Twilight Zone Anthology

by Serling , Carol

  He turned, saw me, smiled. “Well, if it isn’t Nani MacGillvray. Aloha.”

  “Hi,” I said, sounding pretty glum.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I was suddenly reluctant to tell him for fear that he might have the same reaction as my mother.

  “Come on,” he prodded gently, “what is it, what kine pilikia you in?”

  We sat down and I told him everything: the mo’o in the clouds, Mrs. Fereira’s death, my dream about the two aviators. To my relief, he didn’t laugh or even look at me cross-eyed, but seemed to accept my story at face value. I told him about Mama scolding me, half afraid he’d scold me too. But he just smiled.

  “Nani, there’s nothing the matter with you,” he assured me. “What you dreamt is called a ‘revelation of the night.’ You have a gift. Your mama knows it too, even if it scares her.”

  “A gift?” That wasn’t the word I’d have used to describe it.

  “We Hawaiians live in two worlds, Nani,” he said gently. “This world you see around us, that’s just the first layer, like the skin covering our bodies. There’s another layer underneath, like you and I have blood and bones beneath our skin. My tt said the ability to see this second layer of reality is called ’ike pplua: it means ‘twice knowing.’ Seeing events that haven’t happened yet—or things happening now, but at a great distance—that’s a special gift you have, Nani. The haoles call it ‘second sight.’ ”

  “So I’m . . . not being bad when I see things?”

  He laughed. “No, just the opposite. Your gift is pono—a very good thing.”

  “It doesn’t feel good,” I said.

  “That’s because your mama is afraid of it, or she’s worried your father will be afraid. The important thing is, don’t you be afraid of it.”

  “Johnny, do you have—‘twice knowing’?”

  He shook his head. “No, I joined the Army early on a hunch, not a vision. I’m not like you.”

  I thought about that a moment, and as I did I could see Johnny glancing down at the city again, and I knew he was looking at his family’s house in Plama.

  “Johnny?” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “Why do you look so sad when you look down at your home?” I didn’t need second sight to see it.

  He smiled sheepishly. “Long story. Maybe I tell you sometime.”

  “Can’t you go back there and visit your ’ohana?”

  He smiled and said, “I think maybe you’re the one needs to go home . . . your mama’s probably worried.”

  We got up, and then he squatted down and put his hands on my shoulders. “Just remember, Nani: it’s pono. Don’t be afraid of it, no matter what happens.”

  But something in the way he said that only made me feel more afraid.

  For the next few weeks I tried not to remember my dreams, and I even did my best to avoid looking up at the clouds. One weekend Papa took us all for a Sunday drive to Kailua, though this was not as restful as it sounds: Papa took the hairpin turns at his customary brisk clip up the windward side of the island. But we did have fun, stopping to watch the geyser of water erupting out of the Hlona Blowhole, and later Papa bought us all ice cream cones at the Elite Ice Cream Parlor.

  The following day, I was playing tag in the schoolyard when I got tagged by Annabel Lucie—a girl I hardly knew—her fingertips just barely grazing the skin of my arm. All at once I had a familiar feeling—kine like when I was in the ocean, bodysurfing, and a wave pulled me under. It felt like I had a wave sitting on top of me and I didn’t have more than a single breath in my lungs, but I didn’t dare open my mouth to take another. The air of the playground actually began to thicken, to liquefy, as if it were turning to water all around me. I could still see the other girls playing tag, but now they were running in slow motion in the water, their hair floating up from their faces, oblivious to what was happening around them. I felt the sting of salt in my eyes; I couldn’t hold my breath much longer and was on the verge of taking in a deep swallow of ocean when . . .

  “Nani? You okay?”

  It was my friend Beverly’s voice, and the touch of her hand on my arm caused the water to evaporate, just like that. I was no longer bursting for breath.

  “Nani? What’s wrong?”

  “Eh . . . not’ing,” I lied and returned to the game, though steering clear of Annabel after that.

