At least Jack had one of the necklaces…
Or did he?
What was that around Moki's neck? Jack's fake, or the real thing? He cursed himself for not checking the one Kolabati had given him more closely. It didn't feel any different, and if he remembered correctly from years ago, the necklace had caused an unpleasant tingle the first time he'd touched it. But that sensation had dissipated after he'd worn it for a while. Was that why he felt nothing when he touched it now? Or was there nothing to feel because it was the fake?
"What's the matter?" Moki said, his grin broadening. "Afraid?"
"I will go," Ba said, stepping forward.
Jack held up a hand. He couldn't allow that. After all, he'd promised Sylvia Nash he'd get Ba back safely.
"It's okay, Ba. I'm going. But thanks for offering."
"Remove your shirt and follow me," Moki said, then turned and started up to the crater's edge.
Jack followed, removing his shirt as he went. The cold air raised and then flattened gooseflesh on his skin. He tossed his shirt to Kolabati as he passed. Her dark, almond eyes widened when she saw no necklace around his neck.
What had she wanted to do? Rattle Moki by letting him see that Jack wore a necklace exactly like his? Uh-uh. Jack wasn't playing her games.
Jack welcomed the heat from Haleakala's fires when they reached the ridge. Moki stopped and faced him. He looked like a grinning demon in the orange light as he produced two knives with slim, six-inch blades. The flames from below glinted off their polished surfaces. He handed one to Jack, wooden handle first. As Jack gripped it, a chorus of shouting erupted from below. He turned and saw the Niihauans approaching, angrily waving their arms.
"I was afraid of this," Moki said, sighing like an indulgent father watching his unruly children. "That's why I brought you up here early tonight. They want one of their own to defeat me, not some malihini. I'll have to tell them not to worry. They'll get their turn."
But he didn't have to. Ba had stepped between the Niihauans and the crater rim. He spread his arms wide and spoke to them. Jack couldn't hear what he said over the roar of the inferno below, but they were looking up at him in awe. Finally they stepped back and waited.
"Good!" Moki said. "Your friend has bought us some time. Let's get on with it." He put his hands on his hips and puffed up his chest. "You strike first."
"Take the necklace off first," Jack said.
"Stop stalling," Moki said. "Is this the brave Repairman Jack Bati told me about? I think you're a coward."
"You won't take it off?"
"My necklace is not a subject for discussion. It is part of me. It will remain with me until I die. Which shall be never."
"Okay," Jack said slowly, "since we're on the subject of courage, let's give ourselves a real test: Each of us will pierce his own heart."
Moki stared at him with wide eyes. "You mean…I will plunge my knife into my chest and you will do the same into yours?"
"You got it. Simultaneously. It's one thing to stab somebody else, but it takes a god to stab himself."
Moki's grin widened. "I believe you are right. You are a worthy rival, Repairman Jack. I'll be sorry to see you die."
Not as sorry as I'll be if Kolabati has suckered me.
Moki positioned his knife over his chest, the point indenting the scarred area just to the left of the breast bone. Jack did the same. His sweaty palms were slippery on the handle. The touch of the point sent a chill straight through to the organ beating barely an inch beneath it. It picked up its tempo in response.
This had to work.
"Ready?" Jack said. "On three. One…two…" He shouted the last number. "Three!"
Jack watched as Moki rammed the blade deep into his chest, saw his torso hunch, his grin vanish, his features constrict with the sudden agony, watched his eyes fill with shock, horror, rage, betrayal as the sick realization of what had just happened to him filtered through the haze of pain.
Moki looked down at the knife protruding from his chest. Blood welled up against the hilt and ran down his skin. Then he looked at Jack's blade, still poised over Jack's chest. His lips worked.
"You…didn't…"
"You're the crazy one, pal. Not me."
Moki glanced over to where Kolabati stood in the flame-flickered darkness. The hurt in his eyes was unsoundable. Jack almost felt sorry for him, until he remembered the brave Niihauan who hadn't had a chance against him last night and had died the same way. Jack followed his gaze and saw Kolabati staring at him with unmasked fury. Why? Because he hadn't stabbed himself?
