Rig Page 4

  “Good Lord,” he said, “J.D., is that really you on my front porch?”

  “Hey Bear,” J.D. said, returning the smile and extending a hand. “I was in the neighborhood.”

  “You suck as a liar,” Mark replied, standing aside and letting J.D. into the living room.

  As soon as J.D. stepped inside, the small white dog immediately lunged forward barked furiously, its entire body convulsed with rage and fury. The fact that the dog barely made it to J.D.’s knees and he could easily kick it the length of the house did not seem to matter to the animal. It was a mass of shaggy, clumpy white fur and teeth with huge brown eyes and dark black nose.

  “Shelby, shut up!” Mark roared and clapped his hands. The dog stopped for a moment and let loose a series of growls and chuffing noises. Then Mark did a curious thing, he grabbed an empty plastic water bottle and blew across the top of it. The sound was a deep bass sound like that of a ship or foghorn. The dog looked up at him with sudden terror, turned and ran away, tail between its legs.

  “I have no idea why she is so scared of that sound, but whenever I do that she runs and hides. That should give us some time to actually make it into the living room.”

  J.D. smiled and walked into the living room. Mark had not decorated the place and that was a certainty. Mark was a celebrated, if reclusive, writer specializing in stories that dealt with the occult, hell and general tales of horror. J.D. knew that he had an office and bedroom just filled with memorabilia from various conventions, from fans and from things he had just shopped for himself that dealt with these topics. The living room was white with very severe and contemporary-looking furniture; the kind with a lot of black metal around the edges and glass. There was an area rug on the floor and leather sofas. J.D. had a seat in one of those.

  “So, what really brings you here?” Mark asked.

  “You know where my interests lie,” J.D. said. “I can still remember when I first wrote you that letter.”

  “Still the most earnest letter I have ever received,” Mark said. “I am already intrigued by your tone.”

  “Mark, you know what kind of work I do, right?” J.D. asked.

  Mark nodded. “I don’t know any details, of course, but I know enough.”

  “I want you to come along on something I’ve been hired to do,” J.D. said.

  Mark’s eyes went wide. “Me?”

  J.D. sighed and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a white cassette tape.

  “What I have on here is something I cannot possibly explain,” he said. “I think maybe you, with the kind of things you write about, maybe you can.”

  “Well, you have all of my attention now,” Mark replied. “What do you need to show me?”

  “Let’s go to your office for a few minutes,” J.D. said.

  * * *

  What surprised J.D. was not that Mark reacted violently or got ill upon listening to the horrible sounds but the fact that he had almost no reaction at all. They walked upstairs into the parts of the home that it was obvious Mark West had not paid someone to decorate. Strange animals lined the walls and it seemed every available space was filled with a bookshelf, which, in turn, was filled to bursting with books of all sizes and shapes and colors. Most of the authors were ones J.D. had never heard of but then he had never been much for reading anything past the sports page.

  Mark’s office was a stunning example of his dual nature. Mark had a clean-freak tucked away inside him but the laziness of a slob as well. There were attempts to straighten out the clutter, perhaps stacking the assorted papers instead of leaving them scattered, but it was at best half-hearted. Beneath a pile of papers, books and other odds and ends, was a stereo and a tape player that J.D. used to play him the transmissions from Rig 42.

  The sounds filled the room and J.D. felt that sickening feeling in his stomach. The sounds still amazed him. They were like the sounds of billion people screaming, being horribly tortured, and behind that, a strange guttural, growling noise that was anything but human. J.D. expected Mark to react as he had, and as Karmen had and as Larry had told him he had. Instead, the writer sat in his chair; his chin on his chest, eyes fixed on the floor, one hand up to his chin, and stroked his beard. When the tape ended he merely nodded.

  “I’ve heard that before,” Mark said simply.

  J.D was almost knocked back as hard as he had been when Karmen had kicked him in the chest. “You’ve what?”

