Authors: Neal Stephenson
Wes turned to me with just a grin on his face. “Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Satan will get you.”
“That's what they said?”
“I think so.”
“Shit. Then I'll tell Tricia to expect a call from the Prince of Darkness.”
“She'll probably hang up on him.”
We didn't have the stuff we needed to repair the drilling rig. That was okay, since I didn't really think it would work anyway. It was made to bore down through reasonably soft dirt, not a pile of trash that included lots of iron fragments. We had something more reliable: a couple of sledgehammers. I picked out a promising place on the north end, visible from both South Boston and downtown, and we started pounding pipe segments down into the bowels of Spectacle Island.
Ridiculously slow work. We spent about four hours on it, taking turns on the sledgehammers and keeping an eye out for the goons on the boat.
My foot had a one-inch gash in it, ranging from not very deep to pretty fucking deep. Back on the
Blowfish
, I scrubbed it out with soap and water, taking scientific care to probe the deepest parts of the cut, squeezing it to make it bleed, the whole bit; disinfected it with something incredibly painful and wrapped a sterile bandage around the foot. Walking around was painful, so when I wanted to do a little investigating I had to go by water, on a Zodiac.
What I wanted to see was near the northeast corner of the island. It was a huge, rusty, old barge, a piece of shit, but apparently seaworthy. There was no cargo on it. It looked like it had simply run aground.
Right now the tide was almost out and about three-quarters of the barge was high and dry. It was way, way up there; when it had rammed this island, the tide must have been especially high, or it must have been going very fast, or both.
Or maybe it had been deliberately abandoned. Maybe Joe Gallagher had come here and put the nose of the
Extra Stout
against the ass end of the barge and just tossed it up onto the rest of the garbage. The interesting thing was that it was newâit wasn't here three months ago, the last time I was outâand it must have carved some pretty deep gashes into the island.
Geologists love earthquakes and other natural upheavals because they tear things open, providing views into the earth's secrets. I had a similar attitude about this barge. There was no way to drag it off the island and then jump down into the cavity it had dug, but I could skulk around the edges with my sampling jars and see what was coming out.
But I probably wouldn't bother. If I were doing a Ph.D. dissertation on Spectacle Island, I'd go wild over it. But I know what Spectacle Island is: a big heap of garbage. As long as there were bigger issues in the Harbor, no point in getting obsessed with the details.
But just for the hell of it, because it was new and interesting, I circumnavigated the barge, partly on the water and partly by foot. Nothing much to see besides hundreds of feet of vertical, rustcovered wall. Graffiti was sprinkled near the waterline and on the part that stuck out into the Harbor. The walls were a natural for graffiti, but Spectacle Island wasn't accessible to your average jerk with a spraycan. The SMEGMA man had made it out hereâsome guy who'd been wandering around Boston for a couple of years painting the word SMEGMA everywhere. Super Bad Larry had made it, probably swam one-handed all the way from Roxbury. Someone in the Class of'87, and VERN + SALLY = LOVE apparently had had access to a boat. Three-quarters of the graffiti was in red, though, done by a single group. Besides being red, it had a distinctive look to it. Most graffitists just scribble something down and run away, having made their point, but the people with the red spray-paint were performing black magic, exercising ritual care. This was most obvious with the pentacles, which were inscribed in a circle. It's hard to stand on a rolling boat in the middle of the night and draw a perfect five-foot circle with a spray can, but the Satan worshippers had done it repeatedly, all around the barge. Then they drew upside-down stars in the circles, forming your basic pentagram, and an inverted cross underneath that. Arched over the top of the circle were the words PÃYZEN BÃYZENâa heavy-metal band with a thing about nuns and pit bulls.
They weren't finished with the umlauts, though. They put another in the center of the pentagram. If you stood back and looked at it the right way, the inverted star then became a face. The umlaut made two beady red eyes, the bottom prong of the star made a sharp muzzle, the top prongs a pair of horns, and the two side prongs a pair of goatlike ears.
