Red Equinox (3 page)

The long, dry grass was parted and worn to a bald dirt trail by the frequent trespassers who had for years been treading on parts of the grounds the long-ago inmates would never have been granted access to.

Becca shielded her eyes with her hand and assessed the sky. The mid-day sun, diffused by a cover of stratus clouds, cast a gentle silver glow over the abandoned institution. She took her camera from the bag and switched it on.

“I checked out your web page,” Rafael said.

“Yeah? What’d you think?”

“Pretty legal.”

“Legal?”

“Yeah, you know:
cool.
Hey, how you get that effect? Is it Photoshop, how everything kind of glows?”

“Nope. It’s in the picture when I take it.”

“Really?”

She held up her Nikon. “This is modified. I removed the standard hot-mirror filter inside and replaced it with an IR filter.”

“IR?”

“Infrared. People used to use special infrared film in cameras to get the same effect, but it was tricky. Infrared film is so sensitive to light that you have to process it in total darkness.” She saw the glazed look in his eyes and remembered he wasn’t a photo geek. He just wanted to know why the shots looked ghostly. “Infrared light is just a different set of frequencies.”

“Come again?”

“Regular photography is like listening to music through earplugs. All you hear is bass. When I took that filter out of my camera, it was like taking the plugs out of my ears so I can get the higher frequencies, you follow?”

He grinned. Now she was speaking his language.

“Did you notice that not everything has that white glow?”

Poor guy. Only wanted to compliment her work after glancing at her online portfolio and now he was being quizzed on it. She wished she knew how to talk to normal people. A cool girl would undoubtedly say something mysterious about capturing the spirit of things and leave it at that. “The plants were the things that glowed the most, right?” she prodded him.

“Yeah.” He looked relieved. “The weeds and shit.”

She laughed. “That’s because green things emit a lot of IR frequencies.”

“Hey…I should take you to the arboretum sometime where
everything
is green. You’ll get crazy shots!”

Becca nodded and decided not to tell him that the beauty was all in the contrast, that the weeds and vines among the dead gray concrete and plaster were the music she listened for with those earplugs out, not just a lot of cymbals crashing from every tree in the forest. She wasn’t looking for a date, but it was good to have a friend, and if she was being honest, it was especially good to have a friend who wasn’t afraid to go tunnel hacking and rappelling down the walls of derelict factories and mental hospitals to get to the cool parts. “Maybe,” she said.

The asylum loomed over the hedge-bounded field, an imposing red-brick building topped with six gables and a domed copper cupola turned green from the weather. The windows were tall banks of small squares, and while most of those on the ground floor had been boarded up, there were some with rounded tops that were a poor fit for the straight-edged boards hastily thrown up by a demolition crew that would someday return with a wrecking ball. Through these exposed panes, rocks had been thrown and vines had grown, creeping into the dank, moldy interior of the place. On her last visit, Becca had shot a series she was quite proud of in which spirals of rampant ivy wove around the metal frames of the rotting hospital beds like leather restraints. In the photos, the vines resembled radiant silver chains.

With a glance at the second-story windows of the nearest house, Rafael swept aside a tangle of dead brush to reveal their tried-and-true entrance. Becca pulled the elastic strap of a headlamp over her hair, switched it on, and climbed through.

Inside, a long corridor stretched out around them in two directions, dappled with weak sunlight, the floor littered with clods of fallen plaster and flakes of peeled paint the size of autumn leaves. The walls seemed to be molting, and the acidic scent of bat guano hung in the cloying air. To the right, at the end of the hall, a tiled spiral stairway led to the second floor. To the left, a high doorframe opened onto the wards where Becca had shot the vine-bound beds. Rafael had covered the walls of one of the better-lit rooms on this wing with floor-to-ceiling murals: surreal mash-ups of graffiti and fine art.

Today Becca felt ready to begin exploring the second floor, and touching the scarab where it hung in her cleavage just below the neckline of her tank top, she nodded toward the stairs, her beam bouncing forward and back.

“You want to go up?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Rafael took a high-powered LED flashlight from his pocket and twisted it on. He aimed the beam at his own face from below in a clichéd parody of a ghoul, and Becca laughed at the halo of dreadlock shadows blasted onto the wall behind him.

