“Well, you already know what you are here for. I’ll give you all the equipment I think you need, so I expect you to do your job and not come running to me with any little pissant problem you may come across.”
He turned to me. “Rhys, I see from your papers, that you’ve been a professional fisherman in your time.” He picked up a pen and began clicking the nib button up and down.
“Yeah, I worked around the rivers, mud-crabbing up New Guinea way a few years ago. Lost some good mates. Left a bad taste in my mouth.”
He kept clicking that pen. “So now you’re on the other side of the fence—conservation.”
I wondered where this was going. “That’s right.”
Buckmeister nodded, looking unimpressed, all the while clicking that pen. “How old are you, forty? And still a diver? I’d have thought at your age…ahh never mind.”
He paused, and then started up again, slowly, glaring at us. “I have to warn you, there’s a medical condition spreading in the outer Western Chain. It seems there is a problem with children biting people. For reasons we don’t know yet, the kids’ saliva has been found to contain a shit-eating, disease-carrying enzyme. The toxicologist out on Gizo said it’s some kind of neurotoxin. Now we have this goddamned biting going on, so you people are going to have to stay alert and keep a log book.”
I wanted to ask if I could use his pen, just so he would stop clicking the damned thing. Buckmeister looked at each of us in turn, and that look said it all. He did not trust civilians.
“The kids out in Gizo hospital are frothing at the mouth,” he continued. “They’re deranged, trying to bite the staff. What a goddamned fiasco.” The clicking of his pen was rapid. “There are nine hundred islands under our jurisdiction and we can’t be everywhere. When you are in the field, I want you to keep an eye out for a bunch of folk called the Kõpura, who are coming in numbers aboard big-sailed outriggers. They seem to be taking advantage of the locals. I don’t know what they want, but I don’t want the bastards here. Apparently there’s a woman who gives the orders—Pecan, or whatever the hell her name is. Some of these Kõpura women have been caught giving local kids a drink of something, and we think it is connected with the biting. If you lot see her or her cohorts skulking out past Ranongga or Imora, that will be the only time I’ll want to hear from you. You’ll get another shot from the doc on Gizo.”
I was relieved when he finally threw his pen onto the desk. He handed me a sheet of paper with some instructions, a palm GPS, and a printout of a detailed map of the outer islands, then he glared at the ceiling, sighed and shook his head. “Goddamnit, as if I don’t have enough on my plate already, now I’ve got my people helping shore up islands from sea inundation in the east, and out west I’ve got goddamned tsunamis and earthquakes and new islands rising out of the sea. I’m short-staffed and they send me civilians and geriatric divers. Ahh, hell.” He looked at Jenna and nodded at Kero and me. “Just keep safe. Hit the local tarmac. I’ll fit you three onto one of my flights in the next few hours. Your gear should be waiting for you at the Gizo docks, and they’ll tell you where to go from there.” He stood and we knew it was time to leave.
“So how come they call you Kerosene?”
We were at Honiara airport putting our gear on a plane for the trip out. Kero threw a bulky canvas sack up to the guy in the cargo hold and barked a short laugh. “My home brew vodka keeps exploding. Gotta get the formula right one day.”
I looked at Jenna. She shook her head and led the way to the plane’s entry stairs.
During the short flight to Gizo I looked out of the window, onto the scattered islands looking like so many heads of broccoli bobbing in a blue sea, and thought about how isolated we would be in the outer islands. I was glad that my companions looked capable of handling themselves. That would be useful once we got west of Ranongga Island, beyond Gizo, where we were to rebuild a broken down hut and put up a shower for our base.
First, though, we stopped at Gizo’s well-equipped hospital and went to get our inoculations. On the way through reception, I tried not to stare at the people on stretchers crying in pain, but it was hard to ignore those freakish facial growths—especially at first sight. After locating the doctor’s office where we were to receive our shots, I left Jenna and Kero briefly, wanting to find out more about exactly what we were letting ourselves in for. I cornered the toxicologist in his office after bluffing my way in. I told him who I was and who had sent me. He told me what to expect if a child bit us.
