Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues

by Douglas Wynne

  “Come, Noah,” the girl said. “We’re making a sand castle of the citadel.”

  Noah gave Becca a look of concern, then followed after the girl, who spun around to face Becca again as something occurred to her. “Are you going to help us?” she asked. “Since Phineas is dead, will you sing Saturn when we raise R’lyeh?”

  Becca touched the hilt of the dagger—still tucked into the waistband of her cargo pants—through her damp shirt. “I hope so,” she said. “If Tristan wants me to. Where is the cave? I need to find him.”

  * * *

  She found him by the sound of his instrument. He sat cross-legged like a sitar player atop a stone outcropping overlooking the ocean, the cave mouth at his back half-obscured by a curtain of ferns and vines. He wore no cloak, only a black T-shirt and jeans. He was barefoot, his skin pale, his hair a nest of tangled curls.

  Eyes closed and face placid, he breathed in the sea air, and breathed out with the lazy phrases of an exotic minuet ringing from the sound hole of the lyre guitar between his thighs. Golden spruce and abalone gleamed in the sunlight.

  A low cloudbank was smeared with pink along the horizon.

  Becca tried to stay focused on the cold dagger pressed into the hollow of her pelvis as she approached Tristan, the carved hilt rubbing against her belly to the rhythm of her stride, the syllables of the mantra of destruction circling in her mind. But with each step, the mantra grew more muddled, and the dagger warmed from the friction of her flesh.

  She climbed a grassy slope and reached the minstrel’s perch. He kept his eyes closed until she was beside him. As the last chord faded and his eyelids drifted open, he gazed out over the ocean and spoke. “You’ve gained the second gift,” he said. “You can breathe in the water now, like the children.”

  Becca’s hand drifted up, away from the dagger, to touch the gill on her neck. It seemed to have closed up since she’d regained consciousness at the waterline, but she could still feel a ridge, like scar tissue. She examined Tristan’s stubbled jawline and neck for the same, but found nothing.

  “Why here?” Becca said, her voice cracking. “Why did you bring us here?”

  Tristan set the guitar down in the grass and leaned it against the rock on which he sat. He shuffled off of his perch, held up a finger to signal that she should wait for him, then jogged up the slope to the cave. He disappeared through the fringe of ferns, into the blackness. A moment later, he returned with a gourd in his hands, ambled down the slope, and offered it to Becca. “Drink,” he said. “You need to restore your voice. We sing again tonight.”

  Becca held the gourd up to her nose and sniffed.

  “It’s only water,” Tristan said. “From a spring.”

  The liquid was clear and odorless. Becca took a tentative sip and thought she had never tasted such purity in her life. She drank deeper, spilling some out the sides and down her neck. When she’d quenched her thirst, she wiped the back of her hand across her chin and set the gourd down in the grass beside the guitar.

  “How do you swim with it?” she asked, indicating the instrument.

  “I don’t need to. It’s a part of me. Like my robe. It manifests when I have need of it. It answers my call, just as the Priest of the Deep will answer us tonight.”

  “Priest of the Deep?”

  “Cthulhu.”

  Becca felt a thrill ripple through her body, a wave of goose flesh, followed by an immediate aftertaste of shame that whatever was growing inside her should override her revulsion at the mention of the monstrous god.

  “Was that him, rising from the water at Zadar?”

  “No. We almost raised the Blind Lord of Chaos. But the loss of a child broke the spell.” Tristan’s gaze was far away, on the ocean again, but she sensed that the horizon was just a placeholder now, that he was turned inward, toward the memory. Was that grief etched in the corners of his eyes? Was a creature such as he capable of it?

  “They killed him,” Becca said. “A boy. A little boy.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Phineas. His mother’s name is Demi. She’s not much older than you. His father has been in and out of consciousness in a concrete box for the past week. Tortured by white devils for his faith.”

  “SPECTRA,” Becca said.

  Tristan nodded. “Sometimes, in meditation, I visit him when he blacks out. He’s a man, not a mutant like his son. The waterboarding and electricity haven’t broken him…but this will.”

