“I don’t understand,” Becca said.
“How do you feel now?”
“I’m okay. How long have I been here?”
“Dr. Novak will see you in a minute.”
Becca tried to sit up but was wracked with a coughing fit. The nurse put a hand on her shoulder and eased her back to the pillow. Her nametag read: Petra.
“Petra, how long?”
“Rest,” the nurse said, and turned back to the other patient.
Becca felt her chest. The golden scarab was gone. She sat up and threw the sheet off. They had dressed her in a hospital gown. Scanning the room, she saw her own clothes dried and folded on a chair beside the bed. Her army bag hung from the strap slung over the chair back. The nurse was coming at her again with a look of alarm on her face. The other patient continued to moan, but it sounded like the worst of her suffering had passed.
“You need rest,” Petra said.
Becca ignored her, digging in her bag for the dagger. She felt it right away, cold and metallic, then her probing hand touched something soggy: the small leather-bound book of mantras that had taken a swim with her. She was afraid to look, but she pulled the swollen and warped volume out and pried it open. The ink had blurred and the pages stuck together. Well, if she didn’t have the mantras memorized by now, it was too late for study anyway.
“Miss, you need to lie down.”
Becca turned toward the new, more authoritative voice and found a petite brunette with wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes. She wore a white jacket over her scrubs and a nametag with a caduceus beside the name: Anja Novak M.D.
“What’s your name?” the doctor asked. “Are you Canadian?”
“American. I had a necklace,” Becca said, still rummaging through the damp bag. These people had probably saved her life, and a part of her knew she should be grateful, but it was a small part, buried deep in her throbbing, clouded head. Mostly, she felt her mood veering off toward a white-hot rage the longer she was awake. She felt violated and thrown off track, her quest threatened, her possessions picked through, her clothes removed while she was out cold. “Where is it?”
The doctor took a step back, reading the intensity on Becca’s face, but before she could answer, Becca’s fingers touched the chain. She withdrew the scarab from the bag and clutched it in her fist, her hoarse breathing settling down to a normal rate, her heart still pounding. The talisman had no magic left in it without the red gem between the beetle’s pinchers, and yet losing it to the ocean or a thief was unthinkable.
Dr. Novak touched Becca’s elbow gently. “We couldn’t find any identification. No passport. Did you fall out of a boat?”
Becca thought about it for a second, then nodded her head. “My friends will be worried. Where am I?”
“The Opća Bolnica,” Dr. Novak said. “You need to lie down. You almost drowned.”
“Is this Zadar?”
“Yes, the hospital in Zadar. Please, back to bed.”
“My friends will be worried,” Becca said again, picking through her folded clothes for her underwear. She stepped into them and then pulled her pants on under the hospital gown.
“You can’t leave. We need to run tests to make sure you didn’t suffer brain damage.”
Slipping her bra on and then the gown off, Becca said, “Thank you, but no. I have to go.”
“Slow down. We don’t even know your name.”
The doctor visibly relaxed as Becca sat down on the edge of the bed, but it was only to put her socks and boots on.
“They’re almost dry,” Becca said. “How long was I out for?”
“We put them in the sun for a few hours. A jogger found you washed up on the sea organ steps at dawn. He called an ambulance when he couldn’t resuscitate you. He’s worried. He left a phone number.” She took a slip of paper from her jacket pocket and passed it to Becca, who dropped it in her bag, pulled her T-shirt over her head, and slung the bag over her shoulder.
The nurses had pulled a curtain around the woman in the other bed. Over the top of the metal railing, a wall clock read 1:10. Becca didn’t know exactly what time the sun rose here, but if days hadn’t passed on the Twilight Shore or in the hospital, she’d been out for something like… “He pulled me out of the water at sunrise? So I was out for six or seven hours?”
“Yes. You regained consciousness briefly, after you were resuscitated, but then you slept hard. We need to at least check your lungs now that you’re awake.”
“I have to go.”
