Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel

by Douglas Wynne

  Now she touched the scarab, but didn’t hide it. “It doesn’t work anymore, anyway. I’ve tried.”

  Brooks shouldered past Proctor, knocking him aside. He looked at Becca standing frozen in the middle of the kitchen, her fingertip on the jewel, then back at the Reverend with a withering gaze. “The fuck are you looking at, Padre? Why don’t you go polish your stiletto?”

  Proctor’s nostrils flared. He whirled away, leaving Brooks looking at Becca.

  “What?”

  “Jesus, Brooks, I already have a guard dog.”

  She stepped around him, started down the hall, then turned back. “You said the first floor was supposed to be stable, but he came out of my closet. Do I need to barricade it? Should I be worried about every door?”

  Brooks shrugged. They’d been in the house just one night and he already looked haggard. “I don’t know, Becca. I thought we understood more than we do, thought we had a safe zone, but… Just use your head. Try not to close or open doors. And I wouldn’t trust windows or mirrors, either. I wouldn’t count on finding what you expect in them.”

  “Okay. I need to crash for a while. I’ll leave my door open a crack.”

  “Good.”

  * * *

  Becca dreamed she was sitting at a kitchen table, writing in the dream journal SPECTRA had left on her cot. At first she thought it was her grandmother’s kitchen in the house where she’d grown up in Arkham, but the light was strange. Being acutely attuned to light, this was unlike any she recognized at first, a murky green ambience. She was recording a dream she’d had about one of the deities of the Starry Wisdom Church, the one with the dragon wings and tentacles. Darius Marlowe had transformed into a child of that dark god at the equinox, and Becca had sent him to his death down the central shaft of the Bunker Hill obelisk.

  Darius had been a mere minion of the gods, but his devotion had been sufficient to transform his anatomy, to make him a trespasser between worlds. What had she dreamt about the octopus god, whose offspring she had wrestled, following that transformation? She struggled to read her own notes, but they looked more like math than language, like something Darius, an engineering student at MIT, might have dreamed: graphs charting sine waves, lists of numbers in kilohertz and angstroms.

  The pages fluttered in the breeze through the kitchen window. Although she had studied light’s basic properties at art school, she was no physicist, and the words in the journal were beyond her understanding. The air was sluggish, the pages resistant as she flattened them down against the book again. She knew then that it wasn’t a breeze but a current.

  Looking around the kitchen, she found it was the galley of a ship. Fronds of seaweed danced beyond the porthole window.

  Becca stood and felt her stomach sink with unease. She lifted her hand from the page, and vaguely noticed the book floating away in her peripheral vision as she walked to the end of the gallery and opened a steel door with rounded corners. It resisted and groaned when she forced it against the rust and barnacles, a noise that was somehow loud even underwater, just as she could somehow breathe underwater. She put her hand to her neck, thinking that she must have gills. But her flesh was smooth. She felt only the chain from which her scarab dangled.

  She stepped through the doorway expecting to fall out of a closet, but she was still walking underwater, tethered by loose gravity to the deck of a sunken ship. She kept her gaze tightly focused for fear that if she looked up the surface of the water would be far too far away. Or something on the ocean floor would be too big for her to stomach. Sometimes looking up was as bad as looking down when some titanic thing reminded you of how small you were. Walking on the docks of Boston harbor as a child when the tall ships visited, she knew the sensation of vertigo that came from looking up at their towering masts. But how deep could she be if light was reaching her through the water, limning the sunken objects strewn about the deck of the ship: her grandmother’s rocking chair, a painting by her dead friend Rafael Moreno, her father’s motorcycle enswathed in seaweed as if it had lain here for ages.

