Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel

by Douglas Wynne

  “Not yet. We can’t risk drawing public attention to the Wade House until this crisis is resolved.”

  “Fuckin’ Becca…” Brooks shook his head. “She probably went after Hanson more for revenge than anything else. Your daughter has a bit of a temper.”

  Luke nodded. “I think I know where she gets it from. You want to see mine in full bloom, try telling me I’m not going in there with you when you’re back on your feet, which better be soon.”

  * * *

  Django wouldn’t be held back either. He took the lead and scouted ahead when Brooks reentered the house with Luke Philips shortly after dawn. They found that, for the time being anyway, the structure had resolved into its earthly geometry. The mirrors held only what was in front of them, the closets only dusty shelves. The walls terminated in ceilings, and even the piano, when opened, revealed only strings and hammers. Luke ran a finger over the keys without striking any, and Brooks shook his head sternly. “Not unless we have to.”

  They let the dog roam freely, counting on his acute sense of smell to alert them to any trace of Becca. His equilibrium had gradually worked itself out, and now he roved the halls and empty rooms with purpose, nose to the floor, snuffling and swishing his tail with a plaintive whine rasping in his throat, but failing to fix on any one spot, or to vocalize with the urgency that would indicate a breach.

  “Do you think it’s inert because it’s daytime?” Luke asked.

  “Could be,” Brooks said. “Or maybe she found a way to stop the process.”

  “I don’t like it. What if she did something that trapped her?”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions. We don’t know what’s causing the dimensions to go in and out of alignment. Could be tied to day and night; could be based on some other cycle. I doubt my people know as much as they think they do.”

  Luke looked at the dog. Django cocked his head as if even he were asking, What now?

  “Come on,” Brooks said. “There’s one place we haven’t explored yet.”

  Luke raised an eyebrow in a way that reminded Brooks of Becca.

  “The basement.”

  * * *

  Brooks didn’t know what he expected to find in the basement. He had been told there was a candle maker’s shop down there, but events on the upper floors had interfered with even a cursory exploration of the sub level. When he opened the door, Django shot past him and ran down the stairs. He yelled after the dog, but there was no calling him back. Brooks found the light switch and flipped it. There was a hum, and the bottom of the stairs flickered into view, dim and gray-washed. Brooks took hold of the railing and slowly descended. His calves still burned from the eel bites, and his stitched cheek throbbed. Luke Philips took the stairs gingerly behind him, the older man apparently plagued by arthritis or old motorcycle injuries. Brooks grinned wryly at what a pathetic front they had to offer in the face of a real threat. Maybe they could count on the dog at least. He unsnapped his holster and loosened his gun.

  The walkie on his belt crackled and Northrup’s voice came through, distant and metallic: “What’s your location? Over.”

  “Descending to the basement. Over.” He expected a reaction, maybe a warning against this course of action, but after a second of silence, Northrup came back with, “I want contact every five. Over.”

  “Got it. Any luck connecting to the dragonfly? Over.”

  “No. They keep trying, but all we’ve got is snow. Over.”

  Brooks could hear Django’s claws clicking on concrete before his head cleared the ceiling. The dog was pacing around a circular pool ringed with black tiles and iron candelabra bearing the dusty remains of spent wax. Benches lining the walls bore spools of wick string, molds, and tools, but Brooks swept his gaze over these before zeroing in on the primary feature of the room: a set of five bronze bells suspended in a pentagonal configuration above the brackish water. The bells, at least 3 feet in diameter, were suspended from a star-shaped iron frame with heavy rope threaded through a set of pulleys and dangling in a line of balled knots beside the dark pool. Chalk sigils on the concrete floor described a path from the tile perimeter to a gaping tunnel mouth in the east wall. The resemblance to a Boston subway tunnel made Brooks’ stomach churn.

  “All this time you were fucking around with the piano and this was right under your feet,” Luke said.

  Brooks scowled at him. “What is it?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a summoning portal. More controlled than the piano. This wouldn’t be for gaining entrance, but for drawing things out.”

