510: Segway

Synopsis

As the cab heads across Salem, Dom is troubled by what he has read in Fiona's notes. The burning rite and the sacrifices she wondered about don't sound like the kind, gentle Fiona he knew, though it has been a long time. Simeon and Billy are dropped at the Peabody Museum, a two-story brick maritime museum on Essex Street. The elderly receptionist, Chad Glover ("Chug to my friends"), points them upstairs to the Phillips Library and suggests the Essex Institute for local witch history. Searching the library with the mirror, the pair turn up a recent donation from the collection of a sea captain, Elias Church: Scorpius Insidious: A Brief Treatise on the Order of the Scorpius, which is being catalogued in the locked archive room. On a pushed roll, Simeon persuades Chug to let them in by claiming it will help a traumatized sailor patient, and slips him a five-dollar bill for good measure.

The short folio, dated 1898, traces the Order of the Scorpius to ancient Mediterranean cults of the heavenly scorpion. It says the Order exists to find "threshold" sites where the world is thin, usually places of great violence and death, and to force them open with blood, venom and cosmic alignment, welcoming the chaos that follows. Its opposite is the Brotherhood of Orion: "Scorpius opens, Orion locks. Scorpius summons, Orion seals." Old commentaries warn that "the gate is useless without the key, and the key without the gate," and that if key and gate were ever turned together, "the wise and prudent shudder at what might stand revealed." The treatise adds that the Devereux name has withdrawn from public view in France and the Americas, amid reports of scorched ritual chambers in abandoned estates, and that the Order seems to have regrouped into smaller, more secret circles.

Meanwhile Dom, Ezra and Timeon visit the Widow's Wake, a weathered fishermen's bar in Blubber Hollow where everything comes with blubber. The young bartender, Joel Thompson, offers his boat, and a patron's boat turns out to be named the Tempest. Plied with "Water O'Donnells," Luke Renz explains his two-fire theory with a map. The great fire began on Boston Street and was carried south and east by the wind, but Devereux Street, across the river and past an unburned park, also burned that same night. Some say that a bright light tore "a seam right in the firmament" that night, stretching between the two fires. He sends them to "Major Absalom Dexter" in Ledge Hill Park.

Major Dexter turns out to be a weathered bronze statue of a Puritan witch-finder and soldier of King Philip's War, holding an open Bible and a broken sword. Ezra finds a clean, melted hole through the statue's heart. Sighting through it, the group finds that it lines up with Devereux Street in one direction and Boston Street in the other. They follow the line across the park, past a tree with a matching hole and a newly replaced fence rung, to an empty corner lot at Devereux and Adams. The rest of the rebuilt street has new houses, but here they find only a storm drain manhole cover. They fetch Simeon and Billy, who share the treatise, and the cab drops the reunited group at the storm drain.

Funny Moments

• "What is chug?" The taxi "chugs" off, and the museum receptionist turns out to be "Chug to my friends."
• The Widow's Wake menu: the "double play" (eggs with a side of blubber), and a list of waters that includes "Water O'Donnell, extra blubber."
• "Usually the only difference between a conspiracy theory and science fact is just a little bit of time."
• Luke's suspects for the second fire: "Well, the globalists."
• The man they were sent to meet is a statue: "What a waste of blubber."
• Simeon's persuasion pitch involves a traumatized "hot sailor." "I just hate to see a hot sailor suffering."
• "Get in, losers, we're going storm draining."
• "He peels rubber to get that blubber."

Notable Quotes

• "Scorpius opens. Orion locks. Scorpius summons. Orion seals." —Scorpius Insidious
• "The gate is useless without the key, and the key without the gate." —Scorpius Insidious
• "For if Orion holds the key and Scorpius tends the gate, then one must ponder what lies beyond the door that neither dares open alone." —Scorpius Insidious
• "Either one started the other, or one was started to cover up the other." —Luke Renz