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long before the fire could have grown to threatening size; the fifteen civilian witnesses who claimed they had approached the town from the east or west and found the highway cut cleanly, as if by some enormous knife, and nothing on the other side but trees and wilderness. Power lines had been severed just as neatly, and it was the loose lines, some said, that were the real cause of the fire.
    But these were clues that defied interpretation, and they were soon forgotten, except by the fringe element who collected stories of ghosts, rains of stones, and the spontaneous combustion of human bodies.
    Never officially connected with the Two Rivers disaster was the case of Wim Pender, who was found wandering in a dazed condition along the grassy verge of Highway 75. Pender claimed he had been on a fishing/camping expedition in “the north of the Province of Mille Lacs” with two companions, from whom he had been separated when there was “a blast of light and flames to the south of us late one night.”
    Pender gave as his home address a number on a nonexistent Boston street. His wallet and identification had been lost in his flight from the fire. His pack contained only an empty canteen, two cans of something labeled THON PALE EN MORCEAUX (tuna fish, it turned out), and an apocryphal testament of the Bible entitled The Secret Booke of James in the English Tongue , printed on rice paper and bound in imitation leather.
    When Pender’s claims grew even more fantastic—including the accusation that both the Forest Service and the Michigan Department of Welfare were “Mohammedans or servants of Samael or worse”—he was remanded for psychiatric evaluation to a facility in Lansing.
    Mr. Pender was deemed not to be a danger to himself or others and was released on June 23. He made his way to Detroit, where he spent the summer in a shelter for the homeless.
    November was cold that year, and during an early snowfall Pender left his bed and spent his last money on a city bus, because the buses were heated. The bus carried him downriver to Southgate, where he got off in front of a bankrupt and abandoned retail lumber outlet. In the upper story of that building he tied his belt into a crude loop and hanged himself from a rafter.
    Pinned to his shirt was a note:
    THE KYNGDOM OF DEATH BELONGS TO THOSE
WHO PUT THEM SELVES TO DEATH.
JAMES THE APOSTLE.
I AM NOT INSANE.
SIGNED, WIM PENDER OF BOSTON

MYSTERIUM

PART ONE

The void that precedes the creation of the universe is an imponderable, unknowing emptiness—lacking matter, vacuum, time, motion, number, or logic. And yet the universe derives from it according to some law not yet understood—a law which, governing nothingness, yields everything!
Call it Nous. Perfect Mind. Call it the Protennoia. The Uncreated God.
    —from the secret journal of Alan Stern

CHAPTER 1

    Dex Graham woke with the sun in his eyes and the weave of Evelyn Woodward’s bedroom carpet printed on the side of his face. He was cold and his body was stiff and knotted with aches.
    He sat up, wondering what had caused him to spend the night on the floor. He hadn’t slept on a floor since college. The morning after some nightmarish frat party blowout, drunk on the floor of a dorm room and wondering what happened to the strawberry blond grad student who had offered him a ride in her Mustang. Vanished in the haze. Like so much else.
    A breath of cool air made him shiver. The bay window was wide open. Had he done that? The curtains tossed fitfully and the sky was as blue as china glaze. It was a quiet morning; there was no sound louder than the honking of Canada geese in the shallow water under the docks.
    He stood up, a slow operation, and looked at Evelyn. She was awkwardly asleep under a tangle of cotton sheets. One arm was flung out and Roadblock lay stretched at her feet.
    Had he been drunk? Was that possible? He felt the way he remembered feeling after a drunk—the same sensation of bad news hovering just out