“What do you mean? What’s in the candle?”
“Something dark hidden in the wax. Didn’t you see it when I went in close? Maybe it’s what you’re looking for. Maybe Maurice hid whatever he hid in a candle, and hid that one in a forest of candles.”
Brooks looked at Hanson, a vein twitching at his temple. Finally, to Becca, he said, “Show me.”
Becca soon found that focusing on a precise close up was harder than general exploration. Eventually, she had the drone hovering a few inches from the candle, shining its piercing light into the depths of the wax. The candle was speckled with dim stripes, layers of some dusty substance embedded in the wax. A dark spot marred the center.
“Make sure you save the high-res photos,” Brooks said.
“Caleb Wade was a candle maker,” Hanson said. “He probably made these and placed them there.”
Brooks scratched at the stubble on his cheek, coming to a decision. “She could go down and grab the one candle. First sign of trouble, we pull her out.”
Hanson nodded agreement.
“Okay,” Brooks said to Becca. “But if we have a reason to pull you out, you come without question. No resistance.”
Becca took a coil of nylon rope from her pack. She clipped one end to her harness while Brooks tied the other securely around one of the piano legs. It was weird as hell to be anchoring her rope to the same object that represented the abyss she was about to rappel into. She tried not to think too much about it.
While she checked her buckles and adjusted her headlamp, the drone flew out of the piano, following its homing signal, and settled on the floor beside the remote. Becca sat on the edge of the piano and swung her leg over. Brooks situated himself next to the instrument, holding a few coils of rope. Fortunately, he had at least 50 pounds on her. Nonetheless, he called Proctor over to don a pair of gloves and put additional weight on the rope behind him. With tension established, Becca leaned back and braced herself against the inside of the piano with her knees. “Good to go,” she said.
Brooks and Proctor lowered her into the hole. Sitting astride the piano, she hadn’t feared the height. But now, moving through what felt like open air, her lip quivered from more than the cold. She clutched the rope tight despite the harness, descending down and down through darkness for what felt like too long before her boots scraped the floor.
“I’m down!” she called. Brooks tossed a few extra yards of rope into the piano, giving her enough slack to walk among the trees near her landing point. He shouted down, “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her prickled forearms. “It’s so cold down here.”
Becca’s headlamp illuminated a small circle around her, misted with her breath, little more than the drone had covered. But as her eyes adjusted, she could see farther into the darkness than the camera could, and she quickly established a more continuous mental image of the space than she’d been able to compile through the glass. The dim shapes of stalactites confirmed what her echoing voice had suggested—that this was a cave. And yet, in keeping with the tile fragments beneath her boots, certain details of topography implied a man-made space: carved stone arches and ornamented pillars glimpsed dimly through the trees at the edge of the subterranean lake.
Now she could see that all of the candles contained the same shadow at their cores. Impulsively, and without calling up to consult Brooks, she fished a plastic cigarette lighter out of her shoulder bag, flicked it, and lit the nearest wick. She gasped as the entire forest of candle-laden branches ignited around her.
“What did you do?” Brooks yelled. “Did you do that?”
Becca turned slowly, surveying the forest of flames. She touched a branch of the nearest tree, expecting it to feel cold as iron, but her fingertips met the rough texture of bark. She walked the winding path between the glowing trees to the black lake, hearing the gently lapping water more than she could see it beyond the glow of the candles, their light coming up short of the bank. She listened for other sounds beyond the lapping water, the squeal of bats or the moaning of the wind through cavernous spaces high above, but the air was uncannily still. She turned her back to the water and gazed over the field of flickering flames, surmising that what little wind passed among them was derived from her passing.
“Becca?” Brooks called. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she called back, feeling that the echo of her voice marred the hallowed silence like boot treads across virgin snow.
She squinted into the blackness again and detected a sound she had missed before: water dripping into water at long, lazy intervals. She aimed the white flood in the direction of the sound, squinting at its perimeter. The light described the contours of a circular marble platform in the center of the lagoon, either polished to a high gloss, or wet. Another droplet fell from the high ceiling and exploded in a spray like sparks from a struck anvil in the light cast from her crown.
“Luke?” she called, her voice cracking, the word enveloped in echo, undeliverable, returned to sender.
“Focus on what you came for,” she said under her breath. “Take a candle and go.”
She had reached the limit of her tether. The little tug reassured her that she was not alone, not cut off from the others down here in the dark. Something about the marble platform was deeply unsettling, and yet hard to look away from.
A scent reached her brain, complex and exotic, not entirely unpleasant. Something about it was stimulating, and she wondered if it was responsible for the buzzing sensation awakening at her third eye, beneath the elastic band of the headlamp. She searched for the source and saw that the candles had burned down to the first strata of dust frozen in their cores, releasing it to sizzle in the liquefied wax and unfurl in wisps of purple smoke. She watched, entranced as the vapor floated on a subterranean draft toward the gold-veined green marble dais. It coalesced in a spiral around the slow dripping water, and Becca felt suddenly that she was not alone. Her skin, clammy in the damp air, prickled at the certainty. The polar opposite of the umbilical connection she’d felt to her companions above via the nylon cord, this was an overpowering sense of icy intimacy with something alien.