“When this enzyme enters the bloodstream it produces a fungus called Cordyceps, a parasitical growth which sprouts in ‘bunches’ from the skin. In insects such as ants and beetles, it actually pierces the skull from the inside, driving the insect insane. I’ve never heard of it inhabiting human hosts before now. We have traced it back to the saliva of children who have been infected with a rare cone shell neurotoxin—lethal for anyone unfortunate enough to be pierced, and very toxic when taken as a small amount orally. We still don’t know who is feeding these kids this stuff. Anyway, you have to watch yourself out there. Don’t get bitten. I would rather you don’t go at all, but I understand you have a job to do.”
Now seriously concerned, I sought refuge with the others back at the doctor’s waiting room. Jenna had already been jabbed, and Kerosene walked out of the office rubbing his arm as I arrived, so it wasn’t long before I was called up. Seeking more info, I told the doctor what the toxicologist had passed on. She didn’t seem surprised and took this as a sign to educate me.
“Mr Rhys, this Cordyceps gives off its own enzyme, producing a rare condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease.” The doctor swabbed my arm and inoculated me casually, then recapped the needle and threw it into a hazard bin. I rubbed my arm. She cleaned her hands.
“Urbach causes skin lesions, and the build-up of calcium deposits on the brain destroys part of the amygdala,” she pointed to the base of my neck, “here. The amygdala processes emotions, particularly fear. You may have heard of the ‘fight or flight’ response? That’s the amygdala. But it doesn’t just deal with immediate threats. It also manages the smaller signs which curb our social behaviour and keep us safe, such as the ability to read cues in facial expressions.”
I raised my eyebrows to indicate that the conversation may be about to breach the limits of my own brain’s capacity. She seemed to understand.
“You see, a normal brain can recognise joy, pain, or sadness with barely a second thought, it’s kind of automatic, but when the amygdala shuts down, a person not only can’t recognise fear or danger, for example, in some cases they can’t even experience it. Does that make sense?”
I shook my head.
The doctor shrugged as if dismissing a wayward student. “Look, my patients are stacking up. Our Doctors Without Borders staff are being treated for stress. All I am asking is for you and your colleagues to be extra-aware of what is happening around you, okay? When you are in the field be wary of all physical contact with people, especially the children.”
That much, I already understood.
At the docks we hooked up with some Navy personnel and told them Buckmeister had sent us. Their expressions said everything. They set to helping us without delay. They showed us to a six-metre runabout that had a small cabin and an Evinrude 120 outboard motor, with a few spare jerry cans of fuel on board. It was ours, they said. We were loaded up with axes, shovels, hammers and a machete, plus a crate-load of canned food and drink. We were to head to Imora, an uninhabited teardrop-shaped speck that was five hundred metres wide by a kilometre long on the edge of the Solomon Deep. Though I’d never been there before in person, this was familiar territory to me. Solomon Deep sunk to seven thousand metres, while the long, wide Planet Deep goes more than nine thousand metres down to the sea floor—one of the deepest known places on earth.
From Gizo we headed west across the Gizo Strait, south of Vella Lavella Island and around the northern tip of Ranongga. Passing Ranongga we saw the surround of raised c
oral, now bleached and dead under the sun. Scientists had flocked here after the 2007 eight-point-one earthquake, when Ranongga was raised three metres leaving the coral reefs around the island exposed. Now, in the shallows, we could see coral-encrusted planes and sunken boats from the WWII Pacific Campaign. It was a reminder that the island chain hasn’t changed much since the US landed and ousted the Japanese in 1942. The western group that borders the Solomon Sea has several hundred small islands. Out there justice falls only to local communities and village chiefs.
After many hours and with the help of the GPS and a refill from one of the jerry cans, we arrived at tiny Imora. We hauled our gear ashore: axes, shovels, diving equipment, food supplies, and our backpacks.
Together we set to making our camp using discarded poles from the back yard of an abandoned shack. We plaited Sago palm for the roof, and as the locals did, made palm raincoats to protect ourselves from the daily downpours.