The name of the brand was written a few other places, billboard-sized, along with a bunch of incantations I didn't recognize. Old magic symbols cribbed from a book on the occult, I guess: circles and lines and dots connected in rigid but meaningless patterns. A nonchemist might mistake them for molecular diagrams.
The Satan worshippers had left a few other symptoms of their presence scattered around the island. For example, a wrecked toilet with a cross painted on it, surrounded by the remains of five bonfires. A mock shrine, I guess. I knocked it apart by throwing football-sized rocks at it, not because I'm some kind of heavy Christian, but only because it got on my nerves. Besides, there's no incentive to keep a garbage pile neat, which was the problem with Boston Harbor to begin with. I kicked at one of the old bonfires and noticed that they had been burning old wood that had been pressure treated with some kind of preservative. That was fine with me. When you burn that kind of wood, the smoke contains an amazingly high concentration of dioxin. Let's hope Pöyzen Böyzen fans like to roast marshmallows.
A curl of that toxic smoke rose up out of the ashes. This fire was brand new, left over from last night.
I hadn't seen any boats beached near here, so they must have all gone home. Hell, maybe it was the same group we'd been arguing with. I went down to the pseudobeach next to the barge and looked for signs of activity and, sure enough, a few footprints. This obviously was their landing zone, and the graffiti was dense. WELCOME TO HELL, it said, and a few yards after along, written higher than I could reach, a small pentacle and the word SATAN with an arrow pointed upward.
That's why the unrusted area caught my eye. It was way up at the top of the barge, above the SATAN sign. A pair of little spots, a silver umlaut, where the rust had been worn away. They were a little more than a foot apart. At first I thought they were paint spots, but then caught them glinting in the sun.
I went over and stood beneath them. This patch of ground looked smoother, harder-packed. There were some weak indentations, a little more than a foot apart. The Pöyzen Böyzen people had been using a ladder to climb up into the barge.
It didn't look like a rusted-out hulk to me anymore. It looked like an iron-walled fortress, something out of Tolkien. God knows what was going on inside of it.
I had a pretty good idea: high-school kids came out here to drink Narries and fornicate. Maybe they traded in cocaine, or cheaper highs, but at any rate the lunatic fringe to this group owned a lot of red spray paint and had been to some bookstore in Cambridge with an “occult” section in the back.
There was no reason in the world I would want to discover their purpose, so I limped back to the Zode and went back to our pipepounding operation.
Frank, the biggest guy on the
Blowfish
crew, had broken through for us. Something was definitely escaping from the pipe. If you held your hand over it, the warm, moist draft made your skin crawl. I had everyone stand back, lit a 4th of July sparkler, and threw it toward the pipe from about ten feet away. I didn't see the rest, because I turned away instinctively, but I heard a large but quiet
thwup
as a big ball of gas went up. Then there was a mild roaring sound, like distant traffic. The crew of the
Blowfish
applauded and I turned around. We had a nice flare going, a big raggedy yellow flame.
We lengthened the pipe so that its outlet was about ten feet off the ground and then we left it there, burning. In my fantasies, I wanted to encircle Spectacle Island with a blazing corona of yellow flares, a beacon to ships at sea, a landmark for airline pilots, permanent fireworks for the yuppies in the new waterfront condos. It wouldn't really accomplish that much, other than to remind people: Hey. There's a harbor out here. It's dirty.
When I got home I washed my foot again, applied vodka (a particular brand that I keep around strictly as an organic solvent) and rebandaged. My dreams were hallucinatory nightmares about fleeing from oversized, heavily perfumed PR flacks with chrome revolvers. I got up three times during the night to vomit, and when my alarm went off I couldn't move my arm to hit the snooze button because all my joints had gone stiff. My vision was blurry and I had a 104° fever. My muscles and joints were all welded into a burning, smoking mass. I lay there and moaned “two hundred pounds of tainted meat” until Bart came in and brought me a Hefty. When I took enough nitrous to get to the bathroom and finish up with the vomiting and diarrhea, I looked in the mirror and found that my tongue was carpeted with whitish-brown fuzz.
