“I didn’t know you were coming,” he said again. “Would you like some coffee or tea? Susan’s upstairs giving Noah a bath.”
“No,” Brooks said. “We can’t stay long, just stopping by on the way to somewhere else.”
Tom fidgeted with his wedding ring, spinning it on his finger.
“I’ve had you on my mind,” Brooks said, “but things have been crazy at work, and I understood your concerns about wanting to talk privately. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t call before coming. Anyway, I finally had an opportunity to drop in off the books. Is this an okay time? You seem a little anxious.”
“Bath time can be a tad stressful is all.” Tom’s eyes tracked over to Becca, bounced back to Brooks.
“She’s cool,” Brooks said. “If you could remember her, you’d relax. She’s not an agent.”
Tom smiled. The same fake smile on display in the family photos. Becca decided she would offer to take some better candid shots of the Petrie family if life ever approached anything like normalcy.
“I figured. She’s not dressed like one,” Tom said.
Becca took her hands from the pockets of her army jacket and slid them over the thighs of her worn black jeans.
“She’s a photographer,” Brooks said, “and the only person besides me who didn’t take Nepenthe after the crisis to make the extra perception go away.”
Tom nodded and swallowed. “I’ve had a few flashes of memory from that week in September. At least, I think they’re memories. But it seems more like remembering fragments of a nightmare, stuff that couldn’t really have happened. But you say it did.”
“Right,” Brooks said. “It did, and trust me, you don’t want to remember.”
Tom turned to Becca. “Why didn’t you take the drug like the rest of us, if you’re not with SPECTRA?”
She thought about it for a moment and said, “They gave me a choice. At the time, I didn’t want to put blinders on.”
“Because of that, she’s working with us in a freelance capacity,” Brooks said. “But she probably trusts the agency even less than I do. So…you hinted on the phone that you have concerns about your boy, but you’re afraid of approaching SPECTRA directly.”
Tom nodded. He was pacing the carpet, rubbing his stubbled head. “I just think—and maybe I’m paranoid, but you’re on the inside and you haven’t reassured me otherwise—I think you have to be careful about getting the government involved where kids are concerned. I mean, I lean kind of libertarian anyway, but even so, I would never risk a government agency stepping in to take Noah away from us, you understand? I could never let that happen.” His agitated gaze glanced off of the hallway ceiling, toward the direction of the second floor where his wife and son were. “We can’t even talk if that’s a possibility,” he said.
Brooks shifted in his seat. “What I can assure you, Tom, is that it would never happen through myself or Ms. Philips. We won’t betray your confidence, no matter what you tell us.”
“I guess that’ll have to be good enough because we need help. Susan and I feel very alone in this, and I know better than to search the web looking for other families that might be having similar experiences. I mean, I’m an IT guy, I know they sift for keywords.” Tom finally settled in a stuffed chair, facing the couch. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
“I know where my own concerns begin,” Brooks said. “When we talked on the phone around Christmas last year and you told me about some of the gibberish Noah was saying. I didn’t want to alarm you, but I recognized those words. They’re from a lost language. And back then, he had what? One word in English under his belt? Has there been more of that strange language?”
“Yes. We realized it wasn’t just baby talk. He repeats some of the same phrases. There’s definitely a syntax to it.”
“What else?”
“Sometimes it’s more like singing or chanting. You ever hear Tuvan overtone singing? It’s like that. From a kid who’s barely two. Have you ever heard of that? It shouldn’t even be physically possible, right?”
“I don’t know,” Brooks said. “Have you talked to your pediatrician about it?”
“Only very generally. Not like we’ve given her a demonstration or anything.”
“How is he otherwise? Healthy? Developmentally average?”
“Above average. That’s the other thing. His drawings—which should be mostly scribbling, barely even stick figures at this point—are…way above his age level. They’re kind of disturbing.”
“Violent?” Becca asked.
“No. Just weird. Dark. I think they remind me of stuff I’ve forgotten, I don’t know…those nightmare fragments.”
