Red Equinox (10 page)

Interspersed between the cabalistic calculations she came across the occasional list or journal entry in plain English. Such as:

7/19/17 Acquired the power objects to complete my vestments today. A golden solar crown, ruby scepter, and spectacles for activating the R/L hemispheres. I stand at the axis mundi now, between the pillars of Mercy and Severity, and assume the mantle of Guardian of the Wheel.

He sure didn’t write like he talked. Becca heard something shift and crash on the ground floor above, and almost set the book down to run to see if it was Django, but she knew if she left it here she wouldn’t come back, and now she wanted to know more, needed to know more. Did Moe’s 3D glasses somehow enable him to see the invisible patterns on the walls, the alien shapes that her camera could only catch in the infrared part of the spectrum? That seemed impossible, but she had often wondered if schizophrenics were simply people whose consciousness was attuned to a slightly different level of perception than the rest of society. The books she’d read about shamanism in her grandmother’s library seemed to suggest that possibility.

She wished she’d found Maurice at home and could just ask him about the photos and the beetle, maybe buy him a hot cup of coffee and a sandwich, but she also knew that the notebook in her hands might reveal more truth than any oblique explanations he might give her face to face.

Another entry:

The young man was back today in the flooded buildings on the riverbank, testing different labia for the Voice Box of the Gods. Like reeds for a flute. He’s getting closer to the right harmonics. The membrane tween worlds is wearing thin. Took me all night to seal the cracks.

What the hell did that mean, if anything? Maybe
she
was the crazy one for thinking she could decode the ramblings of a burnt-out mystic. Still, she flipped the pages, searching. There were some drawings of what looked like alien landscapes and inhuman sexual anatomy, but nothing that quite resembled the fractal patterns she’d seen in the photos, and no scarabs.

Another small crash echoed down the stairs, followed by a scampering rush, and this time she shut the book, tossed it atop the pile of ratty blankets, and blew out the candle.

She climbed the stairs quickly and quietly. As her head cleared the floor, she glanced around the room and caught sight of the shaggy black-and-tan tail swishing out of sight around a corner where black mold clung to water-stained cinderblocks.

Abandoning stealth, Becca took the remaining steps at a dash and gave chase. She hurtled around the corner and splashed through a stretch of stagnant puddles, cloud-filtered sunlight strobing against her face from holes in the roof, dazzling her eyes with its brightness after their acclimation to the darkness of the basement utility closet.

She stopped short at an intersection of corridors, her green canvas bag swinging at her hip with the weight of the camera. Between her boots, she saw the gray impressions of paw prints in the dust, and followed them down the center corridor, wishing for a flashlight. She’d come less prepared than usual today. Her typical urbex kit included the headlamp, a Swiss army knife, and enough nylon cords, cleats, and hooks to satisfy a rock climber. Rafael called her a “girl scout,” but today in her haste to take more photos and interview Moe, she hadn’t expected to explore the bowels of the building.

The paw prints led through an interior hall built of sheet rock and wood that had suffered more water damage than the brick walls of the outer rooms. In places she could see through gaping holes in the walls where she supposed vandal kids had thrown karate kicks and chunks of bricks for the sheer pleasure of destruction. None of these offered her another glimpse of the dog, though, and eventually she walked out of the far end of a long puddle, her boots glazed with gray water, and no tracks on the dusty concrete to follow. It took her a moment to register the absence of the paw prints because there were other markings on the floor; dark and geometric and hard to read in the darkness.

She now wished she’d taken the book of matches with her, maybe even the candle. She could have stuffed them in her bag and returned them to Moe’s lair before leaving the mill. But now it was as futile to wish for matches as for the headlamp she’d left at home, so she took out her camera, turned on the LCD, and shone the little screen at the floor, straining to see the marks by its weak light.

Becca didn’t like what she saw in the half-second before the light automatically dimmed. It looked like blood.

