Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues

by Douglas Wynne

  OUTLOOK

  NOT SO

  GOOD

  Brooks dropped the Magic 8-Ball back into the cardboard box with the rest of his daughter’s bookcase knick-knacks and glanced at his watch for the caller ID: TEWKS PSY. CTR.

  “What did you ask it?” Heather said beside him, looking over his shoulder. Despite being doubly distracted by messages in windows, he could hear the false levity in her voice, and it warmed him. She cared about what he hoped to find in his future. Somehow, even after several lunches that had gone pretty well, and in the midst of moving the crap she couldn’t bear to part with from her apartment to his house, her curiosity surprised him. Did she secretly hope he’d asked the oracle about his prospects with her mother? She was too wise for that, wasn’t she?

  Brooks held up a finger and said, “Got a call.” He tapped the glass on his wrist and listened to the faint clicking sounds of a switchboard. He was half expecting a fundraising robo-call that had somehow reached him by digital proximity to Nina—his psychiatrist ex-wife—but then a human voice greeted him by name, in a tone that sounded thin with age.

  “Dr. Jack Ashmead calling for Jason Brooks.”

  “Speaking,” Brooks said.

  “Mr. Brooks, I’m calling from the Wingate Peaslee Psychiatric Center in Tewksbury, regarding a patient who listed you as her primary contact. Rebecca Rae Philips.”

  “Sorry, patient?” Brooks turned away from Heather and ducked under the three-quarters open garage door onto the icy driveway. “Is she okay?”

  “Physically, yes. But she wouldn’t have admitted herself if all was well. I don’t know how much, if anything, she’s shared with you about her condition…but, again, she listed you as an emergency contact. Are you familiar with Rebecca’s psychiatric history?”

  “You mean her depression? Yeah. I thought she was doing better. I thought the medication was working, mostly.”

  “Mr. Brooks, would you be available to meet with me at the hospital today? It would be better to discuss the matter in person. You could see her, if you like. But she needn’t know you’re coming unless you decide you want to see her.”

  “You said ‘emergency contact.’ What happened?”

  A pause. “I really think it would be best if you come in for a discussion.”

  “Yeah, okay. Look, it’s not that I don’t care, I’m just confused. I mean…I’m not even family.”

  “You’re the only contact she listed.”

  “Then who’s taking care of Django?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Her dog.”

  Why would she have listed him as a contact and not Neil? He wasn’t family either, but he was closer to it. Enough that she called him “uncle.”

  “Doctor, has she been doing talk therapy with you?”

  “Some, yes.”

  “So she’s told you something about me.”

  “Can you come, Mr. Brooks?”

  Brooks looked up the driveway into the garage. Heather wasn’t even pretending not to listen to his side of the call.

  “She told me that you work for SPECTRA,” Ashmead said.

  “You know what that is?” Brooks scuffed his work boot against the crust of ice, making it whiten against the black pavement.

  “A colleague of mine did a little consulting for your agency. He couldn’t talk about it, of course. Neither can Ms. Philips in any detail, which complicates her treatment. She has had episodes consistent with PTSD. Also…there was an incident last night that I believe falls within the range of your investigations.”

  “Okay,” Brooks said. “Where and what time?”

  “One-thirty?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll ping the address to your device.”

  Brooks tapped his watch to end the call. A second later the screen pulsed with a GPS icon.

  “You have to go to work,” Heather said. At least she didn’t look angry.

  “Not exactly work, but yeah. I have to look in on a friend. Sorry, kiddo. There’s some wine coolers, bread, and cold cuts in the fridge.”

  * * *

  The trek up Route 128 was an icy mess. The storm had arrived at the tail end of a warm winter. It hadn’t piled on snow like some of the late season blizzards Brooks remembered from childhood, but brought enough of a cold front to glaze the tree branches with ice and pull down power lines. Driving north the day after, in what should have been a pretty breezy lunch hour on the highway, he found himself sitting in gridlock while firemen and police ushered cars through a one lane bottle neck around what WBZ reported as a nine-car pileup.

