Something was forming deep within the shifting veils of green light, something bestial. An acrid stench flooded the room, accompanied by a scuffling sound of many heavy limbs scratching at the concrete floor. The sound betrayed the anatomy before it was even fully formed: a percussion of hooves and claws.
Becca was pushing Rafael up the stairs with Django at her heels when her eyes finally made sense of the shape now manifest in the chalk triangle.
A man in a black cloak sat astride a goatish monstrosity with arachnid limbs protruding from its chest, covered in bristling gray fur, and terminating in serrated black hooks. The rear legs were goat-like, angular, almost skeletal, and the horns on its head spiraled through a range of lustrous shades of black and gray as they dwindled to lethal points that Becca had trouble taking her eyes from.
Now Rafael was tugging on her arm, calling her name, trying to shake her from her death trance. Something gleamed, like moonlight on a dorsal fin, and she saw the wide, curved blade the rider held in his fist, pointed toward his hood-framed face, a face she now recognized: the wanted man from the Harvard attack, the MIT student she had seen on the news sites, Darius Marlowe.
He dismounted the creature and strode forth, the symbols on the floor doing nothing to constrain him, his face a rictus of gleeful blood lust.
Rafael was scrabbling at the latch at the top of the stairs. Becca felt her throat constricting. They were trapped between the man with the knife and whatever might be waiting on the other side of the fireplace. Django was barking at Marlowe and the spider-goat behind him in full rage, froth flying, his voice pushing into a range of distorted volume she’d never heard from him before, but then the fireplace door swung open and a draught of fresher air wafted down over them, cutting through the musky reek. With a snarl, Django turned toward it, bounded over Becca and past Rafael, and shot out into the den.
Becca heard the impact of the dog knocking someone to the floor, a man yelling. She kicked off of the stone stairs toward the melee. But when she emerged from the fireplace, she realized with horror that she also knew the man who had broken down the door.
Agent Brooks was shielding his face with his arms, kicking at the frenzied dog. Blood ran down one of his hands, across his wrist, staining the white cuff of his shirt. Becca put her palm between Rafael’s shoulder blades and shoved him toward the kitchen, toward the door to the backyard. He went with a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure she was following but the sight of the attack had stopped her in her tracks.
“DJANGO! NO! NOOO!”
The dog released his grip and the agent seized the opportunity to draw his gun. Rafael was tugging Becca’s arm now, wrenching her into the kitchen as she screamed, “No! Stop!” but whether at the dog or the man, not even she knew. Rafael was dragging her, and she couldn’t hold her ground against him. He threw open the door to the night. Cool air rushed in and chilled the sweat on her brow.
A single shot roared from the gun.
The black-robed body of Darius Marlowe staggered into view and fell to the floor as Django bolted from the gunshot and launched through the open doorway, over the back steps, onto the leaf-strewn ground.
Becca followed into the darkness of the backyard, realizing only after it was too late that she had dropped the heavy book on the kitchen floor when the gun went off.
Whatever secrets the Mortiferum Indicium held were lost to her.
Chapter 19
Brooks nearly tripped over the book when he reached the back door. He kicked it across the linoleum and shouldered through the storm door, gun raised, sweeping the dark yard. Philips and the graffiti artist had already disappeared into the trees—he could hear the jingling of the dog’s collar fading on the wind.
He bounced on the balls of his feet, resisting the temptation to run after them. It wouldn’t be hard to catch up, but what then?
Darius Marlowe was bleeding out on the floor inside and any accomplices he had were likely spilling out of the basement and stepping over the body to reach the front door right now while Brooks was chasing kids caught in the crossfire.
Fuck it.
He circled around the house and found no activity on the street. The jeep he’d checked the plates on when he arrived was still there, dark and vacant. The door he’d kicked in hung motionless.
He trotted up the stairs, set his back against the house, then swung around through the entrance in firing position.
Despite whatever magic had been on display at Copley Square, Darius Marlowe’s blood was red. It pooled around him on the floor, soaking his splayed robes.
