Red Equinox

Red Equinox

By

Douglas Wynne

JournalStone

San Francisco

Copyright © 2015 by Douglas Wynne

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-940161-45-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-940161-46-4 (ebook)

JournalStone rev. date:  January 16, 2015

Printed in the United States of America

Cover Art & Design: Chuck Killorin

A derivative of “Boston skyline from the Atlantic Ocean” by Willem van Bergen. CC BY-SA 2.0

A derivative of "Octopus vulgaris 02.JPG" by H. Zell. CC BY-SA 3.0

Author Photo: Jen Salt

Edited by: Dr. Michael Collings

For Jennifer

Red Equinox

That time of year thou may’st in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

There was a demoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

—H.P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep”

Death has a way of calling us home, and when it does we put on our best. Becca Philips hadn’t been to Arkham in years, hadn’t worn a dress in almost as long, and now here she was, stepping off the train and feeling out of place in both.

Water Street looked just the same as it had the last time she’d been here. The same shops struggling to net a few of the North Shore tourist dollars that tended to flow around Arkham before continuing up the coast to Newburyport and Portsmouth.

She took the Garrison Street Bridge on foot. It was a cool day and overcast. The updraft off the river chilled her through, and she pulled her coat tight around her chest, hair flailing in the wind and whipping across her eyes. Gulls wheeled high above, and the last boats of the season trolled the dark water below. Both avoided the stark little island of standing stones upriver from the bridge. Same as it ever was.

The dress was a simple black thing, knee-length with little red roses, and she wondered now why she’d bothered with it. Her usual mode of dress had mostly been inherited from the woman she was here to honor anyway. Catherine Philips, her late grandmother, had only ever worn dresses to university fundraisers, never in the classroom or the field. Thinking of her, Becca longed for her cargo pants and leather jacket—the sort of attire Catherine would have been wearing in some sepia-toned photo taken in front of a pyramid back when her hair had been as dark as Becca’s was now.

From the bridge she could see the white steeple, her destination and another reminder of the dissonance between a life well lived and a proper burial. Catherine had set foot inside churches less often than dresses.

The service was already underway when Becca arrived. She settled quietly into one of the empty pews at the back of the nave and let the sonorous words of the minister wash over her as she searched the sparsely peopled rows for a mane of sun-bleached hair combined with an inherent restlessness of form. Finding him nowhere, she realized she’d dressed up the little bit she was capable of just to highlight his inevitable shabbiness, his disrespect for his own mother—he who would arrive on the back of a Harley in oil-stained jeans if he arrived at all. But of course he hadn’t. He’d blown them both off to the bitter end.

A man in a brown suit stepped out of the shadows of the narthex and sat down beside her. Her heart jumped into her throat for a second, but it wasn’t the grizzled hand of her hard-living father patting her knee, and she found herself looking into the empathetic eyes of her surrogate uncle, Neil Hafner.

She was surprised at how much he had aged since she’d last seen him: his doggish face now even more hound-like in its sagging, his fading freckles framed by thinning pale hair. Becca gave his hand a squeeze and let it go.

The rows in front of them appeared to be mostly occupied by Catherine’s colleagues and students, with the family underrepresented. She spotted her Uncle Alan with Michelle and the girls, but Becca had always been closer to Neil, who was neither family nor faculty and who had always been more of a friend to Catherine than either. They had met in the nineties when the folklore professor needed photographs of bas-reliefs for a book she was writing. Later, when Becca had shown an interest in photography, Catherine had enlisted Neil as a mentor.

He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a small wooden box, hinged and redolent of cedar, which he held above her lap until she took it. Now he was the one scanning the rows and aisles, but somehow she doubted he was looking for her father. He folded his hand over hers just as she was about to pop the lid on the little box, leaned in and whispered, “Not here. And don’t let anyone see. It belonged to Catherine.”

Becca slipped the box into her purse and glanced around the church, trying not to appear too furtive, but all eyes were on the altar. “Who are we keeping it from?”

“The university might make a claim on it if they knew it wasn’t lost, but she wanted you to have it.”

A birdlike man with dandruff on his black suit collar glanced over his shoulder at them from a few rows up and Neil settled back against the hard wood beside her. When the man faced forward again, he whispered, “Tell you later.”

The open coffin lid glowed in the dusty autumnal light, the white silk lining catching the lowering sun through the tall windows. She couldn’t see Catherine’s face from this distance but knew she would need to see it before leaving, before she could even begin to process the reality of her death. It seemed impossible that a personality as bold as her Gran’s could simply be extinguished without a struggle. The woman had been a force of nature: fearing nothing, seeking out the darkest corners of the globe and of the human psyche for her scrutiny.

Becca believed it was that intrepid spirit that had caused her students and children to fear her. But Catherine had softened with age and had never demanded as much of Becca as she had of her own children, all of whom had fled from her sphere as soon as they could. Becca had come to believe that given a second chance at parenting, Catherine had deliberately chosen a different approach. Or maybe the woman had felt to some degree responsible for the circumstances that had landed Becca in her care.

Despite the years they had spent together in the house on Crane Street, there were still sleeping tigers they had never dared disturb, and now Becca had to find a way to accept that they never would.

The service ended as she brooded and she felt a little jolt at the realization that the front rows were now rising and lining up to approach the casket. Becca numbly found her feet and wondered if she would cry when she saw the embalmed body. She hoped she would. She’d been ruminating on the loss in an effort to break down some intangible barrier in her own heart, but the tears remained stubbornly frozen by the dream-like distance the roomful of strangers, formal clothes, and ill-fitting religious trappings imposed upon the primal loss of the woman who had raised her.

Maybe the increased dosage of Zoloft that her therapist had put her on to gird her against the fading light and impending threat of winter was keeping grief at arm’s length. Maybe it was the past two years away, years in which she had finally left Arkham without looking back and had immersed herself in her art and the city and ill-chosen men. She should have called more often, should have visited, should have been less self-absorbed, knowing that she was the last in a long line to abandon Dr. Catherine Philips.

Her children don’t see it that way. You know the narrative. She drove her husband to the asylum, her daughter-in-law to suicide, and the rest of the family to mass exodus. She and the dark things she couldn’t stop poking and prodding.

When Becca’s turn came, she knelt and looked down at the body that somehow was and was not her grandmother, and wondered if the stroke had delivered that which a lifetime of inquiry had not: knowledge of the other side.

*   *   *

The tears finally came at the graveside. Something about the smell of wet grass from the morning rain and the mound of clodded earth beneath the tarp made it possible for her to feel in a way that had eluded her within the dark wood confines of the church.

They had given her a rose to place on the coffin, and she watched the petals fracture into red shards through the water in her eyes. Neil, beside her, handed her a handkerchief, and wiping her nose she found an odd comfort in this evidence that she could still feel what you were supposed to at a funeral, despite her efforts to protect herself from feeling too much.

As Neil led her back to the car with a pair of ladies he had promised a ride to the campus, she let her eyes linger on the tree line, but her father still wasn’t there, wasn’t leaning on his bike and watching from a distance because no distance from his mother, not even in death, would ever be safe enough. She regretted dressing up; it felt weird to be carrying a purse instead of a camera bag, and now all she wanted to do was get home and out of the dress and the scratchy black hose.

Neil appeared beside her and patted her shoulder to draw her distant gaze back to him. “You’re not alone in this,” he said. “You might expect a death in the family to change people or bring them around, but…. If you’ll let me give you one last photo lesson: it’s the shadows that define things. Okay,
two
last lessons: sometimes you have to alter the focus to see what’s right in front of you. Right? Promise me you’ll call me if you need to talk.”