If you had travelled to the Solomon Islands that year you would have seen it on all the news feeds—hospitals filled to the car parks with Cordyceps victims, mushroom heads sprouting from their eyes, fruiting bodies dangling down by saliva-slick chins, children screaming on gurneys in reception. It was chaos. That was just the beginning.
For three years I had worked as an underwater rig welder off Australia’s West Coast, when I snagged an open position offered by the Australian government. A few years back, the Australian Federal Police and other members of the Australian Defence Forces had formed RAMSI: The Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands. They were busy with the last straggling band of warlord militias, and also worked helping the indigenous peoples try to build sea walls to protect the lower-lying islands from inundation due to rising sea levels. I was to work with a small group to help police the illegal drag chaining and deep netting of protected habitats around the Solomon Islands. I jumped at the chance to escape the inevitable day when a welding accident thirty metres deep off a platform would claim my life or limb. It happened to the best of us.
I met the other members of my future team in the outer office of one Captain Buckmeister, an officious Navy-lifer, re-stationed from the naval base at Jervis Bay in Australia. I’d been standing alone—feeling stupid and trying to look inconspicuous—when I felt someone step up next to me. I said nothing, but turned to look into eyes level with mine. She was tall, with smooth, light brown skin, showing small surgery scars around her collarbone. Lean and muscular, her black hair was shaved with a number two on the clippers. For some reason she reminded me of a volleyball player.
“I’m Jenna,” she smiled and turned her head slightly to nod in the direction of a big guy studying a wall map of the Solomons. He turned and glanced at us, before turning back to the map, feigning nonchalance, but I could tell he was taking everything in. I’d seen that look out on the rigs, just before some bloke would put down his coffee and take out half the kitchen staff because they’d overdone his eggs. The man left the map, grinned back at us, and came over.
“Hey people, I’m Kerosene, Parks and Wildlife, South Australia—surfing represent.”
He was wide for his height, like a rugby halfback, with the yellow-white hair of a surfer. He turned to Jenna: “Hey there you.”
Jenna laughed and it sounded great. She reached out and forced this guy to take her hand. At once I could tell he was impressed with her grip.
“Sup, Kerosene?” she shot back.
He grinned and pumped Jenna’s hand before letting go.
“Just Kero will do.” He turned to me. “So, you’re Rhys?”
“That’s right.”
“I was told to find you two here. It looks like we’re going to be hangin’ together for a bit.”
I shook his hand. “Good to meet you. I see they have a staff shortage. Now they’re bringing in civilians to help out about the place.”
Kero gave a nasal snort. “Yeah, we’re doing their old job. Those guys are more concerned with helping the government sort out rights to the gold these days. It’s worth billions and there’s shit loads of the stuff under a lot of the islands.”
Jenna watched him. “Wouldn’t that gold belong to the Solomon peoples?”
Kero scoffed. “Not if they’re annexed. You get the major player in the South Pacific coming here with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, Feds, the Defence Force and mining interests? Well, in ten years Solomon Islanders are going to be straight-up Australians. As for the gold—mining machinery is huge—little islands built on coral are an engineer’s bad dream, but they’ll find a way. You watch. The take-over is happening now.”
I was sure it was going to be easy to get on with Kero; one cynic recognises another. A subordinate came out of Buckmeister’s office and ushered us in. Once we were seated the Captain got down to business.
“Well, you already know what you are here for. I’ll give you all the equipment I think you need, so I expect you to do your job and not come running to me with any little pissant problem you may come across.”
He turned to me. “Rhys, I see from your papers, that you’ve been a professional fisherman in your time.” He picked up a pen and began clicking the nib button up and down.
“Yeah, I worked around the rivers, mud-crabbing up New Guinea way a few years ago. Lost some good mates. Left a bad taste in my mouth.”
He kept clicking that pen. “So now you’re on the other side of the fence—conservation.”
I wondered where this was going. “That’s right.”
Buckmeister nodded, looking unimpressed, all the while clicking that pen. “How old are you, forty? And still a diver? I’d have thought at your age…ahh never mind.”
