A buzzing vibration caught his attention and Brooks watched his secure work phone judder across the dashboard, throwing icy light at the grimy windshield. He picked it up and saw a text from Base Camp.
Northrup: Is Philips with you? We can’t find her.
“Tom? I have to go.”
Chapter 5
Becca regained consciousness to the sound of Django whining. Someone was carrying her, arms under her knees and shoulders, her body rocking side to side with each step. Somehow she knew it was Brooks before opening her eyes. Stark trees swayed above his head reaching for the ashen sky, leaves crunched beneath his feet. Django, trotting alongside, licked her dangling hand.
“Put me down,” she said.
He stopped walking, set her feet on the ground, and said, “Are you sure you can stand?”
“Yeah.”
He let go of her and she wobbled, put her hand against a tree, and held the other one up to keep him from grabbing her again. “I’m fine. Just give me a minute.”
“Have you eaten anything today? You passed out back there in the stone circle.”
“I…yeah, had a donut. What is that place?”
“We don’t know yet. One theory is that Caleb Wade erected it when he built the house. Another is he might have chosen the location to be near it.”
“Anyone else ever pass out in it?”
“Not since we took over the site. What happened to you in there? Did you see something?”
She shook her head. “I think I had a flashback. I’ve had a few since…Boston. How did you find me?”
“I heard Django barking. We moved into the house. When you didn’t show, they sent me looking. There’s a doctor on standby at the hut. I think he should take a look at you.”
“Told you, I’m fine. Nothing happened that didn’t already happen.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. I just need to lie down for a bit. Let’s go to the house.”
“You’re sure you can walk?”
“I’m sure.”
“Follow me.”
Black flakes swirled at the edge of the woods. Becca pulled her hood over her head and followed Brooks around the north wing of the house to the front steps; a crew was running cables over the porch and across the field to the Quonset hut.
After the stone circle, the house appeared benign, just a neglected mansion crawling with technicians. The fog was absent today, and for a moment, Becca felt like an actress on the set of a horror movie, reassured by the daylight, the company of a working crew, and the ubiquitous technology. The supernatural, the deeply weird would be out of place here.
She climbed the decrepit front steps without trepidation and passed over the oak threshold without ceremony. No chill passed down her spine, no shadow over her heart. She was exhausted from the flashback in the woods, drained of her usual curiosity. She only wanted someone to show her to her room so she could rest and gather her wits before exploring anything else.
Before she could ask for directions, Django had scented her bags, and following him down a hall off the foyer, she found a high-ceilinged bedroom covered in bubbling blue and gold wallpaper with badly scratched hardwood floors, an ebony bureau, and a four-poster bed frame with a stained mattress. Her bags and a clean pillow had been left on an Army cot over which a new sleeping bag was spread.
Brooks came up behind her in the doorway and cocked his elbow against the frame. “Figured you wouldn’t want to sleep on the bed anyway, but just so you know, we have orders to not move any of the furniture unless it’s necessary for the investigation.”
“Why? Are there monsters under the beds?” Becca arched an eyebrow to let him know she was feeling well enough to joke.
Brooks didn’t smile. “There could be. In the closets and cupboards, too.”
“Where’s your room?”
“I’m in the pantry off the kitchen. You gonna crash for a bit?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. But when you get up, remember: no venturing upstairs or down without a partner.”
“Got it.”
As Brooks moved to close the door, Django’s ears pricked forward. He crouched and growled, then sprang through the gap before the door reached the frame, lunging past Brooks and tearing down the hall, claws scrabbling for traction on the floorboards.
“Django!” Becca shot off the cot and Brooks stepped aside, but by the time she’d cleared the doorway, the dog’s bushy tail was disappearing into the parlor at the end of the corridor.
“What was that?” she called to Brooks without looking back as she hurried after Django.
“A cat, I think.”
Now she did turn to gape at him. “What cat?”
