Red Equinox (25 page)

“That might not be such a great idea, Raf.”

He looked at her over his shoulder, eyebrows raised.

“Having the lights on is probably risky enough, but if someone sees smoke from the chimney, we might draw unwanted attention sooner.”

“It’s cold in here, Becca. I tried turning on the heat, but it didn’t kick in. You think they shut off the gas?”

“I don’t know. But I’m not sure we should spend the night here. And I sure as hell don’t want to burn the place down.” She settled on the couch, and took a tug on her bottle. “For all I know the chimney could have a bird’s nest in it. I don’t remember Gran
ever
having a fire in that thing.”

“Ever? There’s firewood.”

“Pretty dusty firewood. Seems like it’s been there forever. I think it was just for show.”

Rafael stuck his head into the fireplace and peered up the chimney, as if he had any chance of seeing an obstruction in the dark channel. Kneeling, with his arms akimbo, he looked over his little teepee of wood and paper, then sighed and got up, fetched another beer from the kitchen, and joined Becca on the couch.

She laid her head on his shoulder. “I really miss her.”

Rafael took her hand and squeezed it.

“Of course you do. She raised you. It’s gonna take time.”

“It just seems wrong, being here and not hearing her voice. After I moved to Boston, when I visited, I’d always hear her voice calling from the kitchen. So excited to see me. And when she hugged you, she’d squeeze the hell out of you. So strong for her size.”

“She sounds cool.”

“She would have liked you. Would have made you tea and told you stories all night. And she would have wanted to hear all about Brazil. Would have told you things your grandparents believed that you never knew.”

“So your dad, he just took off after your mother died, and dumped you with her?”

“It’s complicated. He was afraid.”

“Of what?”

Becca sighed. “My mother couldn’t deal with my grandmother. At all.”

“She sounds pretty easy to get along with.”

“As a person, yes, if she liked you.”

“And she didn’t like your mother?”

“Not really. I was probably too young to be a reliable source on that, but you pick stuff up. Gran was into some dark things…her research. I know if she were here, she’d understand what’s happening now. She’d be able to tell those agents something about the nature of it, maybe even how to stop it.”

“Maybe someone at the university, whoever has her books now, you know, maybe a colleague could help. But what does it have to do with you and me? Maybe we should just get on the road and drive. Get away from it.”

“That’s what my dad did. He ran away.”

“From what? You think something your Gran…
called up
is the cause of what’s happening?”

“No. She used to dabble, I think, to test the validity of her theories. But that was before she realized just how serious the consequences could be. Before my grandfather went insane and my mother killed herself.”

“Jesus.”

“I try to forgive my dad for not forgiving Gran. I try to remember what he lost.”

“No. Fuck that.
You
lost the same, and then you lost him too. He should have put you first and stuck it out, or taken you with him.”

Becca sighed. It was the same old black hole in her heart, and nothing new to be said about it. The same unresolved loss and abandonment, shrouded in the mystery of having been so young at the time that everyone had tried to keep her in the dark, to shelter her. As if that were possible.

“You think your mother saw something?”

She nodded.

“When you lived here did you ever see anything? Any kind of supernatural manifestation?”

Becca sat staring at the inert firewood, sifting her memory. She put her fingers to her lips and laughed. The sound startled Rafael.

“What? You remember something?”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling, “But it’s a good memory. I’d forgotten all about it.” She pointed the neck of her beer bottle at the hearth. “The only mythical creature I ever saw evoked in this house was Santa Claus.”

“Huh?”

“For real. It must have been my Grandpa because I was young enough that he wouldn’t have been in the asylum yet. Fucking Santa Claus in a red suit with the beard, boots and all climbed out of that fireplace one Christmas Eve while I was crashed on the couch with the tree all lit up. I totally forgot about that until now.”

“You sure it wasn’t a dream?”

“I’m sure. They set it up to trick me somehow. I think they let me sleep on the couch just so I’d see it. And it was
perfect.
The sack came out first, and then Santa. How awesome is that?”