He paused, and then started up again, slowly, glaring at us. “I have to warn you, there’s a medical condition spreading in the outer Western Chain. It seems there is a problem with children biting people. For reasons we don’t know yet, the kids’ saliva has been found to contain a shit-eating, disease-carrying enzyme. The toxicologist out on Gizo said it’s some kind of neurotoxin. Now we have this goddamned biting going on, so you people are going to have to stay alert and keep a log book.”
I wanted to ask if I could use his pen, just so he would stop clicking the damned thing. Buckmeister looked at each of us in turn, and that look said it all. He did not trust civilians.
“The kids out in Gizo hospital are frothing at the mouth,” he continued. “They’re deranged, trying to bite the staff. What a goddamned fiasco.” The clicking of his pen was rapid. “There are nine hundred islands under our jurisdiction and we can’t be everywhere. When you are in the field, I want you to keep an eye out for a bunch of folk called the Kõpura, who are coming in numbers aboard big-sailed outriggers. They seem to be taking advantage of the locals. I don’t know what they want, but I don’t want the bastards here. Apparently there’s a woman who gives the orders—Pecan, or whatever the hell her name is. Some of these Kõpura women have been caught giving local kids a drink of something, and we think it is connected with the biting. If you lot see her or her cohorts skulking out past Ranongga or Imora, that will be the only time I’ll want to hear from you. You’ll get another shot from the doc on Gizo.”
I was relieved when he finally threw his pen onto the desk. He handed me a sheet of paper with some instructions, a palm GPS, and a printout of a detailed map of the outer islands, then he glared at the ceiling, sighed and shook his head. “Goddamnit, as if I don’t have enough on my plate already, now I’ve got my people helping shore up islands from sea inundation in the east, and out west I’ve got goddamned tsunamis and earthquakes and new islands rising out of the sea. I’m short-staffed and they send me civilians and geriatric divers. Ahh, hell.” He looked at Jenna and nodded at Kero and me. “Just keep safe. Hit the local tarmac. I’ll fit you three onto one of my flights in the next few hours. Your gear should be waiting for you at the Gizo docks, and they’ll tell you where to go from there.” He stood and we knew it was time to leave.
“So how come they call you Kerosene?”
We were at Honiara airport putting our gear on a plane for the trip out. Kero threw a bulky canvas sack up to the guy in the cargo hold and barked a short laugh. “My home brew vodka keeps exploding. Gotta get the formula right one day.”
I looked at Jenna. She shook her head and led the way to the plane’s entry stairs.
During the short flight to Gizo I looked out of the window, onto the scattered islands looking like so many heads of broccoli bobbing in a blue sea, and thought about how isolated we would be in the outer islands. I was glad that my companions looked capable of handling themselves. That would be useful once we got west of Ranongga Island, beyond Gizo, where we were to rebuild a broken down hut and put up a shower for our base.
First, though, we stopped at Gizo’s well-equipped hospital and went to get our inoculations. On the way through reception, I tried not to stare at the people on stretchers crying in pain, but it was hard to ignore those freakish facial growths—especially at first sight. After locating the doctor’s office where we were to receive our shots, I left Jenna and Kero briefly, wanting to find out more about exactly what we were letting ourselves in for. I cornered the toxicologist in his office after bluffing my way in. I told him who I was and who had sent me. He told me what to expect if a child bit us.
“When this enzyme enters the bloodstream it produces a fungus called Cordyceps, a parasitical growth which sprouts in ‘bunches’ from the skin. In insects such as ants and beetles, it actually pierces the skull from the inside, driving the insect insane. I’ve never heard of it inhabiting human hosts before now. We have traced it back to the saliva of children who have been infected with a rare cone shell neurotoxin—lethal for anyone unfortunate enough to be pierced, and very toxic when taken as a small amount orally. We still don’t know who is feeding these kids this stuff. Anyway, you have to watch yourself out there. Don’t get bitten. I would rather you don’t go at all, but I understand you have a job to do.”
Now seriously concerned, I sought refuge with the others back at the doctor’s waiting room. Jenna had already been jabbed, and Kerosene walked out of the office rubbing his arm as I arrived, so it wasn’t long before I was called up. Seeking more info, I told the doctor what the toxicologist had passed on. She didn’t seem surprised and took this as a sign to educate me.
