Red Equinox

by Douglas Wynne

  A high-pitched whine penetrated his consciousness. Still holding the knife, he rose from his haunches and looked around. The surface of the water in the bath was vibrating as if an electrical current passed through it.

  He stared into the mucky basin where years of leaves had decayed under years of rains. Something moved in the bottom. The water could be no more than six inches, but it seemed to absorb long rays of silver light from the breaking clouds; too long, as if stretching them down fathoms, miles, leagues.

  The rays rotated as he watched, hypnotized by their motion. He knew he should pry the stone free and get out of the courtyard, go see if Becca was okay, but that imperative seemed faint and muted by wooly layers in his head, because this water, this silver mirror, was so fascinating, so odd…and now something seemed to be surfacing in it.

  Rafael squatted, his left hand gripping the basin rim, and with the knife in his right, he pried the gemstone loose and watched it drop to the dirt at his feet.

  * * *

  Becca saw the face of the figure beside the shed. She didn’t know she’d been holding her breath until she let it rush out. It was Neil. But the sense of safety that came with recognition was quickly diminished when more recent memories clamored in, reminders of betrayal, and her footsteps faltered.

  Neil, whom she called Uncle, had handed her over to SPECTRA when she’d sent him the photos. If he was here, then the agents might be here with him, using him as a lure to draw her over.

  She took a step backward, shaking her head. She pulled the leash to turn Django around. But Neil was stepping toward her now, emerging from the shadows. He looked haggard. There were blue shadows under his eyes. She supposed she probably looked equally worn, with her nest of unkempt hair and rumpled clothes, but she’d been on the run. Seeing the toll stress had taken on him gave her a sickly tingle of petty satisfaction. She hoped he’d lost sleep over her these past few days.

  “What are you doing here? Who are you with?”

  “Becca, we need to talk. You don’t have to do this alone.”

  “You’re going to help me now? It’s a little late for that.”

  “I’m sorry they grabbed you. I thought they’d understand that you were just in the right place at the right time to catch these things on film. I thought my vouching for you…I didn’t even think I needed to vouch for you, I just… It never crossed my mind that they would lock you up.”

  “How did you find me?” She was still walking backward, pulling on the leash, and Django was reading her body language, her stress, smelling the fear pheromones spicing her sweat, and sensing the tension in her grip on the leash, in her voice. He bared his teeth, and Neil stopped advancing with his palms turned out, less than five feet away.

  “Some of your pictures were taken here. And it’s not like I don’t know the significance of the place, the family history. I thought you’d come back.”

  “Why would I come back here? Why would you think that with everything that’s happened since?”

  “I saw the stone, Becca. In the photo, in the birdbath. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Heat flashed across her face, like a slap. Her eyes and nostrils flared, and she whisper-shouted, “Who else knows?” She wheeled around and scanned the tree line, the street, the windows above.

  “Becca, calm down,” he said, his hand hovering parallel to the ground between them.

  “No. I won’t. Answer me. Who’s here with you?”

  He shot a glance at the street. “Someone you know. Someone you trust, in that dark red car.”

  “Someone I trust like I trusted you? Who?”

  “Nina, your therapist.”

  Becca reeled. What the fuck was going on here, an apocalyptic episode of This Is Your Life?

  “Nina? How? How did you even find her? I’ve never told you my therapist’s name.”

  “I can explain everything after you get in the car.”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  “Becca, listen to me. We will keep them from putting you in a cell. We will keep them from injecting you with a drug that will make you blind to what’s going on. But you have to trust us. All we want to do is protect you, keep you free to do what you have to do.”

  “And what’s that, Neil? Just what do you think I have to do?”

  He looked at the ground between them. When his eyes came up to meet hers again she saw the fear in them. “Do you have the stone?”

  “Neil you’re freaking me out. How do you know about it? And no, I don’t have it…. Wait, I called Nina before I went to Arkham. Is that how that agent found us there?”