Suddenly pain seared across his chest. He staggered back and saw Moki go down on his knees, blood pumping from the slit in his chest, his bloody knife free in his hand. And across Jack's chest—a deep gash. Moki had pulled his own knife from his wound and slashed Jack.
Jack pressed his hand against the gash but it had already stopped bleeding. The pain, too, was gone. And as he watched in amazement, the wound edges closed and began to knit.
He looked up and saw Moki watching too. Moki reached a bloody hand up to the necklace that encircled his neck. Ashen faced now, he looked at Jack's unadorned neck, his eyes pleading for an explanation. He couldn't speak, but he could move his lips.
They said: How?
Jack pulled up the left cuff of his jeans to show where he'd wound the true necklace around his ankle.
"Just because they call it a necklace doesn't mean you have to wear it around your neck."
Moki pitched forward on his face, twitched, shuddered, then lay still.
Jack looked at the blade in his hand and tossed it onto the hardened lava beside Moki. Another victory for Rasalom, another talented human gone mad, and now dead. Suddenly Jack felt exhausted, empty. Must it have ended like this? Couldn't he have found another way? Was the mad darkness in the air seeping into him as well? Or had he always carried a piece of the darkness within him? Was that what he felt twisting and thrashing against the walls of the cage he'd built for it?
Shouts made him turn. The Niihauans had broken away from Ba and were charging up the slope. Jack backed away, unsure of their intent. But they ignored him, rushing directly to Moki's body. They prayed by it, then lifted him by his hands and feet and tossed his remains into Haleakala's fires.
As the others began to pray, the chief turned to Jack.
"Haleakala," he said, beaming. "The House of the Sun. Now that the false Maui is dead, the sun will return to the path that the true Maui taught it."
"When?" Jack said.
Ba had come up the slope and now stood at his side, looking at the night sky, then at the rumbling crater. He seemed tense.
"Tomorrow," the chief said. "Tomorrow, you will see."
"I hope so," Jack said. He turned to Ba. "But in case he's wrong, I think it's past time we headed back home."
Ba nodded. "Yes. We must hurry. I fear we might already be too late."
"Too late for what?"
A tortured look flickered across his features, all the more startling because of their usual waxy impenetrability.
"I don't know. I only know I must get back to the Missus."
"Okay, Big Guy. We're on our way." He turned toward Kolabati. "All we've got to do is load our lady friend in the Jeep and we're—"
Kolabati was gone.
Jack spun this way and that, searching the darkness. Not a sign of her. The Isuzu was still parked down the slope but no trace of Kolabati. He and Ba searched the entire area but all they found was Jack's shirt, lying on the lava where she had been standing. He pulled it on and hopped into the passenger seat of the car.
"She must have taken off on foot when we were listening to the old chief. You remember how to get back down the trail?"
Ba nodded and started the car.
They picked their way down the trail, Ba driving as quickly as he dared, while Jack scanned the road ahead in the headlights and as far to each side as he could see in the dark. Nothing. Nothing moving but the wind. As they wound d
own from the crest, the wind abated and the fish and seawater began to rain from the sky, narrowing vision even further. An occasional bug began to harass them.
Finally they came to the house. The lights were on and the generator was running, just as they'd been an hour ago. Jack leapt out and ran inside, stepping over a thrashing tuna and dodging bugs on the way. There weren't many around at the moment. Once inside he ran through the halls, shouting Kolabati's name. He didn't expect her to be here—how could she have beat them back on foot?—but he had to give it a shot, had to assure himself that he'd looked everywhere.
Uncertainty gnawed at him. What if he didn't find her? What if she was hiding from him? Had she lied? Had she had any intention at all of coming back to New York with him? Apparently not.
What a pathetic jerk I am.
He took the stairs to the upper floor, to the great room, but lurched to a stop when he heard the sound. Ahead, bleeding down the hall from the great room, a buzz, the unmistakable sound of over-sized diaphanous wings, hundreds of them, beating madly. Had they caught somebody—Bati perhaps? Were they in the midst of some sort of feeding frenzy?
