The chamber was furnished with a small desk and a solitary folding chair. The stone and mortar of the stairs gave way to a smooth cement floor covered in elaborate chalk diagrams: multi-rayed stars, sigils, and names rendered in a thorny, arcane alphabet. Becca put her hand out behind her into Rafael’s stomach and whispered, “Watch where you step.” The whisper felt right for the place, though she couldn’t have said why. It was a solitary, unoccupied room.
On the table lay a short stack of books and one large tome open to a page somewhere in the middle, a glass magnifier perched on the right-facing page. Beside the open book, a black silk cloth lay draped over a globe-shaped object the size of a child’s skull. All was lit by a frosted white orb in an iron cage anchored in a high corner, one of the only spaces not covered with sagging bookshelves.
Becca wondered how her grandparents had furnished the small cell, how they had fit everything in through the narrow stair. Her grandfather had been a handy sort of man, and she could picture him building the shelves and table in the same room where they would remain, but she had a feeling that the secret chamber predated her family’s residence at 19 Crane Street. Miskatonic was one of the only universities in America renowned for occult studies. So why did Gran need a secret room with a hidden entrance? What authority had she been hiding this aspect of her work from? The second floor study had seemed sinister enough. Was there some lore that was forbidden even at Miskatonic?
Becca tiptoed over the chalk lines like a superstitious child avoiding cracks in the sidewalk, heard Django whining from the mouth of the fireplace above, and was grateful that he hadn’t followed them down—his paws would smudge the protective circle. Clearly that was its purpose. But whether Gran had drawn it to keep things out or in she didn’t know.
There was so much she didn’t know as she settled into the creaking chair and looked over the open book. The text was handwritten in fine, ornate letters. She lowered her eye to the magnifier, but it did nothing to clarify the arcane script, which appeared to be in the same mode as the names traced on the floor. Gaining confidence, Becca flipped the left-facing pages and skimmed. The book was rife with abstract diagrams that blurred the boundaries between art, mathematics, and pornography. Triangles of stacked numbers, columns of those thorny letters, and cross sections of marine biological blasphemy.
The paper felt like living tissue between her moist fingers, and she let it fall back into place. She eyed the black-shrouded sphere and felt a chill course through her. She tried to remind herself that this room had lain beneath her bed for years, and that her dear, sweet Gran had been its mistress. But even a kindly grandfather’s wood shop can be a lethal chamber of blades to a child untrained in their proper handling.
“Damn,” Rafael whispered behind her. “Creepy shit.”
The faded spines of the stacked books drew her attention next, one in particular jumping out at her and causing her heart to beat wildly: Mortiferum Indicium. The book Maurice Ramirez had pointed her to with his dying words. She pulled it out of the stack, and another book clattered onto the desktop with it, a Moleskine journal, Catherine’s notebook of choice.
Becca set the Mortiferum atop the broad, open page of the book with the diagrams and took the journal in her trembling hands.
She slipped the elastic band off, opened it, and fanned the pages beneath her thumb, watching as dated entries flickered past, giving way to blank pages at about the three-quarter mark. One phrase lingered under her eye long enough to read when a page snagged on her thumb for a fraction of a second: have seen him in the depths of the glass, a slender man with no face, nearer each time I look.
When she reached the virgin pages at the back, Becca snapped the journal shut. She felt a surge of guilt that breaching the secret room had failed to arouse. Maybe it was the familiarity of the neat script, which had filled years of telephone notes and birthday cards. She was reminded of her own journals documenting dreams, nightmares, and the living nightmare of her recurring depression, and knew that she wasn’t ready to dive into the private diary of Catherine Philips.
It’s not a dead woman’s privacy you’re worried about; you’re afraid of her dark side. You know it’s deeper than your own. It drove Grandpa insane and made Mommy kill herself and Daddy run to the bottle and the needle.
Becca drew a shuddering breath and slid the journal away from her.
“You okay?” Rafael asked.
“Yeah. You want to go watch the street? I don’t know if we should stay much longer, but I found the book.”
“I feel it too. Someone will come looking for you here. Take it with you to read later. This place is weirding me out.”
She looked up at him and felt a weak, nervous smile forming on her dry lips. Lips that had kissed him what felt like a year ago, though it had only been minutes. “My fearless urban explorer is creeped out? After the abandoned asylums and tunnels, this is what finally does it for you? Chalk on the floor and musty books?”
He tried to smile back, but it went sour.
She squeezed his hand. “Yeah, me too,” she said. But he was staring at the bulging black silk, spilled across the desk like a puddle of India ink. “It’s that,” he said, “I don’t like it.”
“Don’t touch it.”
He nodded and stepped away, retreating to the stairs but not climbing them. He sat on a tread. Django whined again and took a few tentative steps down. Rafael scratched the dog’s lowered head.
Becca opened the white leather cover of Mortiferum Indicium, turned a blue-and-gold marbled endpaper, and came to the title page where she found the credit:
Translated from the Latin by Dr. Catherine Philips
She flipped the pages and took in a few lines:
The tongues of old are lost now to the corruption of the species. Even in the Black Pharaoh, the Vox Dei has been silenced in retribution for his sins against the Elder race. And so he bides his time, that usurper who came forth from the desert clothed in the robes of priestcraft. He who gave ill council to the heretic king Akhenaten and wrought calamity upon his kingdom, who unleashed a plague upon the royal family to seize the throne.
