Red Equinox

by Douglas Wynne

  She found it odd that neither paper mentioned the address where Marlowe was shot and killed, nor that she had once lived there. Most puzzling of all: they could have publicized that she was missing and possibly dead, Marlowe’s final victim, but hadn’t. Under the auspices of concern for her well-being, they could have put out a call for tips from anyone who knew her whereabouts. Instead, they were going out of their way to sell the narrative that the city was now safe, even for the briefly notorious Rebecca Philips.

  She drank her tea, and her eyes drifted to the black orb in the northern sky. She wondered what had happened to all of those PTSD cases who knew what she knew—that this was anything but over. She tugged her jacket sleeve over her bandaged wrist, and wished she had a baseball cap to cover her eyes. She felt exposed sitting so close to the street, but the foot traffic was light, Django seemed happy, and it was better than haunting an alley between buildings while Rafael fetched supplies. The candid art photography she favored had always brought with it a certain secret-agent sensibility, and she had learned long ago that sometimes the best way to hide was to appear engaged in ordinary activity in plain sight. Of course, it was likely that any agents following her were doing the same, and she found her eyes returning to the parked cars in the gas station on the corner and the blank windows brooding above her in the apartment towers across the street.

  Django growled, stood erect, and tugged at the leash. Before she could do more than tighten her grip and whirl around, a man in several layers of ragged clothes, a dirty Red Sox cap, and sunglasses appeared out of nowhere and slid into the seat opposite hers at the small metal table.

  “It’s me, Becca.”

  “Jeez, Raf. I didn’t recognize you. That’s good. Were you followed, you think?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “How about your apartment, was it ransacked?”

  “Not obviously, but I’d probably never know if they didn’t want me to. I shoulda put a piece of scotch tape on the door when I left or some crafty spy shit like that, right?”

  Becca tried to smile. “You make a scarily good homeless guy.” She couldn’t help thinking of Moe Ramirez, and a shadow passed over her heart, an uncomfortable reminder of why she was doing this: to rectify things for the dead.

  Rafael watched the street as he spoke. “Got that laptop you wanted in the bag and my Bowie knife strapped to my leg.”

  Becca glanced under the table. He picked up a battered canvas shopping bag and set it beside her boot. She looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Bowie knife? If I’m right, you only need a screw driver or a putty knife.”

  “I usually have it on me for urbex outings; you just didn’t know it because I never had to save you from a gang of skinheads.”

  With the sunglasses hiding his eyes, she couldn’t tell if he was serious. “Well, don’t go poking any federal agents. You’re not spending the rest of your life in prison on my account.”

  “Girl, I was ready to do that the minute I picked you up in Dave’s jeep. Aiding and abetting a fugitive? Sure beats my usual trespassing.”

  She gave his hand a squeeze. “I don’t know if you smell bad enough to pass for a vagabond. Maybe.”

  “Should I piss myself? Let’s do this before people start wondering what the hot chick is doing talking to the dirtbag.”

  She took the laptop from the bag and set it on the aluminum mesh tabletop. It was an old Dell with a lot of peeling stickers on it. She pulled the Wi-Fi card out before flipping the lid up. A moment later she had removed the SD card from her camera and inserted it into a slot.

  Of the twenty or so pictures she had taken at the asylum, only one partially captured what she was looking for, and viewing it on her camera’s LCD hadn’t revealed enough detail for her to be certain. Now she pulled up the image and zoomed in.

  It was a shot of the birdbath in the courtyard where they had encountered the reverend from the Starry Wisdom Church performing his prayers and prostrations. Beyond the black cloth of his frock coat in the foreground, the glass mosaic adorning the concrete basin was in focus enough to reveal one place where the pattern was off. Most of the shards of glass were triangular, but one piece was round and surrounded by just enough triangular blank space to suggest that the original fragment had been removed and this misfit set in its place. It was almost the right size, and the color, although rendered as a shade of gray in the infrared photo, was close enough to the surrounding pieces that unless you were looking for it, you wouldn’t notice the substitution.

