It lifted Virga up and threw him more than thirty yards over the ice. He grasped onto fragments, the terrible blast-thunder ripping at his eardrums, the sea crashing against him again and again. He gripped the ice until his fingers were bloody. Around him there was nothing but the white of plunging ice, the black of rising water. The sound of the blast would not die away; it echoed off to the distant coast and came back full force. He cried out against it. Great chunks of ice, raining back from where they’d been thrown into the sky, clattered down around him, some striking him and glancing off. He strained to hold on to his senses.
Slowly the sound of the blast died away. The sea fell back within its limits. Across the broken field huge fragments groaned as they crushed others. Then there was only the noise of the high wind and the sea as its tides churned about far below the surface.
After a while Virga, wet and freezing, struggled up. The ice was broken all the way to the horizon. Jagged holes gaped. A greater hole, the center of the blast, was devoid of ice. He felt with dead fingers the burns on his face and realized, with a sudden strange humor, that he’d lost his eyebrows and stubble of beard. There were no corpses. It had seemed to Virga that, an instant before the explosion, he’d seen Baal and Michael simply swept away. Zark’s body had probably been blown into the bay. No matter, Virga thought as he shivered with the piercing cold, I shall soon be dead as well.
He fell back and waited, his eyes closed. What did they say about freezing to death? That it is only like falling asleep, that one is indeed very warm when just about to die? Perhaps. He felt the folds closing about him. There were so many questions he’d wanted to ask. Now, very soon, he hoped to have those questions answered. The wind swept over him, whistling past his head, and he welcomed the first signs of death.
Baal’s disciples.
Virga waited, poised with his last strength before slipping away. Someone had spoken, whispering close to his ear, but he didn’t recognize the voice.
Baal’s disciples.
There are more, Virga said. Baal is gone but they remain to walk as men, to spread contamination and brutality, blasphemy and war. They hope to deny man his mind, rob him of his thinking processes and in so doing rob him of his final chance. Baal is gone but they remain.
Something burned in his brain. He envisioned murders, gang warfare in the streets, jet fighters shrieking over flat plains where armies battled face to face, the high columns of mushroom explosions, the blasted bodies, the roar of wind through cracked city towers. Very slowly, very slowly, he climbed from the warm depths back toward the cold rim of life. He was aware, finally, of a noise over the screech of the wind. Something hovering above him. Thock thock thock thock thock thock.
He opened his eyes and they filled with tears.
It was a helicopter. A Danish flag was painted on the gray metal underbelly. Two men in heavy furs bent from the open cargo doors, staring down at him, and one of them lifted a bullhorn to his lips and spoke in Danish.
When Virga had neither stirred nor replied the man spoke again, in English. “This is the Ice Patrol. Lift your hand as a signal. We will lower a lifeline,”
Virga blinked his eyes and lay still. His body felt old and useless, something that had been drained and discarded. He was afraid he would not be able to move and, realizing his fear, he realized also that he desperately wanted to signal. He wanted to cling to life.
Someone, whispering very close to his ear, said, Baal’s disciples.
And Virga raised his arm.
Afterword
Robert McCammon Tells How He
Wrote Baal
Baal is my Angry Young Man novel. It was also my first published novel, and the first book I ever tried to write. I think that in Baal you can feel the friction of shoulders being squeezed by iron walls: my shoulders, pressing against the walls of a dead-end job.
You see, I never thought I could be a writer. Write? For money? Like…really say something? That was someone else’s dream. I went to the University of Alabama and majored in journalism, because that’s what I figured writers did. As a kid, I played around with a typewriter, and I did ghost stories, mysteries, westerns, science fiction…but those were creations to entertain myself. I was a shy kid, gawky, not very good at sports. You know the type—they never go out of style. Somewhere there’s a heaven where revenge is exacted, and all those jocks who burned bright and handsome now have beer guts and have to wait to be…the…very…last…one…chosen.
So maybe I’m still a little angry after all.
Baal is about power, written at a time when I had none. I was twenty-five years old when I wrote Baal, and working at a department store in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. My job was ferrying advertising proofs between the local newspaper and the various department heads: “traffic control,” they called it. When I went home at night, I sat down at my old Royal typewriter—long since deceased—and worked on the novel that would become Baal.
People often ask me where I get my ideas for characters. I always say that each character, whether male or female, is put together from observation, memory, and is part of the author too. I really believe there’s part of me in all my characters—and not only the good ones. The character of Baal—with his unleashed wild power and his ability to do just about anything he pleases—is certainly part of what I was feeling at that time in my life. I was an electric plug, and I couldn’t seem to find the right socket, until I began writing.
One character in Baal particularly stands out to me, and that’s the elderly and very innocent Virga. I used to have lunch at the same place every day, a restaurant called the Molton Grill that’s no longer in Birmingham, and an elderly Catholic priest would come in almost every day as well. He had his favorite table, he always seemed to order the same thing, and he ate alone. I watched the man, and I created the character of Virga in his image. I never knew the priest’s name, but I have his face in my mind. And maybe some of his spirit in Virga.
You always hear this said to young writers: “Write what you know.” I wanted to write about things I didn’t know, so I consciously set Baal in locations as far from the South as possible: Boston, the Middle East, and Greenland. I wanted a global scale and a story that would take the reader to the very edge of Armageddon, and I hope I succeeded.
As I said, Baal was my first novel. My first step into the unknown. Whatever I am today, and wherever I’m going, Baal started me on the path. Ten years since Baal was first published, I’m still on the journey.
Robert McCammon
June 1988
Robert R. McCammon, Baal
(Series: # )
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