The Presence

CHAPTER 6

“You’re sure you don’t want me to drive you?” Katharine asked.

Michael stifled a groan. It had been bad enough on Friday, when she insisted on going with him to the school to register. It wasn’t like it was any big deal — all he had to do was fill out a couple of forms, and then they transferred all his records from New York through the computer. She’d only had to sign one form, and he could have brought it home, had her sign it over the weekend, and taken it back this morning. But no — she’d had to stand there peering over his shoulder like he was in the fourth grade or something, while all the kids who’d come into the office stared at him like he was some kind of geek who couldn’t even get himself into school without his mommy holding his hand.

And now she wanted to drive him to school on the first day.

“I think I can walk to the bus stop, Mom,” he said. “It’s right at the end of the driveway, remember?”

“Just asking,” Katharine told him, glancing at the clock and picking up her backpack. “I can drop you at the bus stop if you’re ready.”

Michael shook his head. “I’ve got half an hour before the bus.”

“Then you can clean up the kitchen, okay? And I’ll see you tonight.” Kissing him on the cheek, she made her exit before Michael had a chance to argue.

A moment later he heard the engine of the nearly worn-out car that Rob Silver had loaned them grinding in protest as she tried to start it. For a minute it sounded as if the battery was going to give up before the engine caught, but then he saw a great puff of exhaust burst from the tailpipe, and the battered four-wheel-drive Explorer jerked down the drive toward the road.

Finally safe from the embarrassment of having his mother drive him to school, Michael cleaned up the breakfast dishes, ignored the mess in his room, stuffed his gym clothes, running shoes, and a notebook into his book bag, and got to the end of the driveway just as a mud-streaked yellow bus appeared around the uphill bend.

Climbing onto the bus, he spotted an empty seat near the back of the crowded vehicle and started down the aisle.

He felt every eye on the bus watching him.

Watching him, and sizing him up.

He could almost hear the word that was going through their minds:

Haole.

“White.”

Josh Malani had warned him it was going to happen. “Some of the kids even got a special day here,” he’d said on Saturday while giving Michael his first lesson in body surfing. “Kill a haole day. ’Course they don’t actually kill guys with skin like yours. They just sorta try to change its color. Make it black and blue, instead of white.”

“You’re kidding,” Michael had replied, though he was pretty sure Josh wasn’t kidding.

Josh shrugged. “Hey, you guys came out here and stole everything, and ran everything your way for a couple hundred years. Times have changed.”

Still, Michael had hoped Josh wasn’t serious.

Now he knew he was.

Walking down the aisle, he suddenly felt like he was back in New York, with Slotzky looking for an opportunity to pick a fight. Except now there were half a dozen Slotzkys just on this bus, and God only knew how many waiting for him at school.

Should he look them straight in the eye?

That was the last thing you ever wanted to do in New York. If someone was looking at you, you just looked the other way, avoiding any direct eye contact.

Meeting someone’s eyes was a challenge.

Better assume it was the same here, he decided. Keeping his eyes carefully on the floor ahead of him, Michael worked his way down the aisle to the nearest vacant seat, slid onto it, and tried to make himself inconspicuous.

The bus continued down the hill, making three more stops. Though he could feel every single person who got on the bus staring at him, no one spoke to him.

It was going to be every bit as bad as he’d thought.

The bus finally pulled to a stop in the school parking lot, and as it began disgorging its passengers, Michael sighed with relief: maybe nothing as bad as Josh had predicted was going to happen.

Maybe they were only going to ignore him.

But then, as he started up the aisle toward the door, he stopped. Two boys — each of them much bigger than him — had hung back, apparently looking for something they’d stuck under the seat in front of them.

How dumb did they think he was?

And why the hell couldn’t Josh Malani have been on the bus with him?

Finally deciding they weren’t going to leave until he did, Michael started for the door again. As he approached their seat, one of the boys moved into the aisle. For a moment Michael thought he was going to block him.

Instead, the other boy started toward the door.

Michael hesitated. He didn’t want to look as if he were afraid of them. So what if they were both three inches taller than he was and outweighed him by at least forty pounds apiece? Looking scared was just what they wanted.

Michael kept moving. The second boy fell in behind him.

Right behind him — so close he could feel the boy’s breath on the back of his neck.

“Why don’t you pricks stay where you belong?” he heard the boy behind him mutter, not quite loudly enough so the bus driver would be able to hear. As the guy behind him spoke, the one in front of him stopped short.

The one behind him gave a hard shove.

“What the fuck you doin’, asshole?” the guy ahead of him demanded, whirling around to cast malevolent eyes on Michael. “You haoles all think you own the world. Well, you can eat my shit!”