  “Listen to me, Becca. There are a lot of connections around you. Some of them may be…fate, for lack of a better word, or synchronicity, but it’s not a conspiracy. There are conspiracies at work, but I swear to you I’m not part of one. And I don’t believe she is either. Her ex-husband is the agent assigned to you, Jason Brooks, but listen, listen, please.” He was talking fast now, his placating hand trembling. He was afraid she was going to turn tail and run and he’d never see her again. It was written all over his face. And why shouldn’t she?

  “Brooks thinks there’s a cultist on the inside at SPECTRA, or some other agency they’re working with, LIMNUS or something. They had Darius Marlowe, the cult leader—they had him in custody yesterday and they were interrogating him, but someone set it up so there was salt water and a giant mirror in the room, and he used those to transform into something monstrous, and he got out. He slipped into that other dimension, the one showing through in your photos, and now he could be anywhere.”

  “Okay, now I know you’re lying because Marlowe is dead. I saw Brooks shoot him, it’s in the news.”

  “Don’t believe the news, Becca. They had to restore order to round up the witnesses and flush you out. They know you have pieces of the puzzle. Brooks has other pieces from the book you dropped in Arkham. That’s why he sent us to find you. To tell you it’s not over, to tell you that the Starry Wisdom cult may have infiltrated the government. He wants to help you put the pieces together and end this. If you don’t have the stone, just get it and let’s get out of here.”

  Becca didn’t know what to believe. She felt like she’d been clinging to a piece of driftwood in a maelstrom of paranoia, the waters rushing around her laden with the shards of her broken sanity, and now Neil was tossing planks pierced with rusty nails into the whirlpool with her as the wind picked up. She wanted him to go away and let her think, wanted to hide in the shed, shut down and sleep, make it all go away. She no longer wanted the responsibility of knowing that something she had only the barest intuitive grasp on might save the city.

  Fuck the city, she thought. Fuck the human race and the Hummer it rode in on. What was she supposed to do, anyway—kill a horde of sea monsters with a blast of radiation from a nuclear scarab? Wipe out a race of ancient intelligent, godlike creatures that had walked the earth before mankind and had now come back to reclaim it after he’d failed as a steward? She wasn’t sure she could, or even should stop it.

  Who was she really helping? Who could she really trust?

  And then she heard a layered siren, like a scream and a whistle rising together. But Django had heard it first and he was off—lunging over the fallen door of the asylum after Rafael before she could tighten her grip on the vanishing leash. She pinned her panicked gaze on Neil’s face long enough to see if he had knowledge of this new turn, but he looked as bewildered as she felt.

  Heart pounding, she turned to run, but he grabbed her by the wrist.

  * * *

  Rafael held the ruby in his fist. It was such a small thing, but it seemed to hum with power, charging the air around him and making his body buzz from his dreadlocks to his toenails. Something was uncoiling in the impossible depths of the basin, surfacing. His consciousness was also surfacing at the prompting of the dog by his side, nudging him, whimpering.

  A human hand splashed out of the water and grabbed his wrist, jerking him toward
the bath. He had time to think that the concrete bowl was too shallow, the pedestal too narrow to hold a man. Then the Ju-Jitsu he’d learned as a child kicked in, and he pressed the thumb of his left hand into the webbing between thumb and forefinger of the dripping gray hand and twisted his wrist out of its grasp while squeezing the pressure point. The fingers unclenched, but before he could step back a bouquet of tentacles lashed out of the water with astonishing speed and twined around the back of his head, wrenching him forward. He felt his ribs crack as his chest slammed into the concrete, and then his head was submerged, screaming bubbles, inhaling foul water, drowning.

  He could dimly hear the frantic barking of the dog, then felt its teeth pulling at the leg of his jeans, ripping the fabric, and pulling him back in a tug-o-war against the muscular grip of the tentacles. But Django wasn’t strong enough, was losing, and Rafael’s eyes were locked on the chittering beak of a beast that could not exist; and the dimming of his consciousness as his brain cells were starved of oxygen was a mercy, but the searing in his lungs as capillaries burst was an anguish beyond any pain he had ever known.

