Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Read online

  Becca caught the gesture with her camera. She felt the little thrill of knowing that it was a good shot without needing to check, and fast on its heels, a pang of regret at leaving the rainforest behind to return to barren Massachusetts in the dead of the year. But if she could find a blue heron in a black January, maybe things weren’t all bad. The contrast of the silvery plumage against the black snow granted the composition a peculiar beauty that she knew she would find nowhere else on earth.

  For a moment she stared at the bird, forgetting the camera and slipping into an almost meditative zone for the first time since she’d arrived at the Wade House. If she had learned anything in the past year, it was that nature had a soothing effect on her. She wondered again why she had spent so many years living in the city. Art school had lured her to Boston from Arkham, but even when she’d called the city her home, she’d made a study of the abandoned places where she could find nature’s fingers clawing their way back in.

  A harsh cawing sound startled her out of her reverie and she almost dropped her camera on the thin ice. The heron extended its wing again and this time stretched its long neck as well with a low, groaning croak that sounded to Becca like someone slow scratching a vinyl record of a human voice: HHAAATE… HAAATE…

  She thought of all the times she had seen faces in water stains or the mold growing on concrete. She thought about the human talent for pattern recognition, the ability to find eyes and hear words where there was only chaos and noise. The bird wasn’t really talking to her any more than stretching its wing meant it was pointing at something. But then, there had been a time when the patterns in her photos turned out to be more than chaos mimicking order. A time when she’d seen tentacles in brick walls.

  HAATE…HAATE…RAAAGE…HAATE…HAATE…RAAGE…RAAGE…

  As if the bird were adding a synonym to hammer the point home.

  But a speaker of another language might hear a different word. And even another English speaker might interpret the squawking differently. The same sounds could be “wait” and “age.” Or “wade” as in The Wade House, also known as The Witch House to locals and students of occult legend and lore. And if ever there was a creek beside a house where a bird might speak a warning…

  The sound was horrid, even without taking the apparent words into account. The gray morning suddenly felt darker. Django returned to Becca’s side, his hair up along his spine, a low, barely audible growl percolating in his throat. The birdcall was almost as deep as his growl and considerably louder.

  Becca felt cold, as if the blood had withdrawn from her extremities, and with the chill came the certainty that the world itself had gone bad as a rotten egg, and would never be right again. And the more the bird repeated the sounds and gestures, the harder it was to pretend she was imposing sinister meaning on something ordinary and natural, if a little out of season.

  She scanned the hill for anyone else who might be out walking, but she was alone. The heron turned its head and stared at her over its wing with glassy black eyes.

  It cawed again, and this time she had the impression that each word was accompanied by a jab in a different direction: HAAATE with the wing pointed at the house on the hill, and RAAAGE with a jab at a different angle, toward the woods. She watched for several cycles more, concerned that the animal might be sick and suffering, but more afraid that it wasn’t, that the only sickness was in the land and the house that had been built upon it, the house where she would soon be living.

  The pattern was consistent. The wing moved back and forth with each vocalization. Becca tried to follow the line of the wing when it stretched toward the woods. She stood up and took a few steps back, away from the creek. Had she really been worried about scaring the bird away just a few minutes ago? It had been doing its best to scare her off ever since. Or did it want her to follow the line of its wing? She picked up Django’s leash and set off in the indicated direction, searching the spare trees for some structure or landmark but finding nothing.

  Becca trundled up the hill at an angle, her boots crunching in the dead grass, the cuffs of her jeans already stained black from the inky flakes. It felt good to be moving away from the house. Its diminishing presence at her back was like a weight lifting off her shoulders. She wondered if this little excursion wasn’t just a way to avoid confronting the place. But even if not for the bird, she would have been curious about the grounds and likely would’ve explored them before the house itself. No one had given her reason to believe that she wouldn’t be allowed to venture outside at will, and yet it felt as if she were taking a last look at the outside world for a while.

