F. Paul Wilson - Nightworld

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?

"All right, then." Bill's insides were coiled tight. "I guess this is it."

He turned to the baker's dozen of villagers armed with chairs and torches who waited behind him in the tower base. The thirteenth was Alexandru, standing off to the side.

Through Alexandru, Bill had explained that the red-haired man who'd come here in 1941 was still alive and in America, that if he could recover some pieces of the "magic sword" that had shattered here on these stones, he might be able to close up the hole out there in the pass and bring the sun back. They'd helped him search around the base of the tower this afternoon but their efforts had been no more fruitful than his own in the morning. They'd have to go out at night.

Bill had expected to be laughed off as a madman, or rudely rebuffed at the very least. Instead the villagers had conferred together, then agreed to help him. The women had begun wicker-weaving while the men set about making torches. Now they were dressed in multiple layers of clothing, wicker armor on their thighs and lower legs, heavy gloves, sheepskin hats and vests. They looked ready for an arctic blizzard, but it was a different sort of storm they'd be facing.

Bill nodded to the men. It was time. Their faces remained mostly expressionless, but Bill noticed glances pass between them, saw them begin to breath more heavily. They were scared, and rightly so. A perfect stranger had asked them to put their lives on the line, to perform the equivalent of wading into a piranha-infested river with only a crab net and a spear for protection. If they turned around and headed back up the stones stairs now, he wouldn't blame them.

But they didn't. They filed out through the opening with their shields and torches raised, to form a shallow semicircle of protection into which Bill and Nick stepped. And then, just as they'd rehearsed it inside the keep, they advanced as a group, the end members closing the circle behind Bill and Nick as they moved away from the tower wall.

The bugs assaulted in a wave. The men in the circle around him began to cry out in fear and anger and revulsion as they blocked the swooping creatures with their raised chairs and shields while thrusting at them with their torches. To the accompaniment of buzzing wings and sizzling bug flesh, they inched forward.

Bill crouched next to Nick, his arm over his shoulders, keeping his head down as they moved. He shouted in his left ear.

"Where, Nick? Show me where!"

Nick kept his eyes down, searching the rocky ground but saying nothing. Bill had a sudden, awful fear that Nick might not be able to see the glow because of the torches the circle of villagers carried. If daylight obscured the glow, would torchlight do the same?

As if in answer to Bill's unasked question, Nick said, "Here's one."