Bart drove me to the big hospital downtown to see Dr. J., my old college roommate. He'd gotten his M.D. on the six-year shake-and-bake program, done an Ivy League residency, and now he worked ERs. Not very prestigious, but the pay is steady. A fine way to subsidize other life projects.
When I explained how I'd cut my foot, he looked at me as though I had just taken both barrels from a twelve-gauge.
“There's some very serious stuff out there in the Harbor, man. I'm not kidding. All those decay organisms? They work on your body
too, S.T.,” he said, shooting me up with some kind of stupendous antibiotic cocktail. He gave me more of the same in pill form, but in the end I was to take only about half the bottle. Whatever those antibiotics were, they just blew the shit out of whatever was in my system. That included the natural bacteria in my colon, the
E. coli
, so I had continuing diarrhea. Life is too short to spend on a toilet, wondering if there's more, so I stopped taking the pills and let my own defenses handle the mop-up work. And yes, I got a tetanus shot.
“I ran into some people you'd like,” I told Bart as he drove me home. “Pöyzen Böyzen fans.”
He sniffed the air and frowned slightly. Bartholomew was a sommelier of heavy metal. “Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. First album was so-so. Then they ran out of materialâthey write maybe two songs a year. Got into a black magic thing for their videos. Already passé.”
“Isn't that the whole point of heavy metal?”
“Yeah. I'm the one who told you that,” he reminded me. “Heavy metal will never leave you behind.”
“Where are they from?”
“Long Island somewhere. Not the Brooklyn end.” He looked at me. “Who were these dudes? How'd you know they were fans?”
“Instinct.” I told him about the barge.
“Shitty bargainers,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“These people sold their souls to the Devil and all they got was a rusty old barge? I would've held out for something with a wet bar. Close to the T.”
When we got home, he went to his racks of albums and tried to remember whether Pöyzen Böyzen was filed under P or B. The answering machine was blinding, so I rewound it, listening to the message fast and backwards. And when you run it backwards, it's supposed to be gibberish. But this wasn't. It was a melody, a song with a strong beat that was compressed into a tinny tik-tik-tik by the machine. And
above that rhythm, a little high-pitched voice was babbling: “Satan is coming. Satan is coming.”
When it rewound all the way, I played it forward. It was heavy-metal thrash. Bart came running in, amazed. “What the fuck?” he was saying. “That's on the machine?”
“Yeah.”
“That's Pöyzen Böyzen, man. Second album. It's called âHymn.'”
“Nice song.”
They'd left the entire song for us. When it was over, there was about ten seconds of a woman screaming. And that was it.
It didn't sound like Debbie, really, but then I'd never heard Debbie scream. She wasn't the type. So I dialed her number and she answered the phone, sounding fine.
“I'd like to talk to you,” she said, and I knew I was in trouble.
“You want to get together?” I said.
“If that's okay with you.” Okay, so I was in trouble.
We had dinner at the Pearl. She let me twist for a long time before she got down to business.
“Are you still interested in seeing me?” she asked.
“Shit, of course I am. Jesus!”
She just fixed me with a big-eyed stare, penetratingly cute, yet one of keen intelligence.
“I'm sorry that I haven't been calling you enough,” I said. “I realize that I don't call enough.”
“How about if I just stopped calling you? Would that give you any more incentive?”
“Isn't that what you did?”
“Not like that, I didn't.”
“You lost me, Debbie. Explain.”
“I like you, S.T., and I've tried, a few times, to reach out and get in touch with you. And now you're addicted to it.”
“Howzat?” She was a speck on the horizon.
“We're getting into this shit now where you expect me to follow you around. To keep track of where you are, pick up the phone and
call you, do the social organizing, set up our dates. And then, when we're together, you give me this gruff shit.”
“I do?”
“Yeah. You make me come on to you, and then you pretend you don't want it. I had to put up with that once or twice on the Canada trip and I'm never going to do it again. No way. You want something from me, call me upâyou've got my fucking numberâand ask for it.”