  I went to bed that night with the salty taste of the ocean still on my lips.

  The next morning, as my classmates and I filed into the schoolroom, I cautiously skirted past Annabel as she settled in at her desk, two rows behind me. I didn’t touch her, didn’t come close, but in my nervousness I bumped into her desk as I passed, and that was apparently enough to trigger it.

  With the same absolute clarity that I’d dreamt of falling like a meteor from the skies above the Big Island, I now found myself treading water off Waikk—I could see Diamond Head off to my right, and some dozens of yards in front of me, a line of surfers rode a break I recognized as the one called Castle’s Surf.

  But the fact that I could see the surfers’ backs meant that I was too far out. My leg cramped suddenly; I flailed in the water like a fish without a fin. I tried to call out to my family on the beach—not my family, I knew, but Annabel’s—and to her older brothers, swimming closer to shore. I didn’t know if they could hear me, couldn’t tell whether they saw me frantically trying to wave and get their attention. A wave suddenly slapped me in the back, knocking the wind out of me as it pushed me under water and held me there. I knew I had only a single breath in my lungs, and I started to panic as I fought the reflex to open my mouth, and . . .

  A boy’s hand clasped my arm, pulling me up to the surface.

  No—a boy jostled me as he passed me in the classroom, startling me from my trance. I was no longer drowning, I was back at school, in my classroom.

  I took a deep gulp of air and hurried to my desk.

  I sat there wondering what had happened. Had—would—Annabel be saved by someone, one of her brothers, maybe? Or had it just been me who’d been rescued, by that boy’s brief contact? And should I warn Annabel, tell her not to go swimming at Waikk—or at least not to swim beyond the surf break?

  My first instinct was to do just that. But then I worried: What if she didn’t believe me? What if she told the teacher I was trying to frighten her? What if the teacher told my mother, or, worse, my father?

  Paralyzed with anxiety, I fretted over the question all week and into the next. And that Monday morning, Annabel came to school breathless with the news that she had nearly drowned in the surf off Waikk and had only been saved at the last minute by a surfer paddling by on his board.

  She had certainly not been saved by me, and, as relieved as I was that she was all right, I was also angry at myself for doing nothing.

  I thought of what Johnny had told me: “It’s pono.” But I knew that what I had done, or failed to do, was not pono.

  That night, alone on the slopes of Puowaina and hiding behind some kiawe brush, I wept in frustration. I was just a little keiki, why did I have to make such important choices? I didn’t want to see these terrible things! Go away, dreams, I commanded them. Go away and leave me alone!

  To my relief and amazement, this actually seemed to work, at least for a while. The dreams and visions of other places, other people’s lives, all stopped—as if my conscious mind were stubbornly refusing to take messages from my unconscious. Weeks went by without anything odd or disturbing happening to me. My dreams were all placid, benign: clouds that looked like clouds, not lizards; flying that didn’t end in a tailspin; frolicking in the ocean, but not drowning in it.

  So at first it seemed typically peaceful to find myself dreaming one night that I was on the beach, building sand castles as I listened to the rumbling sigh of the surf behind me. As in any dream, there were things that made sense only in a dream, so it didn’t surprise me when I looked up to see a group of tanned young Ha
waiian men wearing old-style malo cloths walking up the beach—and carrying lit torches, though it was the middle of the day. I heard drums, too; when I turned around to see where they were coming from, I saw instead an outrigger canoe coming ashore. And the young men were now carrying something else—a long bundle, about six feet long, wrapped in tapa cloth. They stopped in front of me and lowered their burden for me to look at.

  I was startled to see that it was my father bundled up in tapa cloth, his eyes closed, his skin looking unusually pale. But there was such a peaceful calm on his face, it didn’t bother me. I asked him, “Papa, are you sleeping?”

  “Yes,” one of the young men said with a nod, “he sleeps the moe ’uhane.”

  I had no idea what he meant by this but somehow didn’t think it important enough to ask.

