Red Equinox (28 page)

That title was a misnomer, acquired during centuries when the scarab was lost and rumored to be somewhere in Cairo, the last place it was known to have been used, during the reign of Ramses the Great. Its true place of origin was Amarna, or Akhetaton of old, the city of Aten, the sun god, and his greatest worshipper, the pharaoh Akenaten—a heretic who abandoned the capital city of Thebes to establish his throne among the open-air temples he had erected for the worship of the solar disc, sole object of his adoration.

His monotheistic zeal aroused the ire of the priest class and fractured the kingdom. And when a dark conjurer arose, offering to strike him down, it seemed to many that no price was too great. The conjurer was known as a mere scribe when he gathered the priesthood in secret to demonstrate his hidden power. When they had witnessed his abilities, they entrusted him with the oldest treasure from the deepest vault of Egypt, a jewel wrought in the furnaces of Yuggoth and passed through the temples of Valusia, Lemuria, and Khem: The Shining Trapezohedron. The scribe took this mighty treasure in payment, and fulfilled his oath to bring down the pharaoh of the sun.

In the thirteenth year of Akhenaten’s reign, a plague of black airs dripped from the sky like ink and his city was stricken. His mother, Queen Tiye, three of his daughters, and his wife, Nefertiti, were dead within a few years, followed by the king himself. But his son, Tutankhamen, was spared long enough to take the throne under the tutelage of many councilors, including one wise sage who would soon supplant him, a priest who would rule in the wake of the boy-king’s assassination. He would be known (until his name was stricken from all public monuments) as Nephren-ka. The Black Pharaoh. He of the gifted tongue, who was finally banished by a wandering sage from the east bearing a golden scarab set with a fiery gem.

Some scholars speculated that this wanderer had known Akhenaten in his youth, or that contact with such a nomad hailing from a cult of the Far East may have been what inspired the rising pharaoh’s devotion to the sun god. Whether or not this is true, it is agreed that the mysterious figure, flitting like a phantom through the scrolls of the New Kingdom, possessed not only great metal- and gem-craft, but also a mantra which he used to set the ruby ablaze and the beetle to flight. His name is unrecorded, but the mantra survived, preserved in a book hidden by the Black Brotherhood:
The Mortiferum Indicium.

The cult of the Black Pharaoh also preserved an obsidian disk, upon which Nephren-ka exhaled his dying breath. But the Shining Trapezohedron, dark counterpart to the red stone that would be known as the Fire of Cairo, was lost to the ages, until rediscovered by an archaeologist and New England Freemason by the name of Enoch Bowen in 1843.

Most historians credited Bowen with founding the Starry Wisdom Church in Rhode Island in the mid 1800s, but Catherine’s theory was that a secret faction within the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry had developed the cult at the dawn of the American Revolution, and that only after the Trapezohedron was discovered did they go above ground as an openly practicing religious sect.

At this point in the journal, what had begun as a historical treatise started to devolve into equations of Hebrew and Greek Gematria, charts of constellations and geo-coordinates, and records of experiments, including meticulous documentation of weather, moon phases, and tides, occluded by an alphabet soup of acronyms that only Catherine, or perhaps a scholar of ceremonial magic, could decipher.

One of the late entries from July of 2019 had the tone of an exuberant epiphany:

7/16

I knew the Black Brotherhood had steered Solomon’s Lodge to erect an obelisk on blood-anointed ground for the rites of Nephren-Ka, but now, having seen it with my own eyes, I know how they arranged for the transmission of dark rays from the Shining Trapezohedron. They must have the mirror rods in their keeping for use in the days when the old chants will be restored, when our world and the Other are aligned. But the architect must have known that his creation could be subverted. He coded a tribute to the sun, the Greater Light, in the number of steps in the ascending spiral: 294!

Did he know that the Fire of Cairo could be used instead of the dark jewel? If true, then the tide may yet be turned by the providence that brought it into my keeping in Syria all those years ago, long before I knew what it was. That it should have found its way to a young graduate student who would bring it half way around the world to Miskatonic, to Massachusetts, the exact location where it would be needed most…. It forces me to consider the influence of an unseen and benevolent hand.

