Someone was talking, requesting his attention, but he couldn’t seem to pry his gaze from the mirror in which he already saw the greatest horror: an abject failure standing among those who would soon realize it, in front of the pea shooter he’d placed his faith in.
“Sir?” A female voice. “We have a signal from Agent Brooks’ wrist unit.”
“Brooks?”
“Yes, sir. We have GPS coordinates from his device. He’s moving. That is…if he’s still alive and wearing it.”
McDermott looked away from his glare-clouded reflection, at the agent beside him with the tablet. Stratford. He squinted at her, seething skepticism. What did it matter if they found Brooks’ body at this point? “Cadavers do tend to move in ocean currents, Agent Stratford.”
“Not this far.”
“Where?”
She passed him the tablet, which displayed a tracking icon at roughly −27 degrees South, −109 West. Easter Island. The icon flashed on land, near the coast, less than three miles outside of the remote island’s only town, Hanga Roa. McDermott handed the tablet back before Stratford could see it trembling in his hand.
“Do we have anyone in Santiago?” he asked.
“No. That was the first place I checked. The nearest agents are in Mexico City, and even on a light jet, it’s at least eight hours from there.”
“How long for a fully-equipped team from Houston or L.A.?”
“Ten hours with time for gearing up.”
“Too long.” His eyes flicked back to the mirror. Had something moved in it? “Other options?” he asked.
Stratford frowned. “Only a precision strike on the island from an F-35 or a Predator. We’re moving a satellite into place for imagery as we speak. With respect, sir, we should get you to the command center.” She tipped her chin toward the mirror beyond the glass. “There’s nothing you can do here if something comes through. Let your men handle it.”
A ripple of agitation passed through the small assembly. Something black and viscous bubbled out of the mirror onto the floor of the sealed room. Stratford turned her head and gasped. McDermott took the Tillinghast shades off.
It was still there.
“It’s too late,” he said.
Stratford dropped the tablet on the floor and stepped away from the director, reaching into her jacket for the service weapon in her shoulder holster.
“Director McDermott, step aside, sir!” the agent at the cannon shouted.
McDermott walked backward, out of the line of fire, keeping his naked eyes on the manifestation the entire time. The entity poured into the glass cell, a pool of iridescence spreading in rivulets toward the walls. A pattern swirled on the surface of the oily material like ten thousand eyes roving in synchronous motion. Some of these expanded into spheres and broke away from the main mass, floating toward the ceiling. Others popped and spattered oil at the glass. McDermott was near the front of the crowd, and a spray of black droplets landed on the back of his hand and the cuff of his shirt, where they smoldered and sent up curling ribbons of white smoke. He cried out and wrapped a flap of his jacket around the burning hand. It came away smeared with blood where the oil had eaten through his flesh like acid. The glass had offered no barrier, was no deterrent for this alien state of matter.
The soup of dark rainbow spheres spread across the floor beyond the glass cell, sending the agents fleeing to the back wall of the room before the substance could touch their shoes and eat through the leather. As the crowd parted around the cannon tripod, they left a channel immediately exploited by the entity. It surged forward, overtaking the cannon, and melting it in seconds. The gunner shook the flipper gloves from his hands as if they were oven mitts that had caught fire. He stumbled and fell, sizzling and liquefying, leaving only a swirl of blood, marrow, and burning hair on the surface of the encroaching pool.
The entity froze in place. All at once, the floating orbs and iridescent eyes swiveled, fixing their unified gaze on the terrified humans huddled against the wall.
It happened quickly after that. Yog Sothoth, Lord of Time and Space, collapsed time in that place.
McDermott could not look away, could not break eye contact with the sphere that scrutinized him. But he felt the effects, saw the symptoms manifest in his flesh and that of the agents around him as their agonized and astonished moans filled the ozone-tinged air.
His skin shriveled, contracted and thinned. His spine compressed and bowed. His hand before his face wrinkled and contorted into a claw, the fingernails growing in yellowing spirals. Tumors sprouted in his bowels; his hair receded and drifted to the floor in white strands; his hearing and eyesight mercifully dimmed as his sinuses filled with the overwhelming odors of putrefaction. His knees gave out and he crumbled to the floor, withering to a desiccated husk, a shriveled mummy curled like a fetus at the edge of the pulsing pool.
* * *
The first fighter jet to reach Easter Island from the USS Theodore Roosevelt was an F-15E Strike Eagle. It thundered over the scattered lights of Hanga Roa, leaving the island behind in a flash, then circled around the storm for a southerly approach to the lumbering monster. Captain Glen Datlow eased the throttles two percent as the monster emerged from the weather, causing his stomach to drop like a bunker buster. “Jesus. It’s as big as a fucking building,” he said to his Weapons Systems Officer over the intercom. “You getting this on the thermographic, Naf?”
In the seat behind him, Lieutenant Nafpliotis pulled up options on a target that was impossible to miss. “I’ve got it,” he said, sending the infrared image from the LANTIRN system to Datlow’s HUD. “I tagged the head in two places. That’s a head, right?”
