Be nice? he thought. Girl, you probably should take your own advice. But Chip seemed already to have forgotten about his ribbing and was going back to business as usual, watching Whitey out of one corner of his eye, waiting for him to misfile another CD.
Chapter Fourteen
At first something seemed to be wrong with the video. When they started it, the monitor stayed black and there was no music to be heard.
“There seems to be a problem,” Heidi said, and reached out to restart the DVD. “Technical difficulties,” she said into the mike. “Nothing we can’t handle. Banter, guys.”
“Um, did you guys give us some sort of foreign-coded DVD? PAL or whatever?” asked Whitey.
“There is no problem,” said Count Gorgann, in a falsely deep voice and with a heavy Norwegian accent.
“But I’m not seeing anything but darkness,” said Heidi. “And there’s no music.”
“Yes,” said Count Gorgann. “This is it exactly. Darkness. And silence.”
“So let me get this straight, man,” said Herman. “You recorded darkness and silence. Kind of like John Cage.”
“Who is this caged man named John?” asked Count Gorgann.
“Yes,” said Dr. Butcher. He had a similar accent, slightly less thick. “Exactly like John Cage, if John Cage was a worshipper of Satan.”
“Okayyy,” said Herman. “Whitey? Anything to add? Or should we sit here watching darkness and listening to silence?”
“I got nothing,” said Whitey.
“Heidi? What you got for me?”
“You want me to start this thing up again or not?” asked Heidi.
“It is the darkness and silence of the infernal regions,” said Count Gorgann, matter-of-factly.
“Is it now?” said Herman. “Sounds cozy.”
Whitey laughed.
“Real funny,” said Herman. “We got anything else of theirs to play, Heidi?”
“This is it,” said Heidi. “I think their production company was supposed to send something, but nothing has arrived. We only have this DVD because they brought it.”
“Excuse me, it is not only the darkness and silence of the infernal regions,” said Dr. Butcher. “First, it is such silence, to set the tone, and then we deploy our instruments to capture the torments of the damned.”
“So there’s music,” said Herman. “Eventually.”
“Yes,” said Count Gorgann. “It is so.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” said Herman. “Heidi, roll tape.”
“You got it,” said Heidi.
The video started up again. At first, again, there was only the darkness and silence. “How long does this part last?” asked Whitey.
“Shhh,” said Count Gorgann. “You must listen.”
Whitey tried hard to repress his laughter.
“I think I see something,” claimed Heidi. Count Gorgann tried to shush her. On the monitor, the darkness was still there, but it had become a little more variegated. Vague shapes were beginning to appear. Then the music began.
At first it started as a single highly distorted note on a lone bass guitar, strummed over and over until it began to seem like a kind of drone. Then a second bass joined in, and a third, the three of them riffing off one another, punctuated by the aggressive thumps of a bass drum. Each time the hammer struck the bass drum, a flash of light came. These left the stage for the most part veiled in darkness, with brief images captured on the video here and there. Glimpses of the band members flashed on one by one, a drifting smoke rising and obscuring them, even when the lights were on them. They were dressed in black, their faces dead white, spikes sprouting not only from their bodies but from their guitars as well. The music was almost thrashy, very fast and discordant, and the singer sounded like he’d been possessed by the devil. The words were sometimes in Norwegian, sometimes in an English that was badly enough pronounced to be almost incomprehensible.
And then suddenly the stage disappeared, to be replaced by news footage of a church burning. The music continued.
“What’s this?” asked Herman. “Video’s over? New video?”
“History of the struggle,” said Dr. Butcher. “Now please be quiet.”
Herman raised his hands in mock surrender.
The footage suddenly cut out, going back to the concert again. The singer had run the spikes on his wrist along his side until he started to bleed. Watered down Stooges, thought Heidi dismissively. Then it was back to the burning church. Or another burning church, she realized, not the same one. What was the story there? she wondered. She remembered vaguely a controversy in the nineties surrounding the burning of a series of churches in Norway, and the assumption that it had been tied to black metal, maybe even had been done by members of a black-metal band, but she couldn’t remember the band’s name and she wasn’t really sure what the whole story had been. Herman had said something about it on the way over, but she hadn’t really been listening. She’d failed to do her homework for the interview, and there’d never been any question of Whitey doing much—he did better just playing off of whatever Herman said, harassing him mildly. Which meant Herman would have to carry them.
When they shifted back to the concert again, the lead singer’s demonic singing had deteriorated into a series of screams. Heidi winced. The lights flashed on and off faster and faster as the music crescendoed into something that Heidi did have to admit sounded like what she imagined the shrieking of the damned would sound like. And then with a burst of fire, the stage lit up all at once and all four members of the band were finally revealed, their faces now dripping with what looked like blood. The last chord was cut off abruptly, and the stage was plunged into darkness again, leaving Heidi unsure whether the video had ended or if they’d run through the end of the recorded tape.
“That’s it?” said Herman. “We’re done now.”
“Again there is silence and darkness,” said Count Gorgann. “We have returned to the primordial chaos.”
“So wait,” said Herman. “Is the song over or not?”
Count Gorgann shrugged.
“I think it’s over,” said Heidi. “For us, anyway.”
Herman shook his head. “I’m with you, girl,” he said. “If you’re just tuning in, we are here with Leviathan the Fleeing Serpent and the song you just heard and we just saw was ‘Crushing the Ritual.’ ” He turned to Count Gorgann. “I must admit, I’m a little…”
Whitey pretended to cough. “Old,” he said.
“… more into the classics,” said Herman, giving Whitey a dirty look. “Led Zeppelin, Motörhead, Black Sabbath, that sort of thing when it comes to heavy stuff. So I don’t exactly understand your music, but I do understand your passion. I see the passion… I get the passion. Can you explain the philosophy behind your music?”
“Yes,” said Count Gorgann, in his heavy accent. He leaned his elbows on the table and tented his fingers, a posture that clashed oddly with his makeup and manner of dress. “It is very simple,” he claimed. “Our philosophy is to expose the lies of the whores of Christianity and Jesus, the true bringers of death. We believe this way of life should be erased from the earth. More souls have been lost because of this war… God’s war. We fight this in our music.”
Herman looked like he’d swallowed something that tasted awful. “Whoa, all right,” he said. He glanced down at the handful of notes he’d brought. Heidi could see they were largely Internet printouts, most of them from the band’s own Web page. “So, are you for or against the church burnings that were taking place in Norway back in the early nineties?”
Dr. Butcher leaned forward. “We believe all churches should end in smoldering ashes,” he said.
“You do?” said Herman. “Really?”