John Saul

by The Presence (v5) (epub)

  “Stop it!” Rob shouted, so loudly his voice carried over the roar of the rotor even without the help of the headsets. “Will you tell me what the hell you think is going on?”

  “I don’t think!” Katharine bellowed back. “I know!” She jerked her head toward the vista beyond the bubblelike cabin. They had crossed the coastline now, and the helicopter was speeding low over the water, directly toward the small island she had seen. “That’s not the Big Island, Rob. What is it? Does Yoshihara have another lab down there? Or are you just going to dump us into the ocean?”

  Michael, his complexion going ashen in the face of his mother’s fury, loosed his grip on the neck of the plastic bag, and the cabin began to fill with choking fumes.

  Instantly, one of Rob’s hands released Katharine’s arm and closed around the bag. “Careful with that!” he yelled. “You need that for about five more minutes. Don’t let it escape.”

  As Michael, almost hesitantly, took the half-deflated bag back from him, Rob swung around to face Katharine again. “It’s the wind!” he shouted. “We can’t go directly to the Big Island—Michael would never make it! But the wind’s carrying fumes from the eruption almost due west, so we should be able to catch the worst of them just on the other side of Koho’olawe. Then we can turn and fly due east, right into the fumes. It might be rough for the rest of us, but Michael should be able to breathe on his own. It’s longer, but at least he has a chance!”

  Katharine’s eyes bored into his, trying to read the truth.

  And what she saw was love.

  Love, and the agony that her doubt had caused him.

  Then, as if what she saw in his eyes might not be enough to convince her, she felt a shift in the attitude of the helicopter and heard the pilot’s voice coming through the headset.

  “Someone open a window. Let’s see if our boy can breathe.”

  His hands dropping away from Katharine, Rob twisted around and slid his window open. Instead of the fresh sea air Katharine would have expected, the air that filled the cabin was so laden with volcanic fumes that her eyes immediately began stinging.

  “Bingo!” the pilot yelled. “Don’t you love that vog?”

  As the helicopter finished its swing, Katharine searched for the great mass of the Big Island that should be rising out of the sea ahead, but Rob, reading her mind, shook his head. “You won’t be able to see it through the haze. But wait ten or fifteen minutes. Believe me, it’s still there.” Then he said to her son: “Well, what about it, Michael? Can you breathe, or did we take the wrong gamble?”

  Katharine turned to look at Michael. Once more, as he had shortly after the helicopter took off, he exhaled the fumes from the bag and inhaled the cabin’s air. He coughed once, hesitated, and tried again. After a long pause, while Katharine waited anxiously, he stuck his right hand out, thumb up. “It’s not great,” he said. “But I’m not feeling as bad as I did at school yesterday.”

  “Hang on to the bag, but just use it when you have to,” Rob told him. Then he grinned at Katharine. “And as for you, I forgive you your suspicions,” he said, as he drew her close.

  Half an hour later the helicopter, with both its windows wide open, was cruising along the Kalapana Coast southwest of Hilo. The entire mountainside was pocked with glowing vents, and Michael gazed in awe at the lava flows that oozed down the mountain’s flank like slithering, flaming serpents.

  Bathed in the eerie silver light of the moon, he could see the stone cliffs of the coastline being battered by the heaving ocean—an ocean made angry by the mountain’s attempt to invade its realm with spreading fingers of molten rock. The Pacific was waging an unending counterattack, hurling vast masses of water against the intruding rock and casting spume high into the sky like spent artillery shells being ejected from machine guns.

  Here and there along the battle’s front line, enormous plumes of steam gushed up where the ocean quenched the mountain’s fire, and from behind the lines, on the mountain’s slopes, clouds of smoke arose.

  The helicopter crossed the coastline and began moving up the flank of the mountain. Below, most of the terrain was barren lava without so much as an inch of topsoil covering it, though here and there a few scrubby bushes had gained a foothold. Almost everywhere Michael looked, steam or smoke belched forth from deep within the mountain’s bowels. The air reeked with the acrid smell of sulfur.

  He sucked it deep into his lungs, feeling the warmth that spread through his body as he absorbed the fumes. “Where are we going?” he shouted.

