Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Read online

  “Yeah, actually. A minnow. Blends right in.” Mark switched on the handheld unit and tossed the dragonfly into the air. Its wings hummed to life as the screen in his hand lit with amber wheels and grids. The drone rotated on its axis a foot away from Becca’s face.

  “When you first switch it on, it does a sonar scan of the room you’re in.” He swiped the glass and the control grids were replaced by a 3D model of the barn, including rough renderings of the tripod lights and moldy bales of hay piled against the walls. “Of course, it can only model the space it can see, so we won’t get adjacent rooms, or in this case the hayloft, unless we send it up there. You can also set it to infrared to pick up heat signatures from people and animals. Navy SEALs have used it to map out rooms before doing a raid.”

  “I always figured they had something like this, but to actually see it…it’s pretty incredible.”

  “It is.”

  “And a little creepy. Don’t you think?”

  Mark gave her a sidelong glance with a smile. “Yeah, people used to worry about ‘bugs’ in their phones. Now my husband is paranoid about bugs in the air. Thinks I’m spying on him.”

  “Have you been married long?” Becca asked.

  “Almost five years. I’m kidding though, mostly. He’s not too paranoid for someone married to a spook.”

  “So how does a marine biologist get involved with a covert agency?”

  “How does an art photographer?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “I’ve heard some of it. They need all kinds of experts, right? And, I mean, it’s hard to say no to the money. I’ve seen some of your photos. When Boston happened they wanted me to compare the tentacle shapes that were turning up in your infrared shots with actual cephalopod anatomy.”

  “How did they compare?”

  “Well, obviously the patterns you found had fractal repetition in them. Even though sometimes fractals look like trees or what have you, living organisms don’t replicate patterns exactly like that. Northrup wanted to know if those early photos of yours were the result of something you did with the optics, or if they were capturing something organic beyond the visible spectrum. We ruled out optics right away. And then when actual creatures became visible to people who were tuned to perceive them, well…then we knew we were dealing with something from another dimension. But I still don’t know why so much of the anatomy matches marine life. I guess their dimension is some kind of oceanic realm, but they don’t suffocate when they emerge here.”

  Becca nodded. Her mouth had gone dry while he rattled on with geeky enthusiasm, and for a few seconds she worried that a panic attack might be coming on. She had experienced occasional flashbacks to the crisis during her first months in Brazil, and expected one to slam her now, but it didn’t come. She focused on her breath, deliberately slowing and deepening it until the moment passed. If Mark noticed her distress, he didn’t comment on it.

  Grasping for a mundane topic to shift the conversation away from monsters, Becca said, “Did you want to be a marine biologist since you were a kid?”

  Now he took a deep breath before answering. “No, actually. I was afraid of the ocean as a child after my mother drowned.”

  “Oh… Jeez, I’m sorry.”

  Mark waved her sympathy away. “Eventually, I decided that studying it might make it less frightening, less mysterious. Turns out the more you study the ocean, the more mysterious it gets. It’s like outer space that way.”

  “Did it get less frightening?”

  He shook his head, eyes on her boots. “Marine life remains both beautiful and terrifying,” he said with a wry grin.

  “Especially when it’s found thriving on dry land.”

  “True.”

  She thought of telling him she’d lost her own mother at a young age, but something about that felt like pandering. She let the moment pass.

  He had switched the device back to the control display and was sliding his thumb around a wheel of light, causing the dragonfly to circle the barn and weave through the rafters. “I’m honestly stumped about the nature of the creatures you encountered in Boston, but I’m still on the payroll. Northrup seems to think I may get a chance to study them firsthand here at the house.”

  Becca’s voice wavered when she spoke: “Careful what you wish for. No one in their right mind would deliberately open the door to those things.”

  “I know. I mean…I don’t know, but I’ve read the reports. Sorry, I can’t really imagine what you’ve been through, but you asked, and that’s why I’m here.”

