Fires of Eden

by Dan Simmons

  Cordie fired four times, ceasing fire when the thing came too close to the boy. The shark form seemed to dive and for a sickening instant Cordie waited for the boy’s body to be jerked under the water, pulled deep. Instead, the shark-thing disappeared beyond the sunken raft and the boy was still crying, still treading water.

  “Swim!” screamed Cordie. “Here! Now! Do it!”

  The boy swam. Water flew up from his paddling hands and feet, but he seemed to be making no progress. Cordie looked around for the missing kayak paddle, could not see it, realized that she could not use it with the revolver in her hand, and used her left hand to paddle the damaged kayak toward the boy.

  There. The white form was hurtling through the water toward them from beyond the raft. There was a scream of escaping air as shark teeth bit through the raft and then the white form was hurtling the last twenty feet. Beyond the child’s flashing feet, Cordie saw the open maw, blackness, triangular white teeth, white skin, arms, black hair.

  She raised the pistol, steadied it as much as her pounding heart and the bobbing kayak would allow, and fired the last two bullets almost between the boy’s kicking feet. She heard at least one of the slugs hit home—a flat, sickening sound, like a mallet striking dead flesh—and then the shark-thing dove deep.

  The boy would have swum full tilt into the side of her kayak, probably knocking himself out, if Cordie had not reached out with her left arm and lifted him bodily from the water, depositing him across the hull in front of her like a deer on a fender.

  “Straddle it!” she ordered. She dropped the empty pistol into her tote bag, looked around one last time for the kayak paddle, saw it floating with the current fifteen yards out toward the crashing breakers, thought, Fuck it, and began turning the boat around with her hands scooping water.

  “Help me paddle,” she said to the boy. He was straddling the kayak in front of her like a pale-legged frog, careful to keep his arms and legs out of the water.

  “But the thing in the water will…”

  “Help me paddle or I’ll throw you back in,” Cordie said in a totally flat, totally believable voice.

  The boy began paddling and kicking with a will. With all six limbs working, they began making headway against the riptide or whatever it was.

  The trip back to the beach must have taken ten minutes. For Cordie it was an eternity. She thought of Sam Clemens and his stopped watch and knew that if she had a watch that measured terror, days would have passed. Both she and the blubbering child kept checking over their shoulders, glancing from left to right, waiting for the hands or head or shark maw to explode out of the water right next to them.

  There was no sign of the thing. They reached the shallows. “Help me pull this thing out…” began Cordie, but the boy leapt off the kayak and seemed to run across the surface of the last ten feet of water before galloping up the beach to his waiting parents and brother. The parents were blond and angry. They began to shout at the child even before he wrapped his arms around his mother’s waist. The younger brother was smiling and smirking.

  Cordie was sure that if she tried to get out of the damned kayak while it was still in the water, the shark-thing would slash in from the shallows, seize her, and drag her back out. “Hey, could you help me with…” she called to the family. They were walking away, their backs to her, the father and mother shouting and slapping at the wailing child.

  “You’re welcome,” said Cordie. She took a breath, spilled the kayak over on its right, and flailed her way out of the tight cockpit.

  Nothing attacked. She found sand under her feet, stood up, and righted the little boat before any more water slopped in it. She quickly dragged the thing up on the sand a healthy twenty feet from the water and then plopped down to inspect it.

  Two jagged rents ran five feet up the left side of the hull and parallel splinters of fiberglass peeled back like wood shavings. Halfway to the bow, a section of the outer hull was bitten away with only a plastic inner liner remaining to keep the ocean out. It looked to Cordie like a bite taken out of a sandwich…if the biter’s mouth had been three feet wide.

  A shadow fell across her and Cordie jumped before realizing that it was just a lifeguard standing over her. He was one of those hunky twenty-five-year-old Adonis types with a perfect, all-over tan and sun-bleached hair and rippled stomach muscles above his orange swim trunks. He gaped at her and said, “What the hell did you do to our kayak?”

  Cordie rose slowly, pivoted on one leg, and put the entire weight of her body behind the punch. She caught him high in his perfect, rippled stomach, just below the solar plexus. The hunk made a noise very similar to the sound she had just heard of the wind rushing out of the deflating raft and then he went down like a tossed-aside log.

