THE BEAR STAR by Michael Lowell Teague

©2006 Revised ©2008

He contemplated the toothpaste scum slowly building up inside the bathroom basin, and how it was the subtlest indicator that a woman no longer resided in the house. With no idea as to the best way to clean bathroom fixtures, and with little patience to find out, toothpaste was squirted onto his stubby toothbrush and scrubbed over the dull porcelain in a fit of housekeeping.

The television blared away behind him in the bedroom. One of those twenty-four hour news networks was over in Geneva, Switzerland where the leaders of Europe had converged for a conference on global warming. One set of protesters were on hand to encourage the curbing of greenhouse gases while another less organized group were there protesting the CERN Large Hadron Super Collider. Gavin, not sure which group could lay claim to a legitimate fear, turned off the TV in a more pressing concern.

A chemical plant had caught fire near the base of Kale Peak, and a forest fire was rampaging up through the dry pine like kindling. The town of Sundry had been evacuated, and it was up to Gavin to expedite the closing down of the observatory a mile north of it. The facility was largely automated, but two people, working on the Ursa Major Project, were manning the place and presumably battening down the hatches in advance of their supervisor’s arrival. With any luck firemen would have the blaze under control by daybreak, but with the drought that may have been wishful thinking.

Snapping shut his briefcase, Gavin turned to leave the bedroom, but paused at the chest of drawers to eye a snow globe. It was one he bought Marie in Hawaii during an astrophysics conference. Shaking it, the clumped flakes of white plastic could not entice the half-naked hula girl to shift her hips or strum her ukulele. A music box sat beside the souvenir, another gift purchased for his wife on a trip they took together in the Alps. He would not unclasp its lid to see or hear the twirling bear on its pedestal, so opened the drawer below it in search of something buried deeper in his mind. He stroked one carefully folded pillowcase set aside in among his mismatched dark blue and brown socks, and stirred the scent of her hair conditioner still clinging to the cotton. With this memory tucked under his coat, he was to the front door and away.

Kale Peak rose in the dull grey glow some fifteen miles ahead, bringing to mind more thoughts of the Alps: the Matterhorn, cuckoo clocks, foil-wrapped dark chocolates, a wintry window where the half-light of one horizon had spanned a white peak to bridge another on the shortest day of the year...

This recollection too had to be left at the base of the mountain.

Parched smoke ringed the road leading to the observatory, chasing crickets high up the slope in advance of the flames. This concentrated their ear-piercing chorus just below the upper ridge, and only the Foot of God descending from the brown, radiant clouds would have silenced their woeful tune. The project manager drove up the narrow two-laner at a crawl, with the windows up to dampen the smell of burning evergreen. He grimly noted the dark panes of Ascension Café in passing, and remembered the many times he took Marie there to eat. The radio was just then relating more bad news for those downwind of the fire, but mercifully the road into Sundry looked deserted. Given the emergency generator, there would still be power on the summit, and on breaking through the last of the soot-heavy haze a light emerged on a perimeter fence.

Gavin pulled onto the parking lot and was glad to see the retracting doors on the observatory’s dome closed; the telescope’s lens would hopefully be safe from cinders blowing up off the conflagration below. He got out of his car to appreciate just how deafening the crickets were, and only then detected a trace of something faintly acrid in the air. On opening the car trunk, he belatedly realized he had failed to pack his chemical mask. He was not keen on being out-of-doors long, so swiftly dashed to the entrance of the building. Another prick to his senses threw his head around: the motion detector was on by the dumpster. The forest fire had likely flushed wildlife to the higher elevation. It was also possible the infamous black bear known to these parts was nosing about for garbage. The administrator inserted his key in the door lock, yet took a moment to note half a jelly donut smeared over the cement step. It was unwise, even without the threat of fire, to tempt a bear to loiter around the only way in or out of the observatory.

His desire to escape the foul odor was checked by its persistence on the other side of the threshold. He called out ahead of him. “Mick? Sal? Hello…?”

No response echoed under the dim belly of the dome.

He looked around the instrument panels beneath the main scope, and up at the creaking catwalk. The dark sitting room did not look promising, which left only the basement and bathroom. Gavin moved toward the stairwell, but, on seeing light under the bathroom door, stopped to go in.

“Where is everyone?” he asked on seeing feet under the stall partition.

The door opened with a squeak. Ruddy fingers emerged before a burnished mop handle. It was neither Mick nor Sal but Robbie, the janitor.

“Robbie, where is everyone?”