  Becca’s breath hitched in her chest. She couldn’t help it, and she teetered there on the brink of hot tears for a moment. She hadn’t known the child, but he was like Noah, could have been Noah. Tristan placed a hand on the small of her back, and for an instant, she reeled at the prospect of him feeling the dagger through her shirt. It was lucky that she’d tucked it in front…but what did she plan to do with it anyway? Kill this man, this demigod, the only one capable of protecting those children down on the beach?

  Becca looked into the minstrel’s eyes—so deep, gray flecked with gold, the pupils like obsidian. Was she falling under his spell? And if she was, when had the enchantment begun? In Zadar? On the Twilight Shore? Or had the process begun months ago, in her dreams, and only a thin film of rationality on the surface of her mind had ever resisted it?

  “In the city,” he said, “when we met… I knew you weren’t one of us then. You were playing at it. But now, twice baptized, I believe you are awakening. I’m glad you joined us, Becca. Your voice last night was an adornment of our song, but tonight it will be the foundation. Will you take Phineas’ place? Will you honor us, honor him, in a song to raise R’lyeh?”

  “The sunken island…”

  “Where our lord lies dreaming. It will rise again, held aloft by the music of the spheres. And what we nearly accomplished in Zadar will be accomplished here—the union of worlds, forevermore. And arrogant humanity will be cast from the throne.”

  “I thought the time when that could happen passed last night.”

  “In Zadar, the time has passed, yes. But we’ve raced the sun, in and out of time. Here, on Rapa Nui, it’s still Walpurgis. And night is yet to fall. I can see now that it was meant to be this way. I thought we needed the organ because He first answered my call through its pipes. But here, so close to where He sleeps… I brought the children here to protect them, but we were meant to come here. To sing here.”

  She’d been looking at the ocean. Now she looked into his eyes again. “What happens to us after He comes?”

  Tristan brushed a strand of Becca’s hair away from her temple with a long, cold finger. His hand flashed black when it touched her skin, his eyes emerald. “We inherit the Earth.”

  Chapter 22

  In the afternoon, the children splashed in the shallows and dived down the shelf where the sea floor dropped off into darkness. They grinned in shafts of green light, their teeth shining like pearl shards. They laughed bubbles and caught fish in their mouths and ate until their hunger was sated, rolling through red clouds in the water.

  They emerged from the surf, refreshed and revived, and warmed their pale bodies at the bonfire that Tristan built in the lavender evening. And when the first stars appeared, the minstrel led his appointed priestess into the cave with a flaming torch from the fire to light the way, his guitar slung over his back. The children followed, tromping naked through the grass, as if they’d been born on the island and had never known civilization.

  The cave was cold and damp. Slimy water dripped from a chalky ceiling free of stalactites, pooling around piles of stones assembled by the ancients. A draft howled from some deep fissure beyond the reach of the torchlight. Eventually, they came to a place where a great round stone had been rolled aside to reveal a low cavity in the rock wall. Beyond the stone, a body lay on the ground, wrapped in a shroud.

  Tristan swept the torch down beside the mouth of the little cave within a cave, vanquishing the shrouded body to the shadows.
He called Noah and Sarah forward, then instructed them to crawl in and recover the treasures.

  The children looked frightened for the first time Becca could recall in the hours she’d spent with them on the island, but each taking courage from the other’s company, they stooped and entered the low passage. Their voices and actions echoed incoherently, and they emerged a moment later bearing dusty burlap sacks tied with fraying twine.

  Tristan patted Sarah on the back of her blonde head, and she beamed up at him. Noah, clutching his sack to his chest, stared expectantly into the deeper darkness beyond the reach of the torchlight, where the body lay unmoving.

  Tristan handed Becca the torch and slid the guitar around from where it hung on his back. His brow furrowed in concentration, he coaxed a gentle, yearning melody from the strings, cocking his head to listen as the last note hung in the humid air.

  Something slithered along the floor, winding out of the shadows toward the light.

  Instinctively, Becca took a step back and touched the scarab pendant through her shirt.

