Twilight Zone Anthology

by Serling , Carol

  The car’s sole occupant, Geraldine Purdy, sixty-six, of Roswell, was dead on arrival at Mercy Hospital, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

  Those of a mind to meditate on mortality might consult an ancient Persian tale about fate called “The Appointment in Samarra,” as told by Somerset Maugham. The inescapable Angel of Death has a long history of taking many forms, and his henchman is always Fear—and nowhere is that more true than in the Twilight Zone.

  Her name is Nani—not “Nanny,” but “Nani.” An exotic name, perhaps, though not where she comes from. And her home¿ A place some call paradise, while others know it simply as another far-flung outpost . . . of the Twilight Zone.

  O

  h, so you want to talk story? Chicken-skin-kine story, makes you shiver? All right, here’s one I’ve never told before, in all my years—maybe I’ve been afraid to, afraid no one would believe. No, it’s not about the Marchers of the Night (though I did see them once, at Ka’ena Point, and ran like the wind before they could abduct me into their spirit ranks). It happened a long time ago—back in your old auntie’s small-kid time, when I was just a skinny little Hawaiian girl, ten years old. Yes, I was skinny then! My sisters used to joke that “even poi won’t stick to Nani’s ribs,” and it was true. America had entered the First World War the year before, and the sleepy little Honolulu of my childhood suddenly woke up one day to find it had become a bustling seaport. Anchored in the harbor were the dreadnoughts of many navies—American, British, Japanese, Australian—and the once-uncrowded streets were now filled with servicemen on the prowl for bathtub gin and bedroom eyes. (Never you mind what that means!) My mama volunteered as part of the ladies’ food-conservation committee, and as a good Victory Girl I gave up my weekly nickel to see the movies and pledged it to the war effort; but my parents had only daughters, no sons, so this was the closest the Great War came to knocking on our door.

  We lived up on the furrowed slopes of Punchbowl Hill, in a big plantation-style house necklaced by a white picket fence, overlooking the green taro fields and glistening silver rice paddies of the Pauoa Valley. Mama was kanaka maoli, pure-blood Hawaiian; Papa was a haole from St. Louis, Missouri, who’d come to Hawai’i as a young man and found success as an engineer for the Hawaiian Electric Company. When I think of my father, I think of fire: he had an Irishman’s red hair and florid complexion. When I think of Mama, I think of cooled lava: her hair, black as the volcanic ash of the hill we lived on, was usually piled like stones atop her head, but sometimes tumbled in a rockslide down her back. My two sisters favored my father, with light complexions and russet manes; I was my mother’s daughter, tawny skin and black hair, only worn shorter.

  Your auntie was a bit of a tomboy, you see, and long hair got in the way when I’d scale the heights of Punchbowl’s craggy ridges. All the neighborhood keiki climbed it, cutting our own trails that wound their way up to the five-hundred-foot summit. Sure, there was a road for cars to go up, but where was the fun in that? Leave that for the tourists and the soldiers on leave, come to take in the view. Back then, the view was just about all there was up there: the inside of the crater was a brown plain, sparsely decorated with lantana scrub, koa trees, the prickly panini cactus that flourished like a weed, and balloon plants, whose blossoms were round, hairy, and seemed to strike the neighborhood boys as hysterically amusing. But usually I’d go up alone—though I was never completely alone at the top. As I’d hike across the crater, I’d pass poor Hawaiian families squatting in sad little shacks and lean-tos, wives doing laundry in buckets as their children played with yappy little poi dogs. They might be stringing shell-and-seed leis for sale to tourists at the wharves, but otherwise had no jobs, nowhere else to live; when I could, I brought them fresh fruit from our garden.

  On the southern rim of the crater there was a lookout, a tiny spur of land jutting like a raised eyebrow from Punchbowl’s massive crown. I’d sit on the edge of the lookout and gaze down at the city spread out below me, dollhouses scattered amid orchards of toy trees. It was hard for me to imagine that thousands of years ago, rivers of fire had spilled down these slopes to the sea. I’d try to picture the molten lava boiling away the ocean, but the scene was just too peaceful from up here—from Punchbowl’s equally placid volcanic sister, Diamond Head, on the left, to the slumbering mountains of the Wai’anae Range on the right, and across the ocean to mysterious Moloka’i wrapped in clouds on the horizon.

