Brooks rammed his shoulder into the door, but it held. He backed down to the second of three concrete steps leading up to it and threw a kick, cracking the bolt through the frame and sending the door bouncing off a kitchen chair, causing Django to relapse into frenzied barking. Not a subtle entrance, but it didn’t interrupt the ethereal song drilling into his ears and churning his stomach. Against every impulse of his body, he followed the sound through the house to the room it emanated from.
DuQuette, brandishing a golf club, blocked the bedroom doorframe. Beyond him, Becca stood with her back to Brooks, singing into a mirror. He could see her face reflected in the glass, as if in the surface of a wavering pool. Lost in the music, her eyes remained closed when Brooks drew his weapon, pointed it at the old man, and said, “Step aside.”
To his credit, DuQuette did not look intimidated. Maybe he thought one of Becca’s allies wouldn’t shoot another. If so, he was wrong. Brooks still regretted not shooting John Proctor before he stepped through a shimmering portal. That moment came back to him now, bringing with it a wave of sweat and adrenaline as he stared down the professor. A voice in the back of his mind told him that he had to decide now whether or not he was willing to shoot Becca, that if he wasn’t committed to that worst-case scenario, he would lose her to the other dimension, just as he had lost Proctor, and suffer the consequences. He glanced past DuQuette at Becca’s legs, choosing a target of last resort. The possibility sickened him, but he didn’t show it in his eyes when he fixed them on DuQuette again.
“Drop it,” Brooks said.
DuQuette set the golf club on the floor slowly, stretching the time it took to complete the act; intent on giving Becca every last second he could to finish her song.
But she didn’t finish it. She tapered off on a note that didn’t sound like the resolution of anything, but what did Brooks know? It was strange, unsettling music. Still, he had the feeling that she’d stopped short of some climax.
“Three steps that way and down on your knees,” Brooks said to DuQuette, who obeyed while Becca searched the glass for something. Brooks didn’t think he could shoot out the mirror without risking hitting her. She was too close to it. Even if he missed her, she would end up with a face full of glass shards.
“Becca,” Brooks said, “what are you doing? Are you awake?”
She raised her hand and touched the glass; it quivered and her reflection receded under the surface like a corpse claimed by the ocean. Shafts of green light frosted her hair and traced sine waves on the ceiling and walls.
Brooks lowered his gun and reached for Becca’s shoulder. When his hand touched her, she spun around to face him, her placid brow furrowing with recognition, as if the song had put her in a trance that she was now emerging from. Brooks holstered his weapon and raised his right hand to touch her face. He didn’t know what influence the old man had exerted on her, what trap he had laid, but it would all come out in the interrogation. For now, all that mattered was that Brooks had broken the spell in time, and he was taking her home.
“Brooks. I have to go.” Becca said.
“You don’t have to do anything,” Brooks said. “It’s okay. You’re awake now. We’re bringing him in.”
“No. I have to go with him,” Becca said. “The minstrel. He’s come for me.” She turned her head back to the mirror. The glass was gone, replaced by a tunnel of pointed arches receding to infinity. In the center, a figure in a crimson robe plucked the strings of a long-horned instrument, tongues of blue flame dripping from his slender fingers.
Becca put her hands on Brooks’ chest. “It’s for Noah,” she said, and pushed off, sending each of them back a step—Brooks away from the mirror, and she through it. Brooks clawed at the empty air and watched her fall backward into the other world as the tunnel collapsed like a telescope, the minstrel closing the distance, as if to catch her. But the silvered glass rippled back into the frame before Brooks could witness their union, leaving him staring at his own stunned face.
* * *
“You helped her.” Nico Merrit stared at Brooks down the barrel of his 9mm. “You let her go through. You could have stopped her but you let her go.”
“I thought she was in a trance. I thought I broke it.”
“Goddammit, Brooks! I don’t know which of you to cuff first,” Merrit said. He waved the gun at DuQuette. “Get up.”
DuQuette’s eyes ticked back and forth between them. “He says, ‘get up,’ you say, ‘get down.’ You guys should coordinate your routine.”
“Fine, stay down. All the way down. Chest on the floor, hands behind your back.”
Merrit knelt and cuffed the professor, then yanked him to his feet, cranking on the cuffs with enough force to torque the man’s arms almost out of their sockets. Brooks wasn’t a fan of the professor, but he winced at the excessive force. Merrit marched the man into his living room and pushed him onto the couch while Django slunk after the pair, growling.
“Oh, you want to start some shit with me, too, dog?” Merrit said.
“Leave the dog alone,” Brooks said. “He’s a hero.”
“Right,” Merrit said, wheeling on him, “Like your friend who colludes with cultists and jumps down the rabbit hole when things get hot.”
“You threaten the dog again and we fight, partner,” Brooks said.
Merrit scoffed and shook his head, pacing around the room. Brooks loosened his tie and shrugged his jacket off, throwing it over a chair. The room was overheated. It smelled like pipe smoke and cat piss.
“I’m not a cultist,” DuQuette said.
“Shut up.” Merrit picked at the items on the wide desktop, giving each of the books and papers a cursory glance. Brooks recognized the notebook that had belonged to Luke Philips. He picked it up and asked DuQuette, “What were you doing with this?”