“Fuck if I know…” Datlow scanned the screen. Watching the thing move in green pixels was easier than trying to interpret it with his naked eyes through the cockpit glass. At least, it made his eyes ache less. “Yeah…between the bat wings. Gotta be.” He switched the red button on the control stick from the video recorder to weapons release mode and let a sidewinder fly.
The missile flared away and vanished into an expanse of what looked like elephant hide covering the dome of the titan’s tentacle-fringed skull. A cloud of orange fire bloomed in the dark and Datlow pulled away. By the time they came around for another pass, the thing was reconstituting itself, fragments of amorphous flesh raining inward like a meteor shower, regaining the shape it had held before the strike.
The jet buzzed the creature’s congealing head, strafing one of its shoulders with gunfire. A golden eye as large as the aircraft, rolled behind a gelatinous membrane, tracking them as they passed, and Datlow felt his mind shatter under the weight of its baleful gaze.
He laughed into his mask, his voice distorting as it cackled through the intercom.
“Captain, are you all right?” Naf sounded panicked. “Captain. Give me control!”
Datlow laughed harder, unclipped his oxygen mask from his helmet and tore it away from his face. Wild-eyed and whooping, he floored the control stick, plunging them into the heart of the abomination.
Chapter 23
Becca sang at the center of a vortex of song. Jewels and precious metals dripped from her breasts, climbed like interwoven vines from her temples toward the stars. She sang and rose up on an escalating wave of ecstasy, every nerve aflame with newly-awakened power.
The Crimson Minstrel led the choir with his instrument, his face a howling abyss of emptiness in the hood of his cloak. Becca could not take her eyes off the permutations of his fingers, the arcane alphabet of chords pulsing signals to the choir—cues of pitch and vibrato, of lull and crescendo. As she watched and listened enraptured, the music guided not only her voice, but her body as well, instructing her in the secrets of how to dance and gesture with the silver dagger, how to carve mandalas in the air with its gleaming blade, how to raise it to its zenith above the sacrificial offering to He who moved between sea and storm, blotting out the southern stars with His shadow.
The other creature, the one she
now thought of as her attendant, cradled the sacrificial victim in its tentacles and spun it on its axis, unspooling the dirty white shroud, then laying the bound and gagged body down again on the volcanic stone slab.
The song faltered on the priestess’s lips, the dagger poised above the man’s bare chest. The tentacles withdrew, and the creature cascaded sideways out of the path of the blade.
She knew this man. He stared up at her in terror and awe. His gun belt and vest had been discarded with his shirt. He was barefoot, clad only in black field pants, his pale freckled skin crusted with salt and sand. He was, in a way, her mirror image, but while she wore white metal wrought in the likeness of kelp, his wrists, ankles, and mouth were wrapped in strips of the real thing. Where she embodied primeval power, he writhed under the knife, arching his back, his bright blue eyes pleading with her.
She knew this man. And she knew something else, something she had forgotten… A melody. A different melody. One that would irreparably alter the dark harmony swirling around her, resonating around the globe.
His name was Brooks. She saw him sitting awake at her bedside; saw him carrying a spider rescued from a kitchen sink, throwing a ball for her dog. He was a soldier of sorts, a protector. He was kind. And that was something the Great Old Ones would never be, no matter how many aeons passed on Earth.
The minstrel approached the altar, focusing his cold consciousness on her, willing her to finish the song, to spice the air with infernal harmonics and the scent of hot blood.
Becca released an incoherent cry and brought the dagger down, sweeping the blade across Tristan’s throat, releasing a jet of black blood and a gurgling howl. The children, their eyes closed, continued swaying to the rhythm of their song, lost in its currents, even as the blood splashed their faces. Becca pivoted and brought the blade up, retracing the path of its downward arc and severing the strings of the guitar before plunging the tip through the minstrel’s chest, a mantra vibrating on her lips.
The crimson robe folded in on itself, collapsing like a ball of crumpled paper at the heart of a fire, a cloud of black specs swarming out of it and scattering on the rising wind. The choral music staggered and lurched, dragging part of her mind along in its wake. Without a conductor or an instrument to guide it, the song stumbled onward, the children shaken but too fevered to stop.
Becca drew a deep breath and added her voice to theirs, guiding the harmony into a new region with the force of her inverted melody. She had forgotten it for a time, but it returned to her now, and as she sang, she twirled, lashing out with the blade, clearing the air around Brooks, hacking the probing tentacles off the creature circling the slab.
Black blood soaked the sand. Forked lightning struck the sea from the roiling clouds. And Great Cthulhu, unfurling vast, tattered wings, tilted his elephantine head and roared in agony at the shattering sky.
The children collapsed, and in the fading echo of the falling beast, a species of silence prevailed in the spaces between wind and waves.
* * *
Brooks carried a torch along the shoreline beneath a river of stars like spilled milk. The storm had lost its energy and scattered to the west, and the waves that had battered the south shore of the island for hours had finally subsided. Becca had cut his bonds with the dagger that now stuck out of the sand beside her where she slept on the beach, the last thing she’d done before passing out among the children. Brooks, seized by fear that the song had killed them, had scampered around the bodies checking for pulses. When he’d verified they were all alive, he rebuilt the faltering fire, lit the discarded torch, and hiked to the cave to retrieve the clothes and gear that had been stripped from him when he’d washed up unconscious at the minstrel’s feet.