“Mr Rhys, this Cordyceps gives off its own enzyme, producing a rare condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease.” The doctor swabbed my arm and inoculated me casually, then recapped the needle and threw it into a hazard bin. I rubbed my arm. She cleaned her hands.
“Urbach causes skin lesions, and the build-up of calcium deposits on the brain destroys part of the amygdala,” she pointed to the base of my neck, “here. The amygdala processes emotions, particularly fear. You may have heard of the ‘fight or flight’ response? That’s the amygdala. But it doesn’t just deal with immediate threats. It also manages the smaller signs which curb our social behaviour and keep us safe, such as the ability to read cues in facial expressions.”
I raised my eyebrows to indicate that the conversation may be about to breach the limits of my own brain’s capacity. She seemed to understand.
“You see, a normal brain can recognise joy, pain, or sadness with barely a second thought, it’s kind of automatic, but when the amygdala shuts down, a person not only can’t recognise fear or danger, for example, in some cases they can’t even experience it. Does that make sense?”
I shook my head.
The doctor shrugged as if dismissing a wayward student. “Look, my patients are stacking up. Our Doctors Without Borders staff are being treated for stress. All I am asking is for you and your colleagues to be extra-aware of what is happening around you, okay? When you are in the field be wary of all physical contact with people, especially the children.”
That much, I already understood.
At the docks we hooked up with some Navy personnel and told them Buckmeister had sent us. Their expressions said everything. They set to helping us without delay. They showed us to a six-metre runabout that had a small cabin and an Evinrude 120 outboard motor, with a few spare jerry cans of fuel on board. It was ours, they said. We were loaded up with axes, shovels, hammers and a machete, plus a crate-load of canned food and drink. We were to head to Imora, an uninhabited teardrop-shaped speck that was five hundred metres wide by a kilometre long on the edge of the Solomon Deep. Though I’d never been there before in person, this was familiar territory to me. Solomon Deep sunk to seven thousand metres, while the long, wide Planet Deep goes more than nine thousand metres down to the sea floor—one of the deepest known places on earth.
From Gizo we headed west across the Gizo Strait, south of Vella Lavella Island and around the northern tip of Ranongga. Passing Ranongga we saw the surround of raised coral, now bleached and dead under the sun. Scientists had flocked here after the 2007 eight-point-one earthquake, when Ranongga was raised three metres leaving the coral reefs around the island exposed. Now, in the shallows, we could see coral-encrusted planes and sunken boats from the WWII Pacific Campaign. It was a reminder that the island chain hasn’t changed much since the US landed and ousted the Japanese in 1942. The western group that borders the Solomon Sea has several hundred small islands. Out there justice falls only to local communities and village chiefs.
After many hours and with the help of the GPS and a refill from one of the jerry cans, we arrived at tiny Imora. We hauled our gear ashore: axes, shovels, diving equipment, food supplies, and our backpacks.
Together we set to making our camp using discarded poles from the back yard of an abandoned shack. We plaited Sago palm for the roof, and as the locals did, made palm raincoats to protect ourselves from the daily downpours.
It was during a break from getting the campsite built and putting our gear under the still partially-built roof when Jenna told me about some of her ancestors who had settled in the Solomons back in the nineteenth century. Jenna was part Pacific Islander—Tokonu blood—and had been born in Port Moresby over in Papua. She knew the waters bordering the Solomon Sea well, and had had a few run-ins with illegal boats deep netting the protected seamounts in the area. She took a big knife from her carry sack and strapped it to her waist. It was not long before I realised she was an accomplished scuba diver; she knew how to fillet a fish and dive for shellfish and pry it off the rocks. She said she was bought up in Papua killing and skinning wild boars. I found it easy to believe.
We started a small fire on the beach down from the hut so we could cook some of the fish Kero had speared. Kero, however, was in no mood for a story.
“I’m gonna check the waves, have a bit of a body surf.” He put some cooked fillets in a piece of palm leaf and left us. Jenna and I settled on the sand with our fillets on the end of a stick.