  One day as I was sitting on the brow of the crater, I had a feeling—not a start or a fright, just a simple awareness—that there was someone standing behind me. I’d had this feeling a lot lately: I’d be alone in our backyard when I’d know that my sister Moani was standing in the doorway, and when I’d look up, there she was, asking me if I wanted to come in and play jacks. Or I’d sense that my teacher was going to call on me to answer a question a split second before she did. It happened often enough that I was beginning to accept it as routine. I turned to see a man—Hawaiian, maybe twenty years old—standing behind me, wearing the drab, olive-colored uniform of the United States Army. He had a round, gentle face and smiling brown eyes. “Aloha,” he called out to me.

  I returned the greeting.

  “Some kine view, eh?” he said as he approached. “Mind if I share?”

  “Sure, no boddah.”

  He sat down a few feet away and extended a hand, something most adults didn’t bother to do with a little keiki. “John Kua. Friends call me Johnny.”

  I shook his hand, feeling very grown-up. “I’m Nani. MacGillvray.”

  “You know why I like this side of the crater best, Nani?”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I can see the house I grew up in from here.” He pointed into the middle distance, toward the crowded tenement neighborhoods of the Plama district. “Right down there, on Cunha Lane. Little white-frame house sitting under a monkeypod tree.”

  I squinted into the distance. “I can’t make it out.”

  “Eh, neither can I.” He laughed. “But I know it’s there.” Despite his good humor, there was something sad in the way he said it.

  I asked, “You just get home from the war?”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m stationed here on O’ahu. Schofield Barracks.”

  “How long you been in the Army?”

  “Oh, I joined up even before we declared war. Saw the writing on the wall, figured we going get into it eventually. You come a lot to Puowaina?”

  I was confused by this. “You mean Punchbowl?”

  “Punchbowl’s the name the haoles gave it when they came,” he told me. “The old Hawaiian name is Puowaina—means ‘hill of sacrifice.’ ”

  “Why did they call it that?”

  He hesitated for a moment, then explained, “Long time ago, there was an altar up here—like in a church, yeah? Except on this altar, people were put to death for violating the kapus—the rules—laid down by the chiefs. Or they might be offered up as a sacrifice to the gods in exchange for something, like to end a drought.”

  My eyes popped at that. “Honest-kine?”

  “Honest! Not for long time, though.” He winked. “We know better now.”

  “How do you know that’s what happened?” I said dubiously.

  “My tt—my gramma—used to tell me stories about the before time, back when the slopes of Puowaina were covered with pili grass.” He took proper note of my skepticism. “You want to see where it happened?”

  Well, what keiki wouldn’t? He got up and led me over to a large, impressive pile of perpendicular stones that looked, if not like an altar, then definitely like something that used to be something. “The chiefs would bring the victims up from the town,” he said with an expansive wave of his hand. “Sometimes they’d drown them in the ocean before they brought ’em up here . . . and that’s when they were feeling kind. Other times they’d bring ’em straight up and put them in that fire oven, over there” —he pointed to another, smaller pile of rocks not too far away—“built especially for b
urning men alive.”

  I gasped. To think that a place like Punchbowl, which I thought I knew as well as the back of my hand, could have such a hidden, and bloody, history! Needless to say, I was thrilled.

  Johnny went on to tell me a few other legends about Puowaina—how the side of the crater had once opened up and poured fiery lava on a band of warriors who had cruelly destroyed a helpless village on Kaua’i—but, as fascinating as I found it all, eventually I looked at the fading sunlight and said, “I better go, I’ll be late for supper. Nice meeting you, Johnny.”

  “Yeah, same here. Maybe I see you again sometime. Aloha, Nani.”