  “The pilot says there’s a clearing where he can set the chopper down,” Rob told them. “The idea’s to get you as close to these vents as possible.”

  In the distance, and two hundred feet above them, flames rose out of a crater like a beacon. As the pilot guided the chopper higher, rising above the caldera, they saw for the first time its demonic contents. Lava boiled with the fury of hell, flames leaped across its surface, evil fountains of molten rock shot high into the air, some of them breaking apart to drop back into the churning cauldron, others exploding into brilliant bursts of sparkling embers that drifted on the wind before cooling to the point where their fiery glow died away.

  The heat rose in waves, and above the gaping, hellish maw into which Michael was gazing, the air itself shimmered and danced. The flames took on a hypnotic quality that wrapped itself around Michael’s mind until he was staring at the spectacle with unblinking fascination.

  Only when the helicopter began to drop down toward the ground, and the lip of the caldera once more hid its fires from his view, did Michael finally turn away to see where they were going. A minute later the helicopter settled into something that seemed to him like an oasis in the desert of fire and lava. Somehow, in the vagaries of its flow, the lava had left a clearing in which stood a grove of scraggly kiave trees. On the ground, miraculously, a thin covering of grass still survived.

  Near the center of the clearing there was a fire pit, built of a circle of rocks very much like the one in the ravine where his mother had uncovered the skeleton.

  Beyond the fire pit were the ruins of a hut, its walls also built of lava, its roof long since caved in.

  The chopper settled onto the ground and the pilot cut the engine. As the roar died away and the great rotor slowed to a stop, an eerie silence fell over the four people inside.

  “What is this place?” Michael finally asked.

  “Used to be a campground,” the pilot explained. “This is all that’s left of it. It’s about the only place around here that’s still safe to land. Everywhere else, you don’t know what’s under you.”

  Katharine, feeling oddly disoriented by the sudden quiet, looked uncertainly at Michael, as if perhaps his breathing might have been somehow dependent on the power of the helicopter’s engine. “Well?” she asked.

  Pushing open the door, Michael scrambled out of the cabin and dropped to the ground, then turned and grinned at his mother. “I can breathe!” he yelled. “It worked! I can breathe!” Almost as quickly as his grin had come, though, it faded. His eyes flicked around the desolate landscape, taking in the darkness that was laced with patches of glowing fire and swirling smoke and fumes. “Is this the way it’s going to be from now on?” he asked, his voice quavering despite his effort to control it. “Is this where I’m going to have to live the rest of my life?”

  Katharine’s eyes met Michael’s and she felt a terrible sense of dread come over her.

  She had no answer for him.

  CHAPTER

  34

  Katharine and Rob sat side by side, very close together, a few feet from the small campfire the helicopter pilot had built. The pilot himself was hunkered down opposite them, poking at the fire with a stick. He was a lanky man, tall and skinny, named Arnold Berman—“but everybody calls me Puna”—whom Katharine judged to be in his mid-twenties.

  The wind had shifted, flushing some of the fumes from the small clearing, and Michael, his chest starting to hurt, had gone off i
n search of a fumarole, where the smoke and gases boiling up from deep beneath the crust of the earth would ease the pain in his lungs and give him the strength that oxygen no longer could. Katharine, terrified of losing sight of him even for a moment, wanted to go with him, but Rob stopped her.

  “Let him be, Kath,” he’d said. “Whatever happens to him—however this turns out—he’s going to have to deal with it. And so are you and I.”

  As exhausted mentally as she was physically, Katharine had reluctantly settled back, but ten minutes later she wished she hadn’t, for as the first flush of victory at having rescued Michael from Takeo Yoshihara’s estate began to fade, the full horror of her son’s condition set in. The alien landscape seemed to be closing in on her, with its perimeters oddly lit by tongues of flame that flicked up from the fire pits, while all around her there was a strange pulsating glow from the lava flows. When Puna had built the small fire, she’d been drawn to it less for its warmth than for its familiarity, and as the little fire seemed to hold the demons surrounding them at bay, she looked at the man who had flown them here, studying him for the first time.

