A Red Sun Also Rises

2. WHITECHAPEL AND KOLUWAI

“I’m ruined! If I don’t pay the money, the Tanners will destroy my good name!”

We were in my sitting room, Clarissa Stark in an armchair by the fireplace, while I anxiously paced up and down.

“Inform the police,” my friend advised. “You’ve been a respected member of this community your entire life. Your word will be believed over that of these newcomers.”

“Maybe so, but they’ll still be here to spread their vicious lies. They’ll still disrupt my Sunday services. I’ll still—I’ll still have to look upon Alice!”

Overcome by the awfulness of my position, I suddenly ran from the room and up to my bedchamber, where I threw myself down and wept, piteous fool that I was.

I didn’t emerge for two days. Miss Stark left trays of food outside the door, but I had no appetite, and by the time I descended the stairs on Thursday morning, I felt physically and emotionally hollow, and thoroughly exhausted.

I also felt determined.

As I entered the kitchen, where my sexton was preparing breakfast, I announced, “There is only one solution.”

She turned and presented me with the black circles of her goggles. “And what is that?”

“I shall pay Mr. Tanner his fifty pounds, then I shall leave Theaston Vale.”

“To go where?”

“To study at the Anglican Missionary College in London, and, after that, wherever they send me.”

“As a missionary?”

“Yes.”

“Reverend, forgive me, but don’t you think it a little extreme to—”

I held up my hand to stop her. “My mind is made up, Miss Stark. You were right. I’ve hidden behind books for too long. I have no experience of life. I didn’t recognise evil even when it looked me straight in the eye. I cannot believe this crisis has come into my life without there being some purpose to it. That purpose is clear—to do the greatest good, I must know its opposite. And in order to do that, I must start to live.”

She was silent for a moment, then limped over to me, held me by the elbows, looked up into my face, and said, “‘Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you. Discipline yourself, keep alert. Like a roaring lion, your adversary, the Devil, prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith. And, after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.’”

I felt the muscles of my jaw flex. “For a non-believer, you quote the Book with more conviction than I can ever muster. But you chose a passage that suggests my problems have only just begun.”

“The attainment of wisdom inevitably involves a prolonged struggle with adversity,” she replied. “Much more so if the wisdom you seek is an understanding of evil. But the Tanners have set the course, so let us sail it, weather the storms, and see where it takes us.”

“Us?”

“You are my friend—my sole friend. In the time since I was ejected from Hufferton Hall, you’ve been the only person who’s judged me by who I am rather than by what I look like. You’ve been generous, attentive, and agreeable. In short, you are a good man, and, though you doubt it, you’re a good priest, too—but rather a naive one. It is my duty and my desire to accompany you, and to see that you come to no harm.”

I was incapable of immediate response, but that evening, I said to her, “We’ve been meticulous in our observation of social proprieties, but under the circumstances, it feels ridiculous to continue with such formality between us. I’d much prefer it if you would call me Aiden, and allow me to address you as Clarissa.”

She smiled. “Already, the crisis prompts progress.”

The following day, I visited the blacksmith’s, and, standing beside a blazing furnace, handed over the money.

“This’ll do for a start,” Oliver Tanner said with a contemptuous smirk.

“You have my forgiveness, Mr. Tanner,” I replied. “And I thank you.”

“Eh?”

“I believe you are—albeit unknowingly—doing the Lord’s work. You have sacrificed yourself that I may live.”

“What are you gibbering about? I’ve sacrificed naught!”

“Your immortal soul, sir.”

“Superstitious claptrap!” He held up the pound notes I’d given him. “This is what’s real, and it can’t be spent in no bloomin’ afterlife!”

I stared into the furnace. “In that, we are agreed. When payment is demanded of you, those notes will be worthless.”

“The only payment you need worry about, lad, is the one you’ll hand over after I’ve spent this lot. My silence don’t come cheap! Now get out of here! But don’t think this business is finished, ’cos it ain’t—not by a long shot!”

Tanner was wrong. His bribery of me ended there and then—Clarissa and I never saw him, his family, or Theaston Vale ever again. A few days later, we left town and travelled by train to the capital.



°



London. 1888. God in Heaven. What a place.

It was a city divided. Its opulence was incomparable, its sophistication astonishing, its indulgences entrancing, its poverty terrifying, its ruthlessness overwhelming, its vileness unremitting.