“What’s with the shit-eating grin?”

“Nothin’.” He swung the light onto the floor where water-stained papers lay splayed among crushed beer cans and dirty scraps of tin foil—the only garbage the rats and feral cats hadn’t eaten. “I just thought of something you’ll like.”

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

“On the second floor?”

“Yeah, you’ll like it.”

“Okay….” She drew out the word, infusing it with uncertain trust. Then, catching a whiff of the air, she remembered another way to explain light to him. “Wait a sec. Wanna see something cool?”

“Always.”

“Turn off your flashlight.”

He did, and Becca clicked a switch on her headlamp. The white LED spotlight vanished from her crown, replaced by a wide flood of purple ambiance. On the wall, neon splashes and drips appeared.

“It’s urine,” she said. “This is UV light. Ultraviolet, okay? Well, visible light—everything you can see with the naked eye—is sort of in the middle of the spectrum with infrared on one side, and ultraviolet on the other. Sort of like bookends.”

He was smiling, his teeth glowing an unnatural shade of violet. Probably because the big piss revelation was always a hit with the boys. She continued under the assumption that he was actually listening. “Biological things emit some interesting frequencies in those two ranges. So just like how the plants glow in IR, bodily fluids do sort of the same thing in UV. But to me, the really cool thing to ponder is how all of those frequencies are part of one great big wave spectrum. Everything from the subsonic sounds that elephants send through the ground to communicate over distances, up to the ultrasonic songs of dolphins and whales, and then beyond that into where the waves stop being sound and start being light, and then into light we can’t usually see, like UV, then microwaves, gamma rays…. Even matter is just energy vibrating in waves.”

He uttered a nervous laugh. “Sorry, you lost me again. You’re talking over my head.”

“Maybe I’m just not articulating it well. You’d get it with a little time to process it.”

“
Process it
. Photo joke?”

Now she laughed. “Not intentional.” She took a UV marker from her camera bag and wrote on the wall: RAF & BECCA WERE HERE. The letters blazed brighter than the piss stains.

She clicked her headlamp back to white and the message disappeared.

“Whoa,
invisible ink.” Rafael’s eyes and teeth were wide, but no longer violet.

“Cool, huh? Okay, up we go. Lead the way,” she said with a wave of her hand, preferring him in front not just because he was strong and able to handle any squatters they might encounter, but because she knew that (gentleman or not) she could count on Rafael to stare at her ass on a staircase. She’d been told it was one of her finer features.

The twin light beams bobbed up the cavernous walls of the winding stairwell, their footsteps echoing back to them from the tiles. At the top they came to a large room, empty of all furniture except for a rotting upright piano in the corner, an abandoned wheelchair parked at the yellowing keyboard. The vast space reminded Becca of her warehouse apartment. Together, they crossed the room at a pace that felt slower than it was due to the sheer size of what could have been a ballroom but was probably a rec room for the vegetables. Passing under an arch at the far end, they found themselves in a corridor of rusted metal doors with sliding panels at eye height. Some of the doors hung open on their hinges; others were closed, possibly still locked. No light reached the hall from the open doors and peep slots, telling her that these were windowless cells. Shining her headlamp into the cells as they passed, she caught glimpses of stains and hash marks on the walls, clumps of stiff bed sheets and muddy rags.

On the cracked wall of one cell, a single line of graffiti stood out for its lack of style. Unlike the ubiquitous tags rendered in metallic spray paint, this one appeared to have been left by a patient rather than a vandal, scrawled in thick black crayon: DEAD BUT DREAMING.

Becca stared at it, chilled by the possibility that it might be the only remaining record of her grandfather’s residence here. Rafael, bemused, gave her a minute to stare, then prodded her on. “C’mon, it’s right up here in the next room.”

Prying her gaze from the graffiti, she noticed natural light spilling into the end of the hall as a cloud shifted outside.

The last room on the right was a green-tiled chamber with some oddities that Becca didn’t notice until the exhilaration of the main feature had subsided. The hospital staff wouldn’t have considered it a feature, but she felt a surge of affection for Rafael for knowing that
she
would. On the far wall, where a tall window overlooked the inner courtyard, a tree had crashed through the glass, scattering shards on the dusty floor. Branches still bearing leaves reached into the room like the fingers of a giant trying to seize a sleeper from the bed on the left wall.