“A few of my ancestors joined a group of Kanakas—South Sea Islanders—who were shipped to the Queensland cane fields in the 1890s. They were taken on as day workers, on the promise of good food, good hours and comfortable beds. They got nothing they were promised. The rest of the world was already abolishing slavery, but Australians were still going hard at it—of course they didn’t call it slavery.”
I wondered if this was a rebuke and she was trying to shame me, but as she continued her story I realised there was no malice in it. In fact, she seemed quite distant from what she was actually saying.
“It was during this time when people started to see the Kõpura again—they’re the people Buckmeister wants us to watch for. The locals round these parts call them The Blistered Ones, on account of their skin pigmentation. I’ve been close to them many times. They came to my home in Tokonu before moving on to here in their outriggers. Local oral traditions have it that they originated from far out in the Solomon Sea, at a place called Vaalua Tuva. Every time there is a conflict or a catastrophe, such as an earthquake or a tsunami, the Kõpura would arrive. It is rumoured they kidnap people. Many here do actually go missing; but these are mainly put down to fishing accidents at sea.”
She seemed to drift for a moment then, long enough for me to wonder if she, too, had lost someone close to her, but before I could ask she continued.
“They came again during the chaos of the Pacific war. Before that, Catholic missionaries were talking about them back in the nineteenth century, writing about how the Kõpura came and claimed land that was not theirs, even forcing frightened locals to live out of their canoes, to sit it out and wait for the Kõpura to return to where they came from. And that is the problem: to this day no locals know where the Kõpura call ‘home’. ”
Jenna finished her fish and drank some water from one of the plastic bottles we had bought along. The sun was low in the west, an orange ball that lit the wave tops of the sea. I stared at a seashell between my feet. Jenna wiped her mouth.
“The Kõpura men don’t say much. Mostly they sit in groups waiting for whatever it is their women have to do. The women can be creeps, playing with local kids when their parents aren’t around. If some local mother ever caught one of these women with her child, she would start shouting and drag the kid away. The locals never speak to the visitors, they don’t even look directly at them.”
I remembered what Buckmeister had mentioned regarding a woman who was supposed to be a leader.
“What about this leader—what’s her name—Peequad?”
Jenna grinned. “She’s called Pecan. There’s been talk that her skin is the brown of Melanesians but her features—her nose and forehead—are Caucasian. Pecan must be in her seventies by now. They all wear volcanic obsidian plugs in their ear lobes and as flesh inserts on their foreheads,” she used her knife to scrape fish bones from the sand into the fire. “The women’s throats are mottled with big freckles, only more orderly, with stripes running from under their ears down to their breasts. The men have scarred foreheads, running V-shaped from the hairline to the nose-bridge. They wear western clothes—shorts and shirts—clean, but ragged and faded as if each person has only one set. What’s weird is you never see them with weapons or tools for harvesting or fishing. The women are friendly enough, but they have no sense of personal space and it can make you uncomfortable. You know when they are close, even before you see them. It’s as if they are concentrating so hard you begin thinking of them even before you realise they are close.”
The sun had reached the horizon and twilight approached. Somehow this made me more aware of the sound of the small rollers swishing up upon the sand.
I had been diving with Jenna out on Imora shoals next to a big drop-off into the deep. Here were a couple of flat-topped seamounts rising five thousand metres from the seabed to within twenty metres from the surface. Fish and molluscs and king crabs swarmed across these underwater peaks. We had left Kero for the day to mind camp and to finish putting up the temporary shower. We sat in the runabout, the swell rocking us, and unshackled ourselves from our tanks. During our dive we had not seen any sign of recent drag-teething or deep netting, so we packed up our gear and headed back to base. We were only halfway back to Imora when we met two Solomon men in an outboard runabout. They came alongside and kept their motor running. One of them shouted at us in the local Ganongga language. They looked furious. They spoke in halting English.
“Your friend has done a bad thing,” they shouted. “He has been with Kõpura women!” Then, with hateful stares at Jenna, and me, they spat out more words in their own language. Jenna’s eyes told me she understood. They steered their boat eastward. I looked at Jenna.
“What did they say?”
“You sleep with animals, you are animal.”
