Red Equinox Read online

  Kephra. No idea. Typical Gran to be dropping obscure references even from the grave. But Becca had no doubt that a search for the name would lead her to some wiki of mythological figures. Her throat thickened as she thought of the countless fairy tales and legends they had read together. Gran had taught her that every object was a story, and Becca had applied the lesson to her own art: if every shard of pottery anyone had ever unearthed could tell a story, then so could every photograph.

  So what was the story of the beetle that had for so long hung around Gran’s neck, and which now hung from her mirror?

  She tilted the mirror toward her. Her reflection betrayed trepidation in her ice-blue eyes, a furrow in her brow she wasn’t awake enough yet to be aware of. It was fear, she knew, now that she saw it written plainly in the glass.

  Mirrors are windows, mirrors are doors.

  Where had she heard that?

  Catherine had been found dead on her bedroom carpet, spilled out of the chair in front of her vanity when the stroke hit.

  Becca touched the metal scarab, lifted it in the crook of her finger for a moment, then let it swing back against the mirror with a sigh. She wasn’t sure if she was ready to wear it yet, knowing that it would always remind her of how she had failed the woman who had been more of a mother to her than her own. Failed to call when the darkness was upon her, and failed to get her ass on a train before it was too late because she’d been absorbed in the perspective-wrecking drama that came with being fucked up about a boy. Josh, who hadn’t even bothered to check and see how she was doing, never mind accompany her to the funeral. True colors, that’s what that was.

  The scarab, released from her hand, rocked on its chain. She caught a glimpse of its reverse side in the mirror and remembered the markings. Yesterday she had done little more than glance at it and hang it where she could contemplate it while she drifted off to sleep. Now she turned it over and ran her thumb across the inscription: finely etched hieroglyphics she couldn’t read. Another mystery. Even the metal was a mystery. It looked too lustrous to be anything less than the purest gold, but there was no karat marking or jeweler’s hallmark to tell.

  She picked up her phone. The thought of going to work at the gallery and falling back into the mundane rhythms of her life felt wrong. It felt like a betrayal of her Gran’s memory to let the world sweep her along without a moment’s contemplation. With a twinge of guilt, she called in sick and was relieved when Glen didn’t pick up. She left a voicemail, then called Rafael and asked him to spot her on a trip to the asylum.

  He was waiting with a hot tea in a Styrofoam cup from a donut shop when she stepped off the Green Line T at Harvard Ave and Commonwealth. She took the cup with a wince when he offered it. “You know this stuff takes like a billion years to break down in a landfill, right?”

  Rafael stuffed his hands in the back pockets of his torn-at-the-knees, paint-encrusted jeans, hunched his shoulders so that the hood of his sweatshirt drooped over his eyes. Even in baggy clothes with shoulders slouched like a reprimanded dog, his toned and wiry physique showed through like titanium tent poles propping up shabby canvas. He’d spent his teens climbing building scaffoldings in San Paulo, emblazoning the city’s back alleys with street art before coming to Boston to attend the Museum school on a scholarship after a vacationing faculty member had seen his work. One city’s graffiti had been another’s entrance exam.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I mean, thanks.” She gave him a peck on the cheek and regretted the gesture as soon as she saw the way it lit up his face, his full lips spreading into a heart-shaped smile that was equal parts surprise and delight.

  He nodded toward the hill. “We goin’ somewhere new in there, or are you shooting stuff you’ve seen before?”

  Becca shrugged, hiked the heavy camera bag higher onto her shoulder.

  “Here,” he said, “Let me. Looks heavy.”

  “I got it. Maybe when we get to the top of the hill.”

  Rafael swung his arms at his sides, then punched his left palm. He had no gear of his own to carry, didn’t need any for a site as familiar as this one. He claimed to have been over every square foot of Allston State Hospital and had proven himself a reliable guide to Becca, who was taking her time, exploring the place methodically, absorbing the site one room at a time.

