He brought his knee up and kicked her away. For a dizzying moment she teetered on the brink of the void, then regained her balance. She lunged forward, stabbing at him, and he rolled away from the blade, fumbling in his robe for his own weapon.
Becca kicked the tripod and watched the brass legs clatter down the shaft, but the dark crystal didn’t go with it; instead it hovered above the chasm, suspended by the beams it cast through the rods in the windows.
Darius had drawn his dagger—a long, curved, obsidian blade etched with runes. He took a deep breath and on the outflow morphed fully into his nightside form, the tentacles sprouting again, one of them gushing black fluid, the fingers gripping the dagger hilt springing yellow talons. Then, relishing the hunt and seeming to drink in the hot waves of primal fear she radiated as her last vestiges of sanity crumbled, he stalked her around the circle.
The knife fell from Becca’s trembling hand.
Tentacles sprang from the creature’s shoulders. In an instant two had coiled around Becca’s legs, wrenching her into the air, swinging her around, and dangling her over the black hole beside the hovering stone. She forced her gaze from its dark radiance, following one of the beams through a window to the sky beyond. She sensed some seismic shift in the colossal clouds that had gathered around the monument, could imagine how the violet light reflected upward from the tips of the rods was feeding the black sun at the heart of the vortex, the tumorous portal between worlds dilating like an eye; and she felt every inch of the white obelisk bathing in the negative photons raining from that malevolent pole star.
The scarab dangled in her hair from the chain around her neck. The chain slipped, almost caught in her lips, then grazed her nose and fell away. She watched in horror as the talisman vanished down the tunnel, a glint of gold like a falling star consumed by shadow.
Without thinking she moaned the syllables that were already on her lips, calling after the talisman down the echoing shaft.
“Yehi Aour!”
For a terrifying, brief eternity nothing happened. Then a red flame shone, a burning coal in the well below her. The blood had rushed to her head, and she was imagining how it would burst like a paint balloon when the Marlowe-creature dropped her all two hundred feet. But then the beetle buzzed past her in a redgold flash, mechanical wings fluttering, the Fire of Cairo blazing in its pincers, blinding the creature, sending it flailing backward and pulling her up out of the hole. The tentacles uncoiled and dissolved in the corrosive light, and, free of them, Becca fell, caught the edge of the well with her fingers.
The scarab hovered in the air at the center of the room, shedding its dazzling light, filling the chamber with a blinding, white, arctic noon. The other gem, the dirty thing with the dark light, the inverse light of an alien hell, was blasted to shards, blown through the windows. In the aftershock of the white flare, the rays from the scarab blazed redgold, streamed to the four quarters through the brass rods in the windows, reflected up at the apex of the obelisk, and pierced the nucleus of Azothoth, the writhing black orb at the heart of the whirling cloud.
Dangling from the lip of the chasm, Becca shed a tear at the brightness and beauty of it.
Gunshots compressed the air in the chamber, and she almost let go.
Marlowe jerked back and rolled along the wall, leaving a smear of inky blood in his wake before toppling into the shaft. The body, which had resolved back into wiry human form, bumped against Becca on the way down. She let out a cry as she swung to the side, shifting her weight as best she could without letting go. Seconds later she heard the distant thunder and splash when Marlowe hit the metal lid at the bottom, and then Brooks had seized her wrist and was pulling her up, the scarab still floating between them, flooding the room with light, blasting everything into stark contrast.
Becca got her knee up onto the floor and rolled away from the hole, which had terrified her more than the creature. She shuffled her feet, sliding on her butt until her back was against the wall. The light was fading now, as if it were being absorbed into the red gem. Fading and dimming to an orange glow that reminded her so much of steel in a forge that she almost flinched when the beetle fluttered toward her and dropped into her upturned hand. But it was cool to the touch.
The chamber fell into shadow again as the fire in the ruby faded.
Brooks slid down the wall to sit beside her in the dark at the top of the white stone spire as the first faint suggestion of a sunrise touched the sky on the morning of September 23rd.
Chapter 24
What had begun for Becca Philips with a burial, ended with a scattering of ashes.
In the days following the events at the monument, she returned to her warehouse loft and spent most of her time napping with Django, in bed or on the futon. SPECTRA had returned her computer equipment, but she had no desire to look at photos. It was weeks before she had any inclination to pick up a camera.
She had sat for a short debriefing at Government Center on September 23rd; short because Brooks made them stop and release her when it became obvious to him that the questions were causing her too much anxiety. She was sleep-deprived and hungry and didn’t understand what had happened to her, he argued. To her surprise and relief, they listened to him. She caught a look in his eyes that told her he was equally surprised. Hero, he kept calling her, and they either believed him or had reason to fear publicity problems, because as they put her in a cab, they told her she would have to come back in a few days for another interview, but that call never came.
When she finally picked up her camera again, it was to revisit the abandoned buildings and out-of-service train tunnels that Rafael had emblazoned with his graffiti art. He had never found a conventional niche at the Museum School, and these crumbling, moldy walls had remained the canvas he was most comfortable with. Becca felt it was her duty to preserve them in her own way. She didn’t bring the IR modified Nikon, but rather a normal digital SLR to capture his work in all of its shocking color.
