Chapter Text
The sky over Maluku did not clear when the Japanese surrendered.
Instead, it turned the color of bruised lard.
No one remembered exactly when the blue disappeared. They argued about it constantly. Some claimed it had happened overnight. Others swore the discoloration had spread gradually, as though the heavens themselves were suffering from a hidden disease.
Old women in Ambon whispered that Allah had closed His eyes. Former KNIL soldiers insisted that volcanic ash from the Banda Sea had poisoned the air. Fishermen claimed the clouds had begun moving against the wind.
Lieutenant Hendrik van de Berg no longer cared which explanation was true.
He only wished the sky would stop moving.
It never moved visibly. Not enough for anyone else to acknowledge it. But every afternoon, while sitting alone inside the rotting colonial administrative office overlooking Ambon Bay, Hendrik watched the clouds shift like enormous muscles beneath translucent skin.
He had stopped mentioning it.
People already looked at him strangely.
The year was 1946. The war had ended nine months earlier. The Japanese had surrendered. The Australians had left Ambon and handed the ruins back to the Dutch. Somewhere in the hills, Indonesian nationalists were organizing.
Everything was supposedly returning to normal.
Yet no one was fighting.
Everyone was vomiting.
The first cases appeared three weeks after the Americans dropped the second sun on Nagasaki.
At first, the fishermen blamed undersea earthquakes. Then volcanic activity. Then spirits. Then one another. Human beings required causes. They could endure almost anything if it had a name.
But uncertainty had settled over Maluku like mold.
The sea changed first.
Skipjack tuna floated belly-up along the shoreline. Crabs crawled out of the surf with shells softened like wax. The water grew thick and yellow, coated in a greasy film that looked like marrow or rendered fat.
Children poked it with sticks.
Three of them died before the week was over.
Nobody could explain why. Doctors called it food poisoning. Priests called it sin. Traditional healers spoke of disturbed ancestors. Everyone blamed something.
No one believed anyone.
Then came the fog.
It rolled in every evening after sunset. Not white. Yellow—the color of infected wounds.
The smell arrived first: scorched hair, sour vinegar, burned teeth. It worked into uniforms, bedsheets, drinking water, and dreams.
Especially dreams.
Hendrik no longer slept properly. He drifted, surfaced, and sank. Sometimes he woke standing beside his bed, unable to remember rising. Once, he found mud on his boots despite not having left the building.
Another morning, seawater covered the floor beneath his desk.
He stared at it for nearly an hour.
No rain had fallen. The pipes had collapsed months ago. Still, seawater had somehow appeared inside the office.
He called for the servant who cleaned the building.
The man arrived, looked at the puddle, and shook his head.
“Clean it,” Hendrik said.
The servant took one step backward. “No, Lieutenant.”
“You heard me.”
“That water came from below.”
“There is no below.”
The servant’s face tightened. He made a sign against evil, then left.
By afternoon, the water was gone. No stain remained. No salt crust. Nothing.
As though it had never existed.
Hendrik never mentioned it again.
Strange things were becoming common. Common things had become strange.
Food tasted like copper. Milk curdled within minutes. Cats disappeared. Birds flew inland and smashed themselves against walls.
And everyone—everyone—was vomiting.
Not merely ill. Terrified.
Women vomited while praying. Men vomited while digging graves. Children vomited in their sleep. At night, Hendrik could hear entire neighborhoods gagging in unison.
Sometimes he imagined the island itself was trying to expel something lodged in its stomach.
Sometimes he imagined something beneath the island was trying to emerge.
He hated that thought.
Once it entered his mind, it never left. It nested there. It multiplied.
Like worms.
“Lieutenant?”
Hendrik looked across the office.
Sutopo sat in the chair opposite him.
Or what remained of Sutopo.
Three months earlier, the young clerk had been handsome, bright-eyed, and ambitious. Barely twenty. He had wanted to study law in Batavia, or so he had told Hendrik during the first weeks of the occupation’s aftermath.
Now the skin around his jaw hung in gray ribbons. Clear fluid leaked constantly from the corners of his mouth and gathered beneath his chin.
The worst damage was to his eyes.
His eyelids had retracted two days earlier. No doctor understood why. Sutopo could no longer blink. His eyes remained exposed, wet and glassy, fixed on whoever happened to be speaking.
At the moment, that was Hendrik.
The room smelled of iodine, cigarettes, and rot. Flies gathered around Sutopo’s wounds, but none landed. They circled, buzzed, and retreated as though frightened.
“The fishermen from Seram say it has no eyes,” Sutopo said.
His voice sounded like dry palm leaves scraping together. His mouth moved too slowly, as if the muscles were forgetting their purpose.
Hendrik lit another clove cigarette from the stub of the previous one.
“What has no eyes?”
“The thing in the water.”
“There is no thing in the water.”