  It might have been red.

  Becca touched the pendant through her shirt and turned the laptop to show Rafael the screen.

  “You see it? The round piece. That has to be it, that’s the ruby.”

  “I wonder what kind of putty or glue your grandfather had access to.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  “I’ll find out. You’re laying low in case the place is being watched.”

  “I’ll stay close. And if we don’t see anyone, I’m coming with you.”

  “Not a good idea. Too many places in there for agents or cultists to hide. I’m gonna get in and get out.”

  “I hope it’s still there, Raf. God, I hope nobody found it.”

  “It stayed hidden this long. That’s a lot of years. Why do you think he put it there? In the open?”

  “I’m not sure. If he buried it or hid it in a totally secret place, no one would ever have a chance of finding it. The doctors were reading his letters. He knew that Catherine, who gave it to him in the first place, would recognize it if she was looking for it, but without the scarab, no one else would know what it was. Only she never made it back there to look for it. Instead she tried to contact him beyond the grave to ask him where he hid it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “She used that black mirror. But I don’t think she found her husband on the other side.”

  “What did she find?”

  “The black man in the red robe. I think she woke him up. I think she caused the very thing she wanted to prevent.”

  “And now you plan to finish it for her?”

  “I need to make it right, Raf. It was clever of my Grandpa to hide a shiny red thing in the one place where it wouldn’t stand out, where it would blend in with all the other colored glass. But there might be more to it than that. Something happened at the birdbath. Another inmate, a member of the Starry Wisdom Church, evoked something from the water. It set the whole institution into a panic. From what I can tell from the journal, it sounds like Peter banished it with the gem. But I don’t know if setting it in the fountain was part of the process, or just an afterthought.”

  “Lucky thing they didn’t break that birdbath up with a sledge hammer and cart it away.”

  “Yeah. I like to think there was a protective force at work, that maybe I was meant to find it.”

  “A little faith couldn’t hurt.”

  “Well, I don’t have much. But Raf…I feel like I should be the one to take it out. Who knows if removing it will…unleash something. I can’t put you up against the risk.”

  He looked at the sky, took her hand and said, “I can’t see the things you can. I haven’t been exposed, right? That part of my brain isn’t turned on, so I’m not vulnerable like you. It’s better if I do it. Safer. Besides, you don’t have a swanky disguise.”

  She smiled; it felt faint and must have looked it too.

  He squeezed her hand again. “Don’t worry. In half an hour, we’ll have what we need and you’ll be on to telling me all about the next way we get to risk our lives. You do have a plan for that right?” He grinned at her and closed the laptop.

  “I’m afraid I don’t really. I’m still trying to decipher Catherine’s notes, but whatever is happening, it’s reaching critical mass, and I think if we follow the black trails to where they touch down north of the city, we’ll be in the right place to make a difference. Maybe even at the right time.”

  “So you’ll know it when you
see it?”

  “Hope so. But the notes don’t even sound like she’s talking about Boston. More like Egypt or Jerusalem. There are all these references to an obelisk and Solomon’s masons and I don’t know. I don’t get it.”

  Rafael’s eyes widened and his brow furrowed with an epiphany. “That’s the Bunker Hill Monument.”

  “Holy shit…an obelisk.”

  “North of the city. Built by Masons.”

  Becca’s hand trembled as she removed her camera card from the computer and reinserted the Wi-Fi card.

  “Wait, I thought you were afraid of being tracked,” Rafael said.

  “They can’t see my photos, those are on the card. The risk of this machine being traced to you in the next five minutes is probably small, and I have to know, I have to check it out and see if something jumps out at me, something that could help.”

  She selected the café’s free hotspot, went to Wikipedia, and pulled up the Bunker Hill Monument.