Brooks shrugged. “A black and white cat. Must’ve wandered in from the street.”
Becca came reeling around the corner at the grandfather clock expecting to find a fight in progress and found…nothing. The room was empty, its austere furnishings untouched. Not so much as a lampshade wobbled to suggest the passing of animals in full flight.
And yet there were no exits from the room apart from the one she occupied. She turned to Brooks. “He’s gone. Where did he go?”
Brooks pushed past her. “What do you mean gone?”
Becca put her fingers to her lips, trying not to panic as Brooks tossed cushions from an embroidered sofa, then took a knee and peered under its frilly skirt.
“I thought you trained him not to chase animals,” Brooks said.
Becca sighed in frustration. “We didn’t run into any house cats in the rainforest. He’s fine around—”
A bark rang out from the kitchen and Becca hurried toward it, but when it was followed a second later by another, the sound seemed to issue from the bedroom down the hall. She spun on her heel to find Django poking his head out of the room they’d started in, smiling and panting.
Becca exhaled.
They searched the house for a good ten minutes, but there was no further sign of the cat. For his part, Django wasn’t any the worse for wear, lacking so much as a claw sheath embedded in his nose or a clump of white fur in his lips to attest to the feral trespasser’s existence. Eventually, Brooks left Becca and her dog to settle in, with the weak injunction to “give a shout if you need me.”
Becca cleared her bags from the cot and lay down on it. Django settled beside her, his nose on her stomach. She stroked his fur and stared at the cracked, water-stained ceiling, expecting her body to shut down and fall into a nap after the stresses of the morning. But caffeine and adrenaline still buzzed in her veins, and she soon found her thoughts turning to her father as sleep evaded her restless mind.
She reached for her jacket, and dug a worn 3 x 5 photo out of a zippered pocket. Printed on matte photo stock by a pharmacy photo lab, it was the best shot she had ever taken of her parents, during her first mad spree of photography at age 8 when they’d deemed her old enough for a digital camera, but too young for a smart phone.
Her parents looked so young and happy, with sunlight in their entangled, windblown hair and a rippling lake in the background. Lonesome Lake, in New Hampshire, near Mt. Lincoln where they used to camp. Her mother wore sunglasses. Her father’s eyes were the same deep blue as her own.
Why would he have come here, to this house? The place had a reputation for exactly the sort of occult phenomena that Becca’s grandmother, Professor Catherine Philips, had devoted her life to studying. Luke had run off, leaving Becca in her care, after the dark forces Catherine dabbled with drove Becca’s mother to suicide. So what was it about this place that could possibly draw him out of hiding after all these years? The last Becca had heard, her father was holed up in a cabin in the White Mountains when he wasn’t off on cross-country motorcycle tours. Could Brooks be right that he had come here looking for her?
She wondered what kind of network her father was connected to for information. He’d never been computer savvy and it was hard to picture him getting on the Internet, even at a public l
ibrary, to research the Wade House, but she supposed it was possible he had heard something from Catherine about the place when he was young. Who knew what conversations her grandparents had at the dinner table when Catherine was at the peak of her career at Miskatonic University, traveling frequently and gathering data on obscure cults, their practices, artifacts, and sacred sites? But even without computer access, her dad probably had a TV. While the public would never learn most of what had happened, or Becca’s precise role in it during those few weeks in September when Boston was hunkered down under terror attacks by members of the Starry Wisdom Church, she had briefly been connected to those events in the public eye.
Had Luke tried to get in touch with her when the dust settled? By then she had relocated out of the country. He would’ve had no chance of finding her. Had he simply straddled his Harley and followed the falling black snow?
What were you looking for? Was it me? Or was it something else? Something hidden in this house?
Becca ran her fingers over the wall beside her cot. Fleur de lis crumbled away from the wallpaper like moss from a tree at her touch. Was her father really lost in these walls? And if he was, how much did he know about what was going on here? She wanted to believe he’d stumbled unwittingly into it, looking for her. But turning that possibility over in her mind, she couldn’t help feeling it was counterfeit.