  “Out of the pool,” Brooks said.

  “Out of the beyond.”

  “And into the tunnel.”

  Chapter 17

  Becca walked between curtains of light webbed with scintillating radiance. She was near the heart of the labyrinth; she could smell it: ozone and brine and the flora of another world. The moldy granite walls had given way to pulsing phosphorescence that felt wet to the touch. She had lost sight of Hanson what felt like hours ago, but she wondered if time was the same here as on the other side.

  She still had Mark’s blood on her hands and smudged across her belly below the ragged line of her ripped shirt. It looked black in the odd light. At least she didn’t need electric light to navigate these radiant walls. The drone had fallen out of the air, and the remote had blacked out just seconds after she dashed past the guardian on the threshold, the labyrinth lurching away from the house like a carnival ride. She’d stashed both in her shoulder bag and had been creeping around corners blind ever since, clutching her serrated pocketknife in her fist, and touching the scarab beetle between her breasts for reassurance whenever she felt her nerve might fail her. The burnished gold shone faintly but the ruby remained dark, the wings and legs inanimate.

  Becca’s skin and bones vibrated in sympathy with the walls of light, and her mind conjured images of her body unraveling in tatters of stray atoms suddenly unconstrained from the pattern that constituted her existence.

  She came to a T-junction and instinctively took the left turn. Her pace increased with the gravity of the slope and soon she was confronted with a series of passages opening on both sides. All pulsed with the same green glow, but peering into the third passage on the right, she saw faint black splotches on the floor a few feet ahead. Blood? She took the turn and, coming closer, recognized the stains as the heat signatures of footprints. She was perceiving the infrared spectrum directly.

  Were they Hanson’s footprints? She was willing to bet on it. After all, they weren’t claw shaped and dragging a tail.

  The prints started to fade. She picked up her pace. A sound like the ocean in a conch shell swelled around her, and in a little while she could discern something else: a chanted litany emerging from the white noise. Hanson’s voice. The walls of the corridor disintegrated into green mist, and she had the sense that she had entered a great chamber. The floor beneath her feet hardened without warning, causing her footsteps to echo.

  The chant broke like a rusted chain.

  An aperture appeared in the luminous mist, a cyclopean spiral of metal plates converging on a slot from which violet light spilled in a malignant shaft that strained her retinas. Something eclipsed the harsh light, providing momentary relief: the silhouette of a man. He turned to look at her over his shoulder as he notched the key into the slot. “Come for a front row view, have you?”

  Becca squeezed the knife in her hand. It felt small compared to the ritual dagger he had tucked in his belt.

  “You’ve witnessed the glory of the lesser emanations. Now you’ll see their sexless source, begetter of all abominations, the gate of the spheres: Yog Sothoth.”

  “Why did you kill Proctor?” She stalked toward him slowly, hoping to get within striking distance while he answered.

  Hanson sneered. “Only one man in history can turn this key. What did he ever do to earn the honor? All he ever wanted was to escape the world. I’ve come to transform it. To finish the great work
of Caleb Wade.” Hanson scoffed at the knife in Becca’s hand. “You should run, girl. That won’t avail you against what’s coming.”

  “It’ll do fine against you.”

  “Not for long. You’re about to become the sole witness to my apotheosis. I’ll be deemed worthy of entrance to the kingdom. The lady of a thousand hooks will speed my passage, and space and time will be my servants.”

  “How do you know you’re not shit under your gods’ fingernails?”

  “Because I hold the key. The key to the lock that Zann built this house around. The key he stole from Wade when he realized the implications. That crazy shattered nigger went all the way to Paris to dig it up, and what did he do with it? He hid it right on the fucking doorstep.” Hanson shook with laughter and held the shining silver key in front of his face.

  Becca felt a flutter at her heart and caught her breath. Had the scarab stirred?

  “I hope you live to tell the tale,” Hanson said, turning the key. “This moment deserves a witness. But then, I suppose history comes to an end here.”