  “Granite obelisk erected between 1827 and 1834 in Charlestown to commemorate the Battle of Bunker Hill…Actually on Breed’s Hill where the misnamed battle took place…There was something in the journal about blood-soaked ground, this has to be it…. The first monument at the site was created by King Solomon’s Lodge of Masons in 1794… Final monument was based on a design by architect Solomon Willard…Capstone laid on July 23, 1842…Wait a minute, wait…a…minute.” Becca pulled the journal from her bag and flipped to a page she had marked with the fabric bookmark.

  “This is it, Raf. Two hundred ninety-four steps to the top. That’s what Catherine was speculating about in all of these calculations of Hebrew words from the Bible.” Her heart sped up as she went on, jabbing a finger at the page, “Genesis 1:16 refers to the ‘Greater Light’ that God set in the sky: the sun! And the words ‘Greater Light’ equal 294. The mason who designed the obelisk was making a reference to the sun, the power of light. And according to her notes there was a dark faction of Masons in Boston who later formed the Starry Wisdom Church, who intended for the obelisk to be an instrument of dark forces when the stars were right and some gem of power was found.”

  “Gem of power. You mean the ruby? The scarab?”

  “I don’t know. That doesn’t seem right. The Fire of Cairo was made to banish darkness. This sounds like they were searching for a stone that was its opposite. An evil stone.”

  “Well let’s hope they have more trouble finding their stone than we had finding ours.”

  “If they don’t already have it.”

  “Come on, shut that thing down and let’s go.”

  * * *

  The hike to Allston took most of the afternoon, but they couldn’t ride the T with Django. Rafael had brought along a baseball cap for Becca to cover her face. She didn’t seem to attract any obvious attention, probably because most eyes tended to linger on his ratty getup. The sky maintained its iron-gray austerity throughout the day, and when they reached the hole in the slouching chain link fence that hemmed in the asylum, the sun was dissolving in an acid bath of pollution-laced clouds on the western horizon. They were both sweating from the climb—Rafael more so for the heavy layers of clothes. Only Django still seemed as alert and energized as ever.

  Huddled in the shelter of the tree line where the evening shadows gathered in wide pools, they could see no cars parked in front of the crumbling stone gates on the street. Rafael had done a quick reconnaissance of the parking lot beyond the chained off entrance.

  “Empty,” he said when he returned, “But that don’t mean there’s no agents, cops, or cultists in the building. You should stay here like we planned.”

  “I don’t have a good feeling about letting you do this, Raf. It feels like it should be me.”

  “I’ll be back in five.”

  She shook her head, then swept her eyes across the sprawling ruins of the asylum. Rafael, sensing that she was gathering her thoughts, waited for her to speak.

  “I used to be afraid of this place, you know.”

  “Seriously? Then why’d you keep coming back?”

  She swallowed. “Maybe I thought I could get a handle on it, get some power over the fear by photographing it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fucking creepy, but I think what scared me was how it reminded me of my grandfather, like a warning sign, a warning of what could happen to me because it ran in my family.”

  “Insanity?”

  She nodded.

  “You said it used to scare you. Not anymore?”

  “I’m starting to see it as a place where he did a really brave thing. But Gran left the beetle to me. I should be the one to do this, to make it whole.”

  Rafael smiled. Damn, the boy was pretty when he smiled. “Becca, you’ve done a lot of brave things lately. It’s hard to believe you’re the same person. Let me do this one thing for you. You can’t help shit if they jump you and throw you in a van. I’m fast, and I’ll be outta there before they know it’s me. All right?”

  “At least take Django with you.”

  Rafael shook his head. “Defeats the purpose. How many squatters have a dog on a leash? And you’ve been seen with him. I’ll be right back.”

  He turned to go, and she reached out and grabbed his sleeve, pulled him back. She went up on her tiptoes and kissed him deeply, let go of his sleeve reluctantly.

  Django was whining and straining at the leash, anxious to keep their little pack together, anxious for her to follow Rafael as he ducked through the hole in the fence and shambled up the scraggly, balding slope toward the ivy-draped brick edifice with its shattered windows.