Why was this book so important? She didn’t have time to read it whole, and doubted her ability to make sense of it. Why had Maurice been so sure that she could gain something vital from these pages? She considered taking it with her back to Boston. It might fit in her bag. But she couldn’t bring herself to pick it up. It seemed somehow safer for it to remain here, hidden from those who might have already sought its secrets and failed to find it. As long as the room remained hidden….
“Raf, can you close the back wall of the fireplace without locking us in?”
“Lemme see.”
She heard him shuffling up the stairs, and Django skittering around in agitation, worried that their pack might be dividing. Rafael soothed him, and said, “Go see Becca, go to Becca.”
She closed the tome and opened the journal again, deciding that a further invasion of Catherine’s privacy was her only hope of narrowing the focus of her investigation. A note about what she had been working on at the time of her death, a reference to certain page numbers or passages in the Mortiferum might at least give Becca a point of entry into the book.
The contents of the journal both soothed and unsettled her, a sweet-and-sour feeling oscillating in her nerves. The handwriting was a balm for her grief, but the sense of the notes, scrawled urgently with jagged haste, made her stomach quiver as she read.
For the first time in my career I am crossing the line and dealing with a black-market trader. The path that led me to this man, an Iraqi refugee I will call Mr. K, has been fraught with peril. I wish I could deceive myself that my intentions were pure and that I planned to donate the artifact to the university once I obtain it, but to tell my colleagues of the acquisition would be to sacrifice my tenure, my retirement, and my reputation. Even at Miskatonic there are taboos. It wasn’t always so, but certain lines of inquiry have left stains upon the university t
hat no endowment of funds, no prestigious awards, and no revisionist history can remove. To study such things in the abstract, while frowned upon, has never been cause for expulsion; but if it were known that I have passed into the realm of practical experimentation, I would be blacklisted. And yet, how am I to test my theories if not by empirical trial?
The theories of any science are not intrinsically good or evil. It is only through application that we may judge the morality of such forces as electricity and atomic energy. So it is for the powers of the spirit.
But a folklorist is not expected to experiment with the theories of the primitives she studies. How is it any different, I ask, from the modern mathematician or physicist applying the formulae of Pythagoras?
Sadly, I am between a rock and a hard place. To the world outside of academia, I would be a laughing stock, a delusional new-age charlatan, were I to publish my theories of a dimension parallel to our own inhabited by sublime forces, ancient and intelligent. And yet, among those who know enough of the occult history of our planet to connect the dots as I have, my desire to plumb the depths and put my theories to the test is anathema. To them I am worse than a witch. But can I blame them? I fear the price of the knowledge I seek, but I fear that ignorance of our unseen neighbors will one day cost us more.
Becca thumbed the journal open to a later entry:
…seen inside the stone. He has waited these long aeons for some reckless fool to stir him from the slumber of his exile, and now I have. God help me—if only I could believe a benign and merciful lord ruled the universe. I should never have acquired the black mirror. I should never have chanted it open. Some keys are best lost to history.
The entries became harder to read as the journal progressed, the hand and mind of the writer growing visibly more distressed. Becca could imagine those old hands: every gold ring, every blue vein in the liver-spotted, translucent skin. Another line drew her eye, glimpsed at random as she perused the final entries before the blank pages:
I finally understand Oppenheimer, now that it’s too late to learn from his warning. I should have remembered him before it came to this, but I rue the hubris that seduced me, that led me like a lamb to slaughter by the tether of my damned curiosity. When he beheld the fire in the heart of that first mushroom cloud, he thought of Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita, revealing his wrathful form to Arjuna. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” And now I am become death. Forgive me, Peter. If you can see me now, I beg you forgive me.
The image of her grandfather standing vacant and wraithlike in the asylum common room, staring at the courtyard flashed on Becca’s mind.
What I came here pretending to be, I am becoming.
She could sense Rafael and Django pacing the floor behind her now. She knew she would take the journal with her, but she needed to see Catherine’s last entry, to know her last thoughts, before closing the cover and leaving.
The final page was scant on narrative and long on equations, consisting mostly of an example of an art her grandmother had once explained to her in brief when Becca had asked her about the scraps of paper that littered all the surfaces of the house.
It’s called Gematria, dear. In some languages every letter has a number value, and scholars like your grandmother like to amuse ourselves by puzzling out the value of a word.
Becca had only dimly grasped this at the time, but it had made her think of her mild-mannered Gran as a kind of secret agent with a decoder ring. The image had made her smile, and had stayed with her.
If you know the number of a word, and you find another word that has the same value, then you can meditate on the relation between them.
The oddness of the idea had also stayed with Becca. That different words could have an invisible affinity or resonance with each other based on a number they contained. Math wrapped in language like jewels hidden in fruit.
At the top of the last page, Becca found Catherine’s final note:
הַמָּאוֹר הַגָּדֹל = 294
Genesis 1:16, The Greater Light.
