Red Equinox (11 page)

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.

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?”

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.

Or sleeping with a friend might have been easier
.

But fear of sleeping alone in the big loft with those uncanny images slumbering on her hard drive was no reason to cross a boundary in her most precious friendship. One that couldn’t be uncrossed. The fact that she sensed a depth of feeling from Raf that she couldn’t reciprocate made her sad. It had been good to laugh in the spray of the shower wand, but if she wanted to be able to keep laughing with Rafael, she would have to be careful not to hurt him. The medication was getting her through for now, but she knew what was coming with the longer nights, and the ice and snow. Days when she would barely be able to function, when she would fluctuate between catatonia and flashes of misplaced rage. Raf didn’t need that, didn’t deserve it.

“And I’m
not
alone, anyway,” she said to Django, bending down to pet him.

He thumped his tail twice on the wood floor. Soon she realized she had absentmindedly moved from scratching the dog’s fur to scratching her own forearm, picking at an itching scab that she couldn’t recall the origin of. She was always getting banged up on urbex outings, but the scab picking was a nervous habit that Nina had pointed out to her, and she forced herself to stop.

That crown was in a pool of blood and you know it, and seeing it on a big screen will only be worse. Far worse.

She should have told Rafael to stay. She was more rattled than she’d realized because the dog had kept her mind off it until now. And yet she wasn’t finished tending to his needs. She’d been happy to watch her new companion clean his food dish, but now he was due to go out before she could sleep. God only knew what would come out of him, with all of the standing water he’d been drinking. In hindsight, the beef jerky didn’t seem like such a great thing to have given him on an out-of-practice digestive system, but she knew they never would have won him over without it. Not today, anyway. She had done better by him for his first meal at home: kibble soaked in warm water to keep him from bloating. She stretched and cracked her back, trying to let go of the tension, then grabbed a couple of plastic grocery store bags from a cabinet and stuffed them into her coat pocket.

Django didn’t need to see the leash to get up and follow her. He gave up the blanket beside the heater as soon as she started moving. Apparently they had already formed some kind of bond on the basis of one meal and a roof that didn’t leak. He looked both sad and comical with his botched haircut. She’d need a proper electric trimmer to do it right and she wasn’t sure she could spare the expense. There were going to be some significant vet bills in the next few days, with vaccines and maybe even an antibiotic for that ear. She’d asked around and found that even the flat rate for an office visit was steep, but she did have a bit of money now from her grandmother, and groceries were overrated anyway. She wasn’t going to splurge on a groomer, but for now, at least he wasn’t flea ridden and chewing the hell out of himself.

She slipped the collar over his head—black nylon with a red Celtic knot that matched the leash. Then, pausing to grab the headlamp and pull her jacket on, she led him out the door, down the stairs, and into the night.

She could see her breath against the black sky as soon as they stepped out onto the sidewalk, and it reminded her of the nights when she used to step out into the cold to smoke. Django peed on the side of the building before she could even get him near anything resembling a tree. She started to reprimand him but instead said, “You know what? That’s perfectly cool, dude. It’s your territory now, you go ahead and mark it. Rite of passage.”

He looked up at the sound of her voice and seemed to grin while the last few bursts splashed a dark spray across the bricks. It almost frosted on contact.

Looking at the urine-stained side of the warehouse brought to mind the fractal patterns she’d found lurking in seemingly plain surfaces, and she wondered if the same shapes were concealed here. There had been no sign of them in the indoor photos she’d taken earlier, but down here on the shadowy street it wasn’t hard to imagine that there might be traces of whatever had infested the mill, like an encroaching fungus striving steadily toward the second floor. She dismissed the notion with a shiver, gave the leash a little tug, and prompted Django to walk with her around the building. He trotted along willingly, and she took courage from his company when they stepped out of the orange glow of the sodium lights and into the weed-choked horseshoe courtyard.

Django sniffed around, eager to scout new territory even in the bitter cold, and in no apparent hurry to drop a load. Becca followed him, bouncing on her feet to keep warm through each pause.

From the courtyard she could see across Fort Point Channel to Southie. The sight of phone wires swaying in the biting wind made her grateful for the shelter of the building. Django tugged, and, not daring to risk letting go of the leash, she let him pull her around the lot for a while, on the trail of some scent. She gazed at the sky and saw a couple of stars like ice chips through tatters in the gray cloud cover. She cupped her hands around her nose and breathed warm air into them. The heat felt good. It brought feeling back to the tip of her nose, which started to run. She had no tissue and tasted the saline on her upper lip with her tongue. “Okay, buddy,” she said to the dog, “Time’s up. We’re going in. You shit on the floor, so be it.”

But Django’s body had stiffened, and not from the cold. His snout low and ears cocked forward to tune in on some sound, he had dropped into a ready stance, as if preparing to spring. Becca saw that his tail was curled down, the fur raised near the base, and as she bent to stroke it smooth and utter reassurances, she heard a low growling. Within a few seconds it became clear that the rumble wasn’t coming from the dog but from something much larger approaching, and before she could figure out what it was, Django had yanked the leash from her hand and was charging toward the street, barking furiously.

She chased him, stomped on the leash, and put all of her weight on her front foot. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to halt a malnourished mutt. Django strained in his collar and directed a barrage of territorial barks toward the street where the rumble of an engine was growing louder. Becca didn’t take her boot off the leash until she had a firm grip on it, and by then Django was reconsidering his bluster.

The rumble had quickly grown to resemble the din of a small army of dragons—not just one engine cutting the quiet night, but a cavalcade of them buzzing the tarmac. Tail tucked between his hind legs, Django backed against Becca just as the first vehicle came into view. It was an armored tactical truck, like a Humvee but not quite. Becca was no expert on military machines, but she’d seen Humvees on the news and parked around town as gas-guzzling status symbols. This truck was bigger. It sported what looked like a bulletproofed grill emblazoned with a cougar’s head and the word LENCO in white beneath a black hood cut to the angles of a stealth bomber. As the thing rumbled by, she saw some kind of binocular scope mounted on the roof beside a domed hatch. She had glimpsed the shape of a helmeted driver through the windshield, but the only windows on the back and sides were small rectangles of smoked glass.