  “Why aren’t you guys ever around when we need you?” asked Cordie. She pulled her tote bag out of the kayak, checked to make sure the pistol was in it, opened the journal and was infinitely relieved to see that somehow none of the pages had gotten wet, and carried the bag and book under the swaying palms to the Shipwreck Bar.

  The bartender was Hawaiian and overweight and her age. He leaned on the counter and grinned at her as she took a stool. “Hey, Ernie,” said Cordie. “Four Pele’s Fires. Make them doubles. And remember that they’re on the house… Mr. Trumbo’s orders. And pour something for yourself.”

  When the drinks came, Cordie began sipping through a long straw as she carefully, almost reverently, opened Aunt Kidder’s journal and began reading where she had left off.

  SEVENTEEN

  O Kamapua’a

  You are the one with the rising bristles.

  O Rooter! O Wallower in ponds!

  O remarkable fish of the sea!

  O youth divine!

  —ancient chant to Kamapua’a the hog-god

  who also changes into the fish

  Humuhumu-nukunuku-a-pua’a

  June 18, 1866, In an unnamed village along the Kona Coast—

  Even though the storm had passed, it seemed pure folly to abandon our dry hut and circle of candle flame to go out into the night on the advice of an injured heathen child who insisted that two harmless birds had been the brothers and spies of the demon-god Pana-ewa. Nonetheless, we left.

  We discussed this for long minutes, both Reverend Haymark and Mr. Clemens becoming more agitated as the discussion progressed. Our cleric dismissed the child’s statement as pure nonsense. Our correspondent argued that the night had been full of mystery and the boy’s fears were no more nonsensical than half the things we had seen since sundown. I held my counsel.

  Finally, both men turned to me. Reverend Haymark said, “Mss Stewart, would you please bring this…this…literary person…to his senses.”

  Mr. Clemens snorted and said, “Miss Stewart, if we are a democracy…and I trust our Reverend Haymark still believes in democracy…it seems that you hold the deciding vote to dispose of as you will.”

  I waited a second in silence. Halemanu watched me with terrified eyes. The two men watched me with varying degrees of clerical vexation and literary amusement. Finally, I said, “We shall go. Now. Tonight.”

  “But, Miss Stewart, certainly…” expostulated Reverend Haymark, his florid face growing even redder in the flickering candlelight.

  “I cast my vote for leaving,” I said, cutting off the protests with the decisiveness of my tone, “not because of fear of some Sandwich Island bogeyman, but because we have an injured child who needs assistance and…whatever else Mr. Clemens saw tonight…we are on heathen holy ground—or I should say, unholy ground—with marchers afoot who mean us no good.”

  Reverend Haymark paused in mid-expostulation to consider my argument.

  “The boy says that he knows the way to the village only a mile or so north and east of here,” I said. “It is the village his uncle’s party had been attempting to reach. The child has relatives there and the so-called Pele kahuna woman may know folk medicine that could help him. If I do indeed cast the deciding vote, I v
ote that we embark for this village post-haste.”

  “Here, here,” said Mr. Clemens.

  I frowned at him as I gathered my few belongings. “I repeat that I do not fear any male,” I said. “Much less a godless male made of fog.”

  Mr. Clemens colored and bit down on his cold cigar.

  We left quickly but with no panic. The horses still showed the terror they had evidenced earlier when the Marchers of the Night were near, and it took both men to help me saddle my usually docile lio. Mr. Clemens set the boy on the saddle in front of him and the child seemed to be riding comfortably enough in spite of his head wound.

  I confess that I all but held my breath as we clopped down the muddy lane between those evil stone walls. I half-expected some of the gods or demons or dead warrior chiefs from Mr.

  Clemens’s tale to leap out at us from hiding. It was dark enough for entire nations of heathen cannibals to be lurking behind those blood-soaked, ancient stones.

  Nothing leaped at us. Halemanu pointed out a faint trail that ran east from the path we had been following north, and in the starless dark we proceeded up the volcanic slopes once again—Mr. Clemens and the child leading, my fidgety Leo following close to the tail of Mr. Clemens’s horse, and the Reverend Haymark swaying along behind. I found myself checking over my shoulder repeatedly to make sure that the cleric remained behind us; that nothing scaly or shark-mouthed had plucked him from his horse and was even then leaning toward me. It was dark, but I could make out the minister’s portly shape and clearly hear his asthmatic sighs.