  Django did his part to keep track of their path by marking a tree every few yards. Becca unclipped the leash and let him roam, urging him on with the occasional whistle, but it wasn’t long before he was trotting ahead and waiting for her to catch up.

  Just when she was thinking of turning back, she caught sight of stone slabs juxtaposed against the rough bark: monolithic standing stones glimpsed between the trees.

  “What do we have here?” she said to Django, stepping off the path and cutting through a patch of brambles to a clearing marked with a starburst of scorched black ground surrounded by a ring of lichen-speckled granite slabs, twice her height, reaching for the sky at odd angles.

  It took her a moment to realize that the black snow—which had thinned out in the forest, gathering in random drifts scattered here and there—was completely absent in the circle, despite the open sky offering a clear path to the ground.

  “Django, wait,” she said.

  The dog heeled and let her clip the leash to his collar. Finding a fallen tree, she looped the handle of the leash over a broken branch to keep Django from following her. He whined as she moved around the outer edge of the circle of stones, but she spoke to him soothingly, telling him to sit and wait. It was a routine he knew well, and eventually he settled. She couldn’t say why, but she didn’t want him crossing the boundary of the circle.

  Becca snapped a few photos of the stone slabs with her Nikon before taking the dragonfly from her jacket pocket. She switched the drone on and watched it hover in the air while she brought up the controls on the remote.

  Looking across to the inward facing side of the farthest stone, she saw that it was carved with crescents and sigils. She set her thumbs on the amber dials on the screen and sent the dragonfly buzzing between two of the slabs, into the center of the circle. Nothing happened to it when it crossed the invisible boundary, and the tension in her shoulders eased a little. She divided the screen and sent the drone on a lap around the inner perimeter, recording the full set of symbols with its digital eyes as it flew.

  Becca took a breath and stepped into the circle, expecting some sensation upon crossing the threshold; at the very least, a low vibration like the hum of a poorly grounded appliance. But there was nothing, only silent wind through leafless trees. Turning on her heel, rotating clockwise while the drone continued to revolve counter, she gazed out at the stones and walked backwards toward the center.

  Distracted from the screen, she miscalculated an adjustment of the controls and sent the drone crashing into one of the granite slabs. It fell to the ground buzzing and twitching. Becca thumbed the reset button on the remote, picked the dragonfly up, and blew clotted dirt out of its aluminum lace wings before setting it to flight again.

  At the center of the circle, she brought the drone slowly up, high above her head, to hover over the tops of the standing stones. It felt strange to be looking at her own head from above, and she could spot Django sitting flat on the ground as close to the circle as his leash would allow, his nose on his paws. These stones were more refined than the megalithic slabs she had seen at Calçoene in Brazil. Those had seemed older, more irregular in shape, and lacking any iconography or symbols. These were more like pillars, still roughhewn granite, but carefully spaced and elaborately graven. Nevertheless, standing in the center of the circle, she felt rocked by a wave of dreadful déjà vu.

/>   She hadn’t told Brooks much about her experience at Calçoene. Just the bare minimum, really. She had intended to answer his question honestly without getting dragged into details. She trusted him, but was still unsure of what SPECTRA wanted from her. She couldn’t let go of the nagging suspicion that the reasons they’d brought her back to Massachusetts were not all on the table. In fact, if there was one thing she felt certain of, it was that SPECTRA was an agency that never laid all of its cards on the table.

  Had they monitored her email while she was living in Brazil? Had they followed her, perhaps with this very drone, on her excursion to the standing stones known as Amazon Stonehenge? In Brazil, mechanical dragonflies hadn’t been on her radar. Or might they even have orchestrated the trip, posing as the client who’d requested the photos for a book on recent archaeological discoveries? If they had put her there, and were now placing her here, was there a connection between that site and this one?

  Heat rose at her collar, flushing her neck, prickling at her hairline.

  Don’t go getting paranoid or there’ll be no end to it.