DuQuette examined his fingernails.
Merrit rummaged through the desk drawers while Brooks moved to one of the smaller desks and nudged a mouse connected to a laptop. The screensaver gave way to a virtual desktop that was as cluttered as the one the machine was perched on. It would take the geeks at HQ time to comb through it all, but he started by pulling up the web browser and checking the recent history: the itinerary for a cruise ship.
“You thinking of taking a cruise, professor?”
The old man looked away.
“If you want to convince us you’re not Starry Wisdom, tell me what she’s doing,” Brooks said. “Help us keep her safe.”
DuQuette looked less defiant now and Brooks thought maybe he was reaching the guy. Back at HQ, methods would get vastly more persuasive, but they didn’t have that kind of time. He saw the red robed musician closing in on Becca as the mirror world collapsed. It took effort to refrain from punching DuQuette in the face until some answers fell out of his bloody mouth along with his teeth.
No. He hadn’t been that kind of cop and he wasn’t that kind of agent, but when he thought about Becca in danger…
While Brooks riffled through the papers on the desk, Merrit swept the rest of the house for collaborators. He returned holstering his gun and tapping his watch. Brooks half listened to Merrit calling in a status report to the director, his gaze roving over the clutter until—in a cubbyhole at the back of the small desk—he spotted a Nikon camera with a familiar strap, and his heart rate jumped into a higher register. For a moment he was tempted to eject the memory card and pocket it while Merrit was distracted with his call. But that was a course of action he would be unable to retreat from if what he found on the card required the resources of the agency.
Torn between sheltering Becca from scrutiny and maybe locating her faster, he chose the latter and switched the camera on.
The photos loaded as a grid of thumbnails in the LCD. They had the eerie cast of infrared, the weeds and trees glowing stark white around the central object of focus: the birdbath at the Allston Asylum. It took Brooks a minute to figure out how to use the controls, but soon he was enlarging images, moving backwa
rd and forward through the sequence, and zooming in on details. He would need a bigger screen to make sure he wasn’t missing anything, but unless she had done a double exposure trick, it looked like Becca had photographed images of a city in the water of the birdbath. The last photo was of a name on the back of a boat. Brooks felt a chill as he read the fuzzy letters, the same name he’d seen in the search history.
Beside him, Merrit spoke. “There’s a team en route to scour this place for anything relevant, but we’re expediting the professor back to HQ. Chopper’s picking us up at the running track across the street at the university. What do you have there?”
“A photo. A cruise ship in Croatia. That’s what she’s interested in. I think that’s where she went.”
“I thought she went to the other side. To commune with her dark gods.”
“You don’t know her,” Brooks said. “Whatever she’s doing, it’s to help those kids, to bring them back.”
DuQuette had been watching the exchange and seemed to sense that he was witnessing a tipping point beyond which SPECTRA could take one of two approaches to pursuing Becca. “He’s right,” DuQuette said. “She’s risking herself to bring them back. She knows that her voice will grant her access to the children.”
“How does she get from Massachusetts to Croatia without getting lost between worlds?” Merrit asked.
Brooks felt lightheaded as it dawned on him. He sat in the chair Becca had occupied and stared at DuQuette over a pair of empty whisky glasses on the desk between them. “She was fishing, wasn’t she? With that song. She called the one who abducted the children, the avatar of Nyarlathotep. She called him to take her where he took Noah.”
“Yes,” DuQuette said. “A few miles on the Twilight Shore can take you halfway around the world.”
“To Croatia?” Merrit said.
DuQuette nodded.
“Why there?” Brooks pleaded with the old man. He’d given them this much without pressure. Just a little more might prepare them.
“I’m not sure… There’s a strange piece of architecture there, an organ played by the sea. I imagine they intend to use it as a setting for the ritual.”
“What ritual?” Merrit demanded.
“When the stars are right, they will sing the spheres into permanent alignment. But not if she can stop it.”
* * *
The helicopter soared over the Miskatonic River Valley toward Boston. Brooks scrolled through the photos on Becca’s camera in the dark. She had been to the old textile mill on the Charles River. The mystic graffiti of Moe Ramirez—already documented by the agency in 2019—filled several frames. Even the older shots she’d taken on this card, things she’d photographed for her own amusement or artistic inclinations, were oddly enhanced by the infrared spectrum, lending familiar places and objects an aura of the sacred and profound: The facade of his house glowed against a dark daytime sky, the scraggly little patch of lawn transformed to a bed of snow-white grass; his nickel plated tea kettle perched above a propane flame that bloomed like a supernova; Django lay in a square of sunlight on a coil rug, his fur a shower of sparks.
The last one gave him a little shiver and made his thumb linger over the DELETE option: a perfectly composed portrait of his own sleeping face, ethereal in the glow of the alarm clock, as if painted in oils by an old master.
Chapter 19
Becca followed the Crimson Minstrel across the Twilight Shore. The black sand burned her feet and the mustard gas sky made her head throb in rhythm with the expansion and contraction of the swirling clouds that seemed to breathe. There was something at the center of the maelstrom above, but she couldn’t force herself to look up at it, certain it would unravel her sanity as it had done to Mark Burns, the biologist on the Wade House expedition.