  A creature emerged, roughly delineated by the wavering yellow light. It resembled a trio of octopi fused together, the glistening mottled flesh forming a chain of tentacles, bulbs, and eyes. Becca held her breath as she watched it shamble out of the darkness and wrap its limbs around the shrouded body behind the stone.

  With alien grace, the creature lifted the body and carried it toward the mouth of the cave, limbs heaving in such a way that it looked as if the shrouded form were floating on gentle waves of black oil.

  * * *

  The children hummed a mournful hymn as they followed the monstrous pallbearer in a solemn procession to the place on the beach where the bonfire still raged. There, it laid the body on a megalithic slab of pitted volcanic rock, and then withdrew from the heat of the fire. The departing dusk dragged its vestments slowly across the sky. Tristan tossed more driftwood on the fire, sending a shower of sparks up toward the cold heavens. The children gathered in a crescent around the slab.

  Tristan gestured at Noah and Sarah, and the children untied the sacks at their feet, tossing aside the twine, and removing items that sparkled in the fire light: a white-gold diadem and necklace adorned with iridescent seashells and fiery opals. The metal was exquisitely carved with lines reminiscent of marine and amphibian anatomy.

  The children’s humming had tapered off when they took their positions around the slab. Tristan plucked his guitar and they started up again, a song of howling alien vowels with no words.

  The sinewy octopoid creature poured itself over the sand like a waterfall of congealing black paint to reach the pair of jewel-bearing children. As the light leached from the sky, Becca could tell even less where the monster’s limbs began and ended. Two of the tentacles curled up and received the artifacts from the children. Next the creature glided to Becca. At its approach, a faint voice, sequestered behind a locked door in her mind, urged her to do something—to lash out with the blade she carried—but that voice was dim and distant, drowned out by the dawning sense of awe overwhelming her.

  The creature moved like a thing breaking apart and reconstituting itself, and before her eyes could make sense of the motion, it was behind her, its languid limbs sliding up under her shirt and slipping the damp fabric over her head with a delicacy that belied their size and strength, revealing the silver hilt of the dagger jutting out of the waistline of her sea-stained cargo pants.

  Becca looked down at the exposed weapon against her pale skin, almost surprised to find it there. She had a vague notion that the sight of it should alarm her, that she should do something to defend herself against the roving tentacles and the minstrel who orchestrated their motions with commands conveyed in the language of the chords and phases he played. But that was old thinking; claustrophobic, paranoid, human thinking, from a lower limb of the evolutionary tree. A diseased, withering limb.

  The tentacles wound around Becca’s torso. One caressed the hilt of the dagger where its own form was mimicked in metal; another lifted her hair from the back of her neck, while yet another broke the chain holding the scarab. It fell to the ground at Becca’s feet, followed by her bra.

  Undulating tentacles placed the sprawling necklace and diadem on her chest and head. Looking down at the dagger, Becca saw that it completed the trinity of power objects, and was in its proper place after all.

  The music ceased and the sound of the waves rolled in to fill the void. The black silhouettes of the colossal heads watching from the ridge seemed to melt into the molten sky. Above, the icy light of dead stars was scattered like shattered diamonds cast across black velvet.

  The Crimson Minstrel passed behind the slab, gazed at the choir over the shrouded body, and struck the opening chord of the third movement of The Invisible Symphony.

  The children sang. Their harmony churned the air in waves deep and majestic. It seemed impossible that children could make such a sound. The fire leapt. The mottled tentacles climbed the black slab, and unwrapped the shrouded body that lay upon it.

  Tristan’s fingers roved the fret board of the lyre guitar, weaving trails of phosphorescence between the strings, sparks leaping from the nails of his right hand swept into a vortex churning in the half-moon sound hole. He looked up, and Becca, turning to follow the direction of his gaze, saw that the maelstrom in the guitar was mirrored by another gathering on the horizon. The bruised clouds cast a noxious light over the sea. Veils of rain parted below them, and it was as if the swirling clouds and rain formed the crown and vestments of a colossal king. It lumbered toward the island, feet thundering on the sea floor, setting tectonic plates trembling at its approach, tidal waves swelling to herald its coming. Slouching toward Rapa Nui, where it was worshipped of old, to be reborn.

