Red Equinox

by Douglas Wynne

  Darius strained his neck and counted the number of passengers wearing ear buds. There was a woman in a pantsuit with a Bluetooth headset, but those didn’t count. Aside from the Asian guy, he saw only one other person listening to music—a brunette who looked like a college student with an iPod.

  “You’re cutting in and out,” the lady on the phone said, sounding annoyed, “We’re in the tunnel…I’ll call you back when we get above.”

  Darius put his own headphones on now, an over-ear set with noise cancellation that immediately replaced the ambient noise with a white hiss. He could hear the bass drone of the train itself, but only dimly. He longed to hear the black speech when it emerged, but couldn’t risk it. Witnessing its effects would have to be enough. He reached into the inside breast pocket of his suede jacket and pressed play on his iPod, filling his ears with the Saturn Movement from Holst’s The Planets. He took his shades off, folded them, and tucked them into the same pocket. That was when he noticed the red-haired guy who looked like a cop, sitting across and a few yards down, staring at him.

  Maybe he was a cop. Or maybe just some suspicious-looking Irish fuck from Southie. Well, what did it matter? No earbuds, so fuck him. Darius looked down at the boom box in his lap, tilted it up toward his face, and took one last peek at the pink organ through the black grill. Then he set it on the floor and tapped a button on top.

  * * *

  Jason Brooks had seen some weird shit demonstrated in the labs at Harvard and MIT in the two years since his security clearance came through with the Special Physics Emergent Counter Terror Recon Agency, but he had never yet witnessed anything like what happened when the kid on the Red Line pressed PLAY.

  It began as a sound: a droning guttural chant, like a sutra swirling around in the vaulted heights of a Tibetan temple, far away, as if he were only hearing the reverberations as they ricocheted around stone pillars and filtered through draperies of many-layered silk. It was a sound of myriad voices that were somehow joined like an alloy of molten metals into a single androgynous voice—young and old, male and female, bestial and human, and something more than the sum of these parts, something shimmering with alien harmonics, pulsing with prehistoric sub-sonic sludge.

  The two passengers sitting directly opposite the boom box looked up first, the black lady’s eyes startled away from the phone in her hand, and the heavy white guy in the sport coat and cap beside her letting his paperback drift closed without marking his page as his hand dropped to his abdomen. It looked to Jason like the sound was making him queasy, maybe even giving him a cramp deep in his bowels.

  That sound. It was a malicious, sinuous thing, writhing and whipping the tight air in the train with hostile acoustics at the fringes of human hearing. He thought that if a service dog were in the car it would be rolling on the floor, shrieking in pain.

  The sound swelled and more passengers noticed it—he could tell by the discomfort dawning on their faces—but most of them didn’t seem to know where it was coming from; they weren’t looking at the boom box on the floor like he had been when it started.

  The device was set beside a mirror-polished metal plate at the end of the row, and as Brooks watched with escalating anxiety, the air in front of the plate wavered, an effect that at first resembled a heat haze on baked pavement, but only for a second before it morphed into a more profound distortion: the boom box, its owner, and the air itself warped into a vortex of liquid chrome. It almost looked like a great magnifying lens had emerged from the reflection of the speaker grill, stretching reality itself. At the center of the vortex the silvered air seemed to pucker and tremble, and the words that formed in Jason’s mind to explain what he was seeing made no sense.

  Invisible obscenity, he thought. And at that moment the chrome cyclone gave birth.

  What emerged might have been sound waves taking on substance, or maybe a gossamer web-work of malignant green light. Maybe it was some other form of matter, something spectral and immeasurable. Nothing in his training had prepared him to recognize it, so his mind classified it with another paradox: dark light.

