Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Read online

  Staring into the fire, Becca said, “Why would he go looking for the sort of trouble he ran away from? The stuff my grandmother was into…he wanted nothing to do with it.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll tell you if we find anything. If you care.”

  The dragonfly was perched on the arm of Becca’s chair, as if sleeping. It really was a fascinating piece of machinery; so intricate. She ran a fingertip between its aluminum lace wings, stroking it from head to tail, then picked it up and offered it to Brooks.

  “We have a few fragments of info to get us started, so it’s not like it’s hopeless. The most promising stuff is from the journals of Maurice Ramirez. He visited the house about a decade ago.”

  “Moe was involved in this, too?”

  Brooks nodded.

  “His stuff is always hard to decipher, but the geeks are working on it. He was a little more coherent before you met him.”

  Moe Ramirez had been a homeless occultist living in an abandoned textile mill by the Charles River when Becca met him in 2019. Ranting about the apocalypse, writing on the walls, and performing banishing rituals with a Burger King crown on his head. It still seemed strange that the government considered him a reputable authority on the nature of reality, but then he had been right about that apocalypse.

  “I wonder if my dad ever met him.”

  “Dunno. Didn’t you think Ramirez might have been a student of your grandmother at one point?”

  Becca shrugged. “Just a hunch. They studied a lot of the same rare books.”

  “I could check Miskatonic’s records, if you’re curious.”

  “I’m more curious about what my father was looking for in that house.”

  “I have a theory,” Brooks said, dropping his phone back into his pocket but not taking the dragonfly from Becca.

  She raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “You,” he said.

  She closed her fingers around the tiny drone.

  Chapter 2

  The SPECTRA jet touched down at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Massachusetts, a short drive from Concord, where the Wade House was located. Becca had dressed for Boston winter before boarding the plane, but it still came as a shock and she found herself rubbing her arms through her army jacket as she descended the steps to the tarmac. The sky was a shade of dirty pewter and the wind whipped her hair. Brooks led her to a black Ford sedan waiting nearby. An attendant put their bags in the trunk. Brooks opened the passenger door for Becca, followed by the rear door for the dog. As he settled into his own seat and turned the key in the ignition, he pointed at the digital temperature gauge on the dashboard. “Hey look: it’s 48. Unseasonably warm.”

  “Sure as hell doesn’t feel like it,” Becca said. She tucked her chin into the upturned collar of her jacket and pulled the zipper up to her nose. Django, still zonked out on Benadryl to take the edge off of flying, was already falling asleep in the backseat.

  “That’s because it was summer where you came from. You’ve had your share of Boston winters; for January, this is nice.”

  By the time they hit the highway, Becca’s face emerged from her jacket like a turtle from its shell and Brooks turned down the blasting heat. She saw him reach for the radio and change his mind. Maybe he was remembering the Tool t-shirt she’d been wearing on the day they’d met, the day SPECTRA abducted her with a black helicopter and a bag over her head. Maybe he was familiar with her entire music collection from the days the agency had spent sifting through her computers, and knew he would be unlikely to find anything on the radio to satisfy her. She stared out the window at melting snow banks dusted with diesel soot, barren gray tree limbs flashing by.

  “I shouldn’t have come back,” she said.

  “Why is that?”

  “I thought I might be over it. I’m not.”

  “Over what? Rafael’s death?”

  She cast a withering glance at him. “How could I get over that? I was talking about Seasonal Affective Disorder. It was strange breaking the cycle; living in the southern hemisphere when my body said it should be winter. I felt pretty level the whole time I was there. I still had bad days, but it wasn’t like the drowning feeling I always had in Boston or Arkham for half the year.”

  “But there was nothing to test you down there. Why would you think you were over it?”

  Becca drew a rayed sun in the condensation on the window with her finger. “This will sound crazy, but everything that happened that fall was crazy. I thought maybe the scarab, once it had the ruby in its pinchers again…I thought maybe…maybe it healed me. But just looking at this place, I know it didn’t.”

