Jack spoke up. “You would renounce the Golden Bough and embrace the Starry Wisdom, Catherine?”
She moved further into the light so he could see her eyes when she answered. “Meeting you was a revelation,” she said. “You’ve made contact with superior intelligences, the aim of every religion in history, and you’ve done it in a way that’s evident to the senses. I’ve seen it. I want to see more.”
“It should be the most natural thing in the world to commune with them,” Jack said. “But the Black Brotherhood repressed man’s primal energies and closed our senses off from the universe.”
“Black Brotherhood?”
“The Church and their predecessors. Those who would trade spiritual vision and voice for mundane power over other men. Men who would tolerate slavery for false security rather than aspire to meet the gods eye to eye.” It sounded like a well-rehearsed rant. Jack had probably shared it on many a night of drinking with his band of mystics and science fiction writers. SPEAR probably had a transcript of it somewhere.
“What do they want?” she asked. “The gods. Have they told you?”
Abdelmalek scoffed. “What does the sea want? What does a volcano want?”
“To transcend their boundaries,” Jack said.
Abdelmalek stroked the engraved dagger again, tracing the line of a silver tentacle. “When they walked the primordial earth, they shared a symbiotic relationship with our ancestors. But for centuries they’ve been shut out by our fear of the dark, our aversion to the crawling chaos that is life itself and the limits we’ve imposed on our own eyes and tongues.”
“Today that changes,” Jack said. “Today we open the way and welcome them home.” He put a hand on Catherine’s shoulder. “Thanks to you, it’s within our grasp.”
“How?” She nodded at the dagger. “I brought you that as a show of good faith, but the agent said it was made for banishing.”
Jack pulled a sheet aside to reveal a shelf stocked with leather-bound books. The titles ranged from English to Latin, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. Some spines were blank. Others bore only symbols. Jack selected one of these, a burgundy volume with a parabolic pentagram stamped in gold between raised bands. It fell open to an oft-consulted page in his hands and he set it down on the workbench, away from the rocket parts and powders.
The left page was dominated by a diagram of the dagger, surrounded by the same family of runes she’d seen on the scarab pages in Abdelmalek’s briefcase. The right page displayed a catalog of geometric forms with arrows indicating the order in which they should be traced.
“It’s a sacred relic of our order,” Jack said.
“The Talon of Nyarlathotep,” Abdelmalek chimed in reverently.
“A double-edged sword,” Jack said, “if you’ll pardon the pun. This book describes operations for invoking. There is another, penned by a heretic, that details banishings. The blade may not look especially sharp for cutting flesh, but on another level, an energetic level, it has a keener edge than any other, because it can cut air, the very membrane that separates our world from theirs.”
Catherine felt a chill course through her body at these words, and Jack nodded gravely at her naked awe. “If that veil is cut at the proper angles, and vibrated with the proper sounds, the gods can be ushered in or cast out.”
“Why do you need a rocket, then? If you have this weapon.”
“Without the true voice, we need every other advantage we can bring. A Sacred place where a breach has already occurred. A singer capable of producing even partial harmonics. My powder unfurled in the atmosphere to grant substance to the visitor. We had hoped those would be enough, but now, with this…if the god appears, we can slice the membrane and bring it through.”
“It?”
“Azothoth, the mad piper in the eye of the storm. He will open the way for the others.”
“You said the location is sacred. Here, near the ocean?”
“No. A secret place. The place where I had my first encounter with the gods.”
“What about the agents? Won’t they follow us?”
“If they follow, we’ll lose them in the desert with a smoke screen. And if we succeed, we may even become invisible for a time.”
Abdelmalek’s cheeks glistened in the light of the bare bulb. Catherine realized he was crying tears of joy. “We will see their world for a shining moment when I cut the membrane. We will taste the air of the dreamlands. And if those fuckers try to follow us, they will die with it in their lungs.”
Catherine swallowed, acutely aware of the cold weight of the pistol against her calf. “When do we leave?”
Jack checked his watch. “Soon. The others will meet us in the Arroyo at dusk. There’s just enough time to pack up the equipment and prepare you.”
