Nightworld ac-6

by F. Paul Wilson

Jack looked at her again. The tear was still there. In fact it had been joined by others.

  "You love him?"

  She nodded. "I love who he used to be." She turned toward Jack, wiping the tears from her cheeks, chasing the fresh ones that replaced them. "Oh, Jack, you would have loved him too. I only wished you'd known him then. He was gentle, he was so alive and so much a part of his world, these islands. A genius, a true genius who couldn't flaunt his brilliance because he took it for granted. He never tried to impress anyone else, never tried to be anyone else but Moki. And he wanted to be with me, Jack. Me. Nobody else. I was happy, Jack. I was in love. I thought I'd found an earthly Nirvana and I wanted it to last forever. And it could have, Jack. You know it could have."

  He shook his head. "Nothing lasts forever." He reached out and touched her necklace. "Even with that."

  "But so soon? We'd just begun."

  He searched her face. Here was the difference. The seemingly impossible had happened. Kolabati, the cool, aloof, self-absorbed, ruthless Kolabati who had sent him out to kill her own brother Kusum, who had walked out with her own necklace as well as Kusum's and left Jack bleeding in a chair because he had refused her offer of near immortality…Kolabati Bahkti had fallen in love and it had changed her. Maybe forever.

  Amazingly, she began to sob—deep, wrenching gasps of emotional pain that tore at Jack. He'd come here expecting to find the old, cold, calculating Kolabati and had been fully ready to deal with her. He wasn't prepared for the new Kolabati.

  He resisted the impulse to take her in his arms. No telling what Moki-The-Unkillable might do if he saw that. So he settled for touching her hand.

  "What can I do?" he said. "What will fix it?"

  "If only I knew."

  "Maybe it's the necklace. Maybe the necklace is part of the problem—maybe it is the problem. Maybe if you take it off him—"

  "And replace it with a fake?" Her eyes flashed as she dug into the pocket of her muumuu. She pulled out a necklace exactly like her own. "This one, perhaps?"

  Since Kolabati was wearing one of the genuine necklaces, and Moki the other, this had to be Jack's fake.

  He swallowed. "Where'd you get that?"

  "From your duffel bag." Her eyes hardened. "Was that your plan? Steal my brother's necklace and replace it with a fake? It never occurred to you that I might have given it to someone else, did it?"

  Time to bite the bullet, Jack thought. Let her know the whole story.

  "Kusum's necklace isn't enough," he said, meeting her gaze. "We need both."

  She gasped and stepped back, her hand clutching at her throat.

  "Mine? You'd steal mine?"

  "It wouldn't be stealing, exactly. I'd just be returning it to its original owner."

  "Don't joke with me about this, Jack. The people who carved the necklaces have been dead for ages."

  "I know. I'm not working for them. I'm working for the guy they stole the original metal from. He's still around. And he wants it back. All of it."

  Kolabati's eyes widened as she studied him. "You're not joking, are you?"

  "You think I could make up a story like that, even if I tried?"

  "All those years will rush back upon me without it, Jack. I'd die. You know that"

  "I intended to ask you for it."

  "And if I refused?"

  He shrugged. "I was going to be very convincing."

  Actually he'd had no firm plan in mind when he'd come here. Good thing too. He hadn't counted on Moki. Not in his wildest dreams had he counted on the likes of Moki.

  Kolabati's hand still hovered protectively over her necklace. She couldn't seem to drag it away.

  "You frighten me, Jack. You frighten me more than Moki."

  "I know it sounds corny as hell," he said, "but the fate of the whole world depends on this guy Glaeken getting those two necklaces back and restoring them to their original form."

  Kolabati gestured to the stinking valley, to the whirlpool beyond. "He can change all this? He can make everything as it was?"

  "No. But he can stop the force that's making it this way, that's working to destroy everything we see here. And it isn't bad here, Bati. This is really pretty decent because there aren't many people around. But back on the mainland, in the cities and towns, people are at each other's throats. Everyone's frightened, scared half to death. The best are holed up, hiding from the monsters by night and their fellow humans by day. And the worst are doing what they've always done. But it's the average Joes and Janes who are really scary. The ones who aren't paralyzed with fear are running amok in the streets, looting and burning and killing with the worst of them. You can do something to stop it, turn it all around."

