Red Equinox (30 page)

“What if the cult sets off more of these…whatever they are…
harmonic bombs?”
Brooks said. “What if when you think it’s over and loosen up security, they find away to do it over the PA at Fenway Park? Are you going to try to round up thirty thousand people for mass vaccinations? Or will you just crop dust the city with aerosolized Nepenthe? I’m sure you won’t get any resistance to that in a state where you’ve had to beg parents to get an MMR shot for their toddlers. And what does he mean, ‘for now’? This breach is headed toward a critical mass, isn’t it? After that, it won’t matter if you heard the chant or not—everyone will see them among us. The Book Breakers downstairs think it will happen on the equinox. Am I right?
Gary?
”

Gary looked uncomfortable. Brooks was sure he could wrestle the syringe away from him as long as the two guards didn’t have his arms pinned behind his back. But what was he about to fight for, anyway? The ability to be seen and devoured by monsters? No, it was the right to see things as they really were and have a chance of stopping it without fighting blind.

“You need me to be able to see them,” he said to Northrup. “You need at least one agent who can tell you what’s really happening.”

Now Northrup leaned into a dim pool of light. “Why did you let her get away? Twice.”

“There were more urgent priorities. She didn’t represent a threat. I still don’t think she’s a threat.”

“Then why has she been in the middle of this from the start?”

“Judging by what we found at her grandmother’s house, I’d say she was born into it. She might even have pieces of the puzzle that can help us, but I doubt she knows exactly what they are and how to use them.”

“You’re talking about the scarab,” Gary said. “The book is all about it. The guys downstairs think it could be a weapon.”

“Do you think she knows how to use it?” Northrup asked Brooks.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Who knows what her grandmother told her?”

“Really? Who knows? I think maybe your wife knows. Should we bring her in?”

“She’s not my wife anymore and she doesn’t know shit.”

Of course they had pulled Becca Philips’ medical records and knew that Nina was her shrink. But they hadn’t come to him with the information until now. How long had they known? Was this some kind of test?

“Don’t think we won’t use her if we need her to establish trust with the girl.”

“
Use
her?” Brooks laughed. “You don’t know Nina.”

Northrup said, “If Rebecca Philips knows how to stop this and has a device in her possession to do so, then why is she running from
us?
”

“Uh, maybe because we’ve been locking her up, hunting her down? I get the impression she has some trust issues.” He turned his head away from them and stared pointedly through the window into the adjacent room, where the waterboarding equipment waited. “Problem with authority, I guess.”

Northrup nodded at one of the guards, who in turn opened the door and signaled someone in the hall. A moment later two more black-clad security contractors led Darius Marlowe into the room beyond the glass. A third man, with wavy blond hair, a weathered face, and a sporty white neoprene shirt entered the room behind them, his body language casual, almost lazy as he leaned against the wall and waited for the guards to strap Marlowe’s ankles and arms to the board.

Marlowe’s black robe had been replaced with a navy blue smock and matching linen pants. He didn’t struggle, only stared blankly at the ceiling, his mind fixed in another zone entirely, as if he could see the black orb, the promise of salvation, through the ceiling and roof of the building.

Brooks stood, but the guards in the theater didn’t make any move toward him. Somehow, with no verbal command from Northrup, the focus had shifted away from inoculating him with Nepenthe. For now, anyway. Northrup turned in his chair to face the glass. The two guards flanking Marlowe squatted and angled the bottom of the board so that the prisoner’s feet rose above his head. The microphones were live in the room, fed to speakers in the theater, and Brooks could hear every rustle of the plywood on the plastic tarp.

“Everybody thinks he’s dead,” Brooks said, looking at Northrup’s transparent reflection in the glass. “Is that because he soon will be?”

“Pronouncing him dead was a calculated risk: the fastest way to flush Philips out of hiding. If martial law were still in effect we’d have no chance of finding her. But with normal transit up and running, she gets signals that we no longer care about her, and she’s likely to return to familiar places.”

“But you can never let it get out that I didn’t kill him at the scene.”

“True. Darius Marlowe has passed beyond the realm of due process.”