The capital’s split personality was perfectly embodied in a sensational novella published two years before my arrival, entitled The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by a Scottish author, Robert Louis Stevenson. It told of a rather immoral man who, by means of a chemical formula, embodied his weakness of character in an alter ego, which then rampaged about the city.

The tale unnerved me, for Alice Tanner’s wickedness had given such strength to the aspect of my character which, in Theaston Vale, had felt frustrated, isolated, trapped, and inadequate—adding to it a ferocious resentment against the woman who’d spurned and humiliated me—that I could almost believe it might overtake me.

“It’s an inner darkness,” I told Clarissa, “and it won’t be quelled. I hate it!”

“It’s just a phase,” she advised. “Most young men go through it, especially after their first rejection. It’ll wear off.”

She was wrong. London made it worse.

We had enrolled in the Missionary Society upon our arrival in the city, and for a year I’d been taught how to disseminate my religion to those who worshipped at pagan altars. My companion also received instruction as my sexton, and as a part of our training we were assigned three days a week to a workhouse in Whitechapel.

Despite being within reasonable walking distance of the glamorous West End, the district in which we now found ourselves might have been a different world altogether. Overcrowded, filthy, noisy, stinking, and vicious, it was a place where emotions were stripped to their most wretched essence. Need was surpassed by desperation. Hopelessness was eclipsed by utter despair. Love was obliterated by lust. Conditions there had pushed its inhabitants to the brink of animalism, making the men loutish beyond belief, but reducing the women in particular to such a state of bestial savagery that no social propriety or boundary survived in them. I could not walk down a street without being mocked, pawed at, and propositioned by these dreadful creatures. They uttered every blasphemy, put every perversion up for sale.

Whitechapel was a nightmare made real, and every day that I endured it saw an increase in my loathing of the place and its despicable inhabitants.

On the penultimate day of August, I was sent to a lodging house on Thrawl Street, where I was supposed to offer comfort to the fallen women who crowded into its small, damp, mildewed rooms. I arrived there at seven o’clock in the evening and spent the next few hours being regaled with appalling tales of destitution, vice, and violence, all the while trying to remain impassive while seething with detestation.

It was well past midnight by the time I left that awful house and made my way back toward the rooms the Missionary Society had assigned to me. I was tormented and confused, and, inevitably in the warrens of Whitechapel, my preoccupied state caused me to quickly lose my bearings.

Splashing through sewage and bound by the slumping walls of half-derelict and overcrowded tenements, I wandered from alleyway to alleyway, and the voices that jeered and threatened and wheedled suggestively from all around me seemed to close in, until I felt I was drowning in them.

I trudged on, closing my ears to the catcalls, averting my gaze from the ragged clothes and pockmarked faces, from the rotting teeth and alcohol-reddened eyes, from the taunting expressions and obscene gestures.

I wanted to be somewhere else.

No, it was more than that.

I wanted to be someone else, someone immune to all this hatred and revulsion.

My jaw ached, the pressure burning outward from my clenched teeth.

My hands were fisted, fingernails digging into the palms.

I felt rage.

Rage at this world.

Rage at Alice Tanner.

Rage at being Aiden Fleischer.

It filled me and overflowed from me. I saw red. Nothing but red.

My foot bumped against something and I staggered, tried to regain balance, slipped on wetness, and fell to my hands and knees. A growl of impatience escaped me, followed by a horribly primeval and panicked whine that I only vaguely recognised as my own voice.

My fingers had sunk into the slime, refuse, and excreta of an unpaved East End alleyway—and into the rivulets of flowing blood that cut through it.

Suddenly, I was gasping for air. The world snapped back into focus. I pushed myself to my knees. A woman was lying beside me, wreathed in shadows. I’d tripped over her extended leg. Now I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her. She was sprawled on her back, the excruciated grin on her face echoed by two long lacerations in her throat, so deep they’d almost severed her head from her neck. Her skirt had been pushed up to her shoulders, exposing her abdomen. It was deeply slashed and torn wide open. Her internal organs glistened wetly.

My whine increased in volume, became a shriek, and I ran.

I don’t properly recall what happened next. Somehow I arrived at my lodgings. I think I disturbed Clarissa. I washed my hands over and over, took off my bloodied suit and threw it into the fireplace, then blacked out.

It was noon when I regained consciousness. I opened my eyes and looked into the expressionless circles of my sexton’s goggles. She was sitting at my bedside.

“You woke the household at five in the morning, Aiden. You were incoherent. Then you fell asleep as if drugged. What happened? There was blood on you.”

