Horror in Paradise Read online

  “If someone’s son had an affair with my niece and never paid me for it, I think I would kill him,” he explained with gentle logic. “Or the son,” he added reflectively.

  “So,” he said, “I filled one of the cane tubes with saguer, and in it I placed a new sharp knife I had bought from a Moi man. Then I called in a very loud voice to the ghost of Nakari. I told him: ‘The man who killed you with kwi is here somewhere. When he drinks the saguer from this tube, do you, with your ghostly hand, plunge the knife into his insides and kill him.’ Then I gave the tube to him to drink. Dim’s eyes were rolling like this” (it was almost impossible for Sejak’s eyes to roll any more in demonstration) “and his hands were shaking like leaves in the wind, but he tipped up the tube and drank the saguer while we all waited and watched. Suddenly,” shouted Sejak, throwing his comb on the floor with a clatter, “he dropped the tube like this and doubled up like this and he vomited blood, pools and pools of blood, from where the knife had cut his insides. And then he died.” Sejak slapped his thighs and rocked back and forth in retrospective enjoyment. “Nakari’s ghost had killed him; he knew his murderer. You can’t fool a ghost.”

  “That must have been very satisfactory,” we said, impressed. “What happened then? Was Dim’s family annoyed?”

  “Oh, no,” said Sejak, “How could they be? Dim had killed Nakari and it was justice.”

  We mulled over this for a while until we heard Sejak give vent to several heavy sighs. We looked at him in surprise.

  “Were you, after all, sorry to see Dim die?”

  “Oh, no,” he said again. “But I was remembering that then we left the house with the big bamboo full of saguer and we drank it all up. It had little red peppers in it. It was the best I ever tasted.”

  Sejak was a patriotic and important member of his tribe. In the present degenerate days there are few men as well educated as he, for Sejak had not been satisfied with the preliminary general instruction received at the Newun. With a few others he had pursued a postgraduate course under the tutelage of the wise old teacher of the young men’s house. This advanced curriculum had one rather peculiar characteristic. The pupils were instructed in the art of curing a number of complicated diseases which could only be contracted by those who had learned these cures. It would really seem that these ambitious students made very little actual forward progress save in the business of indefinitely checkmating themselves. Why learn to cure smallpox, for instance, if you were immune to it until you knew the cure?

  There was one compensation for this mass of ambivalent information. It was only a postgraduate who knew how to kill a witch.

  Sejak was modest about his accomplishments. It was not from him but from some of his admirers that we were first told the tale of how he slew a witch and saved a human life. When we first commented on the subject to him he blushed becomingly and shrugged his shoulders as though to say, “Of course, anyone can kill a witch.” But he would have been deeply hurt had we appeared to agree with this attitude.

  Angry ghosts, bad words, broken tabus lead often to disaster and occasionally to death. But not even the battle cry of men with spears so congeals the hearts of the people with fear as the very thought of a witch, the terror that stalks by day and by night through the forest and through the houses of sleeping men.

  A great advantage to a Madik witch is that she remains incognito, exhibiting none of the insignia of her profession. More wily than her sisters of the western world, she conducts her nefarious business entirely through the agency of her familiar spirit, thereby obviating any necessity for mumbling spells, harnessing broomsticks, or exposing herself at a coven.

  This familiar spirit is always of the male gender, a twin brother of the witch born either in material or ethereal form at the same time and of the same mother witch. If he appears as a human baby his mother hastily disposes of him, for he is an incarnate accusation of witchcraft against both herself and her daughter. But even as she presses the breath from his tiny body, she is consoled by the assurance that his powerful spirit will never wander far from his sister’s side.

  The reason that this semi-supematural brood is such a menace to society is not because they are activated by malice or ill will towards their fellows; it is purely a question of dietetics. Ordinary mortals may be tempted to dine off the bodies of their acquaintances, but the sublimated palates of the Tubwi and her brother crave the titillation of a meal of human souls.

