Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  The heat increased, bearing down with its load of moisture. Cobb stopped again and switched off the engine. A silence thick as the mud oozing around their wheels fell on them. Wisps of vapor rose from the hood.

  “Why are we stopping?” Handel asked.

  Cobb pointed at the temperature gauge, hovering near the top of the red arc. “Time to cool off. So far so good, but we don’t know for sure what’s waiting up there.”

  “We’d expect a rain or mist to put noticeable marks on the car,” Chazz said. “No one noticed anything on Propter’s car, but of course they weren’t looking. They thought he’d just gotten sick.”

  Handel laughed, a short, tense honk without mirth. The Samurai was already so spattered with mud, little of its original color was visible. “Why would anyone try to come up this road in an ordinary car?” he asked.

  “Propter was following Wakefield and the others, the Candide team. He saw the satellite fall and figured this is where they would come. And they did, too, on Sunday night. They may have come again, though why they would do so after stripping and abandoning their control vehicle I can’t guess.”

  “Why didn’t they bring out the satellite?” Scottie asked. “They were here. They should have brought out the pieces.”

  Cobb, engaged in examining his gun, seemed to give it some thought. “It was poisonous. They would have been prepared for that, but maybe they thought it was too dangerous to bring out to a populated area. Eventually a team from Defense or NASA will show up to remove it. The immediate investigation would try to determine if the toxin on board escaped into the atmosphere, and to manage the crisis, limit the damage, that sort of thing. We can conclude that a small amount escaped, but that they contained it. It’s still up there, though, waiting to release a cloud of the stuff. I want to know about it if it is.” After he strapped his belt onto the outside of his suit and slipped the holster to his side, he looked back at Chazz. “What do you think?”

  “We do have to know,” the biologist said. “If there is, as I would imagine, a biology factory using Candida albicans to produce a mycotoxin akin to T-2 on that thing, then it is only a matter of time.”

  “Look!” Handel shouted.

  Around the bend in the road ahead of them a shape appeared. In the dimness under the overhanging foliage it was difficult to discern what it was at first, but it moved, then stopped, then moved again, toward them. Low, brownish-gray, primitive. A feral hog, with small, intelligent eyes glittering from the gloom, stood with its feet splayed out sideways. It moved toward them a few more steps, stopped and glared.

  “Is there something wrong with it?” Scott said.

  “No, it looks all right,” Chazz said. He was leaning forward between the two front seats, squinting through the dirt on the windscreen.

  “She’s a big one,” Cobb said. “Four, five hundred pounds.”

  The sow stared at them for a few moments longer, as if about to charge. Then she turned and lurched sideways a moment before vanishing around the bend in the road.

  The silence grew deeper. Within it they could hear the hissing of the vapor escaping from the radiator and rising to mingle with the general humidity. Soft uneven ticking sounds from cooling metal, stirrings in the underbrush, running water, all expanded to fill their awareness.

  Takamura started the engine again and they edged forward. “It gets worse further on,” he said. “Few people come up here— hunters, plantation workers, that’s about all. Except for the swamp on top, these back trails are among the most inaccessible on the island, I’d think.”

  “Patria was telling me last night,” Chazz said softly, his voice nearly inaudible over the sound of the engine. “This looks like the world of ‘ana’ana, of black magic. Evil can happen this far from the sea. Why would anyone want to come here? For centuries the forest provided. You did not have to walk far into it to get what you needed— ti, koa, breadfruit, and mountain apple. Not far. And the sea gave everything else. Food. Shell. Sport. Water, a place to grow taro on the gentler slopes, or even up a ways in a valley. Catch basins for rainwater. No need to come so far. Ahead, the river, sacred to the alii. This place is kapu, forbidden. Taboo.”

  “You think we violate kapu by coming here?” Handel asked him.

  Chazz nodded. “Of course. But that was very long ago. We’ve managed to keep the supernatural at a distance this year.”

