Red Equinox (20 page)

They looked at her like she had intruded on a dream. Slowly, eyes were downcast, body weights shifted, as if they were ashamed to admit that, no, they had seen nothing in the sky.

Cyril said, “I heard a guy on the radio saying that he watched a monster crawling down the street in Back Bay. But the broadcast cut out as soon as he started to describe it. I think they’re cracking down on witnesses, trying to cover it up for as long as they can.”

“So why can the infidels see what we can’t?” Samira asked the group.

“To see the gods…,” Darius said. “If you can see them, they can see you.”

“And?”

“If they can see you, they can touch you.”

“Have
you
seen them, Darius?”

His gaze seemed to turn inward as if examining some powerful memory. A feeling of electricity charged the stale air. At last he said, “I have seen their works. My invention gave voice to the old keys. I awakened the Lord of Chaos and brought him through, but I took precautions and denied myself the sight.”

“Precautions?” Samira asked. “What were you afraid of?”

For the first time today he turned a withering gaze on her, and she felt the room scrutinizing her in the spotlight of his contempt. Was she pushing too hard?

“I believe they will recognize us as their sworn servants and spare us,” Darius said.

Cyril asked, “You believe…but you don’t
know? He didn’t tell you?”

“In the tunnel, it was the first time, and it wasn’t a suicide mission. I still have work to do. Gathering you is part of that.”

Kristin spoke up, her voice thin and cracking. “What does the pharaoh say about a place for us in the new world?”

“My Lord has not told me everything, and my studies are ongoing. This is why I’ve been careful.” His gaze pierced Samira again as he said, “All of this would have been easier if I’d been trusted by the church leadership, if I’d been given access to the archives. I would have more answers for you now. But I’m afraid the
true
brethren is only forming here and now in this room, piecing together what facts we can. Maybe it was meant to be this way. At least it keeps them from rounding us up like the figureheads down the street. I won’t lie to you and tell you I know everything. But if you trust my link to the pharaoh, as I have trusted him, then I believe you will be in the right place at the right time to shepherd in the new aeon, to form a new race, to inherit the Earth.”

Several questions overlapped now:

“How will they know us?”

“When can we meet him?”

“What do they see in the sky?”

Darius answered the last and loudest. “The Lord of Chaos, Azothoth, hangs over the city now like a black sun with many tendrils. His emanations are spreading like a web of night and reaching into any suitable portal, any reflective surface, to draw forth the pantheon. Azothoth has laid his blessing upon Nyarlathotep and restored the messenger’s voice so that he can assist in opening those gates.” He pointed at the boom box. “And with
this,
we can help.”

“How?” Cyril stepped forward and Samira thought he looked like a man heeding a call to action. Until today she would have said that he possessed the charisma Darius lacked, but no more. And if Cyril were following Darius, the others would fall in lock step.

“We will call forth the Goat with a Thousand Young and ride her offspring to the other side.” He swept his eyes over their awed faces. “It will be our initiation and empowerment. Afterward, we will move between the worlds freely to do the master’s bidding.”

The room seemed to lose oxygen as they all sucked it in. Sensing that her devotion had been judged thin, Samira spoke up now with ardor in her voice, “
To be a midwife of Shub Niggurath
…I would kill for the honor.”

Darius smiled. “Good,” he said, “You may have to. Your cloaks and lamens are in the backpacks in the hall. Daggers, too, if we need them, and a few guns. We go on foot and don the robes at the site.”

“What
is
the site?” Samira prodded gently. The others were already flowing around her into the hall, willing to follow their Pied Piper wherever he led them and find out if it was crawling with SWAT, BPD, and DHS snipers when they arrived, but their heads turned back toward Darius when she raised the question. Again he reveled in the suspense, the attention he had never garnered before today.

“The biggest mirror in Boston.”

They set about strapping on the backpacks Darius had prepared. He pointed out one with a gun in it for Cyril, and one with a smaller robe for Kristin. Samira stepped up beside her and asked, “Bathroom?”

Kristin gestured to a door on the left at the end of the hall.

