Proctor laughed. “Where I’m going, I won’t need it. I will walk amongst them on the streets of their own city. Here, I’m merely paying admission.” Proctor drew his knife from its sheath, sliced the palm of his hand, and squeezed a trickle of blood out the bottom of his fist into the water.
Brooks almost moved to tackle him and take the stab wound if necessary, but he remembered what had happened to Becca’s friend Rafael when he got too close to that birdbath. The only other option was to shoot and risk sending whatever secrets the reverend kept into oblivion with him. “Admission to what?”
“Did you like the amusement park when you were a boy, Agent Brooks?”
“Sure. Until I figured out the games were rigged.”
“My aunt used to take me when the carnival came to Innsmouth. I liked the fun house, the hall of mirrors…”
Brooks advanced slowly while Proctor talked. At this range he couldn’t miss.
“This place is the ultimate hall of mirrors. It will lead me beyond the Shore of Eternal Twilight and deliver me unto the city of the Great Old Ones.”
“And then what? You’ll lead them back out?”
“I’ve no interest in destroying this world. Don’t you see? I just want out of it. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, to go beyond. You can keep your dirty, poisoned Earth. I’m going to a place of starlight and primordial waters. I’ll take my chances with dark gods over you white devils every time.” Proctor stepped backward toward the shimmering curtain. Brooks saw that it was a waterfall pouring over a marble lintel, a sheet of silver water falling through a slot in the granite floor at Proctor’s feet. The reverend backed up toward it and raised an admonishing bloody hand. “Don’t try to follow me,” he said. “Without the proper sacrifice, these waters would wash the flesh clean off your bones.”
“What about the weapon?” Brooks asked. “You said Ramirez hid a weapon on this beach. Something that would protect us if they came through again. Where is it? What is it?”
“It was never a weapon. But I know how you people think, and you would have looked for nothing less.”
“What then?”
Proctor drew something from a pocket. Brooks almost put a bullet through his head before it emerged, but he controlled himself, resisted the irrevocable act.
“It’s the thing you value least, my friend. A key to the sacred.” Proctor turned the silver key in his fingers. The light of the ever-setting sun flared off its angles as he stepped back under the curtain of falling water and disappeared.
Brooks moved around the basin, just close enough to see ribbons of blood twisting in the water. He approached the curtain and raised his hand, but stopped short of touching the falling water, folded his fingers into a fist, and hammered it down against his thigh. “Fuck!”
He heard a crash like thunder, and looked back through the crooked iron gates at the shore beyond where foam and spray were raining down on the diminishing beach from a crashing wave. From what he understood of this zone, the tides had been receding for decades, retreating from the ridge the wall was built on. Was the sea now reclaiming that territory? Had Proctor’s actions accelerated the process? He approached the gate, and now there could be no doubt: the beach he had just walked was vanishing fast under the encroaching tide. He scanned the sky, found the odd curved hole in the low clouds, and followed the line of his rope to where it now floated beyond the breakers.
Brooks looked again at the curtain of crystal water, and resisted the impulse to dash through it in pursuit of Proctor. He was out of his depth, couldn’t know if the man had lied about the lethality of that threshold to the uninitiated. And now his escape route was escaping him. If he had any hope of returning to his own world, he had to act quickly.
He holstered his gun, pushed through the gate, and bounded down the ridge, splashing into the rising surf. A dark wave towered over him on the brink of crashing, and he dove into it. The water felt unnatural, phlegmy on his skin, the taste of it in his nostrils repulsive, but he didn’t let it deter him, couldn’t, or he would die here. He swam beyond the breakers, and searched the sky for the rope. There—dangling from the cloud ceiling, about twenty yards out. He swam toward it, the water burning his eyes, the pulse of the tide rocking him, pushing him back toward the shore. He fought against the current, and took one last look at the ridge, the wall, and the gate.
A shape walked to the water. A woman? She dipped a toe in the surf and her glistening black body unwound—a shoal of slimy ribbons of flesh slapping into the foam and racing toward him, cutting streamers of agitation on the water’s black surface.
