Spectra Files 03 Cthulhu Blues

by Douglas Wynne

  He turned and looked at the restrooms, hoping to see Noah emerging from the men’s room or drinking from the water fountain on his tiptoes. He knew his son wouldn’t go into a public bathroom. They had limited his fluid intake this morning and Tom had made him pee one more time before leaving the school so he wouldn’t need to go here. But next to that hall of mirrors, the bathroom seemed relatively harmless.

  Tom’s twitchy gaze ricocheted around the hall. He took quick inventory of the staircase, thinking maybe Noah had gone down to look at the dinosaur skeleton like Ian had wanted to, and then his eyes locked on something that made the whole scene feel like a bad dream: Jason Brooks was jogging up the stairs with another man—another SPECTRA agent, judging by the plain black suit—and they were scanning the crowd, too.

  Were they also looking for Noah?

  Tom felt a wave of relief capped with a foam of dread at this possibility. Brooks made eye contact with him and quickened his pace up the stairs.

  “Mr. Petrie?” Brooks said.

  “What are you doing here?” Tom said. Brooks flicked his eyes at his partner and Tom processed the fact that Brooks had addressed him by his last name. They were supposed to interview him at his house tomorrow. That was what Becca had told Susan. But Tom wasn’t supposed to know that.

  Brooks started again. “Mr. Petrie, I’m Agent Jason Brooks, and this is Agent Merrit. We’re with SPECTRA. We met briefly some years ago, when you witnessed the event in Boston.”

  Tom looked away, still scanning for Noah. “How did you find me here?”

  “Your wife said you’d be here,” Merrit said, “with your son. Where is he?”

  “Missing. He’s missing,” Tom said. He could feel his face crumbling inward as he gave voice to the horrible word.

  Now Agent Merrit was staring into the Light House exhibit, too. Tom thought he looked apprehensive. “Shit, Jason,” he said. “Look at this place.”

  Brooks was looking at it, the color draining from his face. “Is he in there?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “He has a thing about mirrors. Freaks out around them, but sometimes he’s drawn to them.”

  Brooks touched his jacket, where a gun might be concealed in a shoulder holster, then blinked and strode into the exhibit. There were too many people around to go brandishing a weapon, but Brooks had once watched monsters pour out of the biggest mirror in Boston, the John Hancock Building, and obviously wasn’t ruling it out.

  Tom followed Brooks past the mosaic of mirrors, the convex mirrors, and the station where couples blended their facial features with optics. He followed Brooks past the tables of prisms and the photoreceptive wall where children projected their shadows, leaving fading impressions. Tom drifted like a phantom or a sleepwalker after Brooks, while Agent Merrit shadowed him.

  The voices of children grew louder as they turned a corner and entered a room that housed what looked like a forest of slim white trees with green painted leaves, all connected by stylized roots and branches. A girl rose from a crouch where she’d been peering into a space between the trees, and Tom saw at least a dozen of the same girl rise with her, each glimpsed from a slightly different angle. The spaces between the trees were mirrors, of course. The girl waved her arm and a multitude of arms waved back at her, each smaller than the one before it as they marched off to infinity. She looked like Shiva, the many-limbed god of destruction. She knocked her little fist on the glass. An infinity of fists knocked back simultaneously.

  Seeing the reflected men behind her, she turned to face them and said, “How do you make it do the trick?”

  “The trick?” Brooks said.

  “Make it play the music again,” a chubby boy in a baseball cap said.

  “What music?” Tom asked him.

  “It starts with the music, and then you see the man with the weird guitar and the goats.”

  “It plays a movie,” the girl said. “But only one kid could make it play.”

  “He’s done it before,” the boy said.

  “He must have,” the girl said. “He knew the song. He sang it and stepped right through the glass without breaking it.”

  “It’s not the song, dummy,” the boy said. “There has to be a button that lets you in.”

  Tom just stared at him.