  The dog let go of his leg, and his face lurched toward that horrid orifice where a black tongue rolled and uncoiled into his own mouth, filling him with rot and revulsion, making him bite down and push away from the birdbath with his left hand. In his right, he still gripped the stone, determined to the last not to drop it, and then he felt the paws on his back: Django climbing and launching over him. The tentacles released him and thrashed like dying snakes in the dog’s jaws.

  Black blood in the water.

  Black novas blooming in his head, like what Becca said she saw in the sky. Sweet Becca, whom he would die for…and he was doing it right now.

  * * *

  Becca struggled to break free of Neil’s grip, anger rising and flushing her face. “Let me go!” To her surprise he did, and she stumbled and fell on her ass on the grassy slope.

  She scrambled to her feet and started to run toward the courtyard, but the sounds rising around her came into focus and slowed her step. The rising whistle and scream had ceased or been masked by Django’s frantic barking, the drone of a helicopter, and tires screeching as cars she couldn’t see raced to the front gate.

  Neil was yelling at her to come back, to get in the car or they’d catch her, and he was right. Damn him, he was right, but she had to help Raf, had to see if he was hurt, had to know he was okay.

  “You can’t reach him now. If you want to get out of here you have to get in the car. Get in the car, Becca, or you can’t help anyone.”

  She wanted to run to the courtyard. Every instinct in her was screaming for her to do it, but she knew he was right. They’d grab her before she got there and throw her into a car or a helicopter, and that would be the end of it. They’d take the journal and the scarab, and….

  “The stone,” she said, “they’ll take the stone.”

  “It’s too late. Get in the car. Maybe Brooks can get it from inside SPECTRA, but you have to come now. I can’t be seen here, Becca, and neither can Nina.”

  She saw real desperation in his eyes. Enough to make her finally believe him. He was here to keep her free, to make up for his mistake.

  But Rafael and Django….

  She took a step toward the car and felt like a coward, felt like she was abandoning the first person she’d ever loved who hadn’t abandoned her.

  Black smoke streamed into the courtyard from the orb, twisting in the air on whatever ethereal currents it responded to, but not stirring or scattering at all in the turbulence of the helicopter landing in the courtyard. Who had sent SPECTRA here if not Brooks? Who else could monitor the sky? Were they still using witnesses for it or had all of those people been “cured”? She couldn’t leave Raf, but she couldn’t spend the equinox in a cell either. What good was the little bit of hard-won knowledge and power she possessed if she was locked away by a cult-infiltrated covert agency?

  Neil was already climbing into the front passenger seat. Nina’s sharp eyes stared out of the driver’s side mirror. As soon as he closed his door, they would be gone.

  Becca ran down the hill, pulled the rear door open, and threw herself onto the leather bench seat. The car started to move before she could get a grip on the door handle to close it, her army bag still dangling in the gap. The door bobbed against the bag strap as she pulled it in, and then she saw Django bounding down the slope toward the street.

  “Stop!” she shouted at Nina, but the car kept rolling, picking up speed.

  “Stop, it’s my dog!”

  Django ran after the car. Nina hit the brake and Becca fell into the foot well. She kicked the swinging door open and Django jumped into the car, tail swishing and smacking back and forth between the seats. Becca pulled herself up and pulled the door shut as the car accelerated. Django toppled onto her as Nina took a hard turn. And then they were cruising down the hill under the pulsing yellow light of the streetlamps, Becca stroking Django’s fur, which was wet and brackish, but he didn’t shake off in the car, only whimpered and rubbed his cold, damp nose into the palm of her hand.

  The dog opened his mouth and dropped a gobbet of blood…no, a gleaming red gem into the palm of her hand.