“I can’t remember!” I answered, truthfully. “I got lost, Clarissa. I was walking and—and—and that’s all! I don’t know where the blood came from! I don’t know how I found my way back here!”

Throughout the afternoon and evening, I struggled to recall what had occurred, but my memory didn’t return until the following day—and then only partially—when the discovery of the corpse was reported in the newspapers. According to the Daily News, the woman I’d fallen over was a drunkard and prostitute named Polly Nichols who often stayed at the boarding house on Thrawl Street where I’d been the night of her murder. A cart driver had discovered her body in the alley—Buck’s Row.

“But I think I found it first,” I told my companion, “and was so shocked that cowardice took over and I ran away.”

“Don’t judge yourself so harshly,” she advised. “You reacted instinctively, that’s all, and I’m glad you did.”

“Glad? Why?”

“Because according to the coroner, the victim wasn’t long dead when she was discovered, which means you were mere moments away from interrupting the killer at work. He may have been in the alley when you entered it. It’s possible that, by taking to your heels, you escaped being murdered yourself.”

I swayed and put a hand to my forehead. “God in Heaven, can it get any worse than this? The sooner the Society sends us overseas, the better!”

Days of darkness and death followed.

A week after Polly Nichols was killed, a woman named Annie Chapman was found dead, with almost identical wounds.

My state of mind deteriorated. I was engulfed by a black mood. My thought processes became lethargic and fragmentary. I undertook my duties, was out night after night, but returned with little memory of where I’d been or what I’d done. I’d disengaged from reality.

On the 30th of September, two more women—Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes—were slaughtered, and journalists gave the killer a name: “Jack the Ripper.”

“What drives him to commit such atrocities?” I enquired of Clarissa.

“Must there be something aside from pure evil?” she asked in response. “Would you explain away this man’s crimes as symptoms of a deprived childhood? Do you believe that Jack is crying out for love and forgiveness?”

“No,” I replied. “Nothing could possibly justify his barbarity. You were right all along—absolute evil exists, and its embodiment is stalking the streets of Whitechapel.”

A fifth killing occurred on the 9th of November, this one so ferocious that the victim, Mary Kelly, was literally gutted and her organs arranged about the room in which the murder took place. It was reported the following day. Clarissa read the details to me from the London Evening News, and while she did so, I opened a letter from the Missionary Society.

“This maniac will be caught soon,” she said. “He obviously can’t control himself. Someone is bound to notice him behaving abnormally.”

“Praise the Lord!” I exclaimed.

“I’d wait until he’s dangling in a noose before you do that.”

“No! This!” I waved the letter. “We’ve been given our marching orders. The Society is sending us to Papua New Guinea—we’re to depart next week!”

Clarissa put the newspaper aside. “Good! Good! I’ll tell you something, Aiden: you’re not the same man upon whose door I knocked when I was at my lowest ebb. That Tanner girl and the horrors of London and the Ripper have demolished you. You needn’t tell me how traumatic it’s been; I’ve seen it in your face and manner. But this—” She pointed at the letter in my hand. “This marks the commencement of your rehabilitation. Soon you’ll see that the malevolence you’ve experienced and witnessed is not endemic. The world is a wonderful place. It will rebuild you, and you’ll be a better person for it.”

“Perhaps so,” I mumbled.

I was eager to be off but felt little enthusiasm for the task that now lay before us. My missionary training had been desultory and inadequate. It was obvious that a prospective evangelist required little more than a thorough grasp of the Bible, a modicum of zeal, and the ability to endure the worst possible conditions. The first, I had. Zeal, I feigned. Endurance, well, where could be worse than Whitechapel?

It was a question I asked again five days later when the Society provided me with a Webley-Pryse revolver. Holding the thing gingerly, I showed it to Clarissa. “They told me the life of a missionary is sometimes perilous.”

“It’s an undeveloped land, Aiden. They are right. Who knows what we might encounter?”

So it was that I abandoned London, leaving it in the demonic grip of Jack the Ripper, and sailed away, a faithless priest with a faithful hunchbacked woman at his side.

