Fires of Eden

by Dan Simmons

  They had advanced professionally enough, like two cops going into a crack house where a homicide suspect was waiting—pistols up and braced, Dillon’s flashlight swinging, their backs and shoulders touching as they covered each other.

  Nothing moved. The cave was free of stalactites or stalagmites. The floor was a polished basalt and it seemed to rise slightly as it twisted out of sight to the right, in the direction Dillon thought was toward the ocean. The wide trail of blood led away down and to the left.

  “This is where we call for backup, right?” Dillon had said as they stood together, pistols aimed toward the curve of cave wall where the blood trail disappeared from sight.

  “Yeah,” Briggs had said, and began moving toward the curve in the tunnel. “But let’s just look around the bend. Whatshisname… Wills…might be there.”

  Dillon had the choice of either following or letting the larger man march off into the darkness. He had followed. Five minutes, two bends in the cave, and a hundred feet later, he wished he’d let Briggs go off in the dark. “This is truly fucked,” he suggested again. His arms were getting tired holding the Glock in firing position while steadying the flashlight. The two moved as quietly and carefully as they could—Dillon recalled from the training sessions years ago that Briggs was very fast and light on his feet for a big man—and they paused every few seconds to listen and check behind them. The flashlight beam whipped across smooth black basalt and dark lava striations.

  “Whatever got Wills dragged him a long way,” whispered Briggs. Both had been straining to hear any sound.

  Dillon nodded. Blood still gleamed in the flashlight beam. “You ever see that movie…Alien?” he whispered back.

  “Shaddup,” said Briggs. “Shine the light down here.” The bodyguard crouched next to the smear of blood on basalt, reached out, and lifted a bit of cloth.

  “What is it?”

  “Part of the poor fucker’s suit, I’d guess. Gray. Linen.”

  “Yeah, Wills dressed pretty well.”

  “It’s wet,” said Briggs. “Like…”

  “Like what?” Dillon moved the flashlight in quick arcs, never leaving any area dark for long. He could see about thirty feet from curve to curve in the tunnel.

  “Like it’s been chewed,” said Briggs.

  “Yeah,” said Dillon. “Well, I’m heading back. I figure that if I call in all of my security people, we can field thirty men in here. With radios and automatic weapons. Whoever or whatever got Wills might have dragged him miles from here. These tunnels go on forever.”

  “Yeah?” said Briggs. He carefully set the piece of chewed cloth back in place. “You pussying out on me?”

  Dillon sighed. Teach these no-necks as you might, they still confused testosterone with brains. “Call it that,” he said. “I’m going back to call for reinforcements and the flashlight’s going with me. You can stay here if you want.” He started backing down the tunnel in a half-crouch, swinging the light as he went.

  Briggs waited only a few seconds before following, backing toward Dillon with his pistol still raised toward the darkness. Dillon half expected some melodrama then—perhaps half a dozen crazed Hawaiian nationalists with axes charging around the bend in the cave—but there was only the sound of their own feet and breathing until they came around the last twist and saw the gleam of light spilling into the cave from the astronomer’s office. Dillon was careful to keep pivoting, keep checking behind them and then flashing the light quickly in the opposite direction. When they got to the crack in the wall, he even leaned over to make sure that nothing was lurking in Wills’s office. It would be poor form if they screwed up and got killed this close to safety. The office was empty, the overhead fluorescent lights terribly bright after the darkness of the cave.

  They paused for a minute at the tumbled wall, still standing in the tunnel. “Mr. T is going to shit bricks,” said Briggs.

  Dillon shrugged. It wasn’t their problem.

  “We can’t really put thirty men in here,” said Briggs. “Mr. T’s got his ex here and his other main squeezes are going to be here soon. They’ll need security. Plus he’s got some of your guys backing up Sato’s guys.”

  Dillon nodded. “OK, so we put ten guys into the tunnel with radios and Mac-tens and we make this the command center. The point is it’s not you and me with one flashlight stumbling around like a couple of dorks in one of those monster movies. You know—‘Let’s split up, you go that way, I’ll go this way’—that kind of shit.”

  Briggs grunted. “What do you think did this? How did it cram Wills’s body through that narrow crack?”

