Red Equinox (5 page)

It was a small thing, given willingly, but it thrilled him to witness it each time.

And there she was, stepping forward, guided by the gentle hand of the Reverend Proctor like a vassal helping a princess to step onto the running board of an opulent carriage on her way to a wedding. She stepped onto the stone dais, her simple white tunic blazing and reflecting the candlelight which the other robes absorbed, her skin flushed, black hair shining with perspiration. She held her hand above the basin, index finger extended, and though Darius couldn’t see it through the throng, he could almost hear the hinges of the slender instrument case creaking open as the reverend lifted the lid on purple velvet and glowing steel. Darius had assisted at the altar often enough in the days when he’d been in the reverend’s favor to know every beat in the rhythm of the rite.

Today a younger man, barely a teen, stepped up and held the virgin’s wrist steady. It was a gentle grip, and mostly ceremonial. Samira Fanan, favored church daughter, keeper of keys, and tower librarian, had the resolve to keep her own hand quite steady without aid.

Proctor touched the tip of the gleaming lancet to the blue flame of a Lengian letter inked on his brow, the A that marked his pineal gland, and then reached over the basin and inserted the tip of the instrument into the pad of Samira’s finger.

Darius lingered, shifting his focus from the ruby drops that swelled and dripped into the bowl of brine and holy water to the flicker of pain that rippled across her features with the transience of the tiny waves that presently stirred the waters.

Then he remembered his objective, and roused himself from the paralysis of fascination. He had already retreated to the back of the room while fading his own voice out of the chant. Now he stepped around a marble column and exited into the vestibule while all eyes were fixed on the bleeding finger.

In the women’s changing room he slid the wooden box out of Samira’s cubbyhole and rifled through it hastily, resisting the urge to examine her undergarments, seizing on the metallic clatter of her key ring. It was customary for the congregation to wear nothing under their robes, to allow the ethereal currents to enter their pores and stir the vortices of their subtle anatomy, their astral bodies.

Darius knew that none of that really mattered as long as the spells remained broken. The human larynx had long ago devolved into an inferior instrument for the overtones the chants required. Nothing was being stirred in that chamber but imagination. Beneath the black cotton of his robe, he had remained dressed in his street clothes, and now he touched his cell phone in his back pocket. He folded his fingers tight around the keys to keep them from jingling as he passed through the curtains of the changing room and stepped light-footed up the stone staircase to the upper library.

He unlocked the door, using his robed body to mute the sound of the tumbler. He had sprayed its hinges with WD-40 earlier that day, and it opened silently. He slipped through, leaving the door ajar, and hurried down the aisle of bookshelves, the chant fading to a low murmur behind him, the intoxicating smells of old leather and parchment stoking his lust.

The library was built around a large, square spiral staircase lined with tomes and boxed manuscripts ascending to the top of the tower. By day it was illuminated by the ambient light from the stained glass windows, but at this hour little moonlight or urban street glare penetrated those thick, dark panes depicting stellar and oceanic dreamscapes, standing stones and cyclopean mountain ranges. The tower was dark, and Darius didn’t dare switch on the electric chandelier—a wrought-iron octopus with glass globes at the ends of its tentacles.

He took the smartphone from his back pocket, dexterously swiping and tapping on the glass to turn on the camera and activate the flash. He quickened the pace of his climb, the little illuminated screen swinging at his side, casting a cold glow on the stairs. At the penultimate level, with the chandelier hovering over his shoulder, the bulbous green glass eyes glaring down on his crime, he slid a worn, brown leather volume from the shelf and laid it open in the crook of his arm:
Liber Nocte Coccineae.

The Book of Scarlet Night.

*   *   *

Across the street from the church, a homeless man reclined in a narrow alleyway, his rotting tennis shoes propped against the brick wall of an apartment building, his head resting against the graffiti-ridden plaster of a liquor store. As he tilted his head to drain the last two ounces of his 40, he considered seeking cover: the sky was flashing lightning. But before the last drop ran down his throat, he saw that the lightning wasn’t in the sky.

It was in the stained glass of the stone church tower.

