Red Equinox

by Douglas Wynne

  As the shackles of sleep fell away, he moved to the bathroom, emptied his bladder, and brushed his teeth without losing sight of the number. He took a handful of water from the tap in his cupped hand, rinsed his mouth, and met his own eyes in the dusty mirror. He smiled at his reflection. There had been a mirror in the dream, and a promise.

  Less than ten minutes later, dressed in jeans, a brown suede jacket, and a scarf, he walked out of the front doors of Fariborz Maseeh Hall and trotted down the steps. The cold morning air invigorated him as it stung his cheeks. He dug his hands into his pockets, turned right past the chapel, and stepped onto Mass Ave.

  The street bustled with the usual book-laden students and neon-clad joggers amid the buses, bikes, and cars. A quarter of a mile on, he realized that the bank of the Charles River across the street was congested with a crowd of onlookers, blue lights flashing in the gaps between them as they milled around near the new tide line. The Mass Ave Bridge wasn’t as high above the river as it had once been. What had never been a bridge worthy of a suicide attempt was now too low to allow more than the passage of kayaks underneath. And yet, as he drew nearer, it became apparent that someone had been drowned. Maybe the victim had capsized a small boat, an inexperienced operator in a rental.

  The flashers turned out to be an EMT truck, beyond which a police boat was bobbing on the gray water, twenty yards out. The bridge wasn’t closed; and, while there were a couple of officers in police windbreakers out on the footpath with walkie-talkies, traffic was moving to the Back Bay side, albeit sluggishly, as drivers strained to catch a glimpse of the tragedy. Darius succumbed to the same curiosity. He watched for a break in traffic and jogged across the street to the back of the crowd, where bystanders were searching their phones and making speculative chit-chat with strangers. One man had a young girl seated upon his shoulders, her cheeks rosy beneath a yellow knit hat. Darius sidled through the crowd until he had a better view of the boat.

  It wasn’t just morbid fascination drawing him closer. He felt a compelling sense that whatever had happened here was linked to his dream, that there was personal significance in the tragedy, and that, if he were observant enough, providence would put him in the right place at the right time to interpret it. This sense had been growing in his waking life over the past month, a feeling that not only were his dreams a conduit for messages from the master, but that even everyday reality had taken on a dreamlike quality rife with coded symbolism and cabalistic significance. Perhaps the patterns had always been there, but he’d been too distracted and unfocused to see them. Perhaps the initiation he was undergoing each night had removed a filter and attuned his consciousness to the rich, synchronistic alphanumeric soup that all modern people waded through without the ability to read it. Or maybe he had been set on a path that consistently put him in the right place at the right time to see it.

  Here was another confirmation: the police boat drifted sideways in the water at his approach, granting him a clear view of a large white 23 at the back of the hull. He thrilled at the sight. That number was a key to a door that he would arrive at one day. It had been appearing to him daily, hinting at some titanic truth, teasing like a harlot, flashing like a beacon, leading him on toward revelation.

  Darius took a pocket-sized marble notebook from his jacket and flipped it open to a clean page. With a pen plucked from his jeans he scribbled the latest entry: “9/17 Police boat trolling for body near Mass Ave Bridge—23.”

  A pair of scuba divers broke the surface with an unmasked face between them; a doughy white visage with weedy black curls clinging to the forehead. The crowd gasped almost in unison at the sight, and those at the back pressed forward. The man with the little girl finally seemed to awaken to the fact of what he was doing. Darius saw him reach up to cover her eyes with his cupped hand as he turned and headed back toward the street.

  Darius moved in closer, stepping into the gaps left by those with weak stomachs and minds. He didn’t think he recognized the drowned man, but it was hard to be certain from this distance. The divers were passing the body to a burly officer perched on a diving platform at the stern of the vessel, and now Darius could see that the corpse was wearing an unusual accessory: a bicycle security chain coated in translucent red vinyl wrapped and locked around his knees.

  He lingered until his intuition told him there would be no more revelations here. It was time to get ahead of the dispersing crowd if he wanted to cross the bridge mostly unaccompanied.