Rafael was squinting at her with a half smile. Then he committed and the smile kicked out into a skeptical smirk. He shook his head, his dreadlocks swaying. “There’s no way a man
and
a sack could fit in there. He had to be crouching with his ass in the fireplace, waiting for you to wake up.”

Becca sat up with a jolt.

She slid off the couch onto her knees, crawled on all fours to the fireplace, and started tossing the split logs out onto the rug. She uncrumpled one of Rafael’s newspaper balls and laid the sheet on the hearthstone to keep the soot off her clothes as she crawled into the black aperture. On a typical expedition she didn’t give a damn if she got dirty, but on the run without a change of clothes and the possibility of her picture on TV, she didn’t need to be marked in any way that would attract attention.

She ran her fingertips over the bricks at the back and realized that the black coloration didn’t come off. It might have even been spray-painted on to create the illusion of long use, but for all she knew there had never been a fire set here. Ever. The newsprint was more likely to blacken her hands and pants than the stones were. She swept the paper away and crouched in the brick frame.

It was a large fireplace, probably larger than most, but Rafael was right—it was too small to contain a man in a fat suit. She ran her fingers over the bricks, pushing on each in turn, and feeling a little silly. Wasn’t that the device always used in old movies? The key brick in a wall? She ran a finger across the seams—top, bottom, and sides, felt around behind the hearth frame, and
there:
a cold metal lever, rough with rust or oxidation. She jiggered it, unsure of how to turn, push, or pull it, and then getting a finger underneath what felt like the short branch of an L, she jogged it, and with a thump, the brick wall at the rear shifted and settled. She gave it a push, and it swung inward on invisible hinges.

A door. A patch of darkness delineated only by the light of the table lamp falling on dust motes caught in the gossamer cobwebs billowing gently around the tunnel mouth on a faint draught from below. Somehow she knew that the stale air she tasted came from below and not behind or above. This was not a doorway onto a recessed room hidden in the architecture of the ground floor, nor a stairway leading to the second floor or attic. It led down to a basement she’d never known existed, a hidden cellar with no other door. She
knew
this as she stared into the blackness. Before the stairs were even lit, she knew they were there.

Rafael, beside her, closer than she’d realized, said, “I’ll grab the headlamp.”

But before he could stand up, Becca had found a chain of brass beads and pulled on it gently, afraid it might break in her fingers. A bare, yellow bulb came on, revealing a tight, winding, stone-and-mortar stair. She shuffled in, feet first.

Rafael put a hand on her shoulder. “Let me go first; make sure it’s safe.”

She shook her head, staring into the tunnel beyond her boots. Then she tilted her chin up and planted a quick kiss on his lips over her shoulder before using his momentary surprise to slip out of his grip and push her butt off the floor with her hands braced behind her.

Django darted into the space between them, sniffing at the musty air, and then Becca’s feet were on the stairs, her upper body and head clearing the doorframe, and passing the faux brick wall with its artfully cut fragments. She scraped down the first three steps on the seat of her pants like a half-awake child bobbing down a staircase on Christmas morning, until the ceiling was high enough for her to take the remainder standing.

The curve of the stairs prevented the dim bulb from illuminating the room at the bottom, and again she groped in the dark, feeling along a beam at the obvious height for a light switch. Her fingers found the edge of a metal plate mounted on a two-by-four. With an indrawn breath to brace herself and a click, a small stone cell lined with crowded bookshelves flickered into existence.

The chamber was furnished with a small desk and a solitary folding chair. The stone and mortar of the stairs gave way to a smooth cement floor covered in elaborate chalk diagrams: multi-rayed stars, sigils, and names rendered in a thorny, arcane alphabet. Becca put her hand out behind her into Rafael’s stomach and whispered, “Watch where you step.” The whisper felt right for the place, though she couldn’t have said why. It was a solitary, unoccupied room.

On the table lay a short stack of books and one large tome open to a page somewhere in the middle, a glass magnifier perched on the right-facing page. Beside the open book, a black silk cloth lay draped over a globe-shaped object the size of a child’s skull. All was lit by a frosted white orb in an iron cage anchored in a high corner, one of the only spaces not covered with sagging bookshelves.