  Becca put her hand to her chest and touched the scarab beetle through her shirt. In Boston, when she had faced the entity known as the Haunter of the Dark, she had tapped the power of the amulet with a two-word incantation recalled at the moment of crisis. In Brazil, she had attempted to repeat the feat, to awaken the ruby in the scarab’s pincers, the Fire of Cairo, to no avail. Alone in the jungle, beneath the stars of the southern hemisphere, she had tried every way of pronouncing those sacred words: Yehi Aur. Let there be light. She had whispered, chanted, sung, and screamed them. But no light had arisen in the dark gem. That had been in the south, near the falls where they had scattered Rafael’s ashes. She had wondered at the time if the power could only be awakened on certain days of the calendar, such as the equinox, the one time she had seen it happen before.

  But then, at Calçoene, the scarab had stirred, fluttering its wings, tickling and startling her long after she’d given up hope of it ever showing signs of life again. She had been too paralyzed with dread at the time to think of the incantation, too eager to get away from the place to linger and experiment. Hope had swelled within her for a moment, but the scarab hadn’t so much as twitched since, and she’d begun to wonder if what she hoped was an awakening was more akin to final death throes.

  Had she spent all the magic she possessed at the Red Equinox? The dragonfly with its nano gears and microchips might be a small miracle of technology, but the beetle was once a wonder of a different order. One she could no longer rely on.

  Becca brought the drone to rest on her upraised palm, switched it off, and tucked it away.

  She had tried not to think too much about what she’d seen at Calçoene. Now, the memory welled up and towered over her like a tidal wave, shortening her breath.

  The stones there hadn’t been graven with letters or glyphs, hadn’t appeared as precisely placed, but their teetering angles had unnerved her. And there had been one precise carving: a circle cut through a single slab, like a porthole.

  Had she been drawn to it? Had she pressed her face to the cold stone and gazed through that ancient aperture on the winter solstice?

  Resisting, remembering, a tremor began in her boots and grew to a shuddering vibration. It climbed her body and thundered in her head, rattling her teeth with a blinding flash. She fell to her knees, the forest eclipsed by the flashback, replaced by a Brazilian meadow. Oily black limbs glistened in the air around her, like ribbons of kelp twisting in dark water. Teeth gnashed in lipless orifices, raw wounds in piebald flesh. A concussion of sound, as if the earth were a drum, and she was cast out, thrown between the jagged slabs onto the dry grass by an invisible blast that sent dust flying at its crest.

  From outside the perimeter, the circle had appeared empty but for the circular hole in the rock through which a giant curdled-milk eye stared out, rolling endlessly like a planet spinning on a diagonal axis, its black hourglass pupil undulating to the rhythm of the maddening pulse in her head until she blacked out.

  * * *

  Brooks parked his black Taurus behind the Wayside Convenience store, just a few miles from the Wade House on Lexington Road. He was on his way back from a supermarket run in Concord. His excuse for the trip into town was that he needed a few ingredients for the meal he had offered to cook for the exploration team on their first night. The house cupboards and fridge were well stocked by SPECTRA runners, and he could have sent one to pick up the spices he wanted. Instead, he’d stressed needing to see the bottles on the shelves to trigger his memory. That much was true enough, but he didn’t want any passing agency personnel to notice his car parked in front of the convenience store while he was making his second stop on the way back.

  At the counter he asked for the cheapest pre-paid cell phone they had, and tried not to stare at the rip-rolls of shiny, glittering scratch cards while the cashier picked it for him. A wad of cash was burning in his wallet and the cards were calling to him. They’d had some scratch cards with the cigarette cartons at the supermarket, too, but it had been a minimal showing; nothing like the extravagance on display here.

