Iona Portal (2 page)

Compassionate by nature, Lys was an easy touch for Kareina’s hard-luck story.  She’d gone to lunch with Kareina several times and spent one Saturday afternoon showing her the sights of Boulder.  Even before the BMW showed up, however, Lys regretted going to tonight’s party with her.  Something about Kareina just didn’t seem right.

 “
I’m
suspicious?
 Yeah, right!”
  Lys jabbed.  “Coming from such a good judge of character…  You thought
Carrington
was a great guy!”

“Well, how was I to know he only had one thing on his mind?”

“Listen Kareina, I’m the blonde.  You’re supposed to have a brain in your head.  We never should have gone to that party in the first place.”

The BMW was now stopped dead in the lane ahead.  Lys slowed cautiously as she approached, then pulled out to pass, flooring the accelerator.  

As the Corolla struggled to gain speed, she caught another glimpse of the BMW’s driver.  He looked young, maybe still in his teens. 
Probably took his dad’s car without permission.
  But his expression showed no hint of playfulness.  His face was as gaunt and pale as his companion’s and was fixed on Lys with the cold determination of a hunter stalking prey.

Despite the blonde jokes, Lys was no fool.  She knew this was not a situation to treat lightly.

A glance in the mirror showed the BMW accelerating again, its 400 horsepower turbocharged V-8 roaring loudly as it bore down on the defenseless Corolla.  

This time the men made no attempt to pass.  Instead, the BMW pulled within feet of her bumper and matched her speed. 

Her speedometer was edging 60, but Lys knew she couldn’t keep it up.  She was approaching a set of treacherous hairpin turns where the road zigzagged down the mountain to Boulder. 

Entering the first switchback, she slid her foot onto the brake, taking the turn much faster than she should have.  Her tires squealed, but the BMW was still riding her tail. 

Near the midpoint of the curve, Lys gasped aloud as a breathtaking panorama appeared beyond the guardrail.  Like a billion sparkling gemstones flung across a field of black velvet, the lights of Boulder exploded into view. 
Almost home!  If I can just stay ahead of them through the switchbacks.

Exiting the hairpin, Lys straddled the center line, trying to keep the BMW from passing.  The men responded by blasting their horn and flashing their high beams repeatedly—nearly blinding her.  

She punched her accelerator but the next switchback was already in sight.  Warning signs flashed past.  The posted speed limit for the curve was 35.  She tried to take it at 50, tires screaming in protest.
 Too fast!
  Hammering the brake, she froze as the Corolla broke into a skid, almost slamming the guardrail before she regained control. 

Lys could feel her heart pounding.  Adrenaline was flooding her bloodstream.  Her breathing deepened, her palms went cold, and her hands were beginning to tremble.  She gripped the wheel with whitened knuckles, struggling to control her rising panic.  As the road ahead straightened, she jammed the accelerator to the floor.  

This has been a night from hell from the start!  It started with the god-awful party at Carrington’s.  Now this!
 Lys was beginning to wonder if she’d survive the evening. 

She shot a glance at Kareina, but her companion seemed oblivious to the danger.  Kareina was watching her intently with an amused smile.  She actually seemed to be enjoying Lys’s distress. 
No wonder she doesn’t have friends…
Lys thought. 
She’s STRANGE!    

But Lys had no time to think about Kariena.  The BMW had coasted through the last curve, but now charged ahead, engine thundering. 

Approaching the next switchback, the BMW pulled up beside her.  The mountain here loomed close on the left with a sheer drop-off to the right. 

Another cluster of warning signs swept past.  The maximum speed limit for the turn was 30 but the men were pacing her—she didn’t dare let them pull in front.  She started into the curve at 50, barely keeping control. 

Lys chanced another look at the BMW.  The man in the passenger seat was leering at her, not three feet away, and the look on his face made her blood run cold.  Something dark, malevolent, and not quite human was staring back at her.  Their eyes met for an instant, and his lips went taut, baring crooked teeth in a vicious grin… the gape of
a wolf about to rip the flesh of its cornered prey.  

