One of the late entries from July of 2019 had the tone of an exuberant epiphany:
7/16
I knew the Black Brotherhood had steered Solomon’s Lodge to erect an obelisk on blood-anointed ground for the rites of Nephren-Ka, but now, having seen it with my own eyes, I know how they arranged for the transmission of dark rays from the Shining Trapezohedron. They must have the mirror rods in their keeping for use in the days when the old chants will be restored, when our world and the Other are aligned. But the architect must have known that his creation could be subverted. He coded a tribute to the sun, the Greater Light, in the number of steps in the ascending spiral: 294!
Did he know that the Fire of Cairo could be used instead of the dark jewel? If true, then the tide may yet be turned by the providence that brought it into my keeping in Syria all those years ago, long before I knew what it was. That it should have found its way to a young graduate student who would bring it half way around the world to Miskatonic, to Massachusetts, the exact location where it would be needed most…. It forces me to consider the influence of an unseen and benevolent hand.
And yet I fear that I will never learn where Peter hid the stone. I failed him. It seems strange now to contemplate this black mirror as if it were a telephone I could pick up and, dialing the right number, try to make amends. I’ve never believed in the charlatans who claim to offer contact with the dead, but if ever there was a time when the fate of humankind depended on such a thing, it is now.
Dare I call forth my long-dead husband from the depths? Dare I face him one last time in this life?
Becca woke with Rafael’s hand in her own. The boat rocked like a cradle, and Django snored in the well between them. Rafael was curled on his side, his left hand tucked under his chest in what looked like an effort to keep it warm. He had taken the journal away and turned off the light while she slept and had draped the one blanket over her shoulders, leaving himself uncovered but at least holed up in the cabin with her where the closed door did more than the canvas to contain their collective heat.
Becca was hovering somewhere in the liminal state between waking and dream when she slid closer to him, threw the blanket over his shoulder, and wrapped her arm around him. Rafael stirred. She wondered groggily if he had been awake the whole time, listening for helicopters. She tucked her head under his chin and breathed into the hollow of his neck.
His skin felt cold, but in the little tent created by the blanket, her breath was trapped and warmed her face, his chest. He squeezed her fingers in his. She burrowed her head down into his chest and felt his heart beat against her cheek. A quick, pounding tempo. She kissed his jawline and felt his hand close around the nape of her neck, then trace her vertebrae down to her hips and ass. She turned her face up and kissed him, taking his full bottom lip between hers. And then they were rolling and writhing in the rising heat between them, and the boat rocked on waves born within its hull as the stars faded at the rumor of dawn.
* * *
They watched the sunrise, a bright, burnished spot on a sheet of dull aluminum, behind the Graves Lighthouse off the port bow on approach to the mouth of Boston Harbor. They were hungry and craving caffeine but cold enough to feel painfully awake, and desperate to get off the water. Django, smelling land and probably the fumes of breakfast wafting from some waterfront restaurant, was pacing the boat, whining. Becca sat in the passenger seat with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, scrolling through photos in her camera, when Rafael, at the wheel, pointed at the shore.
“Look,” he said, “You recognize it? Four Point Channel is just past those bridges. I could almost drop you at your doorstep.”
Becca scanned the waterfront, saw no overt police presence, but said, “Don’t.” Her gaze drifted skyward to the black orb floating high above the city. It hurt to look at it for more than a second, almost like staring at the sun, but different. It caused a throbbing ache in her left eye, and a tingling in her fingertips on that side. She wondered if some deep part of her right frontal lobe was being taxed, like an underused muscle suddenly forced into heavy lifting.
Rafael steered the boat to starboard. The great arch of the Boston Harbor Hotel loomed beyond the prow. “How about there? We can dock at the marina on the wharf.”
“Okay.”
“Get ready to tie up fast and run before the harbor master grabs us.”
“Would they know if the boat’s been reported stolen?”