  It was ironic, he knew, that anticipating his ex-wife’s presence on site had him itching to gamble when the habit was the reason she’d left him in the first place. Well, one of them, anyway. He hadn’t reformed many of his failings since Nina had moved out, but he had made GA meetings a priority. It had been 14 months since his last lapse. He’d lost the house before the wife and had dropped the habit before SPECTRA could drop him. For some reason, the possibility of getting fired hadn’t occurred to him until one of his first partners, a veteran named Joseph Talley, who had a few years on him, spelled it out.

  “Our masters will indulge a hankering for booze better than they will one for cards, James.”

  “Why is that?” Brooks had asked, after tossing back a shot of the former and setting his glass down.

  “Because booze helps some men do the job. But a man in deep debt is a wildcard. Not to be trusted. Sooner or later, his mind will turn to trading in secrets.”

  Brooks had been grateful for the warning and had taken it—like all advice from Talley, whose eyes seemed to brim with all manner of horrors both cosmic and mundane—quite seriously.

  The job, when it was risky enough, when it rode the razor’s edge of survival and madness, gave him everything he needed to satisfy his gambler’s itch.

  Work had been quiet for a while now, but he could feel that changing. He worried about the world in which his daughter lived, a world in which men like himself, fallible men grasping at straws, kept real monsters at bay. And in the absence of a close relationship with Heather, he worried about Becca. He couldn’t foresee the consequences of bringing her back to Massachusetts, didn’t know if they would be damaging or even fatal to her in the long run. And hadn’t she done enough already? He helped her to leave the darkness behind after Boston, and now he’d dragged her back into it. Maybe she would find her father, and maybe that would bring her something other than sorrow. But maybe was a thin thread.

  Action scratched the itch, but worry only aggravated it. And Brooks worried about all the people he had dragged to the edge of the abyss by virtue of their connection to him and his work. Work he could never be fully open about. He wasn’t afraid for himself because he knew he’d already lost most of the things that mattered in his life, things he had won on a miraculous streak of luck when he was younger. He worried about Nina and Becca and even Becca’s damned dog because of how much it mattered to her. And he worried about Tom Petrie, a bystander at the opening act of the apocalypse, whose first child was born after the Red Equinox. Tom who didn’t remember much about his time in SPECTRA’s custody after he’d been exposed to brain altering harmonics in a terror attack, but who remembered enough to not fully trust the agency.

  But Tom did trust Brooks. He had reached out and left a short, cryptic message saying he wanted to talk, using a keyword Brooks h
ad given him the last time he’d paid a visit to the man’s home to check in on him.

  Brooks left the scratch cards at the counter, their loud names and foil letters clamoring around in his mind’s eye as he sat in his car and cut through the burner phone’s packaging with a Swiss Army knife he kept in the glove box. RED HOT CASH, WHEEL OF LUCK, YELLOW KING CROWNS. He looked through the grimy, ash streaked windshield for the dumpster behind the store and was glad to find it lacking a chain. He would toss the packaging in there before he left.

  In his wallet, he found a folded slip of paper with Tom’s number scribbled on it. He punched it into the cheap keypad and waited for it to ring. When Tom answered his voice was little more than a whisper, as if he didn’t want to disturb his napping child.

  “Tom, it’s me. I got your message. About the plants.” Brooks left his name out of it and hoped Tom would, too. Just because his burner phone wasn’t being monitored didn’t mean Tom’s line wasn’t. “How’s the family?”

  “Okay…” Tom said. There was a pause long enough to make Brooks wonder if Tom had hung up. He listened for the telltale clicks of surveillance and didn’t hear them. At last Tom said, “Noah’s episodes are acting up.”

  “I see.”

  “We’re thinking a change of scenery might help. Could you drop in and water the plants?”

  A car pulled up slowly beside the parked Taurus. Brooks watched it pass and noted it was clean. Too clean? Recently washed? No black residue… Don’t be paranoid. “I’ll see what I can do. It’s a little hard to get away right now.”

  “You’re the only one we trust in the house.”

  “Okay. Hang in there, buddy.”