Red Equinox (34 page)

Darius wished he could witness the sacrifice of the ranger, but it would take too long to descend the stairs and he didn’t want to miss the moment when his master arrived at the top of the shaft—well-fed, restored to his true form, and reunited with the holy stone that was once his home.

Darius had prepared the way, had restored the black speech, rent the veil between worlds. He had reclaimed the Shining Trapezohedron from the earth and set it in its rightful place as intended by the church founders. And now he would bear witness, stationed at the left hand of the master when the stars were right, when that which was below joined that which was above.

The floodlights went out. Cyril had cut the breakers to make the obelisk safe for Charobim in his form as the Haunter of the Dark. Darius took a cautious step toward the gaping hole, dragging his shoe to avoid stepping into the void. Dropping to one knee, he pressed his hands against the cold stone floor and tilted his head to the open shaft.

There was a charged silence as the ranger chained in the bottom of the well beheld the coming of Nyarlathotep.

Then the screaming and rattling resumed with fresh intensity, rising through a series of crescendos and peaking when the gag was shredded along with the face it bound, and the chasm echoed with the wet slap of meat and blood and alien anatomy, followed mere heartbeats later by the slither and scurry of myriad appendages, feelers, and folded wings, climbing the stone shaft.

*   *   *

Brooks parked on Monument Square. The dashboard clock read 3:40. No sooner had they climbed out of the car than the floodlights on the monument went dark. Brooks had a flashlight at the ready in one hand and the
Mortiferum Indicium
in the other. He put the barrel of the flashlight in his mouth and flipped to a page marked by a Post-It strip.

“Here,” he said, jabbing a finger at the page as if it wasn’t a rare grimoire but a phone book and he wanted Becca to memorize the number of the power he needed her to dial on her scarab. “A guy I trust told me this is the mantra you need to activate the beetle.”

“A guy you trust?”

“I trust his knowledge, anyway. Can you pronounce it? Memorize it?”

She silently read the line beside his finger and nodded, unable to speak, her breath caught in her throat.

He closed the book with a snap and tossed it onto the car seat, shut the door and locked it. Django was already padding across the street when she seized Brooks’ arm and turned him around, forcing him to look her in the eye. He was taller, but she was close, and the light from a colonial-style street lamp was still shining in the absence of the monument floods. It was enough to lend his face a thin, parchment-tinted glow.

“Tell me what happened to Rafael at the asylum. Is he okay? Do they have him in custody?”

The hesitation was all she needed to confirm her worst fears. He might have lied to her easily in the car’s mirror, but face-to-face she could see the conflict fluttering through his jaw and brow. He was sizing her up, deciding which would make her more able to act here and now—the truth or a lie. She knew then that he favored games of chance, wasn’t a card player. The calculation only delayed him for a half second, but by the time he opened his mouth to answer the question, he had seen the change wash over her face, the welling up and caving in, and he knew that she knew the truth and all that was left was to try to salvage her or take the scarab and go on without her.

“Rebecca,” he said gently, and laid a hand on her forearm, “He didn’t die in vain if we end this here. He’s the reason you have the ruby, he gave it to the dog….”

“No…
no, no, no. Please….”

He pointed up the hill at the dark spire. “Whoever,
whatever
is up there is responsible for Rafael’s death.”

“Oh God. It’s my fault, I sent him there, oh
fuck,
Jesus fuck….”

She was buckled over, her wrists pressed against her stomach, her hair draped over her face, when it started to rain. Something was pressing against her folded arms, something hard and leathery burrowing between her arms and belly. Brooks was giving it to her, trying to make her take it. She looked down through the curtain of hair and saw a leather-sheathed Bowie knife.

Rafael’s knife that he had used to pry the stone from the birdbath.

“Take it,” he said.

Becca curled her fingers around the handle, and was surprised to find that it gave her strength. Hot tears were running down her face, cold rain down her hair. She drew a deep, steadying breath and looked at the sky above the monument. The orb was pulsing against the darkness now. It resembled a purple-tinted negative exposure, darkly radiant, with all tendrils converging in a dome over the hill, the higher lines jumping to ride the lower to earth like loose electricity seeking ground. More purple light flickered from the window at the peak, where something like a brass pipe protruded from the window.