She switched the flash on and took a shot of the floor at her feet, looking directly at it rather than through the viewfinder. The burst of light turned the odd shapes on the floor deep red for a blazing instant, and then she was doused in darkness again, looking at the photo on the screen: three exploded drops of blood on the concrete (drops that had fallen from a greater height than that of a dog judging by their spiky coronae) and a set of bloody, blocky sneaker treads smearing toward the wall. But the dark red skid marks ended there, as if the wall had been built across their path, or as if the body had been pulled through the wall, which was itself devoid of bloodstains. In the dark she could almost imagine she was standing beside a barrier of thick fog, but when she touched it, the eggshell paint was cold, damp, and solid beneath her fingertips.

She backed away from the wall until her shoulders touched its opposite, raised the camera, and shot six photos—three with flash and three without.

Her heart quickened as she thumbed the buttons, standing in the dark, waiting for the last photo to load and light her face. When it did, her breath caught in her throat. The pattern of fractal tentacles was here, just as it had been in the pictures of the brick walls from the previous day. But in the dark, the infrared textures were stronger, as if they’d been weakened by ambient sunlight in the other room, or had grown more tangible, more present in the mill since last she’d been here. And that felt right. The pattern reminded her of the restoration of some fresco from antiquity, the details of the paint emerging from under a layer of grime and soot. Only here it appeared that a layer of some reality or dimension adjacent to our own was revealed.

Becca wiped her clammy hand down her thigh, then turned the thumbwheel and checked the previous shot. In this one, she had aimed at the base of the wall where it met the floor to capture the bloody sneaker treads. A cold dread woke in her, a sense that some grave threat was closing in on her in the dark. Her animal instincts urged her to look away from the camera screen and search the shadows for whatever had spilled blood here, but she couldn’t look away because the terrible and impossible fact confronting her from the brittle light of the LCD was that the monsters were inside the walls, all around her, and in the floor beneath her feet as well. Or that matter itself, the three dimensional space she mistook for floor and wall and God help her maybe even the sky itself, was made of monsters.

Her breath had grown shallow and her limbs felt numb, the onset of terror threatening to immobilize her, and with her eyes still locked on the image, she forced herself to step away from the blood, to back down the corridor in the direction from which she had come…because in the photo the blood smears didn’t end at the wall; they continued through it, and there on the other side was an object she feared she recognized, sitting in a puddle of blood. It was impossible, and she told herself so. It quickly became a mantra, “Not possible, not possible….”

Not possible for a digital camera to function like an x-ray scope, to turn a wall into a window. Not possible for a cardboard crown to be overturned in a pool of blood in another dimension at her feet, inside a solid wall.

*   *   *

When Becca emerged from the mill, staggering over the fallen door and through the brambles, clutching her camera to her chest, sweat beading on her forehead and chilling in the cold air, she didn’t see Rafael. Her panic increased at the idea that he might have gone into the building looking for her, that she might have to go back in there instead of just getting the hell out of here, and the inarticulate fear underlying these other concerns but rapidly rising to the surface of her consciousness—that he could be trapped in the walls, like a fly in amber, among the oily spheres and fractals.

But then she heard a gentle, lilting voice on the breeze,
Rafael’s
voice, and coming around a corner she found him squatting in a bald patch of the weedy lot where the rusty rings of beer can lids poked from the charred ground and shards of dirty glass glinted silver in the diffused sunlight of the dim day.

Sensing her approach, he turned to smile at her, a smile that faded when he saw her. He was holding something in his fingers, something she would never have thought to pack in her own bag. He was feeding a piece of beef jerky to Django.

Darius Marlowe was a man with many keys. He had an ID that served as a key to the building that housed the lab; he had a magnetic card that served as a key to the lab itself; and he had a photo of a sigil drawn in condensation on the surface of a foggy mirror—a mirror misted with the water of another world—on his phone, which served as a key to the mind of Dr. Leonard Martin, who was himself a kind of key to the best 3D printer at MIT.

He flashed the sigil at Dr. Martin as he entered the lab. It probably wasn’t necessary to show it to him every time, but Darius wasn’t sure of the rules for keeping the suggestion effective, so he didn’t take any chances. His recent communications with Charobim had focused on only his most vital technical questions. The face-to-face summoning was an exhausting process, one he resorted to only when the instructions from his dreams required clarification.

