Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues

by Douglas Wynne

“One of the things we’re looking into is whether or not there may have been effects on the offspring of people who were exposed in Boston,” Brooks said.

  “From the drug you gave him?” Demi asked.

  “No,” Merrit said. “From the sound waves he was exposed to.”

  “What kind of effects?” Demi said. “Cancers?”

  Brooks couldn’t tell if she was genuinely concerned, or if she already knew what they were getting at. If so, she was a convincing actress, at least in service of shielding her child from government scrutiny.

  “What happened at the preschool in Massachusetts?” Merrit asked.

  The parents looked at each other. An unspoken permission passed from Cyrus to his wife.

  “He has nightmares sometimes,” Demi said. “It was worse when he first started going to school for a full day. Most likely it was stress, difficulty adjusting to that. I see it a lot in my work with children of that age.”

  “You’re a teacher?” Brooks asked.

  “A speech therapist. I often see stress manifested as impairments or developmental delays. Sometimes a child’s stress leads to outbursts or nightmares, insufficient sleep…”

  “Did Phineas experience any of that, or just the nightmares?” Merrit asked.

  “He didn’t act out,” Cyrus said.

  “I think he stopped sleeping enough because he was afraid of having a nightmare,” Demi said. “And that resulted in him seeing things in the daytime that scared him.”

  “Hallucinations?” Brooks said.

  “That’s a strong word,” Demi said. “More like jumping at shadows. Misinterpreting things he saw. I reduced my hours at work, went back to the half-day preschool program, and he did much better.”

  If she was trying to recontextualize things they’d already learned from the school records, she was doing a good job.

  “These shadows…was he seeing them in mirrors?” Merrit asked. “Or other reflective surfaces? Did you move to the desert to get away from water?”

  “That’s enough,” Cyrus said, standing up. “We didn’t agree to be interrogated about our son’s mental health.”

  “We’re here to help,” Brooks said. “To offer support if there’s still a problem. Is there?”

  “No. There is no problem.” Cyrus gestured at the door. “Allow me to see you out.”

  Brooks stood up. Merrit didn’t move. “Phineas is an unusual name,” Merrit said. “Where’s it from?”

  “The Bible,” Demi said.

  “I don’t see why that should have any bearing on anything,” Cyrus said.

  A keening sound cut the air, high and shimmering. It started as a faint whine, like a dog might make, but twisted as it grew in volume.

  Demi went to the hallway that ran the length of the house, the same direction she’d led Phineas when his father sent him to his room.

  “What’s that?” Brooks said.

  Demi wheeled around in the doorframe, unguarded anger blazing in her eyes. “You’re upsetting him,” she said. “He’s sensitive to the tone of your voices. You should go.”

  “How can he even hear us?” Merrit said, but the parents were ignoring him. Cyrus ushered his wife from the room, his hand on the small of her back. He whispered something in her ear and sent her down the hall.

  The noise warbled and wavered, the high legato note descending into a staccato, guttural chant.

  Cyrus blocked the hallway, his feet set wide, arms folded over his chest. He wasn’t a tall or large man, but he made the most of his stature in the narrow passage.

  “Sir, what exactly is your religious affiliation?” Merrit inquired.

  “Did you have any contact with members of the Starry Wisdom cult when you lived in Boston?” Brooks said.

  “Or since?” Merrit said.

  “None. I was a victim of the attack. Now you come to my home and threaten my family? When a drug you gave me may have impaired my child?”

  Brooks held up a placating hand. “Threaten? Slow down. Nobody’s threatening anyone.”

  Cyrus scoffed. “Really. You ask everyone their religion? Or just the immigrants?”

  “The Starry Wisdom Church is based in Egypt, where you come from,” Merrit said.

  “It’s active where you come from, too. Get out of my house. You want to question me, come back with a warrant and take me in.”

  The boy’s wail faded. Brooks could faintly hear the mother placating him. He knew the family was keeping secrets, but Merrit had made a royal mess of the situation, cornering them with no finesse. Brooks touched Merrit’s elbow and said, “C’mon. Let’s go.”