Three different ships took us in a roundabout manner to Australia. The initial ten days at sea saw me confined to my cabin, my skin a bilious shade of green and my stomach squirming in my throat. Thankfully, I then gained my sea legs and, for the remainder of the voyage, the fresh winds and far horizons did much to dispel the miasmatic dread that had enshrouded me since August. By the time we reached Sydney—a little over two months later—my face and forearms were a deep brown and my blond hair had been bleached almost white. This weathering hardly made me a “man of the world,” though. On the morning we sailed into the harbour, when I examined my visage in a shaving mirror, I saw the same gaunt features and the same guileless pale blue eyes—the same dolt that Alice Tanner had so callously mocked. Yet I also noticed something different. The veneer of intellectualism that had for so long disguised my emptiness was gone. There was a new sort of honesty in my eyes, and it was terrible, for it made a blatant display of my deficiencies. I couldn’t hide. I was exposed for all to see.

After a week’s layover in Sydney, Clarissa and I sailed in a clipper to the Melanesian Islands and landed at Port Moresby. It was our intention to establish a Christian mission in one of the more remote regions of Papua New Guinea, as instructed by the Society, but within days of our arrival the German authorities disallowed the project. We twiddled our thumbs well into the new year while awaiting fresh instructions from London. They finally arrived in the second week of February, and directed us to instead establish a station on Koluwai, a humid hump that bulges out of the sea a thousand miles or so to the southeast of the principal island. Scarcely two hundred square miles in area, swathed in dripping jungle, and prone to particularly vicious seasonal storms, we found that it boasted one coastal town—Kutumakau—and a great many tiny villages, which, with an insane disregard for lightning strikes, were built in the treetops.

“It hardly seems worth the effort,” I commented as we unloaded our baggage and trunks from the little steamer that had transported us there, “but the Church insists that God’s work be done, even in far-flung corners such as this. What will the islanders make of us, Clarissa?”

“We shall be a novelty, at least,” she responded.

In that, she was correct, for most of the Koluwaians had never seen a European before, despite the proximity of German colonies—an indication, perhaps, of just how small and remote their island was. They were untouched by civilisation and had, in fact, barely emerged from the Stone Age. Their diet consisted of fruit, tubers, nuts, fish, monkeys, and wild pigs, the land animals being hunted with barbed spears. The people eschewed ornamentation and wore only loincloths, with no necklaces, rings, or beads of any sort. They did, however, practise tattooism, and from head to foot were covered with swirling patterns of deep red and pale yellow dots. In stature they were a small but plump people, averaging about five-foot-four, with coffee-coloured skin, long black hair, and unfathomable brown eyes. Their jaws and cheekbones were prominent, as is common in primitive races, and their teeth large. Most of the men filed their incisors to points, and I was disturbed to learn that this was in connection with an aspect of their diet that, for them, possessed spiritual significance.

The Koluwaians were cannibals.

They were also slavers, making frequent raids on neighbouring islands and returning with young men and women who’d be spirited away into the jungle to who knows what fate—a cooking pot, I feared.

During the first few days after our arrival, we lived in a couple of semi-derelict shacks on the outskirts of Kutumakau—the town was little more than a sprawl of similarly dilapidated huts—and close to the edge of the steaming jungle. I found it almost impossible to sleep there, not only due to the oppressive humidity, the cacophonous night storms, the mosquitoes and invasive vermin, and the ceaseless din of chirruping tree frogs, but also because, from the moment I set foot on the island, I was subject to terrifying nightmares. These always began with a heightened awareness of my own pulse. Gradually, my heartbeat would increase in volume until it pounded in my ears, then I’d envision the blood coursing through my arteries and would sink into it until I seemed to exist at a microscopic level, with red cells roaring around me. From this crimson tide, Alice Tanner emerged, shamelessly naked, floating, smiling cruelly, her eyes filled with scorn.

In every nightmare, the same conversation occurred.

“Miss Tanner! You have to go! Please, hurry!”

“But I want to look at you, Mr. Skin-and-Bones.”

“He’s coming!”

“Mr. Books-and-Bible.”

“Can’t you feel him, Alice? Can’t you sense him in my veins? He’s approaching! He’s close! Get away from here! Run! Run!”

“Mr. Thoughts-and-Theories.”

“Oh, sweet Heaven, Jack is coming! He’s coming for you!”

Something loomed behind her. A blade slid out of her belly and sawed up through her sternum.

An alleyway.

Alice, on her back, her eyes glassy, her throat slit twice through, her stomach ripped wide open.

The knife—in my hand.

Night after night, I’d jerk awake with a cry of horror, to find the atmosphere throbbing with the thunder of drums.



°



“I don’t understand it,” I said to Clarissa one morning. “It sounds like every village is drumming from midnight onward.”

“There might be a purely practical explanation,” she replied. “Maybe it’s to keep nocturnal predators away.”

