"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.
Dinu Pass, Rumania
"Look down, Nick. At the ground. Do you see anything?"
Night had come. So had the bugs. The air was dense with them. From the base of the keep's tower, Bill watched their bizarre and varied forms buzzing, darting, drifting in the air a mere half-dozen feet away.
But he and Nick were safe. Though they stood in the open doorway, the bugs kept their distance. As soon as it was dark, Bill had guided Nick back into the depths to the heavy stone door where now they both stared into the hungry darkness outside.
"Come on, Nick," he said. "Take a good look. Do you see any of that glow you saw last night?"
He nodded and pointed straight ahead. "There."
A slow change had come over Nick during the day. He seemed more alert, more responsive to the world around him. Were the effects of his descent into the hole wearing off?