Red Equinox (33 page)

“Stop!” she shouted at Nina, but the car kept rolling, picking up speed.

“Stop, it’s my dog!”

Django ran after the car. Nina hit the brake and Becca fell into the foot well. She kicked the swinging door open and Django jumped into the car, tail swishing and smacking back and forth between the seats. Becca pulled herself up and pulled the door shut as the car accelerated. Django toppled onto her as Nina took a hard turn. And then they were cruising down the hill under the pulsing yellow light of the streetlamps, Becca stroking Django’s fur, which was wet and brackish, but he didn’t shake off in the car, only whimpered and rubbed his cold, damp nose into the palm of her hand.

The dog opened his mouth and dropped a gobbet of blood…no, a gleaming red gem into the palm of her hand.

The night sky churned in a roiling black vortex above the granite obelisk on the crown of Breed’s Hill. The monument, two hundred and twenty-one feet of towering white stone, was lit by stands of high-powered halogen lights around the base, like radiant, upturned trees. Six black-robed figures climbed the hill unseen at 3 AM and gathered at the spiked iron fence around the base of the obelisk. The trees bordering the hill were mostly barren, their leaves scattered on ground which had two-and-a-half centuries ago absorbed the blood of the fallen at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

A mound of overturned dirt marked a spot not far from the top of the hill where the earth had been broken with a small spade, now cast aside on the grass, clods of dirt still clinging to the blade. The cloaked assembly paused to gaze at the small hole as they passed. Beyond the statue of William Prescott brandishing a sword, the city stretched: towers throwing light at the low cloud cover, the darker thunderheads sweeping inland with lightning in their hearts, and the white cables of the Zakim Bridge fanning down from arches tipped with obelisks that echoed the monument.

The houses surrounding the hill were dark and quiet at this deep hour, the gray façade of Charlestown High School across the street from the monument as lifeless as a mausoleum. But the squat stone lodge adjacent to the obelisk, its entrance adorned with Ionic pillars, its flat roof topped with banks of upturned lights, was occupied.

The brethren had assembled at the appointed time, less than an hour before the equinox. One of the six now knocked on the iron door: 1-3-1. The door swung open and Cyril ushered them in. Beyond him, beneath a marble statue of Joseph Warren flanked with flags, lay a National Park Services ranger: a ginger-haired young man in a gray-and-green uniform, curled in a fetal position, his wrists and ankles bound in black duct tape, his eyes wide above a gag of the same.

“He’s here,” Cyril said, his eyes alight with boyish glee as he led the brothers and sisters into the echoing, candle-lit chamber and closed the door behind them. “Darius has come back to us, and he’s…look, he’s
magnificent
.” He waved his hand at a cloaked shape huddled in the corner, a shape crowned with undulating appendages where its head should have been, a shape which cast a shadow-dance of writhing gray snakes across the pale wall, white Doric pillars, and marble wainscoting.

The figure rose, and the crawling shadows retracted and resolved into the shape of a man.

A wooden box with brass bands and hinges lay on the floor amid crumbs of dirt. Cold purple light seeped from the cracks in its rotting lid and ill-fitting joints.

*   *   *

“He’s here.” Neil held the curtain aside with a finger. They were at Nina’s brownstone, Becca sitting on the couch nursing a cup of hot tea that was doing more to warm her hands than her belly, Django curled at her feet, and Nina leaning against the island counter in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette to calm her nerves.

Becca got up, pulled her coat on, picked up her army bag, and walked to the head of the stairs, Django at her heels. Nina extinguished her cigarette under a thin stream of water from the tap, and stepped around to touch Becca’s arm. “Good luck,” she said, obviously self-conscious about the whole situation.

Becca knew that the number of boundaries they had breached in the past few hours was staggering. After eighteen months of professional distance, here she was in her shrink’s kitchen, about to get in a car with the woman’s ex-husband to fulfill a quest that should have them all committed for schizophrenic hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. It felt weird on a grand scale, but it somehow felt weirder to be wished luck by the one person who knew best just how unequipped she was to save anyone, including herself.

