A Red Sun Also Rises Read online

  “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.

  °

  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 whi
tely 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.

  °

  3. Yatsill and Yarkeen

  I look back upon the man I was prior to that ritual on Koluwai and I see a pathetic individual. I see a man who professed faith when he felt secure but who had none when he felt threatened.

  True faith is steadfast. When mine was tested, it failed instantly and completely.

  The Tanner family, the women of Whitechapel, the abominable crimes of Jack the Ripper, and the ghastly ordeal I suffered on the island, these things convinced me that God is a figment of the human imagination, for surely if He existed, He would not allow such iniquities to be visited upon one of His advocates.

  So I was born again, a non-believer.

  I was born again, under the palest of yellow skies and with a citrus fragrance in my nostrils.

  I was born again, and I was lying on my back on the ground.

  A voice said, in Koluwaian, “By the Saviour! Look at this one!”

  Panicking, petrified, I turned over and scrambled away on my hands and knees. Then I stopped and sucked desperately at the air, my eyes fixed on the grass between my hands. It possessed a peculiar bluish-green hue and its blades were tubular with minuscule white flowers at their tips. I began to tremble all over. A mewl of mortal terror escaped me as my body was consumed by the unendurable agony of the witch doctor’s torture, except—

  Except it wasn’t.

  The pain was but a memory.

  A second voice exclaimed, “Suns! What is it? Look at its colour!”

  The first voice: “An aberration?”

  “By virtue of there only being two of them, yes, of course. When before have so few been delivered to us?”

  “Is the other awake?”

  “It is moving.”

  I fell onto my side, drew my knees up to my chest, and hugged them. In a quavering whisper, I recited, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy—be thy—”

  I swallowed and felt my lips drawing back against my teeth.

  The words had emerged as empty sounds. Meaningless. There was no comfort in them. They didn’t alter the fact that it was no longer a stifling tropical night but a bright and fresh day, or that the air smelled not of the jungle but of lemons, or that when I turned my head and blinkingly looked upward, I saw, directly above me through the branches of a pink tree, four small moons in a cloudless cadmium sky—three of dusty red and the fourth, the smallest of the spheres, purple with a dark blemish in its centre.

  Four moons.

  I broke into hysterical laughter, uncurled, clambered to my feet, and looked around. Pastel colours slid past my eyes. Nonsensical shapes. A bizarre forest. Long shadows.

  Plum-coloured fruits, shaped like pears but the size of a man, hung from gargantuan trees. The nearest to me emitted an incomprehensible mumble.

  I flinched away from it, turned, and saw Koluwaians standing around me. Koluwaians and . . . other things. One of the latter was bending over the prone form of Clarissa Stark. It said, “This one appears to be damaged.”

  My laughter rose in pitch and became a long, despairing wail. I toppled to one side and hit the ground in a dead faint.

  ° °

  I was aboard a ship, on a voyage to the other side of the world. I was on a stretcher being carried up into the jungled hills of Koluwai. I was being shaken back to consciousness by a hand on my shoulder. I yelled and pushed myself away from it, bumped into warm bodies, and lashed out with my fists and feet.

  “Aiden, is that you?”

  Clarissa Stark. Clarissa Stark!

  I opened my eyes and looked down at myself. I was naked. The grease Iriputiz had smeared over me was dry and breaking off in large glittering flakes.

  Then I looked up and saw figures. There were the—the things I had seen earlier, there were Koluwaians, and there was Clarissa.

  She was still wearing the clothes I’d last seen her in—the trousers hanging over misshapen legs, the shirt pushed up by a humped and twisted spine. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, with tears streaming from them.

  “Clarissa, where are we? Where are we?”

  “I don’t have my goggles, Aiden. I’m blind. Were we rescued?”

  “I don’t—I don’t think so.”

  Though I tried desperately to avoid looking at anything but her, I couldn’t help myself, and glance by fearful glance I took in the immediate environment. We were sitting among a group of Koluwaians, five plump men and three fat women, in a forest clearing. The trees were the same as I’d glimpsed before—of phenomenal size, raised up on mangrove-like roots and heavy with enormous purple fruits from which faint sounds issued. The air was filled with the muted whispering and mumbling, which reminded me of the noise one hears in a theatre during the brief seconds between the lights going down and the curtain going up.r />
  Six creatures were busy around the edges of the glade. They were pushing sharp hollow sticks, similar to bamboo, into the fruits and collecting, in what appeared to be skin containers, the juice that ran out through them.

  One of the things noticed that I’d regained my wits, stepped away from the trees, and approached us. It looked down at me. It was so dreadful in aspect that it was all I could do to suppress a scream.

  In terms of species, it resembled an amalgam of mollusc and crustacean, with a carapace of slate grey. Its body was reminiscent of a mussel shell, standing on end with the seam at the front. From the base of this, four crab-like legs extended, while the top of the torso curled outward in a frilled and complex manner to form wide armoured shoulders. The arms—which like the legs reminded me of the limbs of a crab or lobster—had two elbows and ended in three extremely long fingers and a thumb, all of which moved without cease. A fluted shell—shaped like a hood—protected the head. A revolting “face” bulged out of it. This was the only visibly soft and fleshy part of the creature. It had the appearance of a snail or a slug, in that the skin was grey and wet-looking, with no bones beneath it to give a defined shape. It was, in fact, almost entirely mouth—the long opening dividing it vertically—with outer lips fringed with small red feelers, like a sea anemone, and a further set of flexible inner lips which slid over a hard beak, just visible at the back of the orifice. There were four eyes, two to either side of the mouth, the upper pair being the largest. They were like black beads, circular and carrying no expression. A small bump was located above each upper eye, like nascent horns.

  The creature was about seven feet tall and wore nothing but a leather harness, which held five long wooden barbed spears against its back.

  “I am Yazziz Yozkulu,” it said, in Koluwaian. “You have been delivered, as these others once were—” It wiggled its fingers at the islanders. “This place is the Forest of Indistinct Murmurings. Your appearance is very curious. Are you damaged?”

  I couldn’t answer. With each word that emerged from the creature’s horrible maw, I seemed to recede from the world, until I felt that, rather than participating in it, I was merely looking on as a spectator.