Michael knew nothing he said was going to get him out of this. He braced himself for the fist that was about to plunge into his gut. Then he heard another voice.

“Not till you’re off my bus,” the driver said, standing and fixing Michael’s tormentor with a baleful glare.

The boy in front of Michael hesitated a moment, then turned and got off the bus. Michael, with the second guy crowding him from behind, had no choice but to follow. He readied himself for the confrontation and prayed that Josh Malani might appear. Even if Josh turned out to be no better than he at fighting guys twice his size, he might at least be able to talk these creeps out of killing him.

By the time he was out of the bus, the situation had changed, if only slightly. For the moment, at least, they were surrounded by a couple dozen other kids. Whatever Michael’s two tormentors were planning seemed to get put on hold, at least temporarily. The bigger one gave Michael the same kind of stomach-churning stare he’d seen in Slotzky’s eyes the day he’d gotten his black eye and the cut on his arm. “After school,” the boy said in a grating voice. “Or maybe tomorrow. But don’t worry, haole — we’re gonna put your face in it.” Then he turned away, and both he and his friend disappeared into the crowd of milling students.

As he watched them go, Michael wondered how much more of a punch this guy packed than Slotzky had back in New York.

Probably a lot.

The slight shift in the crust of the earth beneath the island of Hawaii was so small, and occurred so slowly, that for several hours it went unnoticed by anything except the machines.

The machines, of course, noticed everything, for that’s what they had been designed to do. Sensitive instruments perceived the small tremors that resulted as a new fissure opened deep in the bowels of the great volcano Mauna Loa, recording those tremors and reporting them to other machines.

No alarms sounded, no sirens wailed warnings of the tidal waves that can be generated by the sudden major shifts that sometimes occur on the ocean floor.

Instead, the machines whispered among themselves, passing the news of the activity beneath Mauna Loa from one information nexus to another, until, long before any man was aware of the movement, the computers of the world were already building models to project what the slight shifts might mean for the future of the planet.

Deep beneath the mountain, the magma, molten and seething, made its way toward the surface, oozing through the cracks and crevices the pressure from below had caused, widening them and filling them, gathering force from below to propel the climb upward to the surface.

And as the magma moved, the mountain gave way to it, and the tremors increased.

Men, as well as machines, began to notice.

Among the first on Maui to note the trembling in the earth beneath their feet were the technicians tending the array of telescopes at the top of Haleakala. Their computers were programmed specifically to alert them to volcanic activity. Despite the massive concrete blocks on which the telescopes sit and the shock absorbers that are designed to protect them from the smallest vibrations, tremors in the earth wreak havoc with observation of the universe beyond the planet’s bounds.

When the earth moves, nothing stops it.

And astronomical observation stops instantly.

Phil Howell was annoyed. Experience told him that these tremors almost certainly would continue, at least for the next few days. It meant there would be no more observation of a star he’d been watching deep in the Whirlpool Galaxy, fifteen million light-years away.

Howell was fascinated with the star for two reasons. The first was that it seemed to be the source of a signal that various radio-telescopic antenna arrays had begun picking up a few years ago. So far the signal existed only in fragmented bits and pieces that he was only now beginning to assemble into a whole.

The other reason for Phil Howell’s fascination with the star was that it was going nova. The radio signal, he was almost certain, would eventually prove to have been a precursor to the star’s impending destruction.

But now the computer had alerted him that the unrest in the earth was going to postpone his observations of the sky indefinitely. Leaving the computers to continue their work on the fragments of radio signal, he decided to take the rest of the day off and drive out to see the site Rob Silver had been talking about for the last month. Rob’s discovery was intriguing; even more intriguing was the opportunity to meet Katharine Sundquist, the woman who seemed to fascinate Rob Silver every bit as much as the distant star fascinated Phil. Leaving the computers to tend to the universe, he locked his office and headed out toward Hana.

Click!

The shutter snapped, the automatic film advance hummed, and Katharine adjusted her position slightly, as oblivious to the flies that were hovering around her as she was to the sweat that was running down her face in muddy rivulets. Every bone in her body ached from the hours she’d spent crouched over the skull — now nearly fully exposed — but she was no more aware of the pain in her joints than of the heat and the insects.

The important thing was to get the pictures, to have the visual proof of the position in which the skull, and the rest of the skeleton, had been found.

She pressed the shutter release again.

Click!

Another whir, another painful adjustment in her position.

Another photograph.

Another document to prove eventually that despite the fact that what she was uncovering made no sense, it had, in fact, been found in exactly this position, at exactly this location.

She’d been laboring on the excavation for two days now, carefully scraping away the deposits to expose the remains, with no sense yet of when the body had been buried. From what she’d seen so far, it could have been a year or a decade or a century.