His watch was waterproof, but he was still surprised when it indicated a satellite link and displayed the local time, as well as a log of attempted calls from Nico Merrit. Brooks called HQ from the mouth of the cave and Merrit answered immediately.
“Brooks. What’s happening on the island?”
“It’s over,” Brooks said. “Why are you answering the director’s line? Put him on.”
“McDermott’s dead. Assistant Director Spiegal, too. And Bill Klinger, Irene Stratford… Jesus, Brooks, it was a massacre. You got me because I’m acting director. I got back after it happened.”
Brooks felt the urge to vomit. He held the watch away from his face and took a few slow breaths until the feeling passed.
“You there, Brooks?”
“Yeah. How?”
“Something came through a mirror just after 21:30. They didn’t have a chance. It aged them to death.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No one does. But it vanished as fast as it manifested. We had sensors pinging at all of the known hotspots at the same time, but it all stopped at once.”
“It was Becca,” Brooks said. “She put an end to it…did something to the music to knock the spheres out of alignment. How soon can you get us home?”
“There’s a team on the way already. Give it six or seven hours.”
“Okay.”
“Brooks…” On the screen, Merrit held a fist to his lips. Brooks let his finger hover over the watch, let the silence spread between them while Merrit gathered his thoughts. “What I did in Zadar…was the last thing I wanted.”
Brooks nodded. He ended the call and walked back to the beach, scanning the sky where satellites roved among the stars. Somewhere over the Pacific was an unmanned vehicle, veering away from a trajectory that had placed it within striking distance. Or maybe it was an aircraft carrier that had been redirected from patrolling the Chilean coast. Something that no longer needed to decimate a children’s choir at a World Heritage site.
* * *
On the beach, something gleamed amid the crab grass. Brooks swept the torch over the ground until it caught his eye again; Becca’s golden scarab. He picked it up by the chain and put it in his pocket. The tiara had fallen from her head in the melee, and he kicked it away from where she slept. The elaborate necklace she wore could wait for morning. For now, he shook the sand out of her discarded shirt, placed it over her slumbering body, and lay down beside her.
For a while he watched the fire burn down, then rolled onto his back and gazed up at the stars and the fissures of darkness between them. Eventually he dozed off, but woke out of habit at the hour when his biological clock was trained to be vigilant. He checked his watch for Boston time: 3:33.
Becca, with no protective wards etched in the drift of sand that served as her pillow, did not sing in her sleep. Neither did she moan in fear or distress. Brooks shone the cold light of his watch on her face. Her eyelids were still, her breathing deep. He was not a religious man, but he said a silent prayer that she and the children would wake in the morning, and then surrendered to sleep.
When he woke again, to sunlight on his face, he could hear the children playing on the beach and feel Becca’s limbs wrapped around him. He squinted at the shoreline, and for a second thought he might be dreaming. Noah Petrie was petting a dog, a friendly local mutt with shepherd traits. “Django!” the boy cried, with enough delight in his voice to reassure Brooks that he would be okay after all.
Becca stirred and opened her eyes.
Acknowledgements
I first read H.P. Lovecraft in junior high when I picked up a paperback with a lurid cover, probably as part of a haul that included Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Clive Barker. It felt kind of like finally checking out the bluesman who influenced your favorite rock guitarists. The licks weren’t as slick and refined as the modern stuff, but the feeling was there and you could see where it had crept into everything that followed.
I’ve had a lot of fun riffing on Lovecraft’s themes over the course of the SPECTRA Files trilogy. I’ve tried to expand the Mythos in my own way and highlight where it resonates with contemporary fears. For better or worse, Lovecraft’s unique concoction of anxieties and cosmic conceptions is as relevant today as it was in the 193
0s, maybe more so.
There are plenty of writers smarter than me contributing to a dialog around the intersection of Lovecraft’s work and the problematic views underlying it. By and large, it’s a surprisingly diverse and supportive community, and I feel lucky to have found a place in it. I owe a debt to H.P. Lovecraft, not only for the Mythos, but also for the friendships that in some measure I can trace back to picking up that paperback when I was fifteen.
I would also like to thank the following friends, writers, readers, and publishing folks who supported and inspired me over the past three years while I wrote the series: Chuck Killorin, Nick Nafpliotis, Jill Sweeney-Bosa, Jeff Miller, Mike Davis, Pete Rawlik, Chris Kalley, Frank Michaels Errington, Charlene Cocrane, Christopher Golden, Laird Barron, Neils Hobbs, Daniel Braum, Irene Gallo, Christopher C. Payne, and Vincenzo Bilof.
I found invaluable resources along the way in the works of Leslie Klinger, S.T. Joshi, Alan Moore, Daniel Harms, and Michael Bukowski.
As always, my deepest gratitude to Jen and River for constant love and support.
Photo by Jen Salt
DOUGLAS WYNNE is the author of five novels, including The Devil of Echo Lake, Steel Breeze, and the SPECTRA Files trilogy. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son and a houseful of animals. You can find him on the web at www.dougwynne.com
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