“Can we see?” Brooks asked.
“Sure. Follow me.”
Tom led them to the kitchen Becca had glimpsed from the entryway. It was clean and neat with new appliances, but the sink tap was wrapped in black duct tape. A crude drawing of a dog and some flowers was tacked to the refrigerator with alphabet magnets. Tom slid a drawer open, clicking the child-lock with his thumb. He removed a sheaf of paper and laid it on the kitchen table. The top sheet depicted a wavy Crayola blue sea with a jagged black mountain rising from it.
“There are a lot of versions of that one,” Tom said. “I keep them in the drawer so he doesn’t get upset.”
“He’s frightened by his own drawings?” Becca asked.
“No, he just gets worked up about them if he sees them.” Tom pointed to the innocuous dog portrait on the fridge. “That’s one of the few we can display. I don’t mind him getting excited about dogs.” He flipped through the stack of drawings on the table, and withdrew one—a finger painting in smeared shades of green, gray, and purple.
For a couple of seconds, Becca couldn’t make sense of it, then Tom rotated the page and the pattern reconciled itself.
She recoiled with a start. A memory of the transformed Darius Marlowe, his face a squirming nest of tentacles flashed in her mind.
Brooks put a hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”
Becca nodded. “What do you see?” she said.
“A squidface, like what Marlowe was when he came back from the other side,” Brooks said.
“Uh-huh.”
Brooks squinted at Becca. “When you saw those reflections of Proctor in the maze, in the house, was he like that?”
“No. I don’t think so. It was just glimpses, like looking through warped glass, but his face looked human. I saw his tattoos.”
“Who’s Proctor?” Tom asked.
Brooks ignored the question.
Becca slid the paper aside with the tip of her finger, revealing the next sheet in the stack. Another crayon drawing, this one a rudimentary arrangement of yellow and purple squares and triangles forming the shape of what might be a house. Becca wondered how much of the oddly aligned geometry had to do with the child’s primitive skill level and how much was an accurate portrayal of how that house might appear to his mind’s eye in a dream. The white space surrounding the structure was flecked with a storm of black dots.
Brooks frowned at the image, held it up for Tom to see, and asked, “Did he say anything about what this is?”
“He calls it ‘the candy house in the snow.’ It’s one of the ones that’s not so disturbing. To me, anyway. But he gets worked up about it. Says it’s full of candies and the candies are full of smoke. I don’t know what that means. Do you?”
“No,” Brooks said. “Did he see it in a dream?”
“We think so. We think most of this comes to him in dreams. We’ll find him drawing first thing in the morning. Sometimes in the middle of the night, in the dark, if he can find the materials. We’ve had to get over worrying that he’ll choke on a crayon in the middle of the night. Now we leave some in his crib with a pad. I’d never admit that to his doctor, but he was keeping us up all night screaming until we tried it.”
Becca thought of the untouched dream journal lying beside her cot in the uninhabitable Wade House. “Tom, when he t
alks about the candies in the house…do you think he could be saying candles?”
“Huh. Maybe.”
“You mind if I take a picture of this one with my phone?” Brooks asked.
“Go ahead.”
Brooks placed the drawing in better light on the kitchen counter, snapped a shot, and tucked his phone back into the breast pocket of his overcoat. He nodded at the black duct-taped sink tap. “You have a leak?”
“No, we took all the mirrors down. Even the bathroom medicine chest doors. We were seeing things in them when Noah was singing. The faucet was chrome and one time when we were eating dinner, Noah started singing and I swear, I saw something circle the room from the faucet to the toaster to the oven door. I know how it sounds, but Susan saw it too. She screamed. Now, I won’t even use a knife when he’s in the room. I’m afraid of what I’ll see in the blade.”
“What have you seen?”
“It’s hard to describe. Nothing you could name really, nothing you could identify, just gross anatomy, like…veiny membranes and rills of tissue. A web of a hundred eyes like a kaleidoscope, or a fractal made of—”
“Tentacles,” Becca said.
