The Menehune and the Lava Tube

Puna, Hawaii

                It was the time when the ohi‘a blossoms bloomed like fat, red sparklers, and legend said that plucking one would bring the rain. Sam Scanlan was a short, tatted man who looked Polynesian but actually had no Polynesian in his bloodline at all. Still, Sam, who was always curious about Hawaiian superstitions, could not help himself as he passed by the flower for what was probably about the thirty-seventh time. When no one was looking, he quickly snapped off a red blossom. He put the blossom to his nose, but despite it being colorful, it did not smell fragrant. Then, not wanting to be caught holding it, he quickly discarded it, tossing it down a hill. Sure enough, less than twenty minutes later, the rain started to come down in buckets.

“No…no can believe it,” Sam said to himself, staring at the rain. There had been clouds on the horizon, he told himself. Still part of him thought, Maybe I caused this. Maybe plucking that blossom caused the heavens to cry. Still, he did get to knock off work early because of the downpour.

 Some of the guys working on the site were heading to a bar in Puna, and since Sam was far from home, he decided to join them. The bar, which was normally empty, was packed tonight, and the heat from all the bodies was making the temperature practically unbearable. Sam Scanlan wiped the sweat from his brow. Ugh, he was too short to see through this sea of bodies. Where did those three young ladies visiting Kona wander off to? He ordered another beer but was already feeling a little katsu. The reason the bar was so crowded out in North Puna in the middle of nowhere was that the volcano had started erupting again. Huge fountains of lava, spilling and spraying forth. Still, it was dangerous to get too close, so naturally thousands flocked there.

                As Sam approached the bar, a few of his co-workers were doing shots. They pointed at Sam and he felt the need to oblige. Why was he such a people pleaser? Sam waved them off, since he still had to drive back to the rental. He was staying pretty close in Puna, still the roads were dark and winding.

                “Dis Pohaku,” his coworker introduced Sam to a big Hawaiian that must have weighed over three hundred pounds. “He build rock walls, mostly for haoles, but it’s gud money.”

                Pohaku towered over Sam, who was suddenly very aware of his height or lack thereof. Sam shook his hand. “Wow, where’d you learn dat skill?” Sam asked.

“One Menehune taught me,” the big Hawaiian said seriously.

                Sam couldn’t tell if he was joking. A Menehune was sort of like a Hawaiian version of a leprechaun. They were small and able to perform magical deeds. They were said to be able to build amazing engineering feats in only one night, and, well, Sam was afraid of Menehune.

                There was an awkward silence; even the bar seemed to quiet down.

                “Nah, I jus been working around construction all my life,” Pohaku said, laughing out loud. He had the kind of laugh that made everyone else around him laugh, too. At the mention of Menehune, Sam felt uneasy. Sam had had a scare involving Menehune that he didn’t like to talk about. It was silly really; he had been in an accident and hadn’t been seeing things clearly. Sam was from Oahu but construction had gotten a little slow, so he had been offered some jobs on the outer islands. So here he was, on the Big Island of Hawaii only a few miles from the world’s largest active volcano, slamming brews in a bar. The night began to get wild and crazy, and Sam felt the need to extricate himself from the situation.

                “Where yo goin, brah, we gonna go drink some green bottles at Kazumura Cave,” his buddy Rico explained. He had one of the girls from Kona on his arm. Kazumura Cave was the largest lava tube in the world. Lava tubes are giant underground caves where lava had flowed, sometimes for miles. Sam remembered that when he was a boy, he had asked the teacher, “But I thought it was called magma when it was still underground. If these tubes are underground, why aren’t they called Magma Tubes?”

                The entire class had laughed. The teacher was dumbfounded.

                His friend Bryson had commented later, “That’s the dumbest question I’ve ever heard.”

                Sam didn’t think it was a dumb question at all. He thought it was profound, and he legitimately wanted to know the answer.

Kazumura Lava Tube was 42.5 miles long and 3,613 feet deep. It was enormous as if a giant worm had tunneled miles through the Earth. It was the kind of place where you didn’t wander off alone. And talk about spooky. Sam thought again of Menehune for some strange reason and was scared.