The man in the neoprene shirt bowed over Marlowe’s inverted head, set his hands on his knees, and, staring into the prisoner’s eyes, said, “There was a tall man at the Mapparium and reflecting pool. People heard him chanting when the shit hit the fan. Same songs you like to play on your boom box. He goes by many names, but I believe you know him as Nereus Charobim. He’s your mentor, your connection. He provided you with housing, money, materials, and information to execute your plot. Where is he now, Darius? You’re going to tell me the truth within fifteen seconds of getting the water, that’s just a statistical fact, something I’m sure you can appreciate as an MIT guy. So why not cut the extreme suffering out of the equation and tell me now? Everyone thinks you’re dead anyway. No one’s ever going to know how long you lasted. They already think you’re a martyr.”

Marlowe gave no sign of having heard the speech, none that Brooks could discern from the other side of the glass. The interrogator took a small, dark-green towel from beside the water pitcher on the floor and draped it over Marlowe’s face, tucking the sides behind his head. He picked up the pitcher, and, holding Marlowe’s chest down with his left hand, poured the water in a long, slow stream over the towel. The shrouded head jerked from side to side reflexively, then settled, as if bracing against the inescapable flow. It lasted mere seconds, but to Brooks it felt like an eternity. He had read about the gag reflex, the body’s panicked certainty that it was drowning, the burning in the lungs, and again, he wished he’d aimed higher in Arkham.

The interrogator removed the wet towel. Marlowe spluttered and coughed, the wheezing through his nose loud and distorted in the theater speakers.

“Same question, Darius. Where is he? Where is Charobim?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then how do you get in touch with him?”

“I used to need a consecrated mirror.” Marlowe drew ragged breaths, winced at the pain they brought to the bandaged wound in his diaphragm. He pushed through it,
wanting
to speak. “But now his presence is palpable. I can find him in any mirror.” He turned his face toward the one-way glass and stared straight at Brooks, a grim smile lighting his waxy face. Brooks recoiled from it in revulsion.

“Whatever sixth sense you turned on in people, we’re shutting it down, Darius.” The interrogator said. “We have a drug that shuts it off.” He took a syringe from his pocket and held it close to Marlowe’s eyes. “I’ll give it to you. Maybe that’d be worse than the water, huh? Losing your ability to see, hear, and touch your precious gods. And you’re never going to get your hands on the technology again, so…your prayers will be as good as Pig Latin. You’ll have as much chance of evoking Cthulhu as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s over, Darius. Your part in this is finished. Tell me where to find Charobim.”

Marlowe stared at the needle. It was still capped with orange plastic.

“He will arise on the blood-soaked earth when the stars are right. He will appear in his guise as the Haunter of the Dark. He will inhabit the stone and usher in the new aeon at the Red Equinox, and you are powerless to stop it!”

The board had been tilted so that Brooks could see Marlowe gloating through his bloodshot eyes and quivering lips. “You want to know where he is? I’ve
seen
his safe house…a palace of black crystal on the shores of the Cerenarian Sea. I have crossed over and back again from that nightside realm, and I no longer need science to evoke my gods, to draw them forth from the spaces between worlds. I
invoke
them to inhabit my own flesh and blood. No drug will purge the blessed brine from my blood. And all your torture games will only empower—”

The interrogator wrapped the wet towel over Marlowe’s face, cutting off the mad diatribe. He began to pour again. This time there was no struggle. The towel went concave at the location of the mouth, as Marlowe seemed to suck it in, inhaling the water. Then the shape under the towel began to change. Something was writhing under it. Marlowe’s forearms, the only exposed flesh on his body, turned a grayish-green hue. His muscles went taut and seemed to inflate. The straps snapped, and the guards scrambled to seize his ankles.

Brooks was on his feet. He could hear the guards behind him rushing out of the theater to provide backup. He sensed the other men in the room also standing, moving closer to the glass, transfixed. Marlowe reached up and swiped the wet towel from his face, revealing a squirming nest of tentacles with a chattering, many-layered beak at the center. The guards were scurrying across the floor to get away from it. One kicked the water can and spilled it. The creature seized the interrogator by the hair with a clawed hand and yanked the screaming man’s face into its own, as if for a kiss. The tentacles wrapped around the back of the interrogator’s head. Blood sprayed from the gaps in the sinewy embrace.