  Whatever it was, it spun and twisted in the air like ribbons of ink in water. It shook tresses of tendrils as the passengers turned toward its terrible gravity, too stunned to scream, too riveted to the sight to know if it was beautiful or abominable. The crowd was united on the threshold of uncertainty for a shining moment, enraptured at the sight; the impossible sight of iridescent jellyfish rising like balloons toward the ceiling of the car, and rolling tongues of violet fire unspooling, detaching from the nexus, and spinning in eddies like nuclear dust devils. One of these rotated between the two passengers across from the boom box guy, and the collective trance suddenly broke as the little whirlwind shredded man and woman, fabric and flesh, their forms torn asunder at the cellular level, whipped into a storm of blood and bone fragments and splashed around the car. The overhead lights dimmed, painted with the frothy scarlet sludge. Fractions of a second and they were gone, mice dropped in a blender.

  And with that, the screaming began.

  Jason had torn his eyes from the lightshow to scan the crowd for an accomplice to the man with the headphones and sunglasses. He didn’t see anyone obvious, but he noted that an Asian guy lost in a Kindle and listening to something on earbuds didn’t even notice what was going on until the screaming and shoving started.

  Tentacles of dark fractal light uncoiled and whipped out in all directions, plunging through chests, and bellies, spooling around throats. Screams choked off. Jason watched in awe as the only standing passenger at the rear end of the car—the attractive lady with the ugly voice whose phone call had been interrupted by the tunnel—was dragged by the throat, choking and flailing, toward the rolling eye of the cyclone from which all other horrors emanated.

  Somehow Brooks ended up on the floor, taking cover beneath the bench seats. He caught himself scuttling backward on his elbows and splayed knees like a small animal retreating from a predator. Sweat poured down his neck.

  Had someone released an aerosol hallucinogen? It was the only thing that made sense. And if they had, what the hell was really killing that lady who was being eaten alive by a giant squid emerging from a subwoofer?

  Bodies hit the rubber floor beside him. He tried not to look at the small one in the pink Red Sox jersey, tried not to see it being dragged by bloody blonde hair toward the ring of teeth, mammoth shards of fractured light shearing flesh from bone.

  A polished black Oxford stepped on the splayed fingers of his left hand as someone found the wits to retreat to the other end of the car. Something made of plastic and glass hit the floor and cracked, then slid away on a glaze of blood.

  Jason tugged his Sig Sauer P220 from the small of his back, trained it on the center of the maelstrom, and stared in horror at his trembling interlocked hands, the pain from the still crooked fingers of his left barely reaching his brain through the adrenaline and fear.

  He sucked in a breath of fetid air, held it, steadied his hands as best he could, and fired three shots into whatever the fuck it was. If they hit bodies maybe they would end misery, if they hit the speaker that had conjured the horror, and woven a nightmare out of thin air, maybe that would end it.

  And if the bullets merely passed through to some other dimension, then maybe he would be the next one chewed up here and shat out there.

  * * *

  With the headphones on, Darius couldn’t hear the incantation issuing from the larynx at his feet. It was a cruel consequence of his role as midwife of the gods that he himself could never hear the old tongue, the speech that humanity had lost its capacity for eons ago, now reawakened from crumbling pages and given life with restored anatomy. He yearned to hear it, and to experience what hearing it revealed, but he also wanted to live and continue to serve. And since he couldn’t see Azothoth and live, he would have to be content with seeing the effects of the Great One’s presence.

  He witnessed them now as the train rolled through the dark tunnel towa
rd Harvard with the march of “Mars, the Bringer of War” reaching its first crescendo in his ears, the confusion and mortal dread spreading from face to face on those around him. He could feel the bass vibrations in his shoes, the treble harmonics vibrating the hairs on his head. To hear the unfiltered sound was to experience a shift of not only perception but also dimension, and to occupy the same space as the only tangible gods earth had ever known. The knowledge that these people around him had been blessed with such a sight gave Darius a crackling surge of exhilaration across the flesh of his neck and arms, and he nearly gave in to the impulse to rip the headphones off and accept death for a glimpse.

