Nightingale, Sing

by Karsten Knight

  The words lady in black again caused an ancient memory to stir. I could visualize the widow drifting eerily down the beach, her black robes billowing around her, only her toes touching the sand as they dragged two spectral lines through the surf. Where had I seen this image before?

  Still, the memory frustratingly drifted away from me, like the lady in black herself.

  My eyes landed on the fourth line. “Wait—why are these two words reversed?”

  “Reversed?” Atlas leaned closer to the poem.

  “It says to keep the city sound and safe. But the expression is typically safe and sound. Unless …”

  Unless the poem was trying to put emphasis on sound. My brain ran with this idea. Sound had a handful of meanings: it could mean in good condition or healthy. It could mean noise.

  It could also mean the stretch of water that separated the mainland from an island.

  And just like that, everything lined up in my mind, a slot machine coming up all sevens.

  Island. Pentagon. Lady in black.

  I don’t know if it was because I was exhausted, or because I was euphoric at solving the riddle, or maybe because of the utter ridiculousness of where the memory came from, but I started to laugh hysterically, until my eyes watered and my ribs hurt where the cannonball had struck me earlier. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

  Atlas was looking at me like I had smallpox, so I tried to regain composure. “You had the wrong supernatural creature all along,” I explained. “We’re not looking for a witch. We’re looking for a ghost.”

  His mouth formed an O of surprise. “Did you just solve the riddle?”

  “Actually, you’re never going to believe this.” I wiped the tears from my eyes. “But my deadbeat father solved it for us.”

  Meanwhile, at Nox Manor

  Sunrise came and went, and Horace Nox was still waiting in his study for the phone to ring. Sunrise, Aries had promised him. At sunrise, the latest journal page would be his, the Tides bitch would be buzzard bait, and he would be one step closer to killing the infernal malady that was gnawing at his cells.

  One step closer to resurrection.

  But the sun had breached the horizon and began its autumnal ascent across the sky. While he restlessly waited for Aries’s confirmation, he turned on the television, only to see a familiar face in the news.

  A wild-eyed Louis Grimshaw was being led across a lawn in handcuffs by a horde of police officers. In the background, a handful of women in various states of undress were also being shepherded out of a dilapidated house. Grimshaw looked like he’d been pumped so full of drugs that he couldn’t remember his own name. “Corruption in the BPD,” the caption read. “Drug and prostitution bust leads to the arrest of a twenty-year veteran of the force.”

  When the buzzer announced that someone had arrived at the front gates, Nox hurried past the buzzard cage and through the mansion. “About damn time,” he muttered as he arrived at the imposing front doors.

  But the person on the other side wasn’t Aries. It was one of her underlings, a North Shore drug dealer with a mohawk. Between the piercings in his ears, nose, and eyebrows, he had more rings than Saturn.

  Once Nox had allowed him inside, the dealer reached into his bag with trembling hands and pulled out a scuffed metal object. His whole body quaked with fear—nobody liked to be the bearer of bad news to Horace Nox—but he gingerly held the item out for his boss to take.

  It was a single, steel ram’s horn, the forward tip worn down to a nub and the base coated in dried blood.

  Nox stared at the horn, without ever really focusing. Finally, he reached into the holster tucked into his suit pants. “I know this is going to seem really cliché,” he said almost apologetically.

  Then he drew the gun and fired two rounds into the messenger’s head.

  Before the boy’s corpse even hit the ground, Nox’s phone was ringing in his pocket. He expected even more bad news when he answered, but as it turned out, his luck was about to change.

  “One of your hunches panned out,” said the man on the other end, his final remaining contact in the police, now that Grimshaw had been decommissioned. “Tides’s roommate came up clean at first, until I looked into his employment history. Turns out he works at the Haven Halls Condominiums. It’s in the South End, same neighborhood where we got the ping from that disposable phone.”

  Nox couldn’t help it—he started to laugh. I found your new nest, little bird.

