The Scifi & Fantasy Collection
He fled through the palms toward the village, and as he drew near the shadowy shapes of the thatched huts, he could hear restlessness and moaning. The largest one, in the center of the village, formerly the long house and once a Christian church, was now the home of Wanoa. And Billy was convinced that once Wanoa, that sturdy warrior, completely understood that it was either death by storm and plague or death in battle, he would certainly choose the latter.
Billy hammered loudly upon the door and all within went silent. When nobody came, he shouted, “Open up! It’s your fellah mahstah!”
Wanoa’s impassive face showed in a dark rectangle of window which was cautiously opened. Wanoa studied his visitor for some time before he consented to unbolt the door.
Billy burst into the bare-floored room, still holding his lamp. It was in his throat to shout out his news, but the sight he saw there stopped him. Five people—all the members of the chief’s household—lay along the far wall. A few hours before only one had been ill, but now all five were ashen!
“What is this?” cried Billy.
Wanoa’s tone was hostile. “Tonight you say you stop sickness. Tonight you forbid sacrifice to Tadamona. And now all but maybe ten in whole village sick. You have spoken evilly. The god is punishing us all.”
Billy, still on the verge of stating his business, felt a clammy terror, held by the rest of them, enter into himself. He heard a sudden movement at the door and was so on edge that he whirled and almost spilled his lamp.
It was Christina, who had seen his coming. Gone was the shy, delicate beauty Billy had always known. Her eyes blazed with hatred and the scorn in her voice was like thrown acid.
“You forbade the rites! You have caused this to come. And now the sea lies motionless and waiting. The wind has stopped. The village is dying, and only a fool would not know that a typhoon is at hand. This is the end of Kaisan and you, wretched white man, have caused its downfall!”
It was so true that Billy had no answer. He stared at Christina, half of him detached and astonished at the unmasked savagery in the woman, at the strength of which he did not at all disapprove.
“You are right,” he said in a low voice. “I have caused this, but now I have come for help. I have seen the god”—there was a sharp intake of breath and all eyes, the many which now peered in at the door, grew wide upon him—“I have seen the god and I know where he is to be found. With enough men it may be possible to kill him—”
“You have seen him and are alive?” said Wanoa.
“With enough men!” mocked Christina. “All the men of the island, armed as your white soldiers are armed, could not even injure Tadamona. But we have no arms and our men are all ill. Because of you, we shall die!”
Billy saw that she struck the pitch for the others. He saw men in the door with hard hands on their machetes. It would take but very little to rouse them to murder him.
“I understand that now,” said Billy. “I did not think. My mind was frozen. But now I have a plan. If only a few will help me, we may yet save this place from destruction.”
His words fell into the ominous silence which waited for the storm. Nervously he spoke again. “In an outhouse near my bungalow is stored the dynamite we have used for clearing. There are a dozen cases still left. The point where the thing lives is hollow from the wear of the sea, and the shore end of it shows evidence of connection with Mount Kinea above. With help I can place the dynamite on the shore end and set it off. There is enough to break through the crust and perhaps cause the lava pools to explode. It is true that everyone will die before dawn. But isn’t it better to die trying, than like whimpering women in these huts?”
“It cannot succeed!” said Christina. “I know nothing of your dynamite, but I have seen the power of Tadamona. You can avail nothing against it.”
“I can try,” said Billy.
“And we can refuse,” said Christina. “The few who are left may live even yet. The sick are too weak to help. Go back to your bungalow and dwell upon the calamity which you have brought to us.”
It was well that she said he was to go. The men at the door fell away to let him pass when, just as swiftly, they would have cut him down.
He paused, looking back at her, the light of his lantern making her smooth, satin skin glow with an almost luminous light. “Whether I have help or not, I must try. There is but little time left.” He faced about and strode down the lane between the huts and back through the jungle which opened out again upon his bungalow.
The futility of the gesture he planned lay like lead in his heart, but he could not stand inactivity. He went to the hut which housed the machinery of the island, and climbed up into the ancient, tanklike truck which had seen a dozen years of service before it had ever rolled a wheel on Kaisan. It started reluctantly, and he eased it out and around to the roadway which led to the powder shack.
He left the engine running and unlocked the door. He was too discouraged to be careful and set his lamp where it would shed the best light. He counted the cases and found that he had three more than he had thought. But still, it was little enough for a job at which howitzers themselves might have failed.
The electric blasting machine was rusty and damp, and the handle was difficult to pull up. He took it out into the moonlight and, after exerting much force, was able to raise it. He thrust it down again, watching for the end wires to spark. It required several tries before he at last saw their feeble flicker. It was inviting a misfire to use it at all, but all his caps were electric and of the kind used in damp metal mines. He put the machine in the truck and returned to begin on the dynamite.
