“Give me space!” he shouted. “Get the damn dog out of the way!”
Luke wrapped his arms around Django and dragged him back from his frantic efforts to lick Becca’s face.
“If you can reach the walkie without letting go of him, call for backup. Paramedic. Say paramedic.”
“Philips to base. Do you copy?”
He almost forgot to release the PTT button. When he did, the walkie let out a squeal that modulated and stuttered like a fax machine getting raped by some alien intelligence. He tried again, but even with the button depressed this time, the exotic interference garbled on.
“It’s not working.” He squeezed the button and yelled over the noise, “Paramedic! We need a paramedic in the cellar!”
Brooks remained vaguely aware of Luke’s struggles with the dog and the radio, but he shoved these distractions aside, focused on his counting, on keeping the compressions steady and rhythmic.
Bubbles stirred the surface of the pool again, gently at first, then roiling to a boil.
“Something’s coming,” Luke said.
“I know. Get my gun.”
Luke let go of the dog and grabbed the gun. Django, in guardian mode, lunged at the water’s edge and let loose a barrage of aggressive barks.
“Is there a safety?” Luke asked, frantic.
“It’s off.”
The boiling water cast a web of violet light across the ceiling.
Becca’s chest heaved with a ragged breath and she coughed out a spray of brackish water. Her eyes, suddenly open, staring wide and wild past Brooks, told him all he needed to know. Whatever had followed her out of the labyrinth was rising from the water behind him.
Luke raised the gun in his trembling interlaced hands.
Brooks turned to face the pool.
A cloud of iridescent spheres hovered over the water, crackling with flitting blue flames. His mind struggled to resolve the thing into some recognizable pattern and failed after touching on every state of matter and rejecting them all. The only irrefutable characteristic was the aura of baleful intelligence the spheres radiated, permeating his consciousness and eroding his courage. He knew, in the same way that Django—retreating in a looping trail of urine—knew that he was in the presence of a force against which he stood no chance.
A shot thundered from the gun and one of the spheres flickered. Plaster flurried from the ceiling onto the black water. Brooks looked at Luke. “That’s useless,” he said. He scanned the workbenches and his gaze fixed on a shelf where glass bottles of lamp oil were arranged in neat rows. Brooks shuffled behind Becca, seized her under her arms, and dragged her away from the water. “Get a bottle of oil,” he called to Luke. “And rags if you can find some. Over there!”
Luke didn’t waste any time asking why. He ran for the bench. As the spheres rose toward the ceiling, Becca brought her hand to her chest and touched the scarab through her shirt. Brooks had taken note of the chain right away before starting CPR on her. She slipped it out and examined the gem in the beetle’s pincers. Was it starting to glow, or only reflecting the strange light of the spheres? Brooks couldn’t tell.
Luke returned with a moth-eaten blanket and a bottle of oil. Brooks took the bottle and screwed the cap off. He doused the blanket, splashing oil over the floor, and filling the room with bitter fumes that at least had the benefit of temporarily overpowering the swamp stench wafting off of their clothes.
“You got a light?” Brooks asked. “We need to keep it from escaping the house. Fire at the mouth of the tunnel might do it.”
Luke dug in his jacket pocket and produced a disposable lighter.
Becca tried to speak but was seized by a coughing fit. When it passed, she said, “What’s down the tunnel?”
“It leads to the stone circle in the woods,” Brooks said.
“Let it go,” she said. “Let the thing go there.”
“Why?”
“It’s a cage…made to contain it. So Wade could summon and constrain them…commune with them.”
“How do you know that?” Luke asked.
“A bird told me,” she said. “Gate and cage. Hanson opened the gate. Now drive it into the cage.”
Brooks seized Luke’s shoulder. “The bells,” he said. “That’s what they’re for. To drive what he summoned away from the pool and down the tunnel. Can you do it?”
