rivers seemed too quiet to yield any answers. Then, as he crossed the creek and rolled toward downtown, Clifford wondered if the very quietness was itself a clue. No one was mowing his lawn or washing the car. Houses brooded with their drapes still drawn. The sun shimmered on an empty road.
    He heard the sirens when the fire engines went screaming along Beacon and out of town.
    It was, he thought, almost too much like a movie.
    He stopped at Ryan’s, a corner grocery that had been taken over last year by a Korean family named Sung. Mrs. Sung was behind the counter—a small, round woman with her eyes buried in nets of wrinkles.
    Clifford bought a candy bar and a comic book with the money from yesterday’s allowance. Mrs. Sung took his money and made change from a shoebox: “Machine not working,” she said, meaning the cash register.
    “How come?” Clifford said. “Do you know?”
    She only shrugged and frowned.
    Clifford rode away. He stopped at the public park overlooking Powell Creek to eat the candy bar.