Red Equinox (17 page)

“What am I supposed to be shooting?”

“The water. Get a bunch of shots of the water and some of the sky above the pool,” Brooks said.

“The sky?”

“Just pretend there’s a rope going from the middle of the pool up to the sky and…try to get a few shots of it.”

“Right, shoot the imaginary rope. You G-men are fucking nuts.”

*   *   *

Nereus Charobim walked down Mass. Ave and gazed skyward at the black helicopter circling above. He drew no particular attention from his fellow pedestrians on this brisk autumn afternoon. Just a black face in a black overcoat on his way to some business or other. No one noticed the viscous black strands like marionette strings running from his shoulder blades skyward, or the pulsing orb they were tethered to. His destination was marked by a thicker emanation from that dark star, and as he neared the place where it touched down, he could sense the grand design coming into focus.

The entire complex was an architectural marvel, a set of grand monuments to a philosophy that had seen its zenith and was now on the wane. But so were all the faiths of men. Perhaps one day these grounds would be overtaken by the new faith, which was really the oldest faith, and the buildings would be graven with the iconography of the Great Old Ones, and the survivors would attend his sermons in the vast domed cathedral between this library and the pool. When that day came, when the great men of this city saw him in his true form and called him by his true name,
Nyarlathotep
, he would have the giant Van De Graaff generator moved from the Museum of Science across the river and installed on the dais of this church, and the revelations he would espouse at the birth of the new aeon would be
electrical!

It was coming now. He could smell it on the air like ozone and low tide.

Darius had done well. The device had given voice to a language that had long eluded the pharaoh. All these years he had been consigned to the shadows, speaking only to the unhinged through dreams and mirrors, misplacing his hopes for a suitable servant in failed mystics and artists: de Sade, Crowley, Manson. But in the end science was his salvation.

Opening the portal in the bowels of the city had breached dimensions, brought Azothoth through, and set his nuclear chaos as a new star in the sky, visible only to the few who had heard the invocation. And now that black star was drawing the gods from the other side, pulling them through into this world in places where the boundary was thinnest, the membrane porous. Mirrors and waters become windows and doors. Mirrors and waters. And this pool was both.

The dark energy that had rained down on the city for a day and a night was gaining substance and gathering mass. It had clothed him in flesh, and what his apprentice had wrought in a lab was now organically manifest in his own throat. His heart, lungs, larynx, and tongue were no longer astral, but true flesh. And through them, he could move molecules, mountains, and moons. He could utter the black speech again and shake the pillars of the earth.

He was an artist of the apocalypse, an engineer of the end. And he had come to sing his song.

He entered the library and passed through the Hall of Ideas, where projections of words seemed to surface from the center of a fountain, glide across the floor, and climb the walls. Only a handful of people were gathered around the bronze-and-glass sculpture today, a giant bowl in the center of the marble floor. A pair of children and their mother dipped their fingers into the glassy water, the little girl trying to catch the blue words as the miracle of technology swept them over her fingers and spilled them out onto the floor. As Charobim passed through the room, the words
WISDOM, KNOWLEDGE, POWER
stretched and fractured over the coarse black wool of his overcoat. The family did not look up from the fountain at his passing, but the mother rubbed her arms as if chilled.

High above, a parchment-colored lamp glowed in the form of a globe girded by iron latitude and longitude lines, its equator encircled with a calendar ring, giving it a resemblance to Saturn. Two squares were illuminated in the concentric grid: SEPT. and 21. The Equinox was nigh, and the alignment of dimensions was now like two great glass lenses sliding together, overlapping, and moving into sync as they brought two worlds into focus. In just a few days, the people of this seacoast city would meet their masters. It would be like seeing the shapes of zebras or chameleons emerging from the camouflage of their surroundings. And the seeing would be mutual. But today, in this place, there would be another preview for the lucky few.

He approached the Mapparium, heard the hushed chatter of tourist voices through the door, and paid his six dollars for admission.

