Red Equinox Read online

  Becca was face to face with a black-bearded giant in a green army trench coat. Several layers of frayed sweaters hung around his wrists and neck so that it was impossible to guess his true girth. He appeared to be the sort of homeless person who wears his entire wardrobe at all times. What little she could see of his skin looked African American, and the texture of his dense beard would have supported that assessment; but as with the clothes, it was impossible to tell how many layers of dirt and ashy grime the man was wearing. He might have even been white underneath. But at a glance, Becca found it difficult to focus on any one detail beyond his distracting headgear. His hair was mostly hidden beneath a golden cardboard Burger King Crown, his eyes behind a cheap pair of red-and-blue 3D glasses. In his left hand he held a smoldering bundle of burning sage tied with a red string, and in his right, a small laser pointer.

  He bustled past her without acknowledgement, wreathed in smoke, still singing and waving the pungent bundle. Becca recoiled in the wake of the fumes and coughed out a lungful of the stuff before burying her nose in the crook of her arm. The man seemed to give her a shallow nod as he passed, but with his colored plastic lenses, she couldn’t tell if they’d made eye contact. She had begun to wonder if he was blind when he turned to her and said, “What up?”

  Apparently a rhetorical question because he didn’t pause in his genuflections for her reply but spun on his heels in a kind of dance, the trench coat flaring out and swirling around his surprisingly graceful axis, the orange terminator line of the burning ember on the blackening leaves tracing a fiery circle in the air above his head.

  He completed the revolution by landing, left leg in front, bent at the knee. From this position he pointed his right hand at the brick wall and traced a perfect pentagram with the ruby bead of the pointer. The chrome barrel poking out of his folded fingers looked like the type she’d seen at the checkout counter at pet stores for teasing cats, usually for less than three dollars.

  Pointing the dot at the center of the now invisible pentagram, he broke from the Standells’ song and bellowed, “Apos pantos kakadaiminos!”

  Becca backed away from the madman into the corridor of machinery and shadow where she’d last seen the dog.

  The man came up from the weird martial arts stance, surprising her with his agility (she had guessed that he might get stuck there), and proceeded along the wall to the far end of the room, where he repeated the same spin, drop, and pentagram tracing, this time ending with the cry, “Hekas, hekas este bebeloi!” When he rose, he stared at the wall, head cocked as if trying to discern some hidden code in the cracks and graffiti. He whispered a word that might have been skidoo, and dropped the laser pointer into his pocket. He stubbed the sage bundle out in a cement seam on the brick wall, and, touching his cardboard crown to keep it from tumbling off his head, turned with a bow and flourish of his trench coat and addressed her: “Milady.”

  Becca couldn’t help herself; she laughed into the back of her hand to release the nervous tension before remembering how pissed she was about losing Django. When she did, she set her hand on her hip and said, “You scared my dog away, asshat.”

  “Your dog? You mean that shepherd with the split ear?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Shiiit. I din’t know he belonged to nobody. Been sleeping rough like me. He belong to you? For real?”

  She sighed and picked up her camera bag, hoisted the heavy thing over her shoulder, and girded herself to push past him on the way out if she had to.

  “Never mind.”

  “He’s not yours yet, is he?”

  Becca shook her head. “But he needs someone to start feeding him or he won’t last long.”

  “Mmmm. True dat.”

  “Well, nice meeting you,” she said with a tight, sarcastic smile. “Gotta go.”

  “But we haven’t met. Not yet. Name’s Moe Ramirez,” he said, approaching her with some of the same caution she’d shown the dog just moments ago. The similarity was so striking that she couldn’t help laughing again—it was hard to stay mad at this freak when he was stalking toward you on tiptoes. She decided to let it go. Punishing him for existing wouldn’t bring the dog back.

  “Becca,” she said, not quite ready to give up her last name, although he didn’t look equipped to Google it. Then again, he did have a laser, so who could say? “What’re you doing, anyway?” she asked.