* * *
Luke ran for the ropes, slowing as he neared the pool and the nebula rotating in the air above it. He mentally ran through the variations on the symphony, the chord inversions he had experimented with over the years, and tried to correlate them to the scale he had sounded on the iron bells. His hairline prickled with sweat. Then it came to him. Harmony. He would strike a triad of the purest harmony available to him, something that vibrated right by the physics of this world, something that just might antagonize an entity from the other.
Gathering three ropes in his hands, he stepped back and threw his weight against the bells.
The chord rolled over the water and resounded in the domed ceiling. The result was immediately visible. The caged light bulbs exploded in a shower of glass and sparks. The cloud of spheres distorted into jagged shards of blazing plasma, then contracted like a lanced worm and shot away from the pool, coagulating again before gliding through the great stone arch and vanishing down the black throat of the tunnel.
With the eldritch light of Yog Sothoth banished from the chamber, darkness fell around them, almost complete, but for a dim red glow slowly blooming to a ruby blaze at Becca’s heart.
The Fire of Cairo had awakened.
Chapter 18
Becca stood and tugged off her soaking wet jacket. Her boots were heavy and her head ached, but she managed to take a few steps, holding her hand out to ward off the support Brooks offered. Django licked her fingers as she looked around and got her bearings. She took a few swaying steps toward the tunnel from which the last remnants of sickly violet light flickered.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Brooks said. “Where are you going?”
“After it,” she said.
He lit his flashlight and trained it on the tunnel mouth. A faint rumble echoed from the yawning black hole. “We don’t even know what that was. Just be glad you’re alive and let’s get out of here.”
“It’s what escaped when Hanson opened the portal,” Becca said. “Yog Sothoth.”
“Yog Sothoth,” Luke whispered in awe.
“What?” Brooks said.
“It’s the only one that needs to escape. It can manifest the other gods as emanations.”
Becca’s lower lip was already shivering in the drafty air. “I might be able to stop it,” she said. “Like last time. The scarab is stirring.”
Luke stared at the red glow through her shirt. “Catherine’s beetle?” he said.
Becca nodded. “I think proximity to the Great Old Ones wakes it. It was made to banish them. I have to try.”
Brooks checked his gun, ejecting the magazine and slotting it back into the grip. “I’m coming with you. But not that way. Luke and I scouted it out. There’s no way out at the end of the tunnel. Not for humans, anyway. And you don’t want to be trapped in the circle with that thing. We’ll go above ground. You say it’s a trap, right? A cage? It should hold it at least until we get there. Luke, you man the bells in case it tries to retreat. Don’t let it.”
“Okay. Can I borrow your flashlight?” Brooks handed it over and Luke hurried to the workshop in the corner, the light bobbing ahead of him. He returned with another wool blanket, wrapped it around Becca’s shoulders and kissed her temple before she could resist. “You be careful, baby girl.”
“You too.” She looked at him, wanting to say more, but unable to find the words, unsure of where to even begin. His fear was written all over his face. She squeezed his fingers, and let Brooks help her up the stairs.
* * *
The house looked as normal as it ever did; the only odd angles on display were the ones inherent to the architect
ure. Rooms, doorways, and halls were all where they belonged with no double-exposure overlap from the other realm. They detoured through their respective rooms, dripping on the wood floors and frantically rummaging for dry clothes before reconvening in the kitchen and pushing through the back door into the cold. On the veranda, Brooks tried the walkie-talkie again.
“Brooks to base, do you read? Over.”
“Northrup here. What the fuck’s going on, Brooks?”
“Something got out,” Brooks said. “Yog Sothoth. We lost radio contact to interference. Luke drove it down the tunnel with bells. He’s still in the house. I’m going with Becca to the stone circle where the tunnel lets out. She’s gonna try to destroy it with the scarab. I’ve got her back. Over.”
There was a moment of silence. Brooks wondered if the radio had failed. Then static and Northrup’s reply: “Wait. Give me a minute to think. You need backup. Don’t rush in. Over.”
