Becca found the headlamp in her bag by touch, pulled the strap over her head, and clicked it on to the red night vision mode, bathing the space around her in bloody light. Brooks walked ahead toward a set of glass doors. Becca followed, but found herself dragging her feet, lingering for a glimpse into this glass box, and that one, and that shelf up there in the corner. The unnatural light made it difficult to identify anything—not that she had the knowledge to do so even in the best of conditions—but the shapes were fascinating.
The place felt like a science museum crossed with a carnival freak show. Some of the objects were jewelry—a carved jade amulet of a winged hound, a gold ring with a purple stone. Others were devices—a coffin-shaped box with four hands roaming a brass dial in contrary orbits, an array of components resembling an amateur radio with coils, gauges, and vacuum tubes showing through circular windows cut in sheet metal trimmed with oak. Yet others were vials of powders or jars in which impossible biological specimens floated in brine or alcohol. One of these resembled a lamprey eel that Mark Burns, the marine biologist she’d befriended on the Wade House expedition, had tried to classify before it dissolved in the terrestrial atmosphere. Mark, like most of the people Becca had formed a bond with in her life, was now dead.
Some of the objects were labeled with printed cards (Eye of Ubbo-Sathla, Lamp of Alhazred, Tillinghast Resonator). Others were unidentified. Some were guarded with laser sensors and keypads on their glass cases, while others occupied numbered bays on open shelves.
Brooks glanced at his watch. “We should be okay if we’re quick.”
“Right,” Becca said, distracted by the exotic silhouettes adorning the darkness on all sides.
“Come on,” he said, waiting for her in the doorway ahead. Becca swept her hungry gaze over the collection, then forced herself to hurry through the remainder of the section, past brick cylinders, bas relief fragments, and cloudy crystal shards. One of the last items she passed at the end of the row caught her eye and she did a double take: An antique silver spike like a Tibetan phurba with a tentacle-wrapped hilt. Was that the ritual dagger used by Reverend John Proctor? She had watched him use it to banish a hostile entity in the Wade House, and later seen it used against him when Dick Hanson, a cultist who had infiltrated SPECTRA, killed Proctor with his own blade. Becca would never forget watching him die with the silver hilt jutting from his neck. But the true power of the weapon had never been its cutting edge. Used in combination with the proper mantras, it had the power to sever the astral threads that connected this world to the other.
Becca stepped through the doorway and joined Brooks in the next room. Here, the glass cases contained fragments of papyrus scrolls and books with rotting bindings and crumbling marbled endpapers. The shelves were lined with intact volumes, a proliferation of cloth and leather spines, many with raised bands, a few with gilt titles.
In a corner stood a steel file cabinet.
“Manuscripts,” Brooks said, stepping toward it. “If the score is in the archives, it’ll be in here. Second drawer should include sheet music. You sure you can identify the original? They printed a lot of variations on this music when they were trying to unlock that piano.”
“I’ll know it.”
Brooks thumbed the button next to the handle and pulled the drawer open, nodding at Becca to examine the contents.
The first section of files was labeled: Erich Zann. The composer of The Invisible Symphony. Becca checked a random page to confirm that it was sheet music. The file folder tabs were difficult to read by the red light. There were a lot of them but no single section contained many pages. She hunched over the cabinet and set her fingers crawling like a spider through the folders. As she’d expected, most of it was photocopies and computer printouts, variations on the original theme with inversions and permutations generated by man and machine. At the back of the section, she found a dog-eared spiral notebook bulging at the edges with random slips of paper. She carefully removed it and recognized the cover at once: Her father’s notes on the music, painstakingly compiled over years of experimentation when he’d lived a hermit’s life in a cabin in New Hampshire, obsessed with the sonic keys to another world.
“Whatcha got there?” Brooks asked.
“Luke’s notebooks. These should have been returned to me.”
