Devil-Devil (30 page)

The scene changed. Sister Conchita was in the cellar of her house now with her fifteen-year-old brother Jack. The basement was dusty, used as a storeroom. They were playing checkers on a board supported by an upturned box. Sister Conchita, or rather a ten-year-old version of the nun, was winning game after game. Jack stopped smiling. Suddenly he lunged across the board at his sister. He seized her by the throat and started choking her. Sister Conchita fell to the floor, screaming. The inexorable pressure on her neck did not cease. She could hardly breathe. In another moment she knew that she would be dead.

Sister Conchita woke up, her arms flailing. Curiously she no longer felt tired, although she was sure that she could not have slept for long. The child with the bleached hair was no longer in the cave.

The nun recalled her dream and shuddered. She had never received anything but love and care from her parents and brother. The sight of the three of them in the dream behaving in such an irrational and cruel manner was discomfiting. She tried to dismiss the affair from her mind. She told herself that she had been distraught after her exhausting search for the cave; the experience would have been enough to give anyone bad dreams.

She had no trouble finding her way back to the Lau settlement on the plateau. She walked with such certainty that it was almost as if an unseen force was guiding her footsteps. Sam Beni was waiting for her between the huts. He raised an eyebrow at the nun’s abstracted approach.

‘Is everything all right?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ replied Sister Conchita. ‘Except …’ She hesitated and then continued, ‘There was a young girl playing in one of the caves. Is it safe for her to be so far from the settlement on her own?’

‘You met her?’ asked Beni, appearing startled.

‘Why yes. Only I’m afraid I was so tired I fell asleep. Who is she, do you know?’

Beni muttered an apology and reached for the sister’s wrist. Sister Conchita looked down. The outline of a snake had been painted with lime on her flesh while she slept.

‘You have seen the dream-maker,’ said the islander, visibly shocked and impressed. ‘Did she summon up a dream for you?’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact she—’

‘I don’t want to know about it,’ said Beni sharply. ‘It is between you and the ghosts. You must have powerful
mana
to be accepted by them so quickly.’

‘I only stumbled across her by chance.’

‘No one meets a dream-maker by chance. They summon people when they have messages for them.’ The now concerned Sister Conchita tried to say something but Beni waved her away. ‘It will soon be night,’ he told her, clearly anxious to be rid of the white woman who had invaded his culture. ‘It is time you began your descent. Don’t worry. Your footsteps will be guided all the way, I promise you. I will ask one of the magic men to tie a knot in a piece of custom grass. That will slow down time and allow you to get back.’

Sister Conchita stumbled down the track back towards the waiting jeep. What had been in the coconut shell she had accepted from the girl? Could her dream have been some sort of message? Perhaps there had been a drug in the drink and her dream had been the result of an induced hallucinatory trance. Was she meant to deduce something from the antagonistic nature of her parents and brother in her recent and so vivid dream?

It must have taken her several hours to get back to Father Pierre, but it seemed no time at all. She poured out her story to the waiting priest in a breathless cascade, leaving nothing out.

‘What does it mean?’ she demanded wildly as she finished. ‘Was the dream a message? How could that young dream-maker know anything about my family?’

‘You’ve been accepted by the Lau spirits,’ said the priest calmly. ‘That doesn’t happen to many whites. What do
you
think your dream meant?’

‘Ben Kella was standing with me on my parents’ lawn,’ said the nun, breathing deeply and trying to force herself to work the matter out logically. ‘He saw my parents and brother behaving completely out of character. Jack even attacked me. The message was meant for Kella, I’m sure of it. The three people I love more deeply than anyone on earth were doing strange, irrational things that frightened me.’ She thought for a moment. ‘The
implication
was that someone close to Kella is going to behave in an odd way, perhaps even to harm him.’ She looked to the priest for confirmation. ‘Could that possibly be it? If it is, I must get a message to Ben, to tell him that he’s in danger!’

‘My dear,’ said Father Pierre quietly, ‘if the Lau gods have seen fit to warn you, assuredly they will get the same message to Sergeant Kella!’

Kella lay behind a bush and watched the newly built house between the trees. Not far away he could hear the thunder of the great waterfall.

He had been at the killing ground for an hour. He had travelled from Pazabosi’s village as quickly as he could. Hita would be looking for Professor Mallory as well. Kella would not put it past the old chief to tell Hita where he had put the American, just to make matters interesting.

What Pazabosi was doing had its antecedents in bush folklore. The pitting of two young warriors against each other was a staple ingredient of Kwaio legends. It would suit the old chief’s sense of humour to set Kella and Hita at one another’s throats, and at the same time ensure that one of the two men who had been annoying him would die in the process.

The police sergeant knew that if he was going to have any realistic chance of survival he would have to find Professor Mallory quickly and then link up with Inspector Lorrimer and his Roviana constables. If the Englishman kept to the route Kella had given him, the police party should be less than ten miles away down the track at the moment. On the other hand, if Lorrimer had decided to make his own way up into the bush he could be anywhere.

Kella studied the house again. It was the freshly constructed leaf hut he had seen on his last visit to the area. He had wondered at the time who it was being built for. It had gone up too quickly to be a family dwelling place. Many bushmen had worked hard together to erect this thatched building in such a short time. There had to be a reason for their urgency, and Kella believed that he knew what it was.

Still, it was a long shot to believe that the American academic was being kept inside the building. There were no guards, which was puzzling, and since Kella had been there no one had entered or left the long hut.

The police sergeant decided that there was only one way to find out. He got to his feet and started running through the trees as quickly as he could, zigzagging towards the door of the house.

He reached the entrance and flung it open, bursting in to the single room. He did not know what he had expected to find, but nothing had prepared him for the bizarre, writhing tableau that met his eyes.

Two naked young women and a man were squirming together in noisy ecstasy, on top of a pile of pandanus mats. A third naked woman was on all-fours to one side of the group, looking on with rapt concentration and issuing shrill cries of exhortation and encouragement to the others. In the main group, pumping brown and white limbs intermingled and then briefly separated with lascivious pleasure.

Kella relaxed, his initial amazement evaporating in sheer delight and amusement. A bald head and a long-jawed, satiated, bespectacled white face emerged momentarily from the mêlée at an impossible angle through a gap in the amalgamated, sweating bodies, and gaped up in exhausted concern at the watching police sergeant. Kella sketched an admiring salute.

‘Professor Mallory, I presume?’ he asked.

* * *

‘How did you know I was here?’ asked Professor Mallory.

‘It was just a guess really,’ Kella admitted.

Thirty minutes had passed since the police sergeant had first hurtled into the hut. Elizabeth and the two other Sikaiana women who had been conjoined so enthusiastically with the American had hurried into their clothes with many cries of dismay and outraged decency, and had flounced out of the hut. Mallory had struggled reluctantly back into his slacks and shirt and was sitting on a mat opposite Kella. Within the American, a condition of offended embarrassment seemed to be struggling with a prolonged absorbing daydream.

‘I was here some days ago,’ went on Kella, trying to give the American time to recover from his disquiet. ‘I saw that this hut had only just been built. It had been put in an odd place among the trees. Bush people tend to stick together in small
communities
. A place like this, some distance from the village, was probably meant for a guest – or a prisoner. Then there was the mosquito net. Bush people don’t use them. It must have been brought up especially from one of the big saltwater trading stores. You were the only whitey – white man – up here, so I assumed it was meant for you.’ Kella paused. ‘And then I noticed the coconuts,’ he added.

‘Coconuts?’ repeated Mallory. He seemed too tired to make logical connections. Judging by what had been happening to the academic for the last week or so, Kella was not surprised.

‘When I glanced in here that last time, a number of coconuts had been split in half and the milk collected in a bowl. That meant that at least one Sikaiana person was living here. Sikaiana and Ontong Java are the only islands in the Solomons which make their own alcoholic drinks, and the Ontong people seldom leave their island. The Sikaiana drink is a toddy fermented from coconut milk. I wondered if Pazabosi had left Elizabeth here to cook and clean for you. I hadn’t realized that there were three of them and that they …’ Kella’s voice trailed off as he failed to complete the sentence.

The mention of the girl’s name struck a chord with the other man. ‘You’ve met Elizabeth?’ asked Mallory, coming back, as if from a long distance.

Kella nodded. A reluctant, admiring grin creased the
American
professor’s pale, lined face. ‘You, too?’ he cackled suddenly. ‘With Elizabeth? Congratulations!’ He frowned judiciously. ‘I wouldn’t like to live off the difference,’ he said, ‘and I’m certainly not being judgemental, but I’d say she was the best of the three. Just by a tad.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Kella stiffly, hoping to change the subject. ‘I mean I only met Elizabeth briefly.’

‘That one doesn’t need much time, son. Only opportunity.’

‘What happened exactly?’ asked Kella, trying with difficulty to keep to the main thread of his interrogation. ‘How did you get up here in the first place?’

‘I’m writing a paper on Kwaio custom carvings,’ said the American. ‘I particularly wanted to see the
havu
. No white man ever has. One morning two bushmen appeared at the mission, offering to bring me up here and show me the carving.’

‘They were sent by Pazabosi,’ said Kella. ‘He needed you as a hostage.’

‘Is that right? Well, when I got as far as the custom temple behind the waterfall, Pazabosi and some of his boys were waiting there for me. They told me that the
havu
had been stolen and they had to do something about it. Scared the crap out of me, I don’t mind telling you. I thought I was a gonner.’

‘Pazabosi couldn’t harm you. He’s entered the
trochea
, the contemplative last period of his life.’

‘Now you tell me! It didn’t seem so reassuring at the time, that’s for sure! Then the old guy presented me with a kind of ultimatum. I had to stay up here in this hut, in case he needed me, but to make life easier for me, he’d arranged for Elizabeth and the other women to keep me company.’

‘Some ultimatum,’ marvelled Kella.

Mallory closed his eyes in ecstatic contemplation for a moment. ‘Guys who look like I do don’t get many offers like that, I can tell you,’ he said frankly. ‘Not here, or anywhere else.’

‘That would be Pazabosi’s notion of irony,’ said the police sergeant. ‘You came up here looking for a carved representation of the sex act, and he offered you the real thing.’

‘In spades,’ breathed Mallory.

It would also mean that Pazabosi would not have to post guards around the house, thought Kella. He found himself liking the American for his pragmatic acceptance of his situation.

‘Let me tell you, sergeant,’ said Mallory, ‘after the first few hours with those Sikaiana women, I decided that they would have to prise me loose with a shoe-horn ever to get me to leave.’

‘I’m afraid that’s why I’m here,’ said Kella apologetically. ‘I have to get you back to Honiara and out of the Protectorate rather quickly.’

Mallory shook his head resolutely. ‘No way,’ he affirmed. ‘Mrs Mallory’s little boy knows when he’s well off.’

‘I’m afraid that if you stay here another hour, you’ll probably be dead,’ said Kella. In a few words he told the other man about the attempts of Hita to usurp Pazabosi as leader of the Kwaio people.

‘At this moment Hita’s out to make a name for himself by killing the pair of us,’ he finished.

‘Shit,’ mumbled Professor Mallory. ‘I knew it was too good to last.’

‘Stay here for the moment,’ Kella told him, standing up. ‘I’ll just go and take a look round outside before we leave.’

Elizabeth was waiting for him outside the hut. Complicitly she sidled up to the sergeant, murmuring endearments. Kella regarded the extroverted girl warily.

‘Are you really a schoolteacher?’ he asked.

‘Trained and certificated, Sergeant Kella,’ she confirmed. She grinned. ‘Mind you, that doesn’t mean I can’t do other things too.’

‘Just tell me one thing,’ begged Kella, trying to hold her off. ‘Why did you encourage me to spend the night with you the last time I came to the village? Was that Pazabosi’s idea to distract me?’

Elizabeth’s limpid eyes widened at the mere suggestion. ‘Certainly not,’ she said with hauteur. ‘Pazabosi knows nothing about you and me.’

‘Then why did you do it?’ asked the bewildered Kella.

The girl snuggled up against him. ‘Can’t you guess?’ she asked softly. ‘I fancy you, Ben Kella.’

Kella blinked, flattered and alarmed. Elizabeth threw her golden arms about his neck and tried to drag him in the direction of the trees. Before they could get started, another of the Sikaiana women hurried towards them and addressed Elizabeth urgently in her own dialect.