  Turning his back on the scene, he felt a thrill of empowerment, an inarticulate knowing that this was somehow for him, a performance for an audience of one. The feeling grew with each step, each meter, as he passed the broad-brushed markings on the sidewalk. 50 SMOOTS. The wind picked up on the open water, and his scarf trilled against his ear. 100 SMOOTS. A cloud of starlings burst from a tree on the far bank of the river and wheeled through the sky, a secret alphabet written against the clouds in the geometry of their ink-black choreography. This too, was meant to speak to him in a language he teetered on the brink of deciphering.

  The hairs on his arms pricked up beneath his jacket sleeves. The sense of power and portent swelled with each step he took. In the middle of the bridge, he found confirmation. At the 182.2 mark he came to the place where the original pranksters (and every freshman who had come after and preserved their markings) had set down not a number, but a slogan, “HALFWAY TO HELL” with an arrow pointing back toward MIT.

  He stood on the letters and looked away from the college, away from the police vehicles and the dispersing crowd. He gazed across the choppy water toward Back Bay and Kenmore Square, toward the neon Citgo pyramid near Fenway Park, and ran his fingers along the underside of the pale green metal railing until they found something stuck there: a metal object in a wad of gum. He peeled the object free and folded it into his palm. He had lingered only for a moment, and now, walking on toward the other bank, he looked down at the treasure in his palm. It was a key on a ring with a diamond shaped tag inlaid with the name and unit number of his destination:

  FENWAY

  TOWERS

  72

  Darius Marlowe reached the Back Bay side of Mass Ave with a spring in his step.

  Chapter 6

  Becca had last seen the dog she’d begun thinking of as “Django” in a tunnel beneath an abandoned textile factory in Cambridge. Today she was going back for him. The factory was a favorite site for her little band of urbex friends, and she had already milked it for most of the decent shots she was likely to get, but she brought her camera anyway, because she thought, you never know. What she didn’t bring was a partner. In fact, she didn’t even tell Rafael she was going back to the mill. Reckless? Sure, but he was stubborn about safety protocols and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She figured there was no point in telling him if she didn’t want an argument and an uninvited escort.

  The dog had come within arm’s reach on her last visit, but he was skittish. She didn’t know how she knew it, but she felt sure that if he scented or heard anyone other than her, he wouldn’t allow himself to be seen at all…if he was still haunting the place. So she went alone.

  The mill was a huddle of loosely connected ruins in red brick beside the river. Twin stacks that hadn’t belched smoke in decades loomed over a rusting water tank atop the main structure, above grids of shattered windows. Most of the graffiti was old and faded, except for the metallic paint, which caught enough light even on an overcast day like today to render well in photos. The weeds were prolific, and Becca had used them to great effect in infrared sets; but today they presented nothing she hadn’t captured already. She kept her camera in her bag as she ducked under the barbed wire and made her way along the well-trodden paths to her favored entrance: a brick archway before which lay a rotting wooden door.

  Here were long rooms that still housed moldering spools of green and blue thread piled high like mounds of plague-ravaged corpses, and rows of rusting machines, their rollers clogged with crumbling asbestos
tiles. The long halls were illuminated from collapsed ceilings. Passing through them on her way to the deeper, darker chambers, Becca tuned her ears to the flutter and chirp of birds nesting atop unmoored pillars and in the corners of roofless brick walls.

  Last time, she’d seen the dog on one of the sublevels, in a utility tunnel that connected the main factory to an outbuilding. Eventually she would make her way down there by the light of her headlamp. For now, she paused only to put on her trusty leather work gloves. Every surface in a place like this was rife with tetanus.