  “There’s no reason you can’t go back to Brazil after this job. They’ll fly you back if that’s what you want. Your bank account will be replenished. You can get on with living the good life.”

  “You know much about my bank account, Brooks?”

  “I wish you’d call me Jason.”

  “Have you been keeping tabs on me this whole time, Jason?”

  “I worried about you.”

  “You needn’t have. My share from the sale of my grandmother’s house goes a long way in a place like Brazil. And I’m starting to sell photos.”

  “Yeah? That’s great. Who to?”

  “You sure you don’t already know?”

  He kept his thumbs hooked on the steering wheel but splayed his fingers and bobbed his head toward them. “I wouldn’t ask if I knew.”

  “Nature conservation groups, rare butterfly and bird enthusiasts. I’m trying to break into nature magazines.”

  “Butterfly enthusiasts?”

  “Yeah. Who knew, right? There are people who don’t want to visit a location until I’ve scouted it out and sent photographic proof that it hosts the species they’re looking for.”

  “So what’s the coolest butterfly you’ve photographed?”

  “You know a lot about butterflies, Brooks?”

  “Jason.”

  “My favorite was the Blue Morpho, but it’s not rare. You ever seen one?”

  “I don’t know. What’s it look like?”

  “The undersides of the wings are mottled brown and gray, like foliage with circles that look like owl eyes, to keep predators away. When the wings are folded up, that’s what you see. But when it’s flying, the other side is this brilliant shade of metallic blue. Flying, it looks like it’s flickering in and out of existence between camouflage and that blue radiance.”

  “Sounds cool.”

  “I learned a bit about them, and apparently their eyes are really good at detecting UV light. They reminded me a little bit of myself. Reading about them, I could almost believe that the things we saw in Boston were part of the natural world, the natural order, not signs of some malignant chaos underlying everything.”

  “Back up a sec. Why did the butterfly remind you of yourself?”

  “Wishful thinking, I guess. They look blue, right? But they’re not, not really. The blue color isn’t pigmentation. It’s just iridescence from the angle of the scales on their wings. They’re just really good at reflecting blue light. It got me thinking, hoping, that maybe my own blues are like that, that maybe depression isn’t something that was tattooed onto me when I was a kid. Maybe it has more to do with my environment, or the angle of the light.”

  Brooks nodded. “Maybe you’re right.” He flipped the blinker for the Concord exit. “This is us.”

  * * *

  Becca saw the black snowflakes swirling in the sky before the car took the bend at the base of the hill. She pressed her finger to the windshield and the condensation around it melted, but the flakes on the outside didn’t. Soon they were accumulating. “Aren’t you gonna turn on the wipers?”

  “Nah. We’ll be there in a minute. The wipers just smear that shit around like ink.”

  They turned onto a gravel road that wound up a terraced hill surrounded by threadbare woods. The ground appeared to be covered with a dusting of ash, in some places heaped in piles. The flakes swirl
ed in eddies as the car passed.

  The base of the hill was wrapped in a 10-foot electrified fence topped with razor wire. Brooks took a holographic card from a clip on the visor, rolled the window down as the car rolled up to a guard booth, and passed the card to an armed security officer in gray fatigues with a SPECTRA shoulder patch. The guard examined the card, tilting it this way and that and briefly holding it under a UV light before passing it back. He pressed his thumb onto a fingerprint reader and set the motorized gate trundling open on side-rolling wheels. Becca noticed an assault rifle propped in the corner of the booth as they passed. A second guard, with a matching rifle, was stationed under a rain shelter inside the gate.

  Climbing the hill, the first structure to rise from the blackened landscape was a large corrugated Quonset hut.

  “What’s that?” Becca asked.

  “We call it ‘Base Camp.’”

  “Wow. Do I get a Sherpa to carry my stuff?”

  “No, but you get your own bedroom in the mansion.”

  “We’re not sleeping in the hut?”