It was during a break from getting the campsite built and putting our gear under the still partially-built roof when Jenna told me about some of her ancestors who had settled in the Solomons back in the nineteenth century. Jenna was part Pacific Islander—Tokonu blood—and had been born in Port Moresby over in Papua. She knew the waters bordering the Solomon Sea well, and had had a few run-ins with illegal boats deep netting the protected seamounts in the area. She took a big knife from her carry sack and strapped it to her waist. It was not long before I realised she was an accomplished scuba diver; she knew how to fillet a fish and dive for shellfish and pry it off the rocks. She said she was bought up in Papua killing and skinning wild boars. I found it easy to believe.
We started a small fire on the beach down from the hut so we could cook some of the fish Kero had speared. Kero, however, was in no mood for a story.
“I’m gonna check the waves, have a bit of a body surf.” He put some cooked fillets in a piece of palm leaf and left us. Jenna and I settled on the sand with our fillets on the end of a stick.
“A few of my ancestors joined a group of Kanakas—South Sea Islanders—who were shipped to the Queensland cane fields in the 1890s. They were taken on as day workers, on the promise of good food, good hours and comfortable beds. They got nothing they were promised. The rest of the world was already abolishing slavery, but Australians were still going hard at it—of course they didn’t call it slavery.”
I wondered if this was a rebuke and she was trying to shame me, but as she continued her story I realised there was no malice in it. In fact, she seemed quite distant from what she was actually saying.
“It was during this time when people started to see the Kõpura again—they’re the people Buckmeister wants us to watch for. The locals round these parts call them The Blistered Ones, on account of their skin pigmentation. I’ve been close to them many times. They came to my home in Tokonu before moving on to here in their outriggers. Local oral traditions have it that they originated from far out in the Solomon Sea, at a place called Vaalua Tuva. Every time there is a conflict or a catastrophe, such as an earthquake or a tsunami, the Kõpura would arrive. It is rumoured they kidnap people. Many here do actually go missing; but these are mainly put down to fishing accidents at sea.”
She seemed to drift for a moment then, long enough for me to wonder if she, too, had lost someone close to her, but before I could ask she continued.
“They came again during the chaos of the Pacific war. Before that, Catholic missionaries were talking about them back in the nineteenth century, writing about how the Kõpura came and claimed land that was not theirs, even forcing frightened locals to live out of their canoes, to sit it out and wait for the Kõpura to return to where they came from. And that is the problem: to this day no locals know where the Kõpura call ‘home’. ”
Jenna finished her fish and drank some water from one of the plastic bottles we had bought along. The sun was low in the west, an orange ball that lit the wave tops of the sea. I stared at a seashell between my feet. Jenna wiped her mouth.
“The Kõpura men don’t say much. Mostly they sit in groups waiting for whatever it is their women have to do. The women can be creeps, playing with local kids when their parents aren’t around. If some local mother ever caught one of these women with her child, she would start shouting and drag the kid away. The locals never speak to the visitors, they don’t even look directly at them.”
I remembered what Buckmeister had mentioned regarding a woman who was supposed to be a leader.
“What about this leader—what’s her name—Peequad?”
Jenna grinned. “She’s called Pecan. There’s been talk that her skin is the brown of Melanesians but her features—her nose and forehead—are Caucasian. Pecan must be in her seventies by now. They all wear volcanic obsidian plugs in their ear lobes and as flesh inserts on their foreheads,” she used her knife to scrape fish bones from the sand into the fire. “The women’s throats are mottled with big freckles, only more orderly, with stripes running from under their ears down to their breasts. The men have scarred foreheads, running V-shaped from the hairline to the nose-bridge. They wear western clothes—shorts and shirts—clean, but ragged and faded as if each person has only one set. What’s weird is you never see them with weapons or tools for harvesting or fishing. The women are friendly enough, but they have no sense of personal space and it can make you uncomfortable. You know when they are close, even before you see them. It’s as if they are concentrating so hard you begin thinking of them even before you realise they are close.”