It turned out to be a bigger job than she first anticipated because she felt compelled to shoot each mural from multiple angles, with close ups and panoramic shots, and in as many different states of light as she could manage. Most of the buildings had sections of collapsed roofing where sunlight or moonlight could find a way through. She also took to carrying high-powered, portable lighting, fitting Django with a set of saddlebags to help ease the burden of gear. The two of them would sit in dank places, eating a picnic lunch and waiting for clouds to shift.
There were fewer clouds over Boston in those first weeks of November, which was odd for the month but seemed to feel right to everyone on the street. Like a cleansing after long suffering. Whether those crisp, sunny days had been bought by sacrifice or were a gift of grace, only a few people knew. And none more than her.
And so she waited for clouds. Waited for them to cover the sun and smooth the sharp highlights on the painted bricks. Waited for them to pass through her heart. But they never did.
The new photos eventually forced her back to the computer and back to her archives. Her journal of the expeditions she had taken with Rafael didn’t provide enough information to pinpoint the weather and time of day when he had painted many of his pieces, and she wanted to photograph each in the closest approximation of the light he had seen as she could manage. The photos she had taken of him working helped her to puzzle it out, and the project occupied her mind and hands and kept her from thinking too much about what might lie behind the walls, or the sky.
Some nights she woke in the deep hours with the fierce imperative burning in her mind that she should destroy every infrared photo she had taken during the crisis and triple-wipe the hard drives. But she couldn’t erase her own memory, so why bother with the computer’s? Even the thought of letting the cursor arrow hover over those folders chilled her. What if she was tempted to open one? What if she opened them all? And what if she saw things in those photos that she hadn’t seen before?
As winter came on with the first f
lurries, she wore the beetle always and everywhere. Sleeping. Showering. And it troubled her that now, after the monsters had been banished, she was more afraid of them than she had been during that season when they had walked the streets of the city. But there hadn’t been time for fear then, and things you could see would always be less dreadful than those you couldn’t.
She haunted the abandoned places through November, until she could no longer deny that she had all the photos she was going to get and was only lingering to feel close to him, and then she realized how little was left for her in Boston. The prospect of trying to hold her sanity together long enough to finish her degree while her peers—people who listened to Emo and hadn’t lived through hell on earth—critiqued her work…there wasn’t enough Klonopin in the world to get her through that.
She hadn’t seen Nina since the equinox, either. Every time she scrolled past the name in the contacts list on her phone, she felt weird. The relationship had changed, and there was no going back.
By Thanksgiving she was thinking of getting away for a while, and then Brooks called and gave her the excuse she needed and the destination to go with it.
“How would you like to do a job for me? It includes airfare to a sunnier clime.”
“Is this a SPECTRA gig?”
“Sort of.” He paused. “I’ll understand if it would be upsetting for you, but…I figured it might give you a chance to do something you’d want to do anyway. Also, way I see it, we kind of owe it to you.”
“Okay, out with it already.”
“We’ve been back and forth with Rafael’s mother, Estela, in Brazil. Apparently he once told her that he wanted to be cremated. She was against it, would have preferred burial, but not enough to refuse his wishes. The US government is treating him like a fallen hero of a covert war, and we’ve offered to take care of the cremation here in Boston. We would have flown her up for it, but she doesn’t want to come. She only asks that his ashes be taken to Brazil so she can scatter them where he wanted. I’m not trusting an airline with this, and I’m sure as hell not handing it off to FedEx. I thought maybe you could deliver him personally.”
She couldn’t speak for a good minute after that, but the sniffling must have kept Brooks on the line, let him know she hadn’t hung up on him. Finally, she said yes, she would go, if he would take care of her dog while she was away. He told her it was a deal.
* * *
Becca didn’t know how to talk to Rafael’s mother on the phone. Even after all that she had been through, the thought of telling a woman she’d never met that she was responsible for her son’s death terrified her more than anything. She hated phones. Having a conversation about anything of significance without eye contact, facial cues, body language…it unnerved her and always had. She could have turned down Brooks’ offer, could have stayed out of it entirely, but she knew she needed to go. Not just to be there when the ashes were scattered, but to face Rafael’s family, to own up to her role in his death and try to explain what he had died for, if that was at all possible, which she doubted. They would likely send her away, cursing and screaming at the Insane American, the art-school slut who must be a delusional drug addict. And she was loath to admit it, but she actually felt better knowing that Brooks had her back. Estela had been in communication with SPECTRA, had already heard some version of the story that lauded Rafael as the hero he was, and had processed it. The woman knew that a friend of Rafael would be sent by the US Government to deliver the urn, and Becca hoped that counted for something.
So she was grateful for the opportunity, but when she met Brooks at the crematorium in Andover, she found that she had little to say to him. Small talk seemed impossible after what they’d been through, and any talk in the presence of Rafael’s body would have been irreverent anyway. She watched the box roll into the flame chamber in silence, and touched the stone in the scarab at her breast while he burned.