The two guards from the theater burst into the room, guns raised. The first squeezed off three shots, two of which penetrated the Marlowe creature’s shoulder, causing ripples but no damage. The gray flesh sprouted puckered orifices, which spat the lead out onto the floor.

The creature dropped the interrogator’s limp body and approached the glass. Brooks sensed his superiors retreating to the rear of the theater.

When it spoke, in a mockery of human speech, the words seemed to bubble from a deep well of putrid mucous. Brooks could only make sense of the mangled words coming from the overhead speakers because they were already familiar to him. They were from a poem that had haunted his memory ever since he’d first encountered its beautiful, harrowing nonsense in a high-school anthology. “Weave a circle round him thrice and cross your heart with holy dread, for he on honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.”

It walked toward the mirrored glass, crouched, swung its elongated arms back, then dove and disappeared, leaving the glass intact and the men behind it shielding their eyes against the impact.

Becca waited at a coffee shop down the street from Rafael’s apartment while he went to retrieve what they needed. She wasn’t sure if he was being tracked by SPECTRA, wasn’t even sure if
she
was anymore, but it seemed prudent to assume that she was, despite what she read in the newspapers while she waited.

She was the only patron seated on the outdoor patio, and the server had even brought her a bowl of fresh water for Django. Thankfully, the girl didn’t seem to recognize her. Becca’s innocence wasn’t front-page news; it was tucked in after the details of the slaying of Darius Marlowe and the PTSD treatment being offered to witnesses of the attacks. There, on page seven of
The Boston Globe
, was a small black-and-white headshot and a headline that said almost as much as the article:

Photographer Cleared of Suspicion

Apparently she’d been brushed under the media carpet. The mayor had stated in a press conference that she had only been a person of interest because authorities believed she might have captured photos of the cultists.

She found it odd that neither paper mentioned the address where Marlowe was shot and killed, nor that she had once lived there. Most puzzling of all: they could have publicized that she was missing and possibly dead, Marlowe’s final victim, but hadn’t. Under the auspices of concern for her well-being, they could have put out a call for tips from anyone who knew her whereabouts. Instead, they were going out of their way to sell the narrative that the city was now safe, even for the briefly notorious Rebecca Philips.

She drank her tea, and her eyes drifted to the black orb in the northern sky. She wondered what had happened to all of those PTSD cases who knew what she knew—that this was anything but over. She tugged her jacket sleeve over her bandaged wrist, and wished she had a baseball cap to cover her eyes. She felt exposed sitting so close to the street, but the foot traffic was light, Django seemed happy, and it was better than haunting an alley between buildings while Rafael fetched supplies. The candid art photography she favored had always brought with it a certain secret-agent sensibility, and she had learned long ago that sometimes the best way to hide was to appear engaged in ordinary activity in plain sight. Of course, it was likely that any agents following her were doing the same, and she found her eyes returning to the parked cars in the gas station on the corner and the blank windows brooding above her in the apartment towers across the street.

Django growled, stood erect, and tugged at the leash. Before she could do more than tighten her grip and whirl around, a man in several layers of ragged clothes, a dirty Red Sox cap, and sunglasses appeared out of nowhere and slid into the seat opposite hers at the small metal table.

“It’s me, Becca.”

“
Jeez,
Raf. I didn’t recognize you. That’s good. Were you followed, you think?”

“Don’t think so.”

“How about your apartment, was it ransacked?”

“Not obviously, but I’d probably never know if they didn’t want me to. I shoulda put a piece of scotch tape on the door when I left or some crafty spy shit like that, right?”

Becca tried to smile. “You make a scarily good homeless guy.” She couldn’t help thinking of Moe Ramirez, and a shadow passed over her heart, an uncomfortable reminder of why she was doing this: to rectify things for the dead.