Red Equinox

by Douglas Wynne

  * * *

  Darius Marlowe carried the dirt-caked wooden box, the box that held the Shining Trapezohedron, out of the lodge, across the metal grate bounded by spiked iron fencing, and into the base of the monument. The door in the sheer granite façade was ajar, having never been locked for the night. White light spilled into the entrance from the high-powered lamps surrounding the obelisk. The light was hostile to Nyarlathotep in his truest form as the Haunter of the Dark, but Cyril had figured out how to cut the power when the time came. For now, illumination was needed for the preparations.

  Inside the monument, the winding stair marched upward to the left, spiraling around a central circular shaft, a newel, that had once housed an elevator to the observation deck at the top. The elevator, a basket on a cable connected to the steam engine used to raise the granite blocks during construction, had been abandoned and dismantled in 1844, after the first year of service, the shaft covered with an iron grate at the top. At the bottom, the entrance to the newel was shuttered with a gate through which visitors could see a replica of the first temporary monument erected on the site before the obelisk’s construction; a marble Tuscan-style memorial pillar topped with an urn filial and fronted with a brass plaque.

  Darius had used his newfound changeling abilities to great effect on the ranger, terrifying him into divulging the locations of all keys and security features. The chain had been removed from the gate, which now stood ajar. He stepped into the base of the shaft, laid a hand on the marble pillar, and looked up. A hinged metal lid above the pillar lay open in a half-moon shape. Beyond it the dark shaft yawned, a quarter mile of cold stone ascending to the observation chamber at the peak. Darius drew a deep breath of the cool, damp air, and smiled. The chain Cyril had removed from the gate was coiled on the floor beside a popped padlock. Soon they would use the chain to bind the ranger to the base of the marble pillar, a sacrifice to the Haunter of the Dark.

  Darius left the newel and ascended the stone steps, cradling the box against his belly, in the crook of his arm, like a baby. It was a long, dark climb, but with the iron handrail for a guide one didn’t need to see to follow the tight, winding spiral up and up and up. At intervals the white light from the halogen floods outside spilled in through narrow ventilation slits too small to be called windows. Otherwise, the stairs were lit only by the sparse violet light spilling from the cracks in the box he carried. The original, ornately-engraved brass box had been lost after the fall of the Free-Will Church, when the stone had been cast into the Narragansett Bay, and simpler housing had been fashioned for the artifact after a dive team hired by a wealthy benefactor retrieved it in the years when the church was operating underground.

  At length he came to the small observation chamber and found his brothers busy with the preparations. They had hauled tools in burlap sacks up the 294 steps, had cast their robes from their sweat-slicked backs, and now resembled ordinary workmen in jeans, removing the Plexiglas panes from the square windows that gave a sprawling view of Charlestown, and Boston beyond, and the menacing thunderheads majestically under-lit by urban light pollution.

  Two of the brothers stacked the Plexiglas against the wall while another pair removed segments of elaborately engraved brass poles from a bag, and set about screwing them together. These wands—among the oldest relics in the church treasury—had long been an enigma to Reverend Proctor and his predecessors, but Darius, under the tutelage of Nereus Charobim, had learned their purpose. The Black Brotherhood, the left-hand inner order of high-ranking Masons who had subtly guided the construction of the obelisk, had equipped the structure with mounting hardware for these ancient tools. The rods were in fact ocular wands with crystal cores designed to channel dark rays from a power source mounted on a tripod at the center of the chamber, direct them out the windows at the cardinal points, and angle them upward from mirrored tips to converge on the pyramidion capstone. All four windows had originally been fitted with pairs of iron rings for the exoteric purpose of holding flagpoles in the early days of the monument when four American flags had been draped from them. The flags had been retired when the Plexiglas panes were installed for safety reasons, but the mounting rings remained in place.

