She stopped at a blank patch of wall beside a winding staircase, and ran her fingertips over the water stained paint. Was this the place where she had explained infrared photography and ultraviolet light to Rafael? Django glanced back at her and whined.
“Wait,” she said, rummaging in her bag for her headlamp. Without putting the elastic strap over her head, she clicked the light to the UV setting and scanned it over the wall, feeling a flutter in her stomach when her old invisible graffiti glowed ghostly white in the purple haze: RAF & BECCA WERE HERE.
She clicked the light off, dropped it in her bag, and followed Django, sniffling almost as much as he was now, as tears welled up and threatened to spill over.
Professor DuQuette was not waiting for her in the courtyard. The birdbath—a mosaic of colored glass and concrete, cradling a bed of slimy leaves at the bottom of two inches of stagnant water—looked just as it had on the day she’d found Reverend Proctor kneeling before it, making his prayers and prostrations.
Had the dagger she now carried in her canvas bag been concealed beneath his black frock at that first meeting? He’d seemed, at the time, a man far more interested in summoning than banishing.
Becca walked a slow circle around the fountain, her memories layered on top of one another like a triple-exposed photograph. Looking back at the building through a rosebush overtaken by vines, she saw the shattered window of the day room where she and Catherine had visited her grandfather, Peter, when the madness had its hooks in him. Somewhere in that room was a fragmentary mural on a wall that Rafael had painted—waterfalls and butterflies pouring out of cracks in the plaster.
Becca contemplated the dead leaves in the birdbath. Surely they’d fallen since she’d last been here, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were mocking Rafael’s death, pretending that nothing violent had happened here, that a transfigured Darius Marlowe had not emerged from the basin to wrap his tentacles around her lover’s face and drown him in filth.
And now she was crying, and realizing what a horrible place she’d chosen to try and find the strength for what she intended to do. Darius was also dead; she’d sent him to his death down the central shaft of the Bunker Hill obelisk. She couldn’t conjure him or kill him twice. This might be a place where worlds rubbed up against each other, where the membrane was thin, and that might lend her experiment a nudge in both directions, but it was also a place that drained her emotionally.
She’d been pacing in tight circles, growing dizzy without noticing. Now she stopped and swayed. She knelt and touched the ground where Rafael’s body, now scattered in ash and washed down a river in Brazil, had lain in the dusty weeds, drawing its last breath. Kneeling on the damp earth, she was overcome with a compulsion to lay where he had, and curling her body around the base of the birdbath, she gave in to it.
* * *
Someone shook Becca’s shoulder and she opened her eyes with a start. Django licked her face.
“Rebecca. Are you all right?” DuQuette said.
She rolled away from the birdbath and propped herself up with a splayed hand.
“Sorry…”
“It’s all right. Here: water. Have a sip.”
A clear plastic bottle appeared in front of her, crinkled from reuse, but full. She sat up, took it, and drank. It was wonderfully cold. She reached out and ran her finger over the divot in the concrete where Rafael had pried the ruby free of the glass mosaic it had been camouflaged in, where her grandfather had used a piece of chewing gum to adhere a magical gem to the birdbath decades ago. For a second, she could almost believe that this had all been a delusional spiral into madness, that maybe the bottom had dropped out on her baseline depression in 2019 and she’d fallen down the rabbit hole into high-def paranoid schizophrenia. Seeing covert government agents in Boston cops, or magicians in homeless vagabonds and college professors. Maybe the asylum was still operational and she was a patient, weaving apocalyptic fantasias from whole cloth.
The notion was almost a comfort. But no. It was all too real. She had slipped through a secret door that her family cracked open long ago and found herself with each passing year more immersed in an alternate world where everyone corroborated the impossible.
Rafael had died here, but he had pried the stone free with his Bowie knife first. The same knife she had used to fend off Darius Marlowe at the top of the obelisk. But ultimately, no ordinary knife could protect you from such creatures. Only the one in her bag could do that.
“Your brave friend,” DuQuette said, “didn’t die in vain.”
“You know about that?” Was DuQuette telepathic, or did he get his information from mundane channels?
“Some of it, yes.”
“The Starry Wisdom infiltrated SPECTRA. Does the Golden Bough have spies and moles, too?”
“We have eyes and ears. But there aren’t enough of us for that sort of thing. We gather more intelligence from visions seen in meditation with a scrying bowl. Fragments, usually, but together we can sometimes piece together the narrative.”
She studied his eyes beneath their bushy white brows. He was dressed in corduroy pants, a pale blue shirt, and the same tweed jacket as when she’d first met him.
“Catherine never mentioned she was in a secret society.”
He smiled as if to say, That’s because it’s secret.
“But then, there were a lot of things she didn’t tell me.”
“There was much that she didn’t understand until it was too late.”
“You say Rafael didn’t die in vain, but the gem is gone now.”
“The blade and book may be enough to stop what’s coming.”
Becca reached into her bag and withdrew the silver dagger. “How did you know I have it? Was that a vision in water, too?”
“Just a hunch. But I’m relieved to see it.”