Brooks dropped to his knees, set his gun on the floor, and took his phone from his belt. He hit the speed dial with one hand while applying pressure on Marlowe’s stomach wound through a fistful of bunched up black wool with the other. His own wounds from the dog bites added to the mess, but he barely felt them through the adrenaline.
Marlowe’s eyes were fixed on the ceiling, glassy and dim.
Brooks hoped the book he’d kicked aside in the kitchen held some answers.
Getting any out of Marlowe was a diminishing proposition.
Chapter 20
Becca was having trouble coaxing Django onto the boat. The poor boy just didn’t trust the water or the way the thirty-foot passenger craft was rocking and swaying in the lapping waves of the river as she shifted her weight and reached out to scoop him up in her arms. He reared back at the gesture, and she sighed. “Come on, Django. It’s okay. Trust me.” She feared she might have to set his trust for her back a few clicks by climbing up onto the quay and tossing him into the damned thing.
Rafael’s ass was poking out of the tiny cabin, his boxers almost entirely free of his jeans as he struggled with the wires behind the instrument panel. The light of the headlamp occasionally sparked out of the cabin, as did curses and grunts.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?” she said to his butt. “You’re not gonna get electrocuted on me are you?”
The light flashed in her face now, and she could imagine that the scorn he was directing at her was even fiercer than that blinding glare. She shielded her eyes with her hand. “Jesus, keep it down, Raf. Someone will notice if you wave it around.”
The light swept back into the little cubby, and she heard his muffled, affronted voice, “I grew up on the water, Becca. The first thing my father taught me after futebol and fishing was how to hotwire a boat. Only problem on this bitch is getting into the box without tools. Just be thankful the battery was left on board, and pray there’s enough gas in the tank.”
When Brooks had failed to give chase in the aftermath of the shooting, they had stopped running, crept up Hangman’s Hill and stalked across the cemetery, crouching amid the leaning headstones. The hill offered a clear view of the Aylesbury Pike, the road they had taken into town and the main route from which they could expect State Police and military vehicles to enter Arkham if the full weight of the authorities descended upon them. But the road was quiet.
They’d scurried down the embankment and across River Street before the next set of approaching headlights could limn their silhouettes: man, woman, and dog disappearing like ghosts into the mist-shrouded docks where fishing boats and pleasure craft bobbed gently in a row of slips. The tide was low, the ramp to the floating docks now a steep incline; and descending below street level with the slimy timbers towering above their heads, they gained a sense of protective cover, while relinquishing the security of hard ground and passing into the unsettling embrace of the maritime realm to which most of the town’s macabre legends could trace their origins.
Becca sighed with relief at the sound of the outboard engine coughing and sputtering to life, roaring, and finally purring under Rafael’s deft touch.
He directed Becca to untie the ropes from the cleats, but Django was still on the dock, whimpering. “He’ll come,” Rafael said. “He won’t be parted from you.” And sure enough, as the little boat began to drift out from the mooring slip, the dog leapt af
ter it, landing first on the engine compartment, then hopping to the fiberglass floor at Becca’s feet.
They trolled into the dark currents, skirting the rocky hulk of Themystos Island, where Becca shuddered at the sight of the standing stones amid the crooked, skeletal trees. Rafael kept the lights off until they had cleared the bridges, and Django peered up into the darkness of the stone arches as they passed under. Becca could faintly descry bats hanging from the dripping bricks as they floated through the echoing vaults. She felt better when the embrace of the rocky channel fell away at the widening mouth of the Miskatonic, and they passed into open water beneath the dull gray glow of suburban midnight.
They followed the coast south past Beverly and Salem, Rafael doing a remarkable job of navigating the great rocks with only a few buoys and no chart to guide him. In the deep night, under a scattering of stars, he climbed onto the bow and, with a few long wind-up swings, cast the anchor onto the beach of a small, seemingly deserted island off the point of Marblehead. Had they known for certain that they had arrived at Tinkers Island, where several small camp shacks sat vacant for the season, they might have ventured off of the boat and forced their way into one for the night, but having made it this far with no sign of pursuit from sea or air, they were reluctant to test their luck with any exploration.