Two weeks after our arrival, a wizened and uncommonly tall and thin islander named Iriputiz came to visit us. He was a grotesque individual whose dark skin was covered with scars, as if he’d suffered severe burns; whose long face radiated a malign intelligence; and whose eyes were forever restless, never settling on anything for more than a few seconds.

He was Koluwai’s witch doctor.

We introduced ourselves and invited him in.

Speaking in German, which he’d apparently learned during visits to neighbouring, more developed islands, he said, “It is the time of storms on Koluwai.”

His voice creaked like old wood.

“And very odd they are, too,” I responded, speaking the same language and waving him to a chair. “All flashes and bangs but no rain. How long does the season last?”

“We do not measure time as you do, but I have knowledge of your calendar. By that, they come maybe every fifteen months and last for three. They grow stranger and stranger, and, after the strangest of them all, finish quite suddenly. We are now a month into the season. You are a priest, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You have whisky?”

“No, but I have wine.”

“Give me some.”

Clarissa fetched a bottle and poured him a glass. He emptied it in a single swallow.

“More, and more again,” he said.

Glancing at me, my sexton gave him a refill.

He swigged it back, held his vessel out for another, swallowed that, too, then dragged his skinny wrist across his lips. “You will both go from here today. You are not good for Koluwai. We will let you stay only if you speak like us.”

“You mean we can remain if we learn the Koluwaian language?”

“Yes. Only if you do that.”

“Then we will learn.”

“You have more wine?”

“Yes.”

“Then I will teach.”

This sounded like a reasonable proposition, so we conceded, and from that day forward, Iriputiz visited us each evening and proved himself a very capable, if drunken, tutor.

The tongue of Koluwai is, I suspect, entirely unique. It doesn’t at all resemble the languages of the other Melanesian Islands and probably exists nowhere else on Earth, but it is not complex. Consisting mostly of pops, snaps and clicks, buzzes, and long drawn-out vowels, its vocabulary is extensive but its grammar almost childish, requiring only that a noun be stated twice to indicate the plural, and having just three verb tenses. However, in common with many undeveloped idioms, nuances of meaning are primarily indicated through context and tone. Accompanying gestures are also far more extravagant and important than in English; so much so that many things are communicated solely with waved hands, nods of the head, and, especially, flicks and waggles of the fingers.

Clarissa and I were already fluent in a number of languages so we made rapid progress in our lessons, the main challenge being phonetics we weren’t used to and which felt to us ill-designed for the human vocal apparatus. Many ptahs and zz’s and back-of-the-mouth “y” and “g” consonants were demanded, while vowels tended toward lengthy oohs and aahs. The “throat click” was particularly difficult. In isolation it presented no problem, but when it occurred in the middle of a word, it was hard to produce without pausing before and afterwards.

Nevertheless, it was only a few weeks before we were able to converse with the islanders, though when we did so, their reaction appeared somewhat strange to me, for no matter what the subject, our words would elicit first a nod of satisfaction, then, when we moved away, a whispered discussion, as if our progress was being assessed with reference to an agenda of which we weren’t aware.

It was exceedingly odd.

We made fast progress in creating a home for ourselves and soon moved out of the shacks, thanks to Clarissa’s remarkable skills. She positively blossomed on the island. With fairly inadequate assistance from twelve Koluwaians and despite her physical deformities, she constructed with astonishing rapidity an eight-roomed cabin, complete with a veranda, a library, a workshop, and a chemical laboratory. She then started to erect a church. These buildings, which comprised our missionary station, were located on a jungle-free hill overlooking the sea, half a mile to the south of Kutumakau.

I had never seen anyone work with such industry and unflagging energy.

“How do you do it in this tyrannical heat?” I asked one evening. “I can barely lift a finger, yet you race around carrying planks, sawing them up, knocking them together, building, building, building! You must have the endurance and strength of an ox!”

“The more engaged I am with a task, the less I feel the pain of my twisted bones,” she answered.

“Do you really suffer so, Clarissa?”

“I barely remember the days when I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”

“You brought me here, Aiden. This is a place where everything needs doing. There’s no time for me to stop and acknowledge that I hurt. That is a splendid gift!”