  She found herself at the railing and gripped it. Barnacles chewed into the palms of her hands. Here at the edge of the deck, she couldn’t help looking out across the seabed. A jagged trench dropped into darkness a few meters out. On the other side of the rift, a massive structure climbed from the ocean floor, monolithic forms listing at odd angles, forms that could have been carvings in stone, or the bones of Triassic beasts picked clean by the eons. At the pinnacle of the structure, rising ribbons of kelp undulated in the cold currents. Or were they something else? Fronds of torpid flesh.

  A sound rolled over the seabed from the structure, sending a cloud of powdered sand across the chasm. The crest reached Becca, stinging her with grains, compressing her eardrums through the water. And the sound had a shape. Through the bowel-shaking drone, she heard a word: TUTULUUU.

  Something moved in her peripheral vision—a shadow swinging like a pendulum. A bell chimed, a buoy rocking and ringing. Suddenly, as if the spell that had sustained her in these hostile environs had broken, her chest was crushed under the pressure of the icy water. She gazed up at the surface and woke.

  Chapter 8

  The angle of the gray light stretching across the floor beside the cot told her it was afternoon. Becca rolled over and looked up at the carved molding that framed the cracked and stained ceiling.

  A distant bell rang through the house from the second floor. No—a piano note. She glanced at the journal she’d been provided and considered jotting down a note about the already fading dream, just a few key words to trigger her memory later, but the chiming sound called for investigation now and the journal could wait. She followed the sound through the house, past the library where the chanting droned on and the incense spiced the air, past the parlor where they had convened in the morning, now empty. Along the way, she peered into each makeshift bedroom she passed, but saw no one.

  Django followed, his tail swishing at the walls of the hallway. He cut into the kitchen while Becca headed for the staircase. She heard him lapping at his water dish for a moment. By the time she had set her foot on the bottom step and started her ascent toward the circular rose window on the landing, he had caught up and bounded past her, his gait still out of balance, head tilted to one side, as if the meds weren’t done messing with him.

  She hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should go across the lawn to Base Camp instead. But with no one else on the ground floor and the piano clearly being played by someone upstairs, it was obvious she wouldn’t be alone up there.

  The second floor was silent except for the now bright and clear piano notes echoing through the empty rooms. The shades of paint and wallpaper looked brighter than they had at night, but the clarity of the cobwebs, grime and water stains more than made up for any levity granted by the less austere pallet.

  She found Brooks and Hanson in the music room. Hanson was seated at the grand piano, plunking at the keys and shuffling through papers laid out in a manila folder on the music rack. The piano’s top board was propped open. Brooks sat in a red and gold upholstered chair in the corner, a broom propped against the wall at his side, a pile of crystal shards and dust forming a neat mound in front of him. Both men looked up at Becca’s entrance.

  “Hey,” she said, “what are you doing?”

  “A little experiment,” Brooks said.

  “With a piano?”

  “We’ve found some notes in Moe Ramirez’s journals that suggest the piano could be an important portal.”

  “How?”

  “The lid might be another doorway. But only if the right sequence of keys is played.”

  She circled around to Hanson and looked over his shoulder at the sheet music. It wasn’t notated in Maurice’s chaotic hand but looked professionally printed, if fragmentary. “Where did you get the music?”

  “SPECTRA’s code breakers ran some permutations through their computers and printed these variations based on Ramirez’s notes and cr
yptic allusions. He never comes out and says what notes to play, or if he ever did, those pages are missing.”

  “Do you play, like for real?”

  Hanson cleared his throat. “My parents made me take lessons to prepare my brain for math.” He laughed and played a little classical sequence to demonstrate. The piano was impossibly in tune.

  “Any luck yet opening the door you’re looking for?”

  “We’re just getting started,” Brooks said.

  “Have you tried any closets?”

  “We did. None of them are active. Maybe because it’s daylight hours, I don’t know. But we’re not just looking for any point of entry. Ramirez’s notes suggest he intended to hide a power object in one of the zones reached through this piano. Whatever it was, he didn’t want cultists to find it.”

  “You think it could be a weapon against them, like the Fire of Cairo?”

  “We don’t know,” Brooks said.