  Mark nodded. “The sounds of Hell. Come over here.”

  Mark gestured towards the computer that fought hard for space on the cluttered and battered office desk that Mark used for his workspace. The desk was the kind of thing that looked as if it had been plucked from the garbage of an office building going through some remodeling. Mark had had this thing for so many years he couldn’t imagine using any other desk for his work and the shabbiness of it was in stark contrast to the expense that appeared to have gone into the computer itself.

  “Remember, “Mark said, “I am a freak for the urban legend. Those sounds have been recorded before. Recorded in other places and by other people but recorded nonetheless.”

  With a rapidity that J.D. did not posses with a computer and a deftness that was too fast to follow, Mark called up a web site dedicated to urban legends. He typed the word “Hell” into the search engine and a number of entries popped up. He clicked on one link in particular and then paged down to the bottom where there was another link. He clicked on that and found himself on another page, this one obviously run by some Christian organization and with the headline across the top, “Has Hell Been Recorded?”

  “The tale goes that a number of geologists were digging a well in Siberia,” Mark began, “and they were maybe nine miles down when the drill bit began moving wildly, as if they had dug into a huge hollow space. They pulled the drill up and several of the workers felt an intense heat coming from the hole. They lowered a thermometer into the hole and began getting readings of 2,000 degrees or more and several workers felt heat coming up from the hole. Then, some of the workers thought they heard a voice, as if someone were deep in the hole. Legend says that they had super-sensitive microphones, used to detect plate movement within the earth, and they lowered those down. They heard what sounded like a single voice screaming. Someone decided to record the screams and when they played them back later they discovered it wasn’t just one voice, but thousands, perhaps millions of voices screaming.”

  Mark looked up at J.D.’s now wide eyes. Mark clicked on something on the website and, sure enough, the sounds they had just listened to on the tape emanated from his computer. J.D. sat down again with his eyes wide in surprise.

  “Lots of Christian sites have used this recording to try to explain that, well, if there is a Hell, then there must, by contrast, be a Heaven,” he said. “Most have stated it’s just a hoax. If you do listen closely the recordings sound faked. There is even one site that claims Jacques Cousteau, the legendary undersea scientist, stopped going underwater because he was in a cave under there and heard screams. Another legend says an assistant of his was in a diving bell in one of the deep ocean trenches and heard the sounds and went insane. None of that is true, either.”

  “So what are you saying?” J.D. asked. “Are you telling me this is just another hoax.”

  Mark shook his head. “No, that was obviously a mayday signal from that particular rig. Something definitely happened out there.”

  “No one’s heard from anyone on the rig since this,” J.D. said, “and there have been satellite pictures and helicopter fly-overs and it’s like the whole rig was abandoned. Plus, well, there’s something else – “

  He paused, leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

  “Several people died when they heard the transmissions I just played for you,” J.D. said.

  Mark’s eyes went wide this time. “That’s a new one.”

  “Several Coast Guar men and some folks who heard it on their shortwave,” J.D. said. “Their brains and internal organs we
re liquefied.”

  “Jesus,” Mark said, “sounds like something I might write about.”

  “The story is being hushed up by the company,” J.D continued, “and if there has to be an official story it will be that there was some kind of gas leak or gas attack. The story about terrorists is why they want me to go in and why I am bringing some folks who have a background like me along. I want you to come along too, though.”

  Mark laughed. “Me? What possible use could I be out there?’

  “You already have been,” J.D. said. “You knew about this kind of thing. You have knowledge about this kind of thing. Lord knows, you’ve written enough about this kind of thing. I need someone who might have some notion of what we’re dealing with.”

  Mark paused, stroked his beard again, and looked back at the floor, as if the spot between his feet held some answers that his brain did not. After what seemed like a very long time to J.D., who was starting to get just a tad creeped-out by the things on the walls in this office and the covers of the books that hung in frames on the wall, he looked back at J.D.