  “Banishing. Cleansing.”

  “Kinda figured something like that. Banishing what, exactly?”

  “Little nasties, psychic chum in the waters of the C.U.”

  “C.U.?”

  “Collective Unconscious.” He squinted at her through the colored lenses. “I see you.” He chuckled. “And you ain’t one a them. That’s why I din’t chase yo ass outta here, you dig?”

  “Not really…. One of who?”

  “The cultists, that’s who. The brethren of the Starry Wisdom Church. Wisdom my ass. I got more wisdom in my teeth than those motherfuckers got in they heads all combined.” Moe cackled and Becca jumped. “S’all right, s’all right, I’m just sayin’….” He was wagging his head from side to side now, and it gave him the look of a giant insect with cardboard antennae and red and blue eyes.

  “I met one of them,” Becca said. “Didn’t seem so bad.”

  He leaned in close, as if smelling her. “Met ‘em? Did you, now? Did you meet him in the flesh or in the astral? Huh? That’s what I thought. Not all of ‘em can access the ethers, and for now those what can, can only do it when they dreaming. But that’s all gonna change if the wards ain’t kept in place.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, see here now, my fair lady. They call Boston The Hub, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “How true it is. And when you at the hub, you bound to see some of the cracks. That’s what I’m talkin’ about. And Maurice, that’s me but you can call me Moe ‘cause we friends…Maurice is charged with sealing those cracks best he can. There’s one among them been buildin’ a infernal machine gonna change everythang. You watch for it. I hope the day don’t come when it works its dark magic, but if it does, you keep your music on, you hear?”

  “Yeah, okay…I need to try to find that dog, Moe, if you don’t mind. The one you scared off.”

  “Right. I know you think I’m fulla shit, but heed my words, Lady. There ain’t no such thing as coincidence. And that means that we are well met. We may not know the reason yet, but you keep that in mind.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that.”

  “The one I spoke of been haunting the riverbank, doin’ experiments in desolate places like this here mill, seein’ if he can get a rise outta the dirty water. So you be on the lookout. I seen that there urbex patch on your camera bag, and I knew you was all right, but you shouldn’t be in a place like this alone.”

  “I’m not alone.” Becca grinned, and realized that she’d already developed an inexplicable affection for the crazy old bum. He had a way about him.

  He smiled back at her, revealing a gold tooth. “See, I knew you was all right. Told you we was well met. You got headphones?”

  “Uh…no, not on me, no.” In fact she might have had ear buds in her camera bag with her iPod, but affection or not, the thought of letting him borrow them skeeved her out.

  “Get some. Noise cancellation is best if you got the Benjamins.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” she said, mustering as much sincerity as she could for the simple reason that he seemed genuinely interested in protecting her.

  He dug in his ear with a thick finger and removed something gray. “You do what you can,” he said, “within the budget you got. Me? I use chewing gum.”

  Becca suppressed the urge to retch as she stepped back and to the side. “Okay. You take care.”

  He called after her as she walked through sun-dappled litter and leaves back to the fallen door. “Look out for the cracks!” he said, and she waved without turning to look back at him. When she reache
d the empty doorframe, she noticed a piece of graffiti she hadn’t seen on the way in. The runny blue spray paint looked fresh, maybe even still wet. Something about the shape looked familiar. Had she seen it at the asylum? She drew her camera from the bag at her hip and snapped a shot of it, thinking that it resembled a tree branch: a straight line with five short lines branching off of it.

  When she stepped out into the light, she scanned the overgrown lot, but Django was either hiding well or had gone prowling the flooded riverbank in search of sustenance.

  Chapter 7

  Darius Marlowe had spent most of his time in the city with eyes downcast, looking at the stones in the pavement; the flattened gray circles of gum permanently melded to the sidewalks; the plodding shoes, rustling skirts, and swirling overcoats of his fellow pedestrians. If he did look up, it was to read signs and scan storefronts. At night he might use the lights at the top of the Prudential building—Boston’s North Star—as a landmark to orient himself, but on most nights, against a ceiling of cloud, the pulsing red radio aerials and low-flying aircraft were the only lights in the sky, and you couldn’t predict the coming of the Great Old Ones by their alignment.