  “You don’t know much, huh?”

  “Finding it would be a start. For now, it’s one of the only leads we have to go on to make sense of this place and its purpose.”

  Becca thought about it for a moment. “If what he brought here could be used to seal the leaks from the other side, wouldn’t he have done it himself? What if it’s something better left unfound? Something cultists could use to make the breach worse.”

  Brooks shook his head. “I don’t think so. It would be too risky to hide something like that right on their doorstep.”

  Hanson slid out from the bench and lowered the top board. “The working theory is that each chord sequence is a key to a different zone on the borderland of the other dimension. We expect some won’t work at all; when we open the lid, we’ll just see the soundboard and strings. But others—if the geeks at Government Center got it right—should align the house with points of entry that we can start mapping. It’s better than opening doors at random. We can start mapping which sequences lead to which types of terrain. If we see anything that matches the Ramirez notes, we mark it down to revisit when we’re ready to explore.”

  “Okay,” Becca said. “I’ll get the drone. We can send it through for pictures, right?”

  “That’s what it’s for,” Hanson said.

  On her way out of the room, Brooks called after her. “Becca, grab your headlamp and climbing gear, too. Just in case.”

  Gathering her equipment, Becca felt unexpectedly energized, as if she’d taken a shot of caffeine. Part of it was fear, a low-level current that had been with her ever since she laid eyes on the Wade House, surging up to a more perceptible level. But more of it was the anticipation of doing something, having an objective. It was better than waiting around for something to happen, waiting to be the next victim of a malign environment. She had been called here for her skill set, after all, and now that she could finally take action without Brooks holding her back, wringing his hands about how unpredictable the dangers were, maybe she could get a hand on the tiller and steer the ship toward looking for her father. That, after all, was the other reason she was here.

  Back upstairs with her rucksack, she padded into the room to the sound of a fading, dissonant chord. Brooks opened the piano slowly and peered inside.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Hanson turned a page on the music stand and found the next chord fingering while Brooks set the lid back down and Becca put on her gloves and harness. The gloves, fingerless leather, would spare her rope burns while still allowing access to the drone camera’s touch screen.

  “What are you doing?” Brooks asked her.

  “You said to get my gear.”

  “Just in case, I said. I’m not planning on sending you down.”

  “Well, I’ll be ready just in case, then.”

  Hanson tried another chord progression, but again Brooks found only the guts of the piano under the lacquered board. Becca was beginning to wonder if there would be anything to do after all when she heard the stairs creaking. A moment later, Proctor entered the room, swinging a censer on a chain and trailing fragrant clouds of smoke. He nodded at her, crossed the room, and bowed his head to listen to the music from an unobtrusive vantage point. She noticed his ceremonial dagger in his belt.

  Hanson looked up from the keyboard and eyed the reverend suspiciously for a moment before focusing on the printed music again. He rifled back through the pages in the manila folder, took a stubby pencil from behind his ear, and scribbled something on the staff.

  “What are you doing?” Brooks asked, “Changing it?”

  Hanson nodded. “I want to try something. The guys who came up with these…well, they’re not musicians, they’re occult scholars. Music is just another symbol set to them. It’s a little like using computer software to restore a damaged painting rather than having an artist do it. Not that I’m an artist when it comes to music, but I’ve studied enough to know that these fragments are modal and the endings they’ve tried aren’t.”

  “Modal?”

  “The modes are evocative flavors of scales, defined by characteristic notes. They’re named after the Greek islands. There’s one I played a little while ago that resonates the piano in a weird way. I thought for sure you’d see something when you opened the lid. It’s close to the Locrian mode. And if I just change one note at the end…”

  Hanson struck the keys, producing a thunderous cadence that left the air beating with a nauseating pulse as the sound faded.