The janitor’s sulfur eyes were lined in spidery crimson. He grumbled out of a fog. “The Lord moves in mysterious ways. But the Devil always rides coach.”

“What are you talking about?”

He was pointing at the door, though certainly with the telescope in mind. “Came down it like a greased pole. Screams—grown men screaming. I peeked out the bathroom to see its shadow large on the dome. The big doors were closed by then, but it was too late.”

Robbie had been drinking. Gavin pushed through his gibberish. “The smell in the building. How long has it been in here? Where did Mick and Sal get to?”

The janitor continued to list in his nightmare. “Might still be hanging around out there…”

An ungodly screech began to ricochet around inside the observatory. Startled, Gavin stuck his head out the bathroom. Hinges on the entrance door were heaving under the exertion of some considerable force.

Robbie remained calm, swigging the last of his fisted bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.

The project manager retraced his steps to the door once the commotion ceased. He pressed his ear to the metal face, but knew whatever had caused the ruckus was moved away. He waited a few seconds more, to play it safe, then called back to the inebriated janitor. “Robbie? You coming with me?”

The ragged man shuffled out of the dim corridor and dropped his empty bottle with a clink.

Gavin turned back to the door and gently pushed on its metal bar; it gave way to let in more bitter air. Nothing emerged out of the hunkered shadow at the stoop, although, in glancing down, it was disconcerting to find the pitted cement picked clean of its raspberry-filled donut. The senior man braved the open parking lot. The motion detector was off by the dumpster, but this was cold comfort in view of the heavy trash receptacle being shoved off its platform inside the fenced-off enclosure. The sight made both men slow in their escape.

Only an agitated bear would have the strength to do such a thing, Gavin thought. Taken with the thorough removal of the smashed pastry, there was something utterly terrifying about such single-mindedness in a bear.

The project manager approached his car and nervously scanned the perimeter fence; his colleagues’ own means of transportation were still in their designated spots. “Mick? Sal…?” he called out again.

Robbie, already buckled in the passenger seat, was eager to get down off the mountain, though Gavin needed little persuading to leave.

The Saab was directly poking its way down the dark, dropping road. A shredded trash bag from the dumpster was immediately in front of them. It straddled the white line in advance of its spilled contents; the headlights notched each piece of garbage in passing with a long shadow. The trailing edge of the debris included a plastic Pepsi bottle, which appeared to bob above the thicker smoke skirting the peak. With this last marker, the car sank into the morass, and the diminished visibility made both men keener lookouts for the four-legged marauder. Gavin hoped the bear would sensibly retreat to safer terrain, but worried how the toxic smoke might affect its reasoning. Robbie was operating under his own impairment, and quickly lacquering the passenger window with whiskey vapor; still, the driver needed his extra pair of eyes. What finally broke in front of them was not a bear but a skeletal man turning around blindly in the high beams; Gavin swerved into the opposite lane.

He threw open the door, exclaiming, “Sal!”

The smoke was like a suit of clothes on the disoriented scientist.

The driver jumped out and hooked his arm. “What happened? Where’s Mick?”

Sal’s eyes were fire-red; his cheeks, streaked with crusting tears of ash.

“Was it a bear?” Gavin asked.

“A star,” he muttered.

“A star?”

The man was in shock.

He was promptly shoved down into the backseat of the car, and the trek down the mountainside resumed with the hope Mick would be found just as easily.

There’s been a chemical fire,” Gavin explained, glancing up at the rearview mirror to see his colleague. “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

Sal’s pallid face contorted in the glass.

The distraction was brief—so brief that by the time the driver’s gaze locked on the windshield, only the backend of the thing could be seen barreling into thicket. The car skidded to a full stop, but there was only a dusting of pine needles in the taillights. Sal and Robbie may or may not be suffering delusions as the result of breathing in airborne contaminants, but the thought of a mad bear running across a country road—on two legs—was inconceivable. Perhaps the headlights had frightened the creature, just as they had done with Sal; Gavin, regardless, was not going to wait around for the beast to recompose itself. The car inched forward before lurching, and what had been cautiousness was now anxiousness to cover the remaining three miles to the bottom of Kale Peak. The dotted white line blurred under the accelerating tires, and resembled a slack rope tied to a runaway bucket in a well. With any luck, the bottom would offer a return to sanity.

Ascension Café whizzed by on the left shoulder—every window was lit.