  It is appropriately the disembodied male twin who sets out on the quest for food, armed with a barbed spear or a sharpened bamboo as invisible to human eyes as he himself. Several men described to us having been attacked by a hungry Tubwi—the sensation of a sharp stab in the chest followed by the agonizing wrench which they knew meant the slicing off of a piece of soul. The huntsman nibbles off this as he heads for home, but he is careful to save a presentable portion for the sister who awaits him.

  “I have found a good edible soul,” he says to her, “that will last us for some time. As soon as we have finished this, I will go back for more.”

  For the Tubwis skillfully preserve their food supply in the same manner accredited to some of the South Coast Papuans, who are said to tie their victim to a tree and cut off a steak whenever they are hungry, solicitously tending the wounds to keep him alive and the meat fresh in between meals.

  The wounded soul meanwhile is in a torment of apprehension. It knows that it is marked as Tubwi food; that unless it can escape unseen by its vigilant enemy it will be gradually hacked away to nothing. In the hope of eluding its persecutor, its human habitation may make a dash for obscurity. Crawling under creepers, doubling in its tracks, stealing silently along unfrequented paths, it seeks to dodge its lynxeyed hunter, to find somewhere a far-off shelter unknown to him. Sometimes it is successful and the angry Tubwis, balked of their prey, attack another soul with redoubled energy and viciousness, eager simultaneously to satiate their whetted appetites and revenge themselves against mankind. More often the hunted soul is run to earth, for swift and clever beyond the power of ordinary mortals must he be who can outwit a spirit, who can hide from invisible eyes and guard himself from unseen weapons.

  One day Sejak’s friend, the walleyed Unsit, was traveling through the forest. Impatient and foolhardy, he had decided not to wait until someone else felt impelled to follow the same route, but to risk the trip by himself. He arrived in Sejut with haunted eyes and a terrible pain in his chest. He had felt the bamboo blade of a Tubwi entering into him and he was a man without hope. His friends called in Sejak, and Sejak said:

  “Do not try to run away from the Tubwi yet. First I will see if lean kill it.”

  That night after Unsit had laid his kakoya on the floor and gone to sleep, Sejak sat up watching on the steps to the house, his spear and a big stick lying beside him.

  ‘The Tubwi,’ he thought to himself, ‘will be following Unsit closely. Probably he will attack again tonight.’

  Now, a Tubwi, as I have mentioned, is invisible to most people, and that is why men like Sejak require very special training to sharpen their eyes sufficiently to see into the unseen world. It was very late and Sejak was beginning to despair when suddenly his well-trained ears heard an inaudible rustling. He stiffened and peered into the flickering shadows; then with a great shout he leapt from the steps and the aroused and astonished household saw him engaging in a wild struggle with nothing at all. After a last tremendous whack at the ground he gave a triumphant cry and returned to the house saying:

  “The Tubwi is dead. It came in the form of a snake and I have killed it. Unsit will now be well.”

  His trembling friends peered at the spot where Sejak had demolished the snake, but there was nothing to be seen. The following morning Unsit was miraculously recovered, but it was not until several days later that the actual identity of the Tubwi was revealed. Then it was heard that the same night in which Sejak slew the invisible snake, a woman named Malanu had died for no apparent reason at Swailbe. The human femal
e Tubwi cannot survive her alter ego, nor he her. As they came into the world together, so together they must leave it, and when Malanu’s death became known it was obvious that Sejak had truly killed his witch.

  Sometimes a dying man is vouchsafed a glimpse of his Tubwi murderer. The woman witch is unmistakably the higher in command—and though she sends her brother out to the preliminary skirmishes, she is apt to take a hand herself towards the end. The last morsel of a soul is supposed to be the most delectable, and frequently she chooses to give the coup de grace and avail herself of it. As she lifts her bamboo dagger to plunge it into her victim’s throat, his clouded eyes may clear for one brief and horrible vision, and with a strangled cry he shouts the name of his psychophagous murderer.

