The Presence

CHAPTER 15

Katharine came totally awake in an instant, her motherly instincts on full alert, knowing without doubt what had awakened her.

After all, how many times before had she been jolted from sleep exactly this way, sound asleep one moment, wide awake the next?

More than she wanted to remember.

She lay in the darkness, praying that she was wrong, praying that it wasn’t happening again. And listening.

Then she heard it — the sound that must have awakened her.

It was coming from Michael’s room, and it was the terrible racking gasp of someone who is unable to fill his lungs with air.

Getting up from her bed and snatching a thin robe from the chair in the corner, she raced for her son’s room.

There was a silvery glow all around him, and he knew he was in the water again.

He also knew it was night.

And that he was alone.

Fear shot through him: you were never supposed to dive alone.

He turned in the water, trying to orient himself.

Where was the bottom? He gazed downward, peering into the depths, but the silvery glow seemed to go on forever. There were no fish, no heads of coral, no sandy bottom rippled by currents.

He rolled over, peering upward.

No glimpse of the surface. All he could perceive was the same silver-lit expanse spreading endlessly away.

He felt his heart start to beat faster, could even hear it in the silence of the deep.

How deep?

But how deep could he be? He wasn’t wearing a diver’s suit — not even a wet suit.

The pulse of terror pounding in his ears, he realized that not only were his friends not with him, but he wasn’t in the safe confines of the small pool at the end of the lava flow, either.

He was alone in the vastness of the ocean.

Except he wasn’t alone.

There was something else — some presence — nearby.

He could feel it, just out of his range of vision.

Panic reached for him with the grip of tentacles grasping their prey.

He twisted around in the water, searching for the unseen presence, catching just a flicker of it: a figure, ghostly pale in the water, gazing at him.

The tentacles wrapped themselves around him.

He felt the presence again, closer this time, and whirled in the water.

Again he caught just a flash of it before it vanished.

And then he saw another and another: Ghostly wraiths in the water, almost without shape or form, but starting to close in on him.

He had to get away from them.

He started swimming, but the water seemed to have turned to sludge, and he could barely move his arms and legs. Then he felt something clammy on his leg, felt one of the beings touch him, and he tried to jerk away.

They were all around him, surrounding him, wrapping themselves around his body so tightly that he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

Air!

He was running out of air!

He redoubled his efforts to thrash out against the wraiths, but they were twisted around his chest now, squeezing tighter and tighter until he knew it no longer mattered if there was any air left in his tanks, for he no longer had the power to breathe.

He was going to die, drown alone in the sea!

He thrashed out once more, lunging this time with enough force to jerk himself out of the nightmare world in which he’d been entrapped.

Coming awake, he rolled off the bed and onto the floor, and lay still for a moment, struggling to catch his breath, wrestling against the wraiths that still constricted him.

His sheet!

He tore at it, finally pulling it loose and shucking it off, but still he couldn’t catch his breath.

It was as if the nightmare were still upon him, though he knew he was wide-awake.

Suddenly the darkness of the room was washed away by a blinding glare, and in the sudden whiteness he saw one of the apparitions from the sea, nearly invisible in the surrounding brightness, looming over him.

With a great agonizing gasp, Michael finally succeeded in sucking air into his constricted lungs. Jerking the window open even as he rose from the floor, he fled out into the night.

“Michael!” Katharine called as her son dove through the window. “Michael, don’t! Let me help you!”

If he heard her, he gave no sign, and by the time she reached the window a second later, he was gone, swallowed up by the darkness as completely as if he’d vanished from the face of the planet.

Wrapping her robe more tightly around her, Katharine found a flashlight and went out onto the veranda, snapping the porch light on, but turning it out again immediately as she realized it blinded her to anything beyond the circle of its own illumination. As her eyes readjusted to the darkness, she switched the flashlight on and played its beam over the small clearing in which the house sat.

Nothing.

Nothing except the shadowy grove of eucalyptus, the ancient trees surrounding her like giants out of a dark fantasy. As the light passed over their twisted trunks, they seemed to come alive, moving in the darkness, their limbs reaching out to her.

No! she told herself. They’re just trees.

“Michael!” she called again. “Michael, come back!”

Again there was no answer, but she was almost certain he must still be able to hear her. And if he was running through the eucalyptus grove, why couldn’t she hear him?

But of course she couldn’t — his bare feet would be all but soundless on the thick carpet of leaves that covered the ground, so sodden from the frequent rain that they barely cracked under the leather soles of shoes.

She circled the house, then went to the edge of the clearing and circled the area again, using the beam of light to penetrate as deeply as she could into the dense stand of trees.

Finally she returned to the house, but stood on the veranda, trying to decide what to do.

Search the forest?

To go alone into the eucalyptus grove and the rain forest beyond would be to risk getting lost herself.

Call the police?

And tell them what? That her asthmatic son had run away in the middle of the night? When they heard how old he was, they would tell her to call back in the morning.

But what had possessed Michael to run from her that way?

Obviously he’d had another nightmare, and this one must have been far worse than the first. Although she’d barely had a glimpse of him in the moment before he bolted through the open window, she’d seen the terror on his face.

His eyes were wide and his mouth stretched into a rictus of fear as if he were gazing upon the evil countenance of a demon that was attacking him.

But it had been only her, clad in her white robe, reaching out to him.

Then he was gone, diving headfirst through the window, rolling once on the veranda before leaping to his feet and sprinting across the clearing, disappearing into the blackness of the night even before he reached the forest.

If the forest was where he had headed.

And wearing nothing but a pair of Jockey shorts.

For the first time, she despised the isolation of the house. Why had she ever taken it? There were neighborhoods all over the island where there were streetlights, where she would have seen him running, known at least in which direction he had gone.

Where there were neighbors who might have seen him, too, and been worried about a boy running through the night in nothing but a pair of undershorts.

But up here there was nothing but darkness in which he could easily hide, with only a scattering of houses he could skirt around if he didn’t want to be seen.

Maybe she should just wait.

Maybe, when the terror of the dream had finally released him from its grip, he would come home again.

As Katharine turned to step back into the house through the French doors, she noticed her eyes were stinging. Then, as she rubbed them with her fists, she noticed something else.

The winds had died, and the rustling of the leaves of the eucalyptus trees had stopped. Other than the faint chirping of a few frogs and insects, the night was silent.

And the air had turned heavy, laden with the dust and gases being spewed out from the eruption on the Big Island.

If it was making her eyes sting, what must the vog be doing to Michael? Was that what had happened? Had he awakened to find his lungs choking on the pollution that, until a moment ago, she herself hadn’t even noticed?

She moved through the French doors, closing them behind her, then went through the house and switched on every light, both inside and out, turning the little bungalow into a beacon in the night.

If Michael tried to come home, at least he would be able to see the house.

Then she sat down to wait, already wondering how long she could stay here alone, worrying about him, and whom she would call when finally she could stand it no longer.

But of course she already knew whom she would call.

Rob Silver.

And he would come, and help her, and help Michael.

If, that is, they could find Michael.