“It’s good to have visitors.” He smiled. “But I must admit, it makes me a little nervous seeing the two of you in the same place. Did something happen?”
Brooks shrugged.
“Do you have family checking in on you?” Becca said.
“Not really. My oldest is about your age. We don’t see eye to eye on much. After my job put him through college, he decided he didn’t approve of it. Last I heard, he was making a lifestyle out of protesting it.”
“What, does he belong to People for the Ethical Treatment of Monsters?” Brooks said.
Northrup was seized by another coughing fit and Becca kicked Brooks’ leg.
“I told you not to make him laugh.”
“It’s okay,” Northrup said. “He says we’re racists persecuting a religious minority, so…” He drummed his fingers on the bed. “I get the feeling we’re talking about my kid so we don’t have to talk about whatever brought you two here.”
Brooks leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees.
“I can take it,” Northrup said. “Whatever it is, I probably won’t be around long enough to see it.”
“I’ve been having weird dreams,” Becca said.
“After what you’ve been through, I’m not surprised,” Northrup said.
“We both are,” Brooks said. “The same dream. About the sunken island.”
Becca went on to tell him about singing in her sleep and what the song had conjured in the glass. When she’d finished, Northrup looked even more hollowed out, if that were possible.
“You two never took the Nepenthe. That has to be why.”
Becca looked at Brooks. He didn’t volunteer the information that Noah Petrie also had the voice. Northrup was retired from SPECTRA, but Brooks was still unwilling to betray Tom’s confidence. Becca admired his discretion.
“I still can’t even sing regular music,” Brooks said. “But if Becca took the drug now, do you think it would neutralize or reverse the mutation?”
“I don’t know,” Northrup said. “Might be worth a try.”
“I didn’t want blinders then and I don’t want them now,” Becca said. “If something comes through from the other side, I want to know.”
“You getting enough sleep?” Northrup asked.
“The dream happens like clockwork,” Brooks said. “We set an alarm every night.”
Northrup looked from one to the other, but didn’t ask them to elaborate on their sleeping arrangements. “I don’t know why you came to me with this and not McDermott.”
“You don’t?” Brooks said.
“You don’t trust him. Well…I remember having to work through that with both of you myself.”
“It’s not the same,” Brooks said. “And you don’t have to be political anymore.”
“My personal feelings probably aren’t very objective,” Northrup said. “I was shown the door. But let’s face it, I wouldn’t be able to do the job in this condition anyway.”
“Did the job make you sick?” Becca asked. “The house?”
Northrup’s eyes drifted upward, as if remembering. “Truth is, I don’t know. I took certain risks over the years. We knew there could be consequences, dealing with weird physics and forces from outside. But I don’t think you need to worry about your own exposure.” His face twisted in a wry grin. “It was probably just the Camels. The agency paid for my treatment, but it was too late.”
“I’ve been shut out of certain circles since you’ve been gone,” Brooks said, “but word is McDermott is experimenting with cultist tech to see if it can be used for defense.”
Northrup nodded. “That’s not the first I’ve heard of it. You know my stance.”
Brooks grinned. “The Frodo Doctrine, you called it. Destroy it all.”
Northrup reached for a glass of water on the bedside table. Becca passed it to him and helped steady it while he sucked on the straw. When she’d set it back on the table, she said, “Did you destroy The Invisible Symphony before you left? The original?”
Northrup squinted at her. “No. We have your father’s notes on it, and some pages Maurice Ramirez left behind, but those are fragmentary. We have reams of permutations the code breakers and Dick Hanson drafted, but not the original manuscript. We never found it. I always thought you must have destroyed it. We found the video on your phone of your father asking you to. He said you knew where to find it. I didn’t ask you so you wouldn’t have to lie. It wasn’t there?”
“No. Didn’t anyone else at SPECTRA pressure you to track it down? Why didn’t they come to question me?”