  “You have an oil rig that transmitted those sounds,” he said, “and you have missing crew members. You have deceased people who heard the transmissions. You have one of the world’s largest oil companies willing to send mercenaries to their brand new, multi-million dollar oil rig, just to find out what happened. Have I summed things up pretty well, there?”

  J.D. merely nodded.

  “I would suggest you not take this job,” Mark replied. “As you say, I have spent much of my adult life dealing with the strange, the occult and things of the supernatural. Most of it exists only in fiction and only in the mind. What you are describing is something very different and if what you are describing has any merit, then it is a very dangerous thing and should be avoided at all costs.”

  He paused and stared J.D. directly in the eyes.

  “However,” he said, “if you are as you say you are, and I believe that is the case, then I know you have already accepted the job because of your own curiosity and because of your dedication to duty. As such, although the idea terrifies me more than I can express, I will agree to go with you.”

  J.D. smiled. “I’m very relieved you said that.”

  “Don’t be,” Mark said, “because if you are relieved you might feel at ease. If there is any truth to what you’ve said or what you played for me then you definitely cannot afford to treat this lightly.”

  J.D. nodded and then he stood up. He walked over to Mark and shook his hand.

  “I’m glad you’re aboard,” he said. “I’ll have more information for you in a few days. I wish I could stay longer, but –“

  “Yes, I figured,” Mark said, taking his hand. “I’m truly hoping this turns out to be another hoax.”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” J.D. said.

  6

  J.D. sat in his hotel room overlooking the Chicago River and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t really had a home in a very long time so he had retired to this room after his meeting with Mark had ended. He was tired and not just from the jet lag. He was just tired in general and something about this job both excited and terrified him. It was something he felt that Mark had been able to see as well.

  J.D. had been doing what he did for so long it was hard for him to imagine another life. He envied Karmen, who had dreams of things beyond the life they had both been in, even if it was a dream only of isolation and removal from the rest of the world. This was also something J.D. could relate to but he was a strange paradox when it came to this idea. He often felt the need to be left alone by everyone and everything but he also craved being around people. He needed human contact.

  Karmen and J.D. had burned hot for each other a few years back. It was the kind of intense romance that springs from being in intense situations and surrounded by people who did not speak your language. They had tumbled into bed with one another because she was female, he was male, they both had needs and they were both of the same color and spoke the same language. When you got past the surface, to what lurked beneath both of them, they didn’t really have much in common.

  J.D. had left her when the things in Somalia had turned so awful. J.D. had never liked the desert much. He preferred the jungles and brush in South America or Asia. However, Karmen had convinced him that they could maybe actually do some good there. When he got there and saw how the land was torn apart by warlords and apparently not looking to change that any time soon, despair set in. Once too often he watched children, women, and entire families killed outright or slowly starved to death. J.D. had no ideals that he could save the world but when he failed to save even a child or family, he gave up. He begged her to come with but she stayed and something had happened to her there and he knew better than to push to find out what that was.

  He walked back to the bed where he had maps, schematics and pictures of the oil rig spread out from headboard to the foot and onto the floor. The oil rig was enormous. Much of what he read and reviewed made no sense to him. He only needed to have some idea of the layout of the place. What he thought was that the place was very much like a kind of floating prison. The workers lived in small quarters surrounded by nothing but water, exposed to the elements, and doing work that could be very dangerous. Evidently, it had turned out to be more dangerous than any of them could possibly know.

  Mark’s words echoed in his head and he reviewed the pictures again. J.D. had a fascination with the supernatural and the unknown and wanted very much to believe that something more than the sorry world he had experienced actually existed. He feared, very much, that this was not the case. However, the thought that maybe something unnatural had occurred on that oil rig made him all the more desperate to get out there and see what had happened. He was also afraid that if there was a hell then it was a place he might experience firsthand at some point. He figured why not get a preview now.