“Nah, the owner probably doesn’t even know yet, but we got no reservation and no way to pay for docking. You want to have your bag packed when I bring us in.”
“Okay. Try not to scratch up the boat. I’d like it to be returned the same as we found it.”
Rafael smiled at her. “Aye, Captain.”
“What?”
“Not too many people would worry about scratching up a boat while trying to stop the apocalypse.”
Becca stretched out her foot and kicked his calf gently. Rafael tipped his chin toward Django. “Don’t forget leash laws, while you’re at it.”
“He’ll follow us,” Becca said, and stowed the camera on top of the Moleskine journal in her bag.
The blackness from the orb swirled down in rills that reminded her of ink twisting in gray water, converging on a point north of the city.
“Raf, slow down for a second so we can talk before we land.”
He pulled back on the throttle until the boat was idling in neutral, drifting northeast. The harbor was sparsely trafficked in the early hours of a weekday, in the wake of martial law. Becca pointed at the black sun, and traced her finger along the oily streak to the horizon. “Do you see that?”
He squinted. “See what?”
“You’d know if you saw it.”
“What do you see?”
She touched the spot where the scarab was under her shirt. “It looks like a negative exposure of the sun in the sky, and it’s been putting out smoky…roots or something. It’s hard to describe. But one of them touched the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Center when I was there, and it drew something out of the water. A monster.”
“You saw this with your own eyes. A monster.”
Becca stared at the sky. Rafael put his hand on the small of her back and she felt a tingle run up and down her spine.
They were drifting, but the landing was still far off. “I saw the homeless man from the mill come out of a whirlpool right behind the thing. Like he stepped into a parallel world at the mill and came out of it in the reflecting pool when another portal opened up.” She pointed at the horizon to the north, to the thing he couldn’t see and the charcoal trails that scored the sky beyond the peninsula of the North End. “It’s getting worse, whatever it is. Something’s going to happen over there.”
Rafael followed her gaze. “Can other people see it too? There’s a lot of cars on the bridges, planes in the sky. It doesn’t look like a city in lockdown.”
“I was thinking the same, and I don’t get it. It’s not over.”
“Did the journal shed any light on what this is? You say something’s going to happen over there, but do you know what?”
“I can’t say for sure that I understand it. It seems like if Gran meant for me to understand, she would have been more direct, would have spelled it out. She left me the scarab, but that was in a will written before she fully understood it.”
“And she didn’t leave you the journal.”
“Exactly. I don’t think she knew she was going to die. And her last notes tell about how she thought she could contact my grandfather.” Becca looped a finger under the chain around her neck and slipped the scarab pendant over the black fabric of her thermal shirt. The metal gleamed even in the ashen light that hung over the city. “She needed him to tell her where he hid the jewel that’s missing from this.”
“Your grandfather? The one who was in the asylum?”
“Yeah. He did something with the stone, prevented some breach from the other side while he was locked up
there. I think she may have even had him committed in the first place so he could do it. He hid the jewel somewhere in the asylum. Gran never knew where, but I think I might. It’s a long shot, but when I was looking through the pictures in my camera, I saw something….
“I need to go back. If we find that ruby, we might be able to stop this. I think the scarab was made to stop this, over three thousand years ago.”
Rafael raised his hand and tentatively touched the scarab with the tip of his middle finger, as if he half expected an electric shock. “It doesn’t look that old. Wouldn’t it be more worn?”
“I know. It looks like gold, but I don’t know if the metal is even of this Earth. And you probably thought I was crazy enough back when I was just a depressed, artsy chick.”
He smiled. “You say the pendant was made to stop this. How about you? Were you made to stop this?
It seemed impossible that anything so grandiose should fall to her. If she’d been asked just a few weeks ago whether the human race was worth saving, she would have expressed doubts; and if anyone had told her that she would be elected to dig the means of salvation out of the clay of ancient history, she would have laughed.