While my companion worked, I set about spreading the word of Our Lord with, I must confess, very little energy and an almost complete absence of true conviction. Just as I had resented my parishioners in Theaston Vale, so I now felt the same negative emotions toward my new flock. In retrospect, I can see the real reason for my discontent: I was professing a faith I didn’t possess. It was all artifice—something learned by rote and presented as a spiritual truth. It was in my brain but had never touched my heart. It wasn’t the parishioners or the islanders I begrudged—it was Aiden Fleischer, for I knew him a fraud.

My lackadaisical approach didn’t really matter. My subjects had not one whit of interest in Christianity. Heaven, to them, was the bountiful sea, and the very idea of a single supreme deity they considered a flagrant absurdity. They had no need of my religion—they had their own, if “religion” is an appropriate word for the detestable practices and idolatry in which they indulged. Cannibalism was the least of it.

My awareness of the obscenities perpetrated deep in the jungle grew slowly. The drums were the first indication, for it occurred to me that, despite Clarissa’s suggestion, there were no predators on Koluwai big enough to harm a man. Then I started to notice that most of the islanders bore scars between the swirling patterns of their tattoos, and on many occasions I observed that some of the scars were very fresh. Next, I became conscious that—from an age any civilised person would consider still a part of childhood—the female Koluwaians were almost permanently pregnant, but while there were many, many children on the island, the population wasn’t expanding. In investigating this, I soon discovered that the town and all the villages were subject to mysterious disappearances. People simply vanished, and the islanders absolutely refused to talk about it, other than to acknowledge that it happened.

“Surely they don’t eat them all?” I said to Clarissa.

My companion, who was at that time preoccupied with fitting pews inside the church, replied distractedly, “When this place is finished and the natives can gather in it and listen to you, and when I begin to practise medicine, we’ll be better able to foster their trust. Perhaps then they’ll be more willing to explain the way of things in this part of the world.”

I looked around at the inside of the marvellous little church. “Assuming we can persuade them to come here at all.”

It wasn’t long before my suspicion that the islanders were engaging in blasphemous rites became inextricably bound to the phenomenal storms. These queer cloudless and rainless atmospheric disturbances crackled over the island with an almost clockwork regularity. Each night, when the first snap of electrical energy sounded, the men took up their spears and disappeared into the thick foliage—a fact that piqued my curiosity to such an extent that, one morning, I armed myself with my revolver, found the place where they’d pushed into the jungle, and followed their faint trail. It was a long and uncomfortable hike—the dawn’s dew quickly made my clothes sodden and thorns nicked at the skin of my hands and face—but I pushed on, determined to solve the mystery of their nightly excursions.

The path led to a small glade at the summit of a steep hill. It was crowded with white flowers whose cloying scent made the atmosphere so thick and sickly that my senses began to swim. I held my wet shirtsleeve over my nose and mouth, stepped forward, and noticed that something was lying in the middle of the space, its inky-blue form half-concealed by the blooms. Hesitantly, I approached it, an inexplicable chill crawling up my spine.

It was a corpse—eviscerated, beheaded, slashed, torn, and rendered impossible to identify. However, as I gazed at it, spellbound, one horrifying fact gradually overcame me. Though vaguely humanoid, the thing was neither man nor woman. It wasn’t any beast that I recognised. I didn’t know what manner of being it was.

Staggering back, I tripped over the dried husk of a severed limb and saw that there were many more of the dead things strewn around the clearing.

I shrieked, dropped my pistol, turned, and ran. By the time I reached the cabin, I’d half-convinced myself that the pungent aroma of the flowers had caused me to hallucinate.

I made no mention of my excursion to Clarissa. I feared she might already regard me as prone to mental instability.

Perhaps I was.

My nightmares grew worse.

By the middle of the year, the missionary station was completed. Even in a comfortable climate this would have been considered fast work, but under the burning Melanesian sun it was incredible, and I stood in awe of Clarissa’s practical skills, endurance, and knowledge.

“I shall send a man to deliver a message to all the villages,” I told her, “to inform them that we shall hold our first service this coming Sunday. Perhaps curiosity will drive a few to attend, but even if just one person comes, it will be a start.”

In the event, that’s exactly what I got—a congregation of one.

Iriputiz.

So I gave my first and only sermon on the island to its witch doctor, employing as much Koluwaian as I could muster but resorting frequently to German. I explained what the Bible is, and how, through its guidance, a man might live according to God’s will and thus gain eternal peace in the Kingdom of Heaven. I then asked Iriputiz to follow me in the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

“And this will make your god come to us?” he asked.

“God is already present,” I answered.

“I do not see him.”

