Fires of Eden

by Dan Simmons

  Cordie Stumpf laughed. “I guess that makes two of us then,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Trumbo.

  “Never mind.” Cordie looked at Eleanor. “You had enough of this nonsense?”

  Eleanor nodded but hesitated a moment. She looked at the security chief and the owner. “We really did see this hand. It looked as if it had been cleanly severed…almost surgically. And Paul’s right…it was the hand of a white man, the nails were manicured, and it didn’t look as if it had been in the water.”

  Trumbo nodded tiredly, his smile fading. “Ms. Perry…”

  Eleanor waited.

  “I would take it as a personal favor if neither of you would mention this to the other guests. It would disturb their peace of mind for…no real reason. I assure you that we will get to the bottom of this.”

  “If we don’t talk,” said Cordie, “will you cut us in?”

  Trumbo blinked at her, “I beg your pardon?”

  “Let us know what you find out,” said Cordie. “Keep us up-to-date on what you find.”

  “Of course,” said Trumbo. He looked at the security chief. “Mr. Dillon, please make a note to keep Mrs. Stumpf and Ms. Perry abreast of any breaks in the investigation.”

  The hairy little man nodded, took a notebook and pen out of his jacket pocket, and ostentatiously made a note.

  “I presume that the local police will want to speak to us,” said Eleanor.

  “Almost certainly,” Trumbo said smoothly.

  Eleanor hesitated. “I’m booked here until the end of the week,” she said. “Your people know which hale I have.”

  “Thank you,” purred Byron Trumbo. He turned to Cordie. “Is there anything else we can help you with, Mrs. Stumpf?”

  Cordie had opened the door before Dillon or Fredrickson could open it for her. “Just say hi to Jimmy for me when you talk to him next.”

  “Jimmy?” Trumbo was smiling again.

  “The senior senator,” said Cordie. She and Eleanor went out together.

  June 14, 1866, Volcano of Kilauea—

  With the Reverend Haymark as our dubious guide, Mr. Samuel Clemens and I prepared for our midnight descent into the crater Kilauea.

  I knew that the expedition was folly, but the fact that I was committing folly had rarely dissuaded me from an adventure before this. It did not do so now. Our preparations were modest: the caretaker outfitted us with one lantern apiece, sturdy walking sticks, and a canvas bag of bread and cheese and wine for a “volcano picnic” once we reached the active lake of lava several miles across the crater floor.

  While neither Hananui nor any of the other locals would serve as guides on this specific night—it seemed that another cauldron on the crater floor was threatening to spill over—our former guide did lead us to the “staircase”—a precipitous path carved into a crevice along the crater wall halfway between the Volcano House hotel and the thatched-hut Overlook House. The Reverend Haymark attested that this was the way he had descended during his previous expeditions, and with the portly minister in the lead, myself in the middle, and our California correspondent bringing up the rear, we picked our way down a tortuous, thousand-foot lava-stone staircase to the crater floor. I believe that the fact that it was so dark—the rock walls around us lit only by the same ruddy volcano light that turned our hands and faces red—was an advantage, the small circles of illumination thrown by our swinging lanterns not showing us the terrible fate that would be ours had we missed our step or made a wrong turn.

  Once down on the crater floor, it became obvious that while the cooled lava surface had looked quite solid from our vantage point above, it was actually comprised of thousands of chinks and cracks and fissures, through which the red surface of the still-molten lava beneath was quite visible. Reverend Haymark cried that he remembered the path, and finding the smooth section of lava ahead of him with his questing lantern, we set out across the crater floor.

  Although “cooled,” the lava underfoot was still hot enough to warm the soles of my feet through my sturdy boots. I could not imagine the heat of the lava that even at that moment boiled to our height and above in bubbling cauldrons only a few hundred feet to our right and left.

  “It is, I believe, only a few hundred yards across this difficult space,” cried the Reverend, and set off across the hot stone with some haste. I followed, my skirts billowing and reflecting the heat against my booted legs, the circle of my lantern light barely keeping up with the cleric’s. Mr. Clemens hurried along behind, his cigar still in place, although it seemed rather redundant in this hellish pit. At least the stench of sulphur here masked the smell of his cigar.

