Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues

by Douglas Wynne

  DuQuette nodded. “There’s a third way, Becca, between diving blindly into another world, or running back to SPECTRA.”

  “Tell me.”

  “We scry. We seek a vision in the water, to find the children.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Together we can. You have a link to one of them. What was his name?”

  “Noah.”

  DuQuette stepped up to the birdbath. “Can you visualize him clearly?”

  “Sort of,” Becca said. “I’ve only met him a couple of times. Brooks kept their secret, that Noah had the voice. He’s probably regretting that now. Maybe SPECTRA could have prevented his abduction.”

  “Well, it’s too late now.” DuQuette poured three more drops of the golden oil into the basin. Becca was surprised to see the same dirty rainwater and decaying leaves as before, as if a dark goddess hadn’t exploded out of it mere moments ago. “You’ll have to do your best with the last memory you have of him.”

  “It was just the other day,” she said. “I went to their house to warn them that SPECTRA knew about Noah.” The memory of the boy’s face as he handed her the glittering paper planet made her voice waver. She exhaled heavily. “He was so happy to see me, like he knew we had something in common. He gave me a little craft he made.”

  DuQuette looked up from the basin. “Do you still have it?”

  Becca went to the bench where Django was panting, unclipped him from the leash, and dug the little paper disk from the pocket of her bag that she’d tucked it into. “Here.” She offered it to DuQuette. “It’s supposed to be the planet Neptune.”

  “Interesting.” He took it from her and examined it, turning the disk this way and that, the flecks of blue and green glitter shining even in the overcast sunlight.

  “What are you looking for?” Becca asked.

  “I suppose finding a hair of his stuck to it would be too much to hope for, but the fact that he made it with his own hands should more than suffice for a magical link. His fingerprints are likely in the glue. Assuming his mother didn’t make it for him.”

  Becca shrugged. “He’s pretty advanced for his age.”

  “May I?” DuQuette gestured at the dirty water.

  She nodded and the old mage tossed the disk into the water. It floated for a moment, then tipped under the surface and glided down to join the leaves, like a coin cast into a wishing well.

  Becca reached into the bag again and took out her camera, the one she’d modified to shoot in infrared, the same one that had once captured images of entities from the other side lurking at the threshold of reality. She had an idea that it might capture a fleeting glimpse of the other side now, if she was lucky.

  DuQuette muttered something under his breath, gesturing over the basin, his fingers folding through a series of intricate mudras. The water glowed and wavered. Becca tensed and considered trading the camera for the dagger again. What if she had only wounded the monster? What if the portal opened to let it through again? But she wasn’t singing the evocation, wasn’t calling it forth, and whatever spell DuQuette was weaving seemed to be having a different effect.

  “Picture Noah,” DuQuette said. “Hold him in your mind’s eye.”

  Becca closed her eyes and did her best. When she opened them again, an image had formed in the water, like a photo etched on a silver plate.

  A town at the edge of a river or sea. An old town, maybe somewhere in Europe. White buildings, sandstone cathedrals, and narrow alleyways. And then the image was in motion; pedestrians blurring by on cobblestone paths as her point of view rose and glided over the tiled rooftops with the pigeons, swooped under the power cables between the buildings, and soared beyond a long pavilion, out over the gilded waves. She blinked and lost the sense of immersion, saw the scene bounded by the rim of the birdbath again, wavering on the surface of a puddle.

  “There were people on the street,” she said. “Did you see them? They went by in a blur. But I didn’t see Noah.”

  “It’s an earthly city,” DuQuette said. “Do you recognize it?”

  “No.” She raised her camera and clicked a few shots of the receding waterfront city, hoping to capture something distinctive—a landmark building, or a sign in some language that would narrow their search. “Can we control the view?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” DuQuette said. “Absorb whatever you can. There’s interference. Perhaps a glamour of concealment has been cast on the children. I don’t think I can hold it much longer.”