  Now, with the panes removed, the Brothers extended the brass rods through the windows and fitted them into the rings. Darius inspected their work, setting his eye to the base of each staff in turn, and peering through the crystal cores like periscopes, rotating each until all four mirrored tips were focused on the apex of the capstone. The Brothers gave him a wide berth in the small stone chamber, then donned their cloaks and descended the stairs one-by-one as he dismissed them.

  Alone at the top of the obelisk, Darius transformed, his sinuous appendages blooming and writhing from his human shape. He bent to the floor, gripped the bars of the round iron grate with curled fingers and tentacles, and lifted it from the newel. He set it on the floor with a rolling clang, and gazed into the pitch-black shaft.

  One of the Brothers had assembled the brass tripod and leaned it against the wall. He now spread its legs apart and placed it over the hole.

  Violet light played over the walls from the cracks in the box, as if the stone inside sensed that its time was nigh. He lifted the latch, raised the lid, and the exquisite non-Euclidian angles of the Shining Trapezohedron dazzled his mind and heart. It was a fist-sized crystal of marbled blood; it was all sin and song; it was his own heart in mineral form, and the heart of his dark and terrible god.

  He took it in his trembling fingers and set it atop the tripod. He heard the faint strains of a chant on the hill below as the adorants began their circumambulations around the great stone spire on the blood-rich mound. And closer, the inchoate grunts and gag-muted cries of the ranger at the bottom of the well, the chiming of the chains like temple bells as Cyril bound the man to the marble pillar.

  Darius checked his watch and waited, reveling in the sublime anticipation of the moment, the breath before the plunge. Sweet ribbons of incense wafted up from the black hole at his feet, curled around the glowing stone, and teasing his alien olfactory glands, lit up his mind like a plasma globe.

  * * *

  The black car shot down Storrow Drive beside the river. The road was empty at 3:23 AM. Becca could only make out vague impressions of the black orb and its tendrils in the darkness to the north, faint stains on the billowing curtains of night. A storm was moving in, and no stars shone. She kept looking at the rearview mirror, trying to catch Brooks’ eyes and read something there. He wasn’t a big talker, his brow grim and focused. But she needed to know something Nina and Neil couldn’t tell her, and needed to know if his answer was truth or lie, so she held the question, suffering under the weight of it, saving it for when they were out of the car and standing face to face, when she could read more than his isolated eyes.

  “How do you know your people aren’t tracking us?” She asked.

  “I don’t. But I know how it’s done, so I’m pretty sure they’re not.”

  “Your wife says you think there’s a cultist on the inside.”

  “She’s not my wife. And yes, I do.”

  “So…why did she dump you?”

  Becca was pretty sure his deepening crow’s feet were connected to a smile.

  “How do you know I didn’t dump her? Maybe I got tired of being analyzed.”

  “You don’t want to talk about it, just tell me to fuck off.”

  “Did she say she dumped me?”

  “She’s not allowed to talk about her personal life.”

  He laughed. “It was a lot of things…but mostly my gambling habit.”

  “Did you quit?”

  “I’m taking a gamble on you right now.”

  “Touché.”

  “Pretty sure you’re taking one on me too.”

  “That’s just because I need a ride to Bunker Hill and I don’t have cab fare.”

  * * *

  From the window Darius could see the Black Pharaoh climbing the stairs to the crow
n of the hill. The brethren were positioned at the quarters, tracing sigils in the air with daggers, intoning the sacred names, and re-consecrating the hallowed ground.

  Darius wished he could witness the sacrifice of the ranger, but it would take too long to descend the stairs and he didn’t want to miss the moment when his master arrived at the top of the shaft—well-fed, restored to his true form, and reunited with the holy stone that was once his home.

  Darius had prepared the way, had restored the black speech, rent the veil between worlds. He had reclaimed the Shining Trapezohedron from the earth and set it in its rightful place as intended by the church founders. And now he would bear witness, stationed at the left hand of the master when the stars were right, when that which was below joined that which was above.

  The floodlights went out. Cyril had cut the breakers to make the obelisk safe for Charobim in his form as the Haunter of the Dark. Darius took a cautious step toward the gaping hole, dragging his shoe to avoid stepping into the void. Dropping to one knee, he pressed his hands against the cold stone floor and tilted his head to the open shaft.