“When I wrote my report, I said I believed the original had been destroyed by your father. Caleb Wade’s weird piano had burned with his house, and there was no one alive who could sing that music anyway. Until now.”
“If someone found it, another double agent like Hanson…” Becca had thought this scenario through often, lying awake at night, but to say it aloud chilled her. “If the song I sang in my sleep was from the symphony, if it’s being transmitted to me because I’m susceptible to the signal and able to give voice to it… I could be a weapon, a key to doors we thought were closed for good.”
“I see why you’re afraid,” Northrup said.
Brooks rubbed his temple. “I’ll dig deeper, look at the list of agents who had access to Luke’s cabin in New Hampshire.”
“Warwick doesn’t know what he’s playing with in that archive, but there is something that might actually provide some defense,” Northrup said. “A book.”
“In the archives?” Brooks said.
“No. I tried to get a professor at Miskatonic—the translator—to admit that he had a copy, but he denied it. It’s called The Voice of the Void. It’s the source of the banishing mantras Proctor used in the Wade House. I’m no analyst, and you might want to check with one you can trust, but if you have the voice, you might try to use it to fight back against whatever is controlling you in your sleep.”
Becca sighed. “I’m no reverend of the Starry Wisdom, either.”
“True,” Northrup said. “And even if you were, you’d probably need a ritual dagger, too. Sorry, but it’s the only idea I’ve got.”
“We’ll look for the book,” Brooks said. “Maybe something in it will help to jam the signal until we have some idea of what we’re dealing with.”
“What was the professor’s name?” Becca asked. “The one who translated it?”
“DuQuette. He knew your grandmother. He dedicated it to her.”
Chapter 7
The Old Town of Zadar lies across a bridge from the modern city, walled off and crowned with terra cotta tile rooftops. Here the ancient and modern are juxtaposed—Roman ruins and ancient churches stand shoulder to shoulder with modernist concrete block architecture from the post war reconstruction, all of it bleached white in the Adriatic sun, as if the city were carved from bone. Wooden shutters and laundry lines overlook narrow alleys crowded with cafes and jewelers catering to tourists from the cruise ships and the mainland. Art vendors line cobblestone streets worn smooth as ice from centuries of foot traffic. But at the tip of the port city peninsula that Alfred Hitchcock praised for the most beautiful sunsets in the world, a spacious promenade slopes down to the sea and forms the setting for two jewels of architectural art—one in light and one in sound—both in tribute to man’s communion with forces of nature.
Shining like a vast sapphire in the white stone waterfront, a 22-meter glass disk of photo-voltage solar modules collects the light of the sun through the day and emits a multicolored light show after dark, when children and lovers dance on the swirling display. The installation is called the Salutation to the Sun. The central large disk represents the sun itself, while smaller glass disks of various sizes represent the planets of the solar system, spaced at relative distances along the waterfront. These planetary disks are ringed with chrome bezels engraved with the names of their respective planets. The sun disk bezel is engraved with all the saints after whom the church
es of Zadar have been named, the dates of their feasts, and the declination and altitude of the sun within 23 degrees on each saint’s feast day, as well as the length of each day.
The planetary disks leading away from the tip of the peninsula are strewn along the steps of the largest musical instrument in the world, the Sea Organ of Zadar, played unceasingly by the ocean waves since its installation. The tone clusters emitted by the organ correspond to the chords produced by traditional klapa—groups of five to eight singers—and are haunting in their unresolved beauty.
Tristan Furlong walked barefoot along the promenade at dawn. In his hand he held the shanka shell, in his ears the music of the sea—the lapping of the waves against the white steps, and the airy notes they pushed from subterranean chambers through the ports at his feet.