Back at Imora, we beached and looked for Kero, but we couldn’t find him. He had left his work on our temporary hut unfinished. Jenna could not find any tracks in the sand and we assumed he had gone bush. I knew, by the way we had been treated, that we were in trouble. Kero had been screwing, literally, one of the unwanted strangers. It was a weird night to be on a remote speck of land, with the knowledge something bad was about to go down. The rain started. It pelted down and we were glad that part of the roof of the shack had been finished.
We sat under cover and ate from tins of baked beans and drank bottled water. Jenna was troubled and rightly so. I spoke what I assumed she was thinking.
“Doesn’t he listen to anything being said? What the hell was he thinking?” I moved further back away from the rain slanting in through a sagging driftwood window opening.
“Look, we don’t know what went on,” Jenna said. “It may be nothing.”
I knew she wasn’t even convincing herself. “He banged one of them, okay? I get the point. There’s going to be some local men here in the morning, beating the crap out of us, isn’t there?”
Jenna nodded. “Seems likely. We can’t go anywhere in this weather—won’t be able to see a thing.”
I couldn’t argue with her. “Okay, what do we do?”
“When the rain eases, we’re out of here.”
“Fine,” I said. “We still have to take Kero with us.”
Jenna growled. “It’s a small island, we’ll find him.”
It was a long night. I was no longer hungry. I found a spot to rest and lay awake for some time listening to the rain smash down onto the weakening plaited roof.
The next morning I was walking along the beach with Jenna as the sun was rising. We saw Kero sitting in the sand. As we approached we saw he had his hands up against his temples, effectively hiding his face. He saw us and croaked out a statement, which sounded muffled, as if his mouth was packed with something. I felt a punch to my shoulder and turned to see Jenna pointing out to sea. I saw the outrigger. Expecting to see some of the locals I was surprised to find that it was one of the big sailed outriggers of the Kõpura. Kero was whining and began rubbing his fingers against the corners of his eyes. I stood on the sand with Jenna, waiting for the Kõpura to walk up onto the beach. They stepped through the waves to stand metres from us. There were a dozen of them, and nearly half were the taciturn men. The group parted to allow a tall woman to walk ahead of them up the beach towards us. I knew I was looking at the one called Pecan.
I looked back down at Kero. He lifted his head and returned my gaze. I stepped back a few paces in shock, bumping into Jenna. Kero was staring insanely, his head nodding as if he was suffering from Parkinson’s. His eyes bulged, as if there was some massive pressure behind them, pushing outwards. His voice was croaky and weak.
“She gave me a drink, Rhys. She gave me a drink.”
The Kõpura surrounded us. I found myself unable to move, as if these people had somehow sapped my will to resist. Afraid, I let my shoulders drop as three of the men came to me and took hold of my arms. Jenna too seemed to lose any fight. She spoke a sentence of Ganonggan to several of the women. They ignored her and grabbed her arms—one even took Jenna’s knife from its sheath.
Kero was still whining like a thrashed dog. I heard him huff with exertion as he was dragged to his feet. Without a fight from any of us, the Kõpura led us down the beach to the outrigger.
It wasn’t until I was actually thrown into the bottom of the craft that I began to fight back. While the women and the rest of the men were standing alongside in the waves, two of the Kõpura, a man and a woman, jumped in and thrust their knees onto my chest. All the wind went out of my lungs. Totally controlled by their grip, they released a little of the pressure, allowing me to breathe. They leaned down close to me, and I noticed two things. First: the carved strips of volcanic glass inlaid into the man’s forehead, with old-growth flesh holding them in place; second was how calm these people looked, in spite of their exertions. The man reached down and, with a serene stare, yanked my head up. He held a half shell level and I could tell it was full of something.
The woman kneeling beside me also had obsidian inlays, but hers were small and round, forming broken circles surrounding her big eyes. Calmly, with a half-smile—almost as if she were doing nothing more than ruffling a child’s hair—she held my chin and forced me to drink. It all happened so fast that it was some seconds before I recalled what Kero had said on the beach.
“She gave me a drink.”
I began to panic, but it was only permitted for a few seconds. The woman kneeling on my chest held up a spongy thing. I smelled a sickly sweetness, and the sponge was pressed down, covering my face. I struggled in vain for a moment and breathed deeply trying to gasp in oxygen, then I felt myself going under the sweet nectar and my struggles seemed a waste of time, so I gave up and let things happen.