Eventually, she dozed off. Before adrenaline-charged adventures had entered her life, she’d been the queen of the short nap, the long nap, and the fuck it, let’s hibernate until springtime sleep marathon. If depression was good for anything, it was getting plenty of sleep. But these days, sleep came in shorter, shallower doses for her.
* * *
Becca woke to the smell of garlic, her stomach groaning as she sat up. Django swished his tail back and forth at her rising and laid his head in her lap. She scratched behind his ears and kissed him on the temple as he licked her face.
“You must be hungry, too,” she said. “Let’s get you fed.”
Following the dog down the long hall to the dining room, she stubbed her toe against the wall molding and pressed her hand against the wall to absorb the pain. When she could walk again, she came to a doorway draped with a heavy velvet curtain. Here, the smell of incense mingled with the food aromas drifting down the hall, making a sickly blend that almost quelled her appetite. The baritone drone of a chanted mantra reached her ears through the curtain, the rhythm repetitious, the content unintelligible. Django sniffed at the hem of the curtain and growled. Becca nudged him on down the hall and rolled the already aching toe under her foot with another misplaced step.
“Fuck!”
The chant wavered at her curse.
She squeezed her toe in her fist while it throbbed, then set her foot down and limped the rest of the way to the kitchen, the walls tilting around her like an amusement park funhouse, every angle conspiring to mess with her senses of proximity and perspective.
Night had fallen, though it wasn’t yet 5 P.M. by the grandfather clock she passed in the parlor. She found the others in the dining room seated around a long dark wood table with two unoccupied place settings. A ceramic bowl of pasta sat between a larger wooden bowl of salad and a baking pan on a trivet steaming with the aromas of garlic, tomato, and whatever melted cheeses were baked on top. Brooks waved at her with the oven mitt still on his hand.
“Is that clock in the parlor accurate?” Becca asked.
Dick Hanson nodded, piling salad onto his plate with a set of tongs. “I set it this afternoon.” He watched her limp around the table with a mirthless grin.
“Slept longer than I realized. Sorry.”
“I was gonna wake you in a minute for dinner,” Brooks said. He pulled a chair out and gestured at the gold-trimmed white china and silverware.
“Smells good,” Becca said. “But is it—”
“Meat? No, Eggplant Parm. You’re veg, right?”
“Yeah. You remembered.” Becca went to the cupboard where she’d stowed a bag of kibble earlier, dumped a scoop into Django’s bowl, and set it down in a corner away from the table after making him sit. As she settled into her chair, Hanson passed her the bowl of pasta, and Mark flashed her a friendly smile.
“Stub your toe?” Mark asked.
“Yeah.”
“That makes two of us. Hanson walked into a doorframe.”
“I thought the first floor was supposed to be stable,” Becca said. “Not prone to shifts.”
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t…a little off,” Hanson offered. “They say we’ll get used to it.”
Brooks took the seat at the head of the table. “Dig in, everybody. I figured I’d start us off with a group meal for our first night. After this, we can fend for ourselves, but there should be plenty you can eat. The pantry and fridge are well stocked.”
“No plate for the reverend?” Becca asked.
“The rev says he’s fasting to prepare.”
Becca recognized the tense jawline that meant Brooks was restraining himself.
“Chanting, too,” Burns added, pouring a glass of red wine and offering the bottle to Becca. “We gave him the library as a bedroom for privacy. I think he’s turned it into a temple.”
Becca took the bottle, sniffed it, and poured herself half a glass. “So…do you think he can protect us?”
“Can? Yes.” Brooks said. “Will? Can’t say I’m confident. Personally, I have more faith in my sidearm.”
They ate for a while in silence. Becca had taken only a small portion and was soon picking at her salad and nursing her wine. Setting her fork down, she said, “What’s the plan, now that we’re all here?”