“I don’t know, isn’t that kinda hewa,” Sam asked, “especially with the volcano erupting and all?”

The big Hawaiian named Pohaku got a mean look in his eye. “You wanna tell me about hewa?” he asked Sam. Most Hawaiians had their land taken during the Mahele of 1848, and then their Kingdom was stolen about fifty years later. Some were still very angry about it.

                Sam put his hands up as if to surrender. “NO, I was just saying…” but Sam didn’t finish his thought. Sam, who normally fit in with the construction crew, felt oddly out of place in this country setting.

                The bar had started to clear out. Was everybody from the bar going to the lava tube? It looked that way. Young women were piling into the back of pickups, some with open bottles. This was deep country. As the headlights pulled away, the stars seemed to jump down at you as though they were falling from the heavens. Most of the cars had already started to pull away when Sam got to his car and noticed it had been vandalized. The back window was shattered, and someone had put a hole right through the glass.

“What da fuck?” Sam said to an empty parking lot.

Sam looked around suspiciously. Who would do this? The car was a rental so Sam didn’t particularly care, but he did worry that whoever did it might assault him if he continued on to the lava tube. Whoever had done it had used something thin and hard. The window was pierced with a small incision. Upon opening the hatchback, Sam saw something strange in the trunk of the rental car. It was a shard of volcanic glass not much larger than a nail. He picked it up. It was both glass and rock at the same time. He held the rock close to his face, and he could hear the faint sound of vibrating as if it were some kind of tuning fork. Although Sam didn’t know it, he was dealing with something that was supernatural.

“Huh, not possible,” Sam said to himself. Had this come from the volcano? But it was possible; it was true that cars and houses had been hit with falling volcanic debris. A man had even been hit by what could only be described as a lava bomb. He was in the hospital, in stable condition. Sometimes the volcano expelled flying projectiles, Pele help you if you happened to be in the way. His friend Rico pulled up in the passenger seat of a car. “You coming to Kazumura?”

“I don’t know. Check out my car,” Sam said with anger in his voice. Rico got out, inspecting the damage in the darkness.

“Holy shit, what are da odds?” Rico asked when Sam showed him the shard of glass. “Well, at least you wasn’t driving.” Sam was pacing back and forth like a caged tiger.

“You should still go. You can take care of this tomorrow,” Rico reasoned.

“I don’t know,” Sam said shrugging.

Eventually after sulking for a few minutes, Sam got in the car with the back window smashed and started it and headed toward Kazumura Lava Tube. A decision both he and Rico would come to regret.

Into the Tube

They parked in a dusty lot off the side of the road. This was deep country, only one house around for miles. The moon was nearly full, in the Hawaiian phase known as hua, yet after they left the trail, it was still difficult to navigate the jagged lava rocks. With no lights from a nearby city, the darkness seemed to jump in and drown everything else out. The ground was uneven, there were dips and sinkholes, and if one was not careful, he could easily wind up with a trip to the hospital. They had to cut through someone’s backyard; in the darkness you could see the house in the distance. A lone yellow light shone bright like an evil eye in the darkness, and, according to Pohaku, that house belonged to some haole.

“He no kea, he one gud brudda,” Pohaku explained.

Rico stumbled in the darkness. “It’s just up this way.”

“Are you sure we should be here?” Sam asked Rico.

“The tube is full of iwi,” Sam explained. Iwi was the Hawaiian word for bones. These were the bones of ancient Hawaiian chiefs, ali‘i, who had been buried deep in its chambers.

“It’s hewa,” Sam said one more time before ducking his head to enter the opening of the cave. They left the night sky behind; it was spooky as hell. They had to descend a ladder into some room people referred to as the Pit, but once they were inside, it reminded Sam of a rave or a Halloween party. Music blared and lights flashed while Rico and Sam were handed cold ones. There was a total of about maybe eighty to a hundred people, all dancing, vibing, partying under the ground.

Sam, who was very self-conscious, quickly forgot they were in a lava tube as he began talking to a group of young women he had been eyeing at the bar.