In her mind, she recited a silent prayer that there would be no special clothing required, no bare legs, and for a sickening flash, she pictured the ritualists stripping naked among the rattlesnakes and scorpions and discovering she was armed. “Prepare me how?”
Jack paged through the tome on the workbench and tapped his finger on a couplet rendered in phonetic English. “Can you carry a tune?”
14
Abdelmalek’s sedan bounced and rocked over the dirt road, kicking up clouds of dust and startling a jackrabbit across the cracked hardpan to seek cover in the sagebrush. They rode into the Mojave trailed by a small pickup truck that carried the rocket swaddled in blankets, the sun at their backs shining on the distant Providence mountains with the preternatural clarity of long golden rays through thin desert air.
Parked among the Joshua trees, they unloaded the equipment. There were seven in all, a number Jack claimed was auspicious. “The number of letters in the holy name Babalon.” Before Catherine could ask for elaboration, he was marching off into the desert with the rocket cradled in his arms. Abdelmalek tucked the silver dagger through his belt and followed. Catherine and Salome came next, trailed by two young men and an older woman. Jack had skipped over introductions in his haste to reach the site before full dark. The woman carried a bottle of deep blue glass with a cork stopper, and one of the men bore an ebony staff.
They walked beneath the deepening dome of the sky, not a word uttered between them. Catherine strained against the silence, hoping to hear the distant drone of a motor, certain that LeBlanc and his partner must have tailed them from a careful distance.
Eventually, Jack set the rocket on the ground at a spot with no distinguishing features except for the intersection of two overhead power lines running along what looked like an infinity of poles to the horizon. Beneath the wires, the sound of their humming reminded Catherine of the drone of an aboriginal spirit catcher she’d once seen demonstrated by a musicologist at a museum. It seemed odd that Jack would choose a site with an obstructed sky to launch his rocket, but perhaps the power lines figured into his esoteric calculations. So much of what he believed sounded stark raving mad when he tried to articulate it. If she hadn’t seen Salome assume the writhing form of a goddess in that midnight rite, she might have dismissed the whole enterprise as the delusion of a cracked genius. But the fear of what she expected to witness was tangible—and if she was being honest with herself, laced with exhilaration.
Gazing up at the first stars to emerge, she realized with a pang of dread that no one knew where she was. Only two men outside of the Starry Wisdom cult had even the faintest idea of her whereabouts, and of those, one claimed to be a magician and the other a secret agent.
What if she had gambled her life on a miscalculation? Might there not be a sinister reason for the ease with which the Starry Wisdom had welcomed her into the fold? If the dagger was for rending more than a metaphysical veil…if she ended this misguided journey as a sacrificial offering, would her parents be denied even the closure of a corpse? She searched the horizon for a car or helicopter, but found only the circling shadows of raptors.
The man with the staff traced a circle in the dirt about a dozen feet in diameter, while the
woman with the blue bottle uncorked it and moved among the group, offering each celebrant a sip. Her manner was ceremonial, the bottle held on the palm of one hand in between tipping it toward the recipient’s lips with a phrase whispered in a language Catherine couldn’t discern.
“What is it?” Catherine asked Salome, who had just opened her eyes after swallowing. “A tincture of mescal, wormwood, and traditional herbs. It will tune your mind to the right frequency so you can see him when he comes.”
Catherine nodded and folded her hands in the same gesture she had seen the others make. The liquid tasted bitter and florid. She closed her eyes and swallowed, hoping she was projecting the proper appearance of gratitude and grace. Jack arranged the rocket on a triangular launch pad emblazoned with white sigils that made it impossible to distinguish how much of the hardware was technical vs. ceremonial. A pair of wires ran from the launch pad to a control box.
