Red Equinox (9 page)

Becca made a cup of tea in the microwave and settled cross-legged in her rickety gray office chair, waiting for the SD cards from her modified Nikon to load into the iMac. Images flashed before her eyes like a shuffled deck of tarot cards: too fast to focus on but chilling her nonetheless. She leaned forward squinting, as if that would reconcile the mystery.

“No….”

On the screen were elements she recognized from vague oppressive nightmares she’d had before Nina prescribed something for dreamless sleep. Drawn into the procession of aberrant thumbnails, it took a moment for her to realize that a distant sound from the bedroom was her ringtone. She stepped away from the computer desk and, when she saw it was Rafael, answered the call.

“Hey, Raf, what’s up?” she said, moving to one of the wall-length windows, her gaze roving idly over the rain-drenched rooftops spread out below, most of the houses abandoned in the flood zone, some lit against the dark afternoon and the thunderheads that had settled stubbornly on the city.

“Just checking to see how you’re doing… after, you know, losing your grandmother and all. How’s it going?”

“I’m all right.”

“Well, I know this time of year isn’t exactly easy on you anyway. Then that happened.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “I probably should have moved to California by now.”

“You sound distracted. Is this a bad time?”

“No. Sorry. Is that rain I hear? Are you outside?”

“Actually, I’m outside your building. I brought you some soup.”

“And you’re making small talk?” She laughed. “What is wrong with your brain, boy? I’ll be right down.”

His dreads were dripping like a rope mop when she opened the door for him. “Get in here. You look as bad as the dog I’ve been trying to rescue.”

“What dog?”

“Doesn’t matter. He got away.”

“Sounds more like attempted abduction than rescue.”

“If you weren’t bearing a gift of soup….”

“Yeah, well, somebody’s gotta feed you. I stopped by the gallery but they said you were out sick.”

Becca sighed. “I’m okay. I’m just not up for dealing with people.”

He stopped climbing the stairs midflight, nodded, and said, “Okay, that’s cool.”

She grabbed him by the bicep and tugged. The muscle gave more resistance than she expected. He always looked so lanky and mellow; she forgot how athletic he was. “I don’t mean
you
. You don’t qualify as people.”

“
Gee,
Thanks.”
He smiled and followed her up the stairs, closer to the sound of the rain on the roof and the muted rumble of thunder.

The soup was vegetarian curry from a café near Rafael’s apartment. He’d known it was a favorite of hers from lunches they’d had there at the outdoor tables on Boylston Street. On their first visit, Becca had asked the waitress about the broth to make sure it wasn’t chicken stock, and Rafael had apparently filed away the information for future reference. Becca relished the warmth from the cardboard canister as she carried it to the kitchenette and ladled the soup into bowls. The rich smell awakened her hunger.

She brought a bowl and spoon to Rafael, who sat on the futon by the windows, and had almost settled into a stuffed chair with her own bowl when he jogged her memory by asking, “So tell me about this dog.”

She straightened up, sloshing a dollop of broth over the brim of her bowl. She licked it from the heel of her hand and said, “That’s right—I was downloading pictures when you called. You mind eating at my desk? You don’t have to, but I want to look at them. They’re fuckin’ weird. And I might have one of the dog.”

“Weird how?”

“C’mon.”

*   *   *

“Okay, that
is
weird.” Rafael had forgotten his cooling soup. He sat in Becca’s swivel chair, squinting at the widescreen on her desk. “What is it?”

“I don’t know….” Too hungry to forget her own food, she stood behind him, slurping the dregs from the bowl. They had watched the entire set from the mill as a slideshow, and now he was zooming in on one of the better examples.

“It looks like that kelp you find at the beach,” Rafael said. “The brown stuff with bubbles. You ever pop those like bubble wrap when you were a kid?”

“Sure. Yeah, it kinda does, but it’s….”

“Much bigger. This is to scale with the bricks? It’s not a double exposure?”

She shrugged. “I didn’t see anything like this on the bricks at the time, but I don’t even know how to get a double exposure with a digital camera. Not on the card. And even if I did, I haven’t shot any close ups of seaweed, and it only
sort
of looks like that.”

