Red Equinox

by Douglas Wynne

  Action called, but it wasn’t Darius Marlowe’s face he saw while he considered jumping in. The MIT student had been sifted from a facial recognition database, and Brooks knew he had a better chance of recognizing him in person than any of the other agents and cops, having already seen him from multiple angles in the flesh in the subway. But the face in his mind now was Heather’s. His daughter was only a few years younger than Marlowe, and she was down there somewhere. Maybe safe in her apartment in Jamaica Plain, maybe not. The greatest battle he’d fought since obtaining his security clearance was the one waged in his own mind over whether or not to have her tapped and tracked. He had friends at the NSA who could do it for him, but he’d chosen to honor her privacy and keep her blind trust at the expense of sleepless nights and bad digestion. It was a decision that was getting harder to live with every minute of this day. He wanted to direct the helo to her rooftop, strap her into the seat Becca Philips had vacated, and fly her out of the city, away from whatever shitstorm was brewing in the psychedelic light of that black sun.

  “Agent Brooks? You with me, sir?” the pilot’s voice crackled in his ear, a narrow band of frequencies boring into his head.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s it gonna be, sir? Back home or out to Copley?”

  “Copley,” he said.

  He rummaged in his kit bag for Kevlar and extra magazines.

  * * *

  As the sun marched west, the cloud cover that had hung over the city throughout the day was coming undone like rotting gauze. Patches of cold blue and ash gray moved across the glass face of the John Hancock Tower. The declining sun was still more gold than pink, and few lights had come on in the tower to break the glossy perfection of the great grid of windows. Sixty stories and almost eight-hundred feet of monolithic minimalist architecture hovering over the Romanesque masonry of Trinity Church and swallowing it in shadow. And now, moving in that long shadow, noticed at first only by a few pigeons roosting in the arches of the church, came a formation of nine black-robed and hooded figures wearing engraved copper plates on chains around their necks. The copper flashed as they walked, sigils strobing out of the shadows in a geometry of orange fire.

  Three of the company had set censers in the bushes on the south side of the stone foundation of the church, and wisps of smoke, musky and resinous, curled around their robes as they strode across the grass toward St. James Ave.

  Their hands moved in an elegant choreography of mudras: fingers crossed and wrists twisting, elbows rising and arms undulating in some primeval precursor of tai chi, raising and directing an invisible force, a viscous bioelectric substance which they summoned like dew from the soil, like smoke from the sky.

  Knives flashed now in the dusky light, and the dancers stepped forward in synchrony, stabbing the air, tearing a membrane that separated the pedestrian world of the skyscraper from a dark heaven, a nocturnal paradise whose alien constellations stretched their razored rays down to form the crown of a prodigal prince, the man at the head of the triangular formation.

  And now they chanted a drone that rumbled like storm waves pounding a beleaguered shore. IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH! IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH! IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH!

  Scraps of cloud scudded widdershins around the bowl of the sky, a ragged shroud unwinding around the mirrored tower. The pigeons took to the sky and, wheeling over the black-robed figures between the stone church and the glass skyscraper, scattered at the appearance of a dark, malignant wood marching toward an impossible horizon in the towering grid of windows—a forest that existed only in reflection—and the silhouette of some lumbering beast moving among the gnarled branches. Beating their wings to push away, they cast themselves into the turbulent wind of a descending helicopter, caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

  * * *

  The helo touched down on the grass at the center of Copley Square between the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church. Brooks had his vest on and his 9mm at the ready. He took a last look around the bay as he climbed out. Tom looked sick and fatigued. The poor fucker. Brooks wished he’d try to get up, get out, get lost, like Ms. Philips had done. He had taken the guy along as an excuse to fly toward the black streamers that only the initiated could see, without having to spill the fact that he himself was one of them. Now he’d dragged him all over town while the number of roaming seers had grown.