  His dirty-blond hair was long, and he wore the standard Maui uniform of shorts, T-shirt, and sandals. He looked far more like a beach bum than a helicopter pilot. “Is there any way I can ever thank you enough for what you did tonight?”

  Puna shrugged. “Ken Richter was my best friend. We came to Maui together. If what Rob says is true, I wish I’d had a bomb to dump on that prick’s place after we picked you up.”

  “It’s true,” Katharine sighed as Rob slipped his arm protectively around her. “It’s all true.” She pressed closer to Rob and looked into his face. “What are we going to do?”

  “For the moment, all we can do is wait,” Rob told her. “But the way I figure it, as soon as it gets light, we should have some company.”

  Katharine shuddered. “Yoshihara’s going to come after us, isn’t he?”

  “Probably,” Rob agreed. “But if he thinks we’re going to be all by ourselves out here, he’s going to find out he’s wrong.” His arm tightened around her and his eyes rose to scan the sky. And there it was, right where Phil Howell had told him it would be. Glimmering in the blackness of a sky that had been washed all but bare of stars by the light of the fires burning around them, a single light hung far above them.

  A light that would shine more brightly with each passing night, but then—in a week or perhaps a month—would disappear.

  Disappear forever.

  The nova.

  “Look,” he said softly, guiding Katharine’s eyes to the brightening star. “That’s where it all came from.” Then, choosing his words very carefully, Rob began explaining to Katharine exactly what he and Phil Howell had discovered that night.

  The first light of dawn was washing the blackness from the eastern horizon when the sound intruded on Katharine’s dream.

  She was back in the Serinus laboratory on Takeo Yoshihara’s estate, but instead of rats, hamsters, monkeys, and chimpanzees, the cages each contained a little boy.

  The rows of Plexiglas boxes seemed to stretch on forever, and each of the aisles opened into another, forming a labyrinth that went on into infinity. Katharine saw herself running through it, searching for Michael, but there were too many cages, too many children, and all of them were reaching out to her, begging her to help them.

  She stopped finally, and opened one of the cages, but the moment she did, the child inside began to cough and choke, and when she picked up a little boy—a boy who looked exactly like Michael had when he was six—his coughing became convulsive.

  And the child died in her arms.

  She began running again, but now something was pursuing her, coming closer and closer, its sinister noise building to a crescendo.

  Whup-whup-whup …

  She tried to run faster, but the aisles stretched longer and longer before her, and with every turn, there were more of them to choose from. But no matter which way she turned, how many times she dodged from one aisle into another, her pursuer drew ever nearer.

  Whup-whup-whup …

  She cried out Michael’s name, praying he would answer her, that she would be able to find him before—

  “Katharine!”

  Her name! Someone was calling her name! But not Michael!

  “Katharine!”

  She jerked awake, the dream dissolving around her, and with a start remembered where she was. She’d escaped from the estate, and Michael was with her, and so was Rob, and they were safe.

  WHUP-WHUP-WHUP-WHUP!

  The noise was still there, and now that she was wide-awake, she knew exactly what it was.

  She struggled to her feet, ignoring the stiffness that had crept into her body as she’d dozed against Rob’s shoulder, still huddled close to the small fire Puna was nursing. “Where is it?” she asked, searching the brightening sky for the source of the noise.

  Then she saw it. Flying high and coming in from the direction of Maui, she instantly recognized Takeo Yoshihara’s helicopter. “Michael,” she whispered, clutching at Rob’s arm while her eyes remained fixed on the aircraft. “Where’s Michael?”

  “He hasn’t come back yet,” Rob told her. “Let’s go find him.”

  “There!” Takeo Yoshihara said, pointing to the slope of Kilauea where Arnold Berman’s helicopter was clearly visible in a small clearing.

  “Shall I land?” the pilot asked.