If you’re commuting out of the city tonight, you’re gonna want to avoid the 93/Route 1 junction by the Tobin Bridge. A mini-twister caused a sandstorm there this afternoon at the Boston Sand and Gravel quarry. That’s right, I said, “mini-twister.” As if hurricane flooding wasn’t bad enough, now we have sandstorms in Boston. Cue the plague of locusts. Anyway, there’s sand all over the roads there. Enough to stop traffic while they sweep it off. So if you aren’t already jammed in it, try to find another route out of town. Next up, I’ve got some Billy Moon for you. I’m Adam 12 and you’re listening to Radio BDC.

The Black Pharaoh walked the winding paths of the Emerald Necklace. He followed the Muddy River north through the fens, past the war memorials and the Japanese temple bell, past the playground at Mother’s Rest, through swamps turned to gardens. He walked in the dying light of a September evening, his scarlet robes burning in the last rays of the sun, and everywhere he passed, joggers and commuters, mothers and children, should have turned their heads to stare in awe at those radiant robes and the wild swamp animals that flocked at his feet, sniffing the air in his wake and leaping to lap at his long-fingered hands: rats and opossums and foxes. But no one looked in the direction of that dark man. If some rare soul had tried to focus on his face, it would have seemed indistinct and out of focus, as if glimpsed through a glass darkly. But none did. All averted their eyes as he passed like a cloud across the sun, leaving a deep chill that they would take with them to their beds when they turned in for a night of strange and restless dreams.

Walking under the Charlesgate overpass, he removed the robe and tossed it over the brownstone railing into the shallow creek where it melted and marbled the dirty water with tatters of rich blood. He emerged onto Beacon Street dressed in a gray suit, tousling his long black curls with his fingers to cover his horns, and stirring the wisps of lazy blue fire that played in his locks.

At the corner of Commonwealth and Charlesgate the Fenway Towers reared into the purpling dusk: a marvel of red brick, vine-inscribed stone, and mint-green copper, crowned with sandstone finials and iron gates along the roof.

He had absorbed enough energy on his walk through the marshes to push his form into an almost material range, enough to make it difficult not to see him, but not enough for his hands to manipulate objects like door handles. He glided through the plate-glass door into a lobby lit by wall sconces in the shape of frosted glass seashells, and stepped up to a desk of gold-flecked green marble.

The concierge was a young man in a dark blue blazer and crisp white shirt, with impeccably trimmed sideburns that stretched as his jaw worked a stick of gum. His brushed nickel nametag read “Gordon Shea,” but Nereus Charobim didn’t look at it; he plucked the name from the man’s mind like a card from a deck.

“Gordon,” Charobim said without moving his lips, “You have a vacant unit, do you not?” The ambient light from the seashells pulsed with the syllables of the pharaoh’s telepathic speech, and Gordon Shea turned his head slowly to one side to watch it. Charobim knew what the man was seeing. To his human vision, it would look as if the individual photons from the incandescent lights were gliding slowly away from their source, like beads of dew running along a string, and when Charobim spoke, it was like a subwoofer in a passing car was causing those beads to buzz and blur and speed their way across the room. The sight mesmerized the clerk, and he realized that although the
visitor
knew his name,
he
no longer did: a plucked card that the magician had pocketed while he was distracted by the light show.

“Am I having a migraine?” Gordon asked.

“No,” Charobim replied, somehow making the single syllable melodious.

Gordon had stopped chewing his gum, and his jaw hung slack. “Do you see those beads of light? The way they’re pulsing?” He laughed at the absurdity of his own question.

Charobim studied him patiently with a not unkind smile on his face, an African face of a kind that had not been seen in this city for a very long time, save in the statues enshrined on the second floor of the MFA. He knew that Gordon Shea would now be realizing that he felt rather drunk and would feel a dim sense of alarm at the possibility that he was indeed drunk, an alarm heard distantly through a wooly dream, like pain in an anesthetized limb. Mr. Shea would be aware that his boss would not abide drunkenness on the job. Unable to recall the name of his boss, he would nonetheless retain the core fear imprinted on all primates, no matter how sheltered, before they reached puberty—that the meal ticket might be revoked.