  The girl was pressing her palms against an army of her doppelgangers again, feeling each pane of glass like a mime. “It’s an optical illusion,” she said. “One of these isn’t a mirror, it’s a doorway.”

  Chapter 12

  “Looks familiar,” Brooks said. “What is it?” He waited for Becca to throw the dirty tennis ball across the yard for Django, then handed the scrap of paper back to her. She had copied the symbol from the back of DuQuette’s office hours card so she wouldn’t be handing his contact info over with it, having decided that she would tell Brooks about him only if she could confirm that the dagger and book provided some viable defense after all.

  “It’s called the elder sign. I found it going through my grandmother’s papers at Miskatonic. It’s supposed to provide some defense against the Old Ones. Even in dreams.”

  “How?”

  “I want to sleep with it under my pillow, see what happens. Or doesn’t.”

  “Okay. But I’m still watching over you.”

  “Of course.”

  “That it? A doodle? Nothing else we can use?”

  Becca scratched her arm and ticked her head no, took the ball from Django again. Brooks looked up at the dusky sky. He had shadows under his eyes.

  “How is Tom holding up?” Becca asked. “Have you talked to him since Noah’s disappearance?” Brooks had filled Becca in on the broad strokes of his trips to Arizona and Boston. A third child on the list, a girl, had vanished into a puddle in her backyard after her mother heard ethereal music through the kitchen window. The agency’s assumption was that if three children had crossed over within a day, there were likely others that they didn’t know about. They even had their own acronym. COVs: Children of the Voice.

  Brooks shrugged. “He looked shell-shocked when we dropped him off at home. Same as he looked five years ago after watching the monsters tear through reality like tissue paper.”

  “It’s the Black Pharaoh again,” Becca said. “He’s using music to lure them.”

  “You think he has the symphony?”

  “Why else would he need them?”

  “But why take them across to the other side?” Brooks said. “Can they rupture the membrane by singing over there?”

  “I don’t know. As usual, we’re caught in a game we don’t know the rules for.”

  Brooks glanced at his watch. “We should turn in early tonight. I’m still jet lagged and I have to leave for New Hampshire at the crack of dawn. I’d like to minimize the impact of the three o’clock vigil.”

  “Maybe it’ll be the last time, if this symbol works.”

  “I don’t know why it would, but what the fuck do I know? Apparently magic works. I just can’t seem to take that for granted yet unless it’s being used to kill me.”

  Becca threw the ball and wiped the dirt-infused dog slime off her hand onto the thigh of her jeans. “Do you really think that family from Arizona are cultists? That they wanted their son to go through?”

  “It was that or hand him over to us. What would you do?”

  “That’s not an answer. You said Merrit thinks they’re closet cultists. Do you?”

  “Maybe. Probably.”

  “Do you think they know anything that could help us get Noah back?”

  “Ask me again tomorrow night.”

  Becca cocked an eyebrow.

  “We’ve been working on the father since we got him back to Government Center. Tomorrow, we’re going to give the mother a demonstration of power and see if it inspires a change of attitude.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “McDermott is holding his cards close. You’ll know when I do.”

  * * *

  Becca slept through
the night. At daybreak, Brooks drove alone to the granite quarry west of Manchester, NH. He showed his ID at the security checkpoint, received a blank yellow card he was told to keep on his person, and continued on a dirt road for what felt like a longer ride on the inside of the perimeter fence than it had taken him to reach the site from Malden. For this, his first trip to SPECTRAs only aboveground test site on the East Coast, he’d consulted a printout for directions, which he handed over to the guard in the booth on arrival. The guard fed the paper into a shredder—standard protocol for a location that was off-limits to satellite photography and that still showed outdated imagery when anyone pulled it up on Google Earth.

  If you did punch the site coordinates in, you would find an image of the quarry—a stepped granite crater with black water at the bottom—but not the security features, Quonset huts, trailers, and observation towers that had been constructed since 2010. And if you decided it looked like a nice place to take a swim on a hot summer day, you would be politely turned away by men in uniform brandishing assault rifles. Of course, that contributed to local legends, curious teens, and a small graveyard of video drones that had been knocked out of the sky by unknown means as soon as they crossed the perimeter.