“Yeah…I just meant how that batwing stuff connects them. The actual bubbles are more round and…oily.”

“I know what you mean. Like giant soap bubbles right? You can’t see the colors in black-and-white infrared, but I know what you mean. Those swirly shades of gray look like they’d be iridescent.”

Becca leaned over Rafael’s shoulder (he smelled good, like coconut oil) and clicked on a thumbnail in the viewer. Another image of a brick wall expanded to fill the screen. The bricks were flaking with weather-cracked paint and lichen, but overlaying these textures was a ghostly pattern of gray whorls spiraling from pinpricks of blackness. The pattern ran rampant over the entire wall with the exception of a clear area at the focal point of the photo, surrounding the graffiti of a five-branched rune, as if the symbol were repellent to whatever psychedelic infestation had overrun the derelict mill.

“They look like spirals made of spirals,” Rafael said.

“Or fractals. Fractals made of tentacles.”

He looked away from the screen and scrutinized her face. “When did you take these, anyway?”

Becca didn’t meet his eyes when she replied. “Yesterday.”

“You went to the mill without me? The
fuck
, Becca. Have you gone on any other expeditions alone?”

“A few. Look, I know what you think, but this dog is really skittish. I’d have no chance if I wasn’t alone.”

He shook his head.  “Becca, what if you fell through a floor? Or if something collapsed on you? These places aren’t safe, and without—”

“Without a partner, I know. I
know.
Okay? I promise I’ll at least tell you where I’m going next time.”

“No, you’ll bring me next time.”

Now she did meet his eyes with a hardness in her own. “You’re not my father. And I
wasn’t
alone. There was some crazy guy there. Like a tinfoil hat dude.”

“Oh, you’re really making your case now. Good thing he didn’t rape you.”

“Too paranoid to be rapey.”

“Or murder you in a paranoid rage.”

“His only weapon was a laser pointer. One of those cheap ones you use to fuck with a cat.”

Rafael sighed. “What, did he give you a PowerPoint presentation on Ancient Aliens?”

Becca laughed. “Almost. I wonder if he painted that symbol. You ever see it before?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“It looks familiar, but I don’t know from where.”

“He didn’t point it out to you with his laser?”

“No. He was using that to draw red pentagrams on the walls. Wish I’d got a shot of it. He was so freaky cool with like this cardboard crown and 3D glasses.”

“Sounds certifiable. But you
did
get a pentagram picture. There, right?” Rafael pointed at one of the thumbnails he’d clicked past quickly a moment ago. Becca enlarged it. It was a shot of a different wall with the same sort of infrared fractal pattern, except here the pattern vanished around a five-pointed star delineated by the absence of the fractal, the same way the five-branched symbol had kept it at bay in the other photo.

“Wait a minute,” Becca said, “That shot isn’t from the mill, it’s from the asylum.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. And Moe, the freaky guy with the laser, he wasn’t there that day when you and I went.”

“Maybe he was there before us. Can a laser leave some kind of uh... radiation traces that would show up on an infrared photo?”

“I doubt it, but now I kinda want to buy one and experiment.” She went to her shoulder bag where it hung from a chair, dug out the camera, then snapped a few quick shots of the nearest brick wall and of Rafael seated at her desk, the screen glowing behind him. She ejected the card and inserted it into the computer.

“What are you doing?”

She clicked on all three photos in quick succession. They opened, filling her screen. “Just testing the camera to see if we get the same effect here. In case there’s something wrong with the sensor or the lens, but…no….  No spheres or fractals.”

“So it’s not the camera.”

“No.”

Rafael took a spoonful of soup and watched her as she tucked the camera back into the bag, slipped into her jacket, and slung the bag over her shoulder, pulling her ponytail from under the strap.

“Where are we going?” he asked, and sipped from the bowl as she had, eyeing her over the brim, intent on finishing before she left without him.

“Back to the mill.”