“Did you know I would come to the university? You weren’t in the stacks that day by coincidence, were you?”
“I had hoped you would come. And you should know by now that there are no coincidences.”
“Doesn’t that suggest a higher power? Higher than these gods of chaos and malice?”
“That’s a mystery,” he said, gazing at the square of sky beyond the brick building surrounding them.
“That’s a cop out. Doesn’t white magic suggest a god behind it on our side?”
“I doubt it’s that simple, Becca. I don’t think the gods of chaos are any more evil than cancer cells. Maybe God is the whole of creation—darkness and light, chaos and order, dissonance and harmony, each dependent on the other for its existence and meaning. The Gnostics had a name for such a god: Abraxas. The Chinese call it Tao. But in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that just because death and decay will claim us all inevitably in an infinite vicious cycle, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to fight for. I chose to fight for light, harmony, and love a long time ago. What do you choose?”
Becca chuckled. He sounded like Catherine. “Revenge is usually enough to get me through the day.”
“Try love.”
“Okay,” she said, removing the book from her bag. “Teach me how to slay these motherfuckers with love.”
DuQuette took the book and led her to a bench beside a fallen tree. He dusted the dead leaves and dirt off the seat with a handkerchief, gestured for her to sit, and then settled beside her, leafing through the slim volume with a delicate touch. The wind picked up in the courtyard and trilled the pages between his fingers.
“I almost sang to a mirror this morning,” Becca said, “to see if I could wound or banish what came out.”
DuQuette stared at her for a moment. She wasn’t sure what he was searching for in her eyes. “It’s good that we ended up here,” he said, looking around. “This is a good place for such an experiment.”
“A thin place,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“Doesn’t that just make it easier for them to come through?”
“And easier for you to learn
how to push back. There is ebb and flow here. It has a resonant history.”
“For the church,” Becca said. “Their Saint Jeremy brought something through here.”
DuQuette nodded. “A partial manifestation. He was born with half a voice. But that’s not the only history that resonates in this courtyard. There’s your part. Your courage, your friend’s sacrifice, your love. Those are currents that wouldn’t fuel your effort in front of a bathroom mirror. But in front of that basin of water…you might harness powerful forces.”
Becca stared at the birdbath.
“Do you know the song of summoning?”
She nodded. The thought of singing it voluntarily terrified her. “I wish I didn’t.”
“You hear it in your sleep.”
“Yes.”
He pointed to a line in the book. “The banishing. Only you can pronounce the syllables properly. Try it.”
Becca spoke the strange words. They sounded weak, like an electric guitar plucked without amplification.
DuQuette sounded out the mantra for her. “I can’t vibrate them the way you can, but you can hear the difference in the vowels, yes?”
She nodded. “But how do you know? The book is so old. You can’t have heard it spoken.”
“There are similarities to formulas that survived in Greek and Egyptian. I can only draw on sources like the Papyrus of Abaris, and I may have it wrong…but it’s an educated guess, a chance we have to take.”
Becca spoke the words again, this time shifting her voice into that strange new register where it sounded like she was harmonizing with herself.
“I think you’re ready,” DuQuette said.
Becca took Django’s leash from her bag, looped it around a leg of the rusting bench, and clipped it onto his collar.
DuQuette approached the birdbath. From his jacket pockets, he produced two stoppered bottles. He uncorked the first and sprinkled some white powder from it in a wide circle around the base of the birdbath.
“What’s that?” Becca asked. She stood a few steps back, holding the book and dagger in her hands.
“Natron. For purification and protection. Hurry, step inside the circle before it’s complete.”
Becca stepped up to the basin as DuQuette completed the circle behind her. In her cargo pants, flannel shirt and tank top, she felt like anything but a magician. The only thing ceremonial about her attire was the golden scarab dangling inert from her neck.
“Here.” He handed her the second bottle, already uncorked. It smelled of honey, cinnamon, and myrrh. “Consecrated oil,” he said in response to her unspoken question. “Pour it into the basin. All of it.”
Becca did as he said, handed the empty bottle back, and watched the oil twisting in the stagnant water. She lowered her eyelids and deepened her breath, centering herself, searching for the deep point of stillness at the core of her mind.
She sensed DuQuette stepping back, treading quietly, having done all he could to advise and set her on the path. If the tools and instructions failed her now, she doubted he would be able to do much more than watch.
Becca sang the dream song. It came quick and easy, rushing through her like a river finding its course when the dam has broken, her consciousness swept along on its current with vertiginous momentum. This song had been rattling around in her nerves for weeks, maybe years, straining at the bonds of her dreams. Now let loose, it overwhelmed her. Her voice was not her own; it came from a place deeper than her physiology. It was the voice of ancestors who had slithered across beaches, walked across continents long lost to the volcanic tides of epochs.
It was beautiful and terrible, and in submission to its command, the dark pool opened like a great eye. Beads of water and oil spiraled out on a horizontal plane, rotating like planets around the basin. Ribbons of green-black flesh wound out of the portal to form a twisting monolith glittering with needle teeth, alternating between slow cohesion and sudden synchronized turns, swooping and diving like a flock of starlings or a school of minnows.