“What would you do with them? I mean, you want to destroy the original score. Isn’t there enough of it in those notebooks to make them dangerous too, in the wrong hands?”
Becca stared at the creases in the cheap cover where the coating had scuffed off. She flipped it over in her hand and looked at the plain cardboard back where Luke had jotted down a couple of phone numbers and left a coffee cup ring. How much of his sweat had this tattered two-dollar notebook absorbed over the years?
“It’s a part of him,” she said.
Brooks watched her slide it into her shoulder bag. She defied him to protest, her red light bathing his face, but he kept any qualms to himself.
She flipped through the files again, checking every page in the section a second time.
“It’s not here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I’ve been through it twice.”
“Check again.” Brooks said.
“You check. Maybe I’m blind.”
Brooks stepped in as Becca moved away. “What does it look like?”
“It’s on older paper. Crumbling. Wider than printer pages. The title’s in calligraphy and the composer left an ink thumbprint in the upper right corner.”
Brooks clicked his flashlight on. It seemed so bright and white to Becca’s eyes after adjusting to the headlamp. She left him to it and wandered back into the artifact room. A moment later, he appeared between the glass doors.
“You’re right,” he said. “Not there.”
“Is there another place it could be?” Becca said. “A safe or something for the most dangerous books and papers? Maybe in the director’s office?”
Brooks rubbed his forefinger across his bottom lip, thinking, then said, “No. These are some of the most dangerous books on Earth in here. It makes Miskatonic look like the children’s section. I guess it could be in McDermott’s private safe, but even if we knew it was, I couldn’t get in.”
The overhead fixtures clicked to life, flooding the room with white LED strips. The gears and rods of the steel security door they’d entered through turned over.
“Shit,” Brooks said. “Hide. No. This way.”
* * *
The door swung open and a sinewy, dark haired man in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up knelt beside it. He appeared to be chocking it open with an object Becca couldn’t make out from where she crouched behind a shelving unit. When he stood up and looked around the room, she recognized him: Nico Merrit, the agent who had tracked her to her father’s cabin three years ago. The agent responsible for bringing Luke to the Wade House, where he was killed. Agent Merrit had worked on the Wade House operation for a while, filling in for Brooks while he recovered from injuries incurred in the twilight realm between worlds. Becca recalled the unspoken power dynamic of that time—the tensions stemming from the sense that Merrit had been sent to observe then-director Northrup and report back to unnamed superiors about his effectiveness. She wondered now if he had played a role in Northrup’s removal.
Merrit walked backward down the artifact corridor, wagging the fingers of his raised hand like a parking attendant while two other men pushed a rolling flight case into the room. “Right here,” he said when the case had rolled up in front of the machine with the cables, coils and gauges. “This is it: the resonator. Careful with the tubes. You have bubble wrap in there?”
“Yeah.”
“Be generous with it. This thing is the director’s baby. If it doesn’t work when it gets to Berlin, it’s on me.”
“Relax,” one of the movers said. Becca couldn’t see his face, just his black thermal shirt and the cuff of a faded tattoo sleeve poking out. �
��I used to roadie for Billy Moon. You want to see somebody have a shit fit about vintage gear on the road, look no further. We’ll strap it down tight in the truck.”
“Is this some kind of museum?” the other grunt asked, looking around.
“Something like that,” Merrit said. “Eyes on the prize, friend.”
Becca froze as she watched the curious one bend over to get a better look at a set of carved stone figurines lined up on the shelf in front of her face. For a harrowing moment, only the focal point of his gaze kept her from detection. She resisted the impulse to glance at Brooks for guidance, knowing that the motion of her head would only draw the man’s eye.
“You guys bust some brine heads?” the mover asked, reaching for a figurine.
Becca felt her heart in her throat, aware that if he removed the statue from its place on the shelf, the empty spot would be filled with her glaring face.
“Don’t touch,” Merrit said.
