§ § § -- June 8, 1985
Saturday had rolled around again. Twenty-year-old Leslie Hamilton was up earlier than usual, making her way through the house to the kitchen, where Mariki was already preparing breakfast. It was not quite seven-thirty; breakfast was always served at eight, and the guests were due in at eight-thirty.
Mariki looked up in surprise at sight of Leslie. "Well, Miss Leslie, and what brings you down here so early in the morning?"
"Our pet rebel was on the rampage yesterday," Leslie replied, reaching around Mariki and plucking a slice of kiwifruit off a plate that sat on the counter. "I'd rather not meet her at breakfast if I can help it. I'll never get used to her crazy moods."
Mariki sighed. "She's lasted longer than any of the others so far," she pointed out.
"Unfortunately," Leslie agreed and popped the fruit into her mouth. "Is it all right if I take a plate of fruit with me? And maybe a slice or two of cinnamon toast, if it's not too much trouble."
"All right, just this once," Mariki replied, with the air of a cantankerous grandmother indulging a soft spot for a favorite grandchild. "But you be sure to bring that plate right back here when you've finished. I'll not have Mr. Roarke finding ants in this house."
Leslie smiled. "Neither would I. Thanks, Mariki." She filled a plate with fruit while Mariki prepared the toast she had requested; and a few minutes later Mariki watched her leave, wondering what it was going to take to bring peace back to the household. Since firing Adam O'Cearlach over a year before and Lawrence's departure less than a week later, Roarke had already been through four assistants. Assistant number five, the current one, came from Hawaii and was named Kekipi. Leslie often referred to her as "the rebel"; the name had that meaning in Hawaiian, and it fit its bearer. Kekipi had arrived on Fantasy Island in early February and so far had done just well enough to pass muster with Roarke. Unfortunately, Kekipi and Leslie did not get along at all, and Kekipi had picked a couple of fights with Leslie before Roarke had decreed there be peace between them. It was an uneasy truce at best.
Leslie was almost finished eating when Roarke paused by her doorway and studied her for a moment. "Does Mariki know you're eating that in your room?" he asked.
She nodded. "I went down and asked her if I could."
"Why so early?" Roarke asked. "Were you that hungry?"
Leslie glanced at him reluctantly and shrugged. "I just thought it might be better, considering Kekipi's mood yesterday. She was really on a tear, and I didn't want to be around her any more than I absolutely had to."
Roarke sighed softly. "What is it about you and Kekipi that prevents the two of you from getting along?" he asked rhetorically. Already he had turned toward the stairs, and so missed the gargoyle face Leslie made. She knew Kekipi had an enormous crush on Roarke, and Kekipi was jealous of Leslie, in spite of the fact that Roarke and Leslie were father and daughter. But so far, Roarke appeared to be unaware of this, and Leslie had no intention of enlightening him. The fact in itself wouldn't be cause for Kekipi's dismissal, as much as Leslie would have liked it to be. Kekipi wasn't as good an assistant as Lawrence had been, and she was nowhere close to being in Tattoo's league, in Leslie's opinion; but she had yet to make a really major mistake. Maybe this weekend, Leslie thought, as she so often did. Enough time had passed that this hope, so optimistically entertained in Kekipi's early weeks of employment, had degenerated to merely a little habit she couldn't seem to break. It crossed her mind every Saturday morning and whenever it did, it made her roll her eyes in a yeah, right reaction.
At eight-twenty she left her room, returned her plate to the kitchen and met Roarke and Kekipi on the porch. Kekipi had just pushed the button to ring the bell and was standing beside the post on which it had originally been mounted for Lawrence. Ever since Tattoo had left, not one of his parade of successors had actually climbed into the tower to ring the bell, and Leslie suspected only the birds ever went up there anymore.
Roarke greeted Kekipi, who replied with a stiff "Good morning, Mr. Roarke" and ignored Leslie entirely. Roarke had gone back to using the red station wagons with the candy-striped canopies after Lawrence had left, and this always meant that Leslie and Kekipi had to share the middle seat while Roarke sat up front with the driver. Fortunately, they managed to hold the peace on the way to the plane dock, and took their usual places while the natives lined the landing ramp and the band prepared to play its welcoming song.
But both young women were shocked out of their mutual antipathy when their first guests disembarked from the charter plane. A man and woman who appeared to be in their mid-to-late fifties walked one on either side of a younger man wrapped in a straitjacket, guiding him along. It was Kekipi who recovered first. "Mr. Roarke, are you opening an insane asylum here?" she demanded.
"No, that is not the reason that young man is wearing the straitjacket," Roarke informed her. "His name is Teppo Komainen, and the couple with him are his parents, Jaakko and Tellervo. They come from Tampere, Finland, and their fantasy is unique in my experience."
"And it would be…?" Leslie prompted, her eyes fixed on the straitjacketed Finnish boy.