Becca knew its name, had been scrutinized by its icy gaze before. And as if sensing her recognition, it reconciled into its true form, the dancing goddess of the gate, Shabbat Cycloth. She sensed pleasure quivering through the cloud of lamprey creatures as they coalesced into the shape of a hand, an arm, and reached down to confer a blessing upon she who had summoned them, summoned it.
Becca brought the dagger up in a flashing arc, intoning the mantra as she severed the limb: ASKEI KAI TASKEI!
Violet blood and black light poured out in the wake of the blade, the cold metal humming in her hand. This was a different song, a symphony of silver trembling in her bones.
The goddess recoiled, scattered, then reconstituted in a sudden strike, lacerating Becca’s chest and cheek as she reared back on her heels. Instinctively, Becca changed her grip on the weapon and jabbed with the blade jutting out the bottom of her fist. It was a blind, impulsive strike, but it connected with flesh, releasing another spray of unearthly blood and light, accompanied by a wail from the heart of the cyclone.
Somewhere far away, Django was barking.
The creature lashed out again, stinging her exposed biceps, but as she pivoted away, she realized too late that it was a feint to draw her unguarded side toward a fast-forming vortex of eels. They wrapped around her arm, fastening it in a burning trap. Becca cried out in pain. It was like getting snared in ribbons of kelp laced with cactus needles.
“Strike again!” DuQuette’s voice sounded distant, as if it reached her through water. Becca gave in to the creature’s pull, springing forward and using the energy of the tugging ribbons wrapped around her arm to drive the dagger into the heart of the thing. “ARDAMATHA!” she cried, harmonics ringing in her ears.
A flash of light knocked her back as if a bomb had detonated. She landed on her ass on the muddy ground outside the circle, as the portal closed on what looked like a black star the size of a human heart, going supernova. The afterimage burned inside her closed eyelids, and she felt a rain of gelatinous scraps against the arm with which she shielded her face. But when she opened her eyes, there were no remains to be seen on the birdbath or the ground.
Chapter 14
Becca paced the courtyard, her sweaty hair sticking to her face. DuQuette had tried to get her to sit on the bench again and drink some more water, but she was too excited for that, flush with adrenaline and victory. She still clutched the silver dagger, and kept glancing back at the birdbath, as if she expected something else to emerge from it. She almost wanted something else to come through so she could do it again. Maybe the consort of the cosmic bitch she’d just annihilated, that harpoon wielding crab god.
“Did you see it?” she said to DuQuette. “I finished her. There can’t be anything left.” She whirled and stared at him. He looked awed, stunned.
“Long years of practice have granted me a little sight. But not what you can see… Not until just now. Your song burned the scales from my eyes.”
“So you saw that. She couldn’t reconstitute in her own world, could she? I know she’s made of scraps to begin with, but I devastated her.”
“I can’t be sure,” DuQuette said, “but yes, it looked like you did. I would caution you though…”
“Against what?”
“Overconfidence. It must be exhilarating to be a conduit for the light, to feel the song coursing through your heart, hand, and blade. But you’re one person, Becca, and they are legion. And right now you look like you want to go marching into their world.”
“I have to. They’ve abducted children. My friend’s child. They must have the symphony. The Black Pharaoh is probably training those kids to sing it as we speak. He’s weaponizing them.” Becca broke eye contact with her newfound mentor, knowing how fierce she must look to him, how fanatical. She slowed her breathing and waited for her heart rate to follow.
“Think it through, Becca. What would you do? You have power now, yes. But do you have knowledge? Where would you even begin to
try and find the children?” He offered her the water bottle again. She accepted it and drank.
“I don’t know,” she said. “This is a thin place, right? So I find a puddle and sing my way through it, maybe go through the birdbath.”
“And find yourself where?”
She opened her mouth, but no words came out.
“You have no idea,” DuQuette said. “There are many dark paths between our world and theirs. Nyarlathotep lured the children with music, but where did he lead them? How would you find your way?”
“He tried to lure me, too. But I wasn’t ready.”
“And now that you are and you’ve proven your power by attacking a minor deity, you may not find a welcoming committee when you step blindly through.”
Becca sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I need to talk to Brooks.”
“Your agent friend? Can you trust him?”
“Absolutely.”
“And yet you’ve kept secrets from him. The blade, the book.”
“I wanted to know that it worked. If I told him I took the dagger, and if his superiors asked him about it, interrogated him because they found it missing from the archive… If he didn’t know I took it, he wouldn’t be lying, risking his job and betraying his oath to the government.”
“You say you trust this man, but I’m not sure you do.”
Becca contemplated the dagger in her hand. “I’ve had to be careful. Leadership and loyalties shift like sand dunes at an agency like SPECTRA. I’ve worked for them before. If I went to them now, they might offer support, maybe even tell me something I don’t know. But they also might take this away and lock me up, use what I’ve learned in a way that could put those kids in danger. I can’t be responsible for that.”
Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues Page 14