“What do you ladies do?”

“Really. I worked construction there.” To be honest, he wasn’t even sure of where they said they worked.

“Do you want to do shots?” one of the ladies said, pulling out a bottle.

“Sure,” Sam and Rico said in unison.

They descended deeper into the Earth, not knowing what was in store. The night began to turn. It was past 2AM and everyone was getting nice and sloppy. Someone lit a joint. The joint was being passed around.

“Are you sure we should be doing that in here?” Sam asked when the joint was getting close to him.

“You already drinking,” Rico reasoned. “What’s one more kapu?”

Sam didn’t have a good answer for that one. He had come to a sacred place, and he was defiling it, for lack of a better word. Sam was handed the joint; he could’ve very easily passed, but he took a hit and felt the madness of the pakalolo consume him. The night began to get hazy. The alcohol had almost run out when first the music stopped, and then the lights went out. The song Natural Mystic by Bob Marley was echoing throughout the cavern when things started to get strange.

There was that pulsing that seems to get louder and louder, and then Bob Marley started singing, “There’s a natural mystic blowing through the air, if you listen carefully now you will hear.” And then the music stopped. Pohaku, or whoever’s phone it was that was controlling the music, went over to try to restart the music, but the stereo seemed to have a mind of its own. It was frozen. From deep within the cavern there was the sound of blowing, and it was making the partygoers uneasy. Whether it was bats or something else, Sam looked at his empty bottle and began to regret coming here.

“Okay, no play wit me,” Pohaku said as the lights went POOF!!!

And the party was in darkness. There was confusion and uneasiness.

“What the fuck?” someone blurted out at the same time someone said, “Pohaku, do something.”

Pohaku continued to press the lifeless dark phone. “It not working,” he said, raising his hands up in surrender. The lights flashed on. Then off. Then on, and Sam could see people giving each other we should go looks. The lights went off. People began to gather their stuff. No one was panicking, but it was clear people wanted to get the hell out of there.

From within the cavern, the sound began to get louder, and a sharp breeze picked up, blowing the hats off a few partygoers in the darkness.

“Shit,” some guy yelled, grabbing his hat and fleeing up the ladder. The ground under their feet seemed to vibrate as if some chthonic being was waking up. Rico looked at Sam and there was legitimate fear in his eyes. The wind continued to blow. From deep in the tube there was a low guttural roaring and most of the people began to clear out. Party over.

“Probably jus bats,” said Rico, but Sam wasn’t buying it and neither was anyone else.

It sounded like a muffled roar, and it felt as if something was moving under their feet. A leviathan from deep beneath the Earth’s crust whose slumber had been disturbed, or so Sam imagined. There was a line to get up the ladder, and Sam and Rico had to wait till the end, until practically everyone had cleared out.

But that wasn’t the worst part. As Sam and Rico were ascending the ladder, Sam looked back and saw dozens of tiny glowing eyes staring back at him. He thought it might be his mind playing tricks on him, but when he rubbed his eyes, they were still there, staring back at him. He rubbed them again. It’s true , he was inebriated, but the small eyes were still there, peering back at him. He counted them. Ten to twenty. Maybe even thirty. Just staring. Were they really there? Maybe it was just an illusion of light or some mirage inside the lava tube. Before he grabbed hold of the ladder, he rubbed his eyes one more time, hoping the tiny eyes would be gone, but they were still there. Then he saw something that made him want to run. It sounds silly, really, but one of the eyes blinked. It was unsettling. Whatever was there, they were looking at him. They certainly weren’t a mirage. And Sam got this sense that he shouldn’t be there, that he had broken some ancient custom. Sam climbed the ladder as quickly as he could and was hurrying across the lava field back to his car.

Menehune Dreams

Sam had dreams about the eyes he had seen in the lava tube as he climbed the ladder. Those eyes, those eyes, those dreadful eyes. The eyes seemed to follow Sam wherever he went. He even had a dream that he awoke in his bedroom and the eyes were peering at him in the darkness just as they had done in the lava tube. It wasn’t real, he told himself. It was only a dream. He got up out of bed and turned on all the lights. There, that was a little better. The next day was slow and lazy. Sam was hungover and spent half the morning at the car rental place. The clerk seemed uncertain what to do. This had to happen occasionally, Sam guessed.