“He is in all that you see. He is in the air we breathe, the light that shines upon us, in the chirp of insects and the splash of the waves. God is everywhere and everything, for the world is His creation.”

“I do not believe you. Take me to this place you call Heaven. I want to see it.”

“The gates of Heaven open only to those who have professed faith in Our Lord, and in his son, Jesus Christ.”

Iriputiz gave a snort of disdain. “This is all a story,” he said, and stamped out of the church.

“I don’t think I’m cut out for this,” I confessed to Clarissa. “These people need something more tangible than words. It’ll take fire and brimstone before they believe.”

“Give it time, Aiden. I’ve noticed much disrepair in Kutumakau and the villages. I shall embark on a mission of restoration, and I have it in mind to create some sort of metal pylon at the top of the highest hill to draw the lightning away from the tree houses. Once these people gain material benefits from our presence, perhaps they’ll be more willing to listen.”

I nodded my approval but felt useless. It also occurred to me that, despite the frequency and ferocity of the electrical storms, Clarissa and I hadn’t once witnessed or heard of an actual lightning strike.

Moving into our new station appeared to cure me of my nocturnal terrors—I credited the light sea breeze I allowed to blow through my room for this—but on the night of the sermon, I suffered a bad dream of a different sort, one so vivid that it might have been real.

I’d retired at about eleven o’clock and, after an hour of restlessness, had fallen into a fitful and incomplete sleep—that state of suspension where one is aware that the body is slack and snores are being produced, but still feels rather too conscious for it to qualify as proper rest.

I was aware of the salt air whispering through my window. I was aware of the perpetual trilling of the frogs. I was aware that drums were rumbling in the jungled hills.

And I was aware that my bedchamber door slowly creaked open.

A cloud of steam billowed into the room, and with it Iriputiz, who appeared to be floating a few inches above the floor. He slid to my bedside and looked down at me.

“I will send you into the final storm, Reverend Fleischer, there to meet the god I serve—a real god! He has a task for you.”

He reached out and grasped my forearm, sinking his long pointed fingernails into my flesh.

With a cry of pain, I jerked awake, sat up, and swatted a large spider from my wrist. It had bitten me, leaving two little puncture marks. I jumped to the floor and chased the pest into a corner of the room where I flattened it with a slipper. I returned to my bed and lay down. I was trembling and a fiery sensation was creeping up my arm. Moments later, everything skewed sideways and I knew no more.



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A monotonous chanting and distant rumble of thunder summoned me to consciousness. I was on my back, with the stars overhead, and I was moving. It took me a moment to realise that I was being borne along on a stretcher and there were islanders crowding to either side of it. Clarissa’s face hove into view and the light of burning brands reflected in her goggle lenses.

“Are you lucid, Aiden?”

“Of course. What’s happening?” My voice sounded dry and husky.

“Lie still. You’re seriously ill with fever.”

“But I was just sleeping.”

“No. You’ve been ranting and raving for more than a week.”

A week! I could barely credit this, for I had no sense that time had passed.

“Iriputiz says you’re suffering from something called kichyomachyoma—a sickness of the spirit. The islanders are immune to it but we aren’t. I’ve been through our entire pharmaceutical supplies trying to find something to treat it, but nothing has worked. The witch doctor assures me he can cure you with local herbs, so we’re taking you to the place in the hills where they grow. Apparently, they are only effective in the few minutes after they are picked.”

“No,” I croaked. “I’ll be all right. Don’t take me into the hills. There are—there are things there.”

“I’m scared you’re dying, Aiden. I don’t know what else to do. What things?”

“Things. They aren’t human. I saw one. The villagers had killed it. It was—it was a demon!” I struggled to sit up, caught a glimpse of a long procession trailing behind us, then fell back, utterly lacking in strength. The jungle canopy closed overhead as we pushed into the vegetation.

“You aren’t thinking straight,” Clarissa said. “Don’t worry—I’ll see that no harm comes to you. If we have to endure a heathen ritual in order to restore your health, then what’s the harm?”

My vision slipped in and out of focus. The stars, flickering through the branches, went from pinpricks to blurred lozenges and back again. The jungle’s shadows enveloped me and I tumbled into oblivion.

The next thing I knew, there was a loud crackle of lightning and I was looking up at Iriputiz.

“Open your mouth,” he said.

