The zipper growled into the silence. Howard shucked off the bag and huddled in the corner of the tent where the flap opened into the cold air outside, ready to bolt.
But the shadows on the tent reached a noon angle and then grew longer; the light dimmed moment by moment until it was gone.
Howard waited for what seemed an eternity but might have been four or five minutes. Now the darkness was absolute once more. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, glasses or no.
He took a deep breath, opened the tent flap, and crawled outside.
His legs were weak, but he managed to stand.
He was able to see the dim silhouettes of the trees against an overcast sky faintly alight with the dim glow of Two Rivers. There was nothing threatening out here—at least, nothing obvious. No sign of what had passed except a strange, acrid odor, quickly gone. The air was cold and hazy with ground fog.
He staggered ten steps from the tent, suddenly aware of the pressure of his bladder, and relieved himself against a tree. So what the fuck had happened here? What exactly had he seen? A lantern, flashlight, headlights on some car? But there had been no sound. Not even footsteps. Well, he thought, people see weird things in the woods. Swamp gas. Ball lightning. Who could say? The important thing was that it was gone, that he hadn’t been seen.
Probably hadn’t been seen, he amended. But even if he had, there was nothing to do about it. Sleep, he thought, if that was possible, and move on in the morning.
He had reached a state of tentative calm when a second light began to flicker on the pinetops.
He felt marginally less threatened this time. This time he could see what was going on. He crouched in the cover of a young maple and watched the sourceless glimmer rising through a foggy thicket some tens of yards away.
What made it eerie, Howard thought, was its noiselessness: how could something as bright as a spotlight move through these woods without rattling the underbrush? And the smoothness of the motion. A glide. Shadows tall as houses wove among the trees.
Howard squatted in the dark with one hand buried in the loam to brace himself. He felt aloof now, in a state of fine concentration, only a little frightened.
The light moved steadily closer. Now, he thought: now it will come around that hillside and I’ll see it…
And it did—and he gasped in spite of himself, cut by a breathless, helpless awe.
The light had no source. It was somehow its own source. The light was a thing; the light had dimension. The light was a nebulous shape ten or fifteen feet tall, almost too bright to look at, but not quite, not quite. It was not a sphere; it had a shape that was tenuous but seemed to suggest a human form—head, arms, trunk, legs. But the features weren’t solid; they twined like smoke, were lost to the air, flickered alive. Veins of color pulsed in the brightness.
It came closer. Closer, it wasn’t easier to see. The edges blurred; it was diffuse. It moved like a flame; Howard was suddenly afraid it might come close enough to burn him.
Now it paused a few yards away.
The apparition possessed no visible eyes. Nevertheless, Howard was convinced that it looked directly at him—that it regarded him with some complex, chill intelligence that flowed toward him and into him like a slow current.
And then it simply moved on: glided past him and away beyond a scrim of trees.
Howard kept still. There were more lights now, none so close, but all nearby, each casting its own grid of shadows into and around the weaving trees. The woods were populated with these things, each one marching on some stately orbit. My God, Howard thought. The urge to pray was powerfully strong. My God, my God.
He watched until each source of this nebulous light had passed and a genuine darkness descended again.
Then—bone by bone, tendons creaking—he lifted himself and stood erect.
The cold wind was brisk but the sky seemed less weighty now. It was ink-blue beyond the eastern margin of the forest. Dawn, Howard thought. That bright star might be Venus.
He stumbled back to the tent bereft of every emotion but a wordless gratitude for the fact of his own survival.
He woke hours later in cool sunlight filtered through orange nylon. His body felt raw and his thoughts were quick and fragile.
Time to start thinking like a scientist, Howard scolded himself. Find the center of this problem.
Or just keep walking: that was the other option. Walk past the ruined research buildings, walk deeper into this forest, south toward Detroit or whatever mutation of Detroit existed here; walk until he found a population to lose himself in, or until he died, whichever came first.
The fundamental question, almost too sweeping to ask, was simply Why? So many things had happened to Two Rivers, so many enormous, numbing events. All linked, he supposed; all connected in some causal chain, if only he could begin to unravel it. Obviously the town had moved through an unimaginable latitude of time, but why? Had arrived in a world full of archaic technology and perverse religious wars, but why? Why here, of all places? And the night shapes in the forest: what were they?
What single line could possibly connect all these things?
He rolled his tent, fielded his pack, and followed the trail eastward.
Sunlight chased cloud into the hazy east. Howard crossed a brook at its shallowest point, where the water streamed in cool transparency over granite rubble. He wished his thoughts were as lucid. He was out of food; he felt hungry and light-headed.
It seemed appropriate that he was moving toward the heart of the crisis, through the undeveloped lands of the old Ojibway reserve toward the ruined Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory. Through mystery toward revelation. At least, perhaps. Eventually.
Last night these woods had been haunted. Today, in flickering sunlight, the memory seemed ludicrous. And yet there was a presence here, never seen but often felt, a private visitation. He felt his uncle with him as he walked: Stern as a presiding spirit. He guessed that wasn’t scientific. But that was how it seemed.
The woods thinned. Howard moved more cautiously here. He came to the logging road that connected the lab with the highway. The road had been widened by military traffic. He waited until a truck rumbled past, its primitive engine loud in the silence. Then he crossed the rutted, wet road and walked parallel to it behind a screen of low pines.
He reached the hill from which, long ago, he had watched Chief Haldane’s ladder company move beyond a border of blue light. Another trail crossed the road here. It seemed to lead to higher ground along this ridge, and Howard followed it through berry thickets and white pine, sweating under his Navy coat. It was afternoon now and the sunlight was warm.
He came to the peak of the ridge. The Two Rivers Physical Research Laboratory lay in the flatland beyond. Howard felt conspicuous in this elevated place. He shrugged off his pack and left it under a tree. The ridge sloped steeply here and Howard lay on his belly at the edge of it, looking down an incline of rock and wild grasses.
The ruined buildings were still enclosed in their dome of iridescent light. They looked much the way Howard remembered them looking in the spring. The central bunker had stopped smoking, but nothing else had changed—the grounds were embalmed in this glaze of illumination. The single elm outside the staff housing had kept all its leaves.