  Brooks joined the other agents milling into a hut the size of a small aircraft hangar for the briefing. Once inside, he scanned the crowd and found a few familiar faces, but Nico Merrit was not among them. Director McDermott stood off to the side of the riser where a podium had been equipped with a microphone. When everyone had taken seats or assumed parade rest standing positions, a wide man in green fatigues with a pewter buzz cut stepped onto the platform with a sheet of paper in his hand. He set his notes down on the podium and adjusted the microphone height, sending a series of percussive thuds through the speakers.

  “Gentlemen. Ladies. My name is General Bartlett, and I will be overseeing the military component of today’s experiment. It is my understanding that SPECTRA engineers stationed on the floating platform in the quarry pit will activate a device at precisely thirteen hundred hours. This event, if successful, will…generate—for lack of a better term—a life form expected to be hostile. Further, it is understood that the creature may be resilient to, or even unaffected by, conventional weapons.

  “A second team of SPECTRA engineers, stationed on Red Overlook, will engage the creature with a second device—an experimental weapon. Should this weapon fail, my men will engage with conventional tactics from sniper positions and towers surrounding the pit.

  “Every agent present has received a colored card upon entry. Please examine them now.”

  Suit coats ruffled as the cards were produced. Brooks waved his yellow card like he was waiting for a Polaroid to develop.

  “The color of your card corresponds to your observation deck assignment. All SPECTRA agents attending as witnesses will watch from either Blue or Yellow Deck. Do not leave your platform. This is imperative, ladies and gentlemen. If we end up shooting fish in a barrel, you will be out of the line of fire on your overlook decks. But should you stray from your assigned locations, I will be unable to guarantee your safety.

  “Furthermore, if we do engage with conventional weapons, do not join the fight with you own sidearm. This orchestra does not need your kazoo. Are we clear?”

  A murmur of assent passed through the hut.

  “All right, then. Let’s take our positions.”

  * * *

  From Yellow Deck, the quarry pit reminded Brooks of the ruins of an ancient city, the granite carved in stepped layers, streaked with black oil. At the bottom, sheltered from the wind, dark water stirred by a light breeze reflected the silver sun like faceted onyx. The only color down there was the conspicuous Red Deck where two engineers in Kevlar body armor were checking the gauges on the Tillinghast Resonator Merrit had removed from the archive below the JFK building.

  Across the way, Brooks could see Blue Deck filling up with agents, while the platform he had been assigned to remained sparsely populated, as if it were the VIP seating. A black Town Car pulled up at 12:50. Nico Merrit climbed out of the passenger side with a blue card poking out of his jacket pocket, while the driver opened the backdoor for Demi Malik, Phineas’ mother. She was dressed in a SPECTRA polo shirt and khaki slacks. The agents hadn’t given her time to pack a bag before leaving Arizona. Brooks wasn’t familiar with her resting expression, but he thought she looked defiant. Merrit escorted her to Blue Deck like a press-ganged prom date.

  “Our guest of honor,” McDermott said. Brooks was slightly startled to find the director standing at his side.

  Brooks turned to the man. He was even harder to read than usual in expensive, if awkward, sunglasses. Was that a hint of a smile between the lantern jaw and the black lenses?

  “What if she’s just a parent whose kid was abducted by a cult?” Brooks said.

  “Please. The child’s name is Phineas. Some scholars say that means mouth of the serpent in Hebrew. They’ve been grooming him for the apocalypse since the day he was born.”

  Brooks nodded at the resonator. “Is this an experiment or a show?”

  “Both.”

  “The general didn’t sound too confident.”

  “That’s because he’s out of his depth.”