  It is impossible, even so short a time after experiencing this event, for me to adequately describe the wonders of a volcano in the midst of its activity. While it at first seemed that we were in a red-lit void, a rocky absence of texture or detail, we soon learned to adapt our eyes more to the fiery illumination around us than to the circumscribed range of our lanterns, and then the volcano floor became a fantastical place: terraces of black stone, lakes of flame, ridges, cliffs of fall, cones, rivers of molten fire, mountainsides of ash, great gobbets of leaping lava, sheer chasms filled with smoke and sulphurous fumes. Kilauea leapt and frolicked and breathed and gasped and spewed its fiery venom all about us, oblivious of us, as indifferent to our intrusion as some great Vulcan god would be to the timorous presence of three fleas in his fiery furnace.

  And a fiery furnace it was. I believe that even Mr. Clemens realized the folly of our impulsive decision, for when the Reverend Haymark paused to check the trail and mop his sweating face, the correspondent called across the creak and cracking of cooling stone—“Are you sure you know the way?”

  “It is easier in daylight,” said the minister, his eyes looking wide and white in the awful light. “And with a guide.”

  The two of us must have shown our concern on our faces, for the cleric went quickly on, “But we soon will be across the worst part. And then it is mere hiking on stone.”

  As it turned out, there was a quarter mile more of “the worst part,” and it required us to jump narrow chasms where lava flowed hundreds of feet below us. To think about the consequences of not making each of these jumps would have paralyzed me, so I set the thoughts aside and jumped. The heat made my skirts smolder in the thick air. Once I fell into an unseen hole and could feel the flames licking at my boots, so—not waiting for the startled gentlemen to set down their lanterns and fish me out—I set my hands against rock and pulled myself to safety. Surprisingly, the stone under my hands was so warm that my sturdy dog-skin gloves were burned almost through, my hands blistered as if I had set them naked upon the hissing surface.

  I said nothing of this to the men, but lifted my lantern and followed the Reverend in his halting, hopping progress across the rough crater floor.

  Our journey must have taken little more than an hour across the crater of Kilauea, but because of the fiery light, the constant danger, the need to always watch one’s step where that step was all but impossible to watch, the trip seemed endless. But then, suddenly, without warning, we arrived at the lake of fire, the very brink of Hale-mau-mau.

  The words of common speech are quite useless. Those words that come to mind—fountains, sprays, fire, jets, explosions—simply do nothing to convey the total and overwhelming other-worldness, the sheer power and terrifying grandeur of what we saw.

  The lake was some five hundred feet wide at its narrowest, almost half a mile broad. Its shores consisted of perpendicular walls of black lava—the same “cooled” material upon which I now stood and which made my boots smoke from the heat—none of which were less than fifty feet high, and some more than two hundred feet, rising from the glowing lava like some Black Cliffs of Dover from channels of sluggish flame. Cones rose from the lake, from the shores of the lake, and each emitted great gouts of steam and sulphurous fog, all tinted the deepest reds and oranges from the churning lava itself. These clouds of vapor
rose to the crater rim—now a seemingly inestimable distance above us—and to the fiery cap of clouds hanging low above the crater.

  But it was the lake of fire that caught my attention then and, I think, shall never release it.

  Lava surged and fountained, rising on great waves against itself and the black cliffs which sought to contain it. Lava bubbled ahead of us—above us, for the surges sent combers crashing against the cones higher than our heads a hundred yards or less across the lake—and swirled in a thousand fiery vortexes that sent molten rock lapping against its containing shores. Directly ahead of us, eleven fountains of gory fire ejaculated this glowing effluvium into the air, and hence back into the lake of fire which had spawned it. Everywhere around us was the hiss and crackle of congealing rock, the whisper of steam venting from a thousand hidden crevices, the moan of expanding and contracting surfaces…and beneath all this, the constant heat-surge of this ocean of fire, this lake of raw creation which rolled and breathed at our very feet.