  He saved his sky-gazing for trips out of the city on clear moonless nights in the Blue Hills to the south, where he could escape the light pollution, lie on his back, and let his mind fall into the black expanse of night, or alight like a swinging spider from point to point of the Dipper hanging by its handle from Polaris. Tonight however, he cast his gaze at the skyline as he approached his new home and basked in the majesty of the gargoyle-topped columns and green copper gables of Fenway Towers.

  He had been living there a week, but it still gave him a sense of empowerment to climb the steps and pass between the twin griffins, to walk under the oak-leaf-adorned stone arch and enter the place knowing that his rooms there—sprawling, white, and luxurious—were a gift from his benefactor, guru, and guide.

  He nodded at the concierge and pressed the elevator button, turning his back to the desk while he waited, and cradling the white cardboard animal carrier against his jacket to muffle any sounds that might escape through the air holes. He had no idea what the pet policy was and couldn’t take no for an answer. He had read in the Globe that the previous man on the desk was the drowning victim recovered from the river on the day he’d found the key. He couldn’t claim to understand all of the pharaoh’s designs, but he guessed that the dead clerk had stuck the key to the bridge handrail as an errand for Charobim before checking out permanently, leaving the lobby job open to a new face, one that would not find Darius’s out of place when he took up residence in an unsold unit.

  On the fourth floor he turned his key in the lock of unit #72. The door glided open on well-oiled hinges, and he entered his private domain. He stepped out of his shoes in the foyer and tugged his socks off, draping them, with his jacket and scarf, over an art-deco metal chair. He savored the feel of the polished wood floors beneath his feet as he moved to the west wall, where a bank of tall windows offered a panoramic view of Kenmore Square. The streets below were dark, but the ruddy glow of the vanished sun still clung to the underbelly of a thunderhead over Brookline. He closed the sheer curtains and turned to face the room.

  Darius had few possessions and had left most of them in his abandoned dorm room at MIT. It would have felt somehow sacrilegious to clutter this austere white space with the cheap artifacts of his old life. He still took most of his meals on campus where they were already paid for, but he slept here and would soon work here as well. For now, the beautiful empty space was neither lab nor home. It was more of a shrine and monk’s cell. There was no TV and little furniture. He slept on the floor in a sleeping bag he’d picked up at an Army Navy store, and he liked this, too. It felt good on his back after the lumpy dorm mattress, and if he felt any aches, he reveled in them as daily reminders of the Spartan luxury his guru had established for him.

  What little he needed for living he kept in the bedroom, reserving the larger space for use as a private temple. The ceilings were high, the floor taped with arcane geometry, the sole piece of furniture an antique vanity with a swivel mirror in an iron vine mounting. Darius didn’t know if the vanity had been provided by the landlord, or if Nereus Charobim himself had arranged to have it delivered. In any case, it was perfectly suited to his purpose. He had recognized this at first sight and adopted it as an altar immediately.

  At the flip of a switch, the propane fireplace roared to life in the black iron grate. He opened a box on the mantle, rustled through red tissue paper, and removed two sticks of incense, a special blend formulated by a cultist with a backroom shop that was taboo enough to remain clandestine even in Salem, where you could find a pagan emporium on every cobblestoned corner.

  He touched the sticks to the flame and inhaled a taste of their acrid fumes before placing them in the twin burners on the hearth. Then, with ribbons of smoke rising behind his shoulders like angel wings, he approached the vanity. He took a ceramic bowl from the floor and ceremoniously placed it in front of the mirror. He opened the drawer where a woman would have kept her brushes and rouge and removed a long dagger. This too was from the shop in Salem, modeled on a Tibetan phurba, a three-sided blade descending from a handle carved in the shape of a bulbous head with tentacles wrapped around the base of the blade. The knife was black from pommel to point and flecked with sparkling minerals. He set it on the table, uncorked a phial of virgin olive oil, and poured half of it into the bowl.