Becca wondered how her grandparents had furnished the small cell, how they had fit everything in through the narrow stair. Her grandfather had been a handy sort of man, and she could picture him building the shelves and table in the same room where they would remain, but she had a feeling that the secret chamber predated her family’s residence at 19 Crane Street. Miskatonic was one of the only universities in America renowned for occult studies. So why did Gran need a secret room with a hidden entrance? What authority had she been hiding this aspect of her work from? The second floor study had seemed sinister enough. Was there some lore that was forbidden even at Miskatonic?

Becca tiptoed over the chalk lines like a superstitious child avoiding cracks in the sidewalk, heard Django whining from the mouth of the fireplace above, and was grateful that he hadn’t followed them down—his paws would smudge the protective circle. Clearly that was its purpose. But whether Gran had drawn it to keep things out or in she didn’t know.

There was so much she didn’t know as she settled into the creaking chair and looked over the open book. The text was handwritten in fine, ornate letters. She lowered her eye to the magnifier, but it did nothing to clarify the arcane script, which appeared to be in the same mode as the names traced on the floor. Gaining confidence, Becca flipped the left-facing pages and skimmed. The book was rife with abstract diagrams that blurred the boundaries between art, mathematics, and pornography. Triangles of stacked numbers, columns of those thorny letters, and cross sections of marine biological blasphemy.

The paper felt like living tissue between her moist fingers, and she let it fall back into place. She eyed the black-shrouded sphere and felt a chill course through her. She tried to remind herself that this room had lain beneath her bed for years, and that her dear, sweet Gran had been its mistress. But even a kindly grandfather’s wood shop can be a lethal chamber of blades to a child untrained in their proper handling.

“Damn,”
Rafael whispered behind her. “Creepy shit.”

The faded spines of the stacked books drew her attention next, one in particular jumping out at her and causing her heart to beat wildly:
Mortiferum Indicium
. The book Maurice Ramirez had pointed her to with his dying words. She pulled it out of the stack, and another book clattered onto the desktop with it, a Moleskine journal, Catherine’s notebook of choice.

Becca set the
Mortiferum
atop the broad, open page of the book with the diagrams and took the journal in her trembling hands.

She slipped the elastic band off, opened it, and fanned the pages beneath her thumb, watching as dated entries flickered past, giving way to blank pages at about the three-quarter mark. One phrase lingered under her eye long enough to read when a page snagged on her thumb for a fraction of a second:
have seen him in the depths of the glass, a slender man with no face, nearer each time I look.

When she reached the virgin pages at the back, Becca snapped the journal shut. She felt a surge of guilt that breaching the secret room had failed to arouse. Maybe it was the familiarity of the neat script, which had filled years of telephone notes and birthday cards. She was reminded of her own journals documenting dreams, nightmares, and the living nightmare of her recurring depression, and knew that she wasn’t ready to dive into the private diary of Catherine Philips.

It’s not a dead woman’s privacy you’re worried about; you’re afraid of her dark side. You know it’s deeper than your own. It drove Grandpa insane and made Mommy kill herself and Daddy run to the bottle and the needle.

Becca drew a shuddering breath and slid the journal away from her.

“You okay?” Rafael asked.

“Yeah. You want to go watch the street? I don’t know if we should stay much longer, but I found the book.”

“I feel it too. Someone will come looking for you here. Take it with you to read later. This place is weirding me out.”

She looked up at him and felt a weak, nervous smile forming on her dry lips. Lips that had kissed him what felt like a year ago, though it had only been minutes. “My fearless urban explorer is creeped out? After the abandoned asylums and tunnels, this is what finally does it for you? Chalk on the floor and musty books?”

He tried to smile back, but it went sour.

She squeezed his hand. “Yeah, me too,” she said. But he was staring at the bulging black silk, spilled across the desk like a puddle of India ink. “It’s that,” he said, “I don’t like it.”

“Don’t touch it.”