Polo Church had been there since 1869. According to the local Hawaiian mountain police, legend has it some priest came down from Jerusalem with the hair of Jesus. Anyway...this priest buried some under the church, kind of like a gift to the town for being so pure and all, so now all the people claim that it's a holy site, that it can cure whatever you got that's giving you crap...or cramps. The place can chase your demons away, and all that jazz. I even heard of some exorcisms being done there...although some said, “No, they be orgies, man. Orgies of the sexy kind.” In any case, it was a weird place, and I stayed away from it.
To get to the church, you had to cross a cheap bridge on Old Polo road and keep going up. It was a big building on a hill.
Can't miss it. But this bridge, it was where all the cool kids went under to get drunk and do the big poke.
I looked at the woods as we drove over that bridge, imagining old Granny in there, headless, still alive somehow...waiting for me...every now and then bumping into trees and tripping in mud puddles.
I think there were something like 3 or 5 cars. I was in the last car. My driver was an old woman with a sword strapped across her chest for easy access. The car's headlights picked up a figure of a man in the middle of the road. My driver complained something about disobedient teens and stopped. The man fell on the hood of the car. He looked scared to death.
“She's gone crazy!” he was saying to us. “That kid bit the boss, and now she's gone crazy!” He ran off into the forest, fell in a ditch, and that was the last I saw of him.
The old woman looked at me, her face sweating, then continued driving real slow. The other cars were all scattered on the road, all their red lights blinking. The old lady turned to me.
“I'm going on out there,” she said. “You better not do something dumb.” She pulled free her sword. “Remember, I's got this here sword. Got that?”
I wasn't afraid of her, but I played her game and nodded my head.
“Yes, ma'am, I got you.”
The old bag got out and walked to the front of the car...searching the area...holding her sword out and waving it around.
Money floated everywhere, dancing with the wind. The old lady tried to catch some. She brought her hand to her mouth.
“Jerry! Ca'leen! Where you guys at? If this is the surprise birthday party I've been hearing about, I'm not impressed!”
She saw something and turned around. Something struck her on the head, and she did a belly flop on the hood of the car.
Mum jumped on the woman's back and yanked out her spine. The skull flew out and left the woman's face behind. It hit the windshield like a wet mask. Mum threw the spine away and dug into the woman's shivering back. Mum looked like a pig in a trough, snorting and gulping and slurping and all that. I ran out of the car...ran for the church.
When I looked back to see if Mum was following me. She was gone. But I did see Vol all up in that old lady's corpse and munching away.