“Whatever. Fuckin’ squid worshippers make my skin crawl anyway. How is that a god? Am I right? More like a fuckin’ Chinese lunch special. They should go back where they come from.” The guy had a full-on Masshole accent. Becca figured he was the fahkin’ truck driver.
“Again: Eyes on the task,” Merrit said. “Shit in here will give you nightmares, no kidding.”
The guy grunted and withdrew his shiny, black whiskered mug from the space between the shelves. Becca exhaled. She turned to Brooks, squatting deep in the corner between the shelf unit and the wall. He nodded, and the two of them waited it out, listening as the movers took the resonator from its glass case, covered it in protective wrap, and transferred it to the flight case.
When they’d rolled the case out of the archives, the computerized locking mechanism of the steel door shuttled back into place. Brooks let out a sigh. He rose from his crouch and Becca heard his knees pop.
“What does that thing do?” she asked.
“It makes entities visible.”
“Where are they taking it?”
Brooks shook his head. “I’d like to know.”
* * *
They drove back to Malden in the rain. Becca reclined the seat, turned on her side, and said, “Wake me when we get to the house.”
“Sorry it wasn’t there.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’ll find Northrup. Maybe he does know what happened to it.”
The rhythm of the windshield wipers and the hum of the road lulled Becca down to sleep’s damp shore. “Brooks,” she murmured without opening her eyes.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s both get up at three and ride out the hour together. Promise.”
“Okay.”
She shifted, nestling into the car seat, and fell asleep with her hand wrapped around her shoulder bag, feeling the shape of the reverend’s ritual dagger through the canvas.
Chapter 6
In the morning Brooks reunited his gun with its magazine and went to work. Becca walked Django around on the wet grass of the scrappy backyard at dawn and then went back to bed. The pair of them had sat up through the three o’clock hour with the TV on in Brooks’ bedroom, too tired to talk.
When Becca woke again shortly after 10 A.M., the first thing on her mind was the dagger. Brooks had been behind her in the book and manuscript room when she snatched it on impulse, and she was relieved to find it still in her bag on the chair beside the bed. She didn’t think he would search her things while she slept, but couldn’t rule out the possibility. He was, after all, essentially a spy, prone to suspicion of all sorts.
Sitting cross-legged on the bed, she turned the weapon over in her hands, examining the details of the carved hilt and inscribed blade by daylight for the first time. She thought of the blood it had absorbed and the light it had shed in the Wade House, and felt a dim pang of guilt.
Last night she didn’t know why she had taken it—there’d been no time for rational thought when she’d acted, regretting what her hands had done almost as soon as the dagger disappeared into her bag. Then, Brooks appearing at her back made it impossible for her to return it to the shelf without revealing what she’d done. She hoped he wasn’t presently being grilled by the new director about the missing artifact. He had, after all, left a digital record of his presence in the archive, should anyone care to look for it. Having come up empty on the thing they’d actually gone in there to steal, she could have left without giving anyone a reason to check those records. Now she could only hope that either Merrit’s visit to the same vault with a moving crew would add uncertainty to the situation, or that the dagger itself wasn’t deemed important enough for its absence to be noticed for a while. It had been left out on a shelf with no protective glass. And maybe by the time Brooks got home, she would work up the courage to confess the theft.
For now, she found herself entranced by the object’s artful design. In retrospect, it was obvious why she wanted it: Her scarab, lacking its fiery gem, also lacked the power to protect her from chthonic forces. Wrapping her fingers around the dagger, she felt empowered in a way she hadn’t in years. She rolled the handle between her palms, closed her eyes, and tried to remember the incantation the reverend had chanted while wielding it against the entity that had attacked Django in the guise of a cat. But the memory was too dim, and she soon gave up. The dagger remained cold to the touch even after holding it for longer than it took most metals to absorb body heat. Becca hid it under the mattress at the foot of the bed, then dressed, went downstairs, and drank half a cup of coffee before taking Django for a walk around the neighborhood.