Brooks burped into his napkin. “After dinner we fetch his holiness and go upstairs, take a tour of the second story.”
“Are we looking for anything particular?”
“No…but I don’t think we’ll have any doubt if we find it.”
“The first team they sent in,” Becca said, “I know they got inconsistent measurements, but did they see anything weird?”
“They weren’t equipped to explore,” Dick Hanson said. “They only set up the surveying equipment and then retreated to check the data from the hut. The lasers read different measurements at night than in the daytime. Activity seems to increase after the sun goes down.”
“But no one’s been upstairs at night before us?” Becca asked.
“Not since we claimed the site,” Brooks said. “They didn’t want techs getting caught off guard or triggering something they couldn’t cope with. You could say it’s virgin territory up above.”
“And below,” Mark said, pointing downward with his fork.
“The cellar,” Becca said. “What’s down there?”
“We’ll find out when we explore,” Brooks said. “According to the floor plan, it’s a boiler room and workshop. Caleb Wade was a candle maker back when candles and oil lamps were the only sources of indoor light. It’s hard to think of it as a lucrative business now, but he built this mansion on the profits of what was basically a local utility at the time. He had some blacksmithing and glassblowing skills, too. Made all sorts of lamps for the fuel he sold. When his sons inherited the house they installed electricity, but the old man wouldn’t allow it as long as he lived here. Claimed he didn’t care for the color of the light.”
“As a photographer I can relate,” Becca said. “Electric light sucks.”
“How’s it going with the drone?” Mark asked. “You getting the hang of it?”
Becca took another sip of wine. It was warming her up and helping her to relax. “Actually, no. It’s a finicky little bitch. Good thing it’s built strong because I’m good at crashing it.”
“You’ll get the hang of it.”
The conversation diminished with the food, and soon Becca busied herself with cleanup to avoid the discomfort of small talk with strangers. Hanson left the room while Burns wiped down the table. He returned a moment later with a roll of blueprints, which he spread over the
table, pinning the corners with salt-and-pepper shakers and clean utensils.
“This is the floor we’re on,” Hanson said. “You’ve all seen most of it, and we don’t expect it to change, so I won’t dwell on it. The Reverend’s bedroom is the library, Becca’s is at the end of the hall, Mark and I are in the billiard room, and Brooks has the pantry.” He jabbed his finger at a door marked with an X in red pencil. “This is the cellar door, off the kitchen. No one goes down there without a partner.”
Brooks cut in: “And just because the doors don’t change where they lead to on this floor doesn’t mean that it’s a normal zone. Neutral, maybe, but not normal. And we’re not just talking stubbed toes and bruised shoulders.”
“What do you mean?” Becca asked.
“It has its own wild cards up its sleeves, but the geeks figure it can only deal them while you’re sleeping—in the form of dreams.”
“I thought no one has spent a night here since SPECTRA claimed it,” Mark said.
“True, but there’s a lot of Internet literature, accounts written by people who have slept in the house on a dare. Even an amateur parapsychology club. You’ll find journals and pens in with your pillows and blankets. We’re all expected to keep dream journals for comparison, to see if there are common themes, or…messages.”
“Whoa, wait a minute,” Becca said. “Who’s going to read them? Cause if you think for a second I’m going to be transparent with a black government agency—” She scoffed.
“Nina,” Brooks said. “Nina will read them.”
“Who’s Nina?” Mark asked.
Becca and Brooks spoke over each other:
“His ex.”
“Her shrink.”
“How’d that happen?” Mark asked.
“Coincidence,” Brooks said. “But she’s qualified to look for patterns while keeping our confidentiality.”
“She’s working for SPECTRA now?” Becca asked. “Or was she always? Are you two back together?”
“No, we’re not. She’s staying nearby. She’ll be on call. And you don’t have to worry about her sharing anything with me.”
Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Page 6