Brooks swam harder. His muscles cried out and a stitch seared his side. He caught sight of the rope, undulating in the air nearby, and launched himself at it with two powerful kicks. He seized the rope and wound it once around his body, then pulled the slack in, feeling for the end of it until the metal clamp was in his hand. The icy water numbed his fingers as he fumbled with the hardware.
He sensed the swarm of eels closing in on him, spared a glance toward the beach, and saw a flare of white water cutting the surface like a torpedo. The lead lamprey creature surged forward and latched its needle teeth through his soaked shirt, piercing his chest. Blood sprayed against his neck and his mind went white with pain.
He succeeded in hooking the clamp onto the harness and screamed at the sky, “UP! Bring me up!”
His body rose from the water. The eel clung to him, sucking blood from his breast. Two more explosions of pain registered from his right calf and left thigh and set him kicking frantically at the leaping, snapping swarm.
The cable tugged him steadily higher and now he could see the surf sweeping white foam below him. With his hands freed by the harness, he squeezed the slimy black monster trying to bore its way to his heart until it released its grip. He cast it at the water below and stared in horror through his ripped shirt at the ring of punctures weeping blood around his nipple. He thrashed in the air, knocking his legs together in an effort to dislodge the two remaining eels, dimly aware that he must look like a fish wriggling on the hook.
After an excruciating eternity, he was passing through the darkness of the piano frame with hands groping at his clothing, catching him under his arms, and hauling him out. He hit the wood floor with a wet slap and someone was beating his legs with something blunt until the teeth let go. Panicked shouts filled the air until the blood drained from his head and gray darkness welled up, and the horrors went away for a while.
Chapter 11
Becca watched the cable zipping out of the piano and winding onto the electric spindle. She could smell the salt water even before the soaked section at the end came over the lip with a spray of mist. He would be close now. She wanted to look into the hole, but the brawny black-clad agents with their boots and gloves and side arms were huddled close around the cable feed, and she would only get in the way. She hung back, biting her thumbnail and feeling helpless.
A tang of spice and rot bloomed in the air and then the men were reaching in, straining against the awkward shape, cursing and directing each other, trying not to knock the leg that propped the lid up. She wondered why they hadn’t unscrewed the hinges and taken the damned thing off. Maybe they were afraid to tamper with anything in the house lest they inadvertently open a portal they could never close again.
They hauled Brooks out, kicking and groaning through his gritted teeth. He hit the floor hard, despite their best efforts to set him down easy—his flailing limbs knocking their hands off. At least two eels were latched onto his legs, biting through his soaked black jeans. One of the agents tried pummeling one of the creatures, beating his fist against it in vain. Another drew a tactical knife from a sheath strapped to his leg, setting off a string of anxious protest from Northrup. A third man stepped forward with a length of what looked like piano string, and Becca wondered just how many odd implements of death these guys kept in their kits. She watched him wrap the wire around an eel near the mouth and pull tight, cutting through th
e black skin of the thing and into its red meat until the creature let go its grip and hit the floor with a slap. The second agent had traded his knife for a baton and was beating it against the remaining eel—hard enough to fracture Brooks’ femur if he missed—when it, too, let go.
Brooks coughed brine onto the floor and passed out. When they turned him over, Becca saw blood oozing from a ragged hole in his shirt.
The agent with the piano wire put his ear to Brooks’ mouth. “He’s breathing.”
“Get a stretcher up here,” Northrup ordered. “Get him to Medical at base. Now!”
One agent hurried out of the room and down the stairs. Another closed the piano.
Becca moved in and knelt beside Brooks. She took his hand. It was freezing, and his complexion had a bluish hue. Beside her, someone crawled forward on the floor, and turning, she saw that it was Mark Burns. But he hadn’t come forward to check on Brooks; he was scooping up one of the eels in his hands, turning it over gingerly, examining it with an expression of rapt fascination on his face.
