Red Equinox

by Douglas Wynne

  She was sure it was an agent, so when her abductor whispered into her ear, it came as a shock to hear the voice of Darius Marlowe.

  “It’s okay, Samira, it’s me. They’ve arrested Proctor. You’re not going to scream if I take my hand away are you?”

  She ticked her head to the side and back, a sharp, assertive no. The gloved hand loosened its grip and came away from her face, taking its sweaty, chemical smell with it. She quickened her breath, widened her eyes, and turned to face him.

  She’d never seen him unshaven to this extent before; he looked feral, yet simultaneously smug, grinning at her with…was it an air of pride? She let her eyes dart from side to side in a facsimile of panic, glancing across his hands and the pockets of his black jeans as well as the shadow of the last step below them in what appeared to be the rear entrance of a vacated apartment. No visible weapons.

  “Darius. Are you crazy? What are you doing here? I saw you on the news. They’ll catch you. Your face is everywhere.”

  He nodded, but said nothing.

  “Was it you…at Harvard?”

  “I started it. I opened the way for them.”

  “The Great Old Ones.” She whispered it.

  He nodded again, then craned his neck and looked skyward. The helicopter was getting louder, and he waited for it to buzz across a white patch of sky between the buildings before continuing. “I couldn’t let them take you in, Samira. Proctor they can have. He isn’t committed to the apocalypse. You’ll see that now. Others, too. They say they want it, but they’re too comfortable with the status quo. If we’d been more oppressed it might have been better. There would have been some unity, some conviction….”

  “Why you, Darius?”

  He flinched, and his eyes darted from the sky to her face, scrutinizing her, wounded by the question. “What do you mean, why me?”

  “I mean how? How did you do what could never be done before? Who helped you?”

  He smiled, and she wondered how long it had been since he’d last brushed his teeth. “Not out here,” he said, and nodded across the alley to the neglected back of another brick apartment building, where a small, rusted barbecue grill stood among the weeds. “Come on, I’ve set up a safe house. The others are waiting.”

  Their faces were close in the cramped stairwell, his breath and the humidity of dank concrete mingling in a stale miasma. She ignored it and put her hand on his chest, not to push him away but to connect with him, to fix his shifty, darting eyes on hers. Leaning in closer, she spoke softly, forcing him to tune his ears to her small voice and away from the urban background noises, any number of which might represent an encroaching threat. “You’ve done it, Darius. You’ve unseated the reverend and asserted your power. You can take his place when this blows over and everyone will follow you. I’ll follow you and serve you….” She squeezed his breast through his clothes and watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “But maybe what you’ve already done is enough for now,” she said. “If you go too far, overreach….”

  His eyes narrowed, hardened.

  She leaned into his curls and whispered, “There’s so much we haven’t done yet, Darius. This is all happening so fast, and I’m afraid for you. Maybe we should let sleeping gods lie for now. You can’t lead the church from prison.”

  He gripped her bicep, pulled her to her feet and up the stairs. He shot a look at her, and she thought he looked like a man on fire: radiant and dangerous, the muscles of his face roiling with myriad emotions, too many for anyone to take full form—wrath, vengeance, exhilaration. She let him guide her across the alley to the fire escape, where he bent and laced his fingers to give her a leg up. She hesitated, and, looking up at her, he said, “You’ll see. This whole city will be my church. You’ll see.”

  She scanned the backs of the buildings, the gray clouds reflected in blank windows, then stepped into his hands and reached for the bars above her head.

  When she stood on the first level, he jumped, grabbed hold of the creaking, swaying structure, climbed past her and took the lead, confident that she would follow. At the third story they came to a cracked window, through which she saw a dingy white curtain. Darius tapped the glass once, paused, then tapped three more times. The curtain rustled against the glass and one tap came back in answer. Darius hiked the window up and pulled the curtain aside for her.