A thousand years? Four thousand years? Certainly no more than that, for man hadn’t been on Maui — or anywhere else in Hawaii — any longer than that, and no animal except man built fire pits.

Undoubtedly the site was much younger than a thousand years — probably only a few hundred, given how shallow it was.

She’d refused to let Rob’s crew help with the excavation of the skeleton, assigning them to the area around the rudimentary fire circle. The contents of the circle itself were still undisturbed. Having decided to work on the skeleton first, Katharine immediately ordered the fire pit covered and declared it off limits. Once she’d exposed every one of the bones, photographing them at every stage of their excavation until she was satisfied that she had a complete record of their recovery and would feel comfortable about moving them to a lab, she’d turn her attention to the fire pit.

“I want every layer kept separate,” she’d explained to Rob. “Even if I have to peel it down a millimeter at a time.”

“What is it you think you’ve got here?” Rob asked, realizing she was dead serious about doing all the excavation herself.

When he first asked the question, she had no answer for him. She’d been acting purely on instinct — that intuition born of experience that told her that she’d never seen a site quite like this one.

As she began exposing the skull, though, her motives for not telling Rob what she was thinking had changed.

The fact was, what she was thinking made no sense.

As she’d first begun uncovering the skull, it had been clear that it was some sort of primate. That alone was strange enough, because she was well aware that there were no primates native to Hawaii.

In addition, the positioning was problematic: you wouldn’t find a chimpanzee or gorilla — or any species of primate, for that matter — next to a fire circle. Not unless someone had killed the animal and left it there.

A scenario, she knew, that was possible, but unlikely, given the location.

But as she kept digging, patiently cleaning the skull with dental tools and brushes, she began to realize that it didn’t look like a primate at all.

What it most closely resembled, in fact, was some of the early hominids.

That, of course, was impossible.

First, early man hadn’t existed in Hawaii.

Second, this particular site hadn’t existed at the time of early man.

Therefore, the skull had to be something else. Whatever it turned out to be, she was determined to have a perfect scientific record to back up the assertions she would eventually make.

She took one more photograph, and as the camera began rewinding, she stood, stretched, and took a deep breath, wincing as her nostrils filled with the sulfurous odor that seemed to be hanging over the site more strongly than usual today. She was reloading the camera when she heard Rob’s voice.

“Kath? Got a visitor who wants to meet you!” Looking up, Katharine saw Rob step into the clearing. Behind him was a second man the same age as Rob. “This is Phil Howell. He’s the head stargazer up at the top of the mountain. Phil, this is Katharine Sundquist.”

Phil Howell stepped forward, extended his hand, then lifted his brows as he got a whiff of the scent of rotting eggs. “My God! What are you excavating with, sulfuric acid?”

Katharine shook her head. “Just deposits around an old vent. But it seems to be worse today.”

The astronomer frowned. “Are you sure?”

Something in his tone set off an alarm in Katharine’s head. “I think so,” she said. “I assume it has to do with the rain we had this morning.”

“Or maybe the earthquakes opened up a pocket of gas,” Howell replied.

Katharine’s gaze shifted worriedly to Rob. “Earthquakes?” she repeated. “What’s he talking about?”

“The volcano,” Phil Howell said before Rob could speak. “Looks like it’s getting ready to kick up again.”

Katharine’s heart skipped a beat and she looked at Rob again. “You said it was extinct!”

“It is,” Rob assured her. “He’s talking about Kilauea on the Big Island.” He could tell by the look on her face that Katharine wasn’t convinced. “Tell her, Phil. She obviously doesn’t believe me.”

Katharine listened silently as Phil Howell explained the volcanic movement under the Big Island. “It’s not just the earthquakes,” he finished. “If it really gets going, it spews so much dust into the air you can’t see anything even if the scopes are holding still.” He paused. “Makes you wonder if mountaintops are really the best places for observatories, doesn’t it?”

Katharine made no reply, but as she began showing the site to the astronomer, she found herself glancing toward the hole in the side of the ravine that marked the ancient volcanic vent. All but lost in the tangled vegetation of the rain forest, it certainly looked harmless enough.

As she tried to concentrate on what she was saying, she kept thinking that the smell of sulfur was growing stronger.

Should she mention it to Rob and Phil? But no, they seemed unconcerned.

It must be her imagination.

It had to be.

The hostility from the two guys on the bus followed Michael around all day long. Wherever he was, they seemed to be there, always together, always watching him. During the break between his last two classes, they’d shoved him up against a locker.

“Another hour,” the bigger one had growled. “Then you’re dead meat, haole.” So far, though, they hadn’t actually tried anything, and if they were planning to wait for him after school, they were going to have to wait a long time, for today Michael was going to do something he’d never done before. Today, for the first time in his life, he was actