Presently she realized that she was no longer photographing, but only staring at the phone in anticipation, and as her awareness shifted from sight to sound she became aware of a human voice murmuring in an unfamiliar language, what her Gran would have called a “barbarous tongue.” She drew her elbows across her midriff and bit her thumbnail before thinking about where it had lately been.
“Rafael?” she said. Her voice was too thin to be heard, but now that she knew she wasn’t alone, the prospect of shouting seemed reckless, a surefire way to broadcast her location. Wait…could the voice be him, messing with her? Had he slipped down the stairs and into the courtyard just to try and spook her?
If he knew her at all, he knew she didn’t scare easy, but the boy did like a challenge. She went to the window where the chant drifted through the broken glass, muted only by the leaves clustered on the branches of the fallen tree. Taking care not to rustle those leaves or crunch the glass underfoot, she searched for a gap between the branches affording a clear downward angle. The voice gained detail and clarity, and she knew for sure that the timbre was not Rafael’s.
There. A man in a black trench coat with a beaded cap on his head was kneeling in prayer or meditation, his hands flat on his thighs as he rocked back and forth to the rhythm of his mantra at the base of an algae-slicked stone basin—a defunct fountain or neglected birdbath now brimming with muck and decaying leaves.
“Whatcha lookin’ at?”
Becca let out a short squeal and ducked away from the window like a cop taking cover. “Jesus, you scared the shit out of me,” she whispered fiercely. Rafael crept beside her and peered through the shattered window. “What do we have here? A loony rolled back to the bin?”
Becca elbowed him in the ribs.
The song or chant had a strange, alien beauty to it. She detected a profound longing in the lilting melody. The syllables themselves were fricative and harsh wherever they broke the long wavering vowels, but they were also vaguely familiar to her, a fact that in itself endowed the chant with benign associations—the smell of her grandmother’s chamomile tea, the bellowing foghorns of boats on the Miskatonic River—which emboldened her. She leaned out the window and trained her camera on the strange man, zooming the lens, which didn’t have quite enough focal length, to focus on his face. His features were broad and dark, marked by a constellation of tattooed symbols arching across his left temple. Checking the display to make sure she’d gotten the shot, she disentangled herself from the tree and headed down the hall toward the decrepit emergency exit stairs that led to the courtyard.
Rafael was quick at her heels. “What are you doing? You’re not gonna go talk to that guy.”
“Why not?” She turned to face him in the fractured light of the stairwell, the chant permeating the building through the broken slats and crumbling mortar. “You’ve been down these stairs?” she asked. “They’re not going to collapse on me?”
He seemed to want to delay answering just to keep her from going down, but he clearly wasn’t worried about the stairs. She weighed less than he did and could see in his eyes that he’d used them. She started down, hurrying to reach the courtyard before the singer departed. “Wait,” Rafael said, “Stairs won’t hold us both, but…you should stay away from that guy.”
“You know him?”
“Not specifically, but did you see his hat? His tattoos?”
“Yeah. Funky.”
“He’s a brinehead.”
“A what?”
“He’s from the Starry Wisdom Church. They’re like…inbred squid worshippers.”
“Little prejudiced are we?”
“Don’t be stupid, Becca. There are reasons why people avoid them, believe me.”
She turned the camera in her hand, reminding him of why she was on this venture. “I want to know what his story is, why he’s here. He has to have a story, don’t you think?”
Rafael started down the stairs. They creaked and groaned and actually swayed away from the black mold-speckled wall where the gray sky showed through. Becca hurried to the bottom and strode into the overgrown courtyard in the shadow of the asylum, with Rafael’s sneakers hitting the dirt behind her and the tattooed man looking up in alarm, his mantra slipping out of rotation like a dislodged bicycle chain.
“Hey,” Becca said.
The man rose and brushed the dust from his black clothes. He cast a forlorn glance at the stagnant water in the basin, and turned to go. Becca couldn’t resist snapping a couple of shots of the birdbath (a concrete basin on a pedestal inlaid with a mosaic of colored glass) and the robed figure drifting out of focus in the background. At the sound of the shutter, the man spun around, the long, bony finger of his right hand outstretched in an accusatory stab, a gold ring with an onyx stone catching the light.
“Give me the memory card,” he demanded.
“Like hell.”
“You took my picture without permission. It belongs to me.”
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head, cradled the camera to her solar plexus, and stepped backward into the shelter of the building, feeling like a fool.
The old man glanced at her companion and must have seen something there to give him pause—one of those mirages of posture and facial expression that the good-natured Raf could summon in an instant if he found himself on the wrong side of the street. The man dropped his hand to his side.
“Why are you spying on me? Why do you take my picture?”
“I’m sorry, I should have asked. It’s not spying. It’s art.”
The man scoffed.
“I’m Becca—”
“Jesus, Bec, don’t.” Rafael interjected.
“My grandfather lived here for a while,” she said. “What’s your name?”
His anger seemed to have abated, but he still paused before answering. “John Proctor. And your last name, young lady?”
“Philips.”
“I don’t know the name. Your grandfather was an inmate here?” he looked up at the clouds passing over the remaining windows as if he might see long-gone residents there, staring down at him.
“Peter Philips,” she said.
“I had family here as well, of a kind.”
“Did they die here?”
His eyes drifted down and locked on hers again. Not all of the fire was gone from them.
“That’s why you pray here,” she said. “I’m sorry. For intruding, I mean…and invading your privacy.”
He looked at the camera and Becca deflated. “Look, I can’t afford to give you the card, but I’ll delete the pictures if you want. You can watch me do it.” The offer pained her. She had a gut feeling they were good.
“Is it a video; with my voice, my prayers?”
“No, just pictures.”
John Proctor waved his hand, shuffled his feet, and turned away. Something rattled as his hand dipped into his pocket and she saw a trail of black beads on a string vanishing into his frock, a rosary of the same stone set in his gold ring. She felt an impulse and acted on it while his back was turned, slipped a finger under the chain around her neck, and flipped the scarab from under the little bit of fabric that had concealed it. “You don’t care about the pictures?” she called after him, “Just your voice?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The prayers are broken.”
It seemed such an odd thing to say. “How can a prayer be broken?”
He looked back, still walking away, and said, “It would mean nothing to you, but a man named Jeremy Levenda was once imprisoned here. Not my blood, but a brother nonetheless. He had the gift of tongues, a gift long ago rinsed from my race by bad breeding. One day he stood in this courtyard and summoned something glorious from the waters of this bath. And that was the last time the world has ever known such a thing. Still…I try. But as I said, the prayers are broken. And so am I.”
The sun emerged and traced a wedge of light across the weedy ground. Becca leaned into it, still wondering why the chant had sounded familiar, and
saw the reflection of the scarab heliographing across the man’s tattooed face. It had a transforming effect: his eyes dilated, he stumbled, his finger went up again. “Where did you get that?”
She touched the cold metal, and he flinched as if she’d drawn a weapon. This wasn’t the reaction she’d hoped for. She’d wanted his curiosity, not this fear written so plainly on his face. Any hope that he might tell her more about the scarab, help her understand what it meant to people, to her grandmother, was slipping away.
“Let him go,” Rafael said. She’d forgotten he was there.
When she turned back from a glance at Raf, John Proctor had fled through a gap in the collapsed bricks and beams, leaving only a rustle in the teeming weeds to testify that he had been there at all.
Becca went to the birdbath and stared at the slimy leaves through the rainwater.
“What was that about?” Rafael broke the silence. “Your grandfather was a patient here? How come you never told me?”
Becca didn’t reply. She tucked the scarab back under her shirt, and the sun tucked itself behind a cloud.
She approached one of the other doorless entrances to the hospital as if in a trance. It gave onto a common room, the bookshelves sagging and moldy, the other furnishings long since removed. Her boots, painted with Rafael’s silly characters, crunched on dislodged segments of tile grout, bringing small bones to mind. She could sense Rafael behind her, wanting to say something but knowing better.
For a moment she saw the room as it had been when she was eight years old. She had forgotten visiting her grandfather here, but now, looking at the courtyard from this angle, through the empty window frame, she could almost see him, scrawny and gaunt in his gown, barely aware of his granddaughter or wife; him staring at the bright light wavering on the water in the birdbath and shielding his eyes from the glare with a hand against his brow. It had looked like a salute offered to someone she couldn’t see, his hand not quite casual enough to merely be serving as a visor, his thumb pressing against the skin above and between his eyes, massaging the area where a crescent scab marked him. She remembered being afraid for him and thinking that he must have dug his thumbnail into that spot from repetition of the gesture.
It was all rushing back now, the ice cream Gran had bought her on the way home to cheer her up (black raspberry—a flavor she had unconsciously avoided since), and the vacant smile Grandpa had flashed her that made her wonder if he still knew her name. He had been semi-catatonic throughout the visit. No, that wasn’t entirely true. He had said one thing to Catherine as, with her hand on Becca’s shoulder, she turned to leave. The words had croaked out of him in a voice atrophied from infrequent use, through chapped lips stretched in an ironic and horrid grin.
“What I came here pretending to be…I am becoming.”
Catherine had almost pushed Becca to the car after that, and Becca had been relieved to go. Whoever that man had been, he wasn’t her grandfather anymore.
A scratching roused her from her reverie, and she turned to find Rafael down on one knee at the other side of the expansive room. He held a slim putty knife in one hand and was scraping dots of bright blue paint from the floor, as if it were still 2006 and he’d been hired for maintenance.
The wall behind him revealed his latest work, and her breath hitched in her chest as she took it in: a series of torrential waterfalls appeared to pour from ragged holes in the sheetrock while kaleidoscopes of blue and yellow butterflies streamed toward the ceiling from gashes in the sagging wallpaper.
“When?” she asked.
He shrugged. “While you were at the funeral. You like it?”
Chapter 3
In his dusty black frock, Reverend John Proctor climbed aboard an aboveground trolley and rode the Green Line into the city amid college students and commuters, swaying with the rock and pitch of the car, and staring out the filmy window at the darkening skyline until the train plunged underground at Kenmore, leaving his tattooed reflection staring back at him.