  Becca didn’t know if the camera was capturing anything but dead leaves in shallow water. She held it at her throat, looking over it at the dimming apparition while holding the shutter button down. The image wavered and unraveled. She saw a white ship docked at the end of the pavilion, and then it was gone, leaving a blue planet the size of a silver dollar glittering in the murk.

  “I saw a ship,” she said.

  DuQuette nodded. “A cruise ship. Maybe the children are on it.”

  Becca was already clicking through the photos on the camera LCD.

  “Did you get anything?” DuQuette asked, leaning in.

  “Probably not enough to identify the city if neither of us know it. What do I do? Post them on the Internet and ask if anyone recognizes the place?” She was thumbing through them fast, her disappointment escalating to frustration on the way to panic.

  “Wait. Go back one,” DuQuette said.

  They had come to the end of the series with the white ship in the corner of the frame, the majority of each shot showing only an amorphous body of water.

  “Can you zoom in on the stern of the cruise ship?”

  Becca clicked a button. The photograph was magnified until she could read the grainy words, the name of the vessel: THE AEGEAN STAR.

  “You got it. We can search for that cruise ship and find out what port it’s docked at right now.”

  The idea gave her hope. If it really was a glimpse of where in the world Noah and the others were, it gave them a place to start. Still, she would have felt better if she’d seen his face. “You don’t think cultists transported the kids out of the country on a cruise ship, do you? Wouldn’t that be hard to get away with?”

  “I doubt they did. If it looked like Canada or the Caribbean, I wouldn’t rule it out. But the city looked European. Maybe the Mediterranean. And they couldn’t have made it that far by sea, not so soon. I believe they traveled the byways between our world and theirs, the Twilight Shore, where time and space are stretched and compressed. For those who know the way, it’s the shortest distance between any two points on Earth. Like folding paper and piercing it with a needle. Speaking of which, you’re bleeding.”

  Becca touched her cheek and collarbone where Shabbat Cycloth had slashed her. Her fingers came away bloody. She turned her arm and found a spiral of ruby red pinpricks.

  “Does it hurt?” DuQuette asked.

  “Only a little, but I bet they’ll sting like a bitch tomorrow if they’re like most animal bites.”

  “At least it missed your neck. You need to clean those up with some disinfectant. Where are you staying?”

  “Agent Brooks’ house.”

  DuQuette had seemed unflappable in the face of monsters and miracles, but now his eyes grew wide. “Oh my. Are you two…”

  “No. No, we’re not.”

  “Well, it might not be the best place to go until you know your next move. Unless you want their help. I mean, they must keep tabs on their agents. Your chances of being found obviously go up if you’re with him.”

  “I know. But they do have resources. It might be time to ask for help, I don’t know.”

  “I suspect you’re the one with the most resources now. And if they knew you had the gift, the voice… No, I don’t think it would be wise to reveal that.”

  “I told the former director,” Becca said.

  “You did?” DuQuette looked positively alarmed now. He cast a glance around the courtyard, as if he expected men with automatic weapon
s to come crashing through the broken windows of the asylum and rappelling down from the roof. And why not? Becca had witnessed almost that very scene the last time she was here.

  “I trust him. They forced him out. He’s dying. I thought he would know what happened to the symphony, but he swore SPECTRA never had it. I checked the archive myself. All I found was my father’s notes.”

  “Your father’s notes?”

  “He studied the symphony for years, trying to decode what he called an inversion of the melody. He had this theory that most of the insanity in the world came from proximity to the dimension of the Great Old Ones. Like hell was always brushing up against us. He thought if Zann’s symphony could open the way between worlds permanently, then maybe an inversion of it could align us with a heavenly realm, or shatter the connection altogether.”

  DuQuette took the paper planet out of the basin and shook the water off it. She noticed his hand trembling as he folded it in his handkerchief. He had a faraway look on his face as he muttered something under his breath.

  “What’s that?”

