“ Why should we tell you? We don’t even know who you are,” Mohi Tuhiwai said.
“ Because something very bad is going to happen to your daughter, Sunday at midnight, unless I can find her and stop it. And right now I’m sick, hungry, tired, out of money, my passport and clothes are gone, some bad men want me dead and the police want me for murder, both here and in America. I need help. Donna told me to come here.”
“ Then you know where she is?”
“ No. Only that she’s on a boat, she doesn’t know where it is.”
“ I don’t understand,” Mohi Tuhiwai said.
“ I don’t have much time and I need you to believe me. It’ll be a lot easier to explain if you each ask me a question. Something that only you and your daughter would know.”
“ If you’re trying to pull something-”
“ Please, sir, there isn’t much time. Just do it.”
“ Donna was bit by our neighbor’s dog when she was four years old. Where did it bite her?” Mrs. Tuhiwai asked.
“ The dog’s name was Phoenix, it belonged to Mr. Hoeta and it bite me behind the left knee, I still remember how much it hurt.”
“ Behind the left knee, its name was Phoenix, she still remembers how much it hurt.” He paused for a second. “Now you sir.”
“ I don’t know what you’re playing at.” His face was flushing red as he advanced on Jim.
“ Ngaarara has her,” Jim said.
“ Stop, Mohi,” Donna’s mother said, her voice quiet, but commanding. Mohi stopped.
They stared at him and electric tension filled the room.
“ I need your help,” Jim said, breaking the silence. “I’ve seen it. It tried to kill me. It’s killed people I love. I want to help Donna and I want to kill it.”
“ How can you know this?” Mrs. Tuhiwai sat next to him on the sofa.
“ She came into my head four days ago, in California. My life hasn’t been the same since.” And he told them everything. When he finished he lay his head back and closed his eyes.
When he opened them he was in a small wooden room. He felt the gentle rocking and he knew at once he was with Donna, on a boat.
They roved their eyes around the room. Knotty pine paneling covered the walls and ceiling. It seemed out of character. Boat makers usually used hard woods, like teak or oak. The knotty pine would quickly swell and warp in an ocean environment. The cabin was comfortably warm, on a warm day it would be hot and on a hot day, a sweat box.
Cheap pine cabinets, with cheap pine doors, still smelling of fresh sawdust, adorned the wall at the foot of the bed. Those doors, once exposed to humidity, would cease to function. No boat builder was responsible for this.
They turned her head to the bulkhead at the left side of the bed. It was covered with a large mirror, giving the room an illusion of being larger than it was. The mirror was held in place by cheap plastic brackets, the kind made for a small bathroom mirror. It would come crashing down at the first hint of high seas.
A young woman stared back at him from inside the mirror. She was naked. Her breasts grabbed his eyes and held them in their grasp, firm, with perfect amber nipples.
“ Take your eyes off my tits and look at me,” she ordered, and he moved his gaze. She had the kind of face that could start a war. Smooth bronze skin, silky dark hair, full eyebrows and lashes, high cheek bones. And her perfect face was set on a body that would turn the head of even the most senile. She was every man’s dream woman, radiating that strange mixture of childlike innocence and sexual desire.
She was a girl in a woman’s body. Dark amber eyes, matching her nipples, shined at him and drew him into her very being. He allowed them to swallow his soul and in them he saw his life race by and he knew that his life was nothing without this girl-woman.
He heard a large diesel starting. The engine fired, ran for about thirty seconds, then died. It fired again, ran a minute, then died again. So, he thought, they were working on the engine. How long before they came to check on their captive.
He might be a coward in the air, but he loved the sea and was a fearless sailor, veteran of over a hundred races. He knew boats and it was time to put his knowledge to use. From the new pine paneling and cabinets and the amateur way the mirror was mounted, he deduced that the boat was being refitted by someone who didn’t know what he was doing.
He heard the steady sound of a forklift purring by. They were in a shipyard. Another forklift told him it was a busy shipyard. From the way the boat rocked gently in the water, he knew it had a deep keel, a sailboat.
Someone jumped onto the hull with a solid thud. Not the sound of deck shoes on teak, more the sound of work shoes on iron. An old iron sailing ship decked out in cheap pine.
They heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming toward the cabin. They braced themselves for the worse, but he felt himself slipping away.
“ Don’t leave me,” she pleaded.
“ I can’t help it.”
“ Come back for me. Save me. Take me away to be your bride forever and ever.”
“ I will.” He felt himself being tugged, a rope around his soul, jerking him away and he was powerless to do anything about it.
“ Promise.”
“ I will find you and we will be together. I swear it.” And the world turned black.
He woke on the Tuhiwai’s sofa, the midday sun streaming in the living room window, shining in his eyes. He blinked and turned away from the light, its warmth welcome. He was covered in a soft quilt and his head rested on a down pillow. He settled his eyes on a wall clock and felt a pang at the loss of time. He had been asleep, or unconscious, for over three hours.
“ You’re awake,” Donna’s mother said. “One minute you were talking and the next you were out.”
“ You didn’t call the police?” he said, thankful, but wondering why she hadn’t. He would have.
“ Mohi wanted to, but I wouldn’t let him. If Ngaarara has her, there is nothing they can do.”
The cough attacked him again. His stomach muscles seized as he started gasping for air.
“ Here.” She handed him the blue inhaler.
“ Thank you.” He took three puffs and caught his breath. “I don’t know what my problem is.”
“ It’s asthma,” she said. “We have a lot of it in New Zealand. Nobody knows why.”
“ You’re kidding?”
“ No. I work in a medical office in Auckland, so I see a lot of it, especially in immigrants from America and England. It happens a lot to people that had it when they were young. They come here and it comes back.”
“ Does it go away?”
“ Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I’ve had it all my life. I use the inhalers to control it. It’s not so bad, the brown one before going to sleep and in the morning when I wake up. The blue one if I get congested.”
“ Isn’t there a pill you can take?”
“ Yes, prednisone, it’s a steroid. It usually works, but we generally don’t like the side effects.”
“ Which are?”
“ Weak bones, enlarged head.” She made an oval with her thumbs and index fingers around her head. “And a hump on your back.” She held her right hand over her shoulder, just below the neck to indicate where the hump would be.
“ Three things I don’t want,” he said.
“ I believe your story,” she said, changing the subject back to her daughter.
“ You believe me?”
“ Nobody, except the females in my family, knows the end to that story. It’s something that’s been handed down from mother to daughter throughout the generations. We’ve been waiting a long time for Ngaarara to exact his revenge. Now he’s come.”
