“Burns,” Brooks called, “did you hear me? No going alone. That curtain counts as a door.”
The biologist brushed his hand over the curtain, but held Brooks’ gaze and waited for the rest of the team to catch up. When they did, Brooks ripped the heavy fabric from the doorframe and cast it on the floor, the curtain rod clattering for a second before it was muted in a pool of velvet. Brooks kicked it away and shone his flashlight beam into the dusty library.
“You said you had a look at the labyrinth through the mirror on the mantel in here?” he asked Becca.
“Yes.”
Brooks walked through the room, sweeping the beam, and froze when it flared off the square of glass. Holding the light steady, he stalked forward. Mark approached the desk and dragged his fingers through a film of incense ash. Hanson turned on his axis, taking in the height of the octagonal turret room, the shelves winding up into shadow. Becca worked the remote in her hand, flying the drone toward the focus of Brooks’ light, the framed mirror.
“Too much glare,” she said. “Turn it off for a second.”
Brooks killed the flashlight. Hanson sighed at the vista glowing through the glass: a mossy stone passage illuminated by the light of an alien moon.
Mark approached the hearth and raised his hand to touch the glass. Brooks drew a breath to stop him, but changed his mind at the last second, held it, and watched as Mark’s fingertips passed through the space where the surface of the mirror should have been with an iridescent shimmer like a bubble popping.
“It’s warm,” Mark said. “And humid. Like an ocean breeze.” He withdrew his hand, rubbed his fingertips together, and craned his neck toward the mirror. This time, Brooks clapped a hand on his shoulder and pulled him back before he could stick his head through for a look around. “No way. Let Becca send the drone.”
Mark let Brooks lead him away as Becca stepped up and maneuvered the dragonfly into the rectangle of light. She still had trouble believing the mirror had become a window. The action felt surreal, like flying the little machine through the screen of a television. Once it was in, she focused on the display in her hand, sending the drone down the stone corridor and hooking it left, around the corner of the first passage it came to. On the screen this corridor looked much like the first. No sign of Proctor, but why should there be? He could be anywhere in the labyrinth. Even if she caught a glimpse of him, they wouldn’t be able to follow. This portal was too small.
“Bring it back before we lose it,” Brooks said.
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Becca replied. “Not like we can follow it anyway.”
“Come on. Let’s head upstairs and try some doors,” Brooks said. He kicked the curtain aside, and led others down the hall.
Becca took one last look around the library, the dragonfly hovering over her shoulder. “Do you know if they’ve learned anything from the book?”
“Not much yet,” Brooks said. “Most of it’s written in a cipher they haven’t seen before. Northrup said they’re making progress on cracking it, but a full transcription is going to take a while, never mind interpreting the contents. I don’t like flying blind in here either, but time is of the essence.”
They had come to the foot of the stairs. The rose window on the landing was dark, as was what little of the second floor they could glimpse through the balusters. Becca switched the drone’s headlight on and sent it fluttering up the stairs ahead of them, casting a pale puddle of light over the scuffed boards. Her stomach lurched, the moving shadows exacerbating the nausea that had been creeping up on her since reentering the house.
The stairs creaked as they climbed. Becca felt the hairs on the back of her neck rising with each step; a reaction that felt more like the presence of static electricity than fear. Not that she was entirely lacking in fear. She exhaled when Brooks found the switch at the top of the stairs and lit the second-floor lamps, spilling light into the music room and the open bedrooms. She searched every open doorway, half expecting the reverend or something he worshipped to spring out at them, her mouth suddenly dry, her hands clammy on the remote. She dragged her thumb clumsily across the screen, sending the dragonfly careening toward a wall and almost hitting Hanson in the face, but he slapped it out of the air, reflexively.
“Sorry,” Becca said.
He scrutinized her. “You all right?”