  She walked over tangled branches and under slopes of collapsing corrugated metal, her Doc Martens crunching on broken glass and chalky tile shards. Her breathing deepened and slowed with each step. There had always been something soothing to her about decaying places, something peaceful in their absolute abandonment. These failed structures existed in a realm beyond effort and ambition, beyond maintenance and manicure. In contrast, the self-conscious facades of high-rent shops on Newbury Street where she worked in the gallery often threatened to suffocate her with their pretense that life could be beautified and preserved indefinitely, that order and tidiness were some kind of natural state, and that the chaotic and rustic, the rough edges of art, were only beautiful by contrast to the austere and immaculate and could only be acknowledged when safely contained within the protective foursquare boundary of a frame.

  She sought out the ruins of her city because they seemed to speak a plain truth: that all things aged and transformed and withered and died, and that all effort and industry, however dazzling, would have its day in the sun and then fade. In this she found peace because it aligned with her own sense that in the long run the only precious things might be captured frozen moments in a chain of continual change.

  Nina, her therapist, had asked her recently if she thought it was odd for a person who suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder to make a hobby of delving into the dark bowels of the city, places where not even electric light continued to flow. And Becca supposed there was some irony there. But she’d never been comfortable with painting over rot. Better to face it. Better to accept it, maybe even to revel in it and embrace what was hardest for her. Embrace the darkness and decay, and find beauty in them.

  She had tried denial for a while in her teens, but it hadn’t worked out long term. Taking the headlamp from her bag and slipping it over her crown, she remembered the November day in her junior year when a UPS truck had dropped a package addressed to her on the front steps of the house on Crane Street. Catherine had been excited to watch her open it, had told her as she ran a pair of scissors across the packing tape that it would hopefully take some of the misery out of her mornings in the darker half of the year, and make it easier for her to stop missing the bus.

  “What is it, a clock?” Becca had asked, knowing already that it wasn’t as she lifted the heavy object from the box. Styrofoam peanuts rained down from what looked like an opaque plastic half-moon mounted on a black base trailing a power cord.

  “It’s a dawn simulator,” Catherine explained. “Not that different from an alarm clock, but it comes on gradually and fills the room with full-spectrum light. It’s supposed to prime your pineal gland before your other alarm goes off.”

  Becca turned the heavy object over in her hands, skeptically. A plastic sunrise—weird. But later, standing in her room beside her Gran with the curtains drawn and watching the light slowly growing in the frosted dome, she felt a little thrill of hope; not because she believed the gadget would make much difference in her daily life, but because Catherine had thought of it, had pulled her head out of dusty tomes long enough to get on the internet and find something that might help, and had cared enough about her struggle to buy it for her.

  “Yehi Aur!” Catherine proclaimed, her fingers splayed toward the corners of the room where the shadows were shrinking.

  “Huh?”

  The old woman looked askance at her, an eyebrow raised and a sly grin wrinkling the corners of her mouth. “Let there be light, dear. It’s Hebrew.”

  The dawn simulator had helped a little in finishing high school, but in college she’d never taken it out of its box and reverted to oversleeping. That was when she’d started experimenting with reveling in her condition—seeking out dark places in her city and in her art, her only remaining crutches the vitamin D supplements and SSRI prescriptions, because without those she’d likely cut her wrists in the bathtub sometime in January.

  She had also discovered along the way that it was easier to get out of bed when she had a goal. And today the goal was finding Django. She had already named him. Hadn’t earned his trust yet, and certainly hadn’t succeeded in rescuing him, but had named him, after one of her favorite guitarists, Django Reinhardt.

  On the previous occasions, when she’d caught sight of the dog, she had been wary of spooking him with the camera. Shooting him with a flash was out of the question, but she had managed to get one decent photo. He appeared to have some German shepherd traits, probably mixed with smaller breeds.

  She took a piece of dog biscuit from the front pocket of her cargo pants and ducked under a fallen steel girder, treading softly. The only urine stains on the walls were at human height and appeared dry. She’d seen no dog shit and couldn’t imagine what he ate to survive. He was a skinny thing, a real bag of bones, judging by the few glimpses and one photo she had to go on.

  She had entered a long, narrow room with the ceiling mostly intact. Decrepit mechanical looms hulked in the shadows, making an obstacle course of the place. When she’d first entered the room, a few stray shafts of sunlight had cut the air and glanced off of the machinery, highlighting random bits of crusty white corrosion. But now clouds had overtaken the sun again, and the light had faded, casting the entire space into murky, indistinct gloom.