Gordon’s gaze had been drawn to the seashell sconces again, and Charobim wished he could drum his long brown fingers against the desktop to politely regain the man’s attention. Instead, he sighed, and the lights flared, and the concierge looked at him, a wave of relief breaking across his brow as he remembered that
this man
, right here, the one who had asked about a vacant unit, was his boss. Of course he was. Gordon typed on his keyboard and told his boss, “Yes, sir, we do. Number seventy-two.”

“Perfect. Fetch the key.”

The wide drawer below the keyboard slid open on smooth rollers, and the concierge produced a key attached to a ring with a wooden diamond, the number 72 inlaid on it in what looked like mother of pearl.
My, but this place was fit for a king
. Nereus Charobim smiled at the number. It reminded him of evocations he could neither recall nor recite in this weak incarnation, of books he could no longer read. It reminded him of his old friend and rival, Solomon, who had trapped 72 demons in a box, and of the cunning-folk who had burned at the stake centuries later for merely possessing a list of their names and attributes. So much suffering for what amounted to an opening act.

“I have a job for you, Gordon.”

“Anything,” he said, still holding out the key, waiting for the boss to take it.

“Put that key in your pocket and take it halfway to hell. Do you know where that is?”

The young man laughed. “Sure,” he said. “I mean, yessir.”

Charobim turned and silently tapped the desktop with the palm of his hand. “And don’t lose the gum,” he said, “You’re going to need it.”

Charobim showed Gordon exactly what to do; an image flashed in the man’s mind.

Gordon Shea’s final act before abandoning his post and strolling out into the night with his Velcro ankle weights and bicycle security chain in his hands was to press the elevator button for the boss.

*   *   *

On the fourth floor the pharaoh walked through the solid mahogany door of unit 72. His feet were clad in sheepskin loafers, but no footsteps echoed in the sparsely furnished suite as he strolled across the gleaming hardwood floor; nothing changed when he stepped onto the plush white carpet and passed the fireplace on his way to the big window overlooking Kenmore Square and the antique vanity on the south wall. Recessed lights cast their full-spectrum illumination over a white leather couch, white armchairs, and white curtains. It was museum-quality light, and it seemed wasted on blank walls. Charobim doubted that Darius Marlowe would hang art when he moved in. The young scientist was fiercely loyal, but to say that he lacked culture would be putting it mildly. Charobim looked down at the foot traffic and streaming headlights on the street below. The red neon pyramid of the Citgo sign loomed over the square, reminding him of home in the crassest possible way; and despairing at the cheapness of the symbol, he shifted the focus of his eyes to his own reflection. His hair had settled around the ridged black horns. He smiled, a white crescent hanging in the sky.

Nereus Charobim, the Black Pharaoh, avatar of Nyarlathotep, thought of old acquaintances. King Solomon, Pontius Pilate, Franz Mesmer, Harry Houdini.

Houdini had been a fake, but he’d at least never made serious claims to the royal arte. Macgregor Mathers and Helena Blavatsky on the other hand…well, let’s just say Mathers was no Hermes Trismegistus.

The last time Charobim had visited this city, a city known as “The Hub,” even though those who used the moniker had no idea how true it was, he had been just one of many souls gathered on a Beltane morning to watch Harry Houdini, bound in manacles, jump from the Harvard Bridge into the frigid waters of the Charles River, where he managed to shed his chains while holding his breath. May 1, 1908 that had been.
Escape Artist
they had called Houdini. That, more than
magician
, had become his identity by the time he performed the death-defying stunt to draw rubes to his two-week run at Keith’s Theatre.

As Charobim approached the antique vanity, he ruminated on the fact that he too had begun his career as a magician and was now a kind of escape artist. Only
his
aeon-long feat had more to do with helping others escape their manacles. In any event, it was fitting that one cog turning in that cosmic lock was now riding a bicycle across the Harvard Bridge, perhaps coasting to a stop with a pump of the handbrake at this very moment, and preparing to pay homage to Houdini’s daring dive.

The concierge would be slicing into the dark water like a dropped knife, the Velcro ankle weights he wore on his morning bicycle commute dragging his body down into the weedy blackness of the river. Picturing the body piercing the glassy water, Charobim exhaled and glided into the beveled, ironbound mirror, and made himself at home.