He wanted to turn and run but forced himself to stand fast. Something about the buzzing…not wild and frenzied…calmer, smoother, almost…placid.
He stepped forward. He had to see what was going on in there. From back here he could see only the front end of the room. The lone lamp that still functioned gave off enough light for him to make out the details of the room. And what he saw sent his skin crawling.
Bugs…the great room was full of them, crowded with them. They obscured the walls, perched on the furniture, floated in the air. All kinds of bugs, from hovering chew wasps to drifting men-o'-war, and all facing the same direction, away from the smashed windows, toward the interior of the room. Jack's legs urged him to get the hell out of here, but he had to see what held them so spellbound.
Jack dropped to his knees and inched forward. The bugs remained oblivious to him. He stretched out on the bare floor and craned his neck around the edge of the entry way to bring the rest of the room into view.
More bugs. So tightly packed he could barely see through the thick of them. Then a gust of wind sluiced through the windows, undulating the hovering mass enough for Jack to catch a look at the center of the great room.
It was the sculpture, Moki's final work. The only object in the room on which the bugs had not perched. Its long, arching wooden spokes were bare for their entire length, from where they seemed to spring from the walls to their common center, the jagged, unwieldy aggregate of black and red lava fragments. The bugs hovered about it, every one of them faced toward its center like rapt churchgoers in silent benediction.
And the lava center…it pulsed with an unholy yellow light, slowly, as if in time with the beat of a massive, hidden heart.
A single glimpse and then Jack's view was obscured again. But that glimpse had been enough to break him out in a sweat and send him sliding back along the floor. Something about that sculpture, the way it glowed, the reverence of the bugs, the entire scene disturbed Jack on a level too deep to comprehend or understand. Something within him, not from his personal experience, but some sort of racial memory, a warning carved on his hindbrain or encoded in his genes, flooded him with circulating fear, leaving him unable to react in any way but flight.
And when he was far enough down the hall, he rose to his feet and ran out of the house to where Ba waited in the Isuzu.
"Drive, Ba!"
The Oriental pointed to the Jeep they'd driven from Kahului.
"Shouldn't we—?"
"Forget it. Let's get out of here! Now!"
Jack sat and shivered as Ba drove downhill through the downpour. He resented the fear crawling under his skin. He prided himself on his ability to govern his fear, channel it, use it. Now it was nearly out of control. He closed his eyes to the night, ignored the thump of fish bouncing off the hood and roof, took deep breaths, willing himself to be calm. By the time Ba had swerved through most of the downhill switchbacks, he was in control again. But his fingers still trembled on their own in the adrenalin aftermath.
The fear was slowly replaced by disappointment, and perhaps some depression. He'd failed. Kolabati had lied to him. Should he have expected any less? Me, of all people. He'd spent most of his life lying. He mentally kicked himself for believing she'd changed. But she'd been so convincing.
That's what you get for playing by the rules.
Maybe he and Ba simply should have tied up Moki and taken his necklace, then ripped Kolabati's from her throat and left her back there to die of old age in a few hours. Not that it hadn't occurred to him, yet everything within him balked at the plan. But maybe this hadn't been the time for ethical niceties. Too much at stake here.
Was there any use at all in going back to New York? Glaeken had sent him for two necklaces. He was returning with only one.
He set his jaw. Glaeken would have to find a way to make do with one necklace. He'd given it his best shot and had come up short.
He just hoped it wasn't too short.
When Ba hit the pavement above 377, he picked up speed. The wheels skidded on dead fish and clumps of wet seaweed.
"Easy, Ba," Jack said. "If we crack up, we may never get back to the plane, and then this whole trip will be for nothing. If it's not already."
"I must get back to the Missus. Quickly. She needs me."
Jack studied his grim, intent features in the dashboard glow. Ba was scared too. But not of bugs. Ba was scared for his adopted family. Why? Why now? What was happening back there?