“Yes,” he explained to them. “It was hit by a piece of volcanic debris.” He hoped he had volcano insurance. The clerk stared at his computer. Eventually after what seemed like an eternity, they agreed to give Sam a new car. Sam was about to grab his new keys and hele on out of there, when he remembered the piece of volcanic glass in the hatch of the car. “Hold on a sec,” he told the clerk. He ran out to the car, popped the hatch and grabbed the piece of volcanic glass.

Later at the bar he couldn’t even explain why he had grabbed it.

“Why you take the rock?” Rico questioned.

“I-I-I don’t know, it called to me,” Sam stuttered.

“You gotta get rid of it,” Rico stated.

Sam reached into his pocket and pulled out the glass spike. Rico’s eyes got big and serious.

“Oh, you fukka, you brought it here, what you want Pele to take out this entire bar?” Rico was peeved.

“It fell from the heavens into my car, well, my rental car, but still…I feel like I was destined to have it,” Sam explained.

“It may have fell from the heavens, but it came from you know where,” Rico said pointing below.

Sam wanted to bring up the dozens of eyes he had seen when they were ascending the ladder but thought better of it. Three drinks later he would cease to care. The night began to move as nights often do when you’ve had too much to drink, and Sam soon forgot about the magical Menehune and the volcanic spike in his pocket. Of course, all that was about to change when the conversation somehow turned to nightmarchers. Sam wasn’t even sure how it happened. One minute they were laughing light-heartedly, and the next, things got fierce. Sam and Rico had been sitting at the back of the bar when a drunk Hawaiian man telling a story about when he was a teenager seemed to merge with their conversation. His name was Kaulu, he was one table over, and he was sort of a loose cannon.

“I rememeba it was jus afta I got my truck. We wen go searching for nightmarchers and all dat spooky stuff. Four Corners on da Old Pali Road,” Kaulu explained. A few people nodded. Four corners is on Oahu and is infamous for being haunted.

“I was wit a group of like six or seven, kane and wahine. We wen on kapu land and we heard da drums. We was sked. We wasn’t sure what for do, so we stripped naked and got on da ground.”

The story momentarily stopped. A waitress had come by, and Kaulu and the entire table were ordering more drinks. People were laughing, clinking bottles, drinking. One man was high-fiving another.

“Nice,” said one guy.

“You jus like git da wahine outta dem clothes?” another guy joked.

“Nah, we didn’t know what else for do,” Kaulu explained. “We was naked on da ground, my one friend he said he wen see one tree foot tall Hawaiian wit one helmet and spear running away. An we tink it was da chief Menehune,” Kaulu explained. The story was finished but Sam felt it his place to make one tiny correction.

“Couldn’t have been a Menehune though,” Sam said.

“Why?” someone from the crowd asked.

“Because Menehune aren’t three feet tall, they’re actually really small like the size of your hand,” Sam stated to the entire crowd.

Kaulu seemed to take offense, “Well how da fuck would you know, haole?”

Rico stepped between them.

Sam pulled out the volcanic spike. “They haunt me, that’s how I know. They FUCKING haunt me.”

Kaulu got to his feet, and for a moment it looked as if he might punch either Rico or Sam. He steadied himself, then he got this big grin on his face. “Dis fucka is totally lolo,” the drunk Hawaiian said, giving Sam a big drunken hug. Sam didn’t remember much after that. They did more shots, and Sam awoke with a pounding hangover. He dreamed the eyes were staring at him again. He tried to ignore them, but even as he was sleeping in his bedroom, he thought he saw the tiny eyes staring at him.

The next day’s work was torture, but Sam thought little of the tiny eyes or the Menehune that he claimed were haunting him. When the workday was done, he declined to go out for the third night in a row, he just wanted to take a bath and relax. He dimmed the lights and washed off the filth of the day’s construction work before he ran a bath. He was out of the shower and running a bath when, in his peripheral vision, he thought he saw something small scutter across the room. When he turned his head, though, there was nothing there.

