Red Equinox Read Online Free PDF Page B

and yet these other religionists had been grudgingly integrated into the tapestry of Boston’s rough blue-collar fabric over time. It was a white city, but its primary industry was education, making tolerance a natural byproduct that wafted like a benign emission from the towers of higher learning. And yet, for all that, the brethren of the Starry Wisdom Church were still mostly shunned, as if they’d never risen above the station of fishmongers trailing the stench of their trade.
    Most of the laity in this day and age had left the docks behind and now worked in cleaner environs, in IT departments, supermarkets, and even medical centers. As a cleric, the reverend was supported by his congregation, his sole occupation the study of the mysteries. He experienced one such mystery as the train plunged belowground and sped along the subterranean tunnel beneath the brownstones and gothic hotels of the Back Bay: whenever he returned to the neighborhood he called home, a neighborhood built on marshland, something like a cold, blue current stirred in his blood.
    He exited the train at Hynes Convention Center and took the stairs to street level, pushing through the doors and breaking out of the hot, stale air of the station.
    The foot traffic flowed wide around him.
    It had been a hot day, but with nightfall, a breeze had picked up. It flowed across the overpass, stirring his too-heavy frock coat, and bringing some relief from the oppressive air of the subway. Too many people. There were too many people in the city, crawling over every road, clogging every corridor, and there was no escape from them even in the ruins of the asylum. Perhaps the day of reckoning would come and change that. He tried to instill hope in his congregation that it would, but he harbored private doubts.
    The scarab was another mystery. It troubled him. It couldn’t be what it looked like (there was no possible way, and yet the girl claimed an ancestor in the place) but seeing it in that courtyard on this day of all days…what could it mean?
    There were radical elements in his flock who would have urged him to view such an omen as a herald of the hour come round at last, but they were young and hasty, and one couldn’t simply rouse the apocalypse like a sleeping snake, prod it with a stick at the first sign of synchronicity. He had long ago accepted that he was unlikely to see it in his lifetime. His duty was to preserve the traditions for the next generation and shelter them from persecution until their time came. That was why he hadn’t smashed the camera or accosted the girl about her jewelry. The last thing the church needed was for some curiosity seeker to report him to the police and have a holy site barricaded or demolished.
    Hot air rustled his vestments and bus exhaust singed his nostrils.
    He didn’t care for cameras in sacred places, but gazing across the Back Bay at moments like this, under falling night and rising moon, he wished there had been more of them around in the 1850’s when all of this had been underwater. He could imagine it, of course, but he’d only seen one photo of the tidal marshes, and that one did little to capture the majesty of the place. He would have liked to see it beset by storms, waves thrashing and lightning lashing, but in those early days of the camera photographers had been lucky if they could capture a clear image in the bleached light of noonday.
    A punk in a studded and spray-painted leather vest bumped him as he turned onto Boylston Street and he almost muttered a curse—not a swear, but an actual curse—then thought better of it. He would need what energy he had left for the ceremony. It was, after all, the Feast Day of Saint Jeremy. He tapped his fingers against his coat pocket, felt the crystal phial of water from the sacred fount, and made his way up the slope to the stone tower hemmed in by skyscrapers, seeing it in his mind’s eye as the lighthouse it would be if ever it were the last building