  • • •

  Well, after that, I saw Punchbowl in a whole new way. Kine scary way, to tell you the truth. I’d think about climbing it, then look up at the brooding summit, imagine men burning in fire ovens, and think, Eh, maybe I stay home—and I’d go play in my own backyard. That was where I was, late one afternoon, when I looked up from my game of hopscotch and noticed something funny-kine in the sky above a neighbor’s house. The sun was already behind Punchbowl, throwing its dying light onto a big cloud, making it glow like embers. But it was the shape of the cloud that was funny: a long “body” thinning at one end into a curved tail, and at the other end fattening into a diamond-shaped head. It looked exactly like a mo’o, a lizard, breathing fire into the sky above the home of Mrs. Fereira, a widow who lived across the street.

  Then my mother called me in for supper, and at the table I happened to mention what I’d seen. Mama seemed unusually interested in what I’d said.

  “The cloud looked like a mo’o?” she asked me. “Are you sure?”

  “What’s a mo’o?” my little sister, Moani, asked.

  “You are,” my big sister, Cynthia, taunted.

  “Am not! I don’t think.”

  My mother hushed them both. I told her, “It was lit up like it was on fire!”

  “And it was directly above Mrs. Fereira’s house?” Mama said.

  “What’s so all-damned fascinating about that?” my father asked, finally looking up from his bowl of clam chowder.

  Mama instantly seemed to regret her interest in the subject. She explained, reluctantly, “In the old days, the appearance of a mo’o was thought to be an ill omen, for women especially. It augured the worst kind of misfortune.”

  Father let out a derisive snort, as we all knew he would.

  “Superstitious claptrap,” he declared. “There are thousands of lizards on this island, and what do they do? Augur? Portend? No. They stick to ceilings, leave their droppings everywhere, and womankind is none the worse off for their presence, unless it’s to clean up after them.” He shook his head disgustedly and returned his attention to his soup.

  In fairness it must be said: Papa would have been equally likely to pronounce as “claptrap” a sighting in the clouds of the Virgin Mother. He had no patience for any kine religion, whether it was Christianity or the old pagan Hawaiian beliefs. My mother gave me a look that told me, Subject closed.

  Father believed in science, especially as it was represented by his beloved 1915 Ford Model T Roadster—the first model to feature electric headlights. Each morning he would patiently hand crank its engine, then proudly—and, it must be admitted, a bit speedily—drive it down the steep hills of the Pauoa Valley to the offices of the Hawaiian Electric Company on King Street. And nearly every day he would inquire of his daughters, “Who wants a ride to school?”—but because so few of our classmates’ families owned automobiles, we feared being seen driven to school, lest our friends accuse us of being stuck up.

  Sometimes, though, Papa would smile devilishly at me and whisper, “C’mon, Nani—I’ll let you drive,” and my hesitation would disappear like the new moon. I would sit in his lap as he disengaged the parking brake and opened the throttle, and we would hurtle down Pauoa Road as if on a roller coaster. Then, when we reached level ground, Papa would turn off onto a quiet side street with no traffic, carefully place my hands on the steering wheel, and allow me to “drive” the Tin Lizzie for an entire block. (His hands rested lightly but reassuringly on the top of the wheel, in case he needed to take control.) It was always a thrill for me, and well worth the occasional stink-eye I might get from a jealous classmate.

  “Mum’s the word, eh?” Papa would say as he dropped me off at school, and as I nodded readily he would race off, with a squeal of his transmission, to work.

  Two weeks after I saw that fiery cloud above her house, Mrs. Fereira died unexpectedly of influenza. It was very sad; she was a nice lady, still young, and her Portuguese sweet bread was divine. But I didn’t really think of it as having anything to do with what I’d seen in the sky. I’d almost forgotten about what Mama had said about bad luck and mo’o lizards.

  I don’t think Mama forgot, though. After she learned the news about Mrs. Fereira, Mama gave me the strangest look all day.

  It wasn’t long after that I had the most awful nightmare. It started out nice enough: I was soaring like a gull over the sea, though the shadow I seemed to cast on the water was much bigger than a bird’s, the wind raking pleasantly through my hair. But then night and fog darkened both sky and ocean, and soon I felt myself dropping like a stone, unable to see a thing in the foggy dark . . . until the very last moment, when the fog blew away to reveal treetops looming up below me, and I crashed into them with a sound like crumpling wood and metal. Suddenly my whole body was drenched—not with water, but with what smelled like gasoline. Its acrid odor filled my lungs and stung my eyes.