The cabin of the little vessel was small and spare, and the sea air was cold, but the cushions at least were soft, and they settled in to sleep as the boat rocked gently on the surf.
Rafael found a not-too-musty blanket stowed in a compartment under one of the seats and draped it over Becca’s legs. She located the cabin light and switched it on, and the tiny space soon felt cozy. The boat was clean and well cared for, and in spite of the end of the world likely happening around them, she felt guilty about stealing it. Django was curled up on the cushions with his head on her belly, already snoozing. When Rafael tossed the blanket over her, she looked up and asked, “Is it okay to have this light on for a little while or will it drain the battery? I could use the headlamp to read.”
“It’s okay for now, but if you’re up long, you should switch over. Do you think there’s anything in that journal that will help?”
She had only scratched the surface, and many of the entries were too fragmentary and self-referential to make much sense. But it was all she had to work with. “Hard to say. I think she could sense things were coming to a crisis right before she died. But most of what I’ve read so far is a bit guarded and cryptic. I wish we’d had more time in the house. If I could have found older journals I might have a better chance of making some sense of it. And that book I dropped…” She scratched her arm.
“Are you sure it was important?”
Becca nodded, pressed the heel of her hand to her eye socket. “I think most of these notes make reference to it, and she was the translator, so there’s a lot she took for granted that she wouldn’t spell out in a journal. I don’t know…I’ve only skimmed it, but some of it reads enough like rough sketches for a book that I might be able to glean something from it.”
“Well, I’ll let you read. I’m gonna put the canvas on this thing so we don’t freeze to death. Hopefully it’ll hold in enough body heat to get us through the night.”
He looked genuinely worried about the temperature drop on the water in the small hours before dawn. At least there wasn’t any wind. She patted the sleeping dog’s flank and said, “Django will keep us warm.”
Rafael uttered a rueful laugh. “Keep you warm, maybe. I ain’t gonna fit in here with the two of you, but the seats fold down like cots.”
Becca twisted her hair around her forefinger and bit her lip.
“All right, you study hard,” Rafael said. His face disappeared from the cabin door.
Becca soon heard him climbing around on the bow above her, snapping down the cover and stretching it out. The boat rocked as he shifted his weight, and she tried to concentrate on the journal, but found herself thinking of the kiss she had planted on him before venturing through a doorway not much bigger than the one to the cabin she now lay in. She’d surprised herself with the gesture, had been thinking something at the time about how he’d earned it. But she knew now that to view it that way was to avoid the truth—she had wanted it for herself, that kiss. For luck, desire, and for the possibility that she might not get another chance if bad things happened down in the dark. Now she was surprised at herself for dwelling on it when there was so much happening, so much at stake. The threat had awakened a long-dormant vitality in her. Looking back on the past week, she saw that fight-or-flight adrenaline had carried her through, and she realized now that they really could flee, could point the boat north and head for Nova Scotia, leaving the beleaguered city behind. It was tempting.
And yet she couldn’t do it. She had a role to play before this was all over. Catherine had left her the scarab. And had she seen fear in the dark man’s reaction to it? If so, she needed to know why, needed to know what Catherine had been embroiled in in her final days. It wasn’t rational, but she felt that she owed it to her grandmother to at least try to understand. When she finally put her finger on the feeling, she recognized it for what it was: a sense of duty. Not to her city or country, but to the woman who had raised her.
No one had asked her to do anything. She’d been born into a fucked-up family with a history of insanity, and now that madness was made manifest, unleashed on an unwitting world. Her genes had been entangled in this story since before she was even born. And she might be the last one left who could determine how it ended.
Tell me a story, Gran. Make me a myth.