  "I don't believe you. It can't be that bad. I've lived for a century and a half. I saw my parents shot down by an English officer, I witnessed the Sepoy rebellion in the 1850s, two world wars, the Bolshevik revolution, and worst of all, the atrocities in the Punjab, Indian killing Indian during the partition. You have no idea what I've seen."

  "This is worse," Jack said. "The whole world's involved. And after Thursday it'll be night all over the world, forever. There'll be nowhere to run. Unless you do something."

  "Me." The word was spoken in a very small, faraway voice.

  "You."

  Jack let that sink in awhile, let her stare down at the island she seemed to love so much, let her breathe the reek of its slow death. And then he put the question to her. He'd have never considered asking the old Kolabati, the one he'd known years ago in New York. But this was a new, improved version, someone who'd loved a man, who loved this island. Maybe this Kolabati could be reached.

  "What do you say, Bati? I'm not asking you to take it off and hand it to me. But I am asking you to come back to New York with me and talk to Glaeken. He's the only guy on earth who's older than you. Hell, you're a newborn compared to him. You sit down with him and you'll believe."

  She turned and leaned against the railing, staring through the door into the great room of her house.

  "Let me think about that."

  "There's no time to think."

  "All right," she said slowly. "I'll come see this man. But that's all I promise you."

  "That's all I'm asking," he said, feeling his fatigued muscles begin to uncoil with relief. It was a start. "Now, about Moki's…"

  She looked at him sharply.

  "He's not going to die," Jack added quickly, "or even age appreciably if someone should manage to replace his real necklace with a look-alike." An idea occurred to Jack. It was wild but it might help enlist Kolabati more firmly as an ally. "Who knows? Could be it's the necklace that's making him crazy. Get it off him and maybe he'll revert to his old self."

  Before Kolabati could answer, Moki's voice boomed from within the house.

  "Bati! Hele mai! And bring your ex-lover. See what your god has fashioned!"

  Kolabati rolled her eyes and started forward. Jack grabbed her arm, gently.

  "What do you say?"

  "I'll think about it."

  She pulled her arm away and dropped the dummy necklace back into her pocket. Jack followed her.

  And stopped inside the door, staring.

  The great room had been transformed. All the wood and lava from the broken sculptures had been reshaped, combined, coalesced into a single huge assembly that stretched from wall to wall. And where he'd run out of sculpture remnants, Moki had smashed pieces of furniture and added them to the mix. The assorted stained and bleached wooden fragments were arranged so as to appear to spring from the wood paneling of the walls, forming four spokes in a giant lopsided wheel, weaving crooked paths toward a common center. A lava center. Moki had somehow joined all the red and black lava fragments—the gleam of wire, the dewy moisture of still-drying epoxy were visible within the irregular mass—into a new whole, a jagged, haphazard aggregate that had no coherent shape, no symmetry, no discernible intelligence to it, yet somehow was undeniably menacing and implacably predatory.

 
"What do you think of Maui's masterpiece?" Moki said, standing near the center, hands on hips, grinning like a caricature of Burt Lancaster.

  Ba squatted in the far corner, a gaunt Buddha, silent, watching.

  "It's…disturbing," Kolabati said.

  "Yes!" He clapped his hands. "Excellent! Exactly what it is supposed to be! Disturbing. True art should disturb, don't you think? It should challenge all your comfortable assumptions, tip them over so you can see what crawls around on their underbellies.

  "But what is it?" Jack said.

  Moki's smile faltered, and for the first time since he'd arrived, Jack detected a hint of uncertainty in the man's eyes.

  He hasn't the faintest idea what he's done.

  "Why…it's a vision," he said, recovering quickly. "A recurring one. It's plagued me for days. It's…" His eyes brightened with sudden inspiration. "It's Maui! Greater Maui! Yes! The four separate islands—Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, and Maui itself—drawing back to where they belong—together. Forming one seamless mass at the center!"