Tom’s eyes widened. “Yeah. At first I thought I was hallucinating from sleep deprivation. You know, new baby, weird hours. But Susan saw the same things.” Tom blew out a breath through pursed lips, his shoulders heaving. He looked on the verge of a breakdown. Then he blinked and ran his hand over his bristly, balding head again. “I haven’t been able to talk to anybody about it. This is the first time.”
Becca touched his elbow. “It’s okay. You’re not crazy, the world is. Most of the time we can filter it out, but it’s a lot weirder than anyone knows.”
“I don’t want weird,” Tom said. “I want my son to have a normal life.”
A crash rumbled through the ceiling from the second floor, followed by a keening cry of alarm. Tom dashed for the stairs with Brooks and Becca fast at his heels.
At the top of the narrow staircase, unable to see past the men, Becca heard splashing water and a child’s screams cutting through terrified adult voices. “What happened, what happened, what happened?” Tom, babbling, leaving no space for his wife to answer, and her moaning, “No, no, nononoooo.”
Brooks pushed past Tom, and Becca spilled into the upstairs hallway. He knelt in the bathroom doorframe, taking something from Susan, something wrapped in a towel, and then Becca saw small, pale legs poking out of the bundle and knew it was Noah. At first, Susan looked reluctant to hand the boy over, but Brooks was looking her in the eye, saying something Becca couldn’t hear over the child’s shrieks, reassuring her, radiating calm and control. There was blood on the towel, blood on the tiles.
Brooks hurried down the hall and placed the bundle on the carpet of the boy’s bedroom. “Bandages!” he yelled over his shoulder, over Noah’s screams, and Becca suddenly realized that those screams had a shape. They weren’t the garbled wailing she’d taken them for at first. Noah, like his parents, was repeating the same thing over and over in an endless loop: R’LYEEH! R’LYEEH! R’LYEEEEH!
Tom fumbled with his phone. Susan, on hands and knees in the red water and suds, rummaged through the cabinet under the bathroom sink. She tossed bottles of cleaning fluids, a bag of cotton balls, and a box of tampons away from the puddles, and finding the first aid kit thrust it at Becca in the doorway. Becca ran it to the bedroom, fell to her knees beside Brooks, and undid the latches on the box. She tore open a package of gauze pads and shoved them at Brooks, who was holding the child’s bleeding hand while struggling to keep the rest of him from thrashing and squirming away.
“Peroxide,” Brooks said, holding the boy’s hand up.
Becca found a small brown bottle in the kit, unscrewed the cap with shaking fingers, and splashed some on the tiny, gashed palm. Pink foam bubbled up like a craft volcano and Noah gave out a wail of pure, meaningless pain. Brooks pressed a gauze pad against the wound, and wrapped it.
From the hallway, the parents’ frantic voices ricocheted off the tight walls, an argument about calling 911 or taking Noah to the ER. Susan darted into the bedroom and swept her baby off the floor, holding him tight to her chest, patting him and backing away from Brooks into a corner behind the crib. She cooed in Noah’s ear until his screams lost voice and became great, rasping breaths.
Tom appeared in the doorway, still holding the phone, looking anxious and useless. “How bad is it? Do we need to take him to the hospital? I haven’t called.”
Brooks had slipped out of his coat at the height of the mayhem. His arms and blue Oxford shirt were smeared with blood. He nodded. “Let him calm down, maybe give him some Tylenol, then yeah, you should take him in.”
“It happened so fast,” Susan said. “So fast.”
“What happened?” Becca asked her.
“We use bubbles,” Susan said. “Lots of bubbles.”
“So the water isn’t clear,” Tom said. “Like any kid, he likes bubbles, but we also use them to cover the water, so there aren’t any reflections.”
“He made the mountain again,” Susan said with a shudder.
“What mountain?” Brooks asked.
“He likes to gather the bubbles into an island and make a mountain,” Tom said. “It’s another thing he gets excited about. We keep bath time short.”
“R’lyeh,” Susan said. “That’s what he calls the bubble island, R’lyeh.”