“Hello?” he called out to the empty room, feeling a little foolish. He stopped the bath for a moment and took a lap from the bedroom to the bathroom. Everything seemed normal. He turned the water back on, adjusted the heat and was making himself a drink in the kitchen when the chittering started. He had heard this sound before on Oahu when he had been hired to build a well. The sound made his blood run cold.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

He looked around the quiet, empty room.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

There it was again.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

Probably just a gecko, he said to himself, though he knew geckos made a distinctly different sound.

Yup.

Just a gecko.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

The sound seemed to be coming from within the room.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

“STOP,” Sam yelled.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

 “FUCK,” Sam yelled out to the empty room, and then because he figured he should finish the thought, “Please… just stop…STOP FUCKING WITH ME!!!” And then Sam realized they were not fucking with him; it was the rock. They were fucking with the rock. He hurried across the room to his pile of laundry on the floor. He found his pants. He pulled the glass spike out of his dusty pants that were lying on the floor.

“Do you want this?” Sam said holding the volcanic rock up. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

He didn’t know, but he knew who he could ask.

Hilo Town

Sam hadn’t seen his old friend Lepo Joe in close to two years; still he knew if he came knocking on his door he would be accepted with gratitude and aloha. He had known Lepo Joe over a decade ago when they had worked on rebuilding King Kamehameha’s heiau together. Lepo means dirty in Hawaiian, and Joe was constantly wearing surf shorts with a hole, a puka, in the back. The drive into Hilo town took over an hour, and Sam was already weary and wanted to get rid of the rock.

 I could just toss it out the window, he thought to himself. Who would know?

The Menehune would know, that’s who. 

They were watching. They are always watching, even now as I type this sentence.

Hilo isn’t so much a town as it is a few blocks of restaurants, galleries and shops near the waterfront. It is a quaint little town with a farmers’ market and ice ponds. Lepo Joe lived just beyond there, in a dilapidated little shack near the beach. It had started to pour as it often does in Hilo, and Sam waited in the car for the shower to pass. Sam took the rock out of his pocket. It was odd in itself; it was a rock but felt like glass, an odd phenomenon of the volcano. He turned it over in his hands, hoping it would offer him some clue as to what to do, but alas the rock did not speak.

As Sam was getting out of his car, he saw that a rainbow had formed between the mountains and the ocean. It was odd, but the rainbow seemed to be calling him, whispering to him like a siren. He thought he heard it call his name on the whispers of the wind, Ssssammm. For a moment he thought about following it. A voice in his head whispered, “The Menehune live under the rainbow.”

“One adventure at a time,” Sam said to himself.

The house was dark, and upon knocking, Sam found the door slightly ajar. Sam crept in and found Lepo Joe asleep on the couch with the TV on, but the volume turned down to zero. Lepo Joe slowly opened his eyes and got a big smile on his face.

“Brah, why you still asleep?”

“The early bird catches the worm, but the hibernating bear rests all winter,” Lepo Joe explained.

Lepo Joe was in surf shorts and no shirt. He got up off the couch and went to the fridge and got a glass of water. “Tully said you were here. I didn’t know you were working in Hilo.”

“I’m not,” Sam said holding up the volcanic rock. Lepo Joe’s smile disappeared from his face as he saw the spike.

“From Kilauea?” Lepo Joe said, pointing toward the volcano. Sam nodded. Sam told him the entire story, including him climbing down into the lava tube and the little eyes he had seen while ascending the ladder and then the noises in his room.

“Wow, that’s fucked up,” Lepo Joe said.

“Shit, maybe we should drink some awa,” Lepo Joe suggested. Awa or Kava is a drink that is served throughout the South Pacific. It tastes like muddy water and is a mild hallucinogen.

Lepo Joe stirred up a bowl and handed Sam a cup in a half-cut coconut. Sam took a sip, and his mouth immediately became numb.

“I had a friend who was tormented by the Menehune,” Lepo Joe said, staring into the bowl. 

“What did he do?” Sam asked.