WEDNESDAY
WNEW-FM
FREDDY: It's a minute after midnight. A little over nine hours till dawn.
JO: Yeah, you're almost halfway home. Hang in there.
MONROE, LONG ISLAND
Alan felt like a vampire.
Why not? He was living like one. Up all night, sleeping when he could during the day. Reminded him of his days as an intern. Many a time he'd gone thirty-six hours straight without a wink. But he was older now, and the stress of the nights—the insane paradiddles on the storm shutters, the incessant gnawing at the outer walls—carried over into the dwindling daytime, keeping his naps fitful and restless.
He was exhausted, plain and simple. But he couldn't let Sylvia know. She was a wreck as it was. The only time she got any rest herself was when she could curl up in the basement with Jeffy and Mess and Phemus, secure in the knowledge that Alan was patrolling the upper reaches of Toad Hall.
Alan was just finishing one of those patrols now, wheeling through the first-floor halls, checking the candles, replacing the ones that were guttering into glowing puddles. The power had failed around midday. He'd thought it might be just a local failure but the radio said LILCO was off line for good. Another time it might have been romantic. Knowing what was outside, straining to get in, made it anything but.
So now with the midnight rounds completed and fresh candles flickering in every room, Alan settled himself down in the TV room and turned on the radio. Strange how a little adversity could change your habits. A week ago he wouldn't have thought twice about leaving the radio on while he'd made his rounds. Now, with the power out and batteries suddenly scarce, he didn't leave it on a moment longer than necessary.
Jo and Freddie were still hanging in there, God bless 'em. Their voices were ragged, sometimes they were completely incoherent, and they were broadcasting in shifts with power that at times seemed like it was generated by a collection of frantic, wheel-spinning gerbils, but they weren't giving in to the fear. Neither was a fair share of their remaining listeners.
And neither was Alan.
Only problem was they didn't play doo-wop. They played so-called "classic rock." As far as Alan was concerned, the real classic stuff had been sung on street corners, with popping fingers and the bass voice as rhythm section, and close, soaring three- and four-part harmonies telling the story. That was where it all began. There'd been some great
stuff done in the sixties, and even in the seventies, but the heart of it all, the classic end of the music, had begun in fifty-five and tapered down into sixty-four when the Brits had begun reinterpreting the classic formulae.
"Eight Miles High" came on. Alan could live with that. The Bryds knew their harmony. He was losing himself in McGuinn's Coltranesque solos when he heard an unfamiliar sound from the front hall. He turned off the radio.
Splintering wood.
He pulled the tooth-studded billy from the pouch behind his back rest, laid it in his lap, and wheeled his chair toward the front of the house. As soon as he entered the foyer he saw the problem. After nights of constant effort, the chew wasps finally had managed to rip off the metal weather strip from the bottom of the front door and were now busily at work gnawing rat holes at the floor line. Sharp-toothed lower jaws were visible in two spots, sawing relentlessly at the wood, gouging off pieces, building piles of splinters.
This wasn't good. In half an hour or less they'd have a couple of holes big enough to wriggle through. And then Toad Hall would be full of chew wasps—and spearheads, too, no doubt.
All looking for Jeffy. But to get to Jeffy they'd have to go through Sylvia. The very thought of it sickened him.
But to get to Sylvia they've got to get by me.
Alan looked around for some sort of back-up defense, something to shore up the weak point along the bottom edge of the door. He spotted the heavy brass etagere to the right of the door.
Perfect.
He rolled over to it, removed all the netsuke and piled them gently in the corner, then pulled the etagere over onto its side. He tried to let it down easy but it hit the floor with a clang. He found that maneuvering it against the door from his wheelchair was all but impossible, so he slid from the seat onto his knees and worked from the floor.
As he was guiding the thick brass back of the piece against the door, a chew wasp began to wriggle its head through the hole it had made. As its eyes lit on Alan, its movements became more frantic, its toothy jaws gnashed the air hungrily. Alan grabbed his club and bashed in the creature's skull with two blows. It wriggled for an instant, then lay still, its carcass wedged in the hole, blocking it.
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