She backed away from the lake.
Now she could hear more drops falling behind and around her—wax dripping on the cracked tiles like rain—as she retreated up the path, gathering the excess rope in her hands, afraid of breaking into a run and tripping on it but still feeling the urge to flee. The dark seeds at the candle cores were visible now: speckled eggs from which the wicks grew like veiny roots. Becca didn’t want to be down here when those eggs hatched and spilled their contents. What had she set in motion? She had only wanted a little more light.
Looking up, she found the piano hole in the calcified ceiling, the curved shape illuminating the fog she had passed through to reach the cavern floor. She tugged on the rope. “Bring me up!”
The eggs sizzled. A shiver ran through her body and her throat constricted under the pressure of her pulse. “What did I do? Shit. What did I do?”
The rope zipped through her gloved hands, then snapped taut and tugged at her harness.
The eggs popped all at once, unspooling ribbons of light, tongues of green fire. They wriggled through the smoky air toward the lagoon; shoaling, swooping and turning as one body until they were spiraling around the dripping water on the marble dais, merging into the coherent form of a single being, something dancing, swirling, trailing skirts of luminous flesh, something female, abominable.
Becca’s heart thundered. Her boots left the ground. She focused on the pale light above and the rope pulling her toward it until she was passing through the wood frame to the sound of Django barking. Brooks grabbed hold of her, hauled her out of the piano, and together they spilled to the floor.
“Close it,” she cried, scrambling. “Close it before it gets out!”
Chapter 9
“What was it? What did I see down there?” The four of them sat at the kitchen table. Becca warmed her hand
s with a cup of tea Brooks had made for her. She had just described the formation of the creature on the marble disc in the black lake, and if anyone could tell her what she’d seen, it was Proctor. She asked again, “Do you know?”
“Shabat Cycloth,” the reverend said. He seemed stunned by her description.
“What’s that?” Brooks asked.
“The consort of Lung Crawthok.”
Brooks pulled a chair out and sat down across from Proctor, elbows braced on the tabletop, fingers steepled under his chin. “I think it’s time you told us what this house means to the Starry Wisdom Church. I feel like we’re poking a nest and we don’t even know what species made it. What are we dealing with?”
“Some scholars believe the house itself is a garment of Yog Sothoth, the gate and the key.”
“You’re talking gibberish again,” Brooks said. “What does that mean?”
“Think of the house as a hermit crab shell. Curled around the core of it is a god that is itself a doorway to the realm of the gods.”
“And this god is named Yog Sothoth?” Brooks asked.
“Yes.”
“What about the other gods you mentioned; Crawdaddy and Cyclone or whatever the fuck? What are they?”
“Lung Crawthok is the guardian. He dwells on the threshold and keeps the unworthy out. His consort, Shabat Cycloth, is the Lady of a Thousand Hooks. They copulate on the threshold of the beyond, and she spawns the fishers of men, the eels that pierce the flesh and drag their prey to the feeding of Yog Sothoth.”
Brooks squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “He’s speaking English, right? He’s speaking English and I feel like I need a translator.”
Hanson cleared his throat. “Let’s not get too carried away with cosmology. The bottom line is the music opens different zones on the borderland. The one we found today is not the one Ramirez used. So we keep trying until we find the place he described.”
“But you don’t even know what he hid down there,” Becca said. “You don’t know what you’re looking for.”
Brooks looked at Proctor. “We’re hoping it’s a weapon. Something that can be used against an incursion.”
Proctor nodded. “It may be.”
“And we need to find it so no one else ever does,” Brooks finished.
Becca rubbed her arms, the chill of her first descent still clinging to her. “No matter what we stir up in the process?”
“Can you think of a better plan?” Hanson asked. “Are we supposed to leave the house alone and wait for it to stir on its own? We have to take some action, even if it involves risk.”
“So you’re going to keep trying different combinations on the keyboard until we stumble on the right one?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary.” Northrup spoke from the entryway where he had crept up on their conversation. “Hanson, come with me.”
At the west end of the first floor, Northrup ushered Hanson into a room Becca had only peered into once, the game room. Waiting in the hall with Brooks and Proctor, she could hear a clacking sound, like pebbles being dropped in a pile, accompanied by a wavering voice humming softly. She craned her neck into the doorframe and watched Hanson take a seat on the sidewall, careful not to disturb the strange exercise in progress at the center of the room.
Nina sat cross-legged on the floral carpet next to Mark Burns. A wooden backgammon set lay nearby, the board neglected while Mark stacked the black and white game pieces in perfect little towers. He used more black than white, and the combination put Becca in mind of the inverse keyboard on the piano upstairs. The association gave her a little thrill of recognition at what he was doing, but her sense of rising hope was tempered by Mark’s disheveled state: his eyes were glassy, his hair — usually meticulous — was chaotic, and his chin was raw, irritated from wiping off drool. He licked his chapped lips compulsively, and hummed a low dirge. An untouched glass of water occupied a coaster on a nearby end table. Becca got the idea that Nina would have offered it to him, if not for fear of breaking his concentration. She sat stone still, holding a voice recorder in her lap.
