Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) (26 page)

Almost to the house. Another twenty feet and they’d be at the door. The
closed
door. What if it was locked?

Where was Alan? Good God, if he was still outside he was a goner, a sitting duck in that wheelchair.

Just then one of the chew wasps whizzed past her cheek and buried its teeth into Ba’s shoulder. He grunted with pain but kept running, kept swinging his club ahead of him and clearing the path. Fighting her rising gorge, Sylvia shifted Jeffy’s weight to one arm and reached up with her free hand; she forced her fingers around the chewer’s body and gave it a violent twist. The body cracked and the teeth came free of Ba’s back as cold fluid ran down her arm.

Ba turned and nodded his thanks, and at that instant, a writhing mass of tentacles dropped onto the back of his neck. He stumbled but managed to hold his balance and keep moving. And then they were at the door, Sylvia pulling whatever tentacles she could reach free of Ba’s neck as he groped for the doorknob. If the door was locked they were doomed. They’d die right here on Toad Hall’s front steps.

But the door opened before Ba reached it. Light flooded out. She had a glimpse of Alan looking up from his wheelchair as he held it open. They tumbled through to the foyer and the door slammed shut behind them. Ba dropped his billy and sank to his knees, clawing at the tentacled monstrosity wrapping itself around his throat. Sylvia put Jeffy down and went to help him but Alan suddenly rolled between them and reached toward the floor.

“Drop your hands a second, Ba.”

As Ba obeyed, Alan lifted the spiked club. He swung at the man-of-war, ripping its air sac and tearing open its body. The tentacles loosened their grip and Ba ripped it free, hurling it to the floor. As it tried to flutter-crawl toward Jeffy across the marble floor, Alan ran it over with the big wheel of his chair. Twice. Finally the thing lay still.

Behind her, Jeffy was sobbing. From somewhere in the basement, Phemus barked wildly.

Ba staggered to his feet. His neck was a mass of blood, his clothing shredded and bloody. He faced her, panting, ragged, swaying.

“You and the Boy are all right, Missus?”

“Yes, Ba. Thanks to you. But you need a doctor.”

“I will go wash myself.” He turned and headed for the guest bathroom.

Sylvia looked at Alan. Tears streaked his face. His lips were trembling.

“I thought you were dead! I knew you were out there and needed help and I couldn’t go to you.” He pounded his thighs. “God
damn
these useless things!”

Sylvia lifted Jeffy and carried him to Alan. She seated herself on Alan’s lap and adjusted Jeffy on hers. Alan’s arms encircled them both. Jeffy began to cry. Sylvia understood perfectly. For the first time today she felt safe. And that feeling of safety opened the floodgates. She began to sob as she had never sobbed in her life. The three of them cried together.

The Horror Channel’s Drive-In Theatre

Night of Bloody Horror
(1969) Howco International

Cataclysm

Maui

The
moana puka
appeared around dusk.

Kolabati and Moki had been standing on the lanai watching the sun sink into the Pacific—earlier than ever. Barely a quarter to seven. They were also watching the airport far below. Kolabati couldn’t remember ever seeing it so busy.

“Look at them,” Moki said, grinning as he slipped an arm around her waist. “The shrinking daylight’s got them all spooked. See how they run.”

“It’s got me spooked too.”

“Don’t let it. If it sends all the Jap
malahinis
scurrying west back to their own islands, and all the
haoles
back to the mainland—preferably back to New York, where they can fall into that hole in Central Park—it’s all for the good. It will leave the islands to the Hawaiians.”

She’d been fascinated by the news of the mysterious hole in the Sheep Meadow. She knew the area well. Her brother Kusum had once owned an apartment overlooking Central Park.

“
I’m
not Hawaiian.”

He tightened his grip on her waist. “As long as you’re with me, you are.”

Somehow his encircling arm was not as comforting as she would have wished. They watched the airport in silence awhile longer, then Moki released her and leaned on the railing, staring out at the valley, the sky.

“Something’s going to happen soon. Do you feel it?”

Kolabati nodded. “Yes. I’ve felt it for days.”

“Something wonderful.”

“Wonderful?” She stared at him. Could he mean it? She’d been plagued by an almost overwhelming sense of dread since the trade winds had reversed themselves. “No. Not wonderful at all. Something terrible.”

His grin became fierce. “Terrible for other people, maybe. But wonderful for us. You wait and see.”

Kolabati didn’t know what to make of Moki lately. His behavior had remained bizarre since Wednesday when the gash on his hand had healed so quickly. At least once a day he’d cut himself to see if the healing power was still with him. Each time he healed more quickly than the day before. And with each healing the wild light in his eyes had grown.

As the daylight began to fade, Kolabati turned toward the door, but Moki grabbed her arm.

“Wait. What is that?”

He was staring east, toward Kahului and beyond. She followed his gaze and saw it. Something in the water. White water, bubbling, roiling. A gigantic disturbance. With foreboding ballooning within her, Kolabati grabbed the binoculars from their hook and focused on the disturbance.