The cultists swayed in the circle, their eyes on the deepening sky. Just as Catherine was beginning to wonder when the ritual would begin, she realized it already had. It was a subtle confluence of elements coming together, arising out of motions and sounds that at first seemed unrelated. Her first impression was that the buzzing in the power lines had somehow split in two and dropped an octave to vibrate through the desert floor. She looked at the rocket, expecting it to be the source of the vibration, but it remained inert, the control box untouched, like the head of a dead snake lying in the dust at Jack’s feet. Her companions were swaying in rhythm now, Abdelmalek swinging the dagger in long, loping arcs as he moved widdershins around the perimeter of the circle. He looked drunk until she noticed that he never allowed so much as the toe of a shoe to cross the line graven in the dirt.
The others moved inward, allowing Abdelmalek to pass behind them, and Catherine followed suit. As they fell into formation around the rocket, she saw the lips of the man opposite her moving. He was chanting, a low guttural drone. All of the men were. But even this could not account for the low vibration she felt in her feet and bowels. The orange line smudged across the indigo horizon trembled with that same vibration. The scattered stars jittered in the heavens with its thrumming. She became aware that the vibration arose within her own cells even though she had not yet joined in the chant.
Jack knelt and picked up the control box. He grinned at Catherine and rolled his hand in her direction, like the conductor of a choir. A bead of sweat ran from his hairline down the side of his face. Even in the dusk, his eyes shone with a manic light. He was in his element, the two threads of his life’s great work finally conjoined, like the power lines thrumming above the circle, and she knew in that moment she was looking at a man with the will and knowledge to blast a hole through the sky. To heaven, hell, or whatever Byzantine abominations lay on the other side. She could hardly bear the intensity of that look. She closed her eyes and took up the chant. The sacrament they’d given her coursed through her nerves. An inner light bloomed behind her eyelids. In a flash, she was back in New York, the dry heat of the Mojave replaced with falling snow. Peter Philips smiling shyly at her, a book under his arm, looking away as he absorbed her assertion that knowledge was power.
“Same tree, different fruit.”
Something on the ground hissed like a cobra.
Still singing, Catherine opened her eyes and watched the rocket fly.
* * *
“There!” LeBlanc leaned into the windshield and pointed at the sky. Like he was the only one who could see the phosphor-bright star blazing up from the desert into the heavens. Like he thought Whittaker was blind. Whittaker took his foot off the gas and let the car roll to a halt, his eyes tracing the arc of pale gray smoke back to the ground before it vanished on the rising evening wind. It looked like the launch point was somewhere between the power lines north of the road, maybe five miles from their current location.
The rocket soared out of view beyond the car roof. Whittaker put the gearshift in park and stepped out, watching it climb and, half expecting it to culminate with an explosion of fireworks, though he knew it wasn’t that kind of rocket. It was a kind the world had never known, if LeBlanc and the other bookworms were to be believed. Never mind chemical weapons. If Parsons succeeded with this, there would be a weapon that could unleash monsters on the battlefield. The only problem was that Earth itself would be the battlefield and the forces unleashed would be beyond the command of any man. On the other side of the car, LeBlanc tracked the rocket through the viewfinder of his 8mm movie camera. The frames clicked like a noisy stopwatch as he turned the crank. The white flare of the exhaust plume faded into the night followed by a pop like a champagne cork, and a red cloud of smoke. It rained down over the desert in shifting curtains that reminded Whittaker of the northern lights.
“You check your weapon?”
“Of course,” LeBlanc said with the closest thing he could muster to annoyance.
“So you have my back. You’re sure we don’t need to call for a team.”
“No. The camera’s more important than the gun here. We need to document their experiment.”
“So I’m told. Get in the car, Capra.”
The red cloud hung lazily in the air as they drove toward it, shifting and wavering in defiance of gravity. Sometimes a violet light seemed to pulse at its heart. From other angles, as the car progressed through curves and slopes toward the valley floor, it seemed to flicker in and out of existence, assuming myriad shapes. Eventually, the tendrils of vapor coalesced into a descending sphere before vanishing entirely when they hit the final stretch of road and rolled up to the place where the rusted sedan and pickup truck were parked.
The air smelled of sulfur, but there was no sign of the cultists except for their abandoned vehicles and a nine-foot circle traced in the dirt of a clearing. Whittaker drew his weapon and approached it.