  “We were working in parallel, your father and I,” DuQuette said. “You’ll forgive me, but until we met, I believed Luke had sold or destroyed the music just to spite Catherine. I never imagined he’d devoted his life to the study of it.”

  “It got to the point where it was all he cared about,” Becca said. “But what do you mean, working in parallel? You’re a musician?”

  “Violin. Catherine and I experimented with inversions of the choral section at Miskatonic in the nineties. I still have the notes and eight-track recordings. I felt we were getting close, but then Luke absconded with the score. We never dared to make an exact transcription or recording of the original. We felt that one copy in the world was dangerous enough. I wish I could compare his notes to my own.” He looked zoned out again for a moment, then he met Becca’s eyes and said, “Do you know how many Children of the Voice they’ve identified?”

  “No. Why?”

  “The choral section requires eight voices. If they don’t have enough children, they might need you as well.”

  “They tried to take me once. Maybe they’ll try again. If we can’t identify that city, if I can’t get there another way…letting them take me might be the only way to find Noah and the others.”

  DuQuette touched Becca’s arm and nodded at one of the passages through the asylum. “I’m feeling more than a little exposed here. And we should find you some antibiotic ointment to treat those cuts. The car is this way.”

  Chapter 15

  Warwick McDermott stood in front of a trio of LCD screens, addressing an assembly of agents in one of the smaller huts on the quarry property. “Stratford. Where are we at with Cyrus Malik?”

  In the second row, Irene Stratford cleared her throat. “No developments. Every time we dial up the intensity of interrogation, he lapses into gibberish prayers.” Agitated murmurs spread through the room and she clarified: “That’s not to say that he has the voice like his son. But it’s possible that meditation and chanting practices have given him some ability to control his pain level, or maybe withdraw from this world into the other just enough that we can’t break him.”

  “Does he ask about his wife?” Nico Merrit asked Stratford. “Does he think we’re doing the same stuff to her?”

  “No. All we get out of him when he isn’t chanting is threats of a lawsuit with the ACLU.”

  Someone chuckled.

  The screens behind McDermott were split between satellite video of the quarry and infrared stills of the creature. The Wade House door had been removed and loaded onto a truck. “We need to keep pressure on the mother about what will happen to the boy if we find him without her help,” McDermott said. “A more difficult threat to sell now that we’ve failed a demonstration of overwhelming force against one of their gods, even in controlled conditions.”

  “That was controlled?” Brooks whispered. Agent Stratford swatted his leg with the back of her hand in reproach.

  “The plasma cannon isn’t drawing enough power from the other side,” the director continued. “Our engineers in Boston are revamping the gloves to try and scale that up with more Elder DNA on the contacts. In the meanwhile…well, we weakened the creature and sent it back. Three of our best gave their lives to prove that we have some hope of fighting back.”

  Nodding at Bill Klinger in the front row, McDermott said, “Status of the search for Children of the Voice who haven’t walked through a mirror yet.”

  “None found. All confirmed cases happened on the same day.”

  A young agent whom Brooks had seen around but didn’t know by name approached the director with a tablet in his hand and spoke something in his ear.

  McDermott nodded, then finished with Klinger: “Don’t stop looking. If we find a COV, I want a drone ready to follow them through any portal for a look around.”

  “Got it,” Klinger said.

  McDermott pointed at the young agent with the tablet and said, “Patch it through.”

  The center screen behind the lectern switched over to a video feed of a technician at HQ.

  “What do you have?” McDermott asked.

  “One of the motion detector cameras we have monitoring cultist hotspots picked up activity,” the technician said, typing on an off-screen keyboard as he spoke, glancing between the two monitors. “It’s Allston Asylum. Appears to be Becca Philips and an older gentleman we haven’t identified yet.”

  Brooks felt his stomach clench.

  “I wouldn’t have flagged it as urgent, but it gets weird fast. It’s an incursion, and it looks like Philips caused it intentionally.”

  McDermott scanned the assembly, his gaze fixing on Brooks.