  “It gets better,” the dirty cop went on. “I just ran his credit cards and Atlas made an interesting purchase this morning: He rented a boat out of Marblehead.”

  And now, Nox thought, I’m going to clip your wings. And saw off your beak. And pluck you clean until you beg me to throw you in the skillet.

  As soon as he’d hung up the phone, he stepped over the body and the pool of crimson that was slowing spreading over his tiles. In the blood and brain splatter on his wall, he dipped his finger and slowly doodled two words:

  Gone fishin’.

  While the dusk sun languished on the horizon, our pontoon boat skimmed over the gentle waves of Boston Harbor. Atlas stood at the helm, navigating the obstacle course of buoys and danger markers. The harbor’s tallest lighthouse, which sat on a chunk of rock known as “The Graves,” pulsed rhythmically as we motored by. Meanwhile, I let the wind race through my hair and gazed south toward our destination: a series of islands that loomed like coal silhouettes against the darkening sky.

  If the Boston Harbor Islands were a cross-section of the city’s history, you’d see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Famine, Conquest, War, and Death. Today, the thirty-four islands scattered throughout the harbor mostly played home to family-friendly recreation and gull watching. Every weekend from April until September, throngs of visitors squeezed onto boats out of Long Wharf and descended on the archipelago with picnic baskets and quilts. Slathered in sunscreen, they’d bask in the ocean air and eat hot dogs from concession stands, while wondering how such a pastoral oasis could coexist so close to Boston’s skyline.

  Most of these tourists remained oblivious to the uglier rubble of history beneath their feet. Take Spectacle Island, for instance. It got its name because its two hills made it look like a misshapen pair of eyeglasses. Visitors loved to climb its drumlins, which were terraced with shrubs and flowers and offered a beautiful view of the city.

  What these hikers often failed to realize was that they were standing on what used to be mountains of century-old garbage, toxins, and disease.

  Prior to its cleanup, Spectacle was home to a garbage incinerator for many years. Eventually, the city of Boston began to dump trash on the island, until the mid-twentieth century, when the heaps became so immense that the rubbish swallowed a bulldozer whole. To deal with this issue, the city proposed an innovative solution: From the highway tunnel they had trenched through Boston, they would take five thousand barges dirt and dump it on the remaining garbage. They landscaped the whole island into a park, added a visiting center and a marina for incoming ships, and voila! Instant nature preserve.

  The island’s colorful history didn’t stop there. Spectacle had also been home to a grease reclamation plant that processed garbage fluid to make soap; a facility that rendered horse carcasses into glue and brushes; a series of hotels, which were shut down for gambling and prostitution; and a smallpox quarantine station, through which the disease eventually killed much of the Native American population that had fished the island’s coast for centuries.

  Atlas eased off the throttle as we floated deeper into the domicile of these stone giants. To our starboard side, a pyramid striped black and white rose out of the water to prevent sailors from running aground on Nixes Mate, a tiny island with a macabre history. In 1726, the buccaneer William Fly had been captured after a mutiny aboard the Elizabeth, which he and his fellow mutineers renamed the Fame’s Revenge. Fly was sent to the gallows in Boston, and he was such a badass that he’d chastised his executioner for impr
operly tying his noose—then made the proper hangman’s knot himself. Fly’s remains had been displayed on the rocks of Nixes Mate as a public warning to all would-be pirates.

  Atlas was watching me intently. “Nostalgic smile, thousand-yard gaze—something reminded you of Jack, didn’t it?”

  “I can’t even sail past a rock at high tide without hearing the echoes of some yarn he once told me,” I said. “All those times that I begged him not to give me another unsolicited history lecture, and now I’d trade a year off my life just to hear him recite one more stupid fact.”

  Atlas cut the engine as we arrived at our final destination: George’s Island. I hopped off the boat first, catching the tow line from Atlas and lashing it to the pier.