Samira ducked in and dropped the hook on the doorframe into the eyehole. She fished her phone out of her pocket and texted SPECTRA while running the sink.

Watching the spinning icon and the low bars and waiting for the message to send seemed to take an eternity. She slid the phone back into her pocket, flushed the toilet, and opened the door, startled to see Darius’s face. He stood in the doorframe, blocking her way, and turned his palm up. For a heart-stopping second she was sure he was demanding that she hand over the phone, and her reeling mind simply couldn’t process the word he’d spoken until he repeated it: “Keys. I need your church keys.”

“Why? You can’t go in there without getting arrested. Those agents will be picking through the place for hours if not days.”

“I don’t know if you and I will be separated in the crossing, but once I can pass freely between this side and that, I plan to emanate in the church to retrieve a few things from the hidden crucible. You know they won’t find that unless they torture it out of Proctor.”

“How do you even know about it?”

Darius laughed bitterly. “He never trusted me. Never initiated me into his inner circle, but my master knows
all.”

“So you know about—”

“The rods and the map to where the box is buried? Yes. And if those agents are still searching the church at midnight, I’ll be in and gone before they hear the flagstone fall.” He wagged his fingers. “
Keys.
Please.”

The helicopter was already soaring east over the sunken Aquarium, approaching Government Center when the text came in. Brooks had mounted his phone with a strip of adhesive Velcro onto the console in front of him. He carried swatches of the stuff in his kit and in recent years had attached the battered device to more dashboards than he could count, knowing that the bone-rattling vibration of a Humvee or helicopter would invariably override the vibration of a phone in his pocket but a lit screen would get his attention.

The text wasn’t specifically for him. It was going out to several units within range and called for armed agents and armored teams to move in. He could ignore it and return to the station, but that would mean having to account for losing the photographer sooner. Not a prospect he was eager for. It also meant sitting in a debriefing room when he could be in the heat of field action. The pilot’s sunglasses kept swiveling toward him and back again, waiting for a prompt. Soon the question would come and he’d have to decide.

Action called, but it wasn’t Darius Marlowe’s face he saw while he considered jumping in. The MIT student had been sifted from a facial recognition database, and Brooks knew he had a better chance of recognizing him in person than any of the other agents and cops, having already seen him from multiple angles in the flesh in the subway. But the face in his mind now was Heather’s. His daughter was only a few years younger than Marlowe, and she was down there somewhere. Maybe safe in her apartment in Jamaica Plain, maybe not. The greatest battle he’d fought since obtaining his security clearance was the one waged in his own mind over whether or not to have her tapped and tracked. He had friends at the NSA who could do it for him, but he’d chosen to honor her privacy and keep her blind trust at the expense of sleepless nights and bad digestion. It was a decision that was getting harder to live with every minute of this day. He wanted to direct the helo to her rooftop, strap her into the seat Becca Philips had vacated, and fly her out of the city, away from whatever shitstorm was brewing in the psychedelic light of that black sun.

“Agent Brooks? You with me, sir?” the pilot’s voice crackled in his ear, a narrow band of frequencies boring into his head.

“Yeah.”

“What’s it gonna be, sir? Back home or out to Copley?”

“Copley,” he said.

He rummaged in his kit bag for Kevlar and extra magazines.

*   *   *

As the sun marched west, the cloud cover that had hung over the city throughout the day was coming undone like rotting gauze. Patches of cold blue and ash gray moved across the glass face of the John Hancock Tower. The declining sun was still more gold than pink, and few lights had come on in the tower to break the glossy perfection of the great grid of windows. Sixty stories and almost eight-hundred feet of monolithic minimalist architecture hovering over the Romanesque masonry of Trinity Church and swallowing it in shadow. And now, moving in that long shadow, noticed at first only by a few pigeons roosting in the arches of the church, came a formation of nine black-robed and hooded figures wearing engraved copper plates on chains around their necks. The copper flashed as they walked, sigils strobing out of the shadows in a geometry of orange fire.

Three of the company had set censers in the bushes on the south side of the stone foundation of the church, and wisps of smoke, musky and resinous, curled around their robes as they strode across the grass toward St. James Ave.