  Once he knew the cause of the delay, Brooks switched off the radio and slid a Tool CD into the car stereo. He’d picked up the disc from the used rack at the North Shore Mall Newbury Comics, much to Heather’s surprise. The logo on the sticker had caught his eye and reminded him that Becca wore their T-shirts. He’d addressed his daughter’s raised eyebrow at the checkout by joking that it was work related research (“I’ve heard they might be cultists”) but really the purchase was driven by curiosity. An effort to get inside Becca’s head in some small way.

  Or maybe he just missed her.

  Sitting in traffic amid the squall of distorted guitar, he wondered what appealed to her about it. He lasted half of one song before turning it off and stewing in silence.

  Why turn to crappy music for insight into a friend when he could have just called her?

  It was hard to say. Maybe because she wasn’t exactly a friend but one of the many lives his had intersected with when it was caught in the SPECTRA crosshairs. He had met Becca as a suspect, actually, during the cult activity of 2019, when the Starry Wisdom Church tried to initiate the apocalypse in Boston. SPECTRA had targeted the young art photographer when certain keywords were sifted from a phone call she’d made in an effort to understand fractal tentacle imagery appearing in her photos of urban ruins. It didn’t take Brooks long to figure out that she was innocent—in spite of her family’s history of entanglement with the occult—and she soon became a tenacious ally in the effort to understand the phenomena and decode a means of fighting back. It turned out she could be as fierce as her faithful German shepherd mutt when push came to shove.

  Two years later, after Becca had left Boston behind for a new life in Brazil, Brooks was sent to pull her back into the fray. The agency enlisted her to explore and document more weird phenomena at a shapeshifting mansion west of Boston, known as the Wade House.

  Brooks had helped her track down her father in the midst of that mission, only to see him murdered in a circle of standing stones on the grounds of the estate. They had succeeded in destroying the portals the house concealed and had banished the entities responsible for Luke Philips’ death, but in the aftermath, Becca ended her association with SPECTRA. She wasn’t a career agent, just someone with a special skill set under contract.

  After all they’d been through, Brooks felt more of a bond with Becca than with his ex-wife and estranged daughter, but their shared experiences were horrific, and he could understand her wanting to put them in the past. So he hadn’t called. Out of deference to her fragile psychological armor and a reluctance to disturb her equilibrium by dredging up memories of monsters.

  But was it really about her fragility? She had shown real grit under pressure during both crises. And the loss of her father, while painful, seemed to have endowed her with some measure of forgiveness and healing with regard to her troubled upbringing.

  The time they’d spent together had been a whirlwind, and he wondered now if it all caught up to Becca when events finally settled down. Maybe she’d needed someone to talk to; someone who would understand what she was going through. But he wasn’t there. The two of them, alone among those exposed to the attacks in Boston, had refused to take Nepenthe afterward—a drug designed to narrow their perception back to the normal human range. Which meant they were the only two people on Earth, as far as he knew, who would notice if trans-dimensional entities tried to claw their way into
this world again.

  Brooks had seen no signs of that. Had Becca?

  The heat in the car felt stifling, but the traffic was moving again. Brooks nudged the window down a crack and kept his eyes on the road as he passed the accident. He turned the stereo on again and tried the next track.

  * * *

  Tewksbury Psychiatric Center was a modern facility with stainless steel railings, pastel carpets, and an abundance of windows. Nothing like the brick fortress asylum where Becca’s grandfather had died. Dr. Ashmead’s walnut desktop gleamed in the diffuse light of what was shaping up to be a foggy day as the sun burned off the ice, the centerpiece of an office so uncluttered it made Brooks wonder how the guy got any work done. Not even a computer or coffee cup marred the slab of polished wood. Abstract carvings and glass sculptures adorned the shelves of a bookcase behind the doctor’s mesh and leather chair. Dim recessed lighting augmented the gray daylight above a sleek, wave shaped couch that Brooks avoided, opting instead to take a seat in a less comfortable chair that put him at eye level with Ashmead after they shook hands across the desk.