I wanted to ask what he was doing, but the moment I tried to speak, he forced something between my lips and pushed it to the back of my throat with his filthy thumb. I started to choke and felt a ferocious burning expand out from my gullet and into my skull. My heels, which, I dimly realised, were tightly tied together, drummed against the stone surface on which I lay. My wrists pulled at bindings. I bucked and writhed, unable to catch a breath. Then, just as I thought my heart might burst, the old man leaned forward and thumped my chest. I coughed vegetable matter into my mouth and spat it out.

As I sucked shudderingly at the humid air, my mind instantly cleared and I felt a fresh strength pouring into my limbs. I lifted my head and saw that I was stretched out on an altar in the centre of a clearing, around which a crowd of natives had gathered. Male and female, they were unashamedly naked, holding aloft burning brands, chanting their slow and repetitive dirge.

Clarissa was standing nearby. An engorged full moon hung overhead. The sky was cloudless but jagged lines of electrical energy were snapping back and forth across it.

“Get me out of here!” I pleaded hoarsely. “This is the Devil’s work!”

“Iriputiz is saving your life, Aiden!” Clarissa responded.

“Then why am I bound?”

The witch doctor interrupted. “The fever will return, Reverend Fleischer. These bonds are to keep you still while I do my work.”

I looked at my sexton and urged, “Please! Don’t let him touch me again.”

She hesitated and bit her lower lip irresolutely, then limped forward. An islander rushed up behind her and swung a knob-stick into the side of her head. Her goggles went spinning away as she flopped unconscious to the ground.

I groaned, fought, but failed to rise. Iriputiz came to my assistance. He put his arm under my shoulders and hoisted me into a sitting position.

“Your church,” he said, pointing to my left.

I looked and saw that a gap in the trees gave an unrestricted view down a long slope to where Kutumakau town slumped. I little beyond its shacks, the church that Clarissa had built stood whitely in the moonlight.

It burst into flames.

“Such a place does not belong here,” Iriputiz hissed. “In the morning, its ashes will be thrown into the sea. Your imaginary god is not for us. Our gods are real, and it is time for you to serve one.”

He pushed me back down, drew a knife from his loincloth, and sliced at my clothes, tearing them from me. Then he applied the blade to my skin and began to cut me all over—small incisions, about an inch long and a quarter of an inch deep. He made hundreds of them, and into each he inserted a small seed that burned like acid. I screamed. I begged. I prayed for succour. It didn’t come.

Multiple bolts of lightning hissed and fizzled deafeningly overhead.

The islanders’ chanting changed its tone and tempo. It gained a menacing quality, and even through my terrible agony, I could feel an air of expectancy creeping over the jungle clearing.

A woman stepped forward and began a writhing, sensuous, then progressively frantic dance, keeping rhythm with the rolling intonation. At first shockingly unrestrained and animalistic, her movements became increasingly monstrous as her joints, with nasty groans and snaps, started to bend in unnatural directions. She scratched viciously at her own flesh, causing blood to stream over her glistening tattooed skin.

Iriputiz held out a bowl to her. From it, she plucked large thorns, which, one by one, she pushed into her legs, arms, torso, and face. Around each, the flesh swelled rapidly. I watched, horrified, as her skin stretched, split, and spurted blood. Finally, accompanied by an appalling scream, she practically flew apart, showering the gathering with gore.

Her shredded corpse dropped to the ground and lay twitching.

There was a momentary pause, then drums suddenly boomed from beyond the trees, adding their din to the clamouring storm, which was now directly above the clearing and appeared to be descending toward it.

The witch doctor smeared foul-smelling grease over my skin then rubbed a gritty glasslike powder into it, covering my entire body. A prickling sensation needled into every inch of me, as if I’d become filled with a strong static charge.

“It is ground crystal,” he said. “It will ensure that the gods take you.”

He applied his blade to his own palms, threw the weapon aside, held his hands poised above my face, and began to sing.

His blood dripped into my eyes and onto my lips. Each time I opened my mouth to scream, some of it dropped onto my tongue and oozed to the back of my throat.

God! Please! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!

My church, and the last remnants of my faith, burned.

The air above turned into a writhing ball of energy. It flashed and shimmered, boiled, flattened into a disk, and opened in the middle. Warm air, tangy with the scent of lemons, gusted against my face, then suddenly reversed direction and howled as it was sucked upward. I felt a tremendous force pulling at me.

Clarissa Stark tottered to her feet and screamed my name. She staggered over with her eyes clamped shut and tears streaming from them, and threw herself on top of me.

Iriputiz bellowed, “No! Not you, woman!”

I felt myself rising, carrying Clarissa with me.

My senses left me.



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