He had carried about half the boxes outside when his eye was arrested by another type of container, and he stopped to pick it up. Against the chance that the tramp steamer might sometime be forced to unload at night, a long-dead owner had purchased a gross of magnesium flares. Billy put several inside his shirt. For lack of other firing equipment he might find a way to press them into service, as their ignition caps might serve where the electric machine failed.
He picked up another case and carried it outside. Startled by a movement beside the truck, he stopped. And then, with relief, he saw that it was Christina.
She had shed the prosaic mission costume that her movements might be freer, replacing it with a sarong which closely molded her beautiful form. The eerie character of the moonlight gave her the appearance of a jungle cat.
“You had better go back to your hut,” said Billy.
“Save your breath for work. It is barely possible that your plan may work.”
He turned and pulled the rest of the dynamite from the shack, and then helped her fling it up into the body of the truck. He made it fast with some old pieces of hemp, and then they climbed up to the seat. He eased the truck down the jungle-bordered trail. Its lights did not seem to have the power to penetrate this thickening, suffocating murk.
“It may stop him for a little while,” said Christina. “If we are alive at dawn, we will have another day.”
“How do you know that?”
“He has never been known to walk by day.”
Billy looked up at the moon. Although there were no clouds, it was now almost hidden. The heat was so thick he found it very difficult to breathe after his exertions.
“This is all crazy mad,” he said abruptly. “But when I tried to tell myself it was a dream, I found a barometer and his footprints and knew that I had really seen him. Sickness is caused by bacteria, and typhoons are too great a difference in high and low pressure areas. But it is impossible for all the village to become ill at once, and equally impossible for the storm to come on so suddenly.”
“You are through laughing at us, then?”
“I have never laughed at you.”
“The people believe something else. They know white men
think they are gods, though they act as the lowest of men.”
“I don’t feel anything near a god right now,” said Billy with a feeble attempt at a smile.
They drove up the cart road, and it was as though they forced against a wall of sinuous substance which was reluctant to let them through.
“There is the point,” he said at last.
She gazed at it without flinching. “You saw him and still live?”
“I saw him.”
“Then perhaps I too can look upon him.”
“Perhaps.”
“Maybe he is not there.”
“Maybe.”
They forced the truck up the strangely bare jungle path, where no native feet ever trod. It labored on the ascent and then, caught at last by heavy vines, stopped.
“There is a cavern just ahead. I saw it as I came out of its cave.”
“I see it,” she said, walking in front and peering into the murk. She looked at the darker hole beyond and knew it for what it was. She came back to Billy and helped him with the boxes.
Methodically they carried them to the cavern and lowered them down. One by one they placed and packed them, working with a slowness which was defiance in itself.
When they had done, they felt a stir in the air.
“The wind will be here in a moment,” said Christina.
“Yes, I hear it.”
He went back to the truck and took out the firing cable and the machine. He fitted caps into the sticks of the topmost box and then affixed the wire. He went back toward the truck and then beyond, letting out coil after coil. Finally he knelt and connected the blasting machine.
With Christina’s help he piled stones and earth on top of the boxes. They were very quiet, unable to keep from watching the mouth of the cavern so short a distance from them.
Christina followed him back to the machine. The calm which she had so laboriously preserved was now beginning to crack.
“He has not come out. Perhaps he is not there at all!”
Billy again inspected his wires, saying nothing. The next instant, anything he might have said would have gone unheard. With a blast fully as loud as any dynamite explosion, the hurricane struck Kaisan. A torrent of stinging rain, lashed by the scream of the wind, battered them and blinded them. With a deafening thunder the sea rose up and crashed down upon the reef, snarling forward in its eagerness to claw the beaches.
Speech was impossible even at the distance of a foot. They gripped the earth, stunned by the ferocity of the attack, chilled by wave after wave of rain, each one of which left them half drowned. Not ten feet from them a giant royal palm vanished to leave a dark cavern of its own. The very stones streaked away from the path. The wind was full of pelting sticks and leaves and fronds which left their bodies numb as from a flogging.
For ten minutes or more the first attack of the typhoon continued. Then there came a momentary lull as though the great beast paused to take a proud surveyal of what he had done and then blast away again at the most stubborn centers of resistance.
In the instant of respite, Billy groped for Christina and found her shivering at his side. All the while she had been clinging hard to his shoulder but that force was so small he had not felt it in the shock of wind and rain.
“There’ll be nothing left of the island!” she wailed into his ear. “Blow up this place while we still have the calm!”
Billy got to his knees and placed both hands upon the handle. He thrust down with all his might. The ancient magneto whirred, the end of the plunger clanged against the breaker. Nothing happened. Billy fought the thing up again.
With redoubled fury the storm struck anew. He was torn from his grip on the handle and flung back against the earth. Dimly he saw Christina crawling toward him. She helped him breast the blast which swept up from the sea.
He braced himself and took the grips. Again he slammed the bar down.
In the countershock which followed, he lost Christina. The concussion sucked all the wind away for an instant and then the storm, angered, came howling back to pound him into the earth for such insolence. The explosion had been dull in the bedlam already loose, but through the medium of the ground, Billy felt a series of shakes and knew with a surge of triumph that the cavern was caving in.
