Red Equinox (29 page)

“You’re not going anywhere without me. I’ve got your back. Don’t you know that by now?”

She studied his face. It was a new thing for someone to tell her unequivocally that she wouldn’t be abandoned. “Sometimes you have to alter the focus to see what’s right in front of you,” she said with a wry smile.

“What?”

“My mentor told me that shortly before he handed me over to SPECTRA.”

“Yeah, well if you want to rock the quotes, Helen Keller said, ‘Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.’”

She studied his face, so serious, and laughed.

They were drifting sideways on a current that had driven them perilously close to a barge. Rafael engaged the throttle, and the nose of the little boat rose up as the prop dug into the water. He steered clear of the rusty behemoth and aimed for the dome that marked the marina. Shouting over the engine noise, he said, “You ready to run for the street?”

Becca plucked a length of nylon rope out of a side compartment. “Yeah. Bring it in.”

Rafael killed the engine and let the boat glide up to the dock. He had jumped out and tied the front rope to a post before Becca could even find one for the stern. She scooped up Django in her arms, tossed him onto the dock, and climbed out after him. A man in a polo shirt and windbreaker was walking toward them across the grass, but they didn’t wait around to find out if he was the Harbor Master, a marina worker, or just another sailor. As soon as they reached the end of the dock, they broke away from the marina and hurried through an alley to the street.

In under a minute they were doing their best to blend into the early morning urban foot traffic—office workers with their coffee cups and briefcases. It clearly wasn’t the right hour of the day for a pair of ragged bohemians to be up and out, let alone in this part of town. Becca kept her hood up in case her photo was still circulating, and passing a newspaper-vending box, she shot a glance at the front pages.

She wasn’t on them, but a headshot of Darius Marlowe filled the front cover of the
Herald
, beneath the headlines:

DEAD, NOT DREAMING!

TERROR CULT LEADER

SHOT BY FEDERAL AGENT

She grabbed Rafael’s arm. “Brooks killed him,” she said. “At Gran’s house. He shot him dead.”

“Keep walking,” Rafael said. “People are looking at us.”

“They must have caught or killed the other cult members, too, or the city wouldn’t be back to business.” She stopped walking and wheeled on him. “Maybe they aren’t looking for us anymore.”

“You think it’s over?”

She wanted to believe it was, but one glance at the sky told her otherwise.

Brooks was being briefed by one of the translators when his phone buzzed with a summons to the interrogation. The translator was a heavyset young guy with a thick, black beard, a member of the team Brooks thought of as the
Necronomajohns
. They huddled around their own tables in the cafeteria and talked in a bizarre jargon no one else understood. He’d often tried to tell himself that they were no different from your garden variety IT geeks, but the way they never quite made eye contact
was
different somehow.

Their fascination with the most obscure footnotes of occult lore seemed to have given their eyes a bulbous look, like fish that never saw sunlight. And he had the distinct impression that if any of them were ever invited out for a beer with the field agents, they’d die of the bends upon entering the bar, their blood carbonated by rapid ascension into the upper regions of shallow small talk and sexual banter.

Brooks gently scratched his wrist where the dog bites itched like a bastard under the bandage. Thank God he was up to date on tetanus. He looked at the phone screen in his hand: the text summoning him to room 217 had to be an error. That was a conference room, the kind used for light interrogation. It was not the kind of setting required for the job at hand. For that you wanted a concrete floor with a tap and a drain and some chains anchored to the ceiling.

“I’m sorry…uh….” He tipped a pointing finger at the man’s chest.

“Kenneth,” the burly bearded guy reminded him.

“Sorry, Kenneth, I’m being paged. Give me that last bit again in layman’s terms. Sum it up for me like I’m an idiot who hasn’t read his Agrippa.”

Kenneth laughed. It sounded forced. He smelled like pepperoni. “Okay. The book is called the Deadly Amulet. It’s about two powerful gems that are polar opposites: one is the Shining Trapezohedron, which enables cultists to draw their dark messenger Nyarlathotep from another dimension into this world. The other became known as the Fire of Cairo, a ruby-red stone set in a golden scarab and endowed with the power to dispel the creatures of darkness. But neither one would have
much
power unless the two worlds—the two dimensions, that is—could be brought into alignment so that fissures would open between them. And no one has been able to make that happen since about 1300 BC in Egypt, when the pharaoh Nephren-ka was the last person with the genetic gift for chanting the right overtones. Some books say he was an incarnation of Nyarlathotep. You still with me?”

“Yeah. What about this Saint Jeremy?”

“Right. Allston Asylum, 2007. Well, no one can prove that he really caused a dimensional breach, but the staff and inmate accounts do seem to describe that phenomenon. And him using a birdbath for the manifestation, like they say he did, makes sense because once the overtone chant fractures the façade of three-dimensional space-time, reflective surfaces in the vicinity become portals.
If
Jeremy really succeeded in a partial manifestation, then he had to have been a freak of evolution, an anomaly.”

“What do you mean
anomaly
?”

“Well, how many people are born with perfect pitch? Not many, but some, right? Now how many are born with not only that, but a set of pipes like Mariah Carey?
Very
rare. She’s an anomaly. But to be born with a larynx that can naturally produce
this
language? We’re talking about odds so long that it probably only comes along once in a millennium.”

“Unless you’re a genetic engineer with a 3D printer.”

“Like Marlowe. Yeah.”

“But assuming for a moment that Jeremy had that gift…what stopped his monster from coming through? What stopped all of this from happening twelve years ago?”

Kenneth tilted his palms up and reclined in his leather office chair. “Beats me. Maybe his voice box was only
mostly
right for the chanting, but not perfect like the pharaoh’s, so he birthed an abortion.”

Brooks’ phone buzzed again. He nodded. “Gotta go. Thanks.”

He turned away from the cluttered desktop and gazed over the glass partitions dividing the lab into cubicles. In some, there were chalk circles on the floor. Others were adorned with byzantine mandalas and divine names scrawled in red and blue sharpie across the glass. It reminded him of biohazard zones in private-sector labs he had visited; only here the precautionary devices were spiritual. He still had trouble accepting what was happening, but every time he passed a window to the outside world, the pulsing abomination in the sky drove the reality home. He was momentarily distracted by a grotesquery glimpsed through the double panes of a locked case (something that resembled a brain tattooed with arcane sigils), when a tall, thin geek with a blond goatee and black-framed glasses bumped into him. The kid looked like he’d run the entire corridor and all of the stairs. He was trying to catch his breath and holding a printout in both hands, the paper wrinkling under the sweaty pads of his tight-clenching fingers. “Agent Brooks….”

“Yeah?”

“We cracked it.” The guy huffed and heaved.

“Cracked what?”

“The astrological diagram at the end of the
Mortiferum
. It points to a time when the worlds align, a specific date and time when the membrane is thinnest and the stars are right for widening the breach to let them in. It’s called the
Red Equinox
: the autumn equinox of the year in which the Black Pharaoh awakens.
This
year.
This
week. Monday, September 23
rd
, at 3:50 AM, to be exact.”

“You’re sure?”

“Triple checked.”

The phone in his hand was buzzing again and a pair of armed security police was striding down the corridor, their eyes fixed intently on his, the bizarre trappings of the lab doing nothing to diminish their focus despite the transparency of the place.

“Agent Jason Brooks,” the one on the left with an iron-gray crew cut and eyes to match said, “we have orders to escort you to room 217 for the interrogation.”

“What, is Northrup worried I won’t show?”

“You haven’t responded to his texts, sir. Please come along.”

*   *   *

The small theater was dimly lit to reduce reflections on the one-way glass. The two security officers closed the door behind Brooks and stood in parade rest, flanking the only exit. Of the four men already in the room, he recognized two: Northrup and Hanson, the SPECTRA director and Limbus spook respectively. A third was dressed in the uniform of a Navy admiral, but with no nametag amid the medals and regalia. The fourth was young, scruffy, and apparently important enough to dress casually in a plaid shirt and jeans. At least the jeans weren’t ripped.