I swam up out of a stupor and became aware I was lying with the lower half of my body along the bottom of the outrigger, my chest resting against the gunwale and my throat and chin over the edge. Without moving my head I saw sand forming a beach. A metre directly below, but a little away from the outrigger I saw a series of flat, interlinked rocks, seeming to form a kind of roadway. I turned my head and looked up the beach along the length of the road, and saw that it sloped gently upwards and in under Sago palms. Then I realised that the same paved road ran past the outrigger down into the water. Turning further I saw it ran downward under the surface until I could no longer see it amid the green depths. It looked like some kind of ancient boat ramp. Yet I wondered why it would need to run so deep. Somehow I was sure there was much more to its length further down, leading into the darkest depths.
I was properly conscious now. I dragged one of my arms up to grab the gunwale and to take the pressure off my throat. Above me I heard seagulls. My eyes began to itch and a pain arched across and behind my eyeballs. Putting my hand over the edge of the outrigger I gripped it and sat up. Seeking the source of pain I touched the edge of my eye, near my temple. There I felt a lump in the outer corner. I must have shouted, because it drew attention to me. The hair on the back of my head was grabbed roughly and another soft sponge was thrust across my face. Again I fell away into sleep.
I woke to the feeling of sun on my face, which would have been pleasant had it not been for the pain behind my eyes. I managed to sit up, and looked upon an earthen floor packed down hard. I glanced about and saw a waist-high stone wall surrounding me. I regained my senses and realised I was in an enclosure that was open to the weather. I could not see over the top of the wall, but noticed the stones fitted together neatly, cleanly, without mortar. I was reminded of the walls in South American Incan towns. To one side there was a gap in the wall the width of a normal doorway. I shifted and heard the clatter of something I had disturbed. I realised I was sitting amid a scattering of bleached white bones, many of which were oddly shaped and twisted. Some had the overall look of ribs, but were deformed. Some femurs and shinbones had growths branching off like a second stunted leg. With rising disgust, I swept my arms about and shoved the nearest ones away. They clacked into each other.
I heard the sigh behind me, a kind of wet gurgling exhalation. Twisting I sucked in a deep breath. It was Kero, lying on his side. I blinked and saw him smile in my direction. Looking closer I realised he was not seeing me. When I leant forward the pain in my head sharpened, causing my eyes to water. Wiping them, I looked and saw that Kero had his hands wrapped in what looked to be bark strips, with the tips of his fingers protruding. With one bark-covered hand he was clumsily playing with something at the corners of his eyes. There were stalks, much like gangly field mushrooms. I sat up and leant back in an effort to get away from him. He had spittle dangling from the corner of his mouth nearest the floor. Deformed white bones lay close to his face. I leaned forward again and saw the fungus growths flop against one of his cheeks when he turned his head to look upwards. He was still obviously not seeing me. I knew I was looking at the fungus, Cordyceps. The stalks exiting from the corners of his eyes were a pinkish grey, and from this were growths looking like sickly baby lettuce with soft curly edges. I felt ill.
Without warning Kero began to cry out. But they were weak calls, again, wet and gurgling, as if his throat was filling with mucous. His cries soon lessened and finally became a soft, laughing, coughing sound. I was exhausted from my treatment and from the time I had been drugged. In spite of my growing fear and the thought of what might happen to us, I could not stay awake. I slept amid the bones.
Days must have passed because my time in the enclosure seemed interminable. Sunlight and darkness came and went many times. I slept most of the time, only waking occasionally to feel a woven piece of bedding across me, or waking to daylight to see nothing but stone wall, white bones, and Kero’s back as he lay with his face away from me. I only knew he was still alive because of his irregular, gurgling breaths. One time I awoke with the sounds of screams fading away from some fevered dream, only to find they were continuing as I fully woke. I lay on my side with a plaited palm raincoat covering my shoulders. Still the screams continued in short bursts. Again they were incorporated into my nightmares. Daylight came and went and came. The sun burnt me during those days.