“Your larynx looked inflamed on the scans. There may be damage. Honestly, I’m surprised you can even speak. I’ve called a colleague, a specialist. I want him to see you before…”
But Becca was already staggering into the corridor, searching for a staircase or an elevator. She’d glimpsed a red tile rooftop from the window. She needed to reach the ground floor, the exit, the street, and the waterfront. A nurse yelled after her, and she ran.
* * *
Nico Merrit had not risen swiftly through the SPECTRA ranks or secured lead status on sensitive operations by questioning Warwick McDermott’s wisdom to the man’s face. But in the nascent hours of April 30th, he had pushed back hard against the little video representation of the director’s face on his wristwatch in a bathroom stall at Pease International Trade Port in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the helicopter had been redirected en route to Boston.
Merrit objected to taking Brooks on the flight to Zadar. He was too emotional when it came to Becca Philips, too personally involved to think clearly and act decisively. The events at DuQuette’s house in Arkham proved that once and for all. But McDermott stood by the decision, citing Brooks’ EDEP. He could see things others couldn’t, and maybe not just monsters. Maybe, the director had suggested, Brooks could see things in Philips that no other agent could. Like where her loyalties lay. Merrit wasn’t so sure about that. Love blinded people. You saw that in the news every time some nut mowed down a classroom with an assault rifle. The people closest to the killer were always in denial. Brooks might see something, but if he did, would he say something?
Now, at the end of an eight-hour nonstop flight on a SPECTRA jet, there was nothing left to do but prep his own rifle while the Navy SEALS loaded the Zodiac with gear. The boat was a 24-foot rigid hull raft with twin outboard engines and a plasma cannon mounted to a swivel base on the nose. It could hold fourteen people, but their crew was only eight: five SEALS, including the captain of the craft, plus Merrit, Brooks, and Kalley, who had received a crash course in the operation of the plasma cannon before flying out. Merrit didn’t understand the power source for that bit of Elder tech, but he’d seen how low its weight dropped the boat in the water. Merrit had used boats like this one in the Mediterranean while patrolling the Syrian coast with the Navy in 2017. They’d schlepped a lot of gear back then, too, but he’d never seen a Zodiac of this size dip so low without personnel.
It seemed a shame to overburden the craft with something so tenuously useful. He’d seen what the cannon could and couldn’t do at the quarry in New Hampshire. McDermott claimed the modified operator gloves would make the difference, but Merrit was grateful to be riding out with his sniper rifle. The gun had never let him down when he was deployed, and he knew this game wasn’t going to be won by hurling plasma balls at gods. If it came to that, they were all fucked.
One of the SEALS sauntered over to Merrit, bobbing his head to music only he could hear. He tugged a pair of wireless headphones off his ears to dangle around his neck, where they leaked thin strains of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” The SEAL tipped his chin at Merrit’s weapon and slapped him on the back. “Nightforce scope?”
Merrit nodded.
“Good choice, but are you sure you don’t want to leave the shooting to us, Agent Merrit?”
On the jet, it had been just the three agents. They’d met the SEALS upon landing at LD57, the abandoned Sepurtine training base that now served only as an airfield. It was an ideal touchdow
n point, close to the water and just a little way up the coast from the sea organ pavilion. There hadn’t been time yet to sort out the pissing contest of rank.
Merrit scowled at the man. “You will follow my lead on when to shoot. Is that clear, sailor?”
“Yessir. I thought Agent Brooks had command of the operation, sir. They told us in the briefing he’s the only one who can see the entities.”
“That’s not true,” Merrit said. He took a slim metal case from his vest, opened it, and placed a pair of Tillinghast shades over his eyes. The SEAL shrank away from him when he powered them on, spilling violet light over his cheekbones and neatly trimmed black goatee.
“If you and your men have infrared goggles, I advise you use them. Not just for night vision. They’re not as good as these, but they just might save your life.”
