Becca noticed Merrit studying Northrup, as if searching for something in the breath he took before answering.
“Empty,” Northrup said. “We have to assume Proctor found it, whatever it is. We’ll know more when Brooks can talk.”
“So, are we sleeping here tonight?” Becca asked.
“Yes. We’ll assess the house by daylight tomorrow and decide how to proceed.”
Nina appeared at a corner of the conference cubicle and drummed her fingernails against the metal frame. All heads turned. To Northrup, she said, “He’s ready to see you.”
Northrup stamped his cigarette out and rose. “How’s Burns?” He asked.
Nina glanced at Becca. She looked tired, as if the modular wall was propping her up. “He has moments of lucidity,” she said, “which gives me hope that he may come back from this. But mostly, he’s still gibbering like a lunatic. Better that than catatonic, I suppose.”
“Is Brooks exhibiting any signs of psychosis?”
“No. We’re waiting on the pathology report to see if the eels transmitted any neurotoxins to him. Matheson and I recommend that he be monitored carefully for at least three days.”
Becca slid her chair back to follow Northrup out of the conference area but he put his hand up. “Not so fast, Philips. I’m seeing him alone first for debriefing. You’ll have a turn later, if he’s up for it.”
* * *
Becca tried to read on the cot in the cubicle they had assigned her but found it too hard to focus. When Django went prowling the hut in search of any friendly tech who might give him a munchkin from the coffee station, she set her book down, fluffed her pillow, and lay back with her eyes closed. A moment later, Nina’s voice tugged her back from the edge of sleep.
“Becca? You can see Jason now, if you’d like.”
She sat up, blinking.
“Follow me.”
Walking beside her, Becca could see the shadows under Nina’s eyes showing through a thin layer of makeup; eyes that darted side to side as if scanning for predators, devoid of the calm empathy Becca had once found in them.
Becca touched Nina’s arm, causing her to slow her businesslike stride and meet Becca’s eyes.
“He’ll be okay,” Becca said. “Brooks is strong. He’ll bounce back from this.”
Nina grinned; it somehow made her look sadder. “Well look at you reading my worries. How did that happen?”
“Are you okay, Nina?”
Nina blinked, and looked over Becca’s head at the track lights. Was her lip trembling? She shook her head, almost imperceptible but for the swaying of her short black hair.
“What is it?” Becca asked, and a manic smile flashed across the psychiatrist’s face.
“It’s just…everything.” She covered her mouth, collected herself, and glanced around before continuing. “I’ve had a security clearance for less than two weeks and I’m supposed to just…adapt to the idea that everything I’ve ever known is just a thin crust over a world seething with monsters? Ideas I would have had people committed for… I’m sorry, I’m unloading on you. Shit.”
“It’s okay. It’s a lot.”
“I’ve been, uh, holding it together in front of them, but I guess it’s catching up with me.” Nina gave Becca’s hand a squeeze. “He is strong, you’re right. So are you. I had no idea the kind of secrets he had to live with until now. I mean, I had some idea, but…” She studied Becca’s face. “And you actually fought them.”
Now Becca looked away. “I don’t know that it made a difference, Nina. I mean, here we are, right?”
“Can you do it again?” Nina’s gaze settled on the collar of Becca’s shirt.
“No. I’m sorry, but no, not the same way. They brought me here to witness and document, to tell them if something was coming through, but if they’re counting on me to stop it, I’m afraid we’re all fucked. How’s that for a pep talk?”
Nina closed her eyes and laughed. “You’ve always been honest, I’ll give you that. Sometimes to a fault.” She leaned in closer to Becca and whispered, “Has Nico Merrit asked you any questions?”
“No, I just met him. Why?”
“Rumor has it he was sent by the Joint Chiefs to monitor the situation and override Northrup if it spirals out of control. I don’t know if that’s true, but—”
“Wait, what do you mean, override?”