Brooks had stowed his torch and was checking his gun in the half-light when a scream ripped the night. He jogged up the stone steps to the crest of the hill.

Becca followed on his heels.

Two figures in black robes blocked the path to the monument, one brandishing a dagger. Brooks raised his gun, pointed it in the face of the armed one, and drove the pair back onto the grass. Django appeared at the edge of the path, his hackles raised, a low growl issuing from his chest. The coward dropped the dagger and raised his hands, and Becca took the opportunity to run for the ramp that led through the short iron fence into the monument. She knew Brooks wouldn’t fire unless he absolutely had to, wouldn’t want to telegraph their arrival, but she also knew the cultists wouldn’t be cowed for long. They had strength of numbers. She needed to make every second that he could hold them off count.

The gate hung ajar, and, reaching the end of the ramp, she stepped into the darkness of the vestibule. She smelled iron and incense and knew that the iron wasn’t from all that metalwork but from the blood she could feel sticking to the soles of her boots. There was a horrible sound of something crawling, slither-shuffling high above in the core of the great structure.

She felt blindly in the dark until her hand found a railing, her foot a step. She was on the winding stair with only one way to go now, and up she went, quiet at first, but soon climbing with as much abandon as her stamina would allow, her steps echoing in the spiral vault above, and another sound, a subsonic rumble issuing from the damp granite, always to her right as she wound around the core.

She stopped climbing at one of the steel diamond mesh ventilation grates that let on to the central shaft, and listened to the horrid sound, the slither and slap of something monstrous. It made her flesh crawl, and there was a moment when it seemed she wouldn’t be able to force her feet to take another step. On the street outside she had broken down in front of Brooks after keeping up a tough act since their initial encounter in the interrogation room. Now she was alone in the dark with no one to back her up, not even Django.

“What I came here pretending to be, I am becoming,” she whispered.

On she climbed. At intervals she passed slots in the outer wall through which the cold wind rushed into the stairway. She glimpsed the city lights in the distance, and, invigorated by light and air she pushed harder, huffing and pulling on the iron rail, rising and turning toward the peak, rising and turning.

A gunshot crackled outside, followed quickly by another. She thought she heard shouting under the hiss of her own labored breathing. She wished she had counted the steps from the bottom, but knew she wouldn’t have been able to maintain the necessary concentration. On she climbed until she detected a faint, cold light above.

She paused to catch her breath, touched the scarab at her breast, and stealthily ascended the remaining steps.

There was an iron balustrade guarding the stairwell to keep tourists from toppling down if they misstepped walking around the observation deck. Becca crouched low when she reached it, clutching Rafael’s knife in her right hand, the sheath discarded on the step below her. Waves of violet radiance, energized like laser light, ebbed and flowed across the walls and ceiling. A tall figure stood near the top of the stairs, gazing in awe at something in the center of the room. Perched on the stairs, with a hand touching the floor, she crept forward and peered around the metal plate.

A creature lay sprawled on the lip of the pit, streamers of disintegrating matter issuing from its leathery wings, twitching tentacles, and three-lobed burning eye, and pouring up into a redblack stone mounted on a tripod over the void. Whatever it was, it was transforming into energy and flowing into the faceted crystal, which in turn emanated beams of purple light to the four compass points where they were channeled through the brass rods mounted in the windows.

Becca was almost at the man’s feet, and her eyes followed the cut of his robe up to his face, painted in rapture and ambient radiation: Darius Marlowe. Was
he
Rafael’s killer? She didn’t know, but what did it matter whether Marlowe himself had done the deed at the asylum? He was the one who had started all of this, the one who had unleashed dark forces on innocents all over the city, so yes, he was ultimately responsible for Rafael. Becca bit her cheek at the sight of him and tasted her own blood through clenched teeth.

She heard another gunshot, and now through the windows the shouts of men mingled with Django’s snarling and snapping on the hill below.