  “You can go,” Brooks said. “Tom…. Hey, Tom, look at me.” He clapped his hands, startling the man out of his paralysis. “I said you can go if you want to, you can hoof it back home. You’ve done your part to help.”

  Tom’s eyes showed the white of glaring fear. “Leave?” he said, “Aren’t you going to take me back to headquarters where it’s safe?”

  “If you sit tight in the helo, we’ll take you back when we’re done here, yeah. But you’re free to go if you want. You have family in the city?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Well, it’s your choice. But you might want to get out of here before the shit goes down.”

  That was all it took to get the man to unbuckle and climb out. Brooks checked his sidearm one last time and tucked it into its holster. He looked at the rack of automatic rifles and considered taking one but decided against it—didn’t really believe bullets would be much use against whatever they faced here. He gave the pilot a quick salute and turned toward the church.

  Armored vehicles were lining up on Boylston and Dartmouth. Helmeted men with assault rifles. It was a reassuring sight, but he didn’t join them. He could fall back among them if he needed cover, but instinct told him to take advantage of his independence, to go ahead as a scout and see if he could find Marlowe, or Agent Fanan.

  The plaza offered little cover. He skirted a line of trees across the street from the Fairmont Hotel, but at its end came to a wide open space that he had to sprint across before he gained the shelter of Trinity Church. The street was nearly empty of people. Most had cleared out of the square at the approach of the armored cars and helicopter, to watch from between the statues of Art and Science that flanked the library steps: two bronze women, robed and enthroned, one gazing at an orb in her hand, the other holding a brush and easel. Brooks wondered what dark arts and sciences were at work here, and what they might soon unleash between the church and the tower. The whole scene was taking on a mystical resonance for him, and he felt that gambler’s intuition that there were patterns and meanings, vectors and probabilities lurking just below the surface of things, and that if he squinted at reality the right way, if he relaxed his focus and let his peripheral vision lead his eye, he would see the opportunity to win when it emerged.

  Edging around the rough-hewn stone, he sensed a wrongness in the glass façade to his right. Something vast moved in there, like the shadow of a leviathan below a surface of blue water. And when he gazed into the mirrors, trying to use them to see what lay around the corner of the church, he saw not a reflection of Trinity, but of a dense, vine-entangled forest. Trees like those didn’t even belong in the new growth forests of western Massachusetts. They belonged in the Grimm’s Fairy tales his mother had read him— they belonged to the dark heart of old Germany.

  Blind to what he would find around the corner, Brooks drew his gun and sidestepped with his back to the church. He could hear the chanting now. He crouched low, weapon aimed at the ground, and stalked around the corner, but before he cleared the building and reached the grass, he saw them: a group of robed figures marching across St. James Ave. toward the Hancock Tower. They moved in synchrony, like dancers, their hands tracing gestures in the air as they went, some holding glimmering blades, the leader carrying a black box by the handle.

  Brooks thought of the device on the train and almost fired at the figure with the box, but the hoods made it impossible to see their faces. It might be Darius Marlowe, but what if it was Agent Fanan? He raised his pistol, hesitated, and then they were across the street and passing between the small oak trees rising from the concrete islands that sheltered the skyscraper from car bombs
. He sprinted across the street and into the shadow of the tower. Looking back he saw an armored car trolling up Clarendon alongside the small lawn between church and chapel.

  Brooks was aware of vast shadows shifting in the glass beside him, and when he looked into the mirrors, the brain-shattering sight of a forest again nauseated him. The mirage lacked the stark clarity he’d glimpsed at a distance, and it crossed his mind that maybe it was akin to a projection on a movie screen. Up close the boles of the great black oaks resembled pillars of greasy smoke rising in such slow motion that the vapor took on a bark-like texture. The ground on the other side of the glass was littered with a bed of what at first appeared to be fallen leaves but upon closer inspection turned out to be pieces of ash the size of human hands.

