Red Equinox Page 8

  Abandoning stealth, Becca took the remaining steps at a dash and gave chase. She hurtled around the corner and splashed through a stretch of stagnant puddles, cloud-filtered sunlight strobing against her face from holes in the roof, dazzling her eyes with its brightness after their acclimation to the darkness of the basement utility closet.

  She stopped short at an intersection of corridors, her green canvas bag swinging at her hip with the weight of the camera. Between her boots, she saw the gray impressions of paw prints in the dust, and followed them down the center corridor, wishing for a flashlight. She’d come less prepared than usual today. Her typical urbex kit included the headlamp, a Swiss army knife, and enough nylon cords, cleats, and hooks to satisfy a rock climber. Rafael called her a “girl scout,” but today in her haste to take more photos and interview Moe, she hadn’t expected to explore the bowels of the building.

  The paw prints led through an interior hall built of sheet rock and wood that had suffered more water damage than the brick walls of the outer rooms. In places she could see through gaping holes in the walls where she supposed vandal kids had thrown karate kicks and chunks of bricks for the sheer pleasure of destruction. None of these offered her another glimpse of the dog, though, and eventually she walked out of the far end of a long puddle, her boots glazed with gray water, and no tracks on the dusty concrete to follow. It took her a moment to register the absence of the paw prints because there were other markings on the floor; dark and geometric and hard to read in the darkness.

  She now wished she’d taken the book of matches with her, maybe even the candle. She could have stuffed them in her bag and returned them to Moe’s lair before leaving the mill. But now it was as futile to wish for matches as for the headlamp she’d left at home, so she took out her camera, turned on the LCD, and shone the little screen at the floor, straining to see the marks by its weak light.

  Becca didn’t like what she saw in the half-second before the light automatically dimmed. It looked like blood.

  She switched the flash on and took a shot of the floor at her feet, looking directly at it rather than through the viewfinder. The burst of light turned the odd shapes on the floor deep red for a blazing instant, and then she was doused in darkness again, looking at the photo on the screen: three exploded drops of blood on the concrete (drops that had fallen from a greater height than that of a dog judging by their spiky coronae) and a set of bloody, blocky sneaker treads smearing toward the wall. But the dark red skid marks ended there, as if the wall had been built across their path, or as if the body had been pulled through the wall, which was itself devoid of bloodstains. In the dark she could almost imagine she was standing beside a barrier of thick fog, but when she touched it, the eggshell paint was cold, damp, and solid beneath her fingertips.

  She backed away from the wall until her shoulders touched its opposite, raised the camera, and shot six photos—three with flash and three without.

  Her heart quickened as she thumbed the buttons, standing in the dark, waiting for the last photo to load and light her face. When it did, her breath caught in her throat. The pattern of fractal tentacles was here, just as it had been in the pictures of the brick walls from the previous day. But in the dark, the infrared textures were stronger, as if they’d been weakened by ambient sunlight in the other room, or had grown more tangible, more present in the mill since last she’d been here. And that felt right. The pattern reminded her of the restoration of some fresco from antiquity, the details of the paint emerging from under a layer of grime and soot. Only here it appeared that a layer of some reality or dimension adjacent to our own was revealed.

  Becca wiped her clammy hand down her thigh, then turned the thumbwheel and checked the previous shot. In this one, she had aimed at the base of the wall where it met the floor to capture the bloody sneaker treads. A cold dread woke in her, a sense that some grave threat was closing in on her in the dark. Her animal instincts urged her to look away from the camera screen and search the shadows for whatever had spilled blood here, but she couldn’t look away because the terrible and impossible fact confronting her from the brittle light of the LCD was that the monsters were inside the walls, all around her, and in the floor beneath her feet as well. Or that matter itself, the three dimensional space she mistook for floor and wall and God help her maybe even the sky itself, was made of monsters.