Solomon, the architect employed by the Brotherhood of Solomon, built a stair to the sun with as many steps, at the hub of the wheel.
But where did you hide the Fire of Cairo, Peter? After you banished the beast their dread St. Jeremy called up, where did you hide it?
Something moved on the desk at Becca’s elbow, and she startled. It was the black silk shroud sliding sideways. She grabbed at it but too late. Django had the end of it in his teeth, was pulling on it, growling. Becca, her mouth agape in helpless horror watched the cloth fall from the edge of the desk, exposing the object it had concealed. Django dropped the silk and erupted into a battery of barking. He sounded bigger than he was, bigger and wilder, a guardian bracing to make a stand, and Becca was staring into a perfect circle of polished black glass, tilted up at her like a mirror on a vanity.
A faceless man in a red robe with blue fire in his hair stared back at her, and she didn’t know how a man with no eyes could stare and scrutinize, but she knew in the depths of her bowels that he did; he saw through every layer of her skin, through every cell like an x-ray, and his omniscient gaze somehow narrowed to a focus that she could feel by its coldness on the white-gold beetle that hung between her breasts.
The legs of the metal insect twitched, the wings fluttered, the pinchers clicked, and she watched the man in the mirror turn to another portal, another circle, a window to another place, and the shape of his jaw wavered as he spoke to someone there.
Soon, he would turn to face her again, and what would happen then? Would she go insane? Would she get up from this chair, this desk, this cellar vault with a single imperative screaming in her veins—to spill out her own blood by whatever means presented itself? She thought she just might.
Suddenly she knew that the battle of wills this faceless one had fought with Catherine Philips had been a protracted campaign; but with herself, in whom that strength of mind was diluted, it would be brief.
And now the dark face was turning to look at her again, but she couldn’t make a sound in her throat, couldn’t make her hand seize the silk, couldn’t make her eyes look away. The beetle burned into the skin of her chest like a brand, and she felt rage emanating from it, felt a vengeance in the metal to match the sound of Django’s barks, and knew that this was the opposite polarity to the coldness she had felt under the dark man’s gaze, this heat emanating from a sentient creature, a guardian awakened in the presence of an enemy.
Becca reached out, put her hand behind the obsidian disc, and slammed it to the desktop just as Rafael threw the black silk at it, covering both her hand and the artifact in a single sweep. She withdrew her hand from under the fabric, kicked the chair back from the desk, and stood up, her heart pounding, the heat in the beetle fading. She stared at Rafael, eyes wide with horror.
Between them Django growled at the desk, the fur along his spine standing up.
“Someone saw me. Someone in there saw me.”
“In there?”
“Yes. It’s like Skyping with the devil or something. We have to get out of here. Now.”
He looked up the stairs. “Becca, I don’t know. We were lucky to get here without being pulled over. This little Anne Frank setup might be the best bunker we could hope for if someone shows up. I mean, the jeep out front isn’t registered to either one of us. We could turn off the lights upstairs and no one would even know—”
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Shhh….”
Rafael looked at the ceiling while Becca knelt beside Django, cupped a hand over his muzzle, and stroked the back of his head. The dog was still growling, but too low to be heard in the house above.
Rafael said, “What did you—”
Becca cut him off with a raised finger. “We need to get out of here,” she whispered. “If the man in the mirror sent someone, we’ll be trapped.”
Rafael shook his head. “No one could get here that fast.”<
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As if to prove him wrong, a loud crack! resounded from above, like the sound of a door being kicked in or a gunshot taking out a lock. Django erupted into another territorial outburst, and Becca felt her heart drop in her chest, the whole situation tilting out of control, like a table tipping toward the floor, spilling everything her grandmother had entrusted her with, everything she’d managed to find on her own, and every faint hope that a dying man had put on her.
It was all going to end here in the dark.
She stuffed the journal into her bag and clutched the white leather-bound tome to her breast, thinking that, heavy as it was, it would still make a poor bludgeon.
She didn’t know who was upstairs, but she felt sure it was the faceless man himself come to take what he wanted from her, and in a flash she knew just what that was: the scarab that dangled from her neck. Surely if he’d wanted the books, he could have come here before to claim them; but it had been the sight of her and the talisman she wore that had roused him from the depths and spurred him to action.
They needed to climb the stairs. Now. Fast. They needed to make a break for the back door of the house and use Django’s teeth and any weapon they could seize to get out before he grabbed them. But what weapon could help against an entity that could spy you from a sheet of black glass and appear at the door a moment later?
She grabbed Rafael by the bicep and pulled him toward the stairs, but he only rocked on his feet, staring dumbly at the far wall and the darkness beyond the pool of light around the desk. Django was pacing, ears flattened against his head, unsure where to direct his aggression—toward the stairs and the sound of an intruder, or toward that patch of darkness that held Rafael’s gaze. Becca squinted at the darkness and saw a pale green light wavering above an elaborately adorned chalk triangle. It reminded her of the northern lights, a curtain of luminescence, gaining solidity with each passing second.
Red Equinox Page 20
