Читать книгу Honolulu Story - Leslie Ford - Страница 5

NIGHT LAY LIKE A CLOAK OF SABLE FEATHERS, silver-bordered where the quiet rollers of the Pacific broke on the outlying coral reef and broke again as they swept up the long concave line of the shallow beach.

The boy stood motionless by a wind-stunted clump of kiave trees in the dunes, his rifle in one hand, his dog held hard on the leash with the other. His eyes, trained to darkness and the deceptive shimmer of shifting starlight, picked out the rock that when the spray subsided for a moment on the reef looked like a swimmer poised to dive. He looked slowly over the inlet to the empty beach, across the narrow plateau, arid, sparsely grown with the kiave, and up at the black volcanic rock towering in a sheer palisade above him.

Every other night of his solitary patrol along the beach he had looked up at the mountain fortress stretching the whole length of the Island and thought of it as he did in the daytime—a grim barren wall that cut off the windward side of Oahu from Honolulu, shutting him off from the only civilized spot on the God-for-saken dump . . . the Rock, the GI’s called it, and the missionaries could have it back tomorrow. But tonight it was, different. It was closer to him, higher, more densely black and impenetrable, brooding, powerful and alive.

He moved sharply and the dog stiffened and strained forward. But there was nothing on the beach. He was just jittery.

He thought about it, looking up into the black wall of silence again. The Hawaiian girl had begged him and the other boy from camp not to go into the burial cave. They wouldn’t have gone, maybe, if she hadn’t been so frightened. It was funny, too. They had been all over there a dozen times when there wasn’t anything to do at camp. It was funny they hadn’t seen the mouth of the cave before. It wasn’t big but it was hard to see how anybody could have missed it. This morning it was right out in plain sight when they climbed up the ledge to pick some ground orchids for the girl. It almost looked as if they were supposed to find it.

His body went taut again, and the dog, responding instantly, strained on the leash, silent and alert. Again it was nothing, just the wind in the kiave. It wasn’t the music of the People they said came singing out of the mist at night, or the distant beating of drums he’d read about being heard in the hills.

The burial caves were like that too. Only one person was allowed to know where any one was buried, and he handed the secret down to one other in sacred trust when he knew, as Hawaiians seemed to know, when death was coming to him. Even the burial place of Kamehameha the Great, whose statue was everywhere, had never been found, and no one knew who the guardian of his secret was.

The girl’s pale frightened face seemed to come to him out of the mountain wall, her great liquid brown eyes imploring them not to go into the cave. He could hear her frantic words telling them the terrible things that had happened to other people, and hear their laughter echoing back as they wriggled in on their stomach, and the sudden silence when they were inside. The air was heavy and their GI lighters kept going out. They had crouched down and felt around on the ground. He had found a long bone, the other boy a calabash. Then they couldn’t find their way out again. The sweat stood out on the sentry’s forehead as he remembered that silent panic, and the dog quivered on the leash. When they had found the way at last the girl was gone. They had stopped at her house, on a back road on the way to camp, but the house was locked and barred and the blinds pulled down. Not even a dog came out to meet them. It gave them a funny kind of feeling that they felt again as an old Hawaiian up the road shrank out of their path, mumbling quickly to himself, his eyes tightly closed, as if the curse was already visible in their faces.

He still had the bone, and the other boy the calabash he’d broken when he slipped coming down the ledge. He wanted to throw the bone away but he didn’t want the other boy to think he was afraid. And it was the other boy the car hit when they crossed the road to camp. That was funny too, because the road was empty and the car in plain sight.

He shook himself a little and tightened his grip on the leash. The solid wall of the great mountain seemed to loom closer and blacker, and the flesh along his spine prickled cold and hot. The dog jerked abruptly. He looked away from the mountain out to the reef. His hands were trembling and the wind was like fingers crawling across his face. If he could only light a cigarette, he thought. There was no use patrolling the beach any more, anyway. Nothing would come. The Japs were licked—they needed all the submarines they had closer home. He fixed his eyes on the reef where the spray subsiding left the rock that looked like a swimmer about to dive. That was something he was sure of. Then, as he looked, he knew he was not sure of anything any more.

The rock jutting up looked wider. It looked as if it were moving too, like the mountain wall moving closer. He closed his eyes quickly, gripping his rifle tighter, gripping the leash. When he looked again he took a long breath. It was just an illusion. The rock was solid again and motionless as the spray came up around it, blotting it out.

He turned abruptly and started along the beach. The dog held back, bristling.

“Don’t be a dope,” the boy said aloud. “Come on. It’s just a ghost trying to get his shin bone back.”

As he said it there was something, a sound, behind him, and for the first time on his patrol of the lonely beach he knew fear, so strong that he knew he was afraid to turn around. For an instant it paralyzed his feet and held his heart frozen as it tingled like drops of molten steel down his spine and poured cold sweat out of every pore in his body. Then he turned suddenly, to face it, and there was nothing there . . . nothing but the empty beach, the breaking waves, the kiave on the wind-swept dunes under the black fortress of the Kuloo Range, and the dog, straining, quivering, on the leash.

His own body went taut, his heart pounded, alive again. He leaned forward quickly and unleashed the dog. The lean black body flashed as it leaped forward, silent as a savage arrow, to where the slithering sound had come from the trees. The boy’s finger was steady on the cold trigger of his rifle as he crept forward, holding his breath. The cave of the secret dead was forgotten, and the boy with the broken calabash. The mountain receded and diminished. He waited, tense and coordinated and sane again, and crept forward, crouching low. He could see the dog’s tracks, crossing the beach through the dunes to the narrow concrete road. He ran to the road, crouched lower still as he crossed it, and stopped.

The sand was wet there. He looked down at it, back at the road, across the beach to the edge of the ocean and out to the reef where the solid black column jutted up, the swimmer about to dive. He lay there silently, listening, crouched low to the ground. There was no answer to his low call to the dog, nothing but the wind in the dry trees, and the muted roll of waves breaking on the reef and whispering along the shallow beach.

He crept forward, tense, under the black fortress of the mountain. He should go back and report, he knew, but if he could get the man . . . ? If there was a man, he thought . . . a man of flesh and blood. . . . The dark swift shadow behind him moved almost noiselessly. The boy turned too late even to see the white ghost’s face and the flashing gleam of the naked blade. . . .

They found him there very early in the morning, staring sightlessly up at the dark empty sky. The dog lay at the bottom of a rock, his throat slashed open. It was still before dawn when the young officer came back with the thick-set, gray-haired colonel.

“Thought you’d want to see this, Colonel Primrose,” he said. “I’ve got orders to keep you informed. This isn’t the man you’re after, though. It looks like a dirty Jap to me. White men don’t use a knife this way.”

The man he spoke to, standing in front of the huge sergeant, looked down, his black eyes softening for an instant, at the dead boy’s body. He looked back to where the single track of footprints, too solidly indented to be a ghost’s, came up the lonely beach out of the Pacific Ocean. He looked up at the black volcanic rock. No one had ever charted the hidden caves formed in the gigantic turmoil that thousands of years ago threw up the floor of the ocean in masses of molten lava to make the islands and atolls of the Pacific. Somewhere up there, in a cave, or beyond, invisible in the growth of bush and vine and tree that stretched into a wilderness of jungle, was the man who had crept silently up out of the midnight sea. Unless, Colonel John Primrose thought, he had already found his friends. . . .

Colonel Primrose’s black eyes hardened as he looked down again at the dead boy.

“Perhaps,” he said quietly. “We’ll find out.”