And yet I fear that I will never learn where Peter hid the stone. I failed him. It seems strange now to contemplate this black mirror as if it were a telephone I could pick up and, dialing the right number, try to make amends. I’ve never believed in the charlatans who claim to offer contact with the dead, but if ever there was a time when the fate of humankind depended on such a thing, it is now.

Dare I call forth my long-dead husband from the depths? Dare I face him one last time in this life?

Becca woke with Rafael’s hand in her own. The boat rocked like a cradle, and Django snored in the well between them. Rafael was curled on his side, his left hand tucked under his chest in what looked like an effort to keep it warm. He had taken the journal away and turned off the light while she slept and had draped the one blanket over her shoulders, leaving himself uncovered but at least holed up in the cabin with her where the closed door did more than the canvas to contain their collective heat.

Becca was hovering somewhere in the liminal state between waking and dream when she slid closer to him, threw the blanket over his shoulder, and wrapped her arm around him. Rafael stirred. She wondered groggily if he had been awake the whole time, listening for helicopters. She tucked her head under his chin and breathed into the hollow of his neck.

His skin felt cold, but in the little tent created by the blanket, her breath was trapped and warmed her face, his chest. He squeezed her fingers in his. She burrowed her head down into his chest and felt his heart beat against her cheek. A quick, pounding tempo. She kissed his jawline and felt his hand close around the nape of her neck, then trace her vertebrae down to her hips and ass. She turned her face up and kissed him, taking his full bottom lip between hers. And then they were rolling and writhing in the rising heat between them, and the boat rocked on waves born within its hull as the stars faded at the rumor of dawn.

*   *   *

They watched the sunrise, a bright, burnished spot on a sheet of dull aluminum, behind the Graves Lighthouse off the port bow on approach to the mouth of Boston Harbor. They were hungry and craving caffeine but cold enough to feel painfully awake, and desperate to get off the water. Django, smelling land and probably the fumes of breakfast wafting from some waterfront restaurant, was pacing the boat, whining. Becca sat in the passenger seat with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, scrolling through photos in her camera, when Rafael, at the wheel, pointed at the shore.

“Look,” he said, “You recognize it? Four Point Channel is just past those bridges. I could almost drop you at your doorstep.”

Becca scanned the waterfront, saw no overt police presence, but said, “Don’t.” Her gaze drifted skyward to the black orb floating high above the city. It hurt to look at it for more than a second, almost like staring at the sun, but different. It caused a throbbing ache in her left eye, and a tingling in her fingertips on that side. She wondered if some deep part of her right frontal lobe was being taxed, like an underused muscle suddenly forced into heavy lifting.

Rafael steered the boat to starboard. The great arch of the Boston Harbor Hotel loomed beyond the prow. “How about there? We can dock at the marina on the wharf.”

“Okay.”

“Get ready to tie up fast and run before the harbor master grabs us.”

“Would they know if the boat’s been reported stolen?”

“Nah, the owner probably doesn’t even know yet, but we got no reservation and no way to pay for docking. You want to have your bag packed when I bring us in.”

“Okay. Try not to scratch up the boat. I’d like it to be returned the same as we found it.”

Rafael smiled at her. “Aye, Captain.”

“What?”

“Not too many people would worry about scratching up a boat while trying to stop the apocalypse.”

Becca stretched out her foot and kicked his calf gently. Rafael tipped his chin toward Django. “Don’t forget leash laws, while you’re at it.”

“He’ll follow us,” Becca said, and stowed the camera on top of the Moleskine journal in her bag.

The blackness from the orb swirled down in rills that reminded her of ink twisting in gray water, converging on a point north of the city.

“Raf, slow down for a second so we can talk before we land.”

He pulled back on the throttle until the boat was idling in neutral, drifting northeast. The harbor was sparsely trafficked in the early hours of a weekday, in the wake of martial law. Becca pointed at the black sun, and traced her finger along the oily streak to the horizon. “Do you see that?”