  The white cardboard box jostled.

  He stripped off his clothes, tossing them piece-by-piece into a corner, and beheld his sinewy form in the dark mirror. With a match from the drawer he lit a pair of thick black candles that flanked the bowl of oil and tilted the mirror downward to reflect the golden liquid. He dipped his thumb in the oil and rubbed a drop across his forefinger, softening and glazing his hand before taking up his cock and stroking it to erection.

  He thought of Samira. The look on her face when the lancet pierced her finger, and the image brought him to fullness.

  Awkwardly, he bent and opened the white box with the garish pet store logo. He reached in and cupped his hands around the bird—a diamond dove—and lifted it out. The dove trilled and tried to stretch its wings against his fingers.

  He set it down on the vanity beside the bowl and held it there gently with the webbing between his left thumb and forefinger, while with the same part of his right hand, he took up his cock again and stroked himself to the brink of orgasm.

  He stopped there and conjured the sigil of the messenger in his mind’s eye, blazing in blue flame. He drew a deep breath tinged with charred nettle, and on the exhalation, as the wave of ecstasy broke over him, he lifted the dove by the neck and squeezed the life from it while his semen jetted into the golden oil. Before the final convulsions of dove and cock relented, he seized the dagger and plunged it into the dying bird’s chest, spraying dark blood across the bowl and the linen cloth on which it rested.

  A twitching talon cut the heel of his hand, and he tossed the bloody white body to the floor, all the while keeping his eyes focused on the silvered glass and the wavering golden light of candle flame and oil.

  Now he stirred the contents of the bowl with the dagger, making a marbled swirl of blood, semen, and oil, removing the black blade only when the widdershins motion of the liquid had taken on sufficient momentum to keep swirling without assistance. He watched the vortex in the mirror taking on depth and dimension, continuing to rotate long after inertia should have stopped it.

  With the tip of the dagger he traced the sigil of Nyarlathotep on the glass, consecrating the mirror, making a portal of it for daily use, opening the way for a conversation and communion that had until now been relegated to the domain of dreams.

  A face appeared in the marbled vortex, austere and African, eyes twin points of icy light, features shifting like a heat haze mirage, in a scarlet hood from which a writhing appendage fell—a tentacle that breached the glass bou
ndary of the mirror and dipped into the liquid, then retracted with a drop of the offering quivering on its tip, which then darted into the mouth of the master, bringing him a taste and sealing the covenant.

  “I knew you would come,” Darius said in a flood of relief at the sight of the face; all of his fears of rejection and delusion allayed at last.

  “And I you,” the pharaoh said, his voice like a purring engine crackling with sparks and thrumming through every atom of the air, the floor, the walls.

  “I knew you were more than a dream.”

  In reply the face retreated into the red hood, and the fractal swirl in the mirror transmuted into a series of images that had haunted his dreams: flooded subway tunnels, a night sky marked by a unique conjunction of planets and constellations that had not been seen since the time of the Mayans, a mathematical theorem written in blood and light, and a spell written in Sanskrit. Each had visited him in his sleep, but now their order and juxtaposition took on new sense.

  The face of the pharaoh appeared again, and its lips, like ripe black worms, spoke to him. “You are my hands, Darius. Your works grant me substance, but until the stars are right, I act through your agency.”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “We must be prepared for that time. We must open the way.”

  “Yes.” He breathed the word in a fugue of ecstasy.

  “You have obtained the verses I requested? The calls and keys?”

  “I have. I’m ready to leave everything behind…school, church. From this day I serve you, only you.”

  “Leave nothing behind, for all things serve me through you, just as they serve the Great Old Ones through me.”

  “What would you have me do?”

  “I have secured a laboratory for you at the institute.”