The grunt worked his jaw, reappraising Merrit, or gathering the nerve to ask a question. “Are they really gods, or is that bullshit?”
“That’s a question for the philosophers,” Merrit said. “I am not a philosopher. I’ve been a soldier and a sailor, and now I’m a spook. But what I’ve always been is a hunter. To me, they are predators. Reality itself has been their camouflage. And it’s been a thin skin of armor for us. These children are trying to change that. Don’t forget it.”
The SEAL nodded, put the cans over his ears again, and walked back to his own gear with less bounce in his stride, despite the fight song.
Brooks approached next. He had a sheet of yellow paper in his hand, the edges torn where they weren’t covered in packing tape.
“What’s this?” Merrit asked.
Brooks held up the paper, a flyer torn from a telephone pole or a streetlamp.
The Crimson Minstrel Presents:
THE DIVINE PROVIDENCE CHILDREN’S CHOIR
Performing a Selection From
The Music of the Spheres
A Cosmic Chorale
In Harmony with the Zadar Sea Organ
At the Monument to the Sun
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
May Eve 2025
* * *
Becca stood in the middle of a narrow cobblestone street, staring at the poster, mouth agape, as passing tourists jostled her with their shopping bags. After hours of walking the waterfront, combing the city for signs of the children with a slow blooming sense of despair, here at last was confirmation that she wasn’t too late. They would be singing tonight. And yet, with the relief came a new kind of dread fluttering in her stomach. The pharaoh, or minstrel, the monster clothed as a man, was promoting what they were about to do, making a spectacle of it and inviting an audience. It showed a brazen confidence that she found unnerving. What was his purpose in gathering a crowd? To shatter their minds and expose them to harmonics that would initiate them into the perception of predatory gods? After what she’d witnessed in Boston, that felt right.
There was no time listed on the flyer, but Becca would wait at the sea organ all night if she had to. She took her pocketknife from her bag and sliced through the packing tape holding the flyer to the pole. Then she strode across the alley to a shop with a display window facing the place where the flyer had been posted.
Entering the little boutique, Becca gave a cursory glance to the wares on display—blown glass sculpture and jewelry. A woman with short gray hair and fashionably colorful glasses looked up from a display case upon which a tabloid lay open. There were no customers in the shop, and the woman, whose glasses looked like she’d chosen them to echo her stained glass merchandise, gave Becca an appraising look without bothering to flip her magazine closed, as if she could tell at a glance that the girl in the weather-stained clothes with the wild hair wasn’t buying.
“How may I help you?” she asked without enthusiasm.
Becca held up the faded flyer. “This was posted across the street. I wondered if you saw who put it up.”
Having confirmed that she wasn’t dealing with a customer, the shopkeeper slid a cigarette out of a pack tucked under the tabloid and lit it. When she’d taken a drag and exhaled, she said, “He’s kind of hard to forget.”
“How so?”
“Attractive man.” She shrugged. “Tall, dark, young. Helping sick kids. Playing that strange guitar with his long fingers, like he just stepped out of the Middle Ages or something.” She leaned forward, elbows on the glass case, and tilted her head, gazing mischievously up into Becca’s eyes. “Are you a smitten kitten? Is that why you’re looking for him?”
“No.”
The woman smiled. “It’s okay, you can be honest. I know he’s too young for me. But a free-spirited hostel girl like you… American? You should go for it. He will find you exotic just for your accent.”
“He’s Croatian, this man?”
“I think so. We only talked for a moment.” She waved her cigarette at a neat bulletin board at the back of the shop where another copy of the same flyer, this one less sun faded, was tacked between ads for Yoga on the Waterfront and beach house rentals.
“What did you say about sick kids?” Becca asked.
“Honestly, I didn’t catch all of it, what with his eyes and everything. He said something about touring with his children’s choir. I think they’re terminally ill. He had one of them with him, poor little sunken-eyed thing. I think they do religious music.” She waved her hand dismissively, knocking ash to the counter, which she chased away with a puff of breath. “The show is tonight, if you really want to find him.”