*   *   *

Becca convinced Rafael to wait outside while she went in to take another set of photos, this time documenting the walls extensively to see if the phenomenon recurred. She was also hoping she might see Django or Moe again and didn’t want her companion scaring either of them off. There was a semi-collapsed outbuilding where Rafael could have taken shelter while he waited for her, but the rain had let up while they were on the T, so he wandered the weedy lot and smoked a joint. A few rooms in, Becca caught sight of him through a broken window. He produced a tube of oil paint from the pocket of his hoodie, squeezed some purple onto a small brush, and set about dashing off one of his trademark characters on the damp brick façade, his nimble brown fingers amazing her with their innate fluency.

She smelled no sage in the air this time, and as she progressed deeper and deeper along the ground floor through the labyrinth of abandoned machines and rotting textiles, she became increasingly sure that she was alone in the place. In one empty room she found paw prints in the dust and followed them, but they vanished in a roofless hall where the rain had recently assaulted the dirty tiles, pooling in the cracks and empty grout channels. Her footfalls echoed amid the
drip-drop-plop
falling from the heights where tangles of rebar clawed at the pewter sky.

She came to a descending steel staircase and took it one tentative step at a time, the metal groaning under her weight. At the bottom she found a utility closet the size of a bathroom. It was almost empty of evidence of its original function, as all of the circuit breaker boxes and conduit pipes had been stripped of copper, probably by looters. At the far end where the ceiling sloped into shadow, she saw a bed of cardboard scraps and musty blankets. Was this where Moe Ramirez slept? She waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark.

As the room took on detail, she saw that the walls were marked with colored chalk in a profusion of geometric forms, Hebrew letters, and numbers, along with what appeared to be other letters as well, but in no alphabet she recognized. The branch symbol was there again, and what looked like the connect-the-dots mapping of constellations unknown to her on the slanting ceiling. The centerpiece of that ceiling gave her a shock: a perfect rendering of the winged scarab she’d inherited from her grandmother, carrying a blazing red star in its pincers.

There was a light bulb with a chain, but she could tell from the dark sediment settled in the bottom of it that it wouldn’t have promised light even if the breaker boxes hadn’t been gutted. She didn’t even bother trying the chain.

She took a step toward the bed, realizing now that what she had at first sight taken for cans of food were actually squat candles. A few books of matches lay beside them, most stripped to fringed booklets, but she found a pack with three intact atop a dog-eared spiral notebook, and struck one to light a candle.

The little cell seemed to careen like the cabin of a boat at sea for a moment, throwing shadows at vertiginous angles as the flame was tossed by the wind of her hand shaking out the match. In the gold light she saw that the floor and bed were cleaner than she’d supposed, and she noticed a whiskbroom leaning beside the entrance, its straws worn down almost to the stitching. She saw no sign of the cardboard crown or glasses, but this place had to be Moe’s room, judging by the occult graffiti. She eyed the notebook with a guilty weight in her stomach, knowing that there was no way she wasn’t going to peek at its contents.

It might explain why her grandmother’s beetle was etched on the ceiling where he would see it every night as he fell asleep and every morning when he woke.

The door creaked shut behind her, causing the hairs on the nape of her neck to prickle. She went to it, wrapped her hand around the knob, but hesitated, afraid to turn it. She didn’t give herself enough time to let that fear blossom into paralysis; she cranked the knob and pushed the door harder than necessary, intending to shove anyone who might be lurking on the other side, who might have shut her in. There wasn’t time to wonder if she might be knocking Moe or Rafael to the floor.

The door met no resistance, and she found no one there. She looked around for a piece of broken brick or something to prop it open with, and finding nothing suitable, took her chances that it would close again while she hurriedly retrieved the spiral notebook from the floor.

In the hallway, by the light from the stairwell, she flipped through a few pages, nervous that Moe would find her plundering his private journal, a feeling intensified by her recently rattled nerves.

The same crazed metaphysical calculations that lined the walls also filled the pages, as if having run out of paper, the author had put down his pencil and taken up chalk to continue his train of thought. She turned to the back of the book to check, but there were still some blank pages. Starting at the beginning again and doing a quick, methodical scan, she found no other diagrams of the beetle.