But since Saturday, Coldwater Road had changed. The grid of vacant lots had been cut in half by what looked to Clifford like an old, old forest. It was a mystery of enormous proportions.
The forest was deep and cool. Its floor was loamy and it smelled moist and pungent. It was both inviting and frightening. Clifford didn’t venture far into that dimness.
Instead, he was fascinated by its perimeter: a straight line bisecting the blank lots, maybe curving a little if you stood at the far end of the cleared land and sighted northeast along the treeline—but only maybe.
Not every tree was intact. Where the white pines crossed the border, they were neatly cut. The cut trees were eerie, Clifford thought. The heartwood was pale green and bled a sticky yellow sap. On one side: green branches thick with needles. On the other: nothing.
He tried to imagine some force that could have enclosed Two Rivers, could have drawn it up from the world like the dough in a cookie cutter and deposited it here, wherever here was: a wilderness.
He had heard the phrase pathless wilderness, and he guessed that was what this was—except, Clifford discovered, it was not entirely pathless.
If you turned left where Coldwater Road ended, if you followed the line of woods past the vacant lots, over scrubland and a small hill (from which he could see the cement factory and, far beyond it, the tangle of culs-de-sac that contained his own house), and if you left your bike behind and persisted through berry canes and wildflowers and high weeds, then you came to a trail.
A trail in the new forest, which approached Two Rivers but ended there, as all the town’s roads ended at the forest.
It was a wide trail where the trees had been cleared and the undergrowth trampled down as if by trucks. A logging road, Clifford would have called it, but maybe it was not that; he made no assumptions.
He walked a few yards down this path, listening to the sway of the pines around him and smelling the moist pungency of moss. It was like stepping into another world. He didn’t go far. He worried that the connection between this forest and Two Rivers might close behind him; that he would turn back and not be able to find his bike, his house, the town; only more trees and more of this primitive road, its source or destination.
Monday, riding home along Coldwater Road, he saw three airplanes pass overhead. Another clue, he thought. He didn’t know much about airplanes, but it was obvious to Clifford that these were old-fashioned. They circled, circled, circled, then veered away.
Somebody’s seen us, he thought. Somebody knows we’re here.
He spent a day at home with his mother, who was frightened but trying not to show it. They opened cans of Texas-style chili and heated them over wax candles. His mother played the portable radio that night, and for a while there was music, but not anything Clifford or his mother recognized: sad, trilling songs. Then a man’s voice that faded into static.
“I don’t know this station,” his mother said absently. “I don’t know where it’s from.”
In the morning Clifford cycled back to the forest road.
He was there when more planes passed over the town. Bigger planes this time, huge planes, wings bristling with engines. The planes dropped black dots into the June sky: bombs, Clifford thought breathlessly, but the dots grew billowing circles: parachutes, men dangling beneath, a rain of them.
And he heard a rumbling from the earth under his feet, and he ducked into the shadow of the trees and watched terrified from the margin of the road as a column of armored vehicles roared past in choking shrouds of dust and diesel smoke, the men at their helms in black uniform bearing rifles with bayonets, none of them aware of Clifford watching as they broke from the forest into scrub waste and daylight and rumbled over sunlit empty lots to the gray ribbon of Coldwater Road.
CHAPTER TWO
Autumn was wet in Boston that year.
The rain began in mid-September and continued for three weeks without surcease—or so it seemed to Linneth Stone, who had spent most of that time cloistered in the humanities wing of Sethian College, correcting page proofs and double-checking footnotes, pausing at odd moments to watch the rain sluice down the high windows and cascade from the rain gutters and over the casements of the library across the square.
Pagan Cults of Meso-America was the first tangible fruit of her long struggle for tenure. It both consolidated and justified her career. She was proud of the book. She loved the solid look of the typeset words, invested with an authority the manuscript had lacked. But she had been struggling with the book for half a decade, and what she didn’t like to admit was that the work—her life—had begun to border on tedium. Hours of minutiae, days of solitary page-turning, relieved by… nothing much. And the rain went on and on.
It was, in its way, not a bad kind of tedium. Her chamber was cosy enough. She was warm against the weather, and there was coffee from the hallway urn, and the periodic clanking of the radiator, like the complaining of some gruff but dependable old friend. The time passed in neat packets of hours and days. But it was repetitious time, and it was often lonely. Few of the senior academics in her department knew what to make of a woman with tenure, especially a relatively young woman: she had turned thirty-four in August. Young, at least, compared to those bearded venerables who had been haunting the stacks and carrels since the Titans walked the earth. They stared at her the way they might stare at a talking dung beetle, or a chimp that had been trained to smoke cigars.
And each night she hurried home to her tiny apartment on Theodotus Street, through the leaf-tumble and autumn air, past rattling motorcarriages and bored dray horses, from warmth to warmth: the warmth of her hot plate and her quilted blankets. This is success, she told herself. This is my career. This is how I mean to spend the rest of my life.
But each night the memory came of her field expedition three summers ago in the Sierra Mazateca with her guides and two graduate students: a time when she had often been frightened for her life, when she had been dirty, uncomfortable, and too often helpless in the arms of fate. Now she would lie in bed reliving those months. And as terrifying as that time had often been, Linneth thought … it had not been tedious.
Certainly she didn’t want to go back to New Spain. That part of her research was finished. In any case, the entire area was a war zone. But she wondered if the trip had not changed something inside her, had not ignited an unsuspected appetite for—what? Adventure? Surely not. But for something to happen. Another milestone. Something that would matter in her life.
Some nights it was almost a prayer. She remembered her mother murmuring prayers at night: ostensibly to Apollo, since Daddy was a paidonomos in that cult, but more likely to the land around their house in rural New York, away from city lights, where the stars were vivid on summer nights and the forest hummed with life. A prayer to the local gods, who went nameless in the New World, at least since the aboriginals had been exterminated or driven west; whose sybils had fallen silent or never spoken from their meadows. “We live in a breathless place,” Linneth’s mother had once told her. “Without pneuma. No inspiration. No wonder the hierarchs are so powerful here.”
More powerful than she had guessed, Linneth thought. For her mother, the bad times had come all too soon.