Again the storm paused to draw its breath and Billy, feeling movement behind him, faced about as he hugged the earth to find Christina.
But it was not Christina. The thing went up like a tower into the sky. Billy sat back, staring upward and still upward, following the bulk of the two planted legs. He felt rather than saw the two gleaming eyes and the glistening rows of teeth.
“Tadamona!” he said, sickly.
The beast god grinned. The gale was hushed while he spoke. “You have the greater magic. You have stopped the people from dying, you have quelled the typhoon.” The laughter rang from island peak to the sea and back again. “You have dropped the roof of a cavern, puny liar, and that is all. Look at your island! Remember how you found your people. It is an hour until dawn and in that hour Kaisan’s pygmy men will end their days. But you are not to watch their going. See, feel proud! I halt the storm for the instant it will take to break you in half and cast you into the sea.”
Tadamona stooped down and the engulfing shadow of his hand darkened the earth about Billy. He scrambled back, leaping to his feet in a wild attempt to flee from the outstretched fingers. Ahead there was only the cavern and that was now filled with rubble. There was no escape and Tadamona again sent the earth and sky rocking with his laughter to see such a vain struggle.
At the cavern, a few feet inside, Billy found a dead end. He whirled about and suddenly the terror gave way to fury. He was suddenly released from the paralysis which had first been his at the sight of the monster and now he cried out insane, incoherent phrases at the advancing thing.
Tadamona knelt, crouching like a cat about to flick a mouse out of its hole. The clawed fingers drew close to Billy. Savagely he kicked at them, insensible to the pain he caused his own foot. Tadamona, unable to get a sure grip, knelt lower and peered closely with his luminous eyes.
Billy leaped behind a small pile of rocks, but the fingers only brushed them to one side as though they had been sand. With a final shriek of rage, Billy reached into his shirt and yanked out the until-now-forgotten magnesium flares. He bit off a cap with his teeth and hurled it at the face. The flare sparked and then blazed into brilliant white light.
Tadamona recoiled for an instant and then, with a horrifying fury of his own, snatched at and captured Billy, hauling him forth. Billy had another flare, and it, too, he ignited and threw straight at the eyes of the thing.
Billy felt himself jerk high into the air and knew that he had been thrown. He saw the dark earth and the darker jungle god all mingled with the sky. And then he landed in a tangle of vines, and the world went black and sick. But he was too conscious of hovering death to succumb to senselessness. He reeled to his feet and, with every ounce of willpower, followed through his last intention. With a rapidity of which he himself was not immediately conscious, he threw all the remaining flares at the gigantic bulk which had begun to grope anew for him.
One after the other the brilliant lights arced through the murk. There was an odor of singed hair in the wind. One after another the flares struck the path to send out their blinding glares which mounted in intensity as they burned.
Suddenly Tadamona was no longer searching for his quarry. With insane fury, holding both arms before his face, he was stamping at the flares. But their heat was too great for even his thick hide to stand, and he staggered back, blind in the light, howling in agony.
The savage whiteness of the light bathed the monster’s entire hulk, lighting up the gleaming rows of teeth in the half-moon mouth, dragging out an agonized blaze
from the awful eyes, glittering on the claws of hand and foot alike.
Billy stopped in amazement. He had hardly been conscious of his own actions. He had used the flares as the last, hopeless resort. But now a horrible thing was happening.
The thing seemed to melt. First there were no arms and then there was no face. The body became transparent to the moonlight which pierced the storm clouds and then, as Billy stared, the body was not there at all.
Far off, rising upward toward the overcast sky and dwindling there to nothing, a shriek went, went and vanished and was not heard again.
Billy was suddenly weak. He staggered out upon the path, floundering in the loose dust cast up by the explosion of his dynamite. One last flare burned and by its light he saw the two last prints of the giant, large and clear in the sand. He stared up from them, expecting to find the god still. But the sky was empty. The sky was empty and the moon was again showing through the tumbled clouds which fled into the west.
Alone, he staggered down the trail. He passed his truck and walked on, well knowing himself to be too shaky to drive it. He reached the white cart road and floundered along it, dully hoping that Christina had fled to safety.
His bungalow had lights in it, but he did not comment upon it—he was still so dazed. He went up the walk and across the verandah and stopped, holding himself up with the door.
A boy was there, bustling about and very worried. The boy’s face was perfectly clear. At a slight sound Billy made, Osea turned anxiously and then relief flooded his face.
“Mahstah! You b’long doctah house. How come walk about this time?”
Billy ran an exploratory hand over Osea’s young face. There was no mark or abrasion upon it. He sank into a chair, and Osea pressed a glass of brandy upon him which he drank mechanically.
How long he sat there he was not sure, but when he looked up it was daylight.
It was daylight and Wanoa was respectfully waiting with his retinue upon the verandah.