  “The hut is where you’ll be briefed on the mission. It houses our support staff.”

  “The house isn’t big enough for them too?”

  “Oh, it’s big enough. Take a look.”

  The day had grown warmer, the shrouded silver sun drawing a curtain of mist from the marshy ground, but gazing up the slope at the Wade House, Becca felt cold even in the heated car. It loomed out of the fog like the prow of a black ship, and for a moment she felt as if she were in a lifeboat on a limitless sea, falling under the baleful shadow of a vessel that promised no shelter, only menace and terrors to make those of the deep a preferable refuge.

  “We’re sleeping in that?”

  Brooks didn’t answer.

  As they moved through the mist and came nearer to the structure, the impression of a ship passed and the house seemed to shift, as if turning to admire itself in a mirror from a different angle. Even though she knew it was the car that was turning, Becca stopped breathing for a second, sure that something grotesque would be revealed as the details emerged: the mossy foundation stones and the weathered textures of scalloped shingles, the ornate lace of the trim skirting the sloping Mansard roof and towering turrets. She felt certain she was watching a living, breathing thing that had not been built but had grown like a tumor from the earth, and now, having attained a dark sentience, was straining to mimic the shape of a house.

  It made her head ache to look at it. Regaining her breath, she looked away and focused on the gleaming metallic siding of the Quonset hut and the cars parked around it. The contrast was enough to make her stomach lurch, but it broke the spell and she realized she had been thinking in mixed metaphors—trying to reconcile the Wade House into some category, when in fact it was a place beyond category and comparison. She settled her gaze on her hands, afraid that one more glance at what should be merely a slouching, many-winged mansion would instead reveal a glimpse of a cold-blooded predator costumed in the rotting lace, hoops, and straps of a Victorian gown.

  Brooks put the car in park and killed the engine. “The boss wants the support staff to maintain an objective distance from the house so the anomalies don’t affect the computers. Or the minds of the operators.”

  “So they’re scared.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Who’s the boss?”

  “Daniel Northrup. You’re gonna meet him in a minute, I believe.”

  “And what effect do they expect this place to have on our minds, exactly?”

  “Hallucinations, nightmares, shared hallucinations, shared nightmares, murderous rage, the usual.”

  “Great.”

  “It’s the interest in shared dreams that calls for the expedition team to shack up in there.”

  They walked through frost-crusted mud amid a scattering of vehicles, all of them strewn haphazardly between the hut and the house: a Humvee, a white van, and a black Porsche SUV. Leaving the luggage in the trunk for now, Brooks led Becca to the gray door of the hut, slid his magnetic card through a slot in the doorknob mount, and ushered her into what looked like an airplane hangar that had been converted to an NSA surveillance center.

  The curved ceiling was bisected by a grid of white LED lights that cast cold illumination down on cubicles furnished with computer workstations and folding Army cots. Thick cables snaked between the cubicles, feeding banks of blinking servers, and converging on a central conference table outfitted with a horseshoe array of widescreen LCD monitors. The sound of a gas generator droned through the corrugated wall at the far end of the building. Becca followed Brooks to the central table.

  A handsome man in a charcoal suit with black hair frosted at the temples looked over the shoulder of a younger man in short sleeves and a tie marking up blueprints with a pencil. Both men glanced up at their approach. The one in the suit gave Becca a curt but firm handshake while studying her eyes. “Rebecca Philips,” he said. “Thank you for joining us.”

  “Just Becca, please.”

  Brooks chimed in, “Becca, our director, Daniel Northrup.”

  “Becca, meet Dick Hanson,” Northrup said. The seated man tucked his pencil behind his ear and shook her hand with a disarming smile.

  “Dick was a consultant with us during the Boston crisis. Now he’s full time SPECTRA. Background in applied physics.” Northrup scanned the milling bodies and said, “We also have a marine biologist and a reverend of the Starry Wisdom Church around here somewhere. I think you’ve met him before, actually. As you can see, we’re approaching the problem from multiple angles with a variety of disciplines.”