“He killed himself,” Lepo Joe said softly, “but he had other problems with drugs and alcohol.”

“Yikes,” Sam said. “So will they ever go away?”

“Depends. You shouldn’t have been down there. Lava tubes are sacred. They were often used as burial chambers in ancient Hawaii. You added insult to injury by bringing alcohol to a sacred place and consuming it. You need to ask for forgiveness for drinking beer inside the lava tube and return the rock to the volcano, and you need to mean it,” Lepo Joe explained.

“Shit, really?” Sam complained.

“Yes, really…well, if you want the Menehune to leave you alone,” Lepo Joe explained.

“That’s it? Seems simple enough,” Sam stated.

“You’d think,” Lepo Joe said smiling, “but Menehune magic has a way of making simple things complicated.”

They ate vegetarian burritos and reminisced about the crazy times working on the heiau of King Kamehameha the Great. Sam left Hilo late in the evening. He had a lot to think about on the long drive back to Puna.

The Fires of Kilauea

Sam had not been seen for two to three days; he had not even called in to work on the construction site. The Menehune must have struck again, thought Rico. He was worried about his friend. When he showed up at Sam’s rental, he found it a mess and his friend not in good shape mentally. Sam looked pale and as if he hadn’t slept in days. He was a wreck.

Rico picked up a bunch of clothes all over the couch just so he could sit down.

“So I take it things are not well?” he questioned his longtime friend.

“Late last night,” Sam stammered. He was shaking, and then he collapsed to the floor.

Rico didn’t know what to do. Sam was clearly not himself. “Late last night in the darkness where you can’t see… I awoke, and the little eyes were staring at me,” Sam said in a voice that did not sound like his own. He sounded delirious, as if he might fly off the handle at any moment.

“Are the Menehune rhymes part of the delirium?” Rico asked.

Sam did not laugh, he just stared blankly.

There was another awkward silence.

“I need to get rid of this rock,” Sam explained.

“How you gonna do that? You can’t just walk up to the volcano and throw it in.”

Kilauea was massive, and tourists could look from a safe distance but not really get close to the caldera. It was a serious hazard, and every year there was always a curious tourist who ended up falling in and becoming what locals called a pupu or appetizer.

“I think I know a spot,” Sam said, “but can you come with.”

Rico knew Sam couldn’t do it without him.

They took off work and began to drive skyward to where the land turns gray and the fog envelops the land. It reminded Rico of winter when he had visited places up North on the mainland. The domain of Madame Pele, where all plant life ceased to exist, and the land is barren and lifeless.

Past the visitor center there is a little trail where nature appears to be untouched under the haze of the volcano. They parked and got out. The trail started out like most of the volcano; it was gray and desolate, and there were a few ohi‘a lehua trees that had withstood the lava, but the ground was mostly gray and cracked. As they walked through the dried lava field, on both sides were large green cliffs that seemed to wall them in on both sides.

Eventually they dipped into a valley with green trees and ferns that seemed untouched by the violence of the volcano. It was down this primrose path that they could supposedly cut toward the caldera and drop the rock in. At least in theory.

They climbed a set of stairs built right into the mountainside. They were about halfway to the caldera when Sam and Rico saw a steam vent. Just a small hole in the ground that emitted steam from time to time.

“Just drop it in there,” Rico suggested.

“I don’t think that’ll count; we need to drop it in the caldera,” Sam explained.

“What do you mean, count? Fuck, this is getting ridiculous,” Rico said.

Sam knew then that Rico didn’t believe his story about the Menehune. He was just humoring him. Still, he had come on the journey. He could’ve easily said no.

They came over a hill and Sam saw a familiar sight. It was a strange-looking flower that looked more like a bright red claw. It was called Nuku i‘iwi in Hawaiian, and Sam understood it meant the Menehune were close. He didn’t dare tell Rico.

Last time the flowers were blue, this time they’re red. What does that mean? Sam thought to himself. He thought about asking Rico, but decided against it. He suspected they were red because of the volcano and lava, but what did that mean?Maybe nothing.

Sam stopped, looking around suspiciously. He thought he saw something move beyond his field of vision, but it was probably just his mind playing tricks on him.

