Red Sun Also Rises, A by Mark Hodder Read Free Book Online Page A

same negative emotions toward my new flock. In retrospect, I can see the real reason for my discontent: I was professing a faith I didn’t possess. It was all artifice—something learned by rote and presented as a spiritual truth. It was in my brain but had never touched my heart. It wasn’t the parishioners or the islanders I begrudged—it was Aiden Fleischer, for I knew him a fraud.
    My lackadaisical approach didn’t really matter. My subjects had not one whit of interest in Christianity. Heaven, to them, was the bountiful sea, and the very idea of a single supreme deity they considered a flagrant absurdity. They had no need of my religion—they had their own, if “religion” is an appropriate word for the detestable practices and idolatry in which they indulged. Cannibalism was the least of it.
    My awareness of the obscenities perpetrated deep in the jungle grew slowly. The drums were the first indication, for it occurred to me that, despite Clarissa’s suggestion, there were no predators on Koluwai big enough to harm a man. Then I started to notice that most of the islanders bore scars between the swirling patterns of their tattoos, and on many occasions I observed that some of the scars were very fresh. Next, I became conscious that—from an age any civilised person would consider still a part of childhood—the female Koluwaians were almost permanently pregnant, but while there were many, many children on the island, the population wasn’t expanding. In investigating this, I soon discovered that the town and all the villages were subject to mysterious disappearances. People simply vanished, and the islanders absolutely refused to talk about it, other than to acknowledge that it happened.
    “Surely they don’t eat them all?” I said to Clarissa.
    My companion, who was at that time preoccupied with fitting pews inside the church, replied distractedly, “When this place is finished and the natives can gather in it and listen to you, and when I begin to practise medicine, we’ll be better able to foster their trust. Perhaps then they’ll be more willing to explain the way of things in this part of the world.”
    I looked around at the inside of the marvellous little church. “Assuming we can persuade them to come here at all.”
    It wasn’t long before my suspicion that the islanders were engaging in blasphemous rites became inextricably bound to the phenomenal storms. These queer cloudless and rainless atmospheric disturbances crackled over the island with an almost clockwork regularity. Each night, when the first snap of electrical energy sounded, the men took up their spears and disappeared into the thick foliage—a fact that piqued my curiosity to such an extent that, one morning, I armed myself with my revolver, found the place where they’d pushed into the jungle, and followed their faint trail. It was a long and uncomfortable hike—the dawn’s dew quickly made my clothes sodden and thorns nicked at the skin of my hands and face—but I pushed on, determined to solve the mystery of their nightly excursions.
    The path led to a small glade at the summit of a steep hill. It was crowded with white flowers whose cloying scent made the atmosphere so thick and sickly that my senses began to swim. I held my wet shirtsleeve over my nose and mouth, stepped forward, and noticed that something was lying in the middle of the space, its inky-blue form half-concealed by the blooms. Hesitantly, I approached it, an inexplicable chill crawling up my spine.
    It was a corpse—eviscerated, beheaded, slashed, torn, and rendered impossible to identify. However, as I gazed at it, spellbound, one horrifying fact gradually overcame me. Though vaguely humanoid, the thing was neither man nor woman. It wasn’t any beast that I recognised. I didn’t know what manner of being it was.
    Staggering back, I tripped over the dried husk of a severed limb and saw that there were many more of the dead things strewn around the