  Her breath had grown shallow and her limbs felt numb, the onset of terror threatening to immobilize her, and with her eyes still locked on the image, she forced herself to step away from the blood, to back down the corridor in the direction from which she had come…because in the photo the blood smears didn’t end at the wall; they continued through it, and there on the other side was an object she feared she recognized, sitting in a puddle of blood. It was impossible, and she told herself so. It quickly became a mantra, “Not possible, not possible….”

  Not possible for a digital camera to function like an x-ray scope, to turn a wall into a window. Not possible for a cardboard crown to be overturned in a pool of blood in another dimension at her feet, inside a solid wall.

  * * *

  When Becca emerged from the mill, staggering over the fallen door and through the brambles, clutching her camera to her chest, sweat beading on her forehead and chilling in the cold air, she didn’t see Rafael. Her panic increased at the idea that he might have gone into the building looking for her, that she might have to go back in there instead of just getting the hell out of here, and the inarticulate fear underlying these other concerns but rapidly rising to the surface of her consciousness—that he could be trapped in the walls, like a fly in amber, among the oily spheres and fractals.

  But then she heard a gentle, lilting voice on the breeze, Rafael’s voice, and coming around a corner she found him squatting in a bald patch of the weedy lot where the rusty rings of beer can lids poked from the charred ground and shards of dirty glass glinted silver in the diffused sunlight of the dim day.

  Sensing her approach, he turned to smile at her, a smile that faded when he saw her. He was holding something in his fingers, something she would never have thought to pack in her own bag. He was feeding a piece of beef jerky to Django.

  Chapter 9

  Darius Marlowe was a man with many keys. He had an ID that served as a key to the building that housed the lab; he had a magnetic card that served as a key to the lab itself; and he had a photo of a sigil drawn in condensation on the surface of a foggy mirror—a mirror misted with the water of another world—on his phone, which served as a key to the mind of Dr. Leonard Martin, who was himself a kind of key to the best 3D printer at MIT.

  He flashed the sigil at Dr. Martin as he entered the lab. It probably wasn’t necessary to show it to him every time, but Darius wasn’t sure of the rules for keeping the suggestion effective, so he didn’t take any chances. His recent communications with Charobim had focused on only his most vital technical questions. The face-to-face summoning was an exhausting process, one he resorted to only when the instructions from his dreams required clarification.

  The dreams had grown more vivid now that he slept at the Fenway Towers, close to the mirror. Maybe it had nothing to do with the mirror. Maybe he was developing some part of his brain, some facet of his active imagination through regular exercise. He thought of it as a kind of muscle deep in his brain, something serpentine coiled around his amygdala.

  Martin had glanced up at Darius’s entry with perfectly lucid curiosity on his face, but at the sign of the pharaoh his features slackened immediately, and, resembling a lobotomy recipient, the distinguished scientist shambled to a corner of the lab to busy himself with whatever amusements he could find there (probably the non-Euclidian sculpture he’d been building out of coffee stirrers whenever Darius visited) and clearing the way for the protégé to use the lab.

  Darius opened the glass specimen case at the end of the bay and checked on his latest prototype. It was a thing of beauty: a bionic larynx built in the Plexiglas box of th
e 3D printer from bovine cells, silicone, and silver Nano-particles in a mere five hours and then left to cultivate in a Petrie dish for two weeks, a process accelerated by a formula that Charobim had inscribed on the mirror one midnight. Dr. Martin would have been duly impressed if he were in his right mind in Darius’s presence. But then, if the professor were in his right mind, the student would have been ejected from the lab by campus security long before he’d had a chance to exhibit his genius for biotech innovation.

  The project followed a trail blazed by McAlpine and Mannoor at Princeton, where they had developed a bionic ear that could transmit and receive electromagnetic frequencies beyond the natural human range. But their models took four weeks to cultivate and couldn’t detect acoustic sound waves. The work of Charobim and Marlowe would never see the pages of a peer-reviewed journal, but it broke new ground in that it produced actual acoustic speech via a voice box made of similar biosynthetic materials for the vocal folds, cartilage, and epiglottis. Of course, the production of language depended on the entire vocal system from lungs to tongue and teeth, but Darius wasn’t interested in making it speak English or any other known language.