“Mayomyzon pieckoensis?” He probed the creature with his index finger. It contracted like a spasming muscle and Becca yelped.
“No…” He chuckled. “Similar, but no. Look at the hypopharyngeal ridge. A parallel evolution? Is it even a lamprey?”
Becca shuffled away from him on her knees, afraid that the creature would snap his finger off or slip out of his grasp and fasten its rings of teeth into her. Burns seemed beyond concern for his own safety. She was relieved when he rose and carried the thing out of the room. A moment later she heard water running down the hall. Apparently, he had deposited it in the bathtub.
The agent Northrup had sent for the stretcher returned with it, and they soon had Brooks strapped in. A pair of agents carried him from the room with Northrup at their heels, issuing commands into his walkie-talkie.
Becca looked around the room at the blood and water puddled on the floor, and her eyes settled on Dick Hanson. She hadn’t noticed him until now. He was standing behind the keyboard, staring down at it, rumpled and sweaty, his sheet music clutched in his hand. He met Becca’s gaze, and reading her undisguised fear, said, “He’ll be okay.” She couldn’t tell if he believed it.
The floor shook. Becca threw her arm out to grab for the nearest anchor, but finding nothing, bent her knees and swayed. Her first thought was that they had dropped the stretcher on the stairs, sending a jolt through the floor, but she quickly rejected the notion. The tremor was too strong. Earthquake strong. Combined with the eels and the seawater, she couldn’t help feeling that the floor was the deck of a boat, or that the house itself was adrift on whatever subterranean ocean they’d just hoisted Brooks out of.
Her stomach dropped. The wall tilted. Hanson slammed into the piano, buckling over the keyboard and eliciting a dissonant burst of notes. Shards of crystal from the broken chandelier rolled across the floor from the pile they’d been swept into.
Becca hit the floor. She couldn’t tell if she’d slipped in a puddle, lost her balance, or both. She looked up at Hanson. He was holding onto the piano, staring at her through the wrong end of a telescope, far away and small as the room warped and stretched into a corridor. Then something passed between them, a reflection in the glossy black lacquer of the piano: a black-clad man with barbed letters tattooed on his face. Becca looked opposite the reflection, expecting to see Proctor. Was that the hem of his frock passing out of the room into the sunlit hall?
Someone seized her arm and pulled her to her feet. She saw it was Hanson and came along. He had somehow covered the distance between them and was leading her from the room, taking advantage of the current pitch of the floor to pull her forward. She knew at any second it might tilt the other way, but for now gravity was in their favor, urging them toward the doorway where a moment ago she’d glimpsed the fleeting black fabric.
But when they rounded the corner and slammed into the banister, there was no sign of Proctor on the stairs below. Plaster dust flurried from the ceiling as cracks fractured the wall like time-lapse vines climbing for the sky. Somewhere, glass shattered. Holding onto each other and the railing, Becca and Hanson began their descent. And then she remembered.
“Mark,” she shouted over the din. “We have to go back for Mark.”
“Where?”
“The bathroom, I think.”
Hanson gazed up the buckling stairs and shook his head. “Too late.”
“We can’t leave him.”
“Are you sure he’s up there?”
As if in reply, a keening wail sounded from the second floor, cutting through the rumble. Becca broke from Hanson’s grip and climbed the stairs, her feet skipping two out of three steps. The stairs looked closer than they were and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was seeing them through warped lenses. Finally, she dropped to all fours and used her hands to clamber up the rest of the way. Hanson didn’t follow. He lingered on the landing, watching her.
She found Mark in the bathroom, kneeling beside the tub, wringing his hands. He looked like a child praying beside a bed, and when his words resolved in her mind out of the stream of syllables issuing urgently from his lips, she realized it was a kind of prayer or petition, though to whom it was directed, she couldn’t say: “No, please… Don’t go…no, no, no, no, no.”
Becca stepped tentatively toward him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Mark, we have to get out of here. The house is falling down.”