Nina seemed to sense Becca’s fear and the source of it: not the tangible darkness out there in the night, but the personal darkness inside that made her feel too weak to make a difference. The therapist straightened her posture, drew a deep breath, and patted the collar of Becca’s coat. Becca felt herself straightening her own spine as their eyes met.

“Whatever it is you have to do tonight, just remember that
you
were meant to do it,” Nina said. “You’re here because of how you see the world, and you’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

Becca looked at Neil. He looked as terrified as she felt.

“See you later, kiddo,” he said with a bloodless smile.

She nodded and hurried down the stairs, Django shadowing her out the door and into the back seat of the idling black car.

Brooks met her eyes in the rear view mirror. “How you feeling? Ready?”

Becca dipped a finger under the neckline of her shirt, found the chain, and pulled the scarab out. It gleamed in the glow of the dome light, the red gem, the Fire of Cairo, restored in the round bezel between the beetle’s pincers. “Yeah,” she said, “ready.” She closed the door, the light went out, and the car pulled away.

*   *   *

Darius Marlowe carried the dirt-caked wooden box, the box that held the Shining Trapezohedron, out of the lodge, across the metal grate bounded by spiked iron fencing, and into the base of the monument. The door in the sheer granite façade was ajar, having never been locked for the night. White light spilled into the entrance from the high-powered lamps surrounding the obelisk. The light was hostile to Nyarlathotep in his truest form as the Haunter of the Dark, but Cyril had figured out how to cut the power when the time came. For now, illumination was needed for the preparations.

Inside the monument, the winding stair marched upward to the left, spiraling around a central circular shaft, a newel, that had once housed an elevator to the observation deck at the top. The elevator, a basket on a cable connected to the steam engine used to raise the granite blocks during construction, had been abandoned and dismantled in 1844, after the first year of service, the shaft covered with an iron grate at the top. At the bottom, the entrance to the newel was shuttered with a gate through which visitors could see a replica of the first temporary monument erected on the site before the obelisk’s construction; a marble Tuscan-style memorial pillar topped with an urn filial and fronted with a brass plaque.

Darius had used his newfound changeling abilities to great effect on the ranger, terrifying him into divulging the locations of all keys and security features. The chain had been removed from the gate, which now stood ajar. He stepped into the base of the shaft, laid a hand on the marble pillar, and looked up. A hinged metal lid above the pillar lay open in a half-moon shape. Beyond it the dark shaft yawned, a quarter mile of cold stone ascending to the observation chamber at the peak. Darius drew a deep breath of the cool, damp air, and smiled. The chain Cyril had removed from the gate was coiled on the floor beside a popped padlock. Soon they would use the chain to bind the ranger to the base of the marble pillar, a sacrifice to the Haunter of the Dark.

Darius left the newel and ascended the stone steps, cradling the box against his belly, in the crook of his arm, like a baby. It was a long, dark climb, but with the iron handrail for a guide one didn’t need to see to follow the tight, winding spiral up and up and up. At intervals the white light from the halogen floods outside spilled in through narrow ventilation slits too small to be called windows. Otherwise, the stairs were lit only by the sparse violet light spilling from the cracks in the box he carried. The original, ornately-engraved brass box had been lost after the fall of the Free-Will Church, when the stone had been cast into the Narragansett Bay, and simpler housing had been fashioned for the artifact after a dive team hired by a wealthy benefactor retrieved it in the years when the church was operating underground.

At length he came to the small observation chamber and found his brothers busy with the preparations. They had hauled tools in burlap sacks up the 294 steps, had cast their robes from their sweat-slicked backs, and now resembled ordinary workmen in jeans, removing the Plexiglas panes from the square windows that gave a sprawling view of Charlestown, and Boston beyond, and the menacing thunderheads majestically under-lit by urban light pollution.