She’d often mused that spring in New England didn’t quite exist. It seemed that from March to June someone spun a dial each day for a random effect unconnected to the calendar. It could be anything from snow with arctic gusts of wind to sun with temps in the 70s. On this April day, the dial had landed on the latter, and she had every intention of soaking it up. She packed a book, a bottle of water, and a power bar in her bag, along with a ratty tennis ball for Django to chase, and walked a widening circuit of the surrounding blocks until she happened upon what she was hoping for: a playground with a small sports field where a few nannies and stay-at-home parents were busy with children too young for school.
Becca passed most of the afternoon at the park, throwing the ball for Django, letting kids pet him, and ignoring the novel in her bag. She couldn’t quite imagine herself as a mother—the dog was enough—but she liked kids and seldom found herself in their company. It reminded her of Tom’s son, Noah, the only other person on Earth she knew of who possessed the same vocal ability gestating in her own larynx. Brooks had kept an eye on Noah while keeping the boy’s inborn mutation a secret from SPECTRA out of loyalty to Tom, who had become a friend after the first crisis, and who worried that the agency might take Noah away if they had reason to consider him a threat.
As long as whatever remained of the Starry Wisdom cult didn’t know about the child, Becca assumed he was in no danger. When she’d thought about Noah at all in the past few years, the only alarming scenario she’d imagined that put her nerves on edge was the prospect of someone teaching him to sing The Invisible Symphony, an evocation lurking in the camouflage of music. A document that, until last night, she had believed was being kept under lock and key in the hands of men ignorant of its secrets and unendowed with the anatomy necessary to perform it.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
Watching a boy about Noah’s age try to throw a Frisbee that held Django’s rapt attention, she was thinking she should ask Brooks for the latest news of the Petrie family when her phone rang in her jacket pocket.
“Hey, Brooks. What’s up?”
“I’m cutting out early. Got that address I’ve been hunting. I’ll pick you up in ten.”
* * *
The building on High Street in Newburyport where Daniel Northrup would spend his last days looked more like a sprawling colonial boarding house than a hospital. Inside, high ceilings with cracking plaster and dark walnut
trim contrasted with modern elevators, wheelchair lifts, and the odd piece of medical equipment. The place had an austere sort of elegance and Becca suspected it wasn’t cheap. For an old building, it looked scrubbed clean and smelled faintly of disinfectant.
The nurse at the reception desk in the front parlor greeted them with a quiet, cheerful demeanor and seemed genuinely pleased that Mr. Northrup had visitors. Brooks admitted that they weren’t family and gave her their names. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and returned a few minutes later to escort them up to his room—a private unit with striped wallpaper and a window overlooking a scraggly hill tangled with deadfall. They found the former SPECTRA director propped up in a hospital bed with a snow-white pillow under his head. An oxygen tank and mask hung from a hook beside the bed.
Northrup had grown a beard since Becca had last seen him, as if to compensate for the mass his face had lost. She recognized his eyes, sunken deep in their sockets, but not much else. Where his hair had been thick and jet black with frosted temples, it was now all white and thinned. Was it only 3 years ago that he’d seemed so formidable and self-assured?
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “The dynamic duo.” He went from a wet chuckle to a short coughing fit, and held a handkerchief up to his lips. When the coughing subsided, he checked the cloth, as if looking for blood, and said, “To what do I owe the honor?”
Brooks took a wooden chair from an unused desk and placed it beside the bed for Becca. No sooner had he done so than the receptionist nurse reappeared in the doorway with a second chair for him.
“You look like shit, boss,” Brooks said with a grin.
Northrup smiled.
“Don’t make him laugh,” Becca said. Then to Northrup, “How are you doing?”
He scoffed. “I’m dying. What did they used to say? Spoiler alert.”
Becca ignored the chair and perched instead at the edge of the bed. She patted Northrup’s hand. “I’m sorry.”
Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues Page 6