Nightworld

MAUI

Even the coffee tasted like fish.

Jack knew the water was pure—he'd watched Kolabati draw it from the water cooler—but it still tasted fishy. Maybe because everything smelled fishy. The air was so thick with the odor of dead sea life he swore he could taste it when he breathed.

He was standing on the lanai, forcing the coffee down, looking out at the valley below and at the great whirlpool spinning off Kahului. It would have been heart-stoppingly beautiful if not for the stench. Behind him, sounds of chopping, chipping, sawing, and hammering drifted through the door from the house's great room.

Kolabati joined him, coffee cup in hand, and leaned on the railing to his right. She wore a bright, flowered muumuu that somehow enhanced her figure instead of hiding it. Jack's eyes locked on the necklace. He tried to be casual but it wasn't easy. There it was, half the reason for this hairy trip, a couple of feet away. All he had to do was reach out and—

"My silverswords are all dead," she said, looking down at a wilted garden beneath the deck. "The salt water's killed them. I'd hoped to see them bloom."

"I'm sorry."

She gestured with her cup toward the giant maelstrom.

"There's no point to it. It sucks water and fish down all day, then shoots it miles into the air at night."

"The point," Jack said, remembering the gist of Glaeken's explanations, "is not to have a point. Except to mess with our minds, make us feel weak, impotent, useless. Make us crazy with fear and uncertainty, fear of the unknown."

Jack noticed when he said "crazy" Kolabati stole a quick glance over her shoulder at the house.

"And speaking of points," he said, "what's the point of Moki? How'd you get involved with a guy like that? He's not your type, Bati."

As far as Jack could see, Moki was nobody's type. The guy was not only out to lunch, but out to breakfast, dinner, and the midnight snack as well. A homicidal megalomaniac who truly believed he was a god, or at least possessed by one: Maui, the Polynesian Prometheus who brought fire to humanity and hoisted the Hawaiian Islands from the bottom of the sea with his fishing pole. After last night's ceremony the four of them had returned to the house where Ba and Jack spent the night in the garage, the only place in the house secure from the bugs. Moki and Bati were never bothered by the creatures—more proof of Moki's divinity. He'd kept them up most of the night elaborating on his future plans for "Greater Maui" and the rest of the remaining Hawaiian Islands. And running under it all Jack sensed a current of hatred and jealously—aimed at him. Moki seemed to see Jack as a threat, a rival suitor for Kolabati's affections. Jack hadn't planned on any of this. He spent his time wondering how he could use that jealousy to get to the necklace Moki wore, but so far, except for the simple act of putting a bullet through his skull, he'd come up blank.

"How do you know my type?" Kolabati said, eyes and nostrils flaring. "What do you know of me?"

Jack studied her face. Kolabati had changed. He wasn't sure how. Her wide, dark, almond-shaped eyes, her high, wide cheekbones, full lips, and flawless mocha skin were the same as he remembered. Maybe it was her hair. She'd let it grow since he'd last seen her. It trailed long over her near shoulder and rustled in the sour wind like an ebony mane. But it wasn't the hair. It was something else, something inside.

Good question, he thought. What do I know about her?

"I know you don't hang out too long with people who don't see things your way."

She turned and stared down at the valley.

"This is not the real Moki—or at least not the Moki who shared my life up to a week ago."

Shared her life? Jack was about to make a crack about the ability of this one hundred and fifty year old woman to share anything when he saw a droplet of moisture form in the corner of her eye, grow, and spill over the lid to run down her cheek.

A tear. A tear from Kolabati.

Jack was speechless. He turned and stared though the door where Moki was feverishly working like the madman he was. But working on what? And didn't he ever sleep? He'd harangued them for hours, then he'd rushed to the upper floor where he'd gone to work on the shattered pieces of sculpture littering the great room, recutting them, fashioning a new, giant single work from the remnants of all the others. Ba was in there with him now, sitting in a corner, sipping tea and watching him in silent fascination.

"He was wonderful," Kolabati said.

Jack looked at her again. The tear was still there. In fact it had been joined by others.

"You love him?"

She nodded. "I love who he used to be." She turned toward Jack, wiping the tears from her cheeks, chasing the fresh ones that replaced them. "Oh, Jack, you would have loved him too. I only wished you'd known him then. He was gentle, he was so alive and so much a part of his world, these islands. A genius, a true genius who couldn't flaunt his brilliance because he took it for granted. He never tried to impress anyone else, never tried to be anyone else but Moki. And he wanted to be with me, Jack. Me. Nobody else. I was happy, Jack. I was in love. I thought I'd found an earthly Nirvana and I wanted it to last forever. And it could have, Jack. You know it could have."

