F. Paul Wilson - Nightworld

"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!"