  I yelled so loudly it woke me up.

  Cynthia and Moani tried to quiet me but couldn’t. I was a dervish of anxiety. Only Mama, hurrying in from her bedroom, could quell my night terrors. “Sssh, sssh, it’s all right,” she said, taking me up into her arms and rocking me. “It was just a bad dream.”

  “I fell,” I told her breathlessly. “I was flying and I fell. . . .”

  “You fell into bed, safe and sound,” Mama said with a smile. “See?” As I calmed down, I told her a little more about what I’d dreamt, and she reassured me that I was home and safe. But though I felt better when she finally left, I still didn’t get much sleep the rest of the night.

  By the time I got to school the next morning I’d mostly forgotten about it. But the teachers were all talking to each other about a story in that morning’s newspaper about two aviators named Clark and Gray, who had just made the first interisland airplane flight in Hawai’i. The pair had taken off from O’ahu in a seaplane, landed briefly on Maui before heading for Hilo on the Big Island—and then promptly disappeared, and were feared to have crashed.

  When I heard this I began choking again on gasoline fumes, so overwhelming that I had to flee into the bathroom, where I gagged over the sink.

  When I got home that afternoon, Mama was looking at me strangely again. “Nani,” she said, “tell me again about your bad dream.”

  I repeated what I’d told her last night, then said I wasn’t feeling well and asked if I could be excused from supper and go straight to bed. She put a hand on my forehead, said, “Yes, of course,” and tucked me into bed. Once she left the room, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to go to sleep, after all; but eventually I did.

  That night I dreamt calmer, though still exotic, dreams: I found myself walking through a jungle of algaroba trees and maile vines, feeling hot and sweaty and hungry, but oddly unafraid. There were no jarring crashes, no smell of gasoline; just heat, humidity, and a dull ache in my belly. This time I didn’t wake up from it with a shout, just drifted out of it into other, less interesting dreams.

  The next morning, over my breakfast poi, I calmly told my mother, “It’s all right, they’re alive. They’re walking out of the jungle, that’s all.”

  “What? Who?” my father said.

  “The two men in the plane,” I replied casually.

  Mama looked stricken.

  “It’s nothing,” she told my father. “Just a story Nani made up.”

 
“That’s nothing to be spinning yarns about,” Papa chided me. “Those poor devils are probably lying at the bottom of the ocean.”

  But Papa was wrong. That day, against all odds, Harold Clark and Robert Gray emerged unharmed from the thicket of the Kaiwiki Forest on the eastern slopes of Mauna Kea, where their seaplane had crashed two nights before. They had walked away from the crash and then kept on walking through the jungle, without any food, for the next two days.

  I thought Mama would be happy to learn this, but when I got home she took me aside and told me, sternly, “Nani, you must stop doing this.”

  This was the last thing I expected to hear. “Doing what?”

  “Seeing things. In the clouds, in your dreams.”

  “But I’m not doing anything,” I protested.

  “You’re telling your father things you can’t possibly know! He won’t understand.”

  “He will if I explain it to—”

  “No!”

  Mama seldom raised her voice to me, and it stung. “You asked me about my dream and I told you,” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  “No, you didn’t, I know that,” she said, softer. “But from now on I won’t ask you any more questions, and I don’t want you to tell me anything about what you—see. You understand?”

  “But what if I have another nightmare?”

  My mother looked pained at the thought, but said nothing.

  Angrily I turned and ran out of the house, without any real idea of where I was going. Then I glanced up at the slopes of Punchbowl and I sensed, somehow, that if I went up there now I would find Johnny Kua. I picked some mangoes from our tree, put them in a sack, then began climbing the trail to the summit, baffled as to why Mama was scolding me for things I didn’t have any control over—what I saw in the clouds, or dreams that came to me in the night. I ate one of the mangoes on the way up, then when I reached the top I gave the rest to one of the squatter families and hurried across the crater to the lookout. Sure enough, Johnny was standing there, once again gazing down at the city.