  Darius could almost hear the screams through the noise filter, the pounding of the drums, the stabbing of the brass. Swiveling his head and smiling like an amused child, he saw one, two, three people impaled by invisible anatomy. A woman who had been standing and holding a rubber strap a moment ago was now being dragged across the blood-slicked floor toward him, clutching her throat. Darius stared at her in wonder and watched as her body hitched, convulsed, and disappeared as if down the gullet of a great white shark one bite at a time.

  The chaos was in full swing now. It was hard to take it all in. Some people had awakened from the initial shock enough to try climbing over each other, away from Darius and the forces he had unleashed. He searched the car for the one who looked like a cop but couldn’t find him in the mayhem.

  Three pops. Loud enough to cut through the music and the noise cancellation. Loud enough to compress the air around his head. Gunshots. The boom box sprayed fragments of plastic, tissue, and silicone, and slewed to the side, hitting his foot. Darius grabbed the pole beside him and pulled, rising from his seat and swinging around toward the doors. The cop—lying under the bench opposite—was drawing a bead on him.

  Another deafening pop and Darius felt a burning slug punch into his left thigh. He left the damaged device without looking back and tugged the headphones down around his neck, knowing that the gun had shattered the spell, and needing all of his senses now that the cop had identified him as the maestro of the massacre.

  The train shuddered to the sound of screaming brakes. Everyone lurched toward the front. Darius wanted to be first out of the car, but a young woman was already pulling on the red T bar with both hands, forcing the doors open. He threw his weight at her, knocking her through the doors as they opened, and falling into the dark tunnel on top of her.

  He found his footing in the blackened gravel that lined the tunnel floor and limped toward the front of the train. The wound in his thigh blazed. There was no way to avoid passing through the glare of the headlights, so he put his faith in speed over stealth. He knew the driver would radio the MBTA police and tell them that a man on foot was headed for Harvard station, but maybe he could reach the platform before they did. It was close. The train had stopped just short of the sharp turn in the tunnel where the Red trains always slowed and shrieked before rolling into the station. He prayed to Nyarlathotep with each rasping exhalation. He should have planned more, should have had an exit strategy. But he hadn’t counted on an undercover cop or whatever the guy with the 9 was. Darius spared a glance over his shoulder to see if he was being pursued. Not yet. A small crowd of blood-sprayed passengers was pouring out of the train and jamming the tunnel behind him, some of them puking, others shouting about the third rail, still others cursing or praying.

  He touched the bullet wound and his hand came away wet with blood. That was bad, but he could walk on it, and that meant the bullet had only hit muscle, not bone. Even if it didn’t slow him down much while the adrenaline carried him, it was a major problem to be limping and trailing blood. He might climb onto the end of the outbound platform without being noticed, but he’d be dripping on the wide yellow line and all the way down the ramp.

  He wiped his hand on his jeans.

  The lights of the station came into view, the curve of red tile on the left. When he reached the platform he scanned the small crowd, looking for MBTA uniforms or neon-striped vests. Nothing. No Boston police either. He heaved his weight up onto the platform, not giving the small crowd a second look, only wanting to make the sharp hook around the wall and run for the exits.

  The first shout came from the tunnel behind him.

  “Hey! Hold it!”

  Darius knew it was the redheaded cop who’d stopped the show. But was he going to shoot toward a platform of innocents? Darius didn’t think so. He crawled across the yellow line, the raised traction bubbles rubbing against his chest, putting uncomfortable pressure on his sternum while he swung his legs up to get more of his weight behind the forward half of his torso.

  Son-of-a-bitch!

  The crazy cop had squeezed off a shot, maybe a warning aimed into the ground because Darius didn’t feel so much as a stirring of the hot, cloying tunnel air in response, just heard the earsplitting noise.

  So did everyone else: he sensed bodies scattering, heard startled cries, and hoped there wasn’t a levelheaded hockey player among them.

  He was on his feet now and took the corner, his shoulder bumping against the tile with the first two steps. Then he was limp-running down the sloping concourse toward the main station, toward the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Charlie Card kiosks, and undoubtedly into view of a matrix of closed-circuit cameras. To his right, the gap between the upper and lower platforms opened. In a flash he could imagine jumping through and falling onto the lower level, maybe making it onto an inbound train just as the doors closed, like in a movie. No. No good. He’d break both his legs. And soon they’d be tracking him, policing every station. He had to get to the street before that cop made it out of the tunnel and saw which exit he took.