Their hands moved in an elegant choreography of mudras: fingers crossed and wrists twisting, elbows rising and arms undulating in some primeval precursor of tai chi, raising and directing an invisible force, a viscous bioelectric substance which they summoned like dew from the soil, like smoke from the sky.

Knives flashed now in the dusky light, and the dancers stepped forward in synchrony, stabbing the air, tearing a membrane that separated the pedestrian world of the skyscraper from a dark heaven, a nocturnal paradise whose alien constellations stretched their razored rays down to form the crown of a prodigal prince, the man at the head of the triangular formation.

And now they chanted a drone that rumbled like storm waves pounding a beleaguered shore.
IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH! IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH! IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH!

Scraps of cloud scudded widdershins around the bowl of the sky, a ragged shroud unwinding around the mirrored tower. The pigeons took to the sky and, wheeling over the black-robed figures between the stone church and the glass skyscraper, scattered at the appearance of a dark, malignant wood marching toward an impossible horizon in the towering grid of windows—a forest that existed only in reflection—and the silhouette of some lumbering beast moving among the gnarled branches. Beating their wings to push away, they cast themselves into the turbulent wind of a descending helicopter, caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

*   *   *

The helo touched down on the grass at the center of Copley Square between the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church. Brooks had his vest on and his 9mm at the ready. He took a last look around the bay as he climbed out. Tom looked sick and fatigued. The poor fucker. Brooks wished he’d try to get up, get out, get lost, like Ms. Philips had done. He had taken the guy along as an excuse to fly toward the black streamers that only the initiated could see, without having to spill the fact that he himself was one of them. Now he’d dragged him all over town while the number of roaming seers had grown.

“You can go,” Brooks said. “Tom…. Hey, Tom, look at me.” He clapped his hands, startling the man out of his paralysis. “I said you can go if you want to, you can hoof it back home. You’ve done your part to help.”

Tom’s eyes showed the white of glaring fear.
“Leave?”
he said, “Aren’t you going to take me back to headquarters where it’s safe?”

“If you sit tight in the helo, we’ll take you back when we’re done here, yeah. But you’re free to go if you want. You have family in the city?”

Tom nodded.

“Well, it’s your choice. But you might want to get out of here before the shit goes down.”

That was all it took to get the man to unbuckle and climb out. Brooks checked his sidearm one last time and tucked it into its holster. He looked at the rack of automatic rifles and considered taking one but decided against it—didn’t really believe bullets would be much use against whatever they faced here. He gave the pilot a quick salute and turned toward the church.

Armored vehicles were lining up on Boylston and Dartmouth. Helmeted men with assault rifles. It was a reassuring sight, but he didn’t join them. He could fall back among them if he needed cover, but instinct told him to take advantage of his independence, to go ahead as a scout and see if he could find Marlowe, or Agent Fanan.

The plaza offered little cover. He skirted a line of trees across the street from the Fairmont Hotel, but at its end came to a wide open space that he had to sprint across before he gained the shelter of Trinity Church. The street was nearly empty of people. Most had cleared out of the square at the approach of the armored cars and helicopter, to watch from between the statues of Art and Science that flanked the library steps: two bronze women, robed and enthroned, one gazing at an orb in her hand, the other holding a brush and easel. Brooks wondered what dark arts and sciences were at work here, and what they might soon unleash between the church and the tower. The whole scene was taking on a mystical resonance for him, and he felt that gambler’s intuition that there were patterns and meanings, vectors and probabilities lurking just below the surface of things, and that if he squinted at reality the right way, if he relaxed his focus and let his peripheral vision lead his eye, he would see the opportunity to win when it emerged.

Edging around the rough-hewn stone, he sensed a wrongness in the glass façade to his right. Something vast moved in there, like the shadow of a leviathan below a surface of blue water. And when he gazed into the mirrors, trying to use them to see what lay around the corner of the church, he saw not a reflection of Trinity, but of a dense, vine-entangled forest. Trees like those didn’t even belong in the new growth forests of
western
Massachusetts. They belonged in the Grimm’s Fairy tales his mother had read him— they belonged to the dark heart of old Germany.