  Brooks looked at the weapon manned by the second pair of engineers on the platform between the observation decks. He couldn’t tell what it was made of—maybe some kind of carbon fiber. It sprouted from a tripod of sinewy legs, as if it had grown out of the ground, making it hard to sort form from function. Vents and tubes swooped, curved, and connected the components with the sort of sexual flair favored by hot rod car designers. There was an intricacy to the texture of the weapon that suggested it was carved or molded with embedded symbols; something like a hybrid of braille and cuneiform. One of the engineers swiveled the barrel of the thing and sighted it with a scope on the water below. The other busied himself adjusting a pair of long silicone gloves with flipper shaped fingers.

  Brooks nodded at the device. “Those mitts don’t look like they’re made for precision sniping.”

  “They cost more than most aircraft,” McDermott said. “We’ve fitted them with cryogenic DNA samples preserved from a certain Antarctic excavation. The operator’s body heat will thaw and activate the samples for long enough to test the weapon before they degrade.”

  Brooks stared into the director’s dark lenses. “Alien tech?”

  “The cannon, we reverse engineered, but the DNA…well, if the donor was alien, then so are we, Agent Brooks. The Elder Gods were here long before us.”

  McDermott took a step toward the railing, but Brooks grabbed his elbow and leaned close enough to be heard in a stage whisper. “Am I more exposed than the others here? I’m the only one with the perception.”

  McDermott gazed at Blue Deck, where Demi Malik was anxiously contemplating the dark water below. “I’m not so sure about that,” he said. “You might see it first. She, if her son’s songs have opened her eyes, might see it with you. But once the resonator is warmed up, we’re all in the same boat.”

  Brooks noticed he’d been holding his breath. He let it out.

  “Do tell me when you see it coming,” McDermott said.

  * * *

  Becca had read somewhere that the seasons were shifting, a theory borne out in her own experience in New England. Every year of her adult life, it seemed winter had started and ended later. There were still the exceptions that proved the rule—the Halloween snow flurry or balmy week in March, but by and large she found the cold weather holding off until January and then hanging on well into April. Fall felt extended. Spring had ceased to exist. Sometime shortly after the last blizzard, a cosmic switch would flip and temperatures would spike into the 80s and 90s without so much as a how do you do. Winter, it seemed, had become unmoored from the clock change. March was a double-headed lion that had eaten the lamb. For a girl with seasonal affective disorder, it was a bitch to say the least.

  On the April morni
ng the day after Brooks’ return, the Route 1 corridor north of Boston was soaked with cold rain, darkening the windows of the room where she lay curled in bed with Django, and making it easy for her to sleep in for the first time since she’d taken refuge in the house. When she woke at 10:40, the first thing she did was grope for the scrap of paper under her pillow and curled her fingers around it gratefully. She’d slept through the night without the dream, without singing or sleepwalking. She knew Brooks had sat for the usual watch, but he hadn’t needed to wake her.

  She smoothed out the paper and looked at the curling pentagram with the flaming eye at its center. The lines were blurry from where she’d clutched it in her sweating fist. She could have kissed it. Instead, she placed it back under the pillow and slipped out of bed, scratching her bird’s nest of stiff hair. She stomped to the bathroom and brushed her teeth in front of the mirror Brooks had covered with a pillowcase held on by duct tape.

  Becca showered and fixed breakfast for herself and the dog. After they’d eaten, she drank tea at the dining room table and spent the rainy morning studying The Voice of the Void, her eyes lingering on any page marked by Maurice’s pencil, her mind returning often to that white pillowcase shrouding the bathroom mirror.

  She had slept a full night without confronting monsters in her sleep and couldn’t believe what she was about to do in that bathroom while Brooks was in New Hampshire.

  * * *

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  Brooks stood beside McDermott at the railing as an electric winch lowered a blackened wooden door with an ornate silver doorknob into the pit. The wood was badly burned, reduced to charcoal in places. Mounted in an equally scorched frame, the combination appeared to have been reconstructed and reinforced with new nails, their heads shining in the daylight.