Sutopo tilted his head. The movement made a wet clicking sound in his neck.
“The fishermen say it is a mountain that breathes like a man.”
Hendrik exhaled smoke through his nose. His fingers trembled—not from fear or exhaustion, but from a private vibration beneath the skin.
Like a second pulse.
It had begun five days earlier. The NICA doctors had examined him, taken blood, and found nothing.
“Thermal anomaly,” Hendrik said. “Possibly caused by volcanic activity. A pressure event beneath the seabed. Toxic gases released through underwater vents.”
“You have said that before.”
“It remains the most probable explanation.”
“You have said that too.”
Hendrik turned toward the window. “Probability does not change because you are frightened.”
“I am not frightened.”
“Your face is falling apart.”
Sutopo’s mouth opened slightly.
For a moment, Hendrik thought he might laugh.
Instead, Sutopo said, “That is not the same thing.”
Rain tapped against the shattered windows.
Hendrik glanced up.
Sutopo did not move. He sat rigidly in the chair, eyes wide and lidless.
“The fishermen say the sea is dead,” he continued. “They say whatever killed it is coming up the beach to find a place to rot.”
Hendrik’s cigarette burned between his fingers.
“Which fishermen?”
“Men from Hitu. Seram. The eastern islands.”
“Names.”
Sutopo looked at him.
“What?”
“Give me their names.”
“You want to arrest them?”
“I want statements.”
“You want paper.”
“Paper is evidence.”
“Paper burns.”
“Everything burns eventually.”
Sutopo’s expression did not change, but something in his ruined face suggested amusement.
“That is what your doctors said about the first bodies.”
Hendrik stood.
The chair legs scraped against the floor.
“Enough.”
Sutopo watched him cross the room.
“What are you doing?”
“Going outside.”
“Why?”
“To see whether the harbor is still there.”
“And if it is not?”
Hendrik reached the window.
“Then I will write a report.”
He wiped a clear patch through the grime on the glass.
The harbor lay below in darkness. Fishing boats rocked against their moorings, their masts jagged against the yellow-black sky. No lights showed along the waterfront. Even the insects had gone quiet.
Hendrik leaned closer.
Nothing moved.
Then something struck the glass.
Tap.
He flinched.
A transparent smear slid slowly down the outside of the window. It was too thick to be rain. It clung to the glass in a trembling strand.
Another drop landed.
Tap.
Then another.
Tap. Tap.
Hendrik raised his eyes toward the roof.
For one terrible moment, he saw something inside the clouds.
Not a shape. Not a body.
A suggestion.
A curve vast enough to bend the horizon. A contour beneath the bruised sky, as though something unimaginably large lay behind the heavens themselves.
Watching.
Breathing.
Waiting.
The clouds shifted.
The enormous contour shifted with them.
Hendrik stumbled backward. His cigarette fell from his fingers and struck the floor.
He blinked.
The sky was empty.
Only clouds. Only the harbor. Only his reflection in the dark glass.
Except his reflection was not breathing.
Hendrik froze.
His own chest rose and fell. The reflection remained perfectly still.
Then it smiled.
He spun around.
The office was empty.
Sutopo’s chair sat abandoned, still warm. The young clerk was gone.
A wet trail crossed the floor and disappeared into the dark hallway.
“Sutopo?”
No answer.
Hendrik drew his pistol.
The hallway beyond the office stretched through the abandoned administrative building, past cabinets of Dutch records and termite-eaten walls. Darkness pooled beneath every doorway.
“Sutopo, answer me.”
Something dripped in the corridor.
Plink.
Hendrik stepped forward.
The smell had changed. The iodine and rot remained, but beneath them was another odor—salt, hot stone, and something sweetly putrid.
He raised the pistol with both hands.
A sound came from deeper within the building.
Cough.
Hendrik stopped.
The noise was too deep to belong to a man. Too slow to belong to an animal.
It sounded as though a mountain had cleared its throat.
The walls trembled.
Dust fell from the ceiling.
Hendrik’s second pulse throbbed beneath his skin.
Cough.
This time, the sound came from below.
Not from the office. Not from the hallway. Not even from Ambon.
From somewhere beneath the sea.
Hendrik looked toward the harbor.
The boats had stopped rocking.
The yellow water was perfectly still.
Then, far beyond the breakwater, something moved beneath the surface.
Not a wave.
A rise.
A long, dark swelling that crossed the bay without disturbing the water around it.
Hendrik forgot to breathe.
The shape vanished.
A moment later, every dog in Ambon began howling.
Then the vomiting started again.
One house. Then another. Then an entire street.
The sound spread across the city in wet, retching waves.
Hendrik lowered his pistol.
At last, he understood why everyone was sick.
The body rejected poison.
The mind rejected madness.
And perhaps the world itself had seen something it was never meant to witness.
Now, like a dying animal, creation was trying desperately to throw it back up.