  He had built the Voice Box of the Gods to reproduce a lost language, the first language, which man had once sung in wordless adoration of the dark gods who had birthed him from the amniotic tide pools of his marine incarnation.

  It was a language of vowels and overtones preserved by the priest class of ancient Sumer long after the evolution (or devolution) of the human organism had left such utterances behind. Some volumes of occult history claimed that the priests had cut out their own tongues or mutilated their mouths in excruciating initiation rituals to reclaim the gift of black song. Charobim would neither confirm nor deny these accounts when Darius probed him in the deepest hours of the night, when drunken B.U. students would catch glimpses of unearthly lights and colors from a fourth-floor window of the gargoyle-haunted Fenway Towers. The methods of the past were abrogate, Charobim declared in his true form as Nyarlathotep. New science had granted the ability to produce essential harmonics in purer form, and the phonetic codes that Darius had transcribed from the old tomes in the tower library of the Starry Wisdom Church were the keys.

  The first prototypes had failed to reproduce the sounds properly and had only succeeded in thinning the membrane between the dimensions in the abandoned buildings where Darius had tested them. He had gone back to the design, had spent hours with his laptop on the vanity beside the swivel mirror, the two glowing windows exchanging information, his blood-shot eyes and blood-stained fingers serving as the interface. And now he sensed that success was nigh. He could almost taste it.

  He pulled on a blue latex glove and gingerly lifted the larynx from the Petrie dish. A pair of spiral wires trailed from it, their gold contacts brushing against his wrist as he turned the organ this way and that, admiring the translucent pink sheen of its semi-sexual aesthetic.

  He opened the cabinet at his feet and removed an object that had once been, and still resembled, a battery-powered Aiwa boom box. He had gutted most of the electronics and replaced them with a small fan and silicone ductwork which functioned as an esophagus for driving breath through the vocal folds, and a digital chip programmed with the incantations: the Sanskrit, Enochian, and Lengian vowel sequences distilled to ones and zeroes.

  He had encoded the mantras into data strings at the Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences, a complex he loved for its non-rectilinear Deconstructivist architecture—the walls teetering at sickening, random angles around him while he worked. Some sensitive students found the place nauseating, but it delighted Darius, and he reveled in the critique of mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros, who said, “Housing a scientific department at a university inside the symbol of its nemesis must be the ultimate irony.”

  Darius took a screwdriver from the bench and removed the left speaker grill to reveal the custom port he had installed in the boom box. He plugged the contact wires into their jacks and secured the bionic voice box in its latex brace, making sure to position the labia over the air channel. The juxtaposition of bionic bovine tissue and ghetto tech gave him the same thrill it always did, and he took a moment to admire his handiwork before realigning the metal grill and replacing the screws.

  He picked up the finished device and made for the door. “Later, Professor,” he said with a two-finger salute, then paused with his hand on the door handle. It occurred to him that if his newest prototype did the job, this might be the last time he would see Dr. Martin, and he realized he had developed an unexpected affection for the man.

  The hypnosis usually wore off within a couple of hours, and Darius had gotten used to flashing the old coot’s retinas at least once per session to gain an extension of lab time, but now he set the boom box on the floor and dug his smartphone out of his pocket. With a tap he inverted the sigil, then showed it to Martin, who was looking up from his stick sculpture like a dim-witted child, an expression of good-natured curiosity puffing his salt-and-pepper whiskers into a smile that would have shocked his students. But the smile faded as the sigil sunk in, and his brow furrowed into its natural state. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “An admirer of your work. Listen: you should leave the city for the weekend, okay? Just a word to the wise. There’s a new kind of storm coming, and you’ll want to seek out higher ground.”

  And with that, Darius Marlowe slipped out the door, jogged down a square spiral of stairs that echoed with his footfalls, and stepped onto Mass Ave leaving MIT behind.