  Jack stared at the construct. This was no island or regrouping of islands. Too bizarre, too menacing. It was something else, but even the artist hadn't a clue as to what.

  "Come," Moki said, grabbing Kolabati's hand. "Maui is tired. He needs to rest before the ceremony tonight. And he needs his woman by his side." He stared at Jack, challenging him. "The woman who once loved you now loves a god. She can never go back. She will never want to. Isn't that true, Bati?"

  Kolabati smiled and nodded. "Very true, my love."

  Jack watched her carefully. Kolabati was not the type to allow herself to be pushed around like this. No one told this woman what to do.

  As Moki led her away by the hand, she glanced back at Jack and patted the pocket of her muumuu. The one that bulged with the fake necklace.

  Jack nodded. That was the Kolabati he knew.

  "You kids play nice, now," he called after them.

  He watched until she disappeared into the bedroom, then went over to where Ba still squatted.

  "What do you think, Big Guy?" he said, leaning against the wall next to him. "You've been watching the whole process. What's it look like to you?"

  "It is evil," Ba said.

  Jack waited for Ba to elaborate, but that was all he was going to say. So Jack walked around it, ducking under the spokes, crouching, stretching up on tiptoe, looking for a fresh perspective, an angle that would reveal the work's secret. But the more he looked, the more unsettled he became. Why? It was only wood and lava. And it didn't look like anything in particular. If anything, it resembled DaVinci's man in a circle—except the man here was some sort of ugly amoebic embryo.

  He had an inescapable sense that more than Moki was at work here. Jack couldn't help but feel that the sculptor's madness had tapped him into something outside himself, outside everything humans knew, and he'd built a crude model of it.

  And Ba was right. Ba had said it all.

  Whatever it was, it was evil.

  Dinu Pass, Rumania

  "Look down, Nick. At the ground. Do you see anything?"

  Night had come. So had the bugs. The air was dense with them. From the base of the keep's tower, Bill watched their bizarre and varied forms buzzing, darting, drifting in the air a mere half-dozen feet away.

  But he and Nick were safe. Though they stood in the open doorway, the bugs kept their distance. As soon as it was dark, Bill had guided Nick back into the depths to the heavy stone door where now they both stared into the hungry darkness outside.

  "Come on, Nick," he said. "Take a good look. Do you see any of that glow you saw last night?"

  He nodded and pointed straight ahead. "There."

  A slow change had come over Nick during the day. He seemed more alert, more responsive to the world around him. Were the effects of his descent into the hole wearing off?

  "All right, then." Bill's insides were coiled tight. "I guess this is it."

  He turned to the baker's dozen of villagers armed with chairs and torches who waited behind him in the tower base. The thirteenth was Alexandru, standing off to the side.

  Through Alexandru, Bill had explained that the red-haired man who'd come here in 1941 was still alive and in America, that if he could recover some pieces of the "magic sword" that had shattered here on these stones, he might be able to close up the hole out there in the pass and bring the sun back. They'd helped him search around the base of the tower this afternoon but their efforts had been no more fruitful than his own in the morning. They'd have to go out at night.

  Bill had expected to be laughed off as a madman, or rudely rebuffed at the very least. Instead the villagers had conferred together, then agreed to help him. The women had begun wicker-weaving while the men set about making torches. Now they were dressed in multiple layers of clothing, wicker armor on their thighs and lower legs, heavy gloves, sheepskin hats and vests. They looked ready for an arctic blizzard, but it was a different sort of storm they'd be facing.

  Bill nodded to the men. It was time. Their faces remained mostly expressionless, but Bill noticed glances pass between them, saw them begin to breath more heavily. They were scared, and rightly so. A perfect stranger had asked them to put their lives on the line, to perform the equivalent of wading into a piranha-infested river with only a crab net and a spear for protection. If they turned around and headed back up the stones stairs now, he wouldn't blame them.

  But they didn't. They filed out through the opening with their shields and torches raised, to form a shallow semicircle of protection into which Bill and Nick stepped. And then, just as they'd rehearsed it inside the keep, they advanced as a group, the end members closing the circle behind Bill and Nick as they moved away from the tower wall.