  One cannot help feeling sorry for the woman who has, by the hallucinations or the spite of a dying man, been branded as a Tubwi. The kin of the man she is supposed to have murdered are prancing for justice against her. If her family stand by her, unconvinced of her guilt, she may be given the dubious opportunity of taking the hot-water test, with a fifty-fifty chance of proving herself innocent. But often her husband and her relations are so appalled at the thought of the dangerous monster they have unwittingly harbored that they hand the woman over without a protest, receiving gratefully in exchange some child recently captured in a raid. For the self-appointed agents of justice the disposal of the Tubwi that they have acquired is no sinecure. They dare not kill her and they dare not keep her alive.

  It is here that the San or trading partners come in very usefully again. Her first captor marches the witch as fast as possible to his nearest San and requests, in the name of friendship, that he take her over. This San, anxious to be relieved as quickly as possible of his unwelcome responsibility, sets out immediately with her on the journey to a San of his. If anyone is lucky enough to have a San among the wild Mari tribe of the Karon, she is rushed to them, for the Mari have no fear of a Madik Tubwi and murder her without the slightest hesitation. Failing a Mari San, the only hope is that the woman, kept incessantly on the run, will very soon die from sheer exhaustion.

  This sounds distressingly brutal, but the Madik, like our own not so remote forebears, believes he is ridding the community of a very present danger, and his method is surely no more inhuman than a well-attended bonfire in which the witch is burnt alive. I am thankful that while we lived in Sainke Doek the Tubwis were quiescent. Just before our arrival, Sassodet had died the sort of death that was apparently suggestive of a Tubwi’s greed, but the flash of second sight was denied to his last moments and, with no clue to the identity of the devourer of his soul, the matter was not pursued any further.

  There is pathos in the fate of the starved and weary woman, powerless to prove herself an ordinary human being, driven like a pariah through the jungle until she dies. But she is not the only pitiful figure. There must be compassion, too, for those enslaved by the beliefs that cause her fate, for the natives who live afraid, never daring to be alone, haunted by the specter of unseen presences hungering to gobble up their souls. To the Madik the soul is an integral necessity; with its loss his body dies. His fragile soul-substance is as much at the mercy of attack from the invisible world as is his bare brown body vulnerable to the enemy’s spear. It is small wonder that he has developed a philosophy of resignation, of casual acceptance of the march of life and death, that he lives only in the present moment with the future so insecure.

  Don Blanding

  Gods and Old Ghosts

  Donald Benson Blanding (1894-1957), sometimes called “the poet laureate of Hawaii” was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, but lived for some years at Laston, where his father was deputy sheriff. He graduated from The Chicago Art Institute and first came to Hawaii in 1916. In these early days he wrote advertising copy for a Chinese shop in Honolulu. He was a popular lecturer and the author and illustrator of seventeen books. In 1928 he proposed, along with Grace Tower Warren, that May 1 should be celebrated as “Lei Day” in Hawaii.

  Blanding died of a heart attack in Los Angeles but his ashes were scattered at sea. His only marriage was to Dorothy Putnam, former wife of George Palmer Putnam, whose later wife was Amelia Earhart. “Gods and Old Ghosts” is part of a chapter in his prose volume, Hula Moons (1930).

  ON one of these nights I met the Old Man of the Mountain. He was reputed to be a kahuna. A kahuna is a sort of astrologer, philosopher, doctor, and unwritten history of Hawaii. He is a survival of the powerful clan of priests who ruled the kings and the kingdom in the days of the monarchy. Ignorant haoles call them witch doctors; but the term is incorrect, although they are credited with the ability to put good or bad kahuna (spell) on people, and pray individuals to death if they choose. They are respected and feared by most of the Hawaiians, who are quite superstitious, as are any people who live in close touch with nature.

  The Old Man (I never heard him called any other name) looked like an inspired prophet who had survived through the ages from the beginnings of the islands. In repose his features were lost in a tangle of crossing and crisscrossing wrinkles. He had no teeth, and so his face collapsed into folds, resembling a brown lichen. When he spoke, the black gape of his mouth and the dim fires of his eyes identified him as human.