  * * *

  In Boston, musk spread like a toxin through Copley Square, and the Goat Mother moved in the mirrors of the Hancock Tower, flanked by her dark young.

  At the quarry in Berlin, New Hampshire, something broke the surface of the water without the aid of a door. It struck its claws into the granite, sending out a spray of rock shards, and climbed from the pit, its scorpion tail swaying behind it, its shadows cast in triplicate beneath the arc lamps as it approached the SPECTRA huts where sensors pinged and klaxons blared.

  In a derelict textile mill on the Charles River, and in a stagnant bird bath at an abandoned asylum, and in a meadow in Concord, Massachusetts—where all that remained of the support beams of the Wade House was a fine dust of charcoal on the poisoned weeds and the rubble of foundation stones fractured by jackhammers—in all of these places where the membrane was thin, the denizens of another world stirred and tasted the air, and listened for the reverberations of distant music.

  And in the basement of the JFK building at Government Center in Boston, Warwick McDermott gazed through violet-lit shades and bulletproof glass at a soot-smudged mirror in a tarnished antique frame. It was a room he visited often; at least once every three days since Engineering had perfected the shades. He would stand behind the glass and search the mirror’s surface for a glimpse of what lurked in its depths.

  The mirror, removed from the Wade House before it burned, was the most precious artifact in the agency’s collection—a perfect portal. He had dared not risk its use in tests like the one at the Manchester quarry. The stakes would have been too great. Only a minor deity haunted the region beyond the door they’d employed for that experiment. This mirror, however, had revealed to him the presence of another lurker at the threshold since its installation at Government Center, a threat of a far greater order. The bulletproof glass would do nothing to restrain such an entity, but then, the glass was there to protect the mirror from overzealous or paranoid agents. Agents who might harbor sympathies for the Northrup doctrine of destroying such objects. McDermott liked to think he had routed out all personnel of that persuasion, but one could never be certain. Agent Brooks might have been the last of them, and he had apparently drowned in Zadar, although no body had
yet been recovered.

  Today, as McDermott stared into the mirror, he was not alone. He approached the glass flanked by agents. Behind him, a plasma cannon cycled through power modes, manned by an agent fitted with one of two enhanced pairs of gloves. The other pair was on a SPECTRA jet over the Atlantic, returning home with Agents Kalley and Merrit.

  While the bulletproof glass may have offered no protection to the director and the men surrounding him, there were other defenses in place. The legs of the mirror’s frame rested on beeswax disks graven with the Sigillum Dei Aemeth (the Seal of the Truth of God), an elaborate mandala of angelic names devised by the Elizabethan sorcerer, Dr. John Dee. The metal floor beneath the disks and mirror was laser engraved with additional protective wards, sigils, and divine names in a series of concentric circles dusted with consecrated powders. The agency’s think tank of occult scholars had spent a year cross-referencing grimoires seized in Starry Wisdom raids to arrive at the combination most likely to constrain a major manifestation, and McDermott had high confidence in their untested conclusions.

  But he had more confidence in the weapon he had refined over the past week. He had seen the video beamed back from Croatia and believed the cannon would have worked, if the ceremony hadn’t been interrupted.

  So why wasn’t he eager to test it?

  The choir had vanished into the ocean in Croatia, their ritual incomplete and one voice silenced. But McDermott wasn’t naive enough to think the crisis was averted. The apocalypse had only been delayed. Merrit confirmed that Becca Philips was present at the event and working with, not against, the choir, in defiance of Brooks’ misplaced trust. The music required eight voices, and she could fill the role of the fallen child. It was only a matter of time before the minstrel tried again. And when he did, would weapons like the cannon make any difference? Would this mirror, a kind of canary in a coalmine, reveal that the moment had come by releasing the entity McDermott had glimpsed prowling its depths?