He shook his head. "Nothing lasts forever." He reached out and touched her necklace. "Even with that."

"But so soon? We'd just begun."

He searched her face. Here was the difference. The seemingly impossible had happened. Kolabati, the cool, aloof, self-absorbed, ruthless Kolabati who had sent him out to kill her own brother Kusum, who had walked out with her own necklace as well as Kusum's and left Jack bleeding in a chair because he had refused her offer of near immortality…Kolabati Bahkti had fallen in love and it had changed her. Maybe forever.

Amazingly, she began to sob—deep, wrenching gasps of emotional pain that tore at Jack. He'd come here expecting to find the old, cold, calculating Kolabati and had been fully ready to deal with her. He wasn't prepared for the new Kolabati.

He resisted the impulse to take her in his arms. No telling what Moki-The-Unkillable might do if he saw that. So he settled for touching her hand.

"What can I do?" he said. "What will fix it?"

"If only I knew."

"Maybe it's the necklace. Maybe the necklace is part of the problem—maybe it is the problem. Maybe if you take it off him—"

"And replace it with a fake?" Her eyes flashed as she dug into the pocket of her muumuu. She pulled out a necklace exactly like her own. "This one, perhaps?"

Since Kolabati was wearing one of the genuine necklaces, and Moki the other, this had to be Jack's fake.

He swallowed. "Where'd you get that?"

"From your duffel bag." Her eyes hardened. "Was that your plan? Steal my brother's necklace and replace it with a fake? It never occurred to you that I might have given it to someone else, did it?"

Time to bite the bullet, Jack thought. Let her know the whole story.

"Kusum's necklace isn't enough," he said, meeting her gaze. "We need both."

She gasped and stepped back, her hand clutching at her throat.

"Mine? You'd steal mine?"

"It wouldn't be stealing, exactly. I'd just be returning it to its original owner."

"Don't joke with me about this, Jack. The people who carved the necklaces have been dead for ages."

"I know. I'm not working for them. I'm working for the guy they stole the original metal from. He's still around. And he wants it back. All of it."

Kolabati's eyes widened as she studied him. "You're not joking, are you?"

"You think I could make up a story like that, even if I tried?"

"All those years will rush back upon me without it, Jack. I'd die. You know that"

"I intended to ask you for it."

"And if I refused?"

He shrugged. "I was going to be very convincing."

Actually he'd had no firm plan in mind when he'd come here. Good thing too. He hadn't counted on Moki. Not in his wildest dreams had he counted on the likes of Moki.

Kolabati's hand still hovered protectively over her necklace. She couldn't seem to drag it away.

"You frighten me, Jack. You frighten me more than Moki."

"I know it sounds corny as hell," he said, "but the fate of the whole world depends on this guy Glaeken getting those two necklaces back and restoring them to their original form."

Kolabati gestured to the stinking valley, to the whirlpool beyond. "He can change all this? He can make everything as it was?"

"No. But he can stop the force that's making it this way, that's working to destroy everything we see here. And it isn't bad here, Bati. This is really pretty decent because there aren't many people around. But back on the mainland, in the cities and towns, people are at each other's throats. Everyone's frightened, scared half to death. The best are holed up, hiding from the monsters by night and their fellow humans by day. And the worst are doing what they've always done. But it's the average Joes and Janes who are really scary. The ones who aren't paralyzed with fear are running amok in the streets, looting and burning and killing with the worst of them. You can do something to stop it, turn it all around."

"I don't believe you. It can't be that bad. I've lived for a century and a half. I saw my parents shot down by an English officer, I witnessed the Sepoy rebellion in the 1850s, two world wars, the Bolshevik revolution, and worst of all, the atrocities in the Punjab, Indian killing Indian during the partition. You have no idea what I've seen."

"This is worse," Jack said. "The whole world's involved. And after Thursday it'll be night all over the world, forever. There'll be nowhere to run. Unless you do something."

"Me." The word was spoken in a very small, faraway voice.

"You."

Jack let that sink in awhile, let her stare down at the island she seemed to love so much, let her breathe the reek of its slow death. And then he put the question to her. He'd have never considered asking the old Kolabati, the one he'd known years ago in New York. But this was a new, improved version, someone who'd loved a man, who loved this island. Maybe this Kolabati could be reached.

"What do you say, Bati? I'm not asking you to take it off and hand it to me. But I am asking you to come back to New York with me and talk to Glaeken. He's the only guy on earth who's older than you. Hell, you're a newborn compared to him. You sit down with him and you'll believe."