Soon she was immersed in her grandmother’s voice, and all amorous thoughts faded as she was drawn into the web of the great scholar’s efforts to decode the histories of the artifacts she had tracked down, obtained, and experimented with: the obsidian mirror, the golden scarab, and the book that joined them, the Mortiferum Indicium.
The title, as translated by Catherine, was, The Deadly Talisman. At first Becca thought the book itself was the talisman referenced, but the more she read, the more apparent it became that the tome, a holy book of the Starry Wisdom Church, was focused on the identification and history of a weapon devised by a wandering sage, an artifact which posed a threat to the cult of the Black Pharaoh because of its power to banish their dark gods, a jewel Becca recognized with a jolt as the scarab she now wore around her neck, known for generations as The Fire of Cairo.
That title was a misnomer, acquired during centuries when the scarab was lost and rumored to be somewhere in Cairo, the last place it was known to have been used, during the reign of Ramses the Great. Its true place of origin was Amarna, or Akhetaton of old, the city of Aten, the sun god, and his greatest worshipper, the pharaoh Akenaten—a heretic who abandoned the capital city of Thebes to establish his throne among the open-air temples he had erected for the worship of the solar disc, sole object of his adoration.
His monotheistic zeal aroused the ire of the priest class and fractured the kingdom. And when a dark conjurer arose, offering to strike him down, it seemed to many that no price was too great. The conjurer was known as a mere scribe when he gathered the priesthood in secret to demonstrate his hidden power. When they had witnessed his abilities, they entrusted him with the oldest treasure from the deepest vault of Egypt, a jewel wrought in the furnaces of Yuggoth and passed through the temples of Valusia, Lemuria, and Khem: The Shining Trapezohedron. The scribe took this mighty treasure in payment, and fulfilled his oath to bring down the pharaoh of the sun.
In the thirteenth year of Akhenaten’s reign, a plague of black airs dripped from the sky like ink and his city was stricken. His mother, Queen Tiye, three of his daughters, and his wife, Nefertiti, were dead within a few years, followed by the king himself. But his son, Tutankhamen, was spared long enough to take the throne under the tutelage of many councilors, including one wise sage who would soon supplant him, a priest who would rule in the wake of the boy-king’s assassination. He would be kn
own (until his name was stricken from all public monuments) as Nephren-ka. The Black Pharaoh. He of the gifted tongue, who was finally banished by a wandering sage from the east bearing a golden scarab set with a fiery gem.
Some scholars speculated that this wanderer had known Akhenaten in his youth, or that contact with such a nomad hailing from a cult of the Far East may have been what inspired the rising pharaoh’s devotion to the sun god. Whether or not this is true, it is agreed that the mysterious figure, flitting like a phantom through the scrolls of the New Kingdom, possessed not only great metal- and gem-craft, but also a mantra which he used to set the ruby ablaze and the beetle to flight. His name is unrecorded, but the mantra survived, preserved in a book hidden by the Black Brotherhood: The Mortiferum Indicium.
The cult of the Black Pharaoh also preserved an obsidian disk, upon which Nephren-ka exhaled his dying breath. But the Shining Trapezohedron, dark counterpart to the red stone that would be known as the Fire of Cairo, was lost to the ages, until rediscovered by an archaeologist and New England Freemason by the name of Enoch Bowen in 1843.
Most historians credited Bowen with founding the Starry Wisdom Church in Rhode Island in the mid 1800s, but Catherine’s theory was that a secret faction within the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry had developed the cult at the dawn of the American Revolution, and that only after the Trapezohedron was discovered did they go above ground as an openly practicing religious sect.
At this point in the journal, what had begun as a historical treatise started to devolve into equations of Hebrew and Greek Gematria, charts of constellations and geo-coordinates, and records of experiments, including meticulous documentation of weather, moon phases, and tides, occluded by an alphabet soup of acronyms that only Catherine, or perhaps a scholar of ceremonial magic, could decipher.
Red Equinox Page 21