  “Should I roll the feed?” the tech on the monitor asked.

  “Please,” McDermott said.

  Brooks watched the scene unfold in ghostly infrared shot from a high angle, a camera tucked under an eave near the roof overlooking the courtyard. He watched the old man prepare the birdbath by pouring an unidentifiable substance in it. Brooks was pretty sure he’d never seen the guy before, but he didn’t raise his face toward the camera, so it was hard to tell. Was he coercing Becca? Was he a cultist? He watched with growing unease as Becca, holding a dagger that resembled the one John Proctor had carried on the Wade House expedition, stepped up to the basin and started singing. There was no audio, but Brooks could imagine the sound. The song itself seemed to cause electromagnetic interference, scrambling the camera’s image. Twice the picture returned enough to show the water rising from the basin in a slow-moving cyclone. Brooks caught sight of what looked like eels thrashing in the twisting water. The scar on his left thigh twitched.

  Then the feed went black and the pasty face of the young tech filled the screen again.

  “That’s it?” McDermott asked the monitor. “Do we know what manifested?”

  “The guys downstairs think it’s Shabat Cycloth.”

  “So she evoked it,” McDermott said. “Summoned it at a Starry Wisdom sacred site.”

  Brooks tapped his foot, edging forward on his folding chair, wanting to stand up and interject, but not knowing where to begin or what to say.

  “Does the video come back later? Do we know if the entity escaped the courtyard?” McDermott asked.

  “Unconfirmed. We do have more video, but there’s no sign of the creature. It’s like nothing happened. Philips and her companion are just staring at the birdbath. She takes some pictures of it and they leave. Do you want to see it?”

  “Send it to my tablet. Where is Philips now?”

  “We’re trying to establish that.”

  “Trying?”

  “We have satellite photos of a vehicle parked in front of the asylum at the time of the video. We couldn’t get a drone over it in time to follow, so we’re cleaning up an image of the license plate. They can’t be out of the city yet.”

  “Get the BPD on it,” McDermott said. “But I don’t want them apprehend
ed. Not yet. I want to know where they’re going. I want them tracked by drone. Let me know when they’re locked in.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Do we have facial recognition on her companion?”

  “Also in progress.”

  “Work fast,” McDermott said. He clicked the call off with his remote and spoke to the room. “Let’s move. Local team will deal with the remains. Stratford, notify next of kin. I want everyone else at HQ by sixteen-hundred hours.”

  Brooks gave Stratford a sympathetic look, but the sound of his own name jerked his attention back to McDermott. “Brooks. Report to hut B14.”

  * * *

  Polygraph Transcript

  Interview of Agent Jason Brooks Conducted by Agent Clive Holden for Dir. Warwick McDermott on April 29th, 2025, at Manchester, NH, Satellite SPECTRA Facility. Length 21 minutes, 32 seconds.

  13:40:28 p.m.

  CH: Is your name Jason Brooks?

  JB: Yes.

  CH: Are you currently employed by SPECTRA?

  JB: Yes.

  CH: Do you live at 51 Lawrence Street in Malden, Massachusetts?

  JB: Yes.

  CH: Are you a Yankees fan?

  JB: Fuck no.

  CH: Do you have a gambling problem?

  JB: No. I mean yes. I don’t gamble anymore. I go to GA meetings. This is all in my personnel file.

  CH: Understood. I’m just establishing a baseline. Are you a member of the Starry Wisdom Church?

  JB: No.

  CH: Have you ever been a member of the Starry Wisdom Church?

  JB: No.

  CH: Are you in contact with Becca Philips?

  JB: Define contact.

  CH: Have you seen Ms. Philips in the last 48 hours?

  JB: Yes.

  CH: Where did you see her?

  JB: At my house.

  CH: Why was she at your house?

  JB: We have something in common. We were both exposed to the harmonics in the Boston attacks and chose not to take Nepenthe. We’ve kept in touch.

  CH: And why did she visit your house?