  Together they walked through a parking lot and onto Brainerd Road, passing the ramshackle three-story apartment houses of the college ghetto—houses that leaned at odd angles, veering off their foundations, cheaply painted by the students who inhabited them, cats slinking nonchalantly around the eaves, ghostly traces of stale beer and pot smoke clinging to the moldy fabric of porch furniture. The natty suburb had an almost feudal geography, the houses becoming steadily more upscale as one ascended the hill, the rundown Victorians giving way to red brick apartment buildings, then to handsome if modest Town Houses and bi-level homes with vinyl siding and flower boxes in the windows.

  Rafael was in better shape, his breathing less labored than Becca’s when the incline grew steep. He shortened his stride to match her pace and took the army bag that held her camera and lenses from her shoulder to no protest this time. Relieved of the weight, and no longer feeling like she was hiking in the White Mountains, she turned and walked backwards for a few paces, taking in the view of the hazy blue buildings and treetops in the distance below. Cities had always looked friendlier to her from above than down in their dirty crevices. She figured that the illusion of cleanliness afforded by distance was a large part of the price tag up here. That, and the fact that higher ground was always the best flood insurance.

  But if the Brainerd Road hill was a fiefdom, then the castle at its peak was that of a mad, syphilis-stricken despot: Allston State Hospital, one of the few insane asylums in the Bay State that hadn’t yet been demolished. The chain-link fence, barbed wire, and much of the plywood boarding up the doors had, however, been demolished long ago by vandals, kids on Halloween dares, and urban explorers like Becca and Rafael. The police patrolled the area frequently enough to keep junkies and vagrants from taking up permanent residence, but there was no sign of a cruiser on the tree-lined street today as they ducked through a gap in the twisted fence.

  The long, dry grass was parted and worn to a bald dirt trail by the frequent trespassers who had for years been treading on parts of the grounds the long-ago inmates would never have been granted access to.

  Becca shielded her eyes with her hand and assessed the sky. The mid-day sun, diffused by a cover of stratus clouds, cast a gentle silver glow over the abandoned institution. She took her camera from the bag and switched it on.

  “I checked out your web page,” Rafael said.

  “Yeah? What’d you think?”

  “Pretty legal.”

  “Legal?”

  “Yeah, you know: cool. Hey, how you get that effect? Is it Photoshop, how everything kind of glows?”

  “Nope. It’s in the picture when I take it.”

  “Really?”

  She held up her Nikon. “This is modified. I removed the standard hot-mirror filter inside and replaced it with an IR filter.”

  “IR?”

  “Infrared. People used to use special infrared film in cameras to get the same effect, but it was tricky. Infrared film is so sensitive to light that you have to process it in total darkness.” She saw the glazed look in his eyes and remembered he wasn’t a photo geek. He just wanted to know why the shots looked ghostly. “Infrared light is just a different set of frequencies.”

  “Come again?”

  “Regular photography is like listening to music through earplugs. All you hear is bass. When I took that filter out of my camera, it was like taking the plugs out of my ears so I can get the higher frequencies, you follow?”

  He grinned. Now she was speaking his language.

  “Did you notice that not everything has that white glow?”

  Poor guy. Only wanted to compliment her work after glancing at her online portfolio and now he
was being quizzed on it. She wished she knew how to talk to normal people. A cool girl would undoubtedly say something mysterious about capturing the spirit of things and leave it at that. “The plants were the things that glowed the most, right?” she prodded him.

  “Yeah.” He looked relieved. “The weeds and shit.”

  She laughed. “That’s because green things emit a lot of IR frequencies.”

  “Hey…I should take you to the arboretum sometime where everything is green. You’ll get crazy shots!”

  Becca nodded and decided not to tell him that the beauty was all in the contrast, that the weeds and vines among the dead gray concrete and plaster were the music she listened for with those earplugs out, not just a lot of cymbals crashing from every tree in the forest. She wasn’t looking for a date, but it was good to have a friend, and if she was being honest, it was especially good to have a friend who wasn’t afraid to go tunnel hacking and rappelling down the walls of derelict factories and mental hospitals to get to the cool parts. “Maybe,” she said.

  The asylum loomed over the hedge-bounded field, an imposing red-brick building topped with six gables and a domed copper cupola turned green from the weather. The windows were tall banks of small squares, and while most of those on the ground floor had been boarded up, there were some with rounded tops that were a poor fit for the straight-edged boards hastily thrown up by a demolition crew that would someday return with a wrecking ball. Through these exposed panes, rocks had been thrown and vines had grown, creeping into the dank, moldy interior of the place. On her last visit, Becca had shot a series she was quite proud of in which spirals of rampant ivy wove around the metal frames of the rotting hospital beds like leather restraints. In the photos, the vines resembled radiant silver chains.

  With a glance at the second-story windows of the nearest house, Rafael swept aside a tangle of dead brush to reveal their tried-and-true entrance. Becca pulled the elastic strap of a headlamp over her hair, switched it on, and climbed through.

  Inside, a long corridor stretched out around them in two directions, dappled with weak sunlight, the floor littered with clods of fallen plaster and flakes of peeled paint the size of autumn leaves. The walls seemed to be molting, and the acidic scent of bat guano hung in the cloying air. To the right, at the end of the hall, a tiled spiral stairway led to the second floor. To the left, a high doorframe opened onto the wards where Becca had shot the vine-bound beds. Rafael had covered the walls of one of the better-lit rooms on this wing with floor-to-ceiling murals: surreal mash-ups of graffiti and fine art.

  Today Becca felt ready to begin exploring the second floor, and touching the scarab where it hung in her cleavage just below the neckline of her tank top, she nodded toward the stairs, her beam bouncing forward and back.

  “You want to go up?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Rafael took a high-powered LED flashlight from his pocket and twisted it on. He aimed the beam at his own face from below in a clichéd parody of a ghoul, and Becca laughed at the halo of dreadlock shadows blasted onto the wall behind him.

  “What’s with the shit-eating grin?”

  “Nothin’.” He swung the light onto the floor where water-stained papers lay splayed among crushed beer cans and dirty scraps of tin foil—the only garbage the rats and feral cats hadn’t eaten. “I just thought of something you’ll like.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “On the second floor?”

  “Yeah, you’ll like it.”

  “Okay….” She drew out the word, infusing it with uncertain trust. Then, catching a whiff of the air, she remembered another way to explain light to him. “Wait a sec. Wanna see something cool?”

  “Always.”

  “Turn off your flashlight.”

  He did, and Becca clicked a switch on her headlamp. The white LED spotlight vanished from her crown, replaced by a wide flood of purple ambiance. On the wall, neon splashes and drips appeared.

  “It’s urine,” she said. “This is UV light. Ultraviolet, okay? Well, visible light—everything you can see with the naked eye—is sort of in the middle of the spectrum with infrared on one side, and ultraviolet on the other. Sort of like bookends.”

  He was smiling, his teeth glowing an unnatural shade of violet. Probably because the big piss revelation was always a hit with the boys. She continued under the assumption that he was actually listening. “Biological things emit some interesting frequencies in those two ranges. So just like how the plants glow in IR, bodily fluids do sort of the same thing in UV. But to me, the really cool thing to ponder is how all of those frequencies are part of one great big wave spectrum. Everything from the subsonic sounds that elephants send through the ground to communicate over distances, up to the ultrasonic songs of dolphins and whales, and then beyond that into where the waves stop being sound and start being light, and then into light we can’t usually see, like UV, then microwaves, gamma rays…. Even matter is just energy vibrating in waves.”

  He uttered a nervous laugh. “Sorry, you lost me again. You’re talking over my head.”

  “Maybe I’m just not articulating it well. You’d get it with a little time to process it.”

  “Process it. Photo joke?”

  Now she laughed. “Not intentional.” She took a UV marker from her camera bag and wrote on the wall: RAF & BECCA WERE HERE. The letters blazed brighter than the piss stains.

  She clicked her headlamp back to white and the message disappeared.

  “Whoa, invisible ink.” Rafael’s eyes and teeth were wide, but no longer violet.

  “Cool, huh? Okay, up we go. Lead the way,” she said with a wave of her hand, preferring him in front not just because he was strong and able to handle any squatters they might encounter, but because she knew that (gentleman or not) she could count on Rafael to stare at her ass on a staircase. She’d been told it was one of her finer features.

  The twin light beams bobbed up the cavernous walls of the winding stairwell, their footsteps echoing back to them from the tiles. At the top they came to a large room, empty of all furniture except for a rotting upright piano in the corner, an abandoned wheelchair parked at the yellowing keyboard. The vast space reminded Becca of her warehouse apartment. Together, they crossed the room at a pace that felt slower than it was due to the sheer size of what could have been a ballroom but was probably a rec room for the vegetables. Passing under an arch at the far end, they found themselves in a corridor of rusted metal doors with sliding panels at eye height. Some of the doors hung open on their hinges; others were closed, possibly still locked. No light reached the hall from the open doors and peep slots, telling her that these were windowless cells. Shining her headlamp into the cells as they passed, she caught glimpses of stains and hash marks on the walls, clumps of stiff bed sheets and muddy rags.

  On the cracked wall of one cell, a single line of graffiti stood out for its lack of style. Unlike the ubiquitous tags rendered in metallic spray paint, this one appeared to have been left by a patient rather than a vandal, scrawled in thick black crayon: DEAD BUT DREAMING.

  Becca stared at it, chilled by the possibility that it might be the only remaining record of her grandfather’s residence here. Rafael, bemused, gave her a minute to stare, then prodded her on. “C’mon, it’s right up here in the next room.”

  Prying her gaze from the graffiti, she noticed natural light spilling into the end of the hall as a cloud shifted outside.

  The last room on the right was a green-tiled chamber with some oddities that Becca didn’t notice until the exhilaration of the main feature had subsided. The hospital staff wouldn’t have considered it a feature, but she felt a surge of affection for Rafael for knowing that she would. On the far wall, where a tall window overlooked the inner courtyard, a tree had crashed through the glass, scattering shards on the dusty floor. Branches still bearing leaves reached into the room like the fingers of a giant trying to seize a sleeper from the bed on the left wall.
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  Noticing the bed, Becca saw that it was bracketed to the floor. The mattress had been pulped by vandals and rats, but the leather restraints on the side rails were still in good shape. She reappraised the room, finding common purpose in the buckles and straps, the row of three-foot-high electrical outlets, barren shelves which would once have housed equipment, and—among paint flakes scattered on the floor like scales sloughed off of some reptile—a rubber mouth guard with a phallic handle, and a grimy, wrinkled tube of conductive gel.

  “Whoa. They did ECT here,” she said, raising the camera to her eye and framing a shot.

  Rafael put his knuckles to his temples and convulsed with a little jump, reminding her of the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. He accompanied the charade with a loud bzzt! Becca ignored him and moved around the bed, clicking away, capturing the juxtaposition of what might well have been a lightning-struck tree crashing into the electroshock treatment room, and knowing that in infrared the glow of the leaves would infuse all of this darkness and decay with an ethereal light.

  Leaning in, kneeling, shooting, oblivious to the filth on the knees of her pants and the palms of her hands, she felt the sadness of the place getting under her skin. When at last she glanced up from the viewfinder, Rafael had left the room. She felt a flutter of fear at his absence.

  Although most of the equipment had been removed from the room, there was an old-fashioned telephone handset mounted to the wall. It blazed at her in shocking red through the drab, dusty grays of the room. Had it been an emergency line? She snapped a few shots of it, becoming increasingly, irrationally certain that it would jump to life with a jarring jangle at any moment just to freak her the fuck out. And who would be on the other end if she answered? Her long-dead Grandpa who had lived out his last days in this place? Her recently deceased Gran, who had exposed her husband to certain facts about the nature of reality he had never recovered from?