  “How the hell do I know…” began Dillon, Then the lights went out.

  They reacted quickly, each man dropping into a crouch, pistol extended. Dillon had kept the flashlight on and now he swept it up and down the length of the tunnel. “You back into the room,” he whispered. “I’ll follow. Cover me when I come through.”

  Briggs had just stood up to step through the crack when Dillon heard the sound. “Shhhh!” he whispered, Briggs froze, pistol sweeping back.

  Something was scraping and wheezing in the direction the blood trail had led. Dillon went to one knee and steadied both Glock and flashlight. The beam stayed steady on the bend in the cave wall.

  “What the fuck?” whispered Briggs.

  The sound grew louder. It was a snorting, wheezing, huffing sound, and whatever made it was large. Dillon imagined a sumo wrestler with asthma.

  “Two warning shots,” he whispered. He thought that Mr. T would prefer the perp alive.

  “Yeah,” Briggs whispered back, “I’ll put my first two warning shots through the fucker’s head. You put yours in his chest.”

  Dillon did not reply. The wheezing, scraping, huffing, snorting was louder, closer, certainly no farther than just around the bend. So there would be no surprises, he took two seconds to sweep the flashlight to their right, then swung it back to the left. Something sharp-edged scraped on stone. Feet, perhaps. Hooves? It sounded like more than two feet. Dillon could hear the actual breathing now, a heavy rasping beneath the huffing and wheezing. He had already made sure that a cartridge had been racked into the cylinder of the semiautomatic and that the safety was off. Now he thumbed back the hammer. Part of his mind noticed that the flashlight beam remained absolutely steady.

  The snorting and heavy breathing paused for a moment just around the curve of wall, the scraping sound hesitated, and Dillon realized that he was holding his own breath as well. Briggs crouched next to him, both huge hands cradling the .38.

  Suddenly the wheezing started up again, the scraping intensified, and something very large came around into the light.

  “What the fuck?” said Briggs, and stood.

  The pig was gigantic, at least four feet high at the shoulder and five or six feet long. Dillon could only guess at its weight—perhaps four hundred pounds on the cloven hoof. Its legs seemed far too skinny to support such bulk. It stopped twenty-five feet away, still wheezing, its strange eyes gleaming bright red in the flashlight beam.

  “What is this shit?” said Briggs, taking one hand away from the .38.

  “Careful,” said Dillon, still crouching, the light and Glock steady, “The hills are filled with wild pigs…wild boars. They’re goddamned dangerous.”

  The pig in the flashlight beam looked huge but not especially dangerous. It seemed to be blinking in confusion at the bright light. There was something strange about its eyes. The animal ambled a few feet closer.

  “Give me a fucking break,” said Briggs, still holding the pistol at full cock but lowering it. “Are you telling me this fucking pig cracked through the wall, dragged Wills out through an eight-inch crack, and ate him?”

  “No, but…shit!” said Dillon. He had just realized what was wrong with the pig’s eyes. There were too many of them. At least four on each side of the huge snout—the eyes small and close together, but visibly separate now as the pig got within twenty feet of them. Dillon swung t
he flashlight beam away for two seconds. The eyes still glowed red as if from their own flames.

  Dillon swung the beam back just as the pig’s lips pulled back. The teeth there were not swine teeth; they looked like something out of a jaguar’s jaw—all long canines and incisors. The teeth also gleamed.

  “Jesus…” said Briggs, and brought the .38 back up.

  The pig moved impossibly fast then, its hooves scrabbling across blood and black lava, its teeth gleaming as it rushed them.

  The tunnel echoed with explosions and flashes of light as Briggs and Dillon opened fire.

  June 15, 1866, Volcano House—

  A very strange day. I am so exhausted from the previous night’s excursion and today’s wild decisions, that I can hardly find the energy to bring pen to paper.

  If I slept at all last night, it was a fitful tossing, filled with visions of the Pit and nightmares of demons. All of us were awake early, even we three pilgrims of the crater, in order to hear more of the terrible ordeal of the five missionaries who have taken refuge here on their flight to Hilo.