“What’s wrong?” Rico immediately asked, picking up on Sam’s anxiety.

“They’re close,” Sam said quietly.

“Who’s close?” Rico asked.

“The Menehune,” Sam said very quietly.

“Brah, you’re losing it,” Rico said.

“Come on,” Rico said, heading up the trail, “let’s get this over with.”

They had gone another hundred yards when they heard the strange reptilian birdcalls.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

At first it was far away, but then it got clearly closer.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

“Dat’s them,” Sam said again very quietly.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

“Okay, this has gone far enough. I’m pulling da plug,” Rico said.

“Huh?” Sam was confused.

“This is crazy and someone’s gonna get hurt…returning a rock to the volcano over a silly superstition,” Rico said loudly.

“It’s not a superstition,” Sam said, still whispering. “The Menehune, they’re real.”

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

Sam had his finger over his mouth, telling Rico to be quiet. “That’s them.”

Rico was going to walk away, but he feared Sam might die out here alone on the slopes of Kilauea.  

“The eyes you saw, they weren’t real. It’s a figment of your imagination,” Rico tried to reason with him.

“KKKi…TTTi…. KKKi…. TTTi.”

“Dey close,” Sam whispered.

Rico knew he had to follow his friend.

They continued down the trail broken by the mighty Kilauea.

There were more of those claw-like red flowers. Sam knew in one local legend that the Menehune could supposedly put the flower of the Nuku i‘iwi behind their ear and turn invisible. Menehune magic. It was some little kid cartoon bullshit, yet many Hawaiians believed it, and Sam had, in fact, seen Menehune before. It wasn’t something he liked to talk about or even admit to, but he had seen the small creatures, and he knew they’d never leave him alone if he didn’t do what was pono or right.

“Remember we saw them last time but they were blue?” Sam explained.

“Brah, dey jus flowers.” Rico had a sad expression on his face.

The wind started to blow, and there was a real sense of something, a force of nature or something far more sinister, pushing back on them. They could see the caldera in the distance, and Rico feared they somehow wouldn’t be able to get there.

“Let’s fucking get this over with,” Rico said. He was more than a little freaked out.

The air began to get extremely hot though the heat was emanating from the ground.

“It’s just over that ridge,” Rico said pointing in the distance. The ground beneath them had cracks everywhere. In the distance, they could see the smoke billowing up. The trail meandered for another hundred yards or so, and then promptly ended. There was a sign that read “DANGER: DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT, GROUND MAY BE UNSTABLE.”

Sam started to climb over the railing.

“Read the sign,” Rico said pointing.

“I have to toss the rock into the volcano,” Sam explained.

“Come on, brah, this is ridiculous, someone is going to get hurt,” Rico insisted.

“Just a little further,” Sam exclaimed.

“You gonna have to go alone,” Rico said frowning.

Sam hopped the railing and jumped down into the area dubbed dangerous. The ground cracked under his feet, and he thought he felt it buckle slightly. Sam looked back at Rico.

“Be careful,” Rico called out to him.

“I will,” Sam said confidently.

As Sam walked away he felt a loneliness engulf him and wondered for a moment whether he might in fact die on this mountainside, but shrugged it off. The Menehune will protect me, he said to himself.

The plant life was completely gone and there were blobs of magma that had dried looking like wet paint. There was no trail, and Sam had to make one himself; he could follow the smoke plume which was getting closer and closer like a fiery dragon. Rico watched as Sam faded away into the shimmering oasis that was the caldera of the volcano.

Rico would tell you he doesn’t believe in Menehune, but that would be a lie. Rico never saw Sam again. He obviously reported him missing and there was a helicopter search, but after a few days they finally gave up. Chalk it up as another victim of Pele. Rico regrets not going with Sam and deep down blames himself for his death. Was Sam really being haunted by a race of tiny Hawaiians that secretly lived in the forest? The idea seemed absurd. Still, sometimes Rico wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks he sees several tiny eyes peering at him from the corner of his bedroom, but then he reminds himself that Menehune aren’t real.