  Brooks raised the lid a crack and cold vapor drifted into the room, mingling with the milky light of the declining sun. Becca held the silver dragonfly aloft, activated it, and sent it buzzing into the fog with its headlight on. She leaned over the edge of the open piano and watched the ball of light descend into a foggy darkness that she knew shouldn’t coexist with the space in which shadows cast by the piano legs stretched across the floor through dry air laden with dust motes. As the whine of the mechanical wings diminished, Becca focused on the screen in her hand. Brooks leaned in to watch while Hanson maintained his position at the keyboard. The video feed reminded Becca of footage she’d seen from submarine cameras passing through murky water heavy with silt. The fog stirred in swirls and eddies at the dragonfly’s approach. For a while, it was all gray on gray with no reference points to steer by. She selected a preset flight pattern, a descending spiral, trusting the program to gently bring the drone down to whatever floor, if any, might lie below and prevent it from drifting too far from the piano-shaped portal.

  At length, the dark shapes of spindly silhouettes came into view: bare winter trees, dead limbs intertwined in the mist, groping at the void above. The dragonfly crashed into one and fell to the ground. The screen went blind with static for a second, flickering in and out while Becca held her breath and waited for the little twitching machine to reset and right itself. Her stomach fluttered as she wondered if it would ever fly right again.

  From the drone’s vantage point on the ground, all they could see at first were the trunks of scrawny trees layered with gilled shelves of pallid fungus. The ground turned out to be a floor of hexagonal tiles, cracked and crumbling everywhere the tree trunks had grown through. Becca gently brought the drone into the air, let it hover at about the height of a man, and set it rotating on its axis to capture a panoramic view of the room. She exhaled. For all its tiny parts, the thing was built with military-grade durability.

  At this height, she saw that the trees were candelabra. Each branch terminated in a small spike upon which a thick, cylindrical candle was impaled. Becca sent the drone to investigate one of these, following rivulets of frozen wax past something dark like a peach pit at the core, to a blackened wick ensconced in a crater at the top. “Candles,” she said to Brooks. “Trees holding candles. A whole little forest of them.”

  “And they look to have been lit at least once,” he said. “Fly it between the trees if you can. I want to see how far it goes.”

  “What if I lose it?”

  “Don’t worry. You can use the auto return if
you have to and it’ll find its way back to the remote.”

  She found a central path and sent the dragonfly soaring between the black limbs toward whatever limit it might find. Finally the trees gave way to a subterranean lagoon where the drone illuminated its own reflection on the surface of the still, black water.

  “Bring it back,” Brooks said.

  Becca traced a swirl on the glass and soon the camera was moving between the trees again.

  “It’s not supposed to be a forest,” Hanson said. “Ramirez described a shoreline, a beach.”

  “There’s an underground lake,” Brooks said.

  “That’s not the same. The key I used brought us somewhere else. We should get out and try again.”

  “How do we know the trees didn’t grow after he was there?” Brooks asked.

  “It’s only been a few years. Trees don’t grow that fast. And they don’t grow on beaches.”

  “Not in our world. Maybe in this one they do.”

  “Is there sand on the ground?” Hanson asked. “Sea shells?”

  “No,” Becca said. “Tiles. There’s a cracked tile floor.”

  “It’s not the zone we’re looking for,” Hanson said. “We don’t know what could be down there.”

  “My father could be down there.”

  “It’s unlikely,” Hanson said.

  Becca leaned into the piano and called through the cavernous space, “LUKE PHILIPS!”

  Brooks grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back. “You don’t want to go announcing us. He’s right, we don’t know what might live down there, what you might stir.”

  “We’re already flying a light around. I want to go down and have a look. The drone’s no substitute for a pair of eyes. Who knows what we’re missing?”

  Brooks shook his head. “Bring it back up, Becca. Let’s quit while we’re ahead. I’m not sending you down for less than our objective. You could come back shell shocked like Burns, or not at all.”

  She looked him straight in the eyes and said, “There was something in the candle. We should take a sample. And the bug can’t do it.”