  A cascade of icy notes chimed down the hall. Phineas moaned. Cyrus’ head ticked to the side and he glanced over his shoulder at the sound, which evolved into a descending melody, lonely and haunting, forming skeletal chords and curling up into thorny vines of sound, trembling with vibrato. The sound paralyzed Brooks where he stood.

  Merrit broke the spell, seizing on Cyrus’ distraction, shouldering past him and lunging down the hall before the man could get a grip on him. Brooks followed. As the three men tumbled down the hall, Demi’s voice rose over the music and the moaning. “No, Phineas. Don’t go. Don’t!”

  Brooks spilled into the boy’s bedroom behind Merrit. Phineas was crawling across the floor, his outstretched hand reaching to touch a TV screen from which a pale green light, the color of the untouched tea on the tray they’d left behind, flickered over his awestruck face. His mother, on her hands and knees, tugged at his shirt until she saw the agents in the doorway, her husband unable to stop them. Then she let go, and Brooks realized it wasn’t a TV screen but a mirror in a carved oak frame propped up against the wall beside the bed.

  Phineas Malik clambered over the frame and through the shimmering glass, vanishing under a swelling wave of nauseating light and music. The glass rippled over the boy’s feet and resolved into a reflection of the bedroom. Brooks saw his own face staring back, mouth agape.

  Merrit stepped back to a position between the husband and wife. He drew his gun and pointed it at the mirror, but Demi, still on her knees, put her body between the weapon and the glass. Cyrus put his hands up.

  “Call HQ,” Merrit said to Brooks. “Tell McDermott what happened. Tell them we need local support.”

  Brooks released his grip on his still holstered gun and tapped the phone icon on his wristwatch. Demi protested that they couldn’t be arrested, couldn’t leave the house without Phineas. What if he returned to an empty house?

  “We’ll take the mirror to Boston,” Merrit said. “Does he ever come out of a different one?”

  “He’s never gone through before,” Cyrus said. “He just sits in front of it and sings along with the music. Like a normal kid with TV.”

  “Bullshit!” Merrit shouted. “You knew he’d use it to get away from us.”

  “My com is going nuts with interference,” Brooks said. “I’ll try outside.”

  Merrit stepped aside so Brooks could leave the room, but kept his gun trained on the parents.

  Brooks hurried through the house looking at the signal icon on his watch. The screen flickered, and the symbol jumped back and forth between full strength and nothing. He wanted to hear more of the conversation in the child’s bedroom, but there would be time for a proper interrogation back in Boston. He wondered if Phineas had ever sung in his sleep.

  He stepped out the front door to see if he could connect again some distance from the house and was walking across the gravel yard, adjusting the volume of his ear piece, when something caught his eye—a liquid shimmer like a heat mirage in his peripheral vision. Brooks looked up at the Bell Rock butte. The shapes of hikers moved slowly over its contours. The weather was clear, the sky a pristine blue above rock banded in hues of maroon, ochre, and lavender.

  What had stirred the air?

  He glanced back at the house, silent and still.

  The ripple pulsed across the sky again with a faraway echo of strange chimes. Something flar
ed silver white at the peak of the rock formation, and Brooks could swear he spied the shape of a man with a guitar standing up there. Some New Age pilgrim might carry one on the trail, he knew. But something in his bones told him this was no chakra balancing trail guide providing an ambient soundtrack to vortex tourists.

  Brooks had the unsettling sensation that the dark figure was looking directly at him. The air rippled again, and as if the compression of the atmosphere had caused a magnification, the guitarist appeared closer. Blue fire flickered in his hair as he strummed his long-horned instrument.

  The ginger hair at the nape of Brooks’ neck stood up, and the minstrel vanished in a twist of the air, leaving only the reverberation of the last shimmering chord he’d struck.

  Chapter 10

  The day after her excursion to Arkham, Becca returned to the abandoned mill on the flooded east bank of the Charles River for the first time since the fall of 2019. She’d considered driving directly to Cambridge after her conversation with Professor DuQuette at Miskatonic, but had been too tired for the clear thinking and puzzle solving the trip would require.