  While the other islands in the harbor were steeped with colorful histories and folklore, this was the one that seemed to have an answer for every line in the tenth riddle.

  The first stop for enemies from afar,

  George’s Island was home to Fort Warren, a 150-year-old military fortification that had guarded Boston Harbor from marine attacks during the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World Wars I and II.

  The last for enemies from within,

  During the Civil War, the island had served as an offshore prison camp for captured Confederates, including several generals and the vice president of the Confederacy.

  Five brazen stone-faced soldiers

  To keep their city sound and safe.

  Fort Warren had been constructed in the shape of a pentagon for defensive reasons. Its five massive walls were the first line of protection against enemy artillery fire.

  A widow mourns a lonely walk,

  Her grave mistake, her husband’s ruin,

  This was the part where I regrettably had to give my father credit. Buck Tides wasn’t what you’d call a learned man, but as a fourth-generation Boston resident, he’d inherited a wealth of “unofficial history,” including ghost stories that he liked to scare Jack and me with when we were little.

  One his favorites was “The Lady in Black.”

  According to the folktale, the wife of a Confederate prisoner conspired to liberate her husband and infiltrated the island, dressed as a man. During her botched attempt at a jailbreak, her pistol misfired, accidentally killing her husband.

  And roams the beach eternally

  Grieving in black amongst the gray.

  The widow was sentenced to death for treason, and for her execution, she wore the only female clothing they could find on the island: a black dress, instead of the gray of the Confederate uniform. Her spirit purportedly still haunted the shores of George’s Island, and many who spent the twilight hours here reported hearing her wailing on the beach, lamenting her grave mistake.

  Atlas and I gathered the required materials we’d brought with us, and I took inventory to make sure we weren’t leaving anything behind: two shovels, a laser pointer, a hundred-yard spool of twine, and one athletic field marker, the rolling machine that sports teams used to paint lines on the turf.

  “Ready to play ball?” Atlas asked me.

  I hoisted the shovel onto my shoulder. “Batter up.”

  I’d underestimated how eerie the island would be at night. The buildings sat in complete darkness, including the explosives warehouse that had, hilariously, been transformed into a visitor center. A cannon pointed ominously at the empty Adirondack chairs lining the beach. You could easily imagine the wraith of a dead widow gliding between them.

  We journeyed down the dark tunnel that led into the heart of Fort Warren, the sweeping parade grounds where soldiers had once trained and prisoners had stretched their stiff legs after long nights in confinement. The five stone walls rose around us. Although it was dead quiet, I could almost hear the bombastic crack of artillery fire echo through history, the morning bugle call coaxing tired soldiers from the barracks into the cold embrace of dawn.

  In the middle of the vast green, Atlas stopped, drew in a deep breath, and tilted his head to the starry sky. “I used to play vintage baseball games here every summer,” he said. “It was a history nerd’s dream—dressing in nineteenth-century uniforms, playing without gloves like real men. The pitcher’s mound would have been somewhere around here.”

  I dumped my equipment on the ground. “You’d make one hell of a personal ad, you know that? ‘Sandcastle-building vintage baseball player seeks history-loving woman who enjoys a seductive frolic in the blueberry patch.’”

  “Well, I don’t know what the future holds for my love life,” he said as he handed me the end of our twine spool, “but you’ve set the bar unreasonably high for first dates. How am I supposed to go back to ‘dinner and a movie’ after this?”

  Our plan to conquer the third stanza of the riddle involved as much geometry as it did history. The final lines had told us to look where the five petals of the cinquefoil converged, which Atlas and I agreed must be the fort’s geometrical center. To calculate this location more precisely, we’d devised a plan:

  We were going to draw a big-ass star.

  Over the course of the next hour, we repeatedly stretched the rope from one corner of the fort to another. As soon as it was taut, we’d flash the laser pointers at each other to indicate that we were in place. Then we’d roll the athletic line marker along the length of twine, using it like a gigantic ruler to guide the white aerosol paint. When we were done, the five lines formed a star so enormous that even the passengers of a jetliner would be able to see it from cruising altitude.