  They continued their slow progress. The tires whined in the mud, throwing long spatters to either side, and rooster tails behind as Cobb guided the Samurai through ruts, around turns, and over streams. The ohia and fern jungle on either side grew more dense, and the gloom increased too as the sides of this small canyon grew higher and crowded close.

  There was no further sign of the sow, no trampled ferns at the edge, no prints in the mud. She had vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared.

  Time passed, and the steep slopes of the crater began to rise ahead and around them, thickly shrouded in fog and cloud and a vegetation alternately brilliant green in sunlight and somber green in shade. Occasionally an overgrown clearing indicated a place to turn around, but if two vehicles ever encountered one another on this road, it could take time for one to back up.

  They did not encounter another vehicle, though. The sun continued to climb. Finally the trail joined a river. For a time a stream flowed alongside them, the same stream that flowed out through Kapuna Shores. Its waters were reddish-brown. They would be toxic if drunk, filled as they were with intestinal parasites from the feral goats and pigs upstream, but there was nothing tempting about them. Then they had to cross the stream, once, twice, a third time. Waters rose over the hubs of the wheels, Hushing through the undersides of the fenders and wheelwells, trickling away as they climbed the banks. Everything slowed their progress. And still the heat bore down.

  “This could be a trail taken long ago by Hi’iaka,” Chazz said suddenly. His voice, muffled and filtered by the mask of his containment suit, was distant and strange over the sound of the engine, whining in lowest gear, a dreamy murmur in the heat and gloom. He moved his hand toward the stream, flowing along the trail. “Wailua means not only ‘two waters,’ but ‘spirit’ as well. Pele, red-haired malihini goddess of volcano and fire, a foreign woman, very powerful, had come from Kahiki far away, which may be Tahiti, and when she came the god of fire who was here first fled, never to return. Even his name is forgotten. This is important to the story, because Pele is a powerful woman, whose anger is lethal. She came long ago with her sister Hi’iaka, who had charge of many living things, including the mountain birds. Pele settled at last on the big island of Hawaii in Moku-a-weoweo, the Land of Burning, for to make her home she must dig deep without finding water. So she settled there, and one night let her wailua leave her body in a trance to travel to Kaua’i. At Haena she saw Lohi’au, a mighty king, presiding over his court and his hula dancers. He was so handsome, so alluring, so tempting, though a mortal king, that she spent many days with him, days and nights of love.

  “When she returned to her body and awoke, she felt such need for Lohi’au, she sent Hi’iaka to fetch her mortal lover. So she gave to Hi’iaka her powers, and sent her. Hi’iaka traveled, much as we are traveling, with difficulty and pain. Perhaps she came up here. Perhaps she did not. There above us is the ancient crater of Wai’ale’ale, of overflowing waters. Look about us. There are clouds beyond clouds. Tears fall everywhere, all around us, and beyond that the waterfalls from the Alakai fall thousands of feet. Soon we would be there.”

  “What about Hi’iaka?” Handel asked, and his voice too came out of a cavern of gloom. The sun was nearly always obscured, an orange disk some of the time behind thin layers of driving mist, invisible at other times.

  “She found Lohi’au, of course, but it was too late. He had died of grief for his beloved, who had come to him in a dream, and then had vanished without a trace.”

  “That is not the end of the story.”

  “No.” Chazz may have laughed, but the sou
nd was smothered in engine noise and face mask and the oppressive gloom of the steep-sloped amphitheater. “She had powers, you know. Pele herself had given many of them to her. It was not easy, but she brought him back to life, and took him to Pele. And that is where the real story begins, though it is a story that belongs to the active volcanos of Hawaii, and not to the old, decayed, extinct one here on Kaua’i.

  “Pele had broken her promise; some of Hi’iaka’s precious plants and birds were damaged or destroyed. Then Hi’iaka’s anger was great. Because she wanted him anyway, she made love to Lohi’au on the rim of Kilauea, in front of Pele and all the rest. And there was a great battle of magic, and mighty deeds, and Lohi’au was consumed in Pele’s fires.