  After a while the stars came out in their tropical glory, and even by their dim light I could make out the shrubs and flowers that dotted the volcanic landscape around us: ohias and ohelos (a species of whortleberry), Sadlerias, polypodiums, silver grass, and a great variety of bulbous plants bearing clusters of berries that seemed to glow a necrotic blue in the starlight. There were various varieties of palm trees here—although no coconut palms—and a profusion of shrubs, fern trees, candlenut and breadfruit trees, but increasingly as we climbed, this floral vegetation gave way to at first subtle and then dominant flows and beds of the ropey lava called pahoehoe. We progressed slowly, the boy Halemanu seeming to rouse himself from a half-slumber to point the way, and our horses picking their way over the shelves and terraces of shrub-littered basalt with great care.

  Once, about halfway to our goal, we all stopped and listened as there was a rhythmic noise some distance behind, as of a great party of men chanting under their breath, or perhaps the cadence of the surf—although we were far inland now.

  “The Marchers?” whispered Mr. Clemens, but the boy did not answer and the rest of us could not.

  We spurred our horses to less careful progress after this.

  It was almost dawn when we arrived in the village—although “village” is too grand a word for the half dozen ramshackle huts we encountered in the dark. There were no lights. No dogs barked to challenge our intrusion. For a moment we sat there on our horses, convinced that whatever had devoured the Reverend Whister’s party had made short shrift of Halemanu’s relatives in this village. But then the boy called out in that liquid torrent of syllables that was Hawaiian, and I could make out the words wahine haole, which was, of course, “white woman,” and wai lio, which translated to “water for horse” in an interrogative way, and tutu, which I later learned meant “grandmother,” and Ka huaka’i o ka Po, which I remembered meant “Marchers of the Night.”

  Suddenly there were a dozen shadows around us and hands pulled at us. For a moment I felt quite without volition, and I allowed these eager but seemingly not hostile hands to pull me off Leo, set me on my feet, and touch me with naive curiosity. I could hear Mr. Clemens and Reverend Haymark protesting, but they also were off their horses.

  Halemanu’s soft voice spoke again, one of the shadows near me replied in an old man’s voice, and without further ado we were hustled through hanging fronds into the closest and largest of the huts.

  The village obviously was not deserted. Eight old men, three younger women, and a tutu, or granny lady, as old as time took their places sitting in the long hut, their faces and wrinkled bodies now visible in the dimmest of lights from two tiny lamps of candlenut oil. They had pulled us down and now we sat with them, Mr. Clemens across the rough circle from me, Reverend Haymark near the door, and the weary child next to the crone at the darkest end of the hut. The old man next to Reverend Haymark spoke again. His toothless utterings may not have been understandable even if he had spoken in English, but Halemanu translated easily. “Grandfather asks why you are traveling on this bad night.”

  Mr. Clemens answered for us. “Tell him that we were traveling to the Reverend Whister’s church and village.”

  The old man made more toothless noises in Hawaiian.

  “Grandfather says that the church and village are killed. No one remains alive there now. It is a bad place. Kapu.” Halemanu seemed older in his new role as translator.

  Reverend Haymark said, “Ask Grandfather how it is that the minister and the people of the village were killed.”

  Halemanu spoke slowly, his eyes closed to the pain from his wound. Another old man in the circle barked an answer.

  “My other Grandfather says that he and the other kahuna along this coast prayed them to death,” said Halemanu without emotion.

  “Prayed them to death?” repeated our cleric with obvious distaste.

  “Yes,” said Halemanu. “But the haole did not die when they were prayed to death, they only became sick. Which is why Grandfathers who were the strongest kahuna made the old chants and opened the door to the Underworld so that the eepas and kapuas and mokos and Pana-ewa himself could be loosed to rid us of the haole holy men.”

  “Rid us?” repeated Mr. Clemens. I felt my own heartbeat accelerate at the child’s choice of words.