“Fine.” Becca knelt and picked the drone off the floor, then sent it flying into the nearest bedroom. As it disappeared around the corner, reflected light scattered across the wall. Becca selected the stationary hover mode, followed the bug into the chamber, and found it hovering in front of a full-length antique gilt-framed mirror. The light of the LED played over the silver glass, entangled with shafts from within—long, thin rays that rotated lazily, as if filtered through leagues of water. Becca stepped up to the mirror, entranced by the play of light at the center of the shadow-soaked room.
“Don’t touch it.” Brooks stood beside her. “If you break the membrane, it might flood the room.”
Becca stared into the shifting light. It exerted a powerful pull, like a magnet tugging at the iron in her blood. The light was so beautiful. It would be so easy to step through, to swim.
Brooks clenched her wrist and led her from the room. Back in the electric light of the hall, she blinked her burning eyes, realizing it had been minutes since she’d last done so. “That was…hypnotic.”
“Yeah, I could tell,” Brooks said. “Something about it reminded me of a Venus fly trap.”
Reminded of insects, Becca focused on the remote and recalled the dragonfly to the hall. Hanson and Burns had moved on to the room with the fireplace where they had encountered the first closet breach. Brooks called out their names.
“You should see this, Brooks,” Hanson shouted back. Passing the music room on the way to catch up, Becca did a double take and Brooks followed her gaze through the entrance. It was the light in the room—not the incandescent ambience that should be spilling in from the electric fixtures, but a distinctly outdoor cast of light, a diffuse, sallow gloaming.
Becca stepped into the room and gasped. The high walls were sheared off in a rough line where ragged plaster gave way to moldy stone, as if the earthquake had exposed the ancient granite bones of the house. Above the stone slabs, a mustard gas sky roiled and heaved, spilling jaundiced light over the glossy piano lid.
“It’s breaking through,” Becca said. “It’s like the other realm is eating away at the house.”
“Come on,” Brooks said. “We’ll come back and send the drone over the wall for an aerial view, but right now let’s stay together. They shouldn’t be alone in there.”
Becca could see the same yellow atmosphere in place of a ceiling before they reached the room at the end of the hall. Passing through the doorframe, she felt the humidity wrap its clammy embrace around her. The room was gone. She and Brooks stood in a stone passage rife with creeping black mold.
There was no sign of the other two. Brooks called their names again.
“Over here!” a thin voice rang back. Becca thought it was Mark’s, but it was hard to tell and even harder to locate. Brooks sheathed his flashlight on his belt and drew his gun while Becca sent the drone ahead, searching every intersection for signs of Hanson, Burns, or Proctor.
The first three passages she checked were empty and almost identical but for variations in the mold and the erosion of the stone. She sent the drone into a fourth and her heart leapt. “What the fuck?”
Brooks peered over her shoulder at the screen. “Is that a bathroom?”
She nodded. “I think it’s the master bath, but the perspective is…through the mirror.”
Something rustled in the passage behind them, fleshy and weighty, slithering over stone. They turned and scanned the shadows, found nothing. Becca looked back at the screen in her hand. “Someone’s in the bathroom now. Proctor?”
A scream reached their ears, the acoustics of the labyrinth mangling the sound into a ricocheting
echo.
“Let’s go!” Brooks shoved Becca down the corridor, away from the rustling that sounded more like raspy whispers with every passing millisecond. They turned a corner and stopped short, staring into a collision of planes and angles that made little sense, scenes layered atop one another like photos printed on panes of glass: the octagonal tiles of the second floor bathroom stamped into the granite walls. Mark Burns’ body was splayed across a shelf of stone that was also somehow a claw-footed white bathtub, splashed with dark blood. Reverend Proctor spun around, his frock flaring out around him, tattoos arching with the contortions of his battle face, his ritual dagger jutting from the bottom of his clenched fist.
Dick Hanson threw his arms up and buckled backward, getting his belly out of the path of the arcing blade just in time.
Brooks trained his gun on Proctor, but before he could take the shot, Hanson had lunged forward into the wake of the knife, slamming Proctor’s overextended shoulder and driving him into the wall. Hanson dragged Proctor’s knuckles across the rough granite and seized the dagger by the hilt as it fell free. Proctor flailed and kicked out, but Hanson drove the heel of his hand into the reverend’s chin, cracking his head against the stone.