“I don’t know how much time we have,” Brooks said.
The radio whistled with feedback. “Our instruments, the readings are all over the place,” Northrup said. “Nothing is stable. The house, the woods… The book breakers say the stone circle was never meant to constrain Yog Sothoth. It may not hold. Over.”
“That’s what Luke said. I advise setting up a perimeter around the house and woods from the distance of a decent blast radius. Evacuate the hut and try to contain anything that comes out of the house or the woods if we fail. Over.”
“On it. Good luck, Jason. Over and out.”
* * *
Above the treetops, a shaft of darkness pierced the gray afternoon sky, like the negative image of a high-powered floodlight. Frozen grass crunched under Becca’s soggy boots. She pulled the blanket her father had given her tight around her shoulders, a poor substitute for the saturated jacket she’d abandoned. Her shoulder bag swung at her side, the damp canvas hardening as it iced. She had done what she could to dry her hair with a towel before leaving the house, but it was still freezing.
Brooks walked with a mild limp, the sutured gash on his face an angry red against his pale, freckled skin.
“You sure you’re up for this?” Becca asked.
He laughed in spite of his evident pain and misery. “Me? Am I up for it, asks the girl I just resuscitated? You’re something else, Philips.”
“Well, you have taken some pretty good beatings lately.”
“I’m fine. And hey, this only sucks so bad because we’re damp.” He looked at his watch. “Forty-two degrees in January. Could be worse.”
“Life, the universe, and everything,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” She opened the frozen flap of her bag and dug out a piece of beef jerky for Django. The dog eagerly accepted the treat, scoffing it down as they approached the woods.
“A vegetarian carrying jerky?”
“Raf gave him a taste for it.”
“Oh…sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind being reminded of him.”
Brooks nudged her with his elbow. “You ever sneak a little nibble of that stuff when you’re lost in a trans-dimensional maze?”
Becca shoved him back and laughed. “Fuck off.” She picked through the bag and took out the drone remote. “What do you think, toast?”
“Try it.”
“Mark said he used it for marine biology. Said it was waterproof. But unless they built it for Navy SEALS…” She thumbed the power switch. To her surprise, the display lit, accompanied by the sound of the dragonfly buzzing in her bag. “Well I’ll be damned. The government can do that, but they can’t get a web site to work.”
She switched the remote off and put it back in the bag. “Think they’ll let me keep it if we survive this?”
Brooks shrugged. “Maybe you lost it in the maze.”
They had come to the edge of the woods. A low mist rolled between the trees, carrying another wave of the foul odor they’d encountered at the pool. The lowering sun burned through the haze, crowning the pine spires with orange fire. Becca remembered the path she had taken to the stone circle, but even if she didn’t, retracing it now would have been easy given the subsonic waves pulsing through the ground from their destination, setting the dead leaves trembling and small animals fleeing in panic. Django paced in circles, put his snout to the ground, and pawed at his ears, whining.
“I should’ve left him in the basement with Luke,” Becca said. “I don’t think he’ll come any further.” She dropped to one knee and stroked Django’s fur. “You can go, boy. It’s okay, go.” She pointed up the rise toward the house. “Go on. I’ll be right back.”
Django cocked his head and whimpered, then licked Becca’s face and took a few tentative retreating steps. He kept looking back to see if she was coming, prancing in nervous circles. At last, he trotted back toward the house. She hoped he would go straight to Base Camp where someone would let him in and look after him.
When she turned around, Brooks was holding a small gun by the barrel, offering the grip to her. His main sidearm was still holstered at his hip. This must have been a backup he kept concealed somewhere.
“Take it,” he said. “I doubt it’ll do you much good, but I’ll feel better knowing you have it.”
Becca took the gun and examined it. “Will it fire after taking a swim?”
“Try it.”