  “Yes,” said Halemanu and opened his eyes. “The Grandfathers ordered my uncle and the other warriors to fetch you back here for sacrifice. As the youngest of the kahuna, I was allowed to go. It was just bad fortune that we encountered the Ka huaka’i o ka Po on our short journey. They spared me because I carry the name of the most famous of the aumakua who serve Pana-ewa.”

  Mr. Clemens and Reverend Haymark attempted to leap to their feet then, but the old man near the door made a gesture with his little finger and the two strong men fell as if great weights had been set on their backs. Struggle as they might, they could not rise. I did not try.

  “Halemanu,” I began.

  “Silence, woman,” said the child in an imperious voice that sounded much deeper than any child’s voice should.

  The old men began to chant. The sound seemed to enter my body like a drug, the interior of the hut began to waver in the candlenut light, and my eyelids felt suddenly heavy. I could see Mr. Clemens and Reverend Haymark struggling to fight the chant and having no more luck than I.

  At that moment I turned to look at Halemanu. The boy’s body seemed to ripple, as a distant mirage does on a desert in midday, and then the flesh seemed to flow and shift, softening and pouring away like dark water down an invisible drain.

  Fog remained. Fog shifted and flowed. Fog rose and took on the shape and silhouette of a man, albeit a man of impossible height, the form’s head brushing the ceiling of the hut some ten feet above us. I watched the fog swirl in the candlenut light and when the voice came, it came out of the fog with the echo of a great beast roaring from a long tunnel.

  “And now I claim what is mine! Kapu o moe, haole kanaka!”

  The fog in the shape of a man lunged forward into our midst.

  Eleanor turned the Jeep back up Highway 11 and drove a mile or so to the turnoff to Milolii and Hoopuloa. A police barricade stood astride the narrow access road.

  “Don’t go around it here,” said Paul Kukali. “The a’a will tear your tires to shreds.” He got out and moved the barricade. Eleanor drove forward and the curator replaced the heavy sawhorse.

  The road was
very narrow, very winding, and surrounded by the same desolate lava fields that separated the Mauna Pele from the highway. Eleanor drove slowly, half expecting the authorities to come around the next bend and order them back. There was no other traffic.

  Milolii seemed to be a Hawaiian fishing village frozen in time. The few houses looked empty and quiet, and the only public establishment, a general store, had a large, police evacuation notice tacked to its door. The sign warned of the penalties of looting. The wind had shifted and smoke now drifted between the coconut palms and over the little houses with their galvanized-steel roofs. Outrigger canoes sat on a shady beach. Shafts of sunlight cut through the drifting smoke and made the scene look beautiful beyond words to Eleanor.

  “Turn up that road that runs parallel to the beach,” said Paul Kukali.

  The “road” was a barely distinguishable pair of wheel ruts that ran through the tropical foliage and then across fields of ferns.

  “The people here actually fish,” said Paul. “One of the last real fishing villages in Hawaii. But they earn extra money by growing anthuriums and ferns. They had to truck in this soil. You can see that the lava fields don’t support much.”

  Eleanor could see. The rude trail had left the rich fields and now bounced across crushed rock on the edge of the black-lava flows that stretched in all directions. Spray rose from where the ocean crashed into rocks a hundred yards to their right. Less than a mile ahead, the steam from the lava flow continued to climb into the stratosphere. The smoke was thicker now, billowing across the black basalt like tendrils of fog. Eleanor continued driving south parallel to the coast, careful not to slash tires on the a’a that edged the rutted path. After some minutes, when the smoke was almost too thick to continue, Paul said, “Stop.”

  They both got out of the Jeep and walked forward. Here was the same lava flow they had seen covering the highway, but it seemed twice as tall, covering the old a’a and pahoehoe as it did. Eleanor looked up at a wall of cracking, flaking, hissing, freshly congealed lava that rose at least a dozen feet above the ground and disappeared to the east and west in the smoke. Every shrub and small tree within thirty or forty feet of the flow had either burned away or was in the process of burning now. The grass smoldered. Fresh lava extruded from half a dozen low crevices and flowed onto the soil, igniting more grass. Eleanor thought it smelled like fall in the Midwest when she was a child and it had been legal to burn leaves. But beneath the pleasant, burning-leaves smell, something stank of sulfur and other noxious gases.