  He gazed up the vertiginous plane of the tower at the pale sky high above and saw the same oily black cord they’d flown under on landing, connecting the tower to the black orb. He was reminded of an umbilical cord. His stomach churned, and he wanted more than anything for the building to just be a building and for the sky to cradle a solitary yellow sun without that malignant black twin.

  But if none of these things were what they should be, were the cloaked figures really men and women? Would they bleed and buckle over if shot, and if they pulled their hoods back, would he see human faces, or something…else?

  He passed between the planter islands and onto the triangle of concrete that skirted the main entrance, the bank of doors now coming into view. No security guards emerged to confront the cloaked cultists, and Brooks was stone cold certain for a moment that none of the tenants of the Hancock Tower were in this world any longer, despite the fact that the building stood perfectly intact. Were they lost in some parallel dimension? Roaming a forest of black-smoke trees and obsidian columns where rivers of blood wove between ruined temples and stepped pyramids erected in alignment to stars unmapped by man? He swallowed, and his throat reopened with the slow stickiness that came with lack of saliva. All of the moisture in his body seemed to be flooding to his armpits and the slick palms on the grip of his gun.

  The cultists came to a halt in a triangular formation, mimicking the shape of the concrete slab on which they stood, their heads and hands upturned toward the mirrored monolith. The chanting reached a crescendo, a discordant human drone iced with electronic harmonics, swelling and cresting, and crashing against the glass in a wave that caused the building to waver as if the walls were made of water or dense vapor.

  Something was gathering in the surface, something was coming through, and now Brooks realized that the creature stalking the impossible forest beyond the glass had a name, and was being called forth by that name from one world to another.

  IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH! IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH! IÄ! SHUB NIGGURATH!

  Lightning flickered in the glass, delineating a jagged horizon of shale crags and conifer spires. A shockwave rolled over the shadow forest and stirred the heavy wool of the black robes, flooding Brooks’ sinuses with musk so rich with piss and peat and the sexual secretions of that lumbering beast that he retched and felt his knees buckle.

  He turned away, drew a breath, and held it for as long as he could, then moved in, searching the ground for the boom box.

  A giant cloud of oily black smoke floated out of the glass trailing myriad cycling limbs with tufts of coarse fur…or were they wisps of curling vapor? There was a clattering of hooves on the concrete, and the cloud revolved to reveal its massive head, black and goatish, with a snout the size of a car and horns like curved swords forged of serrated bone. But the worst of it was the eyes, rows of eyes the color of congealed milk lining the snout and brow of the thing, rolling along divergent paths, scrolling black hourglass pupils.

  The boom box was nestled in one of the concrete planters, aimed at the glass. The cultists were in front of it, now approaching the creature—some eagerly, others with tentative steps. Brooks had caught sight of the copper disks dangling from their necks, each engraved with a different letter of some arcane alphabet, encircled by asymmetrical symbols. Did they aid in the summoning, or were they protective devices that marked the cultists as forbidden meat? And if they were wards of defense, would the one Samira was wearing be enough to protect her? If the disc provided her with a kind of immunity, then maybe she had a better chance of surviving the encounter than he did with his gun.

  The reeking black mass was moving into the center of the concrete triangle now, wisps of it breaking away through a perverse process of mammalian fission, the hooved tendrils forming pseudopods and then detaching into blind offspring: tumorous bubbles bucking and braying around the central cloud.

  Brooks heard boots and checked the street again. The first unit was crossing St. James Ave., but the lead man had stopped running and stood wide-eyed in the street, making the sign of the cross as his comrades bumped his shoulders and flooded around him. He’d heard the chant, could see the beast, and was raising his assault rifle.

  Brooks looked back at the tower and saw a man and a woman in business dress exiting one of the main doors. They saw the black-robed figures and stopped dead in their tracks. Brooks didn’t know if they could see the monsters, but having spotted the flashing knives and the approaching tactical team, the man pulled the woman back into the lobby.