  The squat building looked as bleak as ever, even in the spring sunshine. If anything, the harsher highlights glinting off the sheet metal of the peeling ARACHNE TEXTILES sign enhanced its apocalyptic aura. She had found Django in this place when he was a stray, scavenging along the waterfront after Hurricane Sonia, and she wondered how much he remembered of the labyrinthine building that had been his temporary home. He seemed excited to be back, weaving in zig-zags through the maze of rusted machinery and snuffling at the spools and bundles of rotting fabric. Becca indulged the dog’s nostalgia, if you could call it such, until they came to a corridor she recognized. She gave a short whistle, and he followed her to a descending metal staircase veering precipitously away from the wall it was barely bolted to. The stairs groaned but didn’t give out, and in a moment she was standing at the door to the basement electrical closet Maurice Ramirez had made a nest of.

  Milky light filtered down from the floor above through windows opaque with grime. Becca removed the elastic from her ponytail and let her hair fall free. She took the headlamp from her bag, pulled the strap over her head, and clicked it on.

  The door was jammed tight to the frame, swollen from the humidity. She pulled hard, yanking it free with a shriek and shudder. Django sniffed at the darkness, then ventured in. Becca pulled the door as wide as possible to let a little light into the cramped room, but it didn’t do much to dispel the darkness. She swept the beam of her headlamp over the walls abutting the door to make sure no one was about to jump her, then scanned the room, finding it empty of squatters.

  Django pawed and sniffed at a heap of blankets on a cardboard pallet beside the remains of an assortment of candles melted to the floor. Becca wondered if the dog could still detect Maurice’s scent lingering in his bedding, but on closer inspection she saw that the blankets were shredded and littered with mouse droppings. Even to her blunt human nose, the room reeked of mold with undertones of urine and old incense. She kicked the blankets around and lifted the cardboard for a glance underneath, but there were no books or journals to be found this time.

  Becca took the camera from her bag, set it for flash, and shot a series of photos documenting the Hebrew and Greek words and Arabic numbers chalked across the cave-like plaster ceiling. The sheer complexity of this chicken scratch made her heart sink at the prospect of deciphering even a fraction of it, never mind sifting it for a viable clue to the location of the mantra book. When she finished documenting the ceiling, she took a few more photos of the places where Maurice’s notes dribbled down the walls. But as she checked the photos for clarity, she felt the futility of the task weighing on her. This search would be as fruitless as her attempt to find the score in the SPECTRA archives.

  Still, it felt like a small accomplishment to finish the set and step out of the room into the relatively cleaner air of the basement corridor where she could breathe deeper. Having captured the data, she considered leaving. It would take forever to puzzle through the translations and calculations, a job best undertaken in front of a big monitor with a legal pad and a cup of tea. But leaving now would also mean having to drive back here again to search for…what? Some physical feature of the place that matched a Hebrew word Maurice had jotted down? It was unlikely that she would know what she was looking for on a second trip any more than she did now. And she lacked the resources to tear the entire mill apart searching for a book. If it was even here.

  She scratched at the back of her head and sighed, accepting that any cursory search she was going to conduct would have to be intuitive. With Django at her heels, she wandered the basement, waiting for a feature to catch her eye, and talking aloud to the dog all the while to help her thought process along.

  “Air ducts? Maybe. They are kind of high, though…”

  Django cocked his head, hanging on her every word.

  “For all I know, he buried it at Bunker Hill.” Becca sighed. “I think he’d want to keep it close. Close to where he bunked. What do you think, Django? Did Moe hide it close? Are we getting warmer?”

  The dog swished his tail.

  Toward the end of the hall, she found a grungy bathroom with no water in the toilet. Feeling that it would be an unforgivable omission, she lifted the lid of the toilet tank but found it empty as well. Motion caught her eye in the streaked mirror, like something skittering away at the bottom of a deep pool of silty water. Becca froze and held her breath. She spent a long moment staring at the glass while Django growled, but when nothing stirred, she left the room.