"It appears that young Teppo has been…possessed by some ancient Finnish god," Roarke said slowly, watching the Komainens as they paused next to a talkative parrot. Neither of the parents seemed to be aware of the bird's raucous squawking; all their attention was on their son. "This has been going on for some time, as I understand it, and has gradually worsened until the young man has grown so violent under the influence of this god that it has been necessary for his parents to restrain him as you see now."
Leslie stared at Roarke in horror. "I hope you can do something for him," she said. "What an awful way to live. Do you think he's aware of being possessed?"
"We'll find out in a little while," Roarke promised her. He turned then to introduce the next guest, but the weekend's other fantasy was completely lost on Leslie. There was something almost morbidly fascinating about the Komainen family's fantasy, and she was determined to be a part of it, no matter what Roarke might have to say.
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At ten that morning, the Komainens came to the main house, with Teppo still straitjacketed. Roarke welcomed them inside, motioned the parents to sit in the two club chairs in front of his desk, and sent Kekipi on an errand that was calculated to take at least two hours. Leslie took up her usual post at the corner of Roarke's desk, to his right; Teppo, quiet for the moment, stood between his parents' chairs. Roarke sat down and leaned forward in his own chair, regarding his guests with lively interest.
"In your original letter, you requested only that I try to free Teppo of his affliction; you provided very little detail," he began kindly. "But in order to have any kind of direction in which to proceed, I must know exactly what has happened to your son. Every detail is important, so I must ask you to try to recall as much as you can, from the time Teppo was first affected."
Jaakko Komainen glanced nervously at his wife, then at Teppo, and finally sighed gently. "I am a simple man," he said, speaking with a heavy Finnish accent. "I speak English not so well, so I let my wife tell you. And perhaps my son if he has his mind."
"'Has his mind'?" echoed Leslie.
"Sometimes," Tellervo Komainen said, "Teppo is himself. He speaks and acts normally, and we can communicate with him during those times. I don't know how the flight here affected him; he's hardly spoken since we left the airport in Helsinki yesterday morning." Her English was excellent, and she spoke with a noticeable British inflection behind her own native accent. "But he's been calm, and for now he seems to be under control."
"Why the straitjacket, then?" Roarke queried.
"In the last month or so, he's become so physically violent that we've found ourselves having to restrain him to keep him from inflicting bodily harm on others. He strikes out without any apparent rhyme or reason to his attacks -- he simply whips his arms around, kicks out with his feet, leaps about in the attempt to reach the person he wants to hurt. The only way to prevent this has been that straitjacket." Mrs. Komainen stared painfully at Teppo for a long moment before turning back to Roarke. "It absolutely breaks my heart to have to do this to him. He's my child, and a mother's instinct is to protect her child. Instead, we have to protect ourselves from him."
Roarke nodded slowly, sympathy gleaming out of his dark eyes. "How often is Teppo lucid now?"
"Less and less as time passes," Mrs. Komainen replied. "He seems to spend more and more of his waking hours under the influence of this…thing. We only recently discovered exactly what was wrong with him. We entertained a scholar of the Kalevala -- the Finnish national epic -- and he saw Teppo's condition firsthand. He thought there seemed to be something about it that struck a chord with him, and he did a great deal of research before finally drawing the conclusion that Teppo has been possessed by an evil god called Lempo."
Roarke nodded again. "You mentioned this god in your letter. As I understand it, Lempo is the god of evil and the lord of demons; he is purported to be the source of much misfortune and disease. It appears to me that, through your son, Lempo has been trying to bring about the aforementioned misfortune by causing Teppo to attempt to hurt those around him." He paused, thinking for a moment. "When did all this begin?"
Mrs. Komainen drew in a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment. "It started just over a year ago," she said. "Teppo had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday. That very evening, he picked up the gift his sister had given him and threw it at her with all his strength. She had a gash on her head that required ten stitches to close. When we turned on him, he claimed not to remember what he had done. It was only the first in a long string of such incidents, and the next one didn't occur for a few days. The episodes gradually increased as time passed, and Teppo spent more and more time raging and lashing out at everyone around him. Now he's under the possession of this god more often than not. We're desperate by now. Just before we got your letter telling us you had accepted our fantasy request, Teppo actually made an attempt to kill his youngest brother. We were debating what to do when your letter arrived." She leaned earnestly forward in the chair. "You're our last hope, Mr. Roarke. If you can do nothing for our son, then no one on earth can."
Roarke settled back in his chair and contemplated the situation at some length. Meanwhile, Leslie gazed at Teppo, trying to imagine what kind of person he must be. He was a rather good-looking young man, with a shiny mop of pin-straight dark-blond hair that fell almost into his gray eyes. He was a little taller than she and a touch too lean; his attractive face was sculpted with clean, sharp lines, and he had a narrow, straight nose and full lips. There was just the slightest cleft in his chin. At the moment he stood slightly slouched, held prisoner by the straitjacket, arms bound tightly to his sides. He was expressionless, his eyes gazing at nothing, as though he were elsewhere mentally. She studied him minutely and found herself hoping that Roarke would allow her to lend whatever help she could, however little it might be.