There were two kinds of people on the subway: those who stared at him, and those who stared away from him. His people had lived in Boston for generations. Longer than the Muslims with their burkas or the Chasidics with their braids, and yet these other religionists had been grudgingly integrated into the tapestry of Boston’s rough blue-collar fabric over time. It was a white city, but its primary industry was education, making tolerance a natural byproduct that wafted like a benign emission from the towers of higher learning. And yet, for all that, the brethren of the Starry Wisdom Church were still mostly shunned, as if they’d never risen above the station of fishmongers trailing the stench of their trade.
Most of the laity in this day and age had left the docks behind and now worked in cleaner environs, in IT departments, supermarkets, and even medical centers. As a cleric, the reverend was supported by his congregation, his sole occupation the study of the mysteries. He experienced one such mystery as the train plunged belowground and sped along the subterranean tunnel beneath the brownstones and gothic hotels of the Back Bay: whenever he returned to the neighborhood he called home, a neighborhood built on marshland, something like a cold, blue current stirred in his blood.
He exited the train at Hynes Convention Center and took the stairs to street level, pushing through the doors and breaking out of the hot, stale air of the station.
The foot traffic flowed wide around him.
It had been a hot day, but with nightfall, a breeze had picked up. It flowed across the overpass, stirring his too-heavy frock coat, and bringing some relief from the oppressive air of the subway. Too many people. There were too many people in the city, crawling over every road, clogging every corridor, and there was no escape from them even in the ruins of the asylum. Perhaps the day of reckoning would come and change that. He tried to instill hope in his congregation that it would, but he harbored private doubts.
The scarab was another mystery. It troubled him. It couldn’t be what it looked like (there was no possible way, and yet the girl claimed an ancestor in the place) but seeing it in that courtyard on this day of all days…what could it mean?
There were radical elements in his flock who would have urged him to view such an omen as a herald of the hour come round at last, but they were young and hasty, and one couldn’t simply rouse the apocalypse like a sleeping snake, prod it with a stick at the first sign of synchronicity. He had long ago accepted that he was unlikely to see it in his lifetime. His duty was to preserve the traditions for the next generation and shelter them from persecution until their time came. That was why he hadn’t smashed the camera or accosted the girl about her jewelry. The last thing the church needed was for some curiosity seeker to report him to the police and have a holy site barricaded or demolished.
Hot air rustled his vestments and bus exhaust singed his nostrils.
He didn’t care for cameras in sacred places, but gazing across the Back Bay at moments like this, under falling night and rising moon, he wished there had been more of them around in the 1850’s when all of this had been underwater. He could imagine it, of course, but he’d only seen one photo of the tidal marshes, and that one did little to capture the majesty of the place. He would have liked to see it beset by storms, waves thrashing and lightning lashing, but in those early days of the camera photographers had been lucky if they could capture a clear image in the bleached light of noonday.
A punk in a studded and spray-painted leather vest bumped him as he turned onto Boylston Street and he almost muttered a curse—not a swear, but an actual curse—then thought better of it. He would need what energy he had left for the ceremony. It was, after all, the Feast Day of Saint Jeremy. He tapped his fingers against his coat pocket, felt the crystal phial of water from the sacred fount, and made his way up the slope to the stone tower hemmed in by skyscrapers, seeing it in his mind’s eye as the lighthouse it would be if ever it were the last building standing amid the roiling waters.
* * *
Darius Marlowe was
being swept into a fugue state in spite of himself. He stood among the congregation of the Starry Wisdom, in their robes of purple and black, and watched the pointed shadows of hoods leaping and retracting on the carved stone walls of the temple like dark gray flames as their bodies swayed to the rhythm of the chant. It was a good bit of theater, an effective piece of hypnosis: the air heavy with the swirling strata of incense, the flickering flames, and the deep droning music of the chant rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, echoing in the vaulted peak of the chamber above and stirring the water in the stone basin on the altar below. Brine from Revere Beach, to which had been added a phial of blessed rainwater from the bath of Saint Jeremy. One ingredient remained to kindle consciousness in that water, and though Darius knew he should be slipping covertly away from the throng while their eyes were closed and their ears were immersed in the music, he couldn’t resist waiting and watching for the moment when Samira would make her contribution.
It was a small thing, given willingly, but it thrilled him to witness it each time.
And there she was, stepping forward, guided by the gentle hand of the Reverend Proctor like a vassal helping a princess to step onto the running board of an opulent carriage on her way to a wedding. She stepped onto the stone dais, her simple white tunic blazing and reflecting the candlelight which the other robes absorbed, her skin flushed, black hair shining with perspiration. She held her hand above the basin, index finger extended, and though Darius couldn’t see it through the throng, he could almost hear the hinges of the slender instrument case creaking open as the reverend lifted the lid on purple velvet and glowing steel. Darius had assisted at the altar often enough in the days when he’d been in the reverend’s favor to know every beat in the rhythm of the rite.
Red Equinox Page 3