People were still in the evacuation zone; the motorist was duty-bound to raise the alarm. He slowed down and turned the car in the narrow pinch. On pulling up at the roadside eatery, he momentarily questioned his judgment in leaving Robbie in charge of Sal, but saw no other way around it.

Gavin ran into the establishment, yet was pulled up short by the musical clink of wine glasses. The lightness of the air was, for a moment, oddly impenetrable. His words rang dully over the heads of mostly bemused diners, and even sounded silly to his ears. “There’s a fire out in the forest,” he explained. “And a wild bear. You must all leave.”

The register’s door closed at the counter. Marisa, the proprietor, shared in her customers’ reaction. “Are you alright, Gavin? You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Where’s Marie?” Marisa asked.

“What?”

The older woman glanced at a table tucked into a corner. A rose lay on one of the two plates and a candle flickered between two long-stemmed glasses. “You called ahead.”

Gavin slowly settled into the seductive details of the room. “I don’t understand.”

Someone was sitting in the dark booth by the kitchen, and using the brim of a fedora to conceal his eavesdropping.

Marisa’s hand lit on the administrator’s arm. “Do you want a glass of something?”

The stranger rose in mid-sentence, curiously attired in a long black overcoat that, like his hat, seemed inappropriate to the dining occasion.

“A glass of water?” the proprietor ventured.

Gavin’s tongue clucked in his dry throat. “There’s been a fire. Evacuation orders…”

Marisa glanced back at the portable radio on the counter; a Mozart’s piano concerto was nearing its cadenza. “There’s been nothing,” she reported.

The stranger never quite emerged from shadow but exited by way of the kitchen. Gavin did the same, and in passing by the man’s table saw a napkin scribbled with numbers. The confused scientist tumbled out onto the rear steps where starlight twinkled in suddenly transparent night air. There was no noxious smoke. No haze lumbering back down the road. He honed in on his idling car, but this one point of continuity seemed more like a marooned vessel than link to what came before. Even allowing for glare from the headlights, it was clear Sal and Robbie were no longer seated inside the vehicle. He nonetheless approached the driver’s door with anticipation. Duller stars—gleaming buttons on an overcoat—greeted him from the rear passenger window. The stranger was crouched over and hiding in the backseat; Stardust, muffled under glass and the purr of the car’s engine, was playing on the dashboard radio.

The man broke away in a faint to return back up the road. Diners had resumed their meals and conversations, and were now oblivious to him. Marisa was still showing concern, and on seeing the long-time patron gravitate to his table, sent a waiter over to pour a glass of red wine. The alcohol was sweet and cleansing in his mouth, and in a way that almost washed down the remaining residue of his sooty nightmare. A payphone hung on the wall. After a soothing gulp or two, he rose to probe his pocket for quarters. He thought to call the Institute, but reflexively punched in Marie’s cell phone number. It rang ten or eleven times, with each tone a plumbing echo down the side of the mountain. There was something too familiar in it. If she would only pick up, he thought, it would all be over. But there was no answer on the other end. He hung up and returned to his seat, waiting on fate to write the next scene. Another phone ran some minutes later. Marisa picked up a receiver behind the counter and threw the anxious man another look: one less furrowed; Gavin moved over to the register.

“It’s Marie,” she said.

He took the phone. “Marie? Where are you?”

“Gavin…” Her voice was close. “I’m at the cabin. I thought we were to meet here first before going over to the café.”

“Yes,” he muttered. “I forgot.”

Click.

Marisa smiled. “I’ll hold your table.”

The man, going through the motion, nodded numbly on leaving.

The sky was still clear, and the Saab, still rumbling down the slope. The cabins Marie referred to were nearby, though lying in the direct path of what was suppose to be a raging fire. The easy walking distance convinced the dazed man to abandon his car and the mirage of the café. Something was wrong with his thinking—he knew that. But Marie had called to end it.

The dark path was steep and covered with loose dirt. Gravity gave him mass in the descent, as well as a sense of conviction about what he was doing. Light soon broke ahead through a patch of tree limbs, but it was impossible to say if it was cabin light or an advance party of flames coming to greet him. Crackling scattered to his rear—the snap of a closing trap. Gavin jerked around to look back up in the direction of the main road. His headlights made flat shadows out of the highest branches, yet betrayed one drooping back down onto the trail. It could have been a tree giving in earth, but there was something primal in its lunging. The man did not hesitate. He zeroed in on his beacon and was soon rewarded with paisley window curtains and the jutting edge of a porch. The rough wood door face surrendered to a push, revealing with an audible yawn an interior of split logs. Mick was sitting at a table beside a kerosene lamp. He looked dead in his smoke-singed shirt, but on seeing his coworker rose halfway out of a chair.