At the sound of the gunshot Darius spun around to face the stairs, but before he could see her, Becca launched off the top step and drove her shoulder into his gut, slamming him into the curved granite wall. His face blurred on impact, tentacles blossoming, mouth mutating, involuntarily flickering in and out of the terrestrial dimension. She brought the Bowie knife up in an arc, the blade jutting out the bottom of her closed fist, lopped one tentacle off and scored a deep groove across another. Then they were gone again, and Darius was howling, raising his hands to grasp at the air in front of him.

He brought his knee up and kicked her away. For a dizzying moment she teetered on the brink of the void, then regained her balance. She lunged forward, stabbing at him, and he rolled away from the blade, fumbling in his robe for his own weapon.

Becca kicked the tripod and watched the brass legs clatter down the shaft, but the dark crystal didn’t go with it; instead it hovered above the chasm, suspended by the beams it cast through the rods in the windows.

Darius had drawn his dagger—a long, curved, obsidian blade etched with runes. He took a deep breath and on the outflow morphed fully into his nightside form, the tentacles sprouting again, one of them gushing black fluid, the fingers gripping the dagger hilt springing yellow talons. Then, relishing the hunt and seeming to drink in the hot waves of primal fear she radiated as her last vestiges of sanity crumbled, he stalked her around the circle.

The knife fell from Becca’s trembling hand.

Tentacles sprang from the creature’s shoulders. In an instant two had coiled around Becca’s legs, wrenching her into the air, swinging her around, and dangling her over the black hole beside the hovering stone. She forced her gaze from its dark radiance, following one of the beams through a window to the sky beyond. She sensed some seismic shift in the colossal clouds that had gathered around the monument, could imagine how the violet light reflected upward from the tips of the rods was feeding the black sun at the heart of the vortex, the tumorous portal between worlds dilating like an eye; and she felt every inch of the white obelisk bathing in the negative photons raining from that malevolent pole star.

The scarab dangled in her hair from the chain around her neck. The chain slipped, almost caught in her lips, then grazed her nose and fell away. She watched in horror as the talisman vanished down the tunnel, a glint of gold like a falling star consumed by shadow.

Without thinking she moaned the syllables that were already on her lips, calling after the talisman down the echoing shaft.

“Yehi Aour!”

For a terrifying, brief eternity nothing happened. Then a red flame shone, a burning coal in the well below her. The blood had rushed to her head, and she was imagining how it would burst like a paint balloon when the Marlowe-creature dropped her all two hundred feet. But then the beetle buzzed past her in a redgold flash, mechanical wings fluttering, the Fire of Cairo blazing in its pincers, blinding the creature, sending it flailing backward and pulling her up out of the hole. The tentacles uncoiled and dissolved in the corrosive light, and, free of them, Becca fell, caught the edge of the well with her fingers.

The scarab hovered in the air at the center of the room, shedding its dazzling light, filling the chamber with a blinding, white, arctic noon. The other gem, the dirty thing with the dark light, the inverse light of an alien hell, was blasted to shards, blown through the windows. In the aftershock of the white flare, the rays from the scarab blazed redgold, streamed to the four quarters through the brass rods in the windows, reflected up at the apex of the obelisk, and pierced the nucleus of Azothoth, the writhing black orb at the heart of the whirling cloud.

Dangling from the lip of the chasm, Becca shed a tear at the brightness and beauty of it.

Gunshots compressed the air in the chamber, and she almost let go.

Marlowe jerked back and rolled along the wall, leaving a smear of inky blood in his wake before toppling into the shaft. The body, which had resolved back into wiry human form, bumped against Becca on the way down. She let out a cry as she swung to the side, shifting her weight as best she could without letting go. Seconds later she heard the distant thunder and splash when Marlowe hit the metal lid at the bottom, and then Brooks had seized her wrist and was pulling her up, the scarab still floating between them, flooding the room with light, blasting everything into stark contrast.

Becca got her knee up onto the floor and rolled away from the hole, which had terrified her more than the creature. She shuffled her feet, sliding on her butt until her back was against the wall. The light was fading now, as if it were being absorbed into the red gem. Fading and dimming to an orange glow that reminded her so much of steel in a forge that she almost flinched when the beetle fluttered toward her and dropped into her upturned hand. But it was cool to the touch.