  There was a charged silence as the ranger chained in the bottom of the well beheld the coming of Nyarlathotep.

  Then the screaming and rattling resumed with fresh intensity, rising through a series of crescendos and peaking when the gag was shredded along with the face it bound, and the chasm echoed with the wet slap of meat and blood and alien anatomy, followed mere heartbeats later by the slither and scurry of myriad appendages, feelers, and folded wings, climbing the stone shaft.

  * * *

  Brooks parked on Monument Square. The dashboard clock read 3:40. No sooner had they climbed out of the car than the floodlights on the monument went dark. Brooks had a flashlight at the ready in one hand and the Mortiferum Indicium in the other. He put the barrel of the flashlight in his mouth and flipped to a page marked by a Post-It strip.

  “Here,” he said, jabbing a finger at the page as if it wasn’t a rare grimoire but a phone book and he wanted Becca to memorize the number of the power he needed her to dial on her scarab. “A guy I trust told me this is the mantra you need to activate the beetle.”

  “A guy you trust?”

  “I trust his knowledge, anyway. Can you pronounce it? Memorize it?”

  She silently read the line beside his finger and nodded, unable to speak, her breath caught in her throat.

  He closed the book with a snap and tossed it onto the car seat, shut the door and locked it. Django was already padding across the street when she seized Brooks’ arm and turned him around, forcing him to look her in the eye. He was taller, but she was close, and the light from a colonial-style street lamp was still shining in the absence of the monument floods. It was enough to lend his face a thin, parchment-tinted glow.

  “Tell me what happened to Rafael at the asylum. Is he okay? Do they have him in custody?”

  The hesitation was all she needed to confirm her worst fears. He might have lied to her easily in the car’s mirror, but face-to-face she could see the conflict fluttering through his jaw and brow. He was sizing her up, deciding which would make her more able to act here and now—the truth or a lie. She knew then that he favored games of chance, wasn’t a card player. The calculation only delayed him for a half second, but by the time he opened his mouth to answer the question, he had seen the change wash over her face, the welling up and caving in, and he knew that she knew the truth and all that was left was to try to salvage her or take the scarab and go on without her.

  “Rebecca,” he said gently, and laid a hand on her forearm, “He didn’t die in vain if we end this here. He’s the reason you have the ruby, he gave it to the dog….”

  “No…no, no, no. Please….”

  He pointed up the hill at the dark spire. “Whoever, whatever is up there is responsible for Rafael’s death.”

  “Oh God. It’s my fault, I sent him there, oh fuck, Jesus fuck….”

  She was buckled over, her wrists pressed against her stomach, her hair draped over her face, when it started to rain. Something was pressing against her folded arms, something hard and leathery burrowing between her arms and belly. Brooks was giving it to her, trying to make her take it. She looked down through the curtain of hair and saw a leather-sheathed Bowie knife.

  Rafael’s knife that he had used to pry the stone from the birdbath.

  “Take it,” he said.

  Becca curled her fingers around the handle, and was surprised to find that it gave her strength. Hot tears were running down her face, cold rain down her hair. She drew a deep, steadying breath and looked at the sky above the monument. The orb was pulsing against the darkness now. It resembled a purple-tinted negative exposure, darkly radiant, with all tendrils converging in a dome over the hill, the higher lines jumping to ride the lower to earth like loose electricity seeking ground. More purple light flickered from the window at the peak, where something like a brass pipe protruded from the window.

  Brooks had stowed his torch and was checking his gun in the half-light when a scream ripped the night. He jogged up the stone steps to the crest of the hill.

  Becca followed on his heels.