“Have you seen other children besides the one that came with him to post the flyers?”
The woman nodded. “Sometimes you spot him by the sea organ, playing his guitar while the kids swim.”
“Did you get his name?”
“Tristan,” she said with a wistful smile. She took another drag and squinted at Becca through tendrils of smoke.
Becca left the shop and did another pass of the waterfront. The sun was beginning its descent toward the water and the foot traffic on the pavilion was picking up. Gentle waves rolled in, lapping at the concrete steps amid the perpetual music of the sea organ. Her stomach groaned with hunger and her feet ached from walking all day, but her head felt clearer than it had in days and her throat no longer burned. She knew she would be in the right place at the right time. It was just a matter of waiting for the children to gather. She sensed that wouldn’t happen until nightfall or later, and risked a short walk through the Old Town again, in search of something to eat that she could buy with the few crumpled American dollars she had in her pocket, stiff from soaking and drying, or the credit card in her bag—assuming the chip still worked after a trip across the Twilight Shore.
Leaving the disquieting moans of the sea organ fading behind her, she thought of how the sound would continue to haunt this place for centuries, even if humans were exterminated. Barring a bomb or an asteroid shattering the pavilion, this place would sound the same in a post-apocalyptic world. Making her way to the nearest pizzeria, she couldn’t decide if the notion was a comfort or a horror.
* * *
When Becca returned to the pavilion with the inverted melody looping in her mind, dusk was falling over the city, the setting sun gilding the languid waves, the notes of a guitar flitting in and out of the spaces between the organ’s deep breaths.
A tingle passed down the nape of her neck beneath her ponytail, and she touched the dagger through the bag at her hip.
A silhouette came into view as she turned her head toward the music. A musician sitting on a step, facing the lowering sun that enflamed his hair and gleamed off of the tuning keys of his exotic instrument, blazing violet trails on Becca’s eyes that followed her gaze as she blinked. Could this really be him? As she approached, she thought she’d made a mistake. The shopkeeper had caught her off guard with her description of him. Becca had only interacted with what she thought of as his true form in the space between worlds. But even that form was likely only one emanation of a being that could manifest in myriad guises. Catherine had been fascinated
with Nyarlathotep, and had told Becca stories about some of those forms. At the monstrous end of the spectrum was the Crawling Chaos; at the human end was the Black Pharaoh. But this earthy avatar of the god had to be a body he’d chosen to inhabit for its charm and musical dexterity. She walked around him, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand, positioning herself between the musician and the water, where she could see his face—it was a face a child could trust.
“I thought we’d lost you,” he said. His voice was husky and kind. His fingers continued roving the fret board between the instrument’s long, curved horns.
“I almost drowned for following you,” Becca said. “That was you, wasn’t it? Without this mask.”
He laughed. “You’ve never seen me without a mask. And I don’t think you’d like to. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not ready.”
“Where are the children?” Becca asked. She tried to keep her tone light and curious, but could hear the tremor in it.
“Somewhere safe,” he said.
“I saw them. Breathing underwater.”
“You might too, someday. They were born with all of their gifts. Yours are growing on you.” He strummed a minor chord and resolved it, as if to say that her deficiency was a sad state that could be rectified.
“I’ve heard a song in my dreams,” Becca said. “I can’t get it out of my head, and…maybe I don’t want to anymore.”
Something flashed in the depths of his storm-gray eyes. “Do you tire of holding a door closed that should be opened?”
Becca sat on the step beside him and looked out over the water, the gold light of the setting sun falling across her face and neck doing nothing to reduce the chill she felt in the presence of this creature in the guise of a man. “I do.”
“Do you see the folly of driving a wedge between worlds that were meant to be joined?”
Careful of appearing too eager, she said, “Everything human in me resists it. My mind…can’t accept what I want to do.”
Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues Page 19