Tom shushed her, knitting his eyebrows together and nodding toward Noah. Becca held her breath, expecting the boy to respond to the word with another fit. But his head remained on his mother’s shoulder, his back rising and falling slowly. The stress appeared to have put him to sleep.
“So he made the mountain,” Tom said. “How did he cut himself?”
Susan’s jaw worked, but at first no words came out. When they did, they came with tears. “I only looked away for a minute, Tommy. I was distracted by who was downstairs. The voices were agitating him. I don’t know how he found it.”
“Found what?”
“One of my razors,” Susan said. “He cut his hand on one of my razors. He didn’t even scream until I got him out of the bath. I turned around and the bubble mountain was red and he was painting on the bathtub wall…painting with his own blood.” Her breath was short and fast now, on the verge of hyperventilating. Becca worried Noah would sense it and wake up. Brooks must have thought the same thing. He patted the air between them in a keep calm gesture.
“It’s okay,” Brooks said. “He’s okay.” He made eye contact with Becca and shot a glance down the hallway. She followed him out of the room, leaving the family alone.
In the bathroom, Becca stepped around the puddles on the floor, looked at the exposed shelves of the medicine cabinet, and ended up staring at the tiled wall above the soapy pink water in the tub.
“Goddamn,” Brooks said. He drew his phone from his pocket and snapped a picture, then toggled the drain switch with the heel of his hand. The water gurgled down the drain, leaving a scummy residue in its wake.
The white tiles were emblazoned with a primitive crimson finger painting, a variation on one they had first seen in the kitchen: a bulbous head formed of a smeared palm print with angles that could have been bat wings curving off to the sides, and a beard of long, wavy finger trails running down toward the water.
Chapter 14
“What’s R’lyeh?” Becca asked Brooks. They had seen the Petries to the emergency room and were headed north again on 495. “Where have I heard that word before?”
“It’s an island,” Brooks said. “A sunken island in the South Pacific. We have people on staff who’ve made entire careers out of studying its legends and lore, and the little bit of documented science they’ve pieced together from times when it made an appearance.”
“Made an appearance? You mean in history?”
“No, I mean times when it surfaced. They don’t know what made it sink, but the legends say it’s older than the moon, so maybe the moon
getting pulled into our orbit had something to do with it. We captured a Japanese submarine during World War II that was studying it up close. That’s still classified, so you didn’t hear it from me. Anyway, there have been times when the mountain peak of the island has risen above the waves. There’s a city on that mountain, and a temple of slanting stones that make no sense.”
“Sounds like the whole thing doesn’t make sense.”
“I mean it defies standard physics.”
“Well sure, a sunken island rising from the bottom of the ocean?”
“It’s like the Wade House. The geometry of the temple at the peak of R’lyeh is utterly fucked. The few expeditions that have landed there have become hopelessly disoriented. They can’t tell if a stone slab is lying flat on the ground or tilted at an angle. Think about it. You’re a climber. Imagine not being able to tell how gravity works in relation to a structure when you’re looking for somewhere to hook a rope, or find a foothold. Also, the times when the island has risen coincided with sensitive people around the world having dreams about the high priest of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu.”
Becca felt a chill spread down her spine from the crawling flesh of her scalp. That was a name she had heard in whispers as a child, a name she still associated with the darkest secrets of her grandmother’s house. “Do you think it’s risen again? SPECTRA must monitor it, right? Do you think Noah is tuned into those dreams?”
“That makes the most sense, but I don’t know. SPECTRA does monitor it. They watch it like they watch for signs of nuclear weapon use. There are sensors in place looking for submarine geologic activity, satellites devoted to the exact coordinates in the Pacific where it has surfaced before, but from what I hear they haven’t been able to find it in years.”
Becca chuckled mirthlessly.
“What?”
“They should have hired my grandmother when she was alive.”
Brooks looked at her. “Are you sure they didn’t?”
Becca’s mouth fell open. “Do you know something about that?”
Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Page 15