F. Paul Wilson - Nightworld

"Shee-it!" Frank said, waving his hand before his face. "Smells like a fish market that's run out of ice."

They trooped through the gloomy, deserted building, looking for someone, anyone. Finally they ran across a dark, middle-aged fat guy squeezing into a wrinkled sports jacket as he hurried toward them down a ramp. His badge read "Fred" and he looked part Hawaiian.

Jack waved him down. "Where are the car rentals?"

"There ain't. All closed up. Nobody to rent to."

"We need a car."

"You're outta luck, I'm afraid."

Jack looked at Ba. "Looks like we'll have to wait till morning, Ba. What do you say?"

Ba shook his head. "Too long away from the Missus."

Jack nodded. He knew Ba was feeling the time pressure as much as he; maybe more. He grabbed the guy's arm as he tried to squeeze by.

"You don't understand, Fred. We really need a car."

Fred tried to pull away but Jack tightened his grip on his flabby upper arm. Ba stepped closer and looked down at him.

"I can't help you, Mister," Fred said, wincing. "Now let me go. It's after five. It'll be getting dark in half an hour. I've got to get home."

"Fine," Jack said. "But we're new around here and you're not. And since you seem to be the only one around here, we've elected you to find us a car. And if you can't help us out, we'll be forced to take yours. We'll pay you a generous rental price before we take it, but we will take it. So where do they keep the cars around here?"

Fred stared at Jack, then up at Ba, then at Frank who stood behind them. Jack felt a little sorry for the guy, but there was no time to play nice.

"Okay," Fred said. "I can do that. I can show you to the rental lot. But I don't know about keys or—"

"You let me worry about keys. You just get us there."

"All right," Fred said, glancing up through one of the broken skylights. "But we've got to hurry!"

They could have walked. The rent-a-car lots were only a couple of hundred yards from the terminal. Jack used his Semmerling .45 to shoot a link out of the chain locking the gate to the Avis lot. The lot was littered with rotting fish—on the cars, between the cars, in the lanes—and so the stench was especially vile here. Fred's tires squished through the fish, sending sprays of rotting entrails left or right whenever he ran over a particularly ripe one. He drove them around the return area until they found a Jeep Laredo. Jack was ready to hot-wire it but didn't have to. The keys were in the ignition. It started easily. The fuel gauge read between half and three-quarters. That would be enough. Jack went back to where Ba and Frank waited with Fred in his car. He pulled out the Maui road map Glaeken had given him and pointed to the red X drawn above a town called Kula.

"What's the best way to get here—to Pali Drive?"

"You want to go upcountry? On Haleakala?" Fred said. "Now? With night coming? You've got to be kidding!"

"Fred," Jack said, staring at him. "We've only known each other for a few minutes, but look at this face, Fred. Is this face kidding?"

"All right, all right. I've never heard of Pali Drive but this spot you've got marked here is somewhere between the Crater Road and Waipoli Road. You take Thirty-seven, it runs right out of the airport here. That'll take you up-country. You turn left past Kula, keep to the left onto Waipoli Road, and it looks like it'll be somewhere off to your right. But there's nobody up there…except for the pupule kahuna and his witch woman."

Jack grabbed Fred's wrist. "Witch woman? Dark, Indian looking?"

"That's the one. You know her?"

"Yeah. That's who we're going to see."

Fred shook his head. "Lot's of strange stories coming down hill. Now I'm real glad you're not taking my car up there. Because you ain't coming back."

"We'll see about that," Jack said.

After Fred rushed off to drop Frank at the hangar where he planned to spend the night in his plane, Jack pushed a half dozen dead fish off the Jeep's hood, unzipped his duffel bag, and began laying out its contents.

"Okay, Ba. Name your poison."

He laid out the chew-wasp-toothed club Ba had given him, plus a .45 1911, a Tokarev 9mm, a couple of TT9mm nine-shot automatics, two Mac 10 assault pistols, and a pair of Spas-12 pump action assault shotguns with pistol grip stocks and extended magazines.

Ba didn't hesitate. He picked out the 1911 and one of the shotguns. Jack nodded his approval. Good choices. Jack already had his Semmerling; he added the toothed billy, the Tokarev, and the remaining shotgun to his own armament, then tossed a fifty-cartridge bandoleer to Ba.

"You ride shotgun."

Ba pumped the Spas-12, checked the breach, then handed it to Jack.

"No," he said, his face set in its usual mortician's dead pan. "I am a far better driver than you."

"Oh, really?" Jack repressed a smile. This was the longest piece of spontaneous conversation he'd been able to elicit from Ba all day. "What makes you say that?"

"The drive to the airport this morning."

Jack snatched the offered shotgun from his grasp.

"Fine. You drive. And try not to wear me out with all this empty chatter as we go," Jack added. "It distracts me."

They'd gone about half a dozen miles or so on Route 37—some of the signs called it "Haleakala Highway"—driving on stinking pavement slick with the crushed remains of countless dead fish. The outskirts of a town called Pukalani were in sight when Jack glanced back at the lowlands behind them. It was fairly dark below; lights were few and scattered; the airport was completely dark. He glanced beyond the coast to the strange-faced moon peeking huge and full above the edge of the sea, but when he saw the sea itself, his heart fumbled a beat and he squinted through the thickening dusk to confirm what he thought he saw.

"Whoa, Ba," he said, grabbing the Oriental's shoulder. "Check out the whirlpool. Tell me if you see what I see."

Ba braked and looked over his shoulder.

"There is no whirlpool."

"Thank you," Jack said. "Then I'm not crazy."

He wished he'd thought to bring the binocs so he could get a better look, but even from this distance in the poor light it was plain that the huge pinwheel of white water in the sea off Kahului Bay was gone.

Had the hole in the ocean floor closed up?

"I don't understand any of this," he muttered. "But then, I'm not supposed to. That's the whole point."

He was about to tell Ba to drive on when he noticed a white area of boiling water bubbling up where the center of the whirlpool had been. The bubbling grew, became more violent, and finally erupted into the night. Not volcanic fire, not steam, just water, a huge thick column of it, hundreds of feet across, geysering out of the ocean and lancing into the sky at an impossible speed. It roared upward, ever upward, ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand feet in the air until it plumed into billowing cumulus clouds at its apex.

And it kept spewing, kept on pouring unmeasured thousands of tons of water into the sky.

"My…God!" was about all Jack could manage in the face of such a gargantuan surreal display.

"It is as the attendant said," Ba said. "The whirlpool backs up at night."

He threw the Jeep back into gear and continued up the highway. They had the road to themselves.

Three or four miles uphill from Pukalani heavy drops of seawater began to splatter all around them. Jack rolled up his window as the shower evolved into a deluge, forcing Ba to cut his pace.

A few minutes later, a blue and green parrot fish bounced off the hood with a nerve-jarring thunk. Then a bright yellow butterfly fish, then they were being pelted with sea life, banging on the hood, thudding on the canvas top, littering the road ahead of them. The ones that didn't burst open or die from the impact flopped and danced on the wet pavement in the glare of the headlights. A huge squid splatted against the windshield, momentarily blocking Ba's vision; when it slid off he had to swerve violently to the right to avoid a six-foot porpoise stretched dead across the road.