He entered, delighted to see that the marvel had drawn a fair crowd. The Mapparium was an enormous stained-glass globe, three stories high, bisected by a thirty-foot bridge. Standing on that bridge in the center of the sphere, one could view the entire Earth, based on a 1934 Rand McNally map. It was a beauty to behold from within, lit from without, blue light falling on the faces of the crowd from the world’s oceans, or swatches of orange and green from the countries. Moving through the crowd, he couldn’t help sparing a glance at the approximate place in the South Pacific where Cthulhu lay dreaming in sunken R’lyeh, nearing the end of a long season of slumber, in an octopus’s garden in the shade.

“
Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,”
he whispered.
He felt the crowd part around him, and raised his eyes toward the interlocked pentacles at the apex of the globe. There was a restless silence as everyone waited for the show to begin, an audio program with LEDs to indicate points of interest. He had disabled the electronics with a wave of his hand upon entry—all but the main lights that encircled the stained glass on the outside.

Now he reached the center of the bridge and cleared his throat. The globe had the unique acoustic property of returning a voice to the speaker’s ears with such clarity that it created a sensation of murmuring into one’s own ears. For those standing on opposite ends of the thirty-foot bridge, a mere whisper was enough to be heard loud and clear.

Nereus Charobim inhaled deeply, and began to drone the overtone chant which turned the tumblers in the locks of human consciousness like a silver key, and as he did so, he reveled in the symbolism of the globe, the feeling that all the hollow places of the Earth were touched by the sound of his resurrected voice, that all of the people and beasts of the planet trembled with the vibration of it.

The screaming commenced a few seconds before the globe shattered and heavy shards of stained glass rained on the crowd in the blinding white glare of a ring of halogen lamps. Where seconds ago the soft colors of the rainbow had painted the faces of the patrons, now they were bathed in stark red on a bridge slick with blood.

*   *   *

From the helicopter with her headset on, Becca couldn’t hear the screams, but she could see people running and bleeding and passing between the buildings, some toward the reflecting pool, fleeing God only knew what. And then, behind them, walking slowly and somehow driving them down the lane like lambs to slaughter, came a man in a black coat. His face was a smudge of darkness, as if the air in front of it were distorted by heat. She trained her camera on him and started clicking. “You getting him?” Brooks asked.

“Yeah. Is he the guy from the train?”

Brooks didn’t answer, just stared at the figure, entranced. Becca glanced at Tom and found him equally enthralled by the increasingly turbulent water of the reflecting pool. She released her seatbelt, turned in her seat, and took a few shots of that as well. She’d passed the pool a few times when walking from Back Bay to Copley Square, and she knew it was only a couple of feet deep; now that a whirlpool was forming in it, she was shocked that she couldn’t see the bottom of the vortex.

She shielded the LCD window of her camera with her left hand and clicked back to look at the image she’d just shot. When the infrared image appeared, it revealed something like a giant curved tube of piebald flesh rising from the ring of agitated water, something with bony spines like hooks.

Motion caught her eye and a flash of black metal. She looked up from the camera and saw Brooks rising from his seat with his gun in his hand. “Put your belt back on,” he said, edging between her and Tom, and grabbing the handle to slide the side door open.

Becca obeyed the order. She wanted to tell him what she’d captured, but he wasn’t wearing his headset anymore, and then the wind was blasting in through the open door and he was leaning out, half sitting on the floor and reaching for the rail with his foot. The pilot spared him a glance and maneuvered in a wide, gentle orbit around the man in black below. Was Brooks really going to shoot him? Becca tried to see past Brooks’ shoulder. The man in black didn’t appear to be armed, but she could only catch a glimpse before he was gone again as the helicopter struggled to gain a steady trajectory that would keep him in sight for more than a few seconds. Now they swept wide and away from the plaza to realign and give Brooks a long enough line of sight on approach. Becca unbuckled and found a looped strap to hang onto with her left hand. The weight of the camera in her right caused her wrist to scream in protest, even with the brace on. She craned into the wind behind Brooks and wished she’d packed a zoom lens.

They were going in low now, racing over water, stone, and fleeing people, toward the black smear of that rippling man. His face took on little detail as they approached and she had the crazy idea that the distortion was being caused by something he was singing.

What did Brooks see that she couldn’t? And could she afford to only see the dangers around them on a delay, after shooting and checking the infrared? Fuck it, how could she photograph things she couldn’t see?