  “Show me how it works,” Becca said, nodding at the remote. Her skin was flushed and prickling, and she was eager to change the subject.

  Mark passed the remote back to her. “This wheel controls the vertical axis, altitude. This is lateral motion, and this rotates it. You can view it as a third person icon, or through its eyes, which is what you’ll want for taking photos. You play video games at all?”

  “No.”

  “That’s okay, you’ll pick it up quick. Just watch out for–”

  The dragonfly shuddered to a halt, frozen in the intersection of a pair of rafters.

  “Cobwebs?”

  “Here—use the pincers to cut the web,” Mark said. “It can be a mean little fucker when you need it to be.”

  Once Becca had the hang of basic maneuvers, Mark left her to practice with a promise to keep an eye on her watch and make the meeting at 7 o’clock.

  By 6:45 she had crashed the drone enough times to admire its resilience. She’d also learned how to free it of the thickest webs. For her last circuit of the barn, Becca turned the drone’s headlight on and killed the halogen lamps to practice flying in the dark.

  Enswathed in cold light and careening shadows, she felt a tingle of fear at the prospect of walking past the Wade House alone with only the glowing bug to light her way. Distracted, she crashed the drone into a wall and watched it tumble onto one of the canvas-draped pieces of farm equipment—or so she assumed—that lay scattered around the outer edges of the dirt floor.

  In her haste to leave the barn and get back up the hill on time, Becca plucked the dragonfly from the dusty tarp without noting the contours of the object it concealed, and so failed to find what her father had left behind.

  Chapter 3

  They gathered around an oval conference table in the center of the Quonset hut. Most of the support staff had left for dinner in town, leaving a quieter environment for Director Northrup and the five members of the exploration team: Becca Philips, Jason Brooks, Mark Burns, Dick Hanson, and Reverend John Proctor.

  Becca had met the reverend briefly the previous year when she photographed a birdbath in the courtyard of an abandoned asylum that turned out to be a sacred site for the Starry Wisdom Church. Proctor had been performing prayers and prostrations at the asylum in observance of a holy day, and for a moment Becca had feared he might try to smash her camera. She had since been in bloody confrontations with members of his congregation and the deities they worshipped, but had not seen the reverend himself since that day. He looked weathered, as if he had aged more than a couple years. He still wore the same dusty black frock and miter cap, but now the tattoos on his forehead and temples—letters of the Lengian alphabet—contrasted more sharply against his sallow complexion. When he reached for a glass of water, Becca noticed scars on his arms that she hadn’t seen before. She tried not to stare, focusing on the others at the table, and letting her eyes glance over him. She hadn’t expected to see him again, and the sight of him made her skin crawl. He reminded her too much of the awful institution where they’d met, where her grandfather had rotted away in confinement, where her friend and lover Rafael Moreno had died.

  “Early investigations of the house confirm that it does appear to change shape,” Northrup was saying when Becca tuned back in to his voice. “So far, our measurements of the first floor remain consistent, as do the number of windows, closets, and doors on the first floor. These elements are va
riable above and below the ground floor. For this reason, we are assigning each of you to a first floor room for sleeping and essentially camping out. There are enough of them for some degree of privacy, even though they aren’t all bedrooms. Ms. Philips, as the only female member of the team, will get a bedroom with a door. Agent Brooks, as the only field agent, will carry the only gun. We don’t know what effect the environment will have on your minds, so we are limiting weapons to Brooks in his capacity as team security officer.”

  “Hold on,” the reverend said. “I thought my job was to provide spiritual protection. What about knives? I can’t cast the proper wards without a ritual dagger.”

  Northrup’s eyes darted to Brooks. “It’s just a symbolic tool, right? You don’t need to bleed goats with it?”

  “A symbol, yes, of the discerning mind. A tool for carving sigils in the astral to keep the forces of chaos at bay.”

  “I thought you worshipped the forces of chaos,” Brooks interjected. “I can’t imagine why anyone would trust you with a knife in a place like that house.”