  I never saw him arrive. In the midst of chatter and laughter he’d suddenly be among us, looking like a gnarled root at the base of a hau tree. On the first night that I met him, he made this grown-from-the-ground appearance. All of the Hawaiians fell silent, even the children. He sat for half an hour, his old eyes watching the stars unwinkingly. Pua brought him a cup of okolehao. He drank it with relish but without comment. After the corrosive fire of the liquor percolated and filtered through his aged bones, he broke into speech, half chant half talk, lifting his face into the light. With the muscles of his long throat quivering and the strange quavers of his voice, he looked like an aged wolf baying the moon.

  Although I could not understand much Hawaiian, I saw at once that he was speaking in a different manner from the conversational tongue of my friends. A th sound which is not in the modem language softened the hard k, giving a smoother slur to the unbroken flow of words which continued for half an hour. I don’t know when or how he breathed.

  He told a dramatic tale full of gestures. His pantomime was so vivid that I could get the larger drawing of the story.

  “He talks old-style Hawaiian,” Aunty Pinau whispered. “These keikis (children) do not understand.”

  After he had finished his story, Aunty Pinau translated what he had told. It was the legend of the demigod, Maui, whose exploits resembled those of Hercules. It related his colossal feat of lifting the sky, which was crushing the earth, and placing it on top of the mountain so that the trees could grow and the people go about the business of living. He told also of Maui’s mother Hina, a famed tapa maker, and her difficulty in getting the bark-cloth dried, owing to the shortness of the days. She appealed to her son for aid. He climbed to the top of Haleakala, lassoed the sun, and broke off some of its rays so that it couldn’t roll across the sky so swiftly, thus lengthening the days and allowing his mother to complete her beautiful tapa robes.

  In the nights that followed he told many other stories. They were delightful, embroidered with poetic metaphor and classical references too intricate to follow. The Hawaiians are natural orators, after the William Jennings Bryan style of silver-tongued eloquence.

  The simple sagas differed only a little from the folk tales of Grimm and Andersen and the Bible. There were the brave princes of remarkable accomplishment, and the villains with low and scoundrelly sculduggery in their hearts, the Cinderellas, the giant killers and Jonahs.

  During those long, pleasant hours, the civilized world became very remote. It was difficult to realize that, just across the channel, Honolulu buzzed with activity, with chittering tourists, honking motors, and the confusion of progress. My mind rested in the simple, unroutined current of life that flowed so aimlessly through the uncounted days and nights.

 
My unfeigned enjoyment and interest in the legends were richly rewarded. I did not realize that I was being studied and weighed, and that I had passed critical inspection, until one day the Old Man appeared in the door of the palm-leaf lean-to which I used for studio. Nalani was with him.

  “He want you come along,” she said. “He show you something. I go too.”

  I put aside the sketch that I was making and we started out along the beach. The Old Man took the lead. I had to realize shortly that the ancient gargoyle was a better man than I was. Although he seemed to stumble and waver, his stride was long and steady, as we wove through guava and lantana thickets and tangled jungle growth, over sand and broken lava. I soon saw that we were going in a tortuously devious way and that the Old Man wanted to confuse me. I stopped Nalani.

  “Tell Old Man I no look see.”

  “He taking you sacred place,” she explained.

  “Tell him go straight. I lost now. I no can find again.”

  Nalani spoke to our guide. He measured me with his squinting eyes and made decision. We started off across a desolate field of lava, among sharp, broken fragments that chewed my tennis sneakers to ribbons. Nalani and the Old Man wore Hawaiian fiber sandals which seemed to protect their feet. I was soon a mass of scratches and gouges up to my knees. Sweat poured into the abrasions and smarted mightily, but I suspicioned that it was all worth while. The wildness of the setting promised well for adventure.

  Finally we came to a large well about thirty feet across, a dark hole in the center of the lava flow. Down twenty feet, among ferns, roots, and mosses, lay a pool of water, so still and clear that every detail, of rock, cloud, and our peering faces was reflected. No breath disturbed the glassy surface.

  The Old Man spoke.

  “Wai-tiapa-napa.”

  “Mirror-water,” Nalani translated, deeply impressed.