She pulled the headset off and dropped it on the seat behind her, then leaned into the wind, into the waves of ultraharmonic song and watched the sound take form in an iridescent web emanating from the walking man. As she absorbed his song and watched it oscillate in the air, she saw black tentacles writhing from his shoulder blades.

Gunshots punched the air, and the shimmering web was shorn along the paths of two bullets from Brooks’ weapon.

The walking, singing man jerked and staggered from the hits, paused in his advance, but only for a moment, then kept coming.

Gripping the strap with her left hand, Becca leaned out beside Brooks, shutter button half depressed. She let the autofocus find the man, wishing she had both hands free to turn the barrel and fine-tune it. She snapped a quick series, then, still hanging out the side door of the helicopter, shot the reflecting pool, the destination of the walking man, whose tentacles seemed to be gesturing at it in some indecipherable semaphore.

Now she could see the thing in the whirlpool with her naked eye. It rose from the pool into the sky, dripping sheets of water that bystanders stared at in confusion. Others, the ones fleeing the singing man, scattered in terror at the realization that he was driving them toward an abomination. But the two groups were becoming one, as those who had been at the pool before the arrival of the singer were exposed to the song. Becca saw the change in their faces, like people waking up to discover that they had been sleeping in a burning house. She could still feel the strangeness of her own transformation, the sense of a drug altering her perceptions, turning myriad keys in the spaces between synapses.

The creature in the pool was like nothing she had ever seen or imagined, an insane hybrid that seemed to defy terrestrial biology by a union of the great and the small. The bulk of the body was a colossal tube of mottled flesh sprouting rows of sharp, yellow spines from ridges where its pink and brown pallor was tattooed with veins of angry red tracery. The tube terminated in great petals of ripe meat, falling in flaps and sprouting a bouquet of gray tentacles that squirmed and thrashed with a speed that belied their size and made a mockery of physics—Becca’s stomach rebelled against the sight with dread so forceful that it almost overpowered her. She tilted forward, nearly dropping her camera into the water and tumbling after it, but Brooks caught the lurching motion out of the corner of his eye and flung an arm out to catch her.

Becca steadied herself and tightened her grip on the hand strap. Tom was yelling at her, “
Get back in! Get away from it!
” but she could barely hear him through the wind and song, the screams, and the shuddering pulse of the rotors above her head slicing and fracturing that horrible sound into a staccato assault on her sanity.

The base of the creature rose from the water ahead of the giant trunk, and she saw legs like a scorpion’s, plated with chitinous armor and crawling on an array of spiked claws, the torso tube swaying at the rear where a scorpion’s stinger would be, while the legs scurried with sickening speed to the edge of the pool.

A smell of maggots flooded Becca’s sinuses, and she felt her bile rising as her tongue tried to crawl back into her throat, retreat from the taste of death on the air. Her eyes watered, and she held down the shutter button on the camera, taking a rapid flurry of shots and hoping she was aiming near enough at the creature to get most of it in the frame. She tried to gulp a breath of cleaner air from the interior of the helicopter, and held it when she turned to look back at the plaza. The monster had seized a man from the scattering crowd in one of its foreclaws, and the nest of tentacles had parted to reveal a puckered maw with a chattering beak at the center.

Becca couldn’t watch. She tossed the camera into the bay of the helicopter and scuttled in after it. Tom was pressed against his seat as if he hoped to merge with it. He wore the wide-eyed look of an animal locked in the slaughter chute at the instant it comprehends the reek of blood and shit.

Brooks climbed in behind Becca and edged into his seat beside the pilot, pointing at Mass. Ave. The pilot nodded and steered away from the pool. Becca tumbled in the open compartment, crawled on hands and knees to her seat, and was almost strapped in when a pair of tentacles slammed the front window, throwing the helicopter sideways. She saw the tips of the tentacles chopped off by the rotor blades before the cathedral came into view at a wrong-looking angle. In a panic, she fumbled with the buckle until by sheer, clumsy luck it latched. Her muscles tensed for a crash, but the pilot had regained control and the bird gained altitude, the buildings dropping away in a grid of gray squares…giant fans, AC units, and rooftop gardens where the reflecting pool had been seconds ago.