  Mr. Clemens, Reverend Haymark, Hananui, and I arrived back at the volcano hotel shortly before dawn, the three of us too weary from our ordeal even to speak to one another, but amazed to find the Volcano House alight with lamps and filled with chattering people.

  Hananui had not been exaggerating the seriousness of the matter. Five members of the Kona Mission—three women, a young boy, and an old man—had arrived in the middle of the night with two Christian natives who had risked their lives in leading the haoles (white people) to safety over the volcano. There are easier ways to Hilo—a rough path running along the saddle valley between the great volcanoes of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa is the shortest—but the missionaries were sure that they would be ambushed if they went that way, so they endured the much longer and more difficult route of the volcano.

  I should mention the fugitives’ names: Miss Charity Whister (sister of the Reverend Whister of Kona), Mr. Ezra Whister (Reverend Whister’s elderly father), Mrs. Constance Stanton (Mrs. Whister’s married daughter), Mrs. Stanton’s nine-year-old son, Theodore, and Mrs. Taylor, sister of the assistant pastor of the mission. All of the fugitives are in a distressed state, but Mrs. Stanton has best summarized the terrible events of two nights ago which sent this band fleeing across the volcanic highlands.

  It seems that Reverend Whister (whom Reverend Haymark had met briefly in Honolulu) and his band of missionary families had been landed in Kona ten months earlier. While the savages along this trackless coast were, in Mrs. Stanton’s opinion, in dire need of assistance toward salvation, it seems that a previous ministry had already taken root in Kona. Reverend Haymark later explained that this was the Kona church of the famous Reverend Titus Coan, friend and advisor to the even more famous Reverend “Father” Lyman of Hilo. Even I had heard of Mr. Coan during my sojourn in Hilo: the amazing pastor has—not once but several times—made the 300-mile circumnavigation of the island by foot and canoe, establishing outrider churches as he did so, baptizing, by his own count, some 12,000 adults and 4,000 infants into the Universal Church. In light of this, the natives’ loyalty had all been turned toward the Reverend Coan and his successors, boding hard times for the simple white-washed church of the more severe (“less liberal” were Mrs. Stanton’s words) preachings of Reverend Whister. After ten months of laboring in the baptismal vineyards, Reverend Whister and his supporters had managed to save only a single Hawaiian soul—and even he had backslid upon the celebration of some pagan holiday and had to be excommunicated by a disappointed Reverend W. All in all, the Whister Ministry in Kona had seemed a failure. Thus it was only one month earlier that the Reverend W. had taken his wife, sister, daughter, son-in-law, and two other families of white Christians, and abandoned their first church, moving south along the Kona Coast into the less visited regions south of Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook had been slaughtered in 1779.

  Mrs. Stanton sounded bitter upon relating these facts to us, as if Fate had pulled a particularly unpleasant trick on her father and his supporting family. (Mr. Stanton, her husband, was in training to become a minister himself, and it seems that her father, Reverend Whister, had held some fame in Amherst, Massachusetts, from whence the hapless missionary troupe had come.)

  At first, the transplantation had seemed effective. The Hawaiians living in coastal villages amidst the desolate lava fields held no special love for Reverend Coan, and were willing at least to come each Sunday and listen to the Reverend Whister’s sermons of imminent fire and brimstone. Indeed, the minister’s particular brand of fiery rhetoric seemed to appeal to these heathen, living as they did literally in the shadow of the volcano’s wrath. I would venture a guess that this past month’s increased activity of Kilauea—the very activity which had brought me to this island—had also increased Reverend Whister’s appeal to the frightened locals.

  Then, two weeks ago, the threats began. Mrs. Stanton related the bullying and terror that local followers of Pele—the fire goddess whom I have mentioned in these notes—brought upon the Christian families just settling their lives at this South Kona outpost. The church, Mrs. Whister interrupted her tears to tell us at this juncture, was just in the process of being erected.

  It seems that the local kahunae (or priests) of Pele were a massive brother and sister—“massive” I say because Mrs. Stanton swore that each weighed at least four hundred pounds—who had finally perceived the minister and his congregation as serious rivals for the affections and loyalty of their Pele worshippers. According to Mrs. Stanton, the first intimations of the coming terror were propagated in the form of “warnings” from the Pele priest to Rev. Whister. The priest ingenuously warned the minister that something terrible was about to happen, that the very gates of hell had recently opened in that region and that the Christians—the “non-believers unprotected by Pele’s benevolence” were the heathen priest’s words—would be in great danger.