  The men lowered Papa into the hull of the canoe, now bobbing in the shallows, then pushed it away from shore. In moments the canoe bearing my father was being paddled out to sea, where the sunlight sparkling off the ocean made it seem as if the canoe were riding waves of white fire. It was beautiful to see, and though parts of this dream may have puzzled me, I didn’t find it at all frightening, and awoke with a feeling of serenity and peace.

  After breakfast, Papa again asked, “Anybody need a ride to school?” —and when Cynthia and Moani shook their heads, all he had to do was look at me with that devilish smile and I replied eagerly, “I do!”

  I climbed into his lap and the Tin Lizzie took off down Pauoa Road. As usual, Papa took us onto a quiet little side street where I could steer, but this time I reached up and gripped the wheel in my hands—

  And suddenly the car was spinning sideways—lurching off the road and down a steep embankment, though the street we’d been on a moment before had been flat as a board. The world literally turned upside down as the automobile rolled over with a crunch, jolting me out of Papa’s lap. I fell, my head banging into the roof, which was now below me—and only inches from where a huge rock had torn a hole in the vinyl. I screamed as we kept on rolling and I was thrown like a beanbag around the passenger compartment. Then I heard a sound like tearing metal under me, and the whole world exploded in an angry roar. Flames were everywhere but we were still rolling, a fireball encased in metal. I continued to scream—even as I found myself suddenly, safely, in Papa’s arms again.

  “Nani, what is it, what’s wrong?”

  We were stopped in the middle of that quiet, level little side street—the car no longer tumbling end over end, no longer in flames. But the sudden normalcy and safety were anything but reassuring. My screams died in my throat as I looked around me and realized that what I’d seen hadn’t really happened.

  Not yet.

  I started to cry. Papa held me tightly against him. “It’s all right, baby, everything’s all right. . . .” But it wasn’t, because as I turned my tear-streaked face into the crook of his arm, I caught one last glimpse from inside the burning car—a man’s hand lying limp on the crushed steering wheel. And though I dearly wished I didn’t, I knew for certain whose hand it was, or would be.

  When I finally stopped crying, Papa asked me again what was wrong, what had happened. I told him I’d just gotten scared. It didn’t sound convincing even to me, but in the absence of any other explanation, Papa took me home . . . and, after he had reassured himself I wasn’t injured, he left me in Mama’s care. She put me to bed, stuck a thermometer in my mouth, and left to make me some tea. I lay there terrified to tell her what I’d seen, yet terrified not to. I thought of Annabel—but that had turned out all right, hadn’t it, even though I’d said nothing? Maybe this would too. How did I know what was the right thing to do?

  Mama came back into the room to find me crying again. She sat down on the bed, took me in her arms, and asked, “What did you see, Nani?”

  I looked at her fearfully.

  “I know I promised I’d never ask you that again,” she said gently, “but never mind that. What was it you saw in the automobile?”

  “You won’t be angry at me?”

  “No. I swear.”

  I told her. She listened, looking concerned but not angry, even when I told her of the last image I’d seen, the man’s hand—the hand I knew belonged to Papa.

  “You—you never saw your father’s face?” Mama asked hopefully.

  “Not this morning,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I . . . I had a dream last night.” I went over every detail: playing on the beach; the Hawaiian boys carrying torches; Papa sleeping as they carried him. . . .

  Mama was looking increasingly agitated. “But he was—just sleeping?”

  “Yes. I asked one of them, and he said, ‘He sleeps the moe ’uhane.’ ”

  She nodded. “ ‘Spirit sleep.’ Hawaiians believe that when someone is deeply asleep, their soul travels outside of their body. What happened next?”

  “Then they put Papa into a canoe and took him out onto the ocean.”

  She could not have looked more horrified had I said that Papa had been stabbed with a knife in the back.

  My heart was racing now. “Mama? Did I say something wrong?”

  She sat, pale and silent, for the longest while, then finally worked up the nerve to tell me: “A dream of a canoe is a dream of death. Your father was sleeping the spirit sleep, and was making the final journey . . . to the next world.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “Maybe the canoe was just going to—to Maui, or the Big Island. . . .”

