Nightworld

5 • CATACLYSM

Maui

The moana puka appeared around dusk.

Kolabati and Moki had been standing on the lanai watching the sun sink into the Pacific—earlier than ever. It was only a quarter to seven. They were also watching the airport. Neither of them could remember ever seeing it so busy.

"Look at them run," Moki said, grinning as he slipped an arm around her waist. "The shrinking daylight's got them all spooked. See how they run."

"It's got me spooked too," Kolabati said.

"Don't let it," he said. "If it sends all the Jap malahinis scurrying west back to their own islands, and all the haoles back to the mainland—preferably back to New York where they can fall into that hole in Central Park—it's all for the good. It will leave the islands to the Hawaiians."

She'd been fascinated by the news from New York of the mysterious hole in the Sheep Meadow. She knew the area well. Her brother Kusum had once owned an apartment overlooking Central Park.

"I'm not Hawaiian."

He tightened his grip on her waist. "As long as you're with me, you are."

Somehow, his arm around her was not as comforting as she would have wished. They watched the airport in silence for a while longer, then Moki released her and leaned on the railing, staring out at the valley, the sky.

"Something's going to happen soon. Do you feel it?"

Kolabati nodded. "Yes. I've felt it for days."

"Something wonderful."

"Wonderful?" She stared at him. Could he mean it? She'd been plagued by an almost overwhelming sense of dread since the tradewinds had reversed themselves. "No. Not wonderful at all. Something terrible."

His grin became fierce. "Terrible for other people, maybe. But wonderful for us. You wait and see."

Kolabati didn't know what to make of Moki lately. His behavior had remained slightly bizarre since Wednesday when the gash on his hand had healed so quickly. At least once a day he'd cut himself to see if the healing power was still with him. Each day he healed more quickly than the day before. And with each healing the wild light in his eyes had grown.

As the daylight began to fade, Kolabati turned toward the door, but Moki grabbed her arm.

"Wait. What is that?"

He was staring east, toward Kahului and beyond. She followed his gaze and saw it. Something in the water. White water, bubbling, roiling. A gigantic disturbance. With foreboding rising, ballooning within her, Kolabati grabbed the binoculars from their hook and focused on the disturbance.

At first all she saw was turbulent white water, giant chop, sloshing and swirling chaotically. But as she watched, the turbulence became ordered, took shape. The white water began to swirl in a uniform direction, counterclockwise, around a central point. She identified the center in time to see it sink below the surface and become a dark, spinning, sucking maw.

"Moki, look!" She handed him the glasses.

"I see!" he said, but took them anyway.

She watched his expression as he adjusted the lenses. His smile grew.

"A whirlpool! It's too close to shore to be from converging currents. It's got to be a crack in the ocean floor. No, wait!" He lowered the glasses and stared at her, his face flushed with excitement. "A hole! It has to be a hole in the ocean floor, just like the Central Park hole! We've got our own hole here!"

Together they watched the whirlpool organize and expand, Moki with undisguised glee, Kolabati with growing, gnawing unease. The troubles from the outer world, from the mainland, were intruding on her paradise. That could only bring misfortune. They watched together until it was too dark to see any more, then they went inside and turned on the TV to see what the news had to say about it. The scientists all agreed—the ocean floor had opened in a fashion similar to the phenomenon in Manhattan's Central Park. Already the locals had a name for it: moana puka—ocean hole.

Moki could barely contain his excitement. He wandered the great room, talking a blue streak, gesticulating wildly.

"You know what's going to happen, Bati?" he said. "The water's going to be sucked down into whatever abyss those holes lead to, and it's going to keep on disappearing into nowhere. And eventually the ocean level is going to drop. And if it drops far enough, do you know what will happen?"

Kolabati shook her head mutely. She had an inescapable feeling that she was witnessing the beginning of the end—of everything.

"I'll tell you what's going to happen: Greater Maui will be reborn." He went to the doorway that opened onto the lanai and gestured into the darkness. "Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, even little Molokini—all of them were part of Maui before the Ice Age, connected to our island by valleys rather than cut off by channels of sea water. I see it happening, Bati. I see them all joined together again, reunited after ages of separation. A single island, as big as the Big Island. Maybe bigger. And I'll play a part in the future of Greater Maui."

"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?