  “What kind of danger?” Mr. Clemens had asked at that point, straddling his chair in a most ungentlemanly manner and leaning forward with that malevolent glint which correspondents evidently acquire upon hearing of someone else’s misfortune.

  Mrs. Stanton had explained that the priest had formulated some nonsense about there being an opening to the Hawaiian Underworld nearby, an opening that Pele had once sealed up in a battle with the evil gods and malevolent demons that had once wandered the coast. According to the priest, the natives had forsaken that section of the Kona Coast for centuries, these demons were so active. It had taken Pele’s generous act of sealing the Underworld before Kamehameha’s people could return to the area. “All nonsense, of course,” Mrs. Stanton had snapped. “The flimsiest of fantasies to conceal the villain’s real intentions of terror.”

  Here, to everyone’s surprise, our Hilo guide had interrupted. “No, no!” he had cried, forgetting his place among white people. “The Underworld of Milu exists! There were two entrances—the cave in Waipio where the dead enter to become ghosts, and the opening in Kona where the vilest demons once escaped! Madame Pele did very good thing to seal Kona entrance to ghost world!”

  “Silence!” the innkeeper had shouted, visibly outraged by the native’s rude intrusion. But Mr. Clemens had silenced the innkeeper in turn, holding up an imperious hand to keep our host from further berating the frightened guide. “Hananui,” Mr. Clemens said gently, “it’s all right. Tell us who or what lives in this Underworld.”

  Hananui had glanced at the glowering innkeeper and the fiercely frowning missionaries, but he had gone on gamely, “It is as I say last night—Milu, he king of the Underworld, Pana-ewa be very bad demon—reptile man, Ku—he sometimes come as dog. All very bad ghost peoples down there.”

  Mr. Clemens had nodded, obviously wanting to hear more but unwilling to irritate Mrs. Stanton or her flock further. I should mention here that Miss Whister was present but contented herself with weeping, the child, Theodore, and his great-grandfather Ezra were sleeping,
and Mrs. Taylor, the third woman, said nothing during the entire time—merely sat and stared fixedly at some internal vision.

  Lips thin and white from the rude intrusion, Mrs. Stanton continued:

  “The warnings…the fantasies…were conveyed to my father, Reverend Whister, a fortnight ago. Then, four nights ago, the terrible events began…”

  Here even the redoubtable Mrs. Stanton showed signs of breaking down, but the innkeeper brought her a glass of water and she continued despite the torrents of emotion welling in her.

  “At first there were the…sightings. Strange things in the streets of the village at night.”

  “What kind of strange things?” inquired Mr. Clemens, his legs spraddled across the chair as if he were still riding a horse.

  “I was just arriving at that, sir,” said Mrs. Stanton between thinned lips. “The natives bore terrified tales of strange animals. A large…” She glanced reproachfully at Hananui. “…a large lizard. A wild boar. Some kind of frightening raptor.” Again she glared at our Hilo guide. “A black dog. All nonsense, of course.”

  I found my heart beating wildly as she conveyed these facts. Something about our setting on the lip of this bubbling volcano made this tale, even in the cloudy light of day, all the more unsettling.

  “It was nonsense until the nightmare began,” continued Mrs. Stanton. “My husband was the first to die.”

  There were at least a dozen of us in the room and yet there was almost complete silence at this point, as if no one but Mrs. Stanton were breathing. Indeed, she took a deep breath then before continuing. “Four nights ago, there came a terrible screaming from the village. Our shack was the closest… Father and Mother live in a more substantial home up the hill near the temporary church. August, my husband—Mr. Stanton—seized the musket and resolved to go see what the fuss was about. I begged him not to go. I told him that no heathen life lost in whatever altercation then occurring was worth risking a Christian life. He patted my hair ribbon then, told me that we had come to this far-off place to prove precisely the opposite, instructed little Theodore to watch the homestead until he returned, and went out with Kaluna, one of our converted Hawaiians.