  The plates shifted, whirling outward with a sound of scraping iron and the churning of massive cogs. The slot of ultraviolet light at the center of the portal spread, became a many-rayed star, a wheel of curling teeth, a dilating eye. The filigreed silver key floated at the core, suspended in the maelstrom. Becca knew she should attack, but bathed in that mind-shattering light, the will drained from her nerves.

  Hanson was chanting again, his mantra cresting, resonating and ricocheting around the misty chamber.

  The scarab twitched and Becca dropped the knife. She reached to touch it but it scampered over the collar of her shirt, fleeing the corrosive radiance of the emerging hell realm.

  Squinting at the undulating substance suspended in the eye of the portal, Becca couldn’t tell if it was water refusing to spill despite the lack of a boundary, or something more viscous. Hanson answered the question with a fingertip. The liquid light broke in a sluggish wave, the placenta of a new world spilling over Becca’s scuffed boots.

  Her paralysis broke. She recoiled from the flood and turned to run, but found herself surrounded by curtains of green mist on all sides with no clear exit. Nonetheless, she backed away from the portal, the anger that had driven her pursuit leaching out of her, leaving only cold dread and an animal urge to flee.

  Hanson let the flood pour over him, his arms spread, basking in the foul wave. Something floated toward him, a spinning globe, oily and iridescent. It passed through the portal, absorbing the key, which flared, released tendrils of electricity, and dissolved.

  The first sphere was followed by a trail of others, clinging in a floating mass, separating and joining. As they rolled over the lip of the aperture toward her, Becca felt probed by a vast and alien intelligence.

  Hanson screamed.

  A swarm of lamprey eels thrashed in the portal, a tumult of black flesh whirling around him. He twisted away, and Becca could see that some of the eels on the outer arms of the spiral had fastened their fangs in his upturned wrists, and were dragging him bleeding into the devouring embrace of Shabat Cycloth.

  The scream wavered and was subsumed in a tidal rush of white noise. Fluid—or was it a wash of photons?—crashed out of the portal as Hanson was sucked into it, sweeping Becca off her feet, and carrying her away on a vile tide.

  * * *

  The rope burrowed rough splinters into Luke’s palm, but it pulled easier than he expected, given the size of the iron bell. The resulting tone vibrated in the core of his body, resounded through the stone chamber, and reverberated down the tunnel.

  The surface of the pool rippled with a pattern of concentric circles. He waited for the water to settle, then moved on to the next rope, girding himself against the impending explosion of sound as he rang the second bell. The tone of this one was higher in pitch, as he had expected, but no less bowel shaking. He could see the discomfort on Brooks’ face across the pool. The agent held his gun and flashlight low, both aimed at the water.

  The second bell vibrated the water in a triangular pattern. Again, Luke waited for the ripples to settle before trying the next node in the sequence, which affected a series of overlapping spirals. He knew that sound waves could form intricate patterns in sand poured over glass but had never seen acoustics behave in quite this way. The growing sense that he was communicating with an unseen listener in a language of geometric signals unnerved him. He was sending those signals blind. And what might answer?

  By the fourth note, he had what he wanted: knowledge of the scale the bells were arranged for, an exotic asymmetrical mode.

  As the fifth and final note faded, Brooks said, “I think that’s enough for now.”

  “Me too.”

  Django paced at the threshold of the tunnel arch, snuffling at the damp stone floor.

  Brooks thumbed the talk button on his radio: “Brooks to base, over.”

  “Base here, over.”

  “You guys know anything about a tunnel in the basement?”

  There was a long pause, then: “Scans show no tunnel.”

  Brooks stepped under the arch and swept the beam of his flashlight over the ceiling. “It appears to be lined with lead. That might have kept it off your scans, but I wonder what the original purpose of the shielding was. Over.”

  Luke walked a careful circuit around the pool and approached Brooks, glancing over his shoulder at the still water. “Could have been to keep entities from escaping through the ground before reaching the end of the tunnel,” he said, his words laced with echo.

  Brooks nodded and clicked the radio. “We’re gonna walk it a bit, see where it leads. Over.”