“If there’s a God, he has some sense of humor, picking a girl who has trouble getting out of bed on a good day.”
“You believe in God?”
“Not really. So much horror in the world…what good is a god who doesn’t intervene? Do you?”
He nodded. “So do those brineheads. Many gods, and you’ve seen theirs. Don’t you want one on your side?”
She sighed. “I don’t think those are gods. Maybe they’re just our nasty neighbors, aliens from another plane of our own planet. They see us the way most people see animals.”
“Food.”
“Yeah.”
“You think they’re more evolved than us? More intelligent?”
“I don’t know.”
“Some humans have compassion for animals. You do.”
“I don’t think those creatures know what compassion is. Or self-sacrifice. Maybe those are the things that make humans more evolved, the things that defy natural selection. Maybe that’s why we’re worth saving.
He pulled her close. “So we’re going to Allston when we hit dry land? To the asylum?”
She turned away from the terrible sky and searched his eyes. They looked deep in the morning light. “You don’t have to come with me. You might be safe from some things just because you can’t see them or share space with them, but that won’t keep you from getting stabbed by a cultist or shot by a jittery cop when the shit hits the fan.”
“You’re not going anywhere without me. I’ve got your back. Don’t you know that by now?”
She studied his face. It was a new thing for someone to tell her unequivocally that she wouldn’t be abandoned. “Sometimes you have to alter the focus to see what’s right in front of you,” she said with a wry smile.
“What?”
“My mentor told me that shortly before he handed me over to SPECTRA.”
“Yeah, well if you want to rock the quotes, Helen Keller said, ‘Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.’”
She studied his face, so serious, and laughed.
They were drifting sideways on a current that had driven them perilously close to a barge. Rafael engaged the throttle, and the nose of the little boat rose up as the prop dug into the water. He steered clear of the rusty behemoth and aimed for the dome that marked the marina. Shouting over the engine noise, he said, “You ready to run for the street?”
Becca plucked a length of nylon rope out of a side compartment. “Yeah. Bring it in.”
Rafael killed the engine and let the boat glide up to the dock. He had jumped out and tied the front rope to a post before Becca could even find one for the stern. She scooped up Django in her arms, tossed him onto the dock, and climbed out after him. A man in a polo shirt and windbreaker was walking toward them across the grass, but they didn’t wait around to find out if he was the Harbor Master, a marina worker, or just another sailor. As soon as they reached the end of the dock, they broke away from the marina and hurried through an alley to the street.
In under a minute they were doing their best to blend into the early morning urban foot traffic—office workers with their coffee cups and briefcases. It clearly wasn’t the right hour of the day for a pair of ragged bohemians to be up and out, let alone in this part of town. Becca kept her hood up in case her photo was still circulating, and passing a newspaper-vending box, she shot a glance at the front pages.
She wasn’t on them, but a headshot of Darius Marlowe filled the front cover of the Herald, beneath the headlines:
DEAD, NOT DREAMING!
TERROR CULT LEADER
SHOT BY FEDERAL AGENT
She grabbed Rafael’s arm. “Brooks killed him,” she said. “At Gran’s house. He shot him dead.”
“Keep walking,” Rafael said. “People are looking at us.”
“They must have caught or killed the other cult members, too, or the city wouldn’t be back to business.” She stopped walking and wheeled on him. “Maybe they aren’t looking for us anymore.”
“You think it’s over?”
She wanted to believe it was, but one glance at the sky told her otherwise.
Chapter 21
Brooks was being briefed by one of the translators when his phone buzzed with a summons to the interrogation. The translator was a heavyset young guy with a thick, black beard, a member of the team Brooks thought of as the Necronomajohns. They huddled around their own tables in the cafeteria and talked in a bizarre jargon no one else understood. He’d often tried to tell himself that they were no different from your garden variety IT geeks, but the way they never quite made eye contact was different somehow.
