Red Equinox (36 page)

She breathed the ionized air deep into her lungs. Looking up and down the towers of thundering water, she knew she had never felt so small in the face of the power of nature. Not even in that red September she would never forget.

The sun flared off the stone that hung from her neck, and Diego leaned in close to be heard over the roar of the falls, and he recited the legend of their origin into her ear.

“They say that the river was the domain of a great serpent god named Mboi. And the local tribes would gather once each year to appease him by sacrificing a maiden to the waters. But one year the chieftain’s daughter, Naipí was chosen, and a boy named Tarobá, who loved her, was heart-stricken and tried to persuade them to let her go. But even the chief would not defy the fearsome serpent, and they said it must be done.

“So the night before the sacrifice, Tarobá freed her and spirited her away in a canoe. But Mboi was enraged, and, pursuing the lovers, he raised his giant body high into the sky and crashed into the riverbed, cleaving the earth, and creating the falls.

“The Guaraní say that Tarobá became a palm tree standing on these cliffs above the falls, and Naipí became a rock below the gulf, and there they remain, separated forever, while Mboi watches them from a cave.

“But on sunny days, like this one, a rainbow bridges the distance, connecting them once again.”

Becca cast her gaze over the falls, over the iridescence of the rainbows and the butterflies, the vast swathes of lush green jungle, and thought about how it would be summer here for months, and the water on the coast would be blue, and even when winter came, the days would be long. She wondered if Brooks could call in another favor and have Django put on one of those private jets. After all, the dog was a hero. When the house in Arkham sold, her uncle would send her enough to live on for a while, and maybe by then she’d have sold something to
National Geographic
. A girl could dream, anyway.

Boarding the bus back to São Paulo, Becca noticed the driver fiddling with the antenna on a transistor radio. The box hummed and crackled, blasted a vulgar buzz as the aluminum rod searched the sky for the right frequencies. At last a signal came through—faint and fuzzy at first, then clear and bright. It was the guitar intro to “Here Comes the Sun” by The Beatles.

Brooks sent the dog to Brazil and moved on to getting caught up in the lives of new strangers, most of them hapless witnesses to the strange sciences that threatened civilization periodically while the sane people of the world carried on in blissful ignorance of the shadows beyond the cold light of the collective digital campfire. But he smiled whenever he received a postcard from Becca, and he kept tabs on the Harvard, Copley, and Back Bay witnesses—especially Tom, because Becca had taken an interest in him and if she asked about him again Brooks didn’t want her to think he didn’t care.

Tom and his wife Susan’s baby arrived two weeks early, on March 30
th
: a healthy boy weighing in at 6.8 pounds, 19 inches. They named him Noah.

Brooks called ahead and dropped by their condo three weeks later with a basket of food for the sleep-deprived couple. They seemed happy, and Tom had gotten used to Agent Brooks as a fixture in his life, albeit a rare one, even if he couldn’t quite remember exactly what they had done together and understood that he probably never would.

Brooks made himself scarcer after the baby came, but he still called every five or six months. On one such call, around the holidays, Tom mentioned that Noah had spoken his first word:
banana
.

Brooks could hear the pride in the man’s voice. “
Mama
or
Dada
would have been nice, but those could be gibberish.
Banana
is a real word. I mean it was clear as day.”

“That’s great,” Brooks said. “First word. He’ll be crawling before you know it.”

“Oh man, yeah, that’ll be chaos. Yeah, before
banana
it was
all
gibberish. The sounds babies make…it almost sounds like a language sometimes. Makes you wonder what he thinks he’s saying.”

Brooks felt a chill, like a trickle of icy water had been poured down the collar of his shirt. He licked his suddenly dry lips and asked, “What kind of sounds?”

“Just sounds I didn’t even know humans could make, you know? Like…I don’t know if I could even remember an example well enough to mimic it. Some of it repeats though. Like…Oh, yeah:
Cthulhu R'lyeh
Wgah’nagl fhtagn
. That’s a piece of something he says a lot. Funny, huh?

“You still there, Jason?”

Brooks still held the phone, but he had half forgotten it as he walked to the window and looked out over the icy, gray city, wondering how many other babies had been born to people whose ears had been infected with those infernal harmonics. He was looking at the silver line of a contrail and the shadow it cast against the burnished gunmetal cloud cover, and thinking about what might lie in wait behind the sky.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been lucky to have the support of some amazing friends and allies on this writing adventure. I’d especially like to thank Jeff Miller and Jill Sweeney-Bosa. Jeff’s story insights and artwork have often helped me to clarify my creative direction, while Jill has been a phenomenal help as a beta reader, publicist, and event planner, making every book a celebration. I love you both and don’t know what I’d do without you. Thanks also to Sue Little and Dan Chartrand, proprietors of my favorite indie book stores—Jabberwocky and Water Street—and to Christopher C. Payne at JournalStone for once again giving me the opportunity to do this thing I love and for blessing me with a great editor in Dr. Michael Collings. Thanks to National Park Services Ranger Eric Hanson Plass for answering my questions about the Bunker Hill Monument on a January day when the steps were too icy for climbing. But don’t blame him for my addition of flagpole mounts in all four windows even though these days the monument only has them in two. Just think of my Boston as a hub slightly out of alignment with history. Early readers who improved the book and to whom I owe much gratitude include Brett J. Talley, Chuck Killorin (who also rocked the cover this time), Robert Falzano, S.T. Joshi, Vincenzo Bilof, and my first and last manuscript reader, my wife, Jen, who helps to keep the chaos at bay.

DOUGLAS WYNNE is the author of two previous novels:
The Devil of Echo Lake
and
Steel Breeze
. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son and a houseful of animals just a stone’s throw from H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional town of Arkham. You can find him on the web at www.dougwynne.com