“I don’t get it,” Brooks said.
Nina shot him a reproachful glance and Becca shushed him.
“He’s communicating in music,” Becca whispered. “They represent black and white keys.”
Hanson held his hand up to Northrup’s ear and whispered something. Northrup left the room, hurried down the hall, and returned a moment later with Hanson’s sheet music folder under his arm and a pencil in his hand. He passed these to Hanson and took a seat in the corner. Hanson shuffled through the papers, found a blank sheet of staff paper, and began transcribing.
For a time, everyone seemed to be holding their breath, as if a toppled stack of backgammon chips would bring the house down around them. Mark seemed completely oblivious to their presence until he laid a final black piece down and spread his hands above his creation, eyes wide with delight. He looked like a magician about to perform a trick guaranteed to draw gasps of awe. The humming had ceased, and now he laughed, a wild outburst of private amusement brimming from deep in his chest.
Hanson made a quick erasure on the page, brushed the leavings aside with his pinky, and resumed his quick notations, rushing to get it down before the chips fell or his memory of the chords evaporated. At last he set the pencil down and exhaled.
As if on cue, the four black and white stacks collapsed, and the spell was broken.
Mark dragged the back of his wrist across his chin, blinked and looked around at his silent audience. “What’s everybody looking at me for?”
* * *
Becca needed air. The veranda wrapped around the front of the house in a U shape with doors leading onto it from many rooms. She found the nearest of these through an ugly sitting room with pink wallpaper that reminded her of vomit, cranked on the handle and pushed through the door. She took a deep, icy breath, looking out over the dead lawn, a flurry of snowflakes swirling down off of the overhanging roof, stinging her hot cheeks and catching in her hair.
The sight of snow, actual white snow, shocked her, and she realized she had become accustomed to the black ash flakes that covered the fields surrounding the house. Now black and white mingled in the air, just as they had in Mark’s trembling fingers moments ago. But, as if in mimicry of the dreadful piano that lay in wait on the second floor, the black remained dominant.
She leaned over the railing and looked up at the house. The deck boards seemed to lurch beneath her feet as she surveyed the façade from this new angle. Then the door clicked open behind her and Nina stepped out, pulling her coat tight around her throat against the cold, and laying a hand on Becca’s back.
“Are you okay?” Nina asked. “You shouldn’t be out here without a proper jacket. You’ll catch a cold.”
“I just needed some air. This place is a bit much, that’s all.” Becca ran her hand through her hair and exhaled sharply. “Even out here…it’s like the angles are all wrong.”
“They are,” Nina said. “There were a couple of studies conducted here in the 70s on the effects of asymmetrical manmade environments on the human psyche. I’ve been looking them over, and it’s true, the place causes distress and nausea. Not as extreme as what some people experience in places like the MIT Stata Center, with its really wild angles, but nothing in this place was done according to the standard building codes your body is accustomed to. The Wade House was designed to be off balance in almost every dimension. It’s mostly subtle, but all of those little misalignments add up.”
“Now you tell me,” Becca said. “I’m over sensitive to things like that.”
“I know. I also know how hard winter can be for you. You’ve shown incredible resilience in coming back here to help.”
Becca looked up at the sky and shook her head. “Fucking January.”
Nina drummed her fingers on the railing. “You know, it’s named for the Roman god, Janus, the two-faced lord of beginnings and endings, gatew
ays and doors.”
“Huh. Sounds like what the reverend was talking about.” Becca took a pillbox from the pocket of her hoodie. She plucked a small, round tablet from the assortment, swallowed it dry, and snapped the lid shut.
“Klonopin?” Nina asked.
“Dramamine. Mark gave me some for seasickness.”
Nina swept her gaze over the lines of the house. “That bad, huh?”
Becca nodded. “So, why was the house built at odd angles?”
“The architecture is based on a mathematical pattern. Like the golden ratio. You’re familiar with it?”
“Sure. They teach it in composition class.”
“Well, like the golden ratio, found in countless natural patterns from the nautilus shell to the proportions of the human face, there are other occult patterns, far less pleasing by our human standards. Patterns that resonate with another world, where life evolved along different lines.”
“Were you always such an expert on this stuff, and it just never came up in our sessions?” Becca said. “How long have you been working for SPECTRA?”
“Not long, honestly. I’ve learned a lot since that autumn two years ago.”
Becca brushed a snowflake out of her hair and watched it melt on her finger. “I don’t know if I can stay here. They don’t need me. Brooks has the sight, and now Mark does, too. At this rate, the reverend will have it next.”
“If you haven’t noticed, Mark isn’t exactly of sound mind after passing through the shadow side of the house.”
“And I should keep meddling with this stuff so I can end up the same?”
“I’m not telling you that you should, but you do have a way of looking at things, a way of exposing the nature of things.”
“Everyone keeps saying that. I don’t know why.”
“Not everyone in your position would have rappelled down into that place and lit a candle.”
“All that makes me is reckless. Seems like that would be a liability, given how volatile this whole situation is.”
Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Page 10