  The psychiatrist looked ballpark close to how Brooks imagined him from his voice on the phone: white-haired with drooping jowls and a neatly trimmed mustache, his thin, hunched frame propping up a brown sport coat over a blue checkered plaid shirt without a tie. His grip was gentler than his penetrating blue eyes.

  “Thank you for coming,” Ashmead began.

  Brooks crossed his legs, brushed a bit of lint from his charcoal slacks and folded his hands, keeping the burden of conversation on the man who had summoned him. He noticed the confrontational wrinkle in his own demeanor and chalked it up to the time he’d spent married to a psychiatrist and the residual sense he retained around them that everything was a game or test.

  “Your friend Becca has been a tricky case,” Ashmead said.

  Brooks grinned in spite of himself. “Tough nut to crack, huh?”

  “She came to us for help with debilitating anxiety, exacerbated by insomnia and recurring nightmares. Unfortunately, it’s been difficult to address the triggers for her anxiety and the content of the nightmares when she insists that she signed an oath of secrecy with your agency in the name of national security.”

  “That’s true,” Brooks said.

  Ashmead looked relieved. “I appreciate you confirming that. It’s the kind of declaration that would ordinarily come from a paranoid narcissist or someone grasping for a defense mechanism, if you’ll pardon a term that’s become a bit of a cliché.”

  “In Becca’s case, it’s not. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you much, either. About what she’s been through.”

  “I gather you’ve been through some of it with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you were surprised that she listed you as her only contact.”

  “We haven’t really kept in touch.”

  “Any reason?”

  Brooks shrugged, uncomfortable with the feeling that Ashmead was fine-tuning his microscope behind that big empty desk that revealed nothing of the man’s personal life and placed no obstacles between them. The doctor laced his fingers and leaned forward, his eyes bright and curious.

  “It was a professional relationship, I guess,” Brooks said.

  “You guess?”

  Brooks shifted in his seat. The vinyl squeaked. “Maybe it’s like with soldiers who served together. I don’t know. Maybe you’d know if you’ve treated vets. They might be the only people who understand what you went through, but that doesn’t mean you want them to remind you of it.”

  Ashmead leaned back and steepled his fingers in front of his pursed lips.

  “Anyway, speaking of oaths,” Brooks said, “you’ve been pretty forthcoming about her complaints.”

  Ashmead nodded, and for a moment his gaze seemed to turn inward as he deliberated. Brooks recognized, from his experience as an interrogator, the moment when the doctor decided he’d toed the line long enough and committed to crossing it.

  “I find myself in an odd position,” Ashmead said.

  “What happened?”

  “We’ve been monitoring Becca’s sleep. Charting her nocturnal neural activity and circadian rhythms. I’ve also insisted that she keep a dream journal, even if she can’t share the experiences that might be informing her dreams.”

  Brooks thought of the dream journals SPECTRA had insisted they keep while staying in the Wade House. He’d written maybe three entries before deciding it was a bullshit task.

  Ashmead continued. “She has a recurring nightmare like clockwork every night at the same time.”

  Brooks didn’t have to ask what time. It would be 3:33, the same time he had his.

  “In the two weeks she’s been here, she hasn’t exhibited somnambulism or other parasomnias, so monitoring her has been relatively straightforward.”

  “You lost me there.”

  “No sleepwalking or talking. Until last night, when she presented symptoms I would normally associate with a rare condition called RBD. That’s REM Behavior Disorder. Patients with RBD act out while dreaming. It can range from unconscious sexual activities to self-abuse to physically attacking a pillow or sleep partner. Becca doesn’t fit the demographic for RDB. Almost all of those afflicted are men over the age of fifty; although, there is reason to believe that younger females who take antidepressants may be more prone to it, and she falls into that category.”