  Chapter 23

  The night sky churned in a roiling black vortex above the granite obelisk on the crown of Breed’s Hill. The monument, two hundred and twenty-one feet of towering white stone, was lit by stands of high-powered halogen lights around the base, like radiant, upturned trees. Six black-robed figures climbed the hill unseen at 3 AM and gathered at the spiked iron fence around the base of the obelisk. The trees bordering the hill were mostly barren, their leaves scattered on ground which had two-and-a-half centuries ago absorbed the blood of the fallen at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

  A mound of overturned dirt marked a spot not far from the top of the hill where the earth had been broken with a small spade, now cast aside on the grass, clods of dirt still clinging to the blade. The cloaked assembly paused to gaze at the small hole as they passed. Beyond the statue of William Prescott brandishing a sword, the city stretched: towers throwing light at the low cloud cover, the darker thunderheads sweeping inland with lightning in their hearts, and the white cables of the Zakim Bridge fanning down from arches tipped with obelisks that echoed the monument.

  The houses surrounding the hill were dark and quiet at this deep hour, the gray façade of Charlestown High School across the street from the monument as lifeless as a mausoleum. But the squat stone lodge adjacent to the obelisk, its entrance adorned with Ionic pillars, its flat roof topped with banks of upturned lights, was occupied.

  The brethren had assembled at the appointed time, less than an hour before the equinox. One of the six now knocked on the iron door: 1-3-1. The door swung open and Cyril ushered them in. Beyond him, beneath a marble statue of Joseph Warren flanked with flags, lay a National Park Services ranger: a ginger-haired young man in a gray-and-green uniform, curled in a fetal position, his wrists and ankles bound in black duct tape, his eyes wide above a gag of the same.

  “He’s here,” Cyril said, his eyes alight with boyish glee as he led the brothers and sisters into the echoing, candle-lit chamber and closed the door behind them. “Darius has come back to us, and he’s…look, he’s magnificent.” He waved his hand at a cloaked shape huddled in the corner, a shape crowned with undulating appendages where its head should have been, a shape which cast a shadow-dance of writhing gray snakes across the pale wall, white Doric pillars, and marble wainscoting.

  The figure rose, and the crawling shadows retracted and resolved into the shape of a man.

  A wooden box with brass bands and hinges lay on the floor amid crumbs of dirt. Cold purple light seeped from the cracks in its rotting lid and ill-fitting joints.

  * * *

  “He’s here.” Neil held the curtain aside with a finger. They were at Nina’s brownstone, Becca sitting on the couch nursing a cup of hot tea that was doing more to warm her hands than her bel
ly, Django curled at her feet, and Nina leaning against the island counter in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette to calm her nerves.

  Becca got up, pulled her coat on, picked up her army bag, and walked to the head of the stairs, Django at her heels. Nina extinguished her cigarette under a thin stream of water from the tap, and stepped around to touch Becca’s arm. “Good luck,” she said, obviously self-conscious about the whole situation.

  Becca knew that the number of boundaries they had breached in the past few hours was staggering. After eighteen months of professional distance, here she was in her shrink’s kitchen, about to get in a car with the woman’s ex-husband to fulfill a quest that should have them all committed for schizophrenic hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. It felt weird on a grand scale, but it somehow felt weirder to be wished luck by the one person who knew best just how unequipped she was to save anyone, including herself.

  Nina seemed to sense Becca’s fear and the source of it: not the tangible darkness out there in the night, but the personal darkness inside that made her feel too weak to make a difference. The therapist straightened her posture, drew a deep breath, and patted the collar of Becca’s coat. Becca felt herself straightening her own spine as their eyes met.

  “Whatever it is you have to do tonight, just remember that you were meant to do it,” Nina said. “You’re here because of how you see the world, and you’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

  Becca looked at Neil. He looked as terrified as she felt.

  “See you later, kiddo,” he said with a bloodless smile.

  She nodded and hurried down the stairs, Django shadowing her out the door and into the back seat of the idling black car.

  Brooks met her eyes in the rear view mirror. “How you feeling? Ready?”

  Becca dipped a finger under the neckline of her shirt, found the chain, and pulled the scarab out. It gleamed in the glow of the dome light, the red gem, the Fire of Cairo, restored in the round bezel between the beetle’s pincers. “Yeah,” she said, “ready.” She closed the door, the light went out, and the car pulled away.