  Chapter 10

  Caring for Django turned out to be a welcome distraction from the mounting fear Becca had felt in the dark corridors of the mill. She knew her camera held clues to a mystery that she would need to confront, but in the hard, gray daylight of the outside, those mysteries took on the bleached-out hue of a fading nightmare, and the dog’s needs took precedence, enabling her to shift her focus from cosmic dread to personal responsibility. Part of her mind was already ticking off things she could do about the photos, like making backups and showing a couple of the best examples to either Clay Dalton—her mentor at the Museum School—or Uncle Neil, who now ran a camera shop after retiring from forensic photography.

  The fact was, she didn’t want to think about what she might have captured in the corridor, so she tamped it down by telling herself that when she did look at the shots on the big screen, the images would somehow make sense in a way that had eluded her while she was freaked out in the dark, with only the LCD for reference. It would make sense, or one of her mentors would make sense of it for her. For now, she focused on the dog. She might not be able to help Moe Ramirez, but she was pretty sure she could help Django.

  When they arrived at her warehouse apartment, she offered Rafael a beer and asked him if he wanted to watch TV while she groomed the dog, already feeling self-conscious about just how prepared she was to take care of an animal she’d been unlikely to ever see again. He accepted the beer but not the remote, and ended up following her around while she fussed with the dog, trimming clumps of matted hair with a pair of shears. To his credit, he did hold Django to keep him from jumping out of the claw-foot tub while she worked what was left of his fur into a medicinal lather. By then Rafael had finished his beer and was shaking his head with a smirk she found infuriating.

  “What? What’s funny about this?”

  “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “Flea shampoo?”

  “Well, duh. I don’t want fleas in my apartment.”

  “So you just keep the stuff on hand?”

  “No, I bought it when I decided to rescue him.”

  “I just think it’s cute you’ve been planning this for a while.”

  “He needed someone.”

  “What if he belongs to someone?”

  “He doesn’t. He’s a hurricane dog.”

  “So you’re gonna have the vet scan him for a microchip?”

&n
bsp; She hadn’t thought of that, and knew he could see the trepidation on her face as she considered it. He laughed. “Fuckin’ dognapper.”

  Becca aimed the shower wand at him. He flinched at the spray and let go of Django, who immediately shook off and soaked the both of them.

  From there it escalated into a water fight, with Django happily yapping between the pair. Later, when Rafael had gone home and Becca was curled up on the futon with a glass of red and the dog on a blanket at her feet trying to burn his nose on the little electric space heater she’d set up for him, she thought of how good it had been to laugh. She’d almost forgotten what it felt like after putting her grandmother in the ground and then succumbing to the encroaching paranoia that had come with the odd encounters she’d had these past few weeks—first with the tattooed reverend at the asylum and then with Maurice and his talk about cracks in some cosmic wheel. She supposed her attraction to the margins of society was responsible for those encounters. She’d never wanted to photograph shiny, happy people, and if you were going to go poking around in abandoned asylums on forsaken hilltops and collapsing mills beside rat-infested wharves, you had to expect to meet your fair share of people who had fallen through the cracks (ha-ha). Lovers, buggers, and thieves. Wasn’t that what Maurice had been singing when she met him? Down by the river Charles. The thought stirred a worm in her stomach, and she wondered if she’d ever be able to hear that song again without a chill running down her spine.

  Well, you were bound to find some crazies when you went looking for them, poking around in the rusty wreckage. But it didn’t help when the paranoid schizoid who wanted to warn you about a cosmic invasion ended up getting pulled through a solid wall into some sidelong dimension by fractal tentacles and iridescent spheres or some such fucking thing, did it?

  She rubbed her stocking foot against Django’s head, scratching between his ears with her toes, and her eyes wandered reluctantly to her workstation across the vast room. Would she be able to sleep tonight if she looked at those pictures? It had been bad enough to look at them in the little LCD window on the camera. She took another sip of her wine and almost regretted letting Raf go home. Examining the photos with a friend might have been easier.