She aimed at a tree and squeezed the trigger. The report was loud, but not as loud as the shot Brooks had fired in the stone chamber at the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. She thought she saw the place where the bullet bored into the oak, chipping the bark, but couldn’t be sure. She thumbed the safety on and wedged the pistol into her jeans pocket where the protruding handgrip was concealed by the blanket she wore around her shoulders like a poncho, feeling like a child playing gunslinger.
A little farther up the trail, they came to a place where the woods were flooded with brackish water laced with ashy silt. At first they tried to find places where the ground humped above the flood, or thick tree roots and rocks to enable a zigzagging course toward the shaft of blackness smudged in the sky, but the effort was futile, and soon they were soaked up to their shins, shivering harder than before.
The low pulse droned through the water, and now, as they approached the standing stones, a peal of metallic harmonics sliced the air and rang painfully in their ears. Becca noticed that even her vision was distorted by the vibrations, but now she could see the granite slabs between the trees. She cut toward them with Brooks keeping pace until they were back on the trail they’d abandoned for the last few yards, the megalithic ring towering before them in the orange limned indigo sky—black silhouettes encircling a morphing storm of flesh and fire.
A hemisphere of pale green energy arched over the stones, constraining the entity for now. Each time one of the spheres collided with the boundary, the light crackled and flared, sending the errant bubble spinning back toward the clustered mass at the center.
The stone grate in the ground at the center of the circle had been shattered by the god’s eruption from the tunnel. Giant shards of rock lay scattered among the standing slabs, partially submerged in the tide of black water bubbling out of the hole.
Becca whirled on Brooks in alarm. “If the tunnel is flooded from the pool, then the bells…Luke.”
Brooks opened his mouth to say something reassuring about how Luke would have fled the basement when the water started rising, but before he could steel his mind to speak against the painful cacophony radiating from the circle, a pair of cyclones rose from the wreckage of the grate, summoned by the languid touch of drooping tendrils of violet flame. Becca took a step backward, tugging at Brooks’ wrist. Whatever the cyclones were, if that storm of malign intelligence at the center of the circle was calling them up, they couldn’t be good.
Her stomach clenched instinctively just a second before the twisters burst. The inky splash congealed and she could make out the shapes of the glistening eels that had formed it. They ex
ploded outward in a rain of black scraps, splattering against the standing stones or burning on contact with the green energy field, leaving the unveiled forms of two humans and two monsters where the cyclones had been.
Shabat Cycloth cradled the pale, naked form of Richard Hanson, if that was even his name. Maybe he had received a new name from his initiators now that he had been baptized on the threshold of their world, dipped in their dimension and returned to the terrestrial. His skin looked raw, his eyes aflame with an order of madness so pure it demanded that the world conform to its warped parameters. The dark goddess deposited him gently on the ground where he uncoiled from the fetal position and revealed the sole object curled in his fist—Reverend Proctor’s silver dagger.
Her consort, Lung Crawthok, clenched a soaking wet Luke Philips in the cage of claws that ran the length of the monster’s armored underside. Its stingray tail undulated between muscled humanoid legs and its eyes blazed—green stars piercing the dusk. The razor sharp hook of the harpoon it brandished in its right hand was poised at its captive’s temple.
Becca moaned at the sight.
“What do they want, Hanson?” Brooks called across the circle.
Hanson laughed. Despite his nakedness, the cold and damp didn’t seem to bother him. His pale skin was shot through with dark veins and his face was stubbled with a beard of writhing maggot-like nodes. Or were they nascent tentacles just starting to bud? A pustule popped with a bloody spray and sprouted another as he stalked to the perimeter of the circle, fingering the baroque pommel of the dagger.
“What they always want,” Hanson said. “Passage. Dominion.”
Brooks raised his gun. Becca wondered if bullets could pass through the energy dome constraining the creatures.
“And they’ll get it,” Hanson said. “No matter what you do.” He gazed upward. “This won’t hold for long.”
Black January: A SPECTRA Files Novel Page 20