“They’ll only indulge exploration for so long before they decide to just take the house down.”
* * *
The medical cubicle looked like all the others, apart from the specific equipment and the presence of an electric hospital bed rather than a cot. Brooks had it in the upright position. He smiled at Becca when she came in.
“What are you grinning at?” she asked him.
“You came to check on me. I didn’t know you cared.”
She punched his chin in slow motion. “I didn’t know if you’d get out of there.”
“Sure would have made for a weird death certificate: Eaten by piano.”
She laughed, then sobered. “Northrup would probably go with ‘drowned.’”
“Drowned in the line of duty in landlocked Concord, Mass.”
“How are you feeling? Do the bites hurt?”
“Like a bitch until the painkillers kicked in. Right now, it’s just a dull throb.”
“I don’t know if you heard: Mark tried to keep one alive in the bathtub, but it dissolved.”
“Mmm. Maybe it couldn’t handle fresh water.”
“Or terrestrial physics.”
“Yeah. I felt a weird pressure down there. Almost worried if I could get the bends from the cable pulling me up too fast through the air. I wonder how Proctor is making out. What’s he been in for, seven hours?”
“Something like that.”
“Ah, he’s probably genetically suited for it.”
“I thought I saw his reflection in the piano during the quake. And then again in a broken mirror.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You mention it to Northrup?”
“Not yet.”
Brooks grunted.
“I won’t ask you to tell me everything you saw down there, but…”
“I didn’t see your father. I’m sorry. Proctor escaped into some kind of maze before the flood; probably caused the flood. He had a key that he showed me. I think that was what Moe Ramirez hid down there. Not a weapon, but a key. Moe probably thought getting it out of this world altogether would keep it lost, so he took the chance of putting it under the doormat, so to speak. He never thought the music would be reconstructed.”
“Keys to a key,” Becca said.
Brooks had been staring up at the ribs of the curved ceiling as he spoke. Now he looked at Becca. “You don’t seem let down that I didn’t find your dad down there. It’s because you know he’s not in the house. Isn’t it?”
“How do you know that?”
“I used to be a cop. I saw how you reacted to the Lincoln log in the saddle bag.” He took hold of her wrist, gently, but firmly, letting her know she couldn’t wriggle out of the question: “What does it mean to you?”
Becca scanned the shadowy ceiling, then raised an eyebrow at him.
He answered the unspoken question. “I don’t think we’re bugged here.”
She leaned in and, in a threadbare voice, said, “Mount Lincoln in the White Mountains. We used to vacation in a cabin there when I was a kid. I think he wanted someone to think he was lost in the Wade House, so they’d stop looking for him. But he wanted me to know where to find him if I showed up here.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t want to lead anyone to him. At one point you thought there was a cultist in SPECTRA, a mole who helped Darius Marlowe escape his interrogation. Do you still think that?”
“Never ruled it out.”
“Then if I go looking for him, I can’t tell anyone here what I’m doing.”
“You tol
d me.”
“Yeah, well…I’m sure you spend your nights praying to the Great Old Ones to help you win big at the casino and get the Sox into the playoffs.”
Brooks laughed. “All right. You were smart to keep it to yourself. Just don’t try to leave until I’m on my feet again. And don’t bring your phone; they might track it.”
“Could you give me a ride up there, if we came up with a good story?”
“Maybe. Let’s see what happens. Now that Proctor’s off the reservation, I’m not sure what our next move will be. Or if they’ll even keep me on the case. I know Northrup will want you to do a full scan of the house tomorrow with the drone. I should be up and around by then. Just be patient.”
“Okay. Do you know what those things were that bit you?”
Brooks’ gaze turned inward and Becca thought he looked even paler than he had when she entered the room and saw him under the cold white LED lamps.
“It walked down the beach,” Brooks said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “It was like a woman doing the dance of the seven veils, only the veils were eels and there was no one underneath.”
“Jesus.”
“No, but I bet it could have walked on the water if it wanted to.”