Gavin rasped. “Is Marie here?”

“What?”

“Marie. Is she here with you?”

Mick sank back in his seat. “Are you okay?”

“Where’s Marie? It’s a simple question.”

“Marie’s dead, Gav.”

There was another crack out in the woods. “What?” he murmured.

The colleague was pained to say it aloud. “Six months ago.”

“But I’m talking about Marie.”

“Yes. She was abducted from her car up on the ridge road. Remember?”

Gavin, coming halfway to his senses, slumped toward the sturdy table.

“Are you the rescue party?” Mick wheezed.

The man finally stepped back over the divide. “Yes.”

The scientist coughed over a glass of water. “I’m not sure how I got here.”

“There’s something in the air,” Gavin confessed. “Something chemical that’s causing hallucinations.”

“And blackouts?”

Gavin leapt ahead. “What was the last thing you remember back at the observatory?”

“I can’t say.”

“Robbie alluded to something like the bear.”

“The bear?” The man perked up. “The Great Bear?”

“The black bear that pokes around in the trash,” Gavin explained.

Mick’s eyes fell blankly on his glass of water.

Gavin continued, “Sal was going on about a star.”

“In The Big Dipper…?”

“No,” the senior man interrupted. “This is nothing to do with The Ursa Major Project.”

The astronomer’s face was anguished. “All I recall is running down the road, and then these cabins.” He looked toward the open door. “Is Sal with you? Robbie?”

Gavin threw a glance back over the dark porch. Heavier smoke was sticking to trees like hot spun sugar. “We have to get back up to the road before the fire cuts us off.”

Mick climbed to his rickety legs. “Is there a way out up there?”

“My car.” Gavin gestured out at the slope.

“There’s food.” Mick rallied, pointing at a white cardboard box lying on the counter by the sink. “Whoever was here before us left behind a box of raspberry donuts.”

“Donuts?” Gavin blurted.

“Yeah.” Mick opened the lid to reveal a haphazard pile of red sticky pastries. They looked as if they had been slammed against a wall. “The box was flipped over outside,” he explained, “but they’re still edible.”

The administrator stiffened against the creaking door. “We called off the search party too soon, Mick.”

“What?”

The man turned to fidget in the smoke. “She’s still up here on the mountain.”

Mick’s tone was muted. “The donuts aren’t Marie’s, Gav.”

“Then how do you explain raspberry donuts—of all things—turning up at this cabin? Marie always brought them up from the city. It can’t be a coincidence! She’s still out there! We gave up too soon!”

Mick moved over to drop a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “We called off the search party because she was found.”

Gavin pointed at the box of donuts, about to speak.

The colleague was forced to say it. “The bear found the body. The body and her donuts. These are not Marie’s.”

The words twisted in the man’s stomach, tearing open what had only begun to heal.

Mick regretted rehashing the details, but the shock therapy appeared to work.

Gavin quieted, and after a few seconds turned more collected to the door. “Yes,” he said.

The two men abandoned the cabin and began the ascent back up the dirt path. Above the steeple-tipped pine, chirping crickets were once again returned to the landscape and fiercely defending their toehold on the upper ridge. The headlights splintered above them in the branches, and in the haze were hard-edged and serrated. Whatever particles were suspended in the air also clung to their clothes—to their very thoughts. Gavin did not want to think on the ill effects, but something else was rudely settling out over the landscape: There was less forest on the way up than had been on the way down. A felled tree straddled the track; both men stepped around it without comment. Another toppled pine was even more charred, and what had been a straight shot up to the road was now an obstacle course of smoldering lumber.

Mick asked the obvious. “Where’s the fire?”

Gravity, which had been an earlier ally, was tugging on Gavin’s shins in a contrary direction. He panted to get it out. “It must be another hallucination. This wasn’t here when I came down.”

“How can we both have the same hallucination?”

The out-of-breath man bent over in a futile attempt to clear his head.

“Are you sure you came down this way?” Mick inquired.

Gavin squinted up at the light above them. “Those are my headlights.”

The astronomer lifted his stinging eyes. “Are you positive?”

“It’s all we’ve got,” Gavin said, pushing ahead.

Just then, his foot struck something glass and kicked it up in a glint. He knelt down to touch the bulb-hot surface of the bottle. A smoky, glaucous film lined the inside of it, but half a scorched label left no doubt whose whiskey bottle it was.

