Red Equinox by Douglas Wynne Read Free Book Online Page B

evidence of a late-night study binge.
    Darius sat up and put his feet on the cold floor. He let the reality of his surroundings sink in and felt disappointment swirling around the drain of another morning. He needed to piss, needed to step into his slippers and head to the dirty bathroom, but he held it in and focused on the gossamer-thin threads of the dream, combing through them gently, so as not to break them with the crude tool of his intellect. What had the number been? A weight on a digital scale? A time on a clock? No. It had been a mile marker on a road. No… a marker in smoots!
    The elation of remembrance was shattered by the absurdity of the notion that the messenger of the gods would communicate to him in such nonsense. The idea was surely a product of his tired imagination. And yet, what would it hurt him to check? 182.2 S. He saw the number in his mind’s eye, as if it were emblazoned on his forehead, and its specificity soothed him. He didn’t even need to write it down to remember it, and he smiled as the little joke began to dawn on him. Maybe the black pharaoh had a sense of humor after all.
    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