  Tears filled her eyes.

  “A dream of a canoe is a dream of death,” she repeated, and began to weep.

  Now it was my time to comfort her, holding on to her, offering her hope. “There’s still time, Mama! We can warn him about what’s going to happen. . . .”

  She shook her head. “He would never believe us, Nani. He would deride it as—‘Hawaiian mumbo jumbo.’ ”

  “But we have to do something, we can’t just let him die! What can we do?”

  She looked more shaken and afraid than I had ever seen her.

  “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “I don’t know.”

  Later, trusting an instinct I wished I didn’t have, I hiked up the trail to the Punchbowl lookout, where of course Johnny Kua was again waiting for me. “Funny how you’re always here when I come,” I said.

  “Or maybe you only come here when I’m here,” he pointed out. “You’re the one with second sight, ’ey?”

  But I really was glad to see him. I told him about what had happened in the car, the terrible fate that seemed to await my father, and I desperately sought his advice. “Johnny, can I—can I change the things I see?”

  He considered that. “Sometimes, I’ve heard, you can. Sometimes, what’s seen in the ’ike pplua is just what’s possible, not inevitable.”

  “So I should warn Papa? Tell him not to drive so fast, to be more careful, or he’ll . . . he’ll . . .”

  Gently, he put a hand on mine. “Tell him.”

  I tried to hold back my tears of worry and hope. “I can save Papa?”

  “You can’t if you don’t try.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Tell him.”

  I thanked him and scrambled down the hill in record time.

  When I got back, my father was already home—he’d left work early out of concern for me—and so I couldn’t speak freely to Mama. When Papa tried to give me a little kiss on the cheek, I couldn’t help myself, I flinched a little, afraid that his touch might plunge me into another vision of his death. This only made him fret more about my own health, and over supper he stole worried glances at me; I could see a similar worry in Mama’s face as she gazed at Papa.

  After supper I insisted on helping Mama wash the dishes, and once alone with her in the kitchen I could tell her that we had to do something to warn Papa, we had to try. She had apparently come to the same conclusion, because she said, “I know we do. I could never forgive myself if I didn’t.”

  �
�Do you want me to go tell him what I saw?”

  “No, you leave that to me. I’d rather he be angry with me than with you. I’ll talk to him after you leave for school tomorrow.”

  I went to school the next day filled with excitement and hope that we would be able to prevent this horrible future from coming to pass. I could barely keep my mind on my schoolwork, and when we were dismissed for the day I ran like a banshee—one of Papa’s favorite expressions—all the way home. As I neared our house I could see Mama sitting on our lnai in a big wicker chair. I pounded up the steps and onto the porch and asked her breathlessly, “Did you tell him?”

  Only now that I was so close did I notice the distant look in her eyes.

  “Yes,” she said, her tone flat as a broken piano. “I told him.”

  She wasn’t looking at me so much as past me.

  “You told him about the car accident?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell him about Mrs. Fereira?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the two pilots? And Annabel Lucie?”

  She said tonelessly, “Coincidence.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  She sighed like a balloon losing the last of its air. “Your father says that was all just coincidence.”

  “But I saw his car go off the road,” I said. “I could feel the flames!”

  “It doesn’t matter what you felt.” There was a bleak surrender in her voice that I had never heard before.

  “Did you tell him about the canoe?”

  She broke into a short, sour laugh. “Oh, yes. The canoe. He especially liked that.”

  She looked straight at me now, and I saw the exquisite, unbearable hurt in her eyes.

  “He told me I was acting like a . . . ‘superstitious native whore,’ ” she said, and though I didn’t know the word, I could feel the shame in her voice as she spoke it aloud. “That I was filling my daughter’s head with ignorant pagan nonsense . . . making her throw a fit in the car. He said if I didn’t stop it, he’d leave me, and he’d take you and your sisters with him.”