  I turned toward the Reverend Haymark, but the cleric was staring with his jaw quite slack, his eyes glazed, muttering something to the effect, “I have never seen it at night… I have never seen it at night.” Then I turned toward Mr. Clemens, as if daring the brash young correspondent to make light of this, but Mr. Clemens had thrown away his cigar and was staring, face rapt, expression one of something like religious awe. As if sensing my gaze, he turned in my direction—his reddish eyebrows and mustaches and curls made orange by the surging light—and he opened his mouth as if to speak, then said nothing.

  I nodded and turned back to watch the spectacle with him.

  For two hours or more we stood on the edge of Hale-mau-mau, Madame Pele’s home, and watched as banks of cooling lava rose, now building ramps and islands into the lake of flame, now succumbing to the heat and roiling away as liquid rock once again, the waves lapping higher as the level of lava grew and the heat drove us back, now cooling as black rock curled into existence, creating new shores and shoals, new cliff faces and cones. And all the while the cones rising from this surging pit of flame spouted their incendiary gibbets toward the clouds and the very rock we stood upon cracked and shifted, offering new vistas of the magma beneath our feet. This was our picnic site as we ate the bread and cheese our host had packed, sipping wine from the glasses he had carefully wrapped and included in our bundle.

  “We’d best head back,” Reverend Haymark said at last, his voice hoarse, as if he had been shouting despite the fact of our almost total silence the entire time we had stood upon this hellish shore.

  Mr. Clemens and I looked at each other then, as if we would protest, as if we would mutiny this decision and remain where we were, through the night, through the day, into the glory of another night in Pele’s realm.

  We did not mutiny, of course, although I believe we read that moment of madness in each other’s eyes. Instead, we nodded our assent and backed away, watching the sea of flame as long as we could glimpse it, until sanity made us watch our feet and follow the bobbing lantern of our clerical guide.

  I confess here that I had set my lantern down upon first sight of the fire-sea, and did not take it up again—nor give it another thought—when I left the vicinity of that terrible ocean. The reddish light had seemed so bright, my senses were so filled with the frightening grandeur all around, that I did not think of the lantern. I thought of nothing but the sights and smells that had overpowered me as nothing else in my thirty-one years had come close to so doing. Still holding my central position between the two men, noting idly that Mr. Clemens had brought his lantern and that the Reverend’s bobbed along ahead with its usual regularity, I set my smoking boots upon the dark lava and trudged along, too fatigued and overwhelmed to think.

  Thus it was a shock when Reverend Haymark’s alarmed voice cried, “Stop!”

  Both Mr. Clemens and I froze in our places, perhaps some ten feet apart. “What is it?” asked the correspondent in a voice that held some tension.

  “We are off the path,” replied the minister. I heard the quaver in his voice and my legs began to shake in sympathy.

  Immediately, both Haymark and Clemens began holding their lanterns to full extent without moving their feet, but all around us was blackness broken only by the glow of lava through narrow crevices.

  “The surface is higher here,” said Reverend Haymark. “We are far above the deep core. The lava is rotten, a thin shell. I noticed the difference in sound as I walked. I confess that I was not paying attention.”

  Mr. Clemens and I said nothing. Finally the correspondent said softly, “If we retrace our steps…”

  Reverend Haymark’s lantern swung in desperate arcs, sometimes illuminating his terrified face. “That would be very difficult, sir. We have been taking broad steps, jumping from hummock to hummock. A misstep here would send us crashing through, falling a thousand feet to the deep lava below.”

  “I think eight hundred would answer for me,” said Mr. Clemens, repeating his weak joke of several hours earlier.

  I felt that I could not breathe, so terrifying was the thought of being lost on this treacherous crust. “We could wait for dawn,” I said, but dawn was hours away and even as I said it, I knew that we could not stand here through the long night.

  “Perhaps we can walk carefully back until we find the path,” said Reverend Haymark and took a single step before breaking through the crust.

  My scream must have been a pitiful thing set against the roar of lava and hiss of steam escaping all around us in the night.