The sun had reached the horizon and twilight approached. Somehow this made me more aware of the sound of the small rollers swishing up upon the sand.
I had been diving with Jenna out on Imora shoals next to a big drop-off into the deep. Here were a couple of flat-topped seamounts rising five thousand metres from the seabed to within twenty metres from the surface. Fish and molluscs and king crabs swarmed across these underwater peaks. We had left Kero for the day to mind camp and to finish putting up the temporary shower. We sat in the runabout, the swell rocking us, and unshackled ourselves from our tanks. During our dive we had not seen any sign of recent drag-teething or deep netting, so we packed up our gear and headed back to base. We were only halfway back to Imora when we met two Solomon men in an outboard runabout. They came alongside and kept their motor running. One of them shouted at us in the local Ganongga language. They looked furious. They spoke in halting English.
“Your friend has done a bad thing,” they shouted. “He has been with Kõpura women!” Then, with hateful stares at Jenna, and me, they spat out more words in their own language. Jenna’s eyes told me she understood. They steered their boat eastward. I looked at Jenna.
“What did they say?”
“You sleep with animals, you are animal.”
Back at Imora, we beached and looked for Kero, but we couldn’t find him. He had left his work on our temporary hut unfinished. Jenna could not find any tracks in the sand and we assumed he had gone bush. I knew, by the way we had been treated, that we were in trouble. Kero had been screwing, literally, one of the unwanted strangers. It was a weird night to be on a remote speck of land, with the knowledge something bad was about to go down. The rain started. It pelted down and we were glad that part of the roof of the shack had been finished.
We sat under cover and ate from tins of baked beans and drank bottled water. Jenna was troubled and rightly so. I spoke what I assumed she was thinking.
“Doesn’t he listen to anything being said? What the hell was he thinking?” I moved further back away from the rain slanting in through a sagging driftwood window opening.
“Look, we don’t know what went on,” Jenna said. “It may be nothing.”
I knew she wasn’t even convincing herself. “He banged one of them, okay? I get the point. There’s going to be some local men here in the morning, beating the crap out of us, isn’t there?”
Jenna nodded. “Seems likely. We can’t go anywhere in this weather—won’t be able
to see a thing.”
I couldn’t argue with her. “Okay, what do we do?”
“When the rain eases, we’re out of here.”
“Fine,” I said. “We still have to take Kero with us.”
Jenna growled. “It’s a small island, we’ll find him.”
It was a long night. I was no longer hungry. I found a spot to rest and lay awake for some time listening to the rain smash down onto the weakening plaited roof.
The next morning I was walking along the beach with Jenna as the sun was rising. We saw Kero sitting in the sand. As we approached we saw he had his hands up against his temples, effectively hiding his face. He saw us and croaked out a statement, which sounded muffled, as if his mouth was packed with something. I felt a punch to my shoulder and turned to see Jenna pointing out to sea. I saw the outrigger. Expecting to see some of the locals I was surprised to find that it was one of the big sailed outriggers of the Kõpura. Kero was whining and began rubbing his fingers against the corners of his eyes. I stood on the sand with Jenna, waiting for the Kõpura to walk up onto the beach. They stepped through the waves to stand metres from us. There were a dozen of them, and nearly half were the taciturn men. The group parted to allow a tall woman to walk ahead of them up the beach towards us. I knew I was looking at the one called Pecan.
I looked back down at Kero. He lifted his head and returned my gaze. I stepped back a few paces in shock, bumping into Jenna. Kero was staring insanely, his head nodding as if he was suffering from Parkinson’s. His eyes bulged, as if there was some massive pressure behind them, pushing outwards. His voice was croaky and weak.
“She gave me a drink, Rhys. She gave me a drink.”
The Kõpura surrounded us. I found myself unable to move, as if these people had somehow sapped my will to resist. Afraid, I let my shoulders drop as three of the men came to me and took hold of my arms. Jenna too seemed to lose any fight. She spoke a sentence of Ganonggan to several of the women. They ignored her and grabbed her arms—one even took Jenna’s knife from its sheath.
Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 2 Page 20