“Wait,” LeBlanc said. “Don’t cross the line.”
“Why not?”
Leblanc panned the camera across the landscape, then tracked back and focused on the circle for a moment before letting go of the crank handle. Absent the ticking of the film, the only sounds were the susurrus of wind in the Joshua trees and the low hum of the power lines. “You hear that?”
Whittaker frowned. “The power lines?”
“Listen closer. There’s a sound inside the hum, like voices chanting.”
It was true, there were syllables hidden in the crackling. He couldn’t make out the words, but they were there, like the echo of a choir reaching his ears through heavy curtains. He kicked a rock into the circle, expecting…he didn’t know what. For it to lose its grip on gravity and float when it crossed the line? But it only tumbled to a stop where it ran out of momentum. “Why did you say don’t cross the line?”
“They’re inside. In a bubble. Half in this world, half in the other. Pick something in the circle, a focal point to keep your eyes on, and walk the perimeter.”
Whittaker focused on the rock he’d kicked. Nothing changed until he’d moved 180 degrees with his eyes trained on it, and then his vision flickered, revealing the ghost of a shoe beside the rock. It disappeared with the next step he took, and he craned his head back until it reappeared and grew: a shoe, a pant leg, the ghost of a man.
Parsons—rapturous eyes aimed skyward, lips moving in sync with the echoes, shaping the long vowel of the power drone into a dirge, a psalm, a song that vibrated the air of an adjacent world. He held a woman’s hand, but when Whittaker leaned in to see the rest of her, the scene winked out again. He tried to regain his previous vantage, but no matter how he turned his head now, he saw only empty ground, dirt and rocks. LeBlanc stalked around the other side of the circle, playing the same game of optics. He still held the camera, but the fact that he wasn’t rolling footage was proof enough that he hadn’t found a view into the bubble.
“Can they see us?” Whittaker whispered. LeBlanc raised a silencing finger and shot him a look. I don’t know, but maybe they can hear us.
“This is bullsh
it,” Whittaker said aloud. “I’m going in.”
* * *
The sky was a fractal quake of ultraviolet violence sleeting photons from a howling maw at the apex of the dome. Catherine’s bones thrummed like tuning forks under the assault. Tears streamed from her eyes into the flame of her hair trailing out behind her. She had ceased singing, but the subtraction of her voice from the cresting song did nothing to diminish it. Salome’s melody surged with icy harmonics, cast out across the alien landscape and reflected back from cyclopean towers. Constellations of stars hung above those structures in configurations she had never seen before. Descending from that sundered sky into the sacred circle, a creature of condensed crimson smoke unfurled to reveal a maw of gnashing shards of light flanked by billowing tentacles. She tried to scream, but the sound was sucked away into the maelstrom.
Jack squeezed her hand. Abdelmalek raised the dagger and traced sluggish glyphs in the congealing air. The others swayed to a rhythm she couldn’t hear, their mouths forming syllables too swift to decipher.
An intruder crashed into the circle, a bear of a man in a black suit and white shirt, his hat snatched away and necktie tugged aloft as he tumbled into their midst. With his arrival, the energy shifted frequency. The atmosphere snapped taut, and Catherine sensed a malevolent sentience turning its predatory gaze on the man. The ethereal tentacles hardened into sinewy flesh and seized the man, lifting him toward the howling mouth. He squirmed, flailed, and kicked a shoe off. Catherine didn’t see the gun in his hand until it went off with a flash, the shot punching through the cacophony. The wrist of his gun arm was squeezed tight in the grip of the beast, causing the shot to go astray.
The sound snapped Catherine out of her trance and she remembered the revolver tucked in her stocking under her slacks. Her hand moved toward it, though her eyes remained fixed on the descending god. It had begun as a nebulous cloud above the desert, but had quickly gained substance as it approached the chanting cultists, fed by the sounds of their song. The stench of it churned her stomach—sulfur, sewage, and ozone. In places, she could still see through its billowing body to the stars beyond.
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