“That’s Robbie’s leather jacket,” Mick yelped.

Gavin stood up to see what he was pointing at. “Let’s keep moving,” he grunted.

The colleague frantically scanned the path in front of them. “Where’s Robbie?”

“Let’s keep moving,” was the only reply.

“What the hell?” Mick crouched over something black and twisted in the scorched dirt. “This is one of the swivel chairs from the observatory!” With the utterance, more familiar items turned up on the rising landscape. The man looked up in the direction of the droning insects. “Did it blow up? I didn’t hear it blow up!”

Gavin was already yards ahead. “Let’s go!”

Both hikers rejoined the zigzagging course, and were resigned, for the moment at least, to leave the arduous work of verbal explanations behind. The project manager knew there would be no stemmed glassware or Mozart waiting for them at the top, but was grateful to have level ground under his shoes again. He peeked out along the gravel shoulder. Ascension Café, with its gritty windows, materialized in the wispy high beams of the car like a burned bridge. The two men got in the car and the driver turned on the radio; Stardust was still playing. He directly cut a half-circle from shoulder to shoulder to spin the Saab heading down the last quarter mile to the highway. The headlights surged in the straightaway, and, though they reached down deep into the throat of the mountain, could not find a bottom to it.

The music crawled up the hairs on Gavin’s arms. It was the same tune on the music box. “There was a man in the backseat,” he muttered. “A man in her backseat.”

Mick looked over. “A man in whose backseat?”

“A man in a fedora and overcoat—hiding in the back of Marie’s car.”

“You’re confusing things, again,” Mick said. “That was Doctor Gruber.”

“Gruber?”

“Doctor Gruber from Geneva. We took him to eat at the café last week when he came to visit. He wore his coat throughout the meal.”

Gavin’s chest tightened in a vice. He wanted to speak, but his windpipe was narrowing at the thought he was about to be plunged headfirst into freezing water.

Gruber had plugged in some numbers for Hawking Radiation on a napkin… “There’s no chance,” he jested over his linguini. “There is simply not enough energy on hand to create anything like a stable black hole or a strangelet.”

“Even though the Hawking theory is untested,” Sal said.

“Nothing has happened at Brookhaven,” the guest countered. “And cosmic rays bombarding the Earth for eons have created no black holes to devour the Earth.”

“But particles colliding with the atmosphere would not be robbed of their momentum, as they would be in a collider,” Sal argued.

“It is impossible,” Gruber reiterated.

Gavin smiled at the exchange, thinking aloud. “It would be too ironic to think that Switzerland, long touted for its neutrality in wars, should be architect to the destruction of the world by building a doomsday machine.”

“Indeed,” Gruber chuckled. “Too ironic to be true. What you should be concerned about is global warming, not CERN. I will attend a conference on that real threat next week.”

Gavin looked at the napkin, wadding up the numbers and tossing them aside in his empty salad bowl. “Too ironic,” he repeated.

Mick was not listening to his mumbling. He was gazing up in the increased illumination of the headlights to see snow high in the trees.

Gavin followed his line of sight. “We’re in the Alps,” he said.

Mick snapped. “We’re not in the Alps!”

“Gruber…” the man replied, “Switzerland… Remember…?”

Snow was wafting down through the pine needles like pillow stuffing—too thick to see past until, in the middle of the attenuating road, the hula girl emerged.

Mick’s fading words barely made it to the glove compartment. “I don’t get it…?”

Gavin slammed on the brakes.

The hula girl stumbled toward them; the headlights quickly burned away her grass skirt.

Gavin exploded out of the car.

Mick's voice trembled from the open door. “She's covered in blood…”

Large wafers of white-hot ash rained down on the woman’s scarred body as she staggered to cover the remaining distance. Her breasts kicked at her boney chest like two, dangling stillborns. Indecipherable words, muffled in the laden air, dropped flat to the pavement in front of her.

Gavin's feet were quickly sinking in the asphalt…

The twirling bear—the colossal, snarling, twirling bear—was charging up the dark road on all fours, out of step with the tune in the box. Muscles—ready to tear limb from limb—rippled under bristling fur. Eyes—the color of embers—reflected the blinding high beams.

It was not blood smeared over the woman's body—but red jelly.

Marie's dead mouth opened, though her cry bellowed up from the grave of the Earth. “They did it! They blew up the whole goddamn thing!”

Gavin recoiled as the bear tore into the back of his wife’s head, but the headlights had already devoured his long shadow, and the bottom of the peak.