  “You must imagine a scene very different from this: bleak, empty, desolate. The harsh rolling black of pohoehoe lava, and the wind blowing over it all, like the sigh of someone dying. Pele is coming, Lohi’au will die. Patria has taught me a bit of the song. It goes like this.”

  He began to chant, very softly:

  “Holo ke ahi mahao’o o Kua-uli;

  Pau Oma’o-lala i ke ahi;

  I hi’a no a á pulupulu i ka lau laau…

  On rushes a fierce dog with flaming mouth,

  Eating the way Oma ‘o-lala.

  For tinder it burns hair from the fern.

  A ghastly rain blots out the sky;

  The sooty birds of storm whirl through the vault;

  Heaven groans, adrip, as with dragon-blood…”

  His voice trailed off slowly as they whined around a bend. Suddenly a wild-eyed apparition rushed headlong toward them so abruptly Cobb slammed on the brakes. In the aftermath of the chant the suddenness of this appearance, the chaotic and tumultuous nature of it, the weird cries and groans it emitted as it lurched and staggered toward them in the gloom, spotted by reflected greenish light from the undergrowth and the splashes of red mud thrown up in front, all served to take it out of the mundane world into the realm of wailua, where spirit abandoned flesh. Its eyes were a wild multitude, aslant in hydra-heads, flashing red and white.

  The sound was eerie, uncanny, a mixture of wailing souls forsaken to eternal torment, bleating and gasping for breath. The wild approach was so swift, so terrifically impressive, that there was no time to react at all.

  They were goats, feral goats, at least a dozen of them, fleeing in a tightly packed group in terror or panic, rolling their eyes as they ran, heedless of the vehicle before them. They scarcely slowed, separating at the last minute to crash through the underbrush at either side. Their heavy bodies, thick bones jutting from meager flesh, crashed from time to time against the side or front of the Samurai, rocking it. One or two leaped onto the hood and over the roof, the metallic sounds of their feet against the vehicle amazingly loud.

  One of the goats, unable to crowd around the Samurai, lost its footing, hit the left front fender, and screamed. The others behind it kept running, sharp hoofs thudding against it as it slid sideways and disappeared from sight.

  Within seconds they were gone, the sounds of their flight fading rapidly.

  Only the labored breathing of the injured goat came to them. Cobb tried to push the door open, but could not budge it against the steep bank rising halfway up on his side. The vegetation at his window level was trampled and broken where the herd had passed. He rolled down the window and leaned out, an alien figure in transparent plastic and distorting face mask. Then he shifted into reverse and backed away from the dying goat. He stopped a few feet away. They watched as the goat twitched and finally died.

  Soon the silence descended again, bringing with it the low hum of the engine, the ticking of hot metal, the hiss of steam once more escaping from under the hood. Cobb inched ahead, maneuvering around the body, tilting crazily onto the right bank. They were looking for another turnaround, a widened spot on the trail where he could park.

  Handel let out a long sigh. “That was spooky,” he said.

  Ten minutes later they found the parking place.

  A Ford Bronco thick with red volcanic mud and leaves torn from the trailside was parked half under the dense ohia branches.

  Overhead the clouds were now thick and increasingly heavy, though just here no rain fell. The air seemed to gather density from the sky, as if trapped beneath it with no escape and no relief. The darkness here, contrasted sharply with the brilliance of the sun further down the trail, was intense. As it deepened over them all, it grew even more oppressive than the heat and damp.

  CHAPTER 29

  SCOTT HANDEL WATCHED them vanish into the undergrowth. Another silence, more profound, more oppressive and cloying than the previous one, descended. The air was hot, motionless, indistinct. He could see little up the sides of the canyon. Only over the very tops of the trees that delimited the horizon could he just make out the rim of the mountain peak. It seemed to be raining all around, but not nearby, not on him or the car. There was still blood on the fender of the Samurai.

  He worked methodically, removing air filters from the cases in the back of the Samurai and exposing them to the air. They were ceramic disks filled with microscopic pores impregnated with a chemical catalyst. Chazz had given him a brief but intense course in sampling technique and chemical technology. If the toxin were present in the air it would show up as a nearly fluorescent purple on the white honeycomb under ultraviolet light.