  J.D. stood and shook his head, trying to clear it. He dropped to the floor and did a number of push-ups and then a large number of sit-ups. He felt as if he had gotten soft. He actually did worry about the fact that Karmen had been able to send him flying across the room so easily at her place. He worried that the years were catching up to him too fast.

  He spent many more hours reviewing the material before it all began to mash together into a giant mess in his head. In the end, he felt nothing could prepare him for whatever might be out there. If Mark was right, nothing on earth could prepare anyone for what was out there. He cleared the papers off the bed and let them tumble down around it and climbed into it. His dreams were troubled but he managed to sleep.

  * * *

  Forty-eight hours later, J.D., Karmen and Mark were seated in the offices of GemCo Oil. They were seated in one of the conference rooms that gave a spectacular view of the city below and, undoubtedly, impressed the clients and visitors who came to the office. J.D. was nervous and he looked around the table at the additional people who had been brought in. Karmen had brought one of the unfamiliar people and the rest were hand-picked by Larry Appling.

  Joe Nealom sat next to Karmen, his eyes narrow and his hand up to his chin. He was dressed well in a suit and tie. This wardrobe completely hid his natural instincts. J.D. and Joe had worked before and he was good friends with Karmen. He was a man J.D. found an enigma. Joe had a beard and a bit of a paunch that masqueraded the fact he was as fast and could kill a man with his bare hands. He was a voracious reader and science fiction fan. He could talk to you about an episode of Star Trek one moment and then gut you with a foot-long knife the next second. He was well trained, but J.D. didn’t know too much beyond that. Given their line of work, it was usually better not to know too much. Only Karmen and himself had crossed that line.

  Larry, when the meeting started, introduced the rest of the team. There was a Latino gentleman with dark hair, dark eyes and brown skin named Lazlo Tropez and he was, evidently, an expert on oilrigs. He was part of the team that designed Rig 42 and knew the systems inside and o
ut. He asked a lot of very strange and, to J.D.’s mind, stupid questions during their introductions and J.D. was very unsure about him. Next to Lazlo were two other women, which also made J.D. nervous. A black woman with long brown hair and ample bosom named Monica Green was also, evidently, an expert on running oilrigs. Finally, there was a tall woman with blond hair, black-rimmed glasses and a face that all-too-easily broke out into a wide toothy grin named Rhonnie Monticue. When she spoke, her voice had a syrupy feel to it that made J.D. think of marshmallows dipped in honey and he immediately felt an intense dislike towards her. Anyone who was so deliberately happy while smiling so coldly and without feeling was someone J.D. did not want to be around or have on his team. Larry stated that Rhonnie was medically trained and might be valuable for the team. This was Larry’s call and he had to go with it.

  “Finally,” Larry said, “I have been asked to go along with the team as well.”

  “Why is that?” J.D. asked.

  “Mr. Iler says that he wants me to go with to look out for company interests,” Larry said. “That’s about all I can say about it for right now.”

  “I’m not entirely comfortable with that,” J.D. said. “I just want that known right here and now. I’ll take these people with, but I hope they understand the potential risks.”

  “I chose these people because they were the type who understood this kind of risk,” Larry said. “I am not looking to jeopardize anything here, J.D., I just want people who can fulfill a function.”

  Larry turned his attention to a large screen on the wall behind him. He held a remote control in his hand. The screen showed slides of the oilrig. The structure was enormous. Metal pipes and girders stretched high above the sea level and stood upon four large posts that were connected to one another with very large, cross-wise posts and all of it was cemented to the floor of the ocean itself using enormous cement blocks. There was a large building on the structure itself that contained the control rooms, various offices, mess hall and the crew quarters as well as a recreation room, computer room, and everything else needed to eke out a semblance of life upon the rig. There was a helicopter landing pad that stuck out over the water, and a large boom stretched high into the sky and over the water. This was not a crane, J.D. was informed, but a pipe for venting gas that came up through the structure when oil had been found.