  Maurice had talked about “sealing the cracks between worlds” in this place where Darius Marlowe had once experimented with his lab-grown voice box prototypes. Becca had seen with her infrared camera just how thin the membrane between dimensions was in the abandoned mill during that bloody autumn. Was it still? Were fractal tentacles still writhing under the thin veneer of reality here? But she had opened herself to EDEP since the last time she’d been here. If the place was infested with entities from beyond, she would see them with her naked eyes now. Wouldn’t she?

  She touched the scarab pendant through her shirt, felt the cavity between the pincers where the gem was missing, and pondered the dagger in her bag—equally impotent for all the good it would do her without knowledge of the banishing mantras.

  A few yards farther on, she arrived at the final two doors of the basement maintenance corridor. One of these revealed a boiler room with an old iron behemoth sprouting pipes into the ceiling. The other opened on a janitor’s closet containing a rope mop and bucket, as well as an assortment of brooms, gallon jugs of cleaning chemicals, and a squat Shop Vac coated in a thick layer of dust.

  The corridor ended in darkness and a shallow black puddle of rainwater. Becca considered searching the derelict loom machinery on the level above, but something made her hesitant to leave the basement. It was silly, but she had the idea that if she remained close to where Maurice had slept, she might catch an idea he’d left floating in the air, like a gossamer cobweb snagged in her hair.

  She backtracked to where she’d left the door of the janitor’s closet ajar, and took the empty mop bucket by the handle. She turned the bucket upside down and set it in the middle of the corridor where she could sit on it and think. It was a less than ideal work space but she made the most of it—syncing the digital camera to her phone so she could view the photos on the larger screen, and then opening her Moleskine notebook to a blank page. She uncapped a felt tipped pen and set the butt end of it on her bottom lip while she pondered the first photo, the fumes of the Sharpie wafting up into her nose facilitating an analytical frame of mind.

  Django circled her perch and eventually settled beside her.

  The letters Maurice had chalked over the ceiling emanated from a hieroglyph of a scarab beetle at the center of the ceiling—she recognized one of the Hebrew phrases closest to it as the words for “Let there be light,” the mant
ra that had kindled the Fire of Cairo, to vanquish the monsters at the Bunker Hill obelisk and again in the circle of standing stones behind the Wade House. But the scarab wasn’t the only graphic element in the cabalistic alphabet soup. There were two other crude illustrations: One was unmistakably the key Maurice had hidden on the Twilight Shore. The other looked close enough to be the tentacle-wrapped ritual dagger.

  Becca copied down the three Greek and Hebrew words closest to the dagger, then pocketed the phone and flipped back to the page in her notebook where she had recorded DuQuette’s rambling example of the sort of numerological code and associative thinking Maurice might have employed to choose a meaningful hiding place for the book.

  Book title:

  The Voice of the Void

  Greek:

  η φωνή του κενού

  i foní tou kenoú

  Arabic: Sawt Alfaragh

  Latin: Vox in Vacuum

  Hebrew:

  הריק‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ של קול

  781 = dung heap

  Dung beetle?

  She thought about how the Egyptians imagined the god Kephra, in scarab beetle form, rolling the sun across the sky like a ball of dung. But she wasn’t looking for the scarab or its gem now. And she hadn’t found anything in the toilet tank, if you wanted to stretch the symbol to suit her current environment.

  As her mind wandered, she found herself staring at a stain on the wall. It looked like a face with a vaguely reptilian nose. She’d explored enough crumbling buildings in her time, and photographed enough water stains, to know how good the human brain was at seeing patterns and extracting meaning from chaos. At times, she had photographed face-like stains precisely because she wanted to exploit that tendency in the service of art. In light of all that she’d seen in recent years, her skepticism about such ordinary things felt unmoored, as if her exposure to real magic had introduced a corrosive agent to the cement that held the tiles of reality together in the mosaic of her mind so that there would never again be anything she could trust as truly benign or mundane.