  Two figures in black robes blocked the path to the monument, one brandishing a dagger. Brooks raised his gun, pointed it in the face of the armed one, and drove the pair back onto the grass. Django appeared at the edge of the path, his hackles raised, a low growl issuing from his chest. The coward dropped the dagger and raised his hands, and Becca took the opportunity to run for the ramp that led through the short iron fence into the monument. She knew Brooks wouldn’t fire unless he absolutely had to, wouldn’t want to telegraph their arrival, but she also knew the cultists wouldn’t be cowed for long. They had strength of numbers. She needed to make every second that he could hold them off count.

  The gate hung ajar, and, reaching the end of the ramp, she stepped into the darkness of the vestibule. She smelled iron and incense and knew that the iron wasn’t from all that metalwork but from the blood she could feel sticking to the soles of her boots. There was a horrible sound of something crawling, slither-shuffling high above in the core of the great structure.

  She felt blindly in the dark until her hand found a railing, her foot a step. She was on the winding stair with only one way to go now, and up she went, quiet at first, but soon climbing with as much abandon as her stamina would allow, her steps echoing in the spiral vault above, and another sound, a subsonic rumble issuing from the damp granite, always to her right as she wound around the core.

  She stopped climbing at one of the steel diamond mesh ventilation grates that let on to the central shaft, and listened to the horrid sound, the slither and slap of something monstrous. It made her flesh crawl, and there was a moment when it seemed she wouldn’t be able to force her feet to take another step. On the street outside she had broken down in front of Brooks after keeping up a tough act since their initial encounter in the interrogation room. Now she was alone in the dark with no one to back her up, not even Django.

  “What I came here pretending to be, I am becoming,” she whispered.

  On she climbed. At intervals she passed slots in the outer wall through which the cold wind rushed into the stairway. She glimpsed the city lights in the distance, and, invigorated by light and air she pushed harder, huffing and pulling on the iron rail, rising and turning toward the peak, rising and turning.

  A gunshot crackled outside, followed quickly by another. She thought she heard shouting under the hiss of her own labored breathing. She wished she had counted the steps from the bottom, but knew she wouldn’t have been able to maintain the necessary concentration. On she climbed until she detected a faint, cold light above.

  She paused to catch her breath, touched the scarab at her breast, and stealthily ascended the remaining steps.

  There was an iron balustrade guarding the stairwell to keep tourists from toppling down if they misstepped walking around the observation deck. Becca crouched low when she rea
ched it, clutching Rafael’s knife in her right hand, the sheath discarded on the step below her. Waves of violet radiance, energized like laser light, ebbed and flowed across the walls and ceiling. A tall figure stood near the top of the stairs, gazing in awe at something in the center of the room. Perched on the stairs, with a hand touching the floor, she crept forward and peered around the metal plate.

  A creature lay sprawled on the lip of the pit, streamers of disintegrating matter issuing from its leathery wings, twitching tentacles, and three-lobed burning eye, and pouring up into a redblack stone mounted on a tripod over the void. Whatever it was, it was transforming into energy and flowing into the faceted crystal, which in turn emanated beams of purple light to the four compass points where they were channeled through the brass rods mounted in the windows.

  Becca was almost at the man’s feet, and her eyes followed the cut of his robe up to his face, painted in rapture and ambient radiation: Darius Marlowe. Was he Rafael’s killer? She didn’t know, but what did it matter whether Marlowe himself had done the deed at the asylum? He was the one who had started all of this, the one who had unleashed dark forces on innocents all over the city, so yes, he was ultimately responsible for Rafael. Becca bit her cheek at the sight of him and tasted her own blood through clenched teeth.

  She heard another gunshot, and now through the windows the shouts of men mingled with Django’s snarling and snapping on the hill below.

  At the sound of the gunshot Darius spun around to face the stairs, but before he could see her, Becca launched off the top step and drove her shoulder into his gut, slamming him into the curved granite wall. His face blurred on impact, tentacles blossoming, mouth mutating, involuntarily flickering in and out of the terrestrial dimension. She brought the Bowie knife up in an arc, the blade jutting out the bottom of her closed fist, lopped one tentacle off and scored a deep groove across another. Then they were gone again, and Darius was howling, raising his hands to grasp at the air in front of him.