And in a moment of chilling recognition, Lys finally saw what the men were after.  With gut-wrenching certainty, her mind embraced the terrible truth she’d been struggling for the last thirty minutes to reject.  For Lysandra Johnston now knew, beyond all doubt, that the men in the black BMW were planning to kill her.
 

Her gaze fixed resolutely on the rapidly-tightening curve ahead.
 A thrill killing…
the thought came numbly to her mind
… and I’m to be the thrill…
  Resisting a wave of nausea, her mind raced, striving frantically to form a plan of escape.  But it was not to be.

At the tightest part of the curve, as her tires shrieked, struggling to maintain their hold on the road; the men swerved abruptly to the right.  With a resounding concussion and the sound of shattering glass, the BMW slammed the Corolla hard, lifting its front end from the pavement and driving it into the guardrail.  There was an agonizing scream of ripping steel, a crash as the guardrail gave way, and a long moment of silence as the Corolla sailed through the air.

The welcoming lights of Boulder spread wide before her.  Lys seemed to float for a moment in mid-air.  Then, by the glare of her one remaining headlight, she saw the ground rising to meet her…
 
Everything was happening in slow motion, but she was frozen to her seat and could not move.

Clenching the wheel in helpless terror, Lys glanced at Kareina one last time.  But Kareina was gone.

Chapter Two:  Kilauea

HALEMA’UMA’U CRATER, MOUNT KILAUEA, HAWAII

Pele angled the tip of one dark, leathery wing and banked to the left.  Gaining altitude rapidly, she opened her mouth in an exultant roar as a blast of frigid, early-morning wind buffeted her face.  Eyes like glowing pools of lava scanned the horizon.  From this height she could see the whole island, from ancient
Kohala
on the north to windswept
Ka Lae
at the south.  She detected no sign of her enemies. 
Perfect!

Long waves of ebony hair flowed behind her as she descended toward Kilauea.  Her prey was now fast approaching.  She watched as the silver Porsche 911
Carrera
slowed to make its turn into Hawaii’s Volcano National Park. 

All had been prepared.  For two weeks, Pele had planted the sequence firmly in the victim’s mind.  There would still be a need for subtle mental influence in the last moments, but that would be easily accomplished.  This victim
wanted
to be hers.

She bared her teeth in anticipation.  Pele was still revered as a goddess on Hawaii’s Big Island, but it had been a long time since she’d savored the taste of human sacrifice.  Too long. 

But her ancient enemies, the
Irin,
were in decline and would soon be vanquished.  Even now, few remained who were strong enough to oppose her, and they were spread thin, distracted by pressing issues in distant places.  The time was coming when she would again be free to do as she pleased on her own island.  Then
all
of her ancient pleasures would be restored.  Perhaps it had begun even now.

Pele had just begun her long glide toward the glowing pit of
Halema’uma’u
crater when she sensed something new. 
No!
 A presence had come … she felt it.  It was a presence she’d not encountered for many years.  Her oldest adversary had returned.  She rumbled quietly under her breath,
Araton!
…then opened her mouth in a shriek of anger and frustration.

 Erin let the door of the Porsche 911
Carrera
swing softly shut behind her, waiting to hear the reassuring
thunk
of the engaging latch.  She glanced quickly around in the pre-dawn mist to make sure no one was watching, then pulled her shawl tightly around her body against the early morning chill.  Even in Hawaii it gets cold at 3700 feet.

Her eyes searched the darkness and found the path leading to the crater overlook, yet she hesitated, a look of confusion and uncertainty on her face.  She glanced around again, eyes darting nervously like a frightened animal’s.
  Could she really go through with this?
 

Most who knew Erin Vanderberg assumed she was in her mid-thirties, though in actuality, she was nearly a decade older.  Taller than average, Erin stood five-eleven in bare feet, but she moved with the assurance and poise of a runway model.  Her perfectly formed face was framed by rich cascades of silken, chestnut-brown hair.  Always impeccably dressed, she exuded an aura of beauty that women envied, and caused men to take a long and lingering second look. 

That had been important to Erin once, but in recent years it meant nothing.  Erin was tired… tired with a weariness that went far beyond physical. 

Gathering her resolve she tossed her purse and keys through the Porsche’s open window onto the driver’s seat. 
 I won’t need those anymore;
she thought to herself, then turned and strode briskly toward the trail.