“It sounds like the goddess of the gate, the one I saw in the cave lagoon.”
Brooks licked his crusty lips. “Shabat Cycloth. The Lady of a Thousand Hooks.”
Chapter 12
After 3 weeks spent crouching in the shadow of the Wade House, the Base Camp hut was stained with oily streaks from the black flakes. They whispered against the roof, a constant background in the hours since the team had retreated. Becca had learned to distinguish between their susurrus and the grainy chatter of icy snowflakes, which tapered off in the evening after a brief flurry in the afternoon. By full dark, the grounds were once again blanketed in black.
Becca had put off taking Django out for his nightly walk for as long as possible, finally relenting and pulling on a hooded raincoat at half-past eleven. The rustling of the flakes had intensified by then, and as she approached the door and clipped the leash onto the dog’s collar, she wondered if the precipitation was surging, or if she was merely more attuned to the sound as she approached the outer shell.
The leash was a new precaution. In the past, she had rarely used one, but now she worried about him bounding off into black oblivion if the cat made another appearance. She was also using it to correct his balance, which had been out of whack since the last encounter. The veterinarian had paid a follow-up visit to Base Camp and diagnosed the imbalance as vestibular disease, a temporary condition of the inner ear that usually afflicted older dogs, a sort of canine vertigo. There was no treatment; you could only wait for it to run its course. The vet assured Becca that Django’s equilibrium would eventually return. Soon, she hoped. The environment was unreliable enough without an inner imbalance to contend with. But she suspected the house was somehow responsible for that, too.
She pulled the drawstrings dangling from her hood and prepared herself for the repulsive sensation of the ashy flakes against her skin.
When she opened the door, it flew out of her hand and banged against the outer wall, driven by a howling wind. Django braced his paws against the weather, then backed up into the hut, making it clear that he didn’t need a walk that badly. Becca dropped the leash and reached out to pull the door shut. Leaning into the buffeting wind, she caught sight of a swarm of black flakes swept through the fan of light cast by one of the halogen lamps SPECTRA had installed atop thick, metal poles around the grounds. The sight stopped her breath.
The black snow was flying upward. She squinted at it, waiting for the optical illusion to reconcile, but it didn’t. Tracking the flakes to their destination, she saw that the chimneys, windows, and even the gaps between shingles appeared to be drawing the flakes from the ground and sucking them in. The house had always been a magnet for the strange precipitation drifting from the sky, but before now it had been a lazy attraction that had left most of the fallout to accumulate in drifts. Now, the attraction had intensified, causing the air around the house to resemble a whirlpool dragging sediment down a drain.
Becca struggled against the wind. She managed to get the door closed, and yelled to a female agent working late in the nearest cubicle, “Call Northrup. There’s something he should see.”
* * *
When she drifted into shallow wakefulness in the middle of the night, the sound had ceased, and when the team emerged from the hut at daybreak, they found the muddy grounds wiped clean of the black snow, as if it had melted overnight. The Wade House looked more unsettling than ever, looming over the sodden meadow, its gray windows fixed on a gray sky, yellow shingles weeping black rivulets like its mascara had run.
Northrup organized a group of technicians to scan the outside of the house with a variety of devices that Becca didn’t recognize. The exploration team was told to hold off while these tests were conducted. Around lunchtime, Northrup declared the interior off-limits due to high levels of radiation and Becca was summoned to fly the drone through it from the Base Camp command center, transmitting video to a high-definition widescreen monitor with Northrup, Hanson, Burns, and Brooks watching.
The fly-through recorded black sludge on the floors and furniture creeping toward mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Becca dragged the drone’s tail through the stuff to collect a sample for comparison to the residue left on the outside of the house by the black snow, which had only ever registered low level radiation. Clearly, something had changed when Proctor entered the labyrinth, causing the house to inhale the fallout from the other dimension. Of course, the question troubling everyone now was: would it exhale, and when? And would that bring a tide of monsters?