  Samira poked her head in to survey the room before climbing leg first through the window. It was a vacant apartment, apparently undergoing renovations between tenants. White splotches of spackle marked the walls, and masking tape ran along the door and window frames where someone had started cutting in a new paint job, but the tape was peeling and yellowed, as if the painter had been called away, never to return. Seven members of the congregation had assembled here, and she recognized every face. Five men and two women—most, but not all of them, young. Some sat in folding metal chairs, or on what odd bits of renovation equipment lay about: a stepladder, an overturned bucket. Others leaned against the walls.

  They were a grim bunch, their faces anxious and weary. Most probably hadn’t slept in days. They nodded at her and a couple murmured her name upon entrance, but none came forward to greet her. Only Kristina Meawad visibly brightened when they made eye contact, and Samira was surprised to see her. The girl had never seemed like the radical type; her brother Stefan had probably put her up to it. A police scanner sat on the paint-speckled floorboards, plugged into an uncovered outlet. It hummed and crackled but transmitted no voices.

  Another device sat beside the scanner, unplugged. It looked like a conventional radio, a boom box with some exposed circuitry where a plastic panel had been cut away, and looking at it she felt her heart drop into her stomach. She stepped to the side of the room as if casually joining the group and awaiting instruction from Darius, but she chose an angle that afforded an escape route through what appeared to be a kitchen, judging by the linoleum floor and white countertop. A few groceries were scattered amid paper plates and plastic utensils, and she thought she could smell spicy take-out hanging in the stale air, emanating more from the pores of these sweaty, paranoid men and women than from any containers that might be festering in the trash.

  “Is this everyone?” she asked Darius.

  He nodded. “You’re the last.”

  She knew everyone in the room, and that begged the question she’d tried to ask him in the alley: Who was helping him? Or was he the leader of his own cell?

  She turned around to face him. “Your mentor. Is he here?”

  Darius grazed his thumb across her cheekbone and, with condescending reassurance, said, “Don’t worry. There will be no more secrets. I’ll explain everything.”

  And with that he moved to the center of the room, cleared his throat, and issued his manifesto to all who would hear it.

  “Now that we are all gathered, I would have you hear the good news that comes down to us from The Messenger, through me, his right hand and, until recently, his voice in the world.” Darius paused for dramatic effect to let them absorb this pretentious introduction. They shuffled and squirmed, sensing that he would soon be demanding sacrifices of them and wanting to have out with it, to hear the price before the pitch. He met their eyes, each in turn, and to a man they cast their eyes downward like subservient dogs. Even Cyril. This was not the Darius Marlowe they had known before.

  Satisfied that he had their full attention, he continued. “We here were born at the right time. We stand on the precipice of a new world. It has been ages since the Great Old Ones walked among men, breathed the same air.

  “Long have they slept, and the keys that would synchronize the orbit of their world with ours had been lost. Lost to the degradation of our species from the ur-race that once spoke their true names, vibrating the sands of Sumer and Acadia, Phoenicia and Kemet. They sometimes stirred, and they have always been among us, but we lost the ability to see, hear, and touch them, and they us. The interface of our race to theirs was lost to the amnesia of our mind
s and the dumbness of our tongues. But I have restored the ancient speech, and wiped the glass clean so that we may know them again, and they us! They walk among us even now, and our Reverend is blind to their presence!

  “Not through his tutelage have I come by this knowledge, rather it has come to me by initiation at the hand of the Black Pharaoh himself, Nyarlathotep!”

  A harmony of indrawn breath swept the room, and the bodies seemed to sway like the reeds of the Nile at the passing of a great beast, a black crocodile, a python, or a jackal.

  “The stars are right. The worlds align to make a window, a door, a portal. And only just in time.”

  Darius’s voice dropped into a delicate, somber tone. “Because man unchecked, left to his own devices, ruled by his greed and arrogance and amnesia, will destroy this majestic planet and all of its inhabitants. You know this. We have lamented it, but until now we have been powerless.”

  Heads nodded, bodies swayed. They were falling under the hypnotic rhythms of his rhetoric.