Their fascination with the most obscure footnotes of occult lore seemed to have given their eyes a bulbous look, like fish that never saw sunlight. And he had the distinct impression that if any of them were ever invited out for a beer with the field agents, they’d die of the bends upon entering the bar, their blood carbonated by rapid ascension into the upper regions of shallow small talk and sexual banter.
Brooks gently scratched his wrist where the dog bites itched like a bastard under the bandage. Thank God he was up to date on tetanus. He looked at the phone screen in his hand: the text summoning him to room 217 had to be an error. That was a conference room, the kind used for light interrogation. It was not the kind of setting required for the job at hand. For that you wanted a concrete floor with a tap and a drain and some chains anchored to the ceiling.
“I’m sorry…uh….” He tipped a pointing finger at the man’s chest.
“Kenneth,” the burly bearded guy reminded him.
“Sorry, Kenneth, I’m being paged. Give me that last bit again in layman’s terms. Sum it up for me like I’m an idiot who hasn’t read his Agrippa.”
Kenneth laughed. It sounded forced. He smelled like pepperoni. “Okay. The book is called the Deadly Amulet. It’s about two powerful gems that are polar opposites: one is the Shining Trapezohedron, which enables cultists to draw their dark messenger Nyarlathotep from another dimension into this world. The other became known as the Fire of Cairo, a ruby-red stone set in a golden scarab and endowed with the power to dispel the creatures of darkness. But neither one would have much power unless the two worlds—the two dimensions, that is—could be brought into alignment so that fissures would open between them. And no one has been able to make that happen since about 1300 BC in Egypt, when the pharaoh Nephren-ka was the last person with the genetic gift for chanting the right overtones. Some books say he was an incarnation of Nyarlathotep. You still with me?”
“Yeah. What about this Saint Jeremy?”
“Right. Allston Asylum, 2007. Well, no one can prove that he really caused a dimensional breach, but the staff and inmate accounts do seem to describe that phenomenon. And him using a birdbath for the manifestation,
like they say he did, makes sense because once the overtone chant fractures the façade of three-dimensional space-time, reflective surfaces in the vicinity become portals. If Jeremy really succeeded in a partial manifestation, then he had to have been a freak of evolution, an anomaly.”
“What do you mean anomaly?”
“Well, how many people are born with perfect pitch? Not many, but some, right? Now how many are born with not only that, but a set of pipes like Mariah Carey? Very rare. She’s an anomaly. But to be born with a larynx that can naturally produce this language? We’re talking about odds so long that it probably only comes along once in a millennium.”
“Unless you’re a genetic engineer with a 3D printer.”
“Like Marlowe. Yeah.”
“But assuming for a moment that Jeremy had that gift…what stopped his monster from coming through? What stopped all of this from happening twelve years ago?”
Kenneth tilted his palms up and reclined in his leather office chair. “Beats me. Maybe his voice box was only mostly right for the chanting, but not perfect like the pharaoh’s, so he birthed an abortion.”
Brooks’ phone buzzed again. He nodded. “Gotta go. Thanks.”
He turned away from the cluttered desktop and gazed over the glass partitions dividing the lab into cubicles. In some, there were chalk circles on the floor. Others were adorned with byzantine mandalas and divine names scrawled in red and blue sharpie across the glass. It reminded him of biohazard zones in private-sector labs he had visited; only here the precautionary devices were spiritual. He still had trouble accepting what was happening, but every time he passed a window to the outside world, the pulsing abomination in the sky drove the reality home. He was momentarily distracted by a grotesquery glimpsed through the double panes of a locked case (something that resembled a brain tattooed with arcane sigils), when a tall, thin geek with a blond goatee and black-framed glasses bumped into him. The kid looked like he’d run the entire corridor and all of the stairs. He was trying to catch his breath and holding a printout in both hands, the paper wrinkling under the sweaty pads of his tight-clenching fingers. “Agent Brooks….”
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