  The bugs assaulted in a wave. The men in the circle around him began to cry out in fear and anger and revulsion as they blocked the swooping creatures with their raised chairs and shields while thrusting at them with their torches. To the accompaniment of buzzing wings and sizzling bug flesh, they inched forward.

  Bill crouched next to Nick, his arm over his shoulders, keeping his head down as they moved. He shouted in his left ear.

  "Where, Nick? Show me where!"

  Nick kept his eyes down, searching the rocky ground but saying nothing. Bill had a sudden, awful fear that Nick might not be able to see the glow because of the torches the circle of villagers carried. If daylight obscured the glow, would torchlight do the same?

  As if in answer to Bill's unasked question, Nick said, "Here's one."

  His pointing finger was directed at a spot two inches in front of his left shoe.

  Bill shouted to the group to stop, pulled out his flashlight, and began pawing through the stones with his free hand. He felt the circle constrict around him as the villagers were beaten back into a tighter knot by the bugs. But under the stones there was nothing but dirt.

  "There's nothing here, Nick!"

  But Nick kept pointing. "There, there, there."

  "Where, dammit?"

  "The glow. There."

  Nick sounded so sure. Out of sheer desperation, Bill began digging through the moist silt. It didn't seem likely, but maybe rains over the decades had buried some of the fragments and the glow was filtering up through the ground. The trip had been a bust so far and they didn't have much time out here, not with the increasing ferocity of the bug attack, so he was willing to try almost—

  Bill's fingers scraped on something hard and slim with rough edges, something that felt nothing like sand or stone. He forced his fingers down into the silt, worked them around the object, under it, then pulled it free.

  A rusty, dirty, jagged piece of metal lay in his palm. He held it up.

  "Is this it, Nick?"

  "Can't you see the glow?"

  Bill turned the object over and over in his hands. No glow. Just a broken, pitted piece of metal.

  "No. Are there more?"

  "Of course." He pointed to Bill's left. "Right there."
/>   Bill began to dig again. One of the men shouted something to him. Bill didn't know the language but the meaning was clear.

  Hurry!

  Bill placed his flashlight on the stones and used the first piece to help dig after the second, throwing dirt in all directions as he dug. He heard a faint clink of metal on metal and was reaching into the hole to feel for it when a chew wasp darted between the legs of one of the men and sank its needle teeth into his arm. Without thinking, Bill lashed at it with the metal fragment in his hand.

  The flash of light nearly blinded him for an instant. He blinked, and when the purple after-image faded, he saw the chew wasp flopping on the stones and gnashing its teeth in waning fury, a deep, blackened, smoking wound in its back.

  Bill stared at the metal fragment in his hand for a second. Whatever power this blade had once held was not completely gone, not by a long shot.

  He threw himself into probing deeper into the bottom of the second hole. He found another piece of metal almost immediately and held it up.

  "How about this one, Nick? Quick! Does it glow?"

  Nick nodded. "Yes."

  "Great. All right now. Where's the—"

  Then one of the villagers screamed and fell backward, landing across Bill's back and nearly knocking him flat. Bill thought the bugs might have broken through his defenses and latched onto him en masse, but he was wrong.

  It was worse.

  Something had the man by the ankle, something that had uncoiled out of the darkness like a long black rope, but alive, tapered, twisting, and powerful. His fall had broken the circle and now the bugs were inside, attacking from within as well as without. The men tried to reclose the circle but wavered as the snake-like thing began to drag their friend from their midst. Some bent to grab his arms to pull him back but the bugs were immediately upon them and they had to let him go to protect themselves. Bill watched in horror as the man was dragged screaming into the darkness, the bugs swarming over him, ripping at him.

  Another inky snake uncoiled from out of the night and snared a second villager. And as he was pulled crying to his doom, a third creature caught Nick and pulled him off his feet. Nick made no sound as he landed on the rocks. Bill wrapped an arm around his chest but the snake began to drag them both away. Bill sensed something huge and dark looming in the blackness beyond the reach of the torchlight and realized then that these weren't snakes but the long, smooth tentacles of a single monstrous creature. Glaeken's off-handed comment floated through his mind…