He shook his head, still staring at the water where a black ribbon was unraveling in inky tendrils. “It’s a new species, it’s a m-missing piece of the f-fossil record. I need samples, need to…photograph it.” He looked at her pleadingly, his eyes wild and bloodshot. “Can you photograph it? Please?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t. I don’t have my camera. You have to come with me, Mark. You have to come now. The house is falling apart! Now!”
He looked at the ceiling, as if only now comprehending that the unraveling transcended the boundaries of the bathtub. Then he looked back at the water. All that remained of the creature was a gelatinous black lump the size of a grape floating in a black cloud. “No!” He thrust his hands under the water and tried to scoop it up, but came away with ink-stained empty palms, rivulets of black running from his wrists to his elbows.
Becca retched at the putrid, fishy stench. She wanted to make him rinse the stuff off in the sink, feared that it might eat away at his skin, infect him with something, maybe something contagious, something that could worm into his nervous system. But there was no time. The house was breaking apart, the thunder crack of beams splitting and the rumble of foundation stones grinding was deafening. Or was that the sound of worlds grinding against each other like gears, cogs in some infernal machine slipping into alignment?
She took a fistful of his clothing, the collar of his cardigan and the t-shirt beneath it, and yanked him to his feet. Thankfully, he didn’t slip on the wet tiles, but found his footing and allowed her to usher him out of the bathroom and into the hall.
Another loud crack. Becca looked over her shoulder as the bathroom mirror shattered in a rain of shards dancing in the sink. Arcane letters tattooed on olive skin slid past in the silvered glass.
* * *
“The US Geological Survey recorded a 4.2 magnitude earthquake centered in Concord at 3:23 PM, followed by two small aftershocks,” Northrup announced from his leather office chair at the end of the conference table. He let the information hang in the air while lighting a cigarette.
Becca, Dick Hanson, and one of the agents who had taken Brooks out on the stretcher sat in folding metal chairs amid paper cups of burnt coffee. Mark Burns was being interviewed by Nina in a cubicle at the other end of the hut. Northrup had introduced the field agent by name only: Nico Merrit. But dressed and armed as he was, Becca wondered if he was next in line to take Brooks’ place as chief security officer. The guy was handsome in spite of—or maybe in part because of—a deep scar on his jawline. He was younger than Brooks,
with short black hair and dark eyes. He looked strong, but Becca didn’t want him at the table if he represented the loss of the one man she trusted to keep her safe in all of this.
“It wasn’t just an earthquake,” Becca said, arms crossed over her chest.
Northrup knocked a plug of ash into the paper cup at his elbow. “I didn’t say it was just an earthquake, but it certainly coincided with one. Did something in the house cause a quake? Please, you were in the thick of it for longer than anyone, so tell us: what else was it?”
Becca squirmed, tried to find the right words, and sighed. “Perspective got weird.”
“Perspective?” Merrit said.
“Space was warped. Like in a funhouse mirror, or when you put on someone else’s glasses and the floor looks too close.”
“She’s right,” Hanson said. “You know how the angles of the place are off on a good day? It was like someone cranked the knob on that. Has anyone gone back in? Have they assessed the damage yet?”
Northrup nodded. “It’s minimal. Pictures fell off the walls, plaster cracked. No major structural damage noted, but it’s night now, and we pulled the inspection team out at sunset. We’ll have a better idea in the morning.”
“What about broken windows? Cracks in the foundation?” Becca asked. “It sounded like the place was coming down around us.”
Northrup shrugged. “We have broken china, toppled furniture. Some of what you heard may have been from…below.”
“The reverend caused it, didn’t he?” she said.
“We believe so. But we don’t know what he set in motion.”
“How is Brooks? Is he conscious?”
“We have him on an I.V. antibiotic and pain killer. He’s groggy. The doctor says we can interview him shortly.”
“Did you check his pockets,” Hanson asked. “When you took him off the stretcher, did you search him for the weapon?”
Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Page 12