  She heard a rustling from one of the corners, and turned her head to pinpoint the origin. Knowing that it could very well be a rat or a raccoon, or even a savage fisher cat, she crept closer, the dog biscuit trembling slightly between her gloved fingers.

  She smelled the animal before she saw it—a pungent concoction of swamp water and breath that could only come from rotting teeth and a stomach eating itself from hunger. Knowing that no small wild animal she’d ever encountered had smelled so desperately canine, she was emboldened, and, stepping around a wide pillar, she caught sight of him, nose to a pile of rubble, mangy black and tan fur poking at odd angles between bald spots where he’d probably licked himself raw from flea infestations. One ear was split at the tip (probably from a fight), and she shuddered to think of how thin he’d look if not for the long fur.

  She wished for clean water to offer him and regretted not bringing wet dog food. Even the cookie might be too much for him to digest in his emaciated state, and she had to stifle a hitching sob, had to catch and suppress it in her breast at the sight of the poor thing. He scratched and pawed at the rubble until he succeeded in unearthing a crumbled shred of dirty tin foil left behind by some vagabond or junkie. Whatever juices the treasure had once contained, their residue was surely rank by now, and she had to resist the urge to shout a command at him to drop it, as if he were already her own and would listen rather than flee.

  Becca crushed the biscuit in her hand and watched the dog tear the foil with a shake of his muzzle. He lapped at the scrap, and she hoped it wasn’t coated with narcotics that had been boiled over a garbage fire.

  Dropping the foil, the dog snuffled along the dirty concrete floor for a few inches, then catching either Becca’s scent or that of her offering, he looked up and locked eyes with her. His fur rose in a ridge along his spine and his tail stiffened, but his ears remained cocked forward.

  She held her palm out, displaying the crushed cookie, and blew a breath down her arm to carry the taste of it to him.

  He took a tentative step forward, lowering his head between his shoulder blades, but stopped a good yard away from her, uncertain.

  “Hey, little guy. You’re a boy, right? Y
ou want a cookie?”

  Ravenous as he was, he bided his time, waited for her next move.

  Sensing that a dance had begun between them, Becca tossed a piece of the biscuit. It rolled through the dust and landed a foot from the dog’s nose.

  Now it was she who waited.

  The dog seized the morsel and retreated to his original position where he chewed it with a jerky crunching and swallowed it down.

  “Django,” she cooed, trying the name out for the both of them. She liked the way it sounded. He took a tentative step toward her. She held her hand out. But he wasn’t quite ready to eat from it yet.

  A new smell reached her nose now, overpowering the funk of the dog, an aroma of earth and fire. It took her a moment to identify it, but then it came to her: burning sage, and with it a voice, a muted baritone echoing through the labyrinth of brick and metal and broken glass. They weren’t alone, and damn it, whoever he was, he was going to scare the dog off before she could finish earning his trust.

  The voice grew louder—it sounded like a chant, a droning litany, and she started to think it might be more than one person. Her mind’s eye conjured a fleeting vision of robed ritualists walking in a procession through the derelict mill, carrying candles and swinging censers on chains. But then, despite the dirge-like rendition, she recognized the melody and her tense muscles relaxed. It was a song, “Dirty Water,” by the Standells.

  Becca stood frozen, peering through a narrow doorway into the next room, where a jungle of hanging swathes of moth-eaten cloth obstructed her view of the singer. When she turned her gaze back on the cracked floor at her feet, the dog was gone.

  “Fuck.” She retraced her steps, checking between every pillar and piece of machinery but finding no trace of the poor mutt. The singing increased in volume behind her, and now, as it moved into the room she was in, she could tell that it was a solitary voice, gravelly and tuneless. She wheeled around, prepared to give the intruder a piece of her mind, but as she drew the breath to launch a tirade, his sheer outlandish bulk silenced her.