  One of the cultists tugged her hood back, spilling long black hair, and turned to look over her shoulder: Fanan. A shot crackled past Brooks and two of the blue windowpanes shattered. A shriek cut the air from the now-exposed lobby. Gunmen were kneeling around the planters, aiming their rifles at the cultists, but the lead man, the one who’d heard the chant and seen the goat creature, had fired into the black cloud and taken out the glass. One of the shooter’s team members was now pushing the muzzle of his gun down toward the pavement and trying to usher him to the side of the road. Brooks turned back to the tower as two of the cultists drew handguns and fired. Bullets sparked off the concrete planters but the police didn’t return fire impulsively, now acutely aware of the glass building.

  One of the gun-wielding cultists took a headshot from a rooftop sniper and crumpled under a mist of blood.

  Fanan drew her own gun from her cloak and dropped another cultist. Brooks sprinted toward the planters where the riflemen were taking cover, seized the boom box, dashed it to the street, and fired a slug into it. The air seemed to lose an electrical charge when the chant cut out, but the wrecked device had already served its purpose. Spinning around he came face to face with Samira Fanan, the roiling black mass charging her from behind. Her eyes bulged as a ridged horn tore through her robe, impaling her.

  Brooks cried, “NO!”

  With no chant to fill the air, he could hear a thin whistle emanating from her throat, laced with a crackling gurgle. The beast jerked its head back, and Fanan’s body was swept away with it. Before Brooks could recover from the sight, Darius Marlowe, mounted on one of the mammoth goat’s offspring, charged into the space where Fanan had been, leading a procession of six riders. God only knew what the riflemen saw coming at them. Most wore helmets that covered their ears. Were they now watching cloaked figures on invisible steeds running them down and jumping the barriers? A couple of them fired shots in panic. Another window shattered, this one on the third floor.

  The great beast passed into the street, its many hooves cycling, but not touching the ground, and even if the Special Forces guys couldn’t see the monster, it seemed they could smell the fetid wave of poison fumes that wafted from its black fur and gaping maw. One vomited, others clamped their gloved hands over their mouths and noses. Brooks squinted against the acrid musk, eyes burning.

  The riders’ cloaks blended with the black fumes rising from their shaggy mounts, and soon they too appeared to be made of greasy smoke. Brooks recovered as the procession passed, and looked up at the rooftops bordering the square. He could make out the silhouettes of snipers training their rifles on the street and the church grounds. Their infrared goggles flashed in the sunlight as they pivoted, but no shots were
fired. The cultists and their steeds were too close to the glass, too much a chaos of rolling smoke.

  Tactical vehicles screeched around the square behind him. He could hear and feel the pounding of boots on the pavement, could sense the crosshairs of the riflescopes passing him over from the rooftops. And then, just as the great black goat had emerged from the mirrored plane of the tower, so did it pass back out of range into that malignant mirage beyond the silver panes, leading the black-robed riders on its spawn.

  Chapter 16

  Watching the front door of her warehouse apartment, Becca thought there was no way of getting in without goons jumping her and throwing her into a van with blacked-out windows. She didn’t see such a van on the street—not even one of those fake delivery vans with a bogus company logo on the side that agencies like SPECTRA used, if TV was to be trusted—but she knew it would appear, jumping the curb, side door sliding open, and men in Kevlar giving her the cable-tie-and-bag-over-the-head express service to Government Center for the second time in two days if she were to walk up the steps and fish her keys out of her pocket. She could feel it.

  Maybe she was paranoid, but she thought Maurice would approve.

  The cabbie, a balding white guy with an ample beer gut and bushy sideburns, was getting antsy. “Time to shit or get off the pot, sweetheart” he said.

  Becca sighed. If she told him to go around the block one more time, that alone would be enough to draw attention to the cab. She rolled her window down and listened to the air outside. The neighborhood was quieter than usual at nightfall; most people were indoors, heeding the Governor’s advice.