  Becca massaged the dog’s scruff and tried to soothe him. “Shhh…. Quiet, boy. He’ll be okay. He’ll be right back.” And she knew the reassurance was more for herself than for Django.

  Clouds passed. She fought the urge to step out of the shelter of the trees and the weed-woven fence and approach the ruined building for a better vantage point.

  The grounds were cloaked in an unsettling silence. With each car that passed, she tuned her ear to the engine noise, listening for any change of pitch that might indicate someone slowing to a stop. But none did.

  And then, amid the rustle of leaves in the evening breeze, she heard a whisper. Her name. There was no mistaking it.

  She squinted into the deeper shadows of the nearby patch of woods where only a neglected shed lay between the abandoned asylum and the nearest house.

  “Rafael?” Could he have circled around behind her somehow after spotting a threat? Was it him coaxing her away from the scene as quietly as he could? And did he have the ruby already?

  Django barked at the woods, and she yanked on the leash, crouched down, and cupped her hand over his muzzle. He growled.

  Holding the leash close to the collar, she took two slow steps toward the trees, as if stealth would help, as if whoever was there hadn’t already spied her and called her by name, as if the tall grass underfoot were a wood-plank floor that might creak if she stepped too fast, too hard.

  The whisper came again. Her name, just her name, toneless. And she took another step. She could see a shadow at the corner of the shed, a human silhouette, and a chill passed through her at the sight despite its androgynous anonymity. Her body was screaming at her to turn and run from it, but her memory found it somehow familiar, and all she knew was that it wasn’t Rafael, and Django didn’t like the scent of it.

  * * *

  Rafael stepped through the brick frame, where the metal doors had long ago been removed, and onto a bed of cinders. He saw the fallen oak tree still leaning against the building, its crown disappearing through the window it had shattered when it went down, and he remembered taking Becca to the ECT room to show it to her because he knew she would want to photograph it. How many days ago had that been? Twelve? It felt like months, and it struck him as strange that this place should look so much the same when so much had happened since. He saw the fountain, too, in the center of the courtyard. The westering sun glanced off of the few unbroken window
s high above and cast a pallid sheen down on the filmy gray, leaf-strewn rainwater gathered in the basin.

  He circled around it, scanning the mosaic for the misfit part, silently praying (Let it be, let it be, let it be) that the gem was still there, where they had seen it in the photo. He looked up at the windows, but saw no motion in them, no sign of sentries on the rooftop, where for all he knew there could be a helicopter perched beyond his line of sight. Or maybe they were alone here. Maybe Becca could have come with him—

  And there it was; a small red stone gleaming like a droplet of blood amid the shards of colored glass.

  He wanted to be her hero, to deliver the jewel, but now that he was here, he hesitated, knowing that once she had it, she wouldn’t be able to turn back. Her course would be set, and she would be marching into deeper danger.

  He almost wished that SPECTRA agents would rappel down from the roof into the courtyard with guns drawn and take the choice away from him, bring her someplace safe. The past few days had divided his desires for her: he could see how this crazy quest he barely understood was invigorating her, pushing her past her limits, and giving her a purpose he wanted to help her fulfill. But it went against his every instinct to help her keep risking her life.

  She had asked him once, on a bad day early in their friendship, why he wanted to hang around with someone like her, someone so moody and fucked up, and he had told her that her moods were like the weather: sure, there were stormy days, but they passed. He didn’t hold her nature against her and wasn’t a fair-weather friend. Now that she was engaging with life on a scale he’d never seen before, he found her more attractive than ever; but he feared it was too much too soon, and the cost might be too high for her.

  Rafael knelt and pressed a fingertip against the gem. It appeared to be set in a wad of dried bubble gum that had hardened over a decade ago. “Please let it protect her,” he muttered. He tried to dig the stone out of the gum with his fingernails, but they were too short. He took the Bowie knife from under his weather-stained trench coat, unsheathed the blade, and gingerly pried at the stone.