  “Man has no regard for the life forms he can see because they lack his intellect. As if intelligence were a requirement to earn his compassion. As if a child of low mental capacity were worth less than one of average intelligence. Less worthy of existence without suffering. Man has climbed to the apex of the earth, and gazing from his silver spire has deemed all other creatures inferior and therefore unworthy of mercy. And so he poisons them, slaughters them, enslaves, or devours them. Always forgetting that he may yet meet his superior in the cosmos. And what mercy might he expect then?

  “He justifies this brutality with the myth of the Garden, his fairy story of dominion over the beasts and birds, the creatures of air, land, and sea. But there is an older myth that is no myth. And the gods who once trod upon the ocean floor with their heads in the heavens care for mankind as little as he cares for the ants beneath his boot.

  “His lust, his addiction to power, to a wealth of tawdry baubles and neon amusements vomited from the putrid maw of his feeble dreams. His conveniences, which sicken the Great Mother Hydra. His gadgets and trinkets, his plunder and pollution, his overpopulation of a globe strained to the breaking point with more and more bipedal parasites craving the same flat, materialistic pleasures, the same empty status symbols, devoid of depth and vision and spiritual awe at the titanic grandeur of the cosmos. He is a pestilence to be washed away by a cleansing tide. And I am the warden of the flood.”

  Darius let the statement hang in the air. He surveyed them, and Samira followed his gaze around the room. He had their rapt attention. The contrast between the socially awkward Darius Marlowe they had known before and this commanding and eloquent presence had confirmed for them his claim to divine inspiration. He was channeling something far greater than himself, and for this, she also saw the fear in their faces. No one had the courage to speak up and ask what he had done in the tunnel. No one dared ask what he planned to do next, or what he expected of his compatriots. Was there a spark of doubt among them? Samara wondered if she could blow on it just right to kindle it without putting it out.

  “People are telling reporters they saw things they can’t even describe,” she said. “Something in the sky. Have any of you seen it?”

  They looked at her like she had intruded on a dream. Slowly, eyes were downcast, body weights shifted, as if they were ashamed to admit that, no, they had seen nothing in the sky.

  Cyril said, “I heard a guy on the radio saying that he watched a monster crawling down the street in Back Bay. But the broadcast cut out as soon as he started to describe it. I think they’re cracking down on witnesses, trying to cover it up for as long as they can.”

  “So why can the infidels see what we can’t?” Samira asked the group.

  “To see the gods…,” Darius said. “If you can see them, they can see you.”

  “And?”

  “If they can see you, they can touch you.”

  “Have you seen them, Darius?”

  His gaze seemed to turn inward as if examining some powerful memory. A feeling of electricity charged the stale air. At last he said, “I have seen their works. My invention gave voice to the old keys. I awakened the Lord of Chaos and brought him through, but I took precautions and denied myself the sight.”

  “Precautions?” Samira asked. “What were you afraid of?”

  For the first time today he turned a withering gaze on her, and she felt the room scrutinizing her in the spotlight of his contempt. Was she pushing too hard?

  “I believe they will recognize us as their sworn servants and spare us,” Darius said.

  Cyril asked, “You believe…but you don’t know? He didn’t tell you?”

  “In the tunnel, it was the first time, and it wasn’t a suicide mission. I still have work to do. Gathering you is part of that.”

  Kristin spoke up, her voice thin and cracking. “What does the pharaoh say about a place for us in the new world?”

  “My Lord has not told me everything, and my studies are ongoing. This is why I’ve been careful.” His gaze pierced Samira again as he said, “All of this would have been easier if I’d been trusted by the church leadership, if I’d been given access to the archives. I would have more answers for you now. But I’m afraid the true brethren is only forming here and now in this room, piecing together what facts we can. Maybe it was meant to be this way. At least it keeps them from rounding us up like the figureheads down the street. I won’t lie to you and tell you I know everything. But if you trust my link to the pharaoh, as I have trusted him, then I believe you will be in the right place at the right time to shepherd in the new aeon, to form a new race, to inherit the Earth.”

  Several questions overlapped now:

  “How will they know us?”