At first all she saw was turbulent white water, giant chop, a chaos of sloshing and swirling. But as she watched, the turbulence became ordered, took shape. The white water began to swirl in a uniform direction, counterclockwise, around a central point. She identified the center in time to see it sink below the surface and become a dark, spinning, sucking maw.

“Moki, look!” She handed him the glasses.

“I see!” he said, but took them anyway.

She watched his expression as he adjusted the lenses. His smile grew.

“A whirlpool! It’s too close to shore to be from converging currents. It’s got to be a crack in the ocean floor. No, wait!” He lowered the glasses and stared at her, his face flushed with excitement. “A hole! It has to be a hole in the ocean floor, just like the one in New York! We’ve got our own hole here!”

Together—Moki with undisguised glee, Kolabati with growing, gnawing unease—they watched the whirlpool organize and expand. The troubles from the outer world, from the mainland, were intruding on her paradise. That could bring only misfortune. They watched together until it was too dark to see, then went inside and turned on the TV to catch what the news had to say about it. The scientists all agreed—the ocean floor had opened in a fashion similar to the phenomenon in Manhattan’s Central Park. Already the locals had a name for it:
moana puka
—ocean hole.

Moki could barely contain his excitement. He wandered the great room, talking a blue streak, gesticulating wildly.

“You know what’s going to happen, Bati? The water’s going to be sucked down into whatever abyss those holes lead to, and it’s going to keep on disappearing into nowhere. And eventually the ocean level is going to drop. And if it drops far enough, do you know what will happen?”

Kolabati shook her head. She had an inescapable feeling that she was witnessing the beginning of the end—of everything.

“Greater Maui will be reborn.” He went to the doorway that opened onto the lanai and gestured into the darkness. “Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, even little Molokini—all of them were part of Maui before the Ice Age, connected to our island by valleys rather than cut off by channels of sea water. I see it happening, Bati. I see them all joined again, reunited after ages of separation. A single island, as big as the Big Island. Maybe bigger. And I’ll play a part in the future of Greater Maui.”

“What future?” Kolabati said, joining him at the door. “If the Pacific Ocean drops that far we’ll be looking at the end of the world!”

“No, Bati. Not the end. The beginning. The beginning of a new world.”

And then the sky caught fire. All around them, like a sustained flash of sheet lightning, the night ignited. At the far end of the island she saw the Lahaina coast and the Iao Valley of West Maui light up like day. The same with the island of Lanai across the channel. Then a blast of superheated air, choked with flaming debris, roared overhead and to the sides, withering west Maui, searing Lanai, yet she and Moki remained in cool shadow, shielded by the enormous bulk of Haleakala.

“Shiva!” she cried in the Bengali dialect of her childhood. “What are you doing?”

And then came the sound. The floor shook and seemed to fall away beneath her as the night exploded with a rumbling, booming, deep-throated roar that shuddered through her flesh, shook every cell of her body, and rattled the very core of her being.

As she tumbled to the floor she heard Moki’s voice faintly above the din.

“Earthquake!”

He crawled to where she lay and rolled on top of her, using his body to shield her from the shelves and lamps and sculptures crashing down about them.

It went on forever. Kolabati didn’t know how the house’s cantilever supports managed to hold. Any moment now they were going to give way and send the house tumbling down the slope. Only once before in her life—when Jack had borrowed her necklace for a number of hours and all of her years had begun to assert their weight upon her—had Kolabati felt so close to death.

The earth tremors and shudders persisted but became quieter, muffled. Moki lifted himself off her and she struggled to her feet.

“Pehea oe?”

“All right … I think,” she said, not bothering to reply in Hawaiian.

They clung to each other like sailors on a heaving deck. Kolabati looked around. The great room was a shambles. Moki’s sculptures lay all about in pieces, their carved wood cracked and splintered, their lava bases shattered.

“Oh, Moki. Your work!”

“The sculptures don’t matter,” he said, clutching her tight against him. “They’re the past. I would have had to smash them myself. Don’t you see, Bati? This is it! The new beginning I told you about. It’s here!”

He drew her to the trembling lanai where they leaned over the railing and stared up at the dark mass of Haleakala, toward her summit, rimmed now with fiery light.

“Look, Bati!” he said, pointing up the slope. “Haleakala is alive! After hundreds of years of dormancy, she’s come back to life! For me! For us!”

Kolabati pulled away and fled back inside. She flipped one light switch after another but the room remained dark. She picked her way through the debris to the television but could not get it to work. The electricity was gone. At least they had a generator. She hoped it still worked.

“Bati!” Moki called. “
Hele mai.
Stand with me and watch Haleakala. The House of the Sun has rekindled her fires. She’s calling us home!”

Kolabati stood amid the shambles of their house—their
life
—and knew that her time of peace had ended, that things would never be the same. She was afraid.

“That wasn’t just Haleakala erupting, Moki,” she said, her voice trembling like the floor beneath her. “Something else happened. Something far more violent and cataclysmic than an old volcano coming to life.”

It’s the end of the world, she thought.

She could feel it in her bones and in the way the ancient necklace pulsed against her skin. The air about her screamed with tortured
atman,
released in sudden, violent death.

Haleakala had awakened, but what else had happened?