  At the turnstiles, he focused straight ahead and put full weight on the wounded leg to blend in a little better, gritting his teeth against the pain. He slowed just long enough for the tinted plastic panel to slide aside, then broke right, knocking a teenage boy out of the way and cutting across the wide floor, his footsteps echoing high and far, as he made for the underground bus terminal.

  He heard the rapid report of the cop’s sneakers pounding on the ramp. The 66 Bus was idling in the tunnel, passengers milling around the door. The smell of diesel fumes filled his overtaxed lungs as he circled around the crowd.

  Daylight flared down the slope, so close, bolstering his confidence.

  He’d made the right choice. The ramp would get him to the street faster than either of the proper exits. The stairs would have been the end of him. Still, he was leaving a trail of blood and video.

  He patted his jacket and felt the comforting bulk of the ritual dagger. He was going to need it when he reached the street.

  * * *

  Brooks jumped the electric gate, slipped on a drop of blood the size of a half-dollar, and pelted down the ramp toward the bus terminal. The perp was already out of sight, but he’d gone this way. Brooks didn’t know what the train driver had called in after throwing the emergency brake, but he wasn’t going to make his own calls unless he failed to grab this fucker by the collar.

  In the bus tunnel, bodies milled around, beginning to board.

  Someone shouted. Brooks held his gun aloft and yelled as he ran, “Police! Police! Move!” He wasn’t police, but at least people got out of the way. It was the on-foot equivalent of a siren and flashers, and he sure as hell couldn’t yell “SPECTRA.” Covert agencies with stupid acronyms made shitty battle cries.

  He came up into the daylight, his pounding steps faltering as he crested the ramp at Mt. Auburn Street. Panting and spinning on his heels, scanning the buildings, the cars, the trees…nothing. No sign of the guy. “Shit!” He stamped the pavement, caught himself squeezing the butt of his pistol too hard and re-holstered it. He took his phone out and tapped a speed dial key.

  “It’s Brooks,” he said, catching his breath. “Terrorist on foot at Harvard Square. Last spotted leaving the bus tunnel. Get MBTA and police in full force to lock down the square. We have…I don’t know
how many dead on the Alewife train.”

  The agent on the other end of the call was firing off orders in the DHS Command Center and telling Brooks to stay on the line, but he was only dimly aware of the man’s voice as he let his phone hand drop from his ear (still ringing from the gunshots he’d fired in the subway car), his eyes drawn to the sky like ball bearings tugged by an industrial magnet.

  Something had shot past him in the tunnel while he’d been in pursuit. Something big. It had been moving too fast to focus on, spinning and radiating what might have been violet streams of plasma. It had blown past the station platform and kept going straight down the tunnel faster than any train and almost as big. He’d been too focused on the terrorist to get a good look at it (or maybe that was an excuse, maybe the last thing he wanted was a good look), but he remembered thinking that it might have been expanding in flight. And now, looking at the sky over Cambridge, he knew it had shot out of the tunnel somewhere farther down the line. It pulsed and wavered high in the sky above the descending sun, and all he could think was that someone had punched a black hole through the powder-blue atmosphere, a pitch-black void with a corona of undulating violet rays.

  He scanned the foot traffic around him: Harvard students, skater punks, and tourists. Not a single one was looking up in terrified awe. He put his palm out against the chest of the next oncoming body: a tall, thin, middle-aged guy with a goatee and glasses, wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt. Brooks wrapped a hand around the man’s shoulder and turned to stand beside him, pointing with his other hand at what he was already thinking of as the black-hole sun. The guy’s eyebrows scrunched, and he almost broke away, but then he seemed to decide to go with it long enough to find out what it was about. Maybe the cop vibe told him he wasn’t about to get pick-pocketed.