  “Not until we find the boy!” Takeo Yoshihara, a satisfied smile curling his lips, gazed down at the landscape below. Though the glow of the lava flowing through the cracked and fissured tubes was fading in the breaking dawn, the flames dancing above the fire pits and calderas were still visible, as were the plumes of smoke and steam from the fumaroles that lined the great fissure—the point where an immense chunk of the island of Hawaii would eventually slide away into the sea, creating a tidal wave a thousand feet high. It wouldn’t happen this morning, or tomorrow, or this year or next. Indeed, it probably wouldn’t happen in Takeo Yoshihara’s lifetime, or for generations to come. Which was too bad: a natural phenomenon of that magnitude and the devastation it would wreak, was something he would like to see. This morning, though, there were more important things to do than contemplate the scene below.

  The timing, as he had intended, was perfect.

  They’d taken off from Maui in darkness, but by the time they found the boy—and they would find him—it would be light.

  Light enough to pursue and capture him.

  Or to kill him.

  But still so early that there would be few witnesses. Only the mother, the besotted Dr. Silver, and their pilot, none of whom would survive.

  “Fly lower,” he ordered. “We should be able to see …” His words died on his lips as he caught a flicker of movement that was neither flame nor smoke nor any of the churning gases that swirled up from below. Raising the pair of Leica binoculars that hung from his neck, he peered downward. “Yes,” he said softly. “There he is.”

  Keeping the binoculars fastened on Michael Sundquist, Takeo Yoshihara began guiding the pilot toward the spot where the boy stood.

  Nearly two hours had passed, but Michael, mesmerized by the undulating rhythm of the fires dancing above the caldera’s surface, had long ago lost any sense of time. After he’d left the small oasis in the lava where the kiawes grew and the others could still easily breathe the air, he’d moved quickly through the tortured landscape. His senses, heightening every minute as his lungs absorbed the nutrients his body now craved, guided him from one vent to another. He’d stopped at each of them, breathing in the thick fumes that steamed out of the cracks in the earth’s crust, inhaling the pungent odors issuing forth from the fumaroles. Finally he’d come to the caldera. There, crouched at its rim, the night had closed around him, wrapping him in a blanket of darkness from which he watched in silent wonder as the fires boiled up from deep within the earth. Through the hours, the flames danced, weaving intricate patterns ab
ove the molten rock that seemed to Michael to throb like the heart of the planet itself. Now, as the black mantle of night began to lift from the mountain, he sensed a change coming.

  The rhythm of the flames seemed to intensify, as if they had some urgent message to impart before the brilliant fires of the sun made their own luminescence fade to invisibility.

  As he was released from the folds of darkness, Michael flexed his body, but found no stiffness in it, despite the hours of crouching near the edge of the caldera’s lip. Then he felt, more than heard, a new rhythm beat into his consciousness. At first he tried to ignore it. Finally, it became so strong that he tore his eyes from the pulsating flames and gazed upward.

  The helicopter hovering in the distance took on an iridescent glitter like that of a dragonfly searching for prey in the first rays of the rising sun. Michael watched it in fascination, but as it swooped down, moving steadily toward him, his fascination gave way to a tingling uneasiness.

  It was, indeed, a predator out hunting in the morning sun like a dragonfly.

  Hunting for him.

  But at the same time that he realized he was the prey for which the great metal dragonfly searched, so also came an absolute conviction that he must remain where he was, close to the fires, where smoke and fumes sustained him, and would also now, somehow, protect him.

  Rising to his full height, Michael waited.

  Katharine, with Rob right behind her, was stumbling along the rocky path that led out of the oasis and onto the lava flow when suddenly a shadow flicked over her. Reflexively, she looked up into the sky, then stopped in her tracks as she watched Takeo Yoshihara’s helicopter, hovering high above for the last several minutes, make a sudden descent.

  “They’ve found him!” she told Rob. “Hurry!”

  “Land!” Takeo Yoshihara commanded.

  His employer’s command ringing in his ears, the pilot searched for a likely looking spot, but found nothing. Already he was beginning to feel the effects of the churning thermals rising from the shattered landscape below, some of them so strong that they shot the helicopter straight up, but at the same time so narrow that by the time he’d adjusted for the added lift, he was out of it, and the aircraft would yaw giddily, or plunge for a second or two like an out-of-control elevator. “There’s no place to land,” he finally replied.