  Northrup held up his hand. “You can have a dagger with a dull blade. We’ll grind the edge off.”

  “Not just any knife will do,” Proctor said. “The blade must be the proper kind to project energy; a three-sided spike, like a Tibetan phurba. I brought one with me.”

  Northrup drew on his cigarette. “An agent will inspect it.”

  Brooks scoffed and sat back in his seat.

  Proctor hunched forward, scowling at Brooks. “I was not involved in the attacks on Boston. You know that. I am no radical. And unless you’ve studied my religion, don’t presume to tell me what I worship.”

  “He cooperated with the investigation—” Northrup said.

  “After you tortured him.”

  “—or he wouldn’t be here.”

  “He was their leader.”

  Northrup stared Brooks down. “Everyone here has a motivation to cooperate. And you’re out of your depth without him. You’re going to need someone who knows the lay of the land. You think we could do anything in Syria or Afghanistan without help from the locals? Think of Reverend Proctor as a citizen of the astral, the borderland between our world and the dimension those creatures come from. He’s been vetted.”

  Brooks examined a pen he’d picked up, his jaw tense. It was clear the discussion was over. Northrup addressed the group. “Tonight you’ll sleep here at Base Camp. Tomorrow we turn the house’s utilities back on. They were shut down while we ran the scans and needed to keep electrical interference to a minimum. Now that you’re all here, you can move in tomorrow morning. Is anyone allergic to dogs?”

  No one spoke.

  “Good,” Northrup continued, “Philips will keep hers in the house. There’s reason to believe that cats are better at detecting these phenomena, but who knows, maybe he’ll serve as an early warning system.”

  “Where I go, he goes,” Becca said. “But you’re not using him as a canary in a coal mine. I won’t send him anywhere you wouldn’t send me.”

  “That’s what the drone is for,” Northrup said.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?”

  “Clearly, the black snow is attracted to the house and seems to be returning to the dimension it came from through any crack it can find,” Northrup said. “Our top priority is to make sure nothing is going in the other direction, leaking into our world.”

  “Do you even know what that stuff is?” Becca asked.

  Northrup stamped his cigarette out. “I could show you the chemical composition, but it wouldn’t mean much. What we do know is where it came from: the destruction of the black orb over Boston. The flakes seem to be the last remnants of that incursion into our world, and now they’re being drawn back to their own.”

  “Brooks said the snow didn’t appear until a year after the Red Equinox,” Becca said. “Why is that?”

  “The theory is that the black fallout was not perceptible until it found a pathway to the other side, at which point it gained some kind of energy,” Northrup said. “The house itself may have become more visible at that time as well, more substantial. And if matter can pass through the house in one direction…might it not go both ways? If there’s a breach in there, we need to find it and seal it.”

  “Any idea how?” Brooks tossed the pen he’d been clicking onto the tabletop to keep himself from fiddling with it. He stared at the reverend.

  “I have some ideas,” Proctor said.

  “What about my father?” Becca said. “I thought we were looking for him. Brooks said he might be trapped in there.”

  Northrup glared at Brooks.

  “What?” Becca said.

  “I hope you didn’t promise her anything,” Northrup said.

  “Hold on,” Becca said. “Was that just to get me here? Is he not a priority?”

  “If you can find him,” Northrup said, “we’ll try to extract him. It’s a big if.”

  Dick Hanson cleared his throat and leaned in. “We don’t know much about how sound and light travel in and out of the structure.” It was the first thing the physicist had contributed to the conversation and all eyes turned to him. “It’s possible that sound may carry through the walls and floors, even when a portal isn’t available.”

  “What does that mean?” Becca scratched at her arm absently, thinking she might know.

  “I’m saying you might hear him. You’re the only one of us who would recognize his voice. And if you do hear him and you call back, we may be able to find a place where we can bring him through. A portal, a door.”