In the parking lot Brooks asked her if she wanted to get coffee, and she accepted. At a nearby café, it felt a little less weird that they weren’t discussing Rafael. Becca wrote directions for Django’s care and feeding on a pad she kept in her camera bag, tore the sheet off and handed it to him.
“That’s some dog, you got, Becca. Braver than most people.”
“I think most dogs are,” she said. “They rise to the occasion and put on a tough act no matter what. But yeah, he’s a keeper.”
The silence spun out.
Becca thought about the other occasion they had spent together, in and around a helicopter in Back Bay when the fabric of reality was fraying around them for the first time, and she realized they had nothing normal to talk about whatsoever.
“How’s Tom?” she asked, “That guy in the helicopter you took along for a set of eyes. You keep tabs on him?”
Brooks nodded, fiddled with his watchband. “Yeah, we check up on everybody. He’s good. The drug therapy…Nepenthe, it seems to have worked. None of them remember what they saw, and no one has claimed hallucinations or nightmares in the follow-ups.” He stared at the scarab as he spoke, and she knew he wondered if no one saw anything because of the drug treatment, or because she had banished the darkness with magic she herself still didn’t quite understand.
“He’s uh, he’s going to be a father, Tom. He and his wife are expecting in April. He seems to be looking forward. I’d tell him that you asked after him, but I doubt he’d remember who you are.”
Becca squeezed a lemon wedge into her tea. “Do you think I should have had a dose? They wanted me to, didn’t they?”
Brooks looked out the window. “Yeah, they thought wiping your drive might be a good safety measure.”
“But you intervened.” It wasn’t a question.
He sighed, stared at his car on the street, where the cedar box containing Rafael’s ashes lay in repose behind tinted glass. “When you lose a friend who died a hero, you should get to remember why. Not to mention remembering what you did for everybody.”
“You calling me a hero?”
“Somebody has to. Not like you’re gonna be on CNN.”
“Thank God.”
“Do you ever think you should have had a dose? You ever want to forget?”
“Yes and no. I want to forget a lot of it, but not all of it. If I’m going to be haunted by it at all, I want to understand at least as much as I do. So I guess I’m stuck with it.
“What about the others? Does Tom seem haunted by it at all, even in a vague way?”
“Hard to say. I didn’t know any of these people before they were witnesses, so maybe he was a little off to begin with, right? Lot of people have some depression, or sorrow in their past. I don’t know, I couldn’t say. Not like the world was a perfect place before the monsters broke through.”
* * *
According to Estela Moreno, her son wanted to be scattered at Iguazu Falls, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the New Seven Wonders of the Natural World. Situated deep in the rainforest on the tri-border of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil, the falls were a major tourist attraction with an airport just thirty miles away. SPECTRA offered to fly Becca direct to Foz do Iguaçu International on a private jet, but she politely declined, insisting instead on a flight to the sprawling metropolis of São Paulo, Rafael’s hometown.
She wanted to meet his mother at her home so that the poor woman could decide for herself whether to send her away or invite her on the pilgrimage. It would be a sixteen-hour bus ride from the city to the falls, and that felt right to Becca. Flying in seemed too easy. She wanted a journey. If Estela allowed her to come along, the ride would give them time to get to know each other. And if she were turned away at the door after presenting the cedar box, at least she would leave having seen where he came from.
In the end, her anxiety was unfounded. One look in the woman’s eyes—Rafael’s eyes—told her that she was a welcome guest, and a wish that she had secretly held close was granted in the days that followed when Rafael’s older brother Diego took her on a
tour of his earliest paintings, hidden in alleys and behind the buildings of the dirty city.
Becca photographed them all.
São Paulo was much bigger than Boston, but the paintings made her feel strangely at home. The Frias de Oliveira Bridge reminded her of the Zakim in Boston, and the whole trip started to feel like a dream, as if her waking life, her familiar environs had subtly shifted into a parallel world, in which some things were the same, and some were alien, and even those that were the same were somehow alien, and then the appointed day came when it was time to take the bus to the jungle.
She was grateful for the change.
She had tried to talk to Estela about Rafael’s death, but the language barrier made it difficult, and the woman seemed to need little in the way of explanation. She had understood the word hero and that seemed to be enough. On the third day, while they ate lunch together in the kitchen, she asked Becca, “You love him, meo menino? He love you?”
“Yes,” Becca replied. And that had been enough. Estela took her hand, and squeezed it, and they shared the tears. “We go together,” Estela said. “You, me, and Diego. We go Iguazu together.”
“Thank you. Obrigado.”
* * *
On January 28th snow was falling on Boston, but at Iguazu Falls, summer was just beginning. Becca Philips stood at the edge of a wooden platform overlooking Devil’s Throat, a semi-circle of terraced waterfalls, and the sound of crashing water was a white noise to wash all other echoes from her mind.
Thousands of butterflies, red and black, yellow and blue, dressed in endless variations of markings, hovered around her in the mist, alighted on the railings, and fluttered amid the ash when Estela poured it out into the chasm. For a moment Becca couldn’t tell the difference between ash and mist as he fell.
Red Equinox Page 27