The lethargy left and I sat up for the first time in what seemed ages. I ached and felt pains on my hips. Checking them I found I had pressure sores. Immediately I realised how hungry I was. I felt weak and could hardly hold myself upright. Because of this, dizziness had come over me. Finally I managed to turn to face Kero. He was sitting among the bones, staring as if blind. He was filthy and emaciated. From his eyes and from out of his head grew a massive growth of greenish grey fungus that nodded and flapped against his cheeks as he shook his miserable head. He moaned and lifted his hands to look at them. I saw the bark bandages had been removed. I stared in disbelief. Bloodied and smeared with soil from the floor of the enclosure I saw what had been done to him. I could tell his fingers had been broken, because they were crooked and a couple bent a little backward in a way that would not be possible on a normal hand. But the worst thing was seeing evidence the Kõpura had sewn the fingers of each hand together. My friend now had two crude paddle-like appendages where he should have had hands.
For a moment I lost reason. Then, regaining clarity, I thought of Jenna. But my body was rebelling at its ill treatment. I vomited up some bile into the back of my throat. It stung and I gasped, swallowing the acid. I began to tremble. All the while I sat there in the dirt among the bones, listening to Kero’s gurgling mucous and still thinking of Jenna, wondering what horrors she was being subjected to. I realised we were being purposely starved, in order to completely break us.
I did not have long to contemplate all this. I saw a group of the Kõpura leaning across the enclosure wall. They came through the open part of the enclosure, their bark-sandalled feet crunching upon the twisted bones. I was forced to eat a foul-tasting puree. When I saw one of my captors holding a wet sponge, I knew what was about to happen, but was too weak to resist.
I woke on a woven flax mat, which sat upon a grassy expanse, some way up from a beach of sand and shingle. I raised myself and sat and realised I was no longer hungry.
I looked up at a cloudless sky. I lowered my gaze and saw a small bay of turquoise water almost surrounded by two finger-like projections of jungle-draped land spits. Out in the bay, some way from the beach, three big-sailed double outriggers rocked in a light swell. I heard birdcalls sounding from some distance behind me. Palms lined the beach, dividing sand from grass. It was beautiful.
Some distance to my right was a pyramid, ancient, and flat-topped with a walkway of massive steps on the side facing the bay. Much of the structure was under water. I peered with my hand up against my eyes to stop the glare of the sun. I saw the sand had encroached upon the massive lower blocks of the structure and that part lying in the water appeared to reach down into the green depths, and I knew it went down further than I could see. I wondered at the millennia that must have elapsed since its erection, for tectonic plates to move, allowing the ocean to climb this high up the structure.
The sun felt good upon me. I felt strength unfamiliar. It was as if I had eaten a substantial meal. I looked about and upon turning my head I felt something soft brush against my check. Raising my hand I felt the soft edges of the fungus. I did something then, which, a short while ago, I would not have been capable of. I smiled. Again, I touched the growths. To my mind they seemed the most natural thing in the world. I heard a sound behind me, the one place I had not yet looked. Turning upon my flax mat, I saw one of the Kõpura women. She was sitting upon a large rock that looked to have been chiselled to form a seat. While she regarded me, her form shimmered under the glare of the sun. She smiled and I could not make out the shape of her mouth. It altered even as I looked at it. She was topless. I saw the mottling on her breasts flash a different colour—green to brown, to scarlet and back. I blinked and stared stupidly at her. My gaze was drawn back to her face. Her entire head had for a fleeting moment changed shape. For an instant it elongated and took on a light brown colour. And for a second there seemed something familiar, but as well something unearthly about the shape. I stretched open my mouth and worked my jaw. Looking again at the woman’s face I caught a glimpse of bright yellow spots ringed by deep blue, flash diagonally up across her face from chin to forehead. It looked like an octopus changing colour.