The waterfront was tranquil at this hour when the tourists were still sleeping in their hotels and cruise ships. Only a few joggers and locals moved along the promenade as he sat down on the top step with the sunrise to his back, the shadow of the city diminishing on the water before him. He put the jeweled shell to his lips and whispered to it, a mantra that swelled from a murmur to a melody. He sang 93 repetitions, imagining the syllables falling like pearls cut loose from a string, swirling down and around the glossy spiral, his petition winding down to the ocean floor, radiating around the globe, stirring the boundary between worlds, and waking the slumbering Priest of the Deep.
When he stopped, his skin buzzed with the oxygenation of his blood. He set the shell down beside him, drawing his feet and hands into the lotus position, straightening his spine, tucking his chin, and focusing his inner gaze on his third eye. Just another euro-hippie meditating on the shore at sunrise to any passersby.
He tuned his ears to the song of the sea through the pipes.
He waited for his answer to emerge from the deep.
The monument to the sun, engraved with the astronomical data for the feasts of Christian saints, was a kind of calendar, but it could not supply the date and hour he needed to confirm for the work he was about to undertake.
Only the Priest of the Deep could do that.
Tristan listened, and the ocean answered his call.
* * *
When he opened his eyes, the waves were gilded. He rose and stretched his muscles, slipped his feet into his sandals and strode through the waking city to the luthier’s shop on Ulica Mihovila Klaića. It was too early for business hours, so he rang the bell for the upstairs flat where the man lived above his shop. A boy lifted the sash and looked down.
“Papa is sleeping,” the boy said. “The shop is closed. Come back at ten.”
“Tell him it’s Tristan. I’ve come for the lyre guitar. I think he’ll get up to take my money if it’s done.”
The boy’s head disappeared. A few minutes later a bedraggled Andelo Dragović appeared in the shop window and unlocked the door.
“Dobro jutru,” Angelo said without cheer as Tristan stepped into the shop.
Tristan returned the good morning, scanning the counter, eyes hungering for their first glimpse of the instrument he had commissioned. Andelo locked the door behind him. The shop smelled of resinous woods and glue. On the glass countertop, a set of wood chisels and calipers of various sizes were laid out atop a soft leather case. Dark wood shavings littered the floor, while fragments of abalone like fingernail clippings lay scattered on the workbench. A veritable bestiary of guitars and mandolins crowded the walls. Only a few years ago Tristan would have lusted for any of them, but none possessed the elegance of the instrument he had designed under the guidance of Nyarlathotep, who dwelled in the base of his brain.
“Is it ready?” Tristan asked.
“Da, da. I finished late last night. The varnish maybe is not dry yet.” Andelo stepped through a curtain. Tristan waited impatiently, gazing at his reflection in the mirror behind the counter. These days, he barely identified with his own face. Only recently had he stopped mistaking it for someone else’s.
The luthier reemerged from the back room, holding the instrument in a handkerchief wrapped around the neck.
Tristan took a deep breath, admiring the sweeping contours of the wood, the intricacy of the inlays on the fingerboard, before reaching out to take it. He stayed his hand and formed a question with his eyebrows.
“It’s okay. Not too sticky. Take.”
He took the guitar by the neck, ran his hand along it, and peered into the crescent shaped sound hole. The design was based on a nine-string French lyre guitar with long hollow horns stretching up around the neck and curving outward at the headstock. He rested the base of the body on the counter and strummed a dissonant chord.
“Strings are still stretching,” Andelo said, stepping behind the counter toward the cash register and flipping through a pad of sales slips. “The wood you provided for the bridge…you must tell me what it is. I have never worked with anything so lively.”
“A traveler provided it,” Tristan said. “A member of my church. He obtained it from a rare tree in a far-off country.”
Dragović waved his hand dismissively. “You want to keep your secret, fine. You don’t have to be so pretentious.”
Tristan tuned the instrument to an open drone chord and strummed again. Harmonics leapt like silver sparks from the soundboard. He closed his eyes and listened to the sustain. It was glorious. He sang a note over the chord, the augmented fourth of the Lydian mode.
When he opened his eyes, the luthier was looking at him eagerly, every inch a child awaiting praise and reward, despite the bristly nose hair and balding pate. “She is a beauty, yes?”