Her guide plucked the strings of his instrument as he walked, his robes rippling in the wind. The notes reached her in gusts, between the poundings of the distant surf—the breakers crashing about a mile to the east, assuming they were walking north. As a New Englander, she thought of the ocean as lying to the east out of habit. But terrestrial geography meant nothing in this in-between place.
They crested a ridge from which she could see where the black water met the black sand by a lace of foam. Descending into the sheltering hollow of the dunes, a closer sound than the boom of the waves reached her ears: a mixture of clacking percussion and a droning chant.
Memories of what Mark had described after passing through this place scratched at the locked doors of her mind. He had been broken and scrambled like an egg by a few hours here. Towering marble columns floated into view above the line of the dunes. This had to be the temple of the Twilight Choir—a circle of black cloaked, eyeless singers who listened for celestial currents of song, then amplified and harmonized them for transmission to the dream realm, where they would reverberate in the minds of sleeping sensitives.
It was coming back to her now, everything he had explained. Everything that had sounded like lunacy at the time. Did her own nightmares pass through here each night, gathered in the neural nets of singers who boosted the signal with tongues marinated in cephalopod ink, through mouths ringed with shark teeth?
Becca shivered as she passed their shadowy forms, keeping her eyes on her boots and watching for the faces of northern stargazer fish concealed by the sand, poised to administer their electrified bite to the unwary traveler.
The minstrel’s clawed hands quickened their pace on the strings, tangling his own music with that of the robed figures in a syncopated conversation. The choir chittered as he passed, and Becca—imagining that they sensed her even without eyes—picked up her pace.
The temple behind them, her guide cut a course for the ocean. Becca scanned the horizon for structures, but finding none, returned her gaze to her scuffed boots kicking up jet-black grains, and the featureless footprints of the one she followed.
With proximity to the water came a scent on the air—spicy and sweet. Becca’s headache thrummed in her ears, ringing her skull like a bell. She needed out of here, and soon. But there was no going back. The framed mirror had vanished a mile or more behind her, swept away by a curtain of mist, as if the atmosphere of the realm was capable of devouring the materials of her dimension like an acid bath.
The only way was forward.
The minstrel had walked ahead of her from the moment she had emerged into this world, confident that she would follow, not turning to glance back at her even once as they crossed the desolate plain. And the longer he didn’t, the more she dreaded what she would see in the hood of his cloak if he did. Now, as they approached the rolling surf, he slowed his pace, allowing the waves to soak the bottom of his robes.
Becca clutched at the canvas bag slung over her shoulder. She could feel the hard contours of the dagger she had placed hilt up in the side pocket and was tempted to draw it, to stab the bipedal beast between his shoulder blades with a howling mantra to accompany the blow. Finish him here between worlds before he could ever set foot on terra firma again, before he could return to the children he had assembled to serve as an earthly analog to the choir they had just passed, another watchtower to receive and transmit the signal fire that would burn the world.
But if she murdered her guide—if that was even possible in this realm—she would never find her way back.
For a woman who had spent years suffering under the weight of depression, it was an odd awakening to realize that somewhere along the way, she had put suicide into a category of last resorts. She wanted to live. She wanted to grow old and put the monster years behind her. She wanted to see her dog again, see Brazil again, and maybe even find love again. But first she wanted to see Noah Petrie and return him to his parents.
And so she stood paralyzed in a wash of realizations, her thumb caressing the spine of the dagger through the damp canvas, when the shadow of a great wave fell upon her. There was just time to suck in a deep breath before the crash.
* * *
Someone was pla
ying an organ underwater. The music conjured images of creaking playground equipment—seesaws and swings, rusty chains, even before she saw the children in the water. When the bubbles cleared, they were soaring through shafts of light in the dark water, tumbling and somersaulting. They wore bathing suits and swim shirts and had gills curling behind their ears, running along their jawlines. They were beautiful until they sang their joyful songs in dark harmony with the moaning organ and then they were terrible, their eyes lit with blue phosphorescence.
Becca was falling away from them, to where the shafts of light thinned. Her clothes, bag, and boots dragged her down to the darkness, and she was drowning. She ran a numbing finger along her jaw, but found no slit for breathing seawater. She kicked and clawed her way upward, but soon lost her sense of direction. What she’d thought was the direction of daylight was now murky. She thrashed in the water and spun herself around, searching for light. Or was it her consciousness that was dimming? The children were gone. She was alone, exhaling her air, a cloud of silver bubbles in the black.
* * *
Becca woke in a hospital bed. She could tell by the equipment, the blood on the floor, and the woman in the next bed groaning through what might have been a miscarriage. She couldn’t be sure—both the woman and the nurses were speaking a different language—but the emotional content was unmistakably agony and grief. The urgency of the scene snapped her from sleep to high alert.
She coughed and her lungs burned. One of the nurses in black scrubs stepped away from the hemorrhaging woman and approached Becca’s bedside, setting a hand on the railing.
“I kako se sada osjecate?” the nurse asked.
Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues Page 18