  “And if we don’t find him? If we only find a portal he isn’t on the other side of? Then what? Are you planning to ‘seal the breach’ anyway? Trap him inside forever?” Becca had felt cold despite the cranked electric heater beside the table, but now she was flushed with heat from within as a new thought occurred to her and tumbled out of her lips. “Is he the reason why you haven’t brought a wrecking ball up here, or is he not even a factor in that decision? What’s stopping you from burning the place down?”

  “We don’t think it’s that simple,” Hanson said.

  “We don’t know what destroying the house would do,” Northrup said. “It might open a bigger portal, more permanent than the ones that are blinking in and out of existence in there right now.”

  Brooks leaned forward and met Becca’s eyes. “Blowing up the gates of Hell is the last resort, kiddo. Lest they end up throwing them wide open.”

  Chapter 4

  In the morning, Becca followed the smell of coffee until she found a station with a carafe and a box of donuts. She poured a cup, snagged the plainest looking donut she could find, and took Django out for a walk around the grounds with her camera hanging from its strap and the dragonfly stowed in her jacket pocket.

  The previous evening, leading Django from the car to the hut, the dog had shown a cursory interest in the black flakes but was more interested in where she was leading him, sniffing out the structure to determine whether or not he needed to protect Becca from the people inside. That was a question she hadn’t fully answered for herself, she realized, but Django had settled in and accepted their company quickly. Now, roaming the hillside and marking the terrain, he sniffed at the ashy flakes but stopped short of tasting them.

  There was little else in the way of animal life on the property to help her assess the toxicity of the environment. Only when they had walked some distance from the house did she begin to notice signs of birds and squirrels. Granted, it was winter and only the cawing of crows marred the silent morning, but as Brooks had pointed out, it was unseasonably warm for January.

  Becca wondered at what temperature the black flakes would melt. They were cold to the touch, but body heat didn’t affect them the same way it did snow.

  She led Django around the house and peered up at its blank gray windows. The place exuded an aura of disquiet. She wondered how much she was projecting onto it based on what she’d heard, and how much had to do
with the environment. Psychologically, the shorter days crushed her, and had since she was a teenager—although medication helped. Even in Brazil she’d been afraid to stop taking it. But the dark part of the year could be dazzlingly bright when it snowed, and she’d always appreciated how the white crystals reflected and amplified what little sunlight there was. This black stuff, however, seemed custom ordered to darken her spirits, and it cast scant light at the windows that watched over her. She soon felt uneasy walking in the shadow of the house. She led Django down the path Mark had shown her the previous night, to the barn beyond the creek.

  The creek had been frozen when she’d last crossed it on the fallen tree, but today she heard the trickle of water before she reached it. In the morning light, she could see the cloudy ice near the banks pierced through by reed stalks fading to black ice, which gave way to a channel of rushing water in the center of the creek. Spindly, leafless branches forked off the fallen tree trunk and disappeared below the surface. Becca stopped dead in her tracks. A blue heron that had no business in Massachusetts in January stood perched on one of the gnarled branches, head cocked, eyes fixed on the water, hunting for breakfast.

  Despite the warm temperatures, Becca figured all the frogs and small fish were long gone and this fellow should have made his way south with the others months ago. As she watched, the bird stalked across the branch bending its long stilt legs slowly and deliberately, head ticking from one angle to another as it regarded reflections in the stream.

  Becca switched on her camera and focused it on the bird, wishing for the telephoto lens she’d left in her bag back at the hut. Django had long ago grown accustomed to watching her stalk predators as they stalked their own prey, and when she dropped his leash, he snuffled in the tall dead grass along the bank, paying the bird no heed. In turn, it ignored him.

  Becca took a few shots of the heron, checked them in the LCD, and adjusted her settings. The bird had its back to her, its blue-gray feathers almost silvery in the diffuse light of the overcast morning. She was framing another shot, crouching and moving in, feeling her boot sink into the soggy ground, when the bird raised its right wing and stretched it out to the side with a long slow jab, as if pointing toward the woods behind the house.