I sat on the mat feeling confused, looking again at this extraordinary woman who now appeared completely normal. Behind I heard the sound of feet squeaking on hot sand as someone walked towards me. I turned with renewed strength and saw to my astonishment Kero striding purposefully across the sand toward us. I looked at his face and was surprised to see none of the pain and horror I had seen only recently. It occurred to me I had no idea how long ago that had been. His transformation was miraculous. He appeared to be now taller and thinner, but it was still his face. Gone was the fleshy, nodding, grey fungus of the Cordyceps. In its place, circling his eyes, were incisions not yet healed, tracing a V-shape from his forehead down to the bridge of his nose, inside of which sat freshly inlaid shards of volcanic black glass. I stared and wondered how long had elapsed since we had lain in terror amid the bones inside the open stone enclosure.
To my surprise, the man whom I had once known as Kero, looked down at me and smiled faintly, as if he did not recognise me. I could think of nothing to say. But I caught one thing in his look and it was as if he pitied me. Remembering his hands, I looked at them as he passed me and walked towards the Kõpura woman seated on the chiselled boulder. He was swinging his hands by his side as he walked, like a man supremely confident in himself. It was on those swinging hands where I saw the most change. There was no longer any dirt or blood. The hands were clean and there were no fingers. As he strode past me I saw there were no longer any stitches. The skin had grown seamlessly together and all he now had were two thumbs and one seamless expanse of flesh on both hands. I watched his back, and he reached the Kõpura woman, bent down and kissed her on her mouth. She responded enthusiastically, the bare flesh of her arms rippled as if the muscles underneath were tightening and relaxing, bulging with stubby, extended pseudopods looking like a blind worm smelling the air. Colour flashed up and down the lengths—blue, emerald green, red and purple. They stopped kissing and the woman leaned out from behind Kero’s shoulder. She smiled and winked at me. She spoke and I recognised the voice.
“Your growths will wither and pain will come and then go. It will be lost and you will no longer care. Your vices will be many and you will feed on the terror of our guests.”
It was not what she said, it was who said it. I realised I was looking at Jenna. What had once been Kero, and what had once been Jenna, looked down at me sitting on the mat. It was as if they were thinking of me as a child. Again, I remembered Kero’s words on the beach at Imora: “She gave me a drink”.
Then I knew. He had been talking about Jenna. She was Kõpura. They had sailed to her home of Tokonu all those years ago and had taken her, changed her. There were those marks across the flesh covering her collarbone—not surgery, but makeup, where her pigmentation had been covered in order for her to walk unsuspected among the Solomon peoples. Even before she had met us, she had been planning our abduction.
I felt no anger at this. Something had been lifted from me, some sense of responsibility for my existence had been removed and there was nothing to ever worry over—others could now make all my decisions. I felt light headed and strangely safe.
In another moment of clarity, I realised it had never mattered that I had not been bitten and had escaped the enzyme from the saliva of infected children. The hospital at Gizo had been harvesting it. That was what was in the syringe when I had my shot. When the doctor had given me the needle and had explained things, she was shutting down my amygdala, by infecting me with Urbach disease. Realisation came to me. Jenna had been sitting in the chair in the waiting room, because she had never needed a shot. The doctors at Gizo, the navy; RAMSI, the entire lot of them were creating a weapon. I laughed at the genius of it all.
I pulled my knees up to my chest and held them together with my arms. I watched my old companions watching me, smiling with their oddly shaped mouths. Colours flashed across Jenna’s flesh. She and Kero stood and walked to me, one each side. They held down their hands for me to take and I did so. To my new way of thinking, Kero’s surgical enhancements seemed now quite normal.
They led me up the beach towards a group of people waiting for us on the sand. As we got closer, Kero and Jenna let go of my hands. I looked at Jenna in her splendid form and she smiled and nodded to me. I turned and faced those others. I heard them give a collective sigh. I wondered what they might smell like. I knew, of course, that creatures so powerful would smell sweet. I went forward on shaky legs, still a little weakened from my incarceration, but gaining strength with each step. I crossed the expanse of sand and shingle. For a moment their forms jerked in unison, like a faulty hologram. Then, as if a veil had dropped, I was allowed to see beyond, to the true reality that was hidden from humanity. I knew I would soon be seeing things as they really are, and I would gaze upon my brethren and marvel upon their terrible majesty. I laughed and stared in wonder at the sight of the flashing and brilliant colours as their subsurface chromatophores relayed their many emotions. With a happiness I felt would burst out of me, I walked into the arms of my new family.