The dreams had grown more vivid now that he slept at the Fenway Towers, close to the mirror. Maybe it had nothing to do with the mirror. Maybe he was developing some part of his brain, some facet of his active imagination through regular exercise. He thought of it as a kind of muscle deep in his brain, something serpentine coiled around his amygdala.

Martin had glanced up at Darius’s entry with perfectly lucid curiosity on his face, but at the sign of the pharaoh his features slackened immediately, and, resembling a lobotomy recipient, the distinguished scientist shambled to a corner of the lab to busy himself with whatever amusements he could find there (probably the non-Euclidian sculpture he’d been building out of coffee stirrers whenever Darius visited) and clearing the way for the protégé to use the lab.

Darius opened the glass specimen case at the end of the bay and checked on his latest prototype. It was a thing of beauty: a bionic larynx built in the Plexiglas box of the 3D printer from bovine cells, silicone, and silver Nano-particles in a mere five hours and then left to cultivate in a Petrie dish for two weeks, a process accelerated by a formula that Charobim had inscribed on the mirror one midnight. Dr. Martin would have been duly impressed if he were in his right mind in Darius’s presence. But then, if the professor were in his right mind, the student would have been ejected from the lab by campus security long before he’d had a chance to exhibit his genius for biotech innovation.

The project followed a trail blazed by McAlpine and Mannoor at Princeton, where they had developed a bionic ear that could transmit and receive electromagnetic frequencies beyond the natural human range. But their models took four weeks to cultivate and couldn’t detect acoustic sound waves. The work of Charobim and Marlowe would never see the pages of a peer-reviewed journal, but it broke new ground in that it produced actual acoustic speech via a voice box made of similar biosynthetic materials for the vocal folds, cartilage, and epiglottis. Of course, the production of language depended on the entire vocal system from lungs to tongue and teeth, but Darius wasn’t interested in making it speak English or any other known language.

He had built the Voice Box of the Gods to reproduce a lost language, the
first
language, which man had once sung in wordless adoration of the dark gods who had birthed him from the amniotic tide pools of his marine incarnation.

It was a language of vowels and overtones preserved by the priest class of ancient Sumer long after the evolution (or devolution) of the human organism had left such utterances behind. Some volumes of occult history claimed that the priests had cut out their own tongues or mutilated their mouths in excruciating initiation rituals to reclaim the gift of black song. Charobim would neither confirm nor deny these accounts when Darius probed him in the deepest hours of the night, when drunken B.U. students would catch glimpses of unearthly lights and colors from a fourth-floor window of the gargoyle-haunted Fenway Towers. The methods of the past were abrogate, Charobim declared in his true form as Nyarlathotep. New science had granted the ability to produce essential harmonics in purer form, and the phonetic codes that Darius had transcribed from the old tomes in the tower library of the Starry Wisdom Church were the keys.

The first prototypes had failed to reproduce the sounds properly and had only succeeded in thinning the membrane between the dimensions in the abandoned buildings where Darius had tested them. He had gone back to the design, had spent hours with his laptop on the vanity beside the swivel mirror, the two glowing windows exchanging information, his blood-shot eyes and blood-stained fingers serving as the interface. And now he sensed that success was nigh. He could almost taste it.

He pulled on a blue latex glove and gingerly lifted the larynx from the Petrie dish. A pair of spiral wires trailed from it, their gold contacts brushing against his wrist as he turned the organ this way and that, admiring the translucent pink sheen of its semi-sexual aesthetic.

He opened the cabinet at his feet and removed an object that had once been, and still resembled, a battery-powered Aiwa boom box. He had gutted most of the electronics and replaced them with a small fan and silicone ductwork which functioned as an esophagus for driving breath through the vocal folds, and a digital chip programmed with the incantations: the Sanskrit, Enochian, and Lengian vowel sequences distilled to ones and zeroes.