  He climbed a few meters up the slope in the direction the others had gone and hung one of the round traps from an ohia branch. He returned to the Samurai, removed another test trap, and walked fifty or sixty meters up the trail, wading through the foot-deep water. He found a place where he could climb fairly easily to a lava outcropping, on which he carefully placed another of the traps.

  Again he collected one from the Samurai and moved up the opposite slope to the south, where he found a dead ohia lehua, its twisted branches stripped of bark and twigs. He hung the trap from a spur. The last he set up beside the vehicle.

  Nothing moved. There was neither sound nor breath of wind. He did not admit to fear, though he felt the tendrils of fear of what the first round of the tests would reveal. If the virulent stain appeared, would the face mask, the filters, the plastic protection, be enough?

  Elliot Propter was proof that something had floated down this valley. The others had only confirmed it.

  He waited fifteen minutes, then carrying the small ultraviolet lamp, clambered up the hill to the first trap. His fingers shook a little as he took it down.

  Nothing. The faint bluish light fell on the white ceramic, but no color appeared on the surface.

  He moved on to the next trap, with the same result. The third and fourth showed no signs of the toxin. He settled down to wait.

  Up the slope, a little deeper into the semicircle of ridges, Chazz and Cobb moved clumsily and slowly though thickets of twisted ohia, gray trunks shimmering with the ever present damp. They could look up from time to time to see the rain falling in small tight veils from drifting clouds moving along and below the mountain rim, but rain seemed to disdain falling in their vicinity. It was a mixed blessing. Rain might offer some relief from the oppressive heat.

  They reached the top of the ridge that ran along the north edge of the canyon and found a thin place in the forest. Beyond were more ridges, more forest, more cloud and dark mountain slope. The ridge was fairly sharp, and offered slightly easier going than through the slick, rugged forested slopes.

  Cobb unfolded a large scale sectional topographic map and peered through his faceplate at the tiny red marks that showed their route leading to the debris. With his finger he traced the path. He held up three fingers and pointed. Three hundred meters, that direction.

  They struggled up the ridge to the west.

  At the Samurai Scott Handel sat on the right fender, the side away from the traces of the dead goat, and watched the forest. The forest did nothing; it did not seem to watch, to offer hostility or threat. It was indifferent, and that was, in some indefinable way, worse.r />
  Hundreds of years ago people must have made their way up this tiny valley on foot, cutting through the forest with stone knives. In old photographs the plain to the east was bare, nearly desert. Now, of course, it was green with woods and cane and gardens. This secluded circle of mountain ridge would have been a sacred spot, the source of life giving waters, a natural amphitheater three thousand feet high.

  He left the car and climbed the south slope to move along the ridge, eyes soft and slightly out of focus. He would notice an unusual formation, a line or outcropping a bit too straight, a right angle somewhere in the jungle. Some sign of human intervention in the chaos of nature’s fertility. It had been part of his childhood, this recognition of local ruins, signs of the oldest culture of the island.

  The ridge climbed more steeply to the west, took a southern turn, then extended west once more, dropping suddenly away where the lava had collapsed before the irresistible pressures of time and water. He gazed gloomily at a stream that had cut through a section of the ridge that had collapsed; the ridge resumed lower down on the other side. To the north, where the others had gone, the trees were low and stunted on the narrow edge of this spine of crumbling lava. Scott could see quite a distance, although intervening rain and rags of cloud partially obscured the view. He thought he could see figures moving over there.

  He squinted into the obscurity. Something was moving, but it could have been a goat or even a wild cow. Light seemed to catch and shine off a shape; then another seemed to move behind the first.

  He let his eyes travel slowly over the speckled gray and green surface of the forest, and, by some freak combination of parting clouds, a shaft of sunlight, and the precise angle of his point of view, he saw light flash off a metallic surface about halfway up the opposite slope. The figures, too far to the west, were making their way back toward the debris.