  Northrup’s voice came back this time, “Be careful and keep talking to me. Over.”

  The tunnel seemed to go on for about a quarter of a mile, the walls slimy and streaked with corrosion where water had seeped through seams in the lead sheets. Django diligently wove back and forth ahead of the men, nose to the ground. Mushrooms sprouted occasionally in the corners where the flagstone floor joined the leaded arch, but there were no other signs of organic life. The oppressive silence had begun to work on their resolve to find the end when Django started whining and pacing frantic circles in front of them. A moment later, Brooks could smell it too: fresh air and pine.

  The tunnel inclined upward for the last stretch before coming to an abrupt end at a lead covered wall. Sunlight dappled the floor. Looking up they could see fragments of gray sky through a stone slab cut like a drain grate with oddly shaped holes—an occult configuration of whorls and fractured star shapes. Small leaves and pine needles littered a puddle of rainwater on the floor below the grate. Django spun, sat, looked up, and whined at the smell of the woods above.

  The grate was probably ten feet above the flagstone floor. Brooks sized up Luke Philips, and said, “You’re lighter than me. Climb on my shoulders and tell me what you can see.” He dropped to one knee while Luke mounted the back of his neck, then stood up. They wobbled for a few seconds while Brooks stabilized the weight, but then a bolt of pain shot through his thigh and he hissed sharply through gritted teeth.

  “My stitches…” He said. “Can you grab hold and take your weight off?”

  Luke reached up and slipped his fingers through a cluster of holes, raising himself off Brooks’ shoulders by his fingertips. Brooks made a final effort to push him up high enough for a glimpse through the grate. Luke held on for a few seconds, his face and clothes speckled with daylight, before giving out and dangling at a full stretch. He let go and landed hard on his feet in front of Brooks.

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Yeah. Standing stones with symbols carved on them.”

  “I know the place,” Brooks said. “Becca found it the day we moved into the house.” He played his flashlight beam around the circumference of the stone grate. “Doesn’t look like anything could pass through that but mice.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Luke said. He pointed at the figur
ed holes in the slab. “Could be those are meant to filter whatever raw energy passes down this tunnel. Like the angles of the house, it might be designed to let certain things through.”

  Brooks nodded. “Well, I don’t see us getting through.” He thumbed the walkie. “Northrup: we’re headed back. Over.”

  Luke touched Brooks’ arm. “You hear that?”

  Brooks tilted his head. “Something in the water.”

  * * *

  Emerging from the arch at the end of the tunnel, Brooks stopped dead. A shadow was rising from the bottom of the churning pool. He trained his gun on it, but before it surfaced, Django shot past him and dropped to his haunches at the edge of the tile coping, yelping frantically. It was a human body. The filmy gray water concealed the details until it had almost surfaced, but Brooks knew who it was even before he could make out the flowing strands of long, dark hair or the army jacket. Moving fast, he slipped out of his coat and emptied his belt, tossing his holstered weapon, flashlight, and radio to the floor. Luke stared at the rising body, stammering, trying to form a sentence as Brooks jumped into the pool.

  The water slammed his senses with its slimy caress and foul odor. He swam to the body, then dove under the surface to come up from under it, turning it around and wrapping his arm across the chest. There was no struggle in response, only dead weight. He kicked hard, propelling toward the edge and using the momentum to lift Becca’s head above the water.

  Django was panicking, filling the cavernous space with his barking. Luke seized Becca under the arms, and hauled her out onto the tile. The skinny old man’s strength surprised Brooks. Becca was out cold and heavy in her soaking jeans, boots, and jacket. Dried blood was still smeared across her belly below her torn shirt.

  “She’s not breathing,” Luke said. “Do something! She’s not breathing!”

  Brooks climbed out of the water and crawled on his hands and knees to Becca’s side, gasping for breath and wishing the damned dog would shut up. He checked for a pulse and couldn’t find one. Her skin was so cold. No time to waste. He tugged her jacket out of the way, layered his hands over her sternum, and started compressions.