"What future?" Kolabati said, joining him at the door. "If the Pacific Ocean drops that far we'll be looking at the end of the world!"
"No, Bati. Not the end. The beginning. The beginning of a new world."
And then the sky caught fire. All around them, like a sustained flash of sheet lightning, the night ignited. At the far end of the island she saw the Lahaina coast and the Iao Valley of West Maui light up like day. The same with the island of Lanai across the channel. Then a blast of superheated air, choked with flaming debris, roared overhead and to the sides, withering west Maui, searing Lanai, yet she and Moki remained in cool shadow, shielded by the enormous bulk of Haleakala.
"Shiva!" she cried in the Bengali dialect of her childhood. "What are you doing?"
And then came the sound. The floor shook and seemed to fall away beneath her as the night exploded with a rumbling, booming, deep-throated roar that shuddered through her flesh and shook every cell of her body, rattled the very core of her being.
As she tumbled to the floor she heard Moki's voice faintly above the din.
"Earthquake!"
He crawled to where she lay and rolled on top of her, using his body to shield her from the shelves and lamps and sculptures crashing down about them.
It went on forever. Kolabati didn't know how the house's cantilever supports managed to hold. Any moment now they were going to give way and send the house tumbling down the slope. Only once before in her life—when Jack had borrowed her necklace for a number of hours and all of her nearly 150 years had begun to assert their weight upon her—had Kolabati felt so close to death.
The earth tremors and shudders persisted but became quieter, muffled. Moki lifted himself off her and Kolabati struggled to her feet.
"Peheaoe?"
"All right…I think," she said, not bothering to reply in Hawaiian.
They clung to each other like sailors on a heaving deck. Kolabati looked around. The great room was in a shambles. His sculptures lay all about in pieces, their carved wood cracked and splintered, their lava bases shattered.
"Oh, Moki. Your work!"
"The sculptures don't matter." he said, clutching her tight against him. "They're the past. I would have had to smash them myself. Don't you see, Bati? This is it! The new beginning I told you about. It's here!"
He drew her to the trembling lanai where they leaned over the railing and stared up at the dark mass of Haleakala, toward her summit, rimmed now with fiery light.
"Look, Bati!" he said, pointing up the slope. "Haleakala is alive! After hundreds of years of dormancy, she's come back to life! For me! For us!"
Kolabati pulled away from him and fled back inside. She flipped one light switch after another but the room remained dark. She picked her way through the debris to the television but could not get it to work. The electricity was gone.
"Bati!" Moki called. "Hele mai. Stand with me and watch Haleakala. The House of the Sun has rekindled her fires. She's calling us home!"
Kolabati stood amid the shambles of their home—their life—and knew that her time of peace was at an end, that things would never be the same. She was afraid.
"That wasn't just Haleakala erupting, Moki," she said, her voice trembling like the floor beneath her. "Something else happened. Something far more violent and cataclysmic than an old volcano coming to life."
It's the end of the world, she thought. She could feel it in her bones and in the way the ancient necklace pulsed against her skin. The air about her screamed with tortured atman, released in sudden, violent death.
Haleakala had awakened, but what else had happened?
The pain is gone. Only the ecstasy remains now. And it grows. The night things run rampant in the dark sectors above. Rasalom senses the delirium of fear and pain and grief and misery they leave in their wake.
And then there was the convulsion of death and horror when the Pacific volcanoes roared back to life. The surge was almost unbearable.
As a result, the pace of the Change has picked up. He is so much larger now, and his granite womb has grown to accommodate him. The chips of sloughed stone have disappeared down the hole that has opened in the bottom of the chamber. Like the other holes that have opened around this globe, it, too, is bottomless. But it leads to a different place. A place of icy flame. Even now, a faint glow creeps up from the depths.
And the Change…his limbs have thickened, hardened to a stony consistency. His head has drawn into his trunk, concentrating his essence in a soft, bulbous core, a fleshy center in the hub of a four-spoked wheel.
He spreads his intangible feeders further and further afield, seeking more nourishment. He can never get enough.
SUNDAY
1 • SUNDAY IN NEW YORK
WCBS-TV
Good morning. This is a special edition of Sunday Morning. The sun rose late at 7:10 a.m. this morning and found not only a devastated New York City, but the entire world reeling from the events of last night…
MANHATTAN
What a night.
Jack stood yawning in the chilly dawn outside Gia's townhouse. He shivered and tugged the zipper on his windbreaker a little higher.
It's almost June, he thought. Isn't the weather supposed to be getting warmer?
Across the East River the sun was rising red and quick over Queens. He thought he could almost see it moving. Around him, Sutton Square had never looked so bad. The little half block of townhouses hanging over the F.D.R. Drive had been spared Friday, but last night had more than made up for it. Shattered glass on the sidewalks, lacerated screens hanging from the windows.
The chew wasps and the belly flies had been back, but other things—bigger, heavier things—had come as well. Luckily, the louvered wooden shutters flanking the windows of Gia's townhouse hadn't been merely ornamental. They were hung on real hinges and actually swung closed over the windows. The night had been long and tense, filled with hungry, predatory noises, but they'd passed it in safety.
Other places hadn't been so lucky. Jack was wondering whether he should check out some of the neighboring townhouses to see if anybody needed help when he noticed something hanging over the arm of the street lamp on the corner. Something big and limp.
He took a few steps toward it and stopped when he realized it was a corpse. Female, maybe, but so torn up and desiccated it was hard to tell.
But how had it got there? Twenty feet up. Was there a hole creature flying about at night big enough to fly off with someone?
It was getting worse faster than he'd thought.
Jack checked the 9mm Llama in his shoulder holster and the extra clips in his pockets, then went back and checked Ralph. The Corvair's black canvas convertible top had been shredded during the night, the antenna scored with teeth marks and bent almost double; the paint on the hood had been bubbled off as if it had been splashed with acid, and the windshield was fouled with some putrid-smelling gunk that Jack wiped off with a rag from his trunk.
"Eeeeuuuu! What happened to Ralph?"
Jack turned and saw Vicky standing in the townhouse doorway, dressed in bib-front overalls, a flannel shirt, a jacket, and her green-and-white N.Y. Jets cap. With the little suitcase in her hand, she looked like a country cousin arriving in the big city for a visit. But her blue eyes were wide with shock as she stared at the ruined top of the car.