Proctor collapsed and Hanson straddled him, pressing the blade to the reverend’s throat and rooting through the man’s pockets with his free hand. Proctor’s head lolled on his shoulders. He uttered a gravelly moan that climbed in pitch and intensity—a final prayer, or last ditch defense?
Becca took a stumbling step backward, watching the scene play out beyond Brooks’ poised weapon. She considered flying the drone into Proctor’s face just to interrupt his chant, but before she could, Hanson pressed the blade into Proctor’s throat with enough pressure to draw blood and silence the man.
Becca’s heart hammered. She tried to focus on Mark, sprawled in the ghostly tub in a pool of his own blood. She stepped around Brooks to reach the body, knelt, and checked for a pulse. Mark stared at her, his eyes glassy but alive, his pulse sluggish under her trembling fingers.
* * *
Brooks had Proctor’s head lined up on the sight blade of his 9mm. The reverend had stopped chanting but was still conscious. Hanson had proven to be a fierce fighter, and Brooks considered him with fresh eyes. He held the knife to Proctor’s throat while searching his clothes. Off to the side, Becca had produced a pocketknife of her own and was cutting a strip of black cotton off her t-shirt. She folded it into a makeshift pad and pressed it to Burns’ wound. A sharp laugh pulled Brooks’ focus back to Hanson, who was now clenching the gleaming silver key tight in his hand.
Brooks lowered his gun. It was over. They had what they needed. Now the most pressing issue was getting everyone out of the house before they found themselves trapped in the twilight realm. But scanning the area, he saw the bathroom solidifying around them, becoming more present, more materially manifest than the other half of the double-exposure world.
Hanson, sweaty and wild-eyed, smiled at him. Brooks returned the grin and was still wearing it like an idiot with his gun at his hip when Hanson punched the dagger through Proctor’s throat. Blood gushed over Hanson’s knuckles, and he rose, his right hand gripping the dripping dagger, his left the glowing key. He took a step toward Brooks and held the key up by the shaft, his eye burning through the hole in the grip.
Brooks reeled, brought the gun back up. “Why kill him?”
“He wanted out of this world anyway,” Hanson said. “But we couldn’t just let him choose his own exit.”
Brooks trained his gun on Hanson’s chest. “Drop the knife.”
Hanson slipped the ritual dagger into his belt.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Brooks said. “You were the one who made sure it was salt water when they waterboarded Darius Marlowe. You son of a bitch. Who are you working for?”
Hanson laughed. “I serve no earthly power, Brooks.” He brought the key to his lips and blew through the filigreed hole. An undulating whistle pierced the air, climbing to the height of human hearing and beyond. Air, stone, tile, and plaster trembled, rippled.
The whispering sound rushed in from behind. Brooks whirled and brought the gun up, was lashed across the face by something serpentine. A fang lacerated his cheek, blazing a searing trail of pain; no, not a fang, he saw as the fleshy whip retracted, the barb of a stingray tail curling up from the crustacean-armored form of Lung Crawthok. Hanson had called it with the whistle and it was suddenly upon him, rows of claws clacking a vicious syncopated rhythm, face flayed wide and teeth chittering.
Brooks felt a wave of cold fear sluice down his body and for a moment forgot about shooting the thing, frozen by the helpless dread of prey within reach of an overpowering predator. He wobbled, tried to steady his weapon hand. The muscles in his torn cheek burned and spasmed, contorting as the venom from the barb spread, his vision dimming and tunneling. Or was the space around him tunneling and stretching as the two worlds passed out of alignment?
Hanson lunged past him down that tunnel, sounding the whistle as he passed below the harpoon arm of the towering guardian. Brooks fired two shots. One shattered the creature’s shell on its thigh, releasing a spray of green paste. Its head swept forward, eclipsing all other sights and a fetid howling wind of pain and rage blasted Brooks in the face. He turned his cheek and saw Becca propping up Mark with her neck under his armpit, pressing the soaked cloth to the gash in his side, trying futilely to drag him away from the monster, her face blanched with terror at the thing.