Noticing the bed, Becca saw that it was bracketed to the floor. The mattress had been pulped by vandals and rats, but the leather restraints on the side rails were still in good shape. She reappraised the room, finding common purpose in the buckles and straps, the row of three-foot-high electrical outlets, barren shelves which would once have housed equipment, and—among paint flakes scattered on the floor like scales sloughed off of some reptile—a rubber mouth guard with a phallic handle, and a grimy, wrinkled tube of conductive gel.

“
Whoa.
They did ECT here,” she said, raising the camera to her eye and framing a shot.

Rafael put his knuckles to his temples and convulsed with a little jump, reminding her of the scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz.
He accompanied the charade with a loud
bzzt!
Becca ignored him and moved around the bed, clicking away, capturing the juxtaposition of what might well have been a lightning-struck tree crashing into the electroshock treatment room, and knowing that in infrared the glow of the leaves would infuse all of this darkness and decay with an ethereal light.

Leaning in, kneeling, shooting, oblivious to the filth on the knees of her pants and the palms of her hands, she felt the sadness of the place getting under her skin. When at last she glanced up from the viewfinder, Rafael had left the room. She felt a flutter of fear at his absence.

Although most of the equipment had been removed from the room, there was an old-fashioned telephone handset mounted to the wall. It blazed at her in shocking red through the drab, dusty grays of the room. Had it been an emergency line? She snapped a few shots of it, becoming increasingly, irrationally certain that it would jump to life with a jarring jangle at any moment just to freak her the fuck out. And who would be on the other end if she answered? Her long-dead Grandpa who had lived out his last days in this place? Her recently deceased Gran, who had exposed her husband to certain facts about the nature of reality he had never recovered from?

Presently she realized that she was no longer photographing, but only staring at the phone in anticipation, and as her awareness shifted from sight to sound she became aware of a human voice murmuring in an unfamiliar language, what her Gran would have called a “barbarous tongue.” She drew her elbows across her midriff and bit her thumbnail before thinking about where it had lately been.

“Rafael?” she said. Her voice was too thin to be heard, but now that she knew she wasn’t alone, the prospect of shouting seemed reckless, a surefire way to broadcast her location.
Wait…
could the voice be him, messing with her? Had he slipped down the stairs and into the courtyard just to try and spook her?

If he knew her at all, he knew she didn’t scare easy, but the boy did like a challenge. She went to the window where the chant drifted through the broken glass, muted only by the leaves clustered on the branches of the fallen tree. Taking care not to rustle those leaves or crunch the glass underfoot, she searched for a gap between the branches affording a clear downward angle. The voice gained detail and clarity, and she knew for sure that the timbre was not Rafael’s.

There. A man in a black trench coat with a beaded cap on his head was kneeling in prayer or meditation, his hands flat on his thighs as he rocked back and forth to the rhythm of his mantra at the base of an algae-slicked stone basin—a defunct fountain or neglected birdbath now brimming with muck and decaying leaves.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?”

Becca let out a short squeal and ducked away from the window like a cop taking cover. “Jesus, you scared the shit out of me,” she whispered fiercely. Rafael crept beside her and peered through the shattered window. “What do we have here? A loony rolled back to the bin?”

Becca elbowed him in the ribs.

The song or chant had a strange, alien beauty to it. She detected a profound longing in the lilting melody. The syllables themselves were fricative and harsh wherever they broke the long wavering vowels, but they were also vaguely familiar to her, a fact that in itself endowed the chant with benign associations—the smell of her grandmother’s chamomile tea, the bellowing foghorns of boats on the Miskatonic River—which emboldened her. She leaned out the window and trained her camera on the strange man, zooming the lens, which didn’t have quite enough focal length, to focus on his face. His features were broad and dark, marked by a constellation of tattooed symbols arching across his left temple. Checking the display to make sure she’d gotten the shot, she disentangled herself from the tree and headed down the hall toward the decrepit emergency exit stairs that led to the courtyard.