  Brooks leaned forward and straightened his watchband on his wrist. “What did she do?”

  “It began with her singing in her sleep, in what may have been a foreign or nonsense language, a glossolalia.”

  Was Brooks projecting, or had Ashmead’s skin gone a shade whiter?

  “Did you hear it yourself, this song?”

  “No, but we have a recording of it. It’s quite chilling, to be frank.”

  “So…that it? Sleep singing?”

  “No. We usually monitor subjects through one-way glass. Becca has a fear of mirrors and insists that we cover hers with a curtain. While singing, she rose from the bed, tore the curtain aside, and threw a vase at the mirror, shattering the glass. All while maintaining REM sleep, according to the machines.”

  “Jeez. Anyone hurt?”

  “No, thankfully. Well, she did step on some of the shards, but the wounds were superficial.”

  “You said this could be related to her medication?”

  “In an effort to remain scientific about it, yes. I have to consider all possible options, and I’m debating the pros and cons of switching her meds. The link between RBD and antidepressants hasn’t been proven, but there are studies that suggest it, and Wellbutrin, which affects different brain pathways, may be exempt from those potential side effects. But Becca has been taking Zoloft for years, and this is the first incident of violent sleep behavior.”

  “Back up. You said you’re trying to remain scientific? What other point of view is tempting you?”

  “Are you familiar with the work of Carl Jung?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I haven’t read the books, but I have a layman’s familiarity.”

  “I believe his theory of the collective unconscious leaves room for what you might call ‘shared psychic phenomena.’ He sometimes called it synchronicity. Others might go so far as to label it telepathy. And Freud himself, dubious as many of his theories have turned out to be, said that ‘sleep creates favorable conditions for telepathy.’”

  Brooks smiled at the quote.

  “Does the idea amuse you or make you nervous, Agent Brooks?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your smile. I don’t profess to know much about the Special Physics SPECTRA investigates, but I’d hoped you might be open to the notion, maybe even willing to confirm whether Becca has exhibited such a talent.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, Doc, but no. I’ve never received mental messages from Becca. Not last night, and not when we worked together.”

  “I didn’t ask if you had.”

&n
bsp; “You want to get to the point?”

  “The singing last night caused quite a disturbance on the ward. Patients who had been sleeping woke up terrified, all at the same time. And Becca wasn’t the only one to attack her mirror. In sessions today, many patients claimed to have…seen things in the glass. A mass hallucination, if you will. A term I quite dislike; it always feels like a copout.”

  Brooks opened his mouth to speak and realized how dry it had become. “What exactly did they see?”

  “Two other sleep study patients within hearing range of Becca’s room saw what I suppose you’d have to call sea monsters. I’ve spent the morning coaxing drawings and descriptions out of them: A woman made of eels, a slender robed figure with a beard of tentacles… A janitor on the ward claims he saw a bed of flat-faced fish with large eyes and hooked teeth, flickering like lightning in the glossy tile floor he’d just mopped.”

  “And Becca? What did she see?”

  “She won’t say. Shattering the mirror woke her up and put an end to the song. It seems to have shattered the illusion for the others as well. As if she was the source. She doesn’t remember singing at all.”

  Brooks cleared his throat. “It can’t be the first time you’ve had a rash of nightmares. Am I right? Maybe the storm got under people’s skin. They’re here because they’re prone to nightmares, right?”

  “Not all of them. And the janitor wasn’t sleeping. Nor does he have a history of mental disturbance.”

  “Well, all that moaning, screaming, and singing could have agitated his imagination.”

  Dr. Ashmead’s perfectly trimmed mustache twitched, reminding Brooks of a rabbit. “I have to say, I’m disappointed, Agent Brooks.” Was there a slight emphasis on the word agent? “I had hoped you might be more forthcoming.”

  “I’d like to see Becca.”

  “Of course. You understand I want to help her. Even if she can’t share certain memories.”