Mysterium Read Online Free PDF Page B

while Meg, stunned, rummaged in a shoebox for change.
    “I was supposed to drive to Detroit this morning,” the man said. “For my sister’s wedding. I wake up late, so I throw the tux in the back seat and I drive out Beacon and turn south on the highway, right? But I only get about a mile and a quarter past the city limits.”
    “The road’s blocked?”
    The man laughed. “The road’s not blocked . The road just ain’t there. It stops . It’s like somebody cut it with a knife. It ends in trees. I mean old growth. There’s not even a trail through there.” He looked at Dex. “How the hell could that happen?”
    Dex shook his head.
    Meg put the groceries in two boxes and gave the man his change. Her eyes were wide and frightened.
    “I think we’re in for a long siege,” said the man in the John Deere cap. “I think that’s pretty fucking obvious.”
    Meg toted up Dex’s bill, all the while casting nervous glances at the man as he loaded his boxes into the back of an old Chevy van. “Mr. Graham? Is what he said true?”
    “I don’t know, Meg. It doesn’t seem likely.”
    “But the electricity doesn’t work. Or the phones. So maybe—”
    “Anything’s possible, but let’s not jump to conclusions.”
    She looked at his collection of canned goods and bottled water, not too different from the previous order. “Should we all be—you know, stocking up?”
    “I don’t honestly know. Is your father around?”
    “Upstairs.”
    “Maybe you should tell him what happened. If any of this is true, or even if rumors start flying, there might be a crowd in here by this afternoon.”
    “I’ll do that,” Meg said. “Here’s your change, Mr. Graham.”
    He put the groceries in the trunk of the car. It might have been wiser to go straight back to Evelyn’s, but he couldn’t let the matter rest. He drove past the house on Beacon, connected with the highway and turned south.
    He passed a couple of cars headed in the opposite direction. Through traffic, Dex wondered? Or had they hit the mysterious barrier and turned back? He decided he didn’t believe the John Deere man’s story; it was simply too implausible . . . but something might have turned the man around, perhaps something connected with the power failure and the explosion on the old reserve.
    The state highway wound through low pine punctuated with back roads where tar paper shacks and ancient cabins crumbled in the noon heat. He saw the city limits sign, LEAVING TWO RIVERS; a billboard ad for a Stuckey’s ahead where the state road met the interstate; LEAVING BAYARD COUNTY. Then he rounded a tight curve and almost rammed the back end of a Honda Civic parked with one wheel in the breakdown lane. He stomped the brake and steered hard left.
    When the car came to a stop he let it idle a few minutes. Then, when it occurred to him to do so, he put it in park and switched off the muttering engine.
    Everything the man had said was true.
    Three vehicles had arrived here before him: the Civic, a blue Pinto with a roof rack, and a tall diesel cab without a trailer. All three were motionless. Their owners stood at the end of the road, huddled in confusion: a woman with a toddler, a man in a business suit, and the truck driver. They looked at Dex as he climbed out of his car.
    Dex went to the place where the road ended. He wanted to make a careful observation; wanted to be able to describe this with scientific accuracy to Howard Poole, the graduate physics student back at Evelyn’s. It seemed important, in this senseless moment, to register every detail.
    The highway simply stopped. It was as if someone had drawn a surveyor’s line across it. On this side, two-lane blacktop; on that side—old-growth forest.
    The road seemed to have been cut by something much finer than a knife. Only a few particles of asphalt had crumbled. The graded road was lower than the forest floor on the other side. A hump of loamy soil rose above the road surface and had dropped