  The convergence of the five lines left a smaller pentagon in their center. We repeated the process inside it, painting a smaller star, and then again within that one, until our kaleidoscope of lines left us with an innermost pentagon six feet across. This marked the center of the courtyard.

  In unison, Atlas and I both scooped up our shovels and clinked the heads together like champagne glasses. “The promise of life springs anew,” I quoted the riddle.

  The digging was easier this time, since the moist harbor ground wasn’t frozen like the soil in Dana. Still, it wasn’t until we had excavated enough dirt for the hole to rise over my head that my shovel struck something. If the hollow metallic bong that resonated on impact gave any indication, it was enormous.

  We vigorously uncovered the iron shell, which was several feet in diameter and perfectly round. When the top half of the sphere was fully exposed, Atlas gave a low whistle.

  “You know what this is?” I asked him.

  He cleared his throat. “It, uh, appears to be a submarine mine.”

  “A mine?” I screeched. “Of the explosive variety?” I took a step back toward the edge of our deep hole. I entertained a horrific vision of the shell detonating, of feeling a short-lived burst of unfathomable, fiery pain before my consciousness was squelched out and my liquefied flesh painted the parade grounds.

  Atlas seemed less concerned. He knelt down and began to scrape the remaining dirt off the casing, using water from his canteen to loosen it up. “Something tells me that this one isn’t stuffed with dynamite, unless the person who designed this riddle quest was a psychotic nihilist. Mines like this were manually detonated by a long series of electrical wires. If it was touch-activated, it probably would have blown up when you harpooned it with your shovel.”

  I waited tensely while Atlas pulled a knife from his pocket. He found a metal cap that covered an entry point into the mine and scored the dirt away from the seam. “At one point, during World War II, there were more than five hundred of these buoyed beneath the surface of Boston Harbor, fifty tons of dynamite ready to shred any German U-boats. Kind of makes you wonder if they forgot one, and it’s still floating out in the water somewhere …”

  With the cap loosened, Atlas grasped it by the metal ring on top. “Last chance to get out of the hole before I pull the pin on this ginormous grenade.”

  “And let you be the sole martyr? Fat chance.” I steeled myself for the worst as the muscles in Atlas’s forearm tensed. With his eyes scrun
ched shut, he gave the cap a hard yank.

  Pop. The plug came free and the torpedo expelled a plume of musty air, a long sigh decades in the making. Relieved that we hadn’t been incinerated, I dove for the mine and slipped my arm down into the sphere. It took some grasping around the inside, but eventually my hand found something thin and papery plastered to the interior wall. I carefully pried it from the adhesive holding it in place. “Either we just opened the world’s biggest fortune cookie”—I pulled the eleventh journal page through the opening—“or we found the next riddle.”

  Tempted as we were to start reading, we agreed to make ourselves scarce. Getting caught by harbor patrol on an island that we vandalized, with the paint still drying on what looked like the symbol from an occult ritual, would put a definite kink in our plans.

  Our excited smiles lasted only until we emerged from the other end of the tunnel. Because when we reached the beach, that’s when we heard the boat.

  Atlas and I lunged for cover behind the ornamental cannon as the motor approached. At first, we could only make out the ship’s outline through the all-consuming darkness. A spotlight bloomed on the bow and swiveled around until it landed on our little Sun Cruiser.

  “The Coast Guard?” I whispered to Atlas. I squinted to make out the name painted on the hull.

  Someone on the ship lobbed a green baseball-sized object through the air. It landed in the bed of our Sun Cruiser.

  Atlas understood what he was seeing before I did. He flattened me to the sand.

  The grenade exploded, rending our boat into fiery scraps of wood and scorched fiberglass. The heat wave hit my face from across the beach and debris clattered down around us.