  ELEVEN

  Long as the lava-light

  Glares from the lava-lake,

  Dazzling the starlight;

  Long as the silvery vapour in daylight,

  Over the mountain

  Floats, will the glory of Kapiolani be mingled with either on Hawa-i-ee.

  —Alfred Lord Tennyson

  “Kapiolani,” 1892

  Security chief Matthew “Matt” Dillon was not in a bad mood when he passed through the doors marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and trotted down the ramp into the catacombs beneath the Mauna Pele. Dillon had worked for the FBI briefly, then—in a rare shuffle—for the CIA for seven years before entering private security work. His area of expertise had been antiterrorist tactics, specifically terrorism targeted at large installations. To be an expert in protecting such installations, Dillon had become an expert in terrorizing them. His services had even been offered to the military when the idiots around President Carter had been planning the rescue of the hostages held at the occupied American Embassy in Iran. Dillon had always been glad the Army had not taken the FBI up on its offer and involved him in that monumental fuck-up.

  Dillon had been a private consultant for five years when Pete Briggs, who had taken a course in executive protection from him the year before, approached him about working for Byron Trumbo. Dillon had no interest in such a job—static security work bored his ass off—but Briggs pressed, they flew him in a private jet from San Diego to New York, Trumbo personally interviewed him, the job sounded interesting—more a troubleshooter around Trumbo’s widely scattered empire of businesses and casinos and hotels than a simple security director—and the money was twice what he was making as a consultant, even in those rich times of executive kidnappings and shootings. Dillon had said yes.

  For a year or two it had been fun, jetting around the world looking into blackmail threats and security breaches, exposing thieves in Mr. Trumbo’s casinos and counting houses, even laying some muscle on Mr. T’s less savory enemies when it came down to that. Dillon had never had a problem working in the gray areas of the law, or even descending into the black outside the law when the job demanded it. Trumbo had seemed to sense this, and used Dillon accordingly.

  Then, six months earlier, the disappearances had begun at Trumbo’s Mauna Pele Resort and Dillon had been on the next plane west. His plan was to arrive unofficially to get a sense of the place. At first it was a lark, soaking up the sun, sitting at the
Shipwreck Bar all evening, generally playing the idiot tourist while he scoped out the resort and tried to figure out what was going on. It didn’t tell him much. Stephen Ridell Carter was running a tight ship. Mauna Pele’s security chief at that time, a local Hawaiian ex-cop named Charlie Kane, had been lazy but not totally incompetent. The local cops had looked into all the obvious angles—disgruntled ex-employees, local crazies, someone with a grudge against Trumbo personally—but nothing panned out. After a week of fruitless undercover work, Dillon had identified himself to Carter, Kane, and the local authorities and worked with them. Still nothing.

  The failure had frustrated him. After Trumbo had fired Charlie Kane and asked him to assume the position of resort security director “until this thing’s ironed out,” Dillon had accepted, thinking it would be a few weeks at most. Leaving the mystery open had not been his style.

  Now, more than six months later, Matthew Dillon was sick of Hawaii, sick of the Mauna Pele, sick of sunshine and fresh air and the crashing surf. He wanted to get back to New York in the winter with its grimy streets and surly cabdrivers. He wanted to troubleshoot one of Mr. T’s casinos in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, working through the night in an interior world where no one knew if it was night or day or gave a shit.

  But now this. Body parts turning up on the golf course. The three missing New Jersey guys. The astronomer disappearing in great gouts of blood. Matthew Dillon grinned and hurried down the service tunnel, patting the holster on his hip as he moved along. This was more like it.

  The astronomer’s office was unlocked. Dillon slipped the 9mm Glock out of the holster and pushed the door open gently.

  Pete Briggs was standing in the center of the room, holding a ten-pound sledgehammer and rubbing his massive chin. Dillon slid the semiautomatic back in the holster. “You really going to knock down that wall?”

  Briggs did not turn his head. Dillon knew that the big man looked like some half-wit linebacker but was fairly canny. And a good personal security man. Dillon knew lots of worse professionals when it came to watching someone’s back.