She turned and leaned against the railing, staring through the door into the great room of her house.

"Let me think about that."

"There's no time to think."

"All right," she said slowly. "I'll come see this man. But that's all I promise you."

"That's all I'm asking," he said, feeling his fatigued muscles begin to uncoil with relief. It was a start. "Now, about Moki's…"

She looked at him sharply.

"He's not going to die," Jack added quickly, "or even age appreciably if someone should manage to replace his real necklace with a look-alike." An idea occurred to Jack. It was wild but it might help enlist Kolabati more firmly as an ally. "Who knows? Could be it's the necklace that's making him crazy. Get it off him and maybe he'll revert to his old self."

Before Kolabati could answer, Moki's voice boomed from within the house.

"Bati! Hele mai! And bring your ex-lover. See what your god has fashioned!"

Kolabati rolled her eyes and started forward. Jack grabbed her arm, gently.

"What do you say?"

"I'll think about it."

She pulled her arm away and dropped the dummy necklace back into her pocket. Jack followed her.

And stopped inside the door, staring.

The great room had been transformed. All the wood and lava from the broken sculptures had been reshaped, combined, coalesced into a single huge assembly that stretched from wall to wall. And where he'd run out of sculpture remnants, Moki had smashed pieces of furniture and added them to the mix. The assorted stained and bleached wooden fragments were arranged so as to appear to spring from the wood paneling of the walls, forming four spokes in a giant lopsided wheel, weaving crooked paths toward a common center. A lava center. Moki had somehow joined all the red and black lava fragments—the gleam of wire, the dewy moisture of still-drying epoxy were visible within the irregular mass—into a new whole, a jagged, haphazard aggregate that had no coherent shape, no symmetry, no discernible intelligence to it, yet somehow was undeniably menacing and implacably predatory.

"What do you think of Maui's masterpiece?" Moki said, standing near the center, hands on hips, grinning like a caricature of Burt Lancaster.

Ba squatted in the far corner, a gaunt Buddha, silent, watching.

"It's…disturbing," Kolabati said.

"Yes!" He clapped his hands. "Excellent! Exactly what it is supposed to be! Disturbing. True art should disturb, don't you think? It should challenge all your comfortable assumptions, tip them over so you can see what crawls around on their underbellies.

"But what is it?" Jack said.

Moki's smile faltered, and for the first time since he'd arrived, Jack detected a hint of uncertainty in the man's eyes.

He hasn't the faintest idea what he's done.

"Why…it's a vision," he said, recovering quickly. "A recurring one. It's plagued me for days. It's…" His eyes brightened with sudden inspiration. "It's Maui! Greater Maui! Yes! The four separate islands—Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, and Maui itself—drawing back to where they belong—together. Forming one seamless mass at the center!"

Jack stared at the construct. This was no island or regrouping of islands. Too bizarre, too menacing. It was something else, but even the artist hadn't a clue as to what.

"Come," Moki said, grabbing Kolabati's hand. "Maui is tired. He needs to rest before the ceremony tonight. And he needs his woman by his side." He stared at Jack, challenging him. "The woman who once loved you now loves a god. She can never go back. She will never want to. Isn't that true, Bati?"

Kolabati smiled and nodded. "Very true, my love."

Jack watched her carefully. Kolabati was not the type to allow herself to be pushed around like this. No one told this woman what to do.

As Moki led her away by the hand, she glanced back at Jack and patted the pocket of her muumuu. The one that bulged with the fake necklace.

Jack nodded. That was the Kolabati he knew.

"You kids play nice, now," he called after them.

He watched until she disappeared into the bedroom, then went over to where Ba still squatted.

"What do you think, Big Guy?" he said, leaning against the wall next to him. "You've been watching the whole process. What's it look like to you?"

"It is evil," Ba said.

Jack waited for Ba to elaborate, but that was all he was going to say. So Jack walked around it, ducking under the spokes, crouching, stretching up on tiptoe, looking for a fresh perspective, an angle that would reveal the work's secret. But the more he looked, the more unsettled he became. Why? It was only wood and lava. And it didn't look like anything in particular. If anything, it resembled DaVinci's man in a circle—except the man here was some sort of ugly amoebic embryo.

He had an inescapable sense that more than Moki was at work here. Jack couldn't help but feel that the sculptor's madness had tapped him into something outside himself, outside everything humans knew, and he'd built a crude model of it.

And Ba was right. Ba had said it all.

Whatever it was, it was evil.