Tristan nodded and smiled. But the smile wasn’t for Andelo Dragović. It was for the shadow forming in the mirror behind the old man: The Goat of a Thousand Young stalking the trees of the ancient forest, a shifting conglomeration of eyes, horns, and black smoke approaching, emerging.
“Balance minus deposit comes to seventeen-thousand five hundred kuna.”
“Yes,” Tristan said. But he was in no hurry to lay the instrument in the case lying open on the counter and reach for his wallet. He strummed another chord and sang another long note to accompany it.
The luthier licked his lips. His salt and pepper nose hairs twitched as if he’d caught a whiff of the musk of Shub Niggurath. “You are satisfied?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” Tristan said. “It’s important to have an instrument that inspires one, don’t you think?”
Dragović nodded. The spiral horns of the beast emerged from the silvered glass, sending a ripple through the surface, as if they had penetrated a vertical pool of still water.
“It helps to feed the muse,” Tristan said, watching the myriad hour glass pupils rolling in sour milk eyeballs as the shaggy head reared back.
The luthier jolted suddenly up on his tiptoes, his back arched as if an electrical current had surged through him. The horns impaled him, poking his nightshirt forward in twin points of blood. Tristan laughed. It looked like the old man had grown monstrous breasts. Dragović sucked silent air to power a scream that would never come, his breath a ragged wheeze, his lungs punctured. The goat’s head jerked back through the mirror, taking the body with it, the rippling glass solidifying in its wake.
The Dark Young would feast on terrestrial flesh tonight.
Tristan Furlong laid his new axe on its bed of crushed velvet and snapped the case latches shut.
Chapter 8
The morning after he took Becca to the archive, Brooks found a note on his desk summoning him to the director’s office. Warwick McDermott had taken over the office previously occupied by Daniel Northrup, but to Brooks that seemed impossible every time he set foot inside it. Sure, the windows were in the same places and the view of Faneuil Hall was the same, but everything else had changed, from the furniture to the anal-retentive care with which the papers, tablets, and writing implements were arranged. The only framed photo showed a younger McDermott in hip waders, river fishing with Dick Cheney. It was signed, “To The
o, a great angler.” Brooks had heard the director went by his middle name among friends, but this was the first evidence that he had any.
McDermott was on the phone. He gestured at a chair in front of his desk while wrapping up the call. Brooks sat and focused on the soft, percolating tones of ambient electronic music emanating from a Bose sound system on a shelf that also housed a small collection of occult books. The new director was younger than his predecessor but not by much, judging by the gray hair combed back over his long ears. The music struck Brooks as an odd preference. But, on second thought, it was as antiseptic as the rest of the man’s personality.
McDermott set the phone in its cradle and stood. Brooks leaned forward, thinking the boss was going to extend his hand for a shake, but settled back again when McDermott turned to the long dark shelf below the bookcase and poured a refill of pungent Brazilian coffee from a carafe into a delicate china cup. He waved his hand at a second cup, overturned on a linen square, and raised an eyebrow.
“Sure,” Brooks said. “Black.”
When McDermott had filled the cup and passed it to Brooks, he settled into his office chair, laced his fingers in front of his mauve silk tie, and said, “Becca Philips.”
“What about her?” Brooks said.
“You brought her into the archives after-hours. A hidden camera picked you up. What were you looking for?”
Brooks took a sip of coffee. It was the perfect temperature and strength. “A musical score she believed had been seized from her father’s cabin.”
“The Invisible Symphony,” McDermott said.
“It was once part of her grandmother’s collection.”
“Catherine Philips had no claim to the manuscript, but at least she was an academic. Luke Philips, a mere thief, had even less. I’m sure you are aware of the consequences of bringing a civilian without a security clearance into the vault?”
“I thought she still had clearance. She’s worked with classified material before.”
Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues Page 7