It was a ten minute walk from the parking area to the
Halema’uma’u
crater rim.  The path was barely discernable in the early morning gloom, but Erin knew the way.  It had all been in the dream.

The dream had begun two weeks earlier, shortly after she arrived at the beach house, and had repeated every night since.  It seemed a pleasant dream, in a macabre sort of way, and it was always exactly the same.  By now Erin had every detail memorized.  She could re-play it in her mind at will.

The dream always began with her driving south along the windward coast of Hawaii’s Big Island at four o’clock in the morning.  By 4:30 A.M. she’d slipped through the near-empty streets of Hilo and begun ascending the long highway through the cloud forest to Volcano National Park on Mount Kilauea.  Arriving at the park, Erin cruised through the entrance gate, unmanned at that hour, and turned left on the road to
Halema’uma’u
crater. 

The area around
Halema’uma’u
had been closed to visitors for several years, but in the dream the road barricades had been removed.  Erin followed Crater Rim Road to the south and pulled into the deserted parking lot of the
Halema’uma`u
overlook at precisely five in the morning.  The eastern sky was just beginning to glow with the faint light of a new day. 

As the dream continued, she walked up the path to the crater’s edge and easily vaulted the low fence designed to keep wayward tourists from approaching its crumbling rim.

Halema’uma’u
looked like something from another world:  an immense pit, 300 feet deep and 3000 feet across, set within the great caldera of the Kilauea volcano.  Until the 1920s it had been a seething lake of fire, often boiling over its edges.  But in 1924, following days of explosive eruptions, the surface fell to its present depth and hardened.  Even now, however, lava often broke through, forming churning pools of molten rock on the crater floor.

Erin stood ten feet from the crater’s edge and surveyed the chasm below.  In her dream,
Halema’uma’u
was a pool of total blackness, an ocean of night.  From its stygian depths, huge clouds of steam and sulphurous gas billowed skyward. 

The ancient Romans believed the entrance to the underworld was located at
Avernus
, a volcano near Cumae.  Erin had never visited that Italian volcano, but she wondered if it looked like this.  It was easy to imagine
Halema’uma’u
as a bottomless pit stretching down into the interior of the earth—an open portal to the realm of the dead.

For her, that’s what it would be… she would take a few quick steps and a long graceful dive into darkness.  She’d never see the jagged lava rocks rising to met her.  If she felt an impact at all, it would be a twinge of pain lasting only an instant.   

As the dream progressed, Erin began to disrobe.  That was an odd element of the dream, but it was the same every time.  She would stand fully exposed at the crater’s edge and casually remove every item of clothing; carefully folding her dress, shawl, and undergarments, and leaving them neatly stacked on her shoes at the craters edge. 

Tidy to the end,
she thought.

She’d read somewhere that those who commit suicide by swimming into the ocean often strip at the water’s edge and swim naked to their death.  She wondered if a similar etiquette applied to volcano divers.  It made sense really, exiting life the way you entered, totally unencumbered.

Finally she stood upright, naked, facing the crater.  She relaxed her body and took a deep breath, like an Olympic diver about to go off the high board.

Then, as she stood before the waiting abyss, a wispy form materialized out of the surging clouds of steam.  Vaguely humanoid, the apparition drew closer and solidified, until a beautiful Polynesian woman with an abundance of flowing black hair hovered in the air above the crater, not thirty feet away.  Erin somehow knew the woman was
Pele
, the goddess of the volcano.  Pele hung in mid-air, suspended over the darkness, watching Erin and smiling.

Pele was the oldest legend of the island.  Even when white missionaries came and supplanted the gods and goddesses of ancient Hawaii with Christianity, belief in Pele had endured.  Erin didn’t believe in God or the afterlife, but she couldn’t deny that Pele was a real presence on the Island.  According to legend,
Halema’uma’u
was Pele’s home.  Locals believed she lived in the frothing lava that still belched from the crater’s floor.  Every year, hundreds of sightings of Pele were reported all over the island, and the natives still brought her offerings… not the human sacrifices of ancient times, but rocks and fruit, and even bottles of rum were carefully wrapped in
ti
leaves and left for Pele to find.