Structural damage was minimal, as far as they could tell, but Becca was unable to explore the basement, which lay beyond a closed door. All told, it took her a couple of hours to survey 80% of the house, sometimes flying in through broken windows to gain access to rooms with closed doors.
The piano appeared to be inert, with only the soundboard showing under its propped hood. It released a metallic glissando when the drone’s wings brushed the strings in passing, giving Becca goose bumps at the distorted sound issuing from the built-in speakers of the remote in her hand.
She felt a wave of relief when it was time to bring the dragonfly out and land it, as if she herself were shaking off the dreadful claustrophobia of the rooms she’d been immersed in through its lenses.
By dinner time, word came back from the lab in Boston that the sludge sample had a different chemical composition from the flakes they had tested: It was an organic substance previously uncatalogued, but bearing a close resemblance to radioactive cephalopod ink collected in the ocean near Fukushima in 2014.
An assistant roamed the cubicles gathering takeout orders from local restaurants. By the time dinner arrived, Becca had recharged with a short nap and was ready to join the others gathered around a monitor on the conference table to study the video she’d recorded.
On the screen, the drone moved down a corridor she recognized as the first floor main hallway when the red drapery that Proctor had tacked over the library entrance came into view. Watching the replay, she recalled how she’d maneuvered the dragonfly over the thick folds of fabric before realizing she could fly it in through the small gap between the curtain and floor.
The library was an inner room with no windows, two stories high and situated at the center of the house. She’d switched on the drone’s headlight, but the footage was still murky. Nonetheless, she had captured something of interest.
“There,” Northrup said. “Roll it back.”
The tech sitting at the keyboard scrubbed the video with a trackball and found the beginning of the segment. He tapped the spacebar and ran it again. The dragonfly’s floodlight traveled the length of a bookshelf, spines flicking past until a gray smudge on the wood (possibly incense ash) came racing toward the camera at the same location a
s a book tilted slightly forward, as if it didn’t quite fit the space it had been crammed into. The tech froze the frame.
“What is it?” Brooks asked.
“It’s not much,” Northrup said. “But enough, I think, to send an agent in a suit in there to fetch that book. It looks like it was of interest to the reverend.”
“I’ll go,” Brooks said.
“No,” Nina said. “You’re not yet recovered from the last expedition.”
“That’s why it should be me. For all we know, I already have poison in my system from exposure to this stuff in the realm below. At least this time, I’ll be suited up. And anyway, it should be someone with EDEP.”
“Listen to Nina,” Becca said. “You’re still recovering. Exposing you to something new only complicates things. If you suffer side effects from entering the house, how will we know it’s from that and not your swim in the ocean, or the lamprey bites?”
“She’s right,” Northrup said. He pointed at Becca. “Philips it is. You go in, you get the book, you come out. Got it?”
“Got it.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later Becca stood outside the hut in a charcoal gray radiation suit. The gloves were a little big and clumsy, but all she needed to do with them was open the front door and pull a book from a shelf. Brooks helped her get the hood on, and checked for gaps. Her breath sounded loud and quick through the valve as he draped her camera strap over her neck.
“You okay?” Brooks asked.
“Fine. It’s just a little claustrophobic.”
“I mean are you okay about going in there? You don’t have to.”
“I’m good. Be out in a flash. This isn’t so bad. I expected it to be heavier. You sure it’s safe?”
“Don’t worry, you’re dressed in the best. It’s nanotech. Lighter than lead, but just as effective. Remember: in and out, that’s it. Don’t forget to breathe.”
Becca nodded, took a deep breath, and trudged up the soggy slope to the veranda. She took a moment to look up at the sky, overcast but clear of snow both black and white. The last remnants of the malignant orb that had hovered over Boston, and that she had destroyed, were no more. It seemed fitting that she should be the one to wade through the sludge formed from the fallout.
Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Page 13