Burns locked eyes with Brooks, and Brooks could see both of their oncoming deaths in the man’s gaze. He turned back to the creature, sensing its claws poised to sweep in on him from the fringes of his diminishing peripheral vision.
And then a body was tumbling past him to the sound of a woman’s scream.
Burns had gathered his last reserves of strength and hurled his broken body into the embrace of the pinchers, knocking the monster down the yawning tunnel.
Brooks dropped his gun, felt his consciousness dissolving under the caustic power of the venom. He staggered backward and tripped over something—the edge of the bathtub—and landed in the slippery blood of the man who had sacrificed himself to save them. It was in vain, he thought, as the world contracted to a keyhole of light. The last thing he saw passing through it down the tunnel was the running silhouette of Becca Philips.
Chapter 16
The first thing Brooks saw when he came to was Luke Philips hovering over him, all salt-and-pepper stubble and scraggly hair haloed by painfully bright halogen lights on the tracks that ran the ceiling of the Quonset hut. Luke turned his head and the light flared into Jason’s eyes, intensifying the throbbing in his skull. He touched his cheek and felt a thick bandage and medical tape. His face ached in the dull sort of way that told him he’d been given painkillers. His mouth was parched, his tongue a little numb. He looked down at his arm and saw that they were giving him fluids. He groaned. Why did the answer to every injury have to involve plugging him into a saline bag?
“Where is she?” Luke asked. Brooks saw a hand squeeze the man’s denim jacket at the biceps and urge him away. Northrup stepped around the worried father and gazed down at Brooks, concern etched in his brow.
“Sorry, Jason. Can you speak?”
Brooks tried to say, Yeah, I can talk, but it came out as a sloppy approximation.
“You had a barb stuck in your cheek. Dr. Matheson removed it and stitched you up, but the anesthetic will keep you numb for a while. Unfortunately, we have to send you back in as soon as you’re up to it. I’d send someone else, but you’re the only one left with EDEP. How’s your head?”
“Too soon to tell,” Brooks said. He looked at Luke Philips, a man who had only known the whereabouts of his daughter for the past 24 hours, and yet was suddenly very worried about her. Brooks supposed ignorance was bliss compared to knowing your kid was stuck between dimensions.
“What happened in there?” Northrup asked.
Brooks slurre
d through the story, recounting everything from the overlay of the house with the maze to the discovery of Proctor to Hanson’s murder of the reverend, his summoning of the guardian, and escape with the key while Burns threw himself into the path of Lung Crawthok, saving Brooks’ life. Luke Philips looked fascinated by the account at first, and then increasingly agitated.
“What about Becca?”
“She followed Hanson down the tunnel. I saw her slip past the guardian while it was…dealing with Burns, but I was fading out by then. If you didn’t find her when you found me, then she’s still in the maze.”
Northrup had remained placid throughout the recap. Now he kneaded his temple with one hand and patted his pocket with the other, instinctively searching for his cigarettes before stopping short of taking one. “If Hanson was a cultist all this time, why did he kill Proctor? Why not work together?”
Brooks sat up. His head throbbed and he let it fall back against the pillow. “Water.”
Luke handed him a plastic cup with a straw. Brooks took a sip and relished the icy sensation in his throat before trying to speak again. “I think Proctor told me the truth right before he went into the maze. He doesn’t care about letting anything out; he just wants in. And that’s not good enough for Hanson. Maybe all he cares about is releasing the Old Ones.”
“You don’t think they were ever working together?” Northrup asked.
“No. Doesn’t matter now anyway. The reverend is dead.”
“And Becca’s in there alone with this traitor who killed him for the key,” Luke said.
Brooks looked at Northrup. “What brought you in after us?”
“When you didn’t respond on the radio, we sent the backup team in after you. The house was stable by then. They found only you, in the upstairs tub with a good amount of blood. We thought you were dead.”
“Burns. It was his blood. I think Hanson attacked him first. Me and Becca got there after. Have you talked to his husband?”
Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Page 18