He squinted. “See what?”

“You’d know if you saw it.”

“What do
you
see?”

She touched the spot where the scarab was under her shirt. “It looks like a negative exposure of the sun in the sky, and it’s been putting out smoky…roots or something. It’s hard to describe. But one of them touched the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Center when I was there, and it drew something out of the water. A monster.”

“You saw this with your own eyes. A
monster
.”

Becca stared at the sky. Rafael put his hand on the small of her back and she felt a tingle run up and down her spine.

They were drifting, but the landing was still far off. “I saw the homeless man from the mill come out of a whirlpool right behind the thing. Like he stepped into a parallel world at the mill and came out of it in the reflecting pool when another portal opened up.” She pointed at the horizon to the north, to the thing he couldn’t see and the charcoal trails that scored the sky beyond the peninsula of the North End. “It’s getting worse, whatever it is. Something’s going to happen over there.”

Rafael followed her gaze. “Can other people see it too? There’s a lot of cars on the bridges, planes in the sky. It doesn’t look like a city in lockdown.”

“I was thinking the same, and I don’t get it. It’s not over.”

“Did the journal shed any light on what this is? You say something’s going to happen over there, but do you know what?”

“I can’t say for sure that I understand it. It seems like if Gran meant for me to understand, she would have been more direct, would have spelled it out. She left me the scarab, but that was in a will written before she fully understood it.”

“And she didn’t leave you the journal.”

“Exactly. I don’t think she knew she was going to die. And her last notes tell about how she thought she could contact my grandfather.” Becca looped a finger under the chain around her neck and slipped the scarab pendant over the black fabric of her thermal shirt. The metal gleamed even in the ashen light that hung over the city. “She needed him to tell her where he hid the jewel that’s missing from this.”

“Your grandfather? The one who was in the asylum?”

“Yeah. He did something with the stone, prevented some breach from the other side while he was locked up there. I think she may have even had him committed in the first place so he could do it. He hid the jewel somewhere in the asylum. Gran never knew where, but I think I might. It’s a long shot, but when I was looking through the pictures in my camera, I saw something….

“I need to go back. If we find that ruby, we might be able to stop this. I think the scarab was
made
to stop this, over three thousand years ago.”

Rafael raised his hand and tentatively touched the scarab with the tip of his middle finger, as if he half expected an electric shock. “It doesn’t look that old. Wouldn’t it be more worn?”

“I know. It looks like gold, but I don’t know if the metal is even of this Earth. And you probably thought I was crazy enough back when I was just a depressed, artsy chick.”

He smiled. “You say the pendant was made to stop this. How about you? Were
you
made to stop this?

It seemed impossible that anything so grandiose should fall to her. If she’d been asked just a few weeks ago whether the human race was worth saving, she would have expressed doubts; and if anyone had told her that
she
would be elected to dig the means of salvation out of the clay of ancient history, she would have laughed.

“If there’s a God, he has some sense of humor, picking a girl who has trouble getting out of bed on a good day.”

“You believe in God?”

“Not really. So much horror in the world…what good is a god who doesn’t intervene? Do you?”

He nodded. “So do those brineheads. Many gods, and you’ve
seen
theirs. Don’t you want one on your side?”

She sighed. “I don’t think those are gods. Maybe they’re just our nasty neighbors, aliens from another plane of our own planet. They see us the way most people see animals.”

“Food.”

“Yeah.”

“You think they’re more evolved than us? More intelligent?”

“I don’t know.”

“
Some
humans have compassion for animals. You do.”

“I don’t think those creatures know what compassion is. Or self-sacrifice. Maybe those are the things that make humans more evolved, the things that
defy
natural selection. Maybe that’s why we’re worth saving.

He pulled her close. “So we’re going to Allston when we hit dry land? To the asylum?”

She turned away from the terrible sky and searched his eyes. They looked deep in the morning light. “You don’t have to come with me. You might be safe from
some
things just because you can’t see them or share space with them, but that won’t keep you from getting stabbed by a cultist or shot by a jittery cop when the shit hits the fan.”