Two of the brothers stacked the Plexiglas against the wall while another pair removed segments of elaborately engraved brass poles from a bag, and set about screwing them together. These wands—among the oldest relics in the church treasury—had long been an enigma to Reverend Proctor and his predecessors, but Darius, under the tutelage of Nereus Charobim, had learned their purpose. The Black Brotherhood, the left-hand inner order of high-ranking Masons who had subtly guided the construction of the obelisk, had equipped the structure with mounting hardware for these ancient tools. The rods were in fact ocular wands with crystal cores designed to channel dark rays from a power source mounted on a tripod at the center of the chamber, direct them out the windows at the cardinal points, and angle them upward from mirrored tips to converge on the pyramidion capstone. All four windows had originally been fitted with pairs of iron rings for the exoteric purpose of holding flagpoles in the early days of the monument when four American flags had been draped from them. The flags had been retired when the Plexiglas panes were installed for safety reasons, but the mounting rings remained in place.

Now, with the panes removed, the Brothers extended the brass rods through the windows and fitted them into the rings. Darius inspected their work, setting his eye to the base of each staff in turn, and peering through the crystal cores like periscopes, rotating each until all four mirrored tips were focused on the apex of the capstone. The Brothers gave him a wide berth in the small stone chamber, then donned their cloaks and descended the stairs one-by-one as he dismissed them.

Alone at the top of the obelisk, Darius transformed, his sinuous appendages blooming and writhing from his human shape. He bent to the floor, gripped the bars of the round iron grate with curled fingers and tentacles, and lifted it from the newel. He set it on the floor with a rolling clang, and gazed into the pitch-black shaft.

One of the Brothers had assembled the brass tripod and leaned it against the wall. He now spread its legs apart and placed it over the hole.

Violet light played over the walls from the cracks in the box, as if the stone inside sensed that its time was nigh. He lifted the latch, raised the lid, and the exquisite non-Euclidian angles of the Shining Trapezohedron dazzled his mind and heart. It was a fist-sized crystal of marbled blood; it was all sin and song; it was his own heart in mineral form, and the heart of his dark and terrible god.

He took it in his trembling fingers and set it atop the tripod. He heard the faint strains of a chant on the hill below as the adorants began their circumambulations around the great stone spire on the blood-rich mound. And closer, the inchoate grunts and gag-muted cries of the ranger at the bottom of the well, the chiming of the chains like temple bells as Cyril bound the man to the marble pillar.

Darius checked his watch and waited, reveling in the sublime anticipation of the moment, the breath before the plunge. Sweet ribbons of incense wafted up from the black hole at his feet, curled around the glowing stone, and teasing his alien olfactory glands, lit up his mind like a plasma globe.

*   *   *

The black car shot down Storrow Drive beside the river. The road was empty at 3:23 AM. Becca could only make out vague impressions of the black orb and its tendrils in the darkness to the north, faint stains on the billowing curtains of night. A storm was moving in, and no stars shone. She kept looking at the rearview mirror, trying to catch Brooks’ eyes and read something there. He wasn’t a big talker, his brow grim and focused. But she needed to know something Nina and Neil couldn’t tell her, and needed to know if his answer was truth or lie, so she held the question, suffering under the weight of it, saving it for when they were out of the car and standing face to face, when she could read more than his isolated eyes.

“How do you know your people aren’t tracking us?” She asked.

“I don’t. But I know how it’s done, so I’m pretty sure they’re not.”

“Your wife says you think there’s a cultist on the inside.”

“She’s not my wife. And yes, I do.”

“So…why did she dump you?”

Becca was pretty sure his deepening crow’s feet were connected to a smile.

“How do you know I didn’t dump her? Maybe I got tired of being analyzed.”

“You don’t want to talk about it, just tell me to fuck off.”

“Did
she
say she dumped me?”

“She’s not allowed to talk about her personal life.”

He laughed. “It was a lot of things…but mostly my gambling habit.”

“Did you quit?”

“I’m taking a gamble on you right now.”

“Touché.”

“Pretty sure you’re taking one on me too.”

“That’s just because I need a ride to Bunker Hill and I don’t have cab fare.”

*   *   *

From the window Darius could see the Black Pharaoh climbing the stairs to the crown of the hill. The brethren were positioned at the quarters, tracing sigils in the air with daggers, intoning the sacred names, and re-consecrating the hallowed ground.