Beyond the glass he saw that the conference table and chairs had been removed from the adjacent room. A large plastic tarp had been spread out on the floor to cover most of the carpet. Three objects rested on the tarp. Brooks had expected these, but somehow seeing them sitting there looking so ordinary made the whole scenario feel more real, and for a fleeting moment he wished he had shot Darius Marlowe in the chest or head and not in the gut.

Until he remembered the carnage on the train and the screams that he couldn’t differentiate between men, women, and children because most voices sounded surprisingly similar in the upper register of excruciating pain.

Northrup stabbed a finger at a folding chair that had been placed in front of the rows of theater seating. “Sit, Brooks.”

Brooks walked down the carpeted slope, sat, and leaned forward, hands cupped on his thighs. “What is this?”

“We’d like to interview you before we interview your prisoner.”

Brooks laughed. “Guess I should be happy I’m on this side of the glass.”

For a few long seconds he thought no one was going to speak. Finally Northrup said, “You’re a hero, Brooks. You caught the bad guy, and your country is grateful for your service. Thanks to the photos we’ve leaked, everybody thinks you killed him, too, which I’m sure makes you even more popular than we’d all be if Mr. Marlowe had to go through that due-process bullshit before Boston could have the pleasure of seeing him on ice. So relax. You’re going to be on all of the Sunday morning shows. You’re not here to be punished, even though you broke protocol by pursuing Rebecca Philips without a TAC team.”

Brooks stared at the backlit silhouettes of the men seated before him. “But it’s not over,” he said. “Right? Not everyone can see what’s going on in the sky, but the ones who can probably have a fucking Facebook group by now.”

“Actually, no. While you were off leash on the North Shore, we rounded them all up. Well, we’re pretty sure we got at least ninety percent of them. The one silver lining of terror events happening in public places is that you have a lot of surveillance cams to feed into the facial recognition software. And your Facebook joke isn’t that far off, either. People do most of their talking online these days, so that helped us track them down. You and Philips may be the only two people with EDEP still walking free.” Northrup let the statement hang in the air for a moment. Brooks didn’t know the latest acronym, but the unspoken accusation was clear enough:
You lied to us about your exposure.

“EDEP?”

The skinny guy who looked like a young George Lucas said, “Extra-Dimensional Entity Perception. Hearing the chant causes a modulation of consciousness—”

“It’s what enables you to still see that black shit in the sky,” Northrup interrupted.

Brooks scoffed. “Ninety percent, huh? What about the other ten?”

“A few people who see strange things is a psychiatric problem, not a national security issue.”

“And you think you can just disappear a whole group of civilians without their friends and families noticing?”

“Who said anything about disappearing anyone? They’re being treated for PTSD on the house. You gotta love government health care.” Brooks couldn’t quite make out Northrup’s face, but he knew the smile the man was wearing right now, had seen it enough times to know how smug it would look.

“Where are they, the witnesses?”

“In this facility,” Northrup said. “And they’ll be right as rain when we send them home. No black rays in the sky to trouble them. No tentacles writhing in their peripheral vision.”

“How?”

Dick Hanson spoke for the first time since Brooks had entered the room. “We call it Nepenthe. It’s a Limbus product. One injection and the nightmares go away. We’ve prepared a dose for you, James. If you have any questions or concerns, I’m sure Gary here can address them. He developed it.”

The guy in the plaid shirt, Gary, leaned into the light, his hairy forearms resting on his knees. Brooks could see the capped syringe curled casually in the fingers of his right hand. The silhouettes of the guards at the door shifted almost imperceptibly.

Brooks sat up straighter in his chair. “Turning a blind eye to what’s happening won’t make it go away. Is that really your solution?”

“My understanding,” Northrup said, “is that this is one case when
If I can’t see you, you can’t see me
is actually true. These invading entities need us to share the same plane of perception with them to do us harm.”

“For now,” Gary said, and Brooks was pretty sure Hanson shot his pet genius a corrective glance.