  “When can we meet him?”

  “What do they see in the sky?”

  Darius answered the last and loudest. “The Lord of Chaos, Azothoth, hangs over the city now like a black sun with many tendrils. His emanations are spreading like a web of night and reaching into any suitable portal, any reflective surface, to draw forth the pantheon. Azothoth has laid his blessing upon Nyarlathotep and restored the messenger’s voice so that he can assist in opening those gates.” He pointed at the boom box. “And with this, we can help.”

  “How?” Cyril stepped forward and Samira thought he looked like a man heeding a call to action. Until today she would have said that he possessed the charisma Darius lacked, but no more. And if Cyril were following Darius, the others would fall in lock step.

  “We will call forth the Goat with a Thousand Young and ride her offspring to the other side.” He swept his eyes over their awed faces. “It will be our initiation and empowerment. Afterward, we will move between the worlds freely to do the master’s bidding.”

  The room seemed to lose oxygen as they all sucked it in. Sensing that her devotion had been judged thin, Samira spoke up now with ardor in her voice, “To be a midwife of Shub Niggurath…I would kill for the honor.”

  Darius smiled. “Good,” he said, “You may have to. Your cloaks and lamens are in the backpacks in the hall. Daggers, too, if we need them, and a few guns. We go on foot and don the robes at the site.”

  “What is the site?” Samira prodded gently. The others were already flowing around her into the hall, willing to follow their Pied Piper wherever he led them and find out if it was crawling with SWAT, BPD, and DHS snipers when they arrived, but their heads turned back toward Darius when she raised the question. Again he reveled in the suspense, the attention he had never garnered before today.

  “The biggest mirror in Boston.”

  They set about strapping on the backpacks Darius had prepared. He pointed out one with a gun in it for Cyril, and one with a smaller robe for Kristin. Samira stepped up beside her and asked, “Bathroom?”

  Kristin gestured to a door on the left at the end of the hall.

  Samira ducked in and dropped the hook on the doorframe into the eyehole. She fished her phone out of her pocket an
d texted SPECTRA while running the sink.

  Watching the spinning icon and the low bars and waiting for the message to send seemed to take an eternity. She slid the phone back into her pocket, flushed the toilet, and opened the door, startled to see Darius’s face. He stood in the doorframe, blocking her way, and turned his palm up. For a heart-stopping second she was sure he was demanding that she hand over the phone, and her reeling mind simply couldn’t process the word he’d spoken until he repeated it: “Keys. I need your church keys.”

  “Why? You can’t go in there without getting arrested. Those agents will be picking through the place for hours if not days.”

  “I don’t know if you and I will be separated in the crossing, but once I can pass freely between this side and that, I plan to emanate in the church to retrieve a few things from the hidden crucible. You know they won’t find that unless they torture it out of Proctor.”

  “How do you even know about it?”

  Darius laughed bitterly. “He never trusted me. Never initiated me into his inner circle, but my master knows all.”

  “So you know about—”

  “The rods and the map to where the box is buried? Yes. And if those agents are still searching the church at midnight, I’ll be in and gone before they hear the flagstone fall.” He wagged his fingers. “Keys. Please.”

  Chapter 15

  The helicopter was already soaring east over the sunken Aquarium, approaching Government Center when the text came in. Brooks had mounted his phone with a strip of adhesive Velcro onto the console in front of him. He carried swatches of the stuff in his kit and in recent years had attached the battered device to more dashboards than he could count, knowing that the bone-rattling vibration of a Humvee or helicopter would invariably override the vibration of a phone in his pocket but a lit screen would get his attention.

  The text wasn’t specifically for him. It was going out to several units within range and called for armed agents and armored teams to move in. He could ignore it and return to the station, but that would mean having to account for losing the photographer sooner. Not a prospect he was eager for. It also meant sitting in a debriefing room when he could be in the heat of field action. The pilot’s sunglasses kept swiveling toward him and back again, waiting for a prompt. Soon the question would come and he’d have to decide.