  “How many of us are exploring the house?” Becca asked.

  “Only those I mentioned. A team of five, including you.”

  She looked at Brooks. “Are you the fifth?”

  He nodded. “Team leader, charged with keeping the rest of you alive.”

  Northrup addressed Brooks, “Have you shown her the drone?”

  “She has it.”

  “My camera’s in the car,” Becca said. “Will I need it? I don’t know how to fly this other thing.”

  “The dragonfly is equipped with infrared sensors, but yes, you should also carry whatever equipment you’re most familiar with. We’ll set you up with a training session on the drone first thing.”

  “I’m curious: Why does it look like a dragonfly?”

  “Two reasons. Natural selection is a far better designer than man, and we’ve repurposed a device originally built for discreet surveillance.”

  “Thought so.”

  “There’s an empty barn down the hill where you can get a feel for flying the drone through a structure. I’ll have Mark take you down there and show you the ropes.”

  Northrup put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. A hush fell over the busy space and heads turned. He called out, “Burns!” and waved a young man over: lanky with spiky dirty-blond hair and stubble, dressed in black jeans and a navy blue thermal shirt. “Burns, this is Becca Philips, the urbex photographer. She’ll be documenting everything on-site. Photo, audio, and video.”

  Another quick handshake. “Hey, I’m Mark.”

  “Burns is the biologist,” Northrup said. “Take her down to the barn and train her on the dragonfly. Be back at eighteen-hundred for a pow-wow.”

  Mark Burns nodded toward the door. Becca followed him through the bustle, back out into the quiet of a January afternoon on a sleepy wooded lane, past the vehicles and away from the electrified fence. Near the house they picked up a trail that led down the side of the hill, branching off from the gravel path that continued to the veranda and front door. Night was falling early, and the hazy effect of low light was augmented by the black snow sailing in lazy flurries around the mansion, making it little more than a silhouette as they passed. No lights shone in the windows. Not even a porch light had been illuminated. Her guide seemed intent on passing the house as quickly as possible, but Becca looked back, training her eye on t
he chimneys where black flakes gathered and streamed in, like fireplace ash flowing in reverse, or a swarm of mutant moths drawn to darkness rather than light.

  “Your jacket’s a little light,” Mark said, “but I see you’ve got good boots. You’ll need them for this next bit. We’ll cross over a creek. Messy, but it beats having to go through security checkpoints, and it’s more direct than walking on the road.”

  Becca followed, stepping sideways down a gentle ravine. She scooped up a few flakes in her fingers and rubbed her thumb across them. They felt as cold as snow, but didn’t melt in her hand. Rather, they smudged, just as Brooks said they would, leaving a grainy residue, and a faint aroma of swampy decay.

  Feeling naked without her camera bag, she wished for her headlamp as she wiped her hand on her jeans in the deepening dark. A moment later, Burns produced a small LED flashlight, and guided her through brittle brown reeds to a place where a fallen tree bridged a shallow creek of black ice. Following him across with her arms out for balance, Becca felt like a little kid. On the other side, she saw the barn—a slouching mossy wreck nestled in a shoulder of the hill, skirted with ash and frost.

  Mark slid the door aside and flicked a switch that flooded the cobwebbed rafters with harsh light from a pair of halogen tripods.

  “Let’s have it,” he said.

  Becca took the dragonfly and remote from her jacket pocket and handed them to him gingerly.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You don’t have to be delicate with it. It was built for the field. I’ve seen it take quite a beating and keep going.”

  “This same one? I thought you were a marine biologist.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do dragonflies have to do with the ocean?”

  “This was one of the first models that worked. I’ve used it to observe arctic animals. It’s surprisingly reliable in cold weather, even waterproof. So’s the remote. I don’t know how the nano gears don’t get jammed up with ice, but they don’t. Some new formula of metal. They eventually gave me a submarine version, but the controls are almost the same.”

  “Submarine? Let me guess: Does it look like a little fish?”