name. The sound of it reverberates through his brain. They claim him as one of their own.
“ Lopaka…”
“ We, your gods, need you… beg you…”
“… feed the hunger…”
“… hunger that is great…”
“… feed the blood-sky-fire that feeds you…”
“… empty yourself into us…”
“… into the unbearable fire coursing through us…”
“… find us… give us your fire heart…”
“… give us our daily red…
He stands it-the suffering of those ethereal voices, dripping with unimaginable sorrow, stabbing at his brain- until he can stand it no more.
This is how he remembers it in the beginning, with the first life he ever sacrificed to the voices. It had begun with the noises in the wind, voices only he could hear, even long before he ever knew Kelia. He'd tried to change after meeting Kelia, whose presence at first ended the lamenting voices inside his head. For a time the voices were silent and held in check.
After Kelia had left, he slowly came to a startling realization: The gods had chosen Kelia for him, to grant him a special insight into their spectral world. Kelia was really the kind of sacrifice they wanted. And finally, he'd known what the gods wanted of him, why he had been born, why he had come here from his true homeland, what his purpose, after all, was… and why he killed. All part of a plan beyond even his full comprehension.
He is so focused by them when he kills that it happens independently of him, as if his limbs and his mind are overtaken by the powers who speak through his actions, as if he is no more than an arrow of his gods, as if he is not even truly present in the normal sense.
The next day, after he kills, he's awakened into a new body and being, refreshed and feeling clear-headed, remembering only the final moments before she finally expired, her blood spewing about him, painting him as he carves on and ejaculates on the body.
His ingenious method of disposing of the bodies he also owes to the inspiration of his gods.
In time, under the most common of circumstances, he will remember snatches of what he has done-or rather, what they have done, until eventually flashes of memory will reveal everything-absolutely everything.
He recalls only one name for all his victims, Kelia-for they are all one and the same when they belong to him; they are no longer Lindas or Kias, but Kelias. He knows they are all alike; that they are all shallow little creatures, interested only in pop music and rock stars, in mindless magazines and makeup, in instant gratification-“What's between their legs”-in becoming yet another dark-skinned haole, loving all things white. Western and decadent. Kelia-the real Kelia-is a full-blood Hawaiian, rarer these days than a virgin, but the Kelias he has sent to his gods were all of mixed blood, and now the gods are repeating their demand for a full-blood Hawaiian. He has tried to get it right, but the intermarriage between the races makes it near impossible here in Oahu to find such a flower for his gods.
To him, there seems little difference, just so they look like Kelia, so that when he begins to hack away with the cane knives or the swords, he might voyeuristically enjoy Kelia's torturous death again; it seems of no importance what kind of blood it is while he is catching it in his hands, sending it to the ceiling and walls or rubbing it into his nude body in an ecstatic orgy of body art.
His little bungalow's walls bear the marks of many such deaths now. It is fortunate that he lives at the end of a dead-end street against a vacant lot, his closest neighbors the clannish Portuguese down the block. No one ever seems disturbed by the noise or the odors coming from his home.
But now with the killing of the two Hawaiian cops, he worries. They are not killings he planned or wanted, particularly since the men killed were Hawaiians, and most certainly he was not told to take these lives by his Hawaiian gods, who have, for the moment, abandoned him. His gods speak continually of regeneration and rebirth, of a great empowering of the Hawaiian race far beyond what the Hawaiian politicians and newspapers scream for. How then do they feel about his having killed two strong Hawaiian warriors? He now wonders.
Warriors, hell… he rationalizes his last killings. They were working for the man, playing white cop.
He now puts his head against his pillow on the bloodstained couch and tries desperately to pretend that his eyes are weary, that he is sleepy. The drugs he uses have helped to bring him down; still, his eyes roam about the little place, marking where the previous night's fresh blood, brighter in color, shining in the glow of the oil lamp, has splattered the ceiling fan. He is effectively painting his interior in crimson, all since Kelia's leaving.
He wonders again if Kelia will ever return. Wonders if he will ever again find her. Again… perhaps a pointless time frame as long as she refuses to understand. Still, he wonders and wanders over the shards of his past, the moments when he tried to convince her, what he might have said to otherwise convince her to accept her fate, to become a sacrificial lamb. Now the what-ifs cram into his mind. He wonders if he can gain her back, what then? Might she understand now more than she did? Would she ever willingly share his newfound religion with him? Or would she again run… again too afraid to allow him a single cut, much less willingly sacrifice her life for his beliefs.
He stares at the still-blaring TV set. Reporters are jockeying for position around the federal building downtown, trying to get some joker in a beige suit to talk about the deaths of two kanaka cops. It looks like a re- hash of the earlier news programs, and so he pretty well ignores it, just letting the voices wash over his brain, their tedium hopefully helping him to get the sleep he so needs, when suddenly his ears perk at the mention of a supposed human body part found at the Blow Hole.
“ Ho'ino wale, damn! Kuamuamu. r' he curses.
He instantly sits upright, staring at questioner and questioned. The FBI man wears expensive Costa Del Mar dark glasses and has handsome haole features, is tall and ruddy-complexioned. He quickly denies knowledge of any body parts dredged from the Blow Hole.
“ It's impossible,” Lopaka tells himself.
The TV voice continues. “Seems some boys were playing a prank, a practical joke, with some mannequin parts,” says the FBI man named on the screen as Parry. “Scared a few tourists using broken parts of mannequin. That's all.”
They got part of her out. They found part of Kelia… He cringes, stares about at the evidence of multiple murder all around him. He wonders what he must do. Wonders what his gods want him to do. He can't possibly go on as if nothing has happened, as if all is right with his world, as if they don't know anything about him anymore, and aren't actively searching for him this fucking moment. Before now authorities knew only what the gods wanted them to know, only that a shadowy “maybe-man” called the Trade Winds Killer whom they hadn't a clue about was abducting whores. But now? Now they know something about him, and they know something about Kelia; they have a part of her, something that belongs to Ku… and they'll have the Blow Hole staked out.
The thought terrifies him.
He imagines they know his name, his place of work, where he lives. That they have the living Kelia in custody and under questioning, grilling her. He imagines they have the dead Kelia's head, and the damned thing is speaking to them from its parched lips.
He envisions them crashing through his door with huge animal nets and a cage to put him into; imagines them dragging him before the TV cameras now focused on a second FBI man named Gagliano. He imagines being dragged into a court of law, being sentenced to a life behind bars unless he is executed by some angry cop or relative.
“ Hell,” he tries to convince himself, “such a quick end mightn't be so bad, really.”
It'd mean an end to all his unrest, to the fevered state of his soul; maybe in the next life he'll be a god, a real god… not some make-believe god, or at least somebody. In this life, what chance did he have with his father always standing over him? His bloody father was the reason he chose to leave home to seek out a place of his own, and perhaps why he hears the voices in the trade winds, and perhaps why he helps the evil ones to feed upon the Kelias of the world. His father was one of the sharks, and so was he…
In this life, if he'd never heard the voices telling him what to do, what would he be? Nothing, less than the sand on the beach, dirt. Besides, now on the rare occasion when he dares disobey his gods, they torch his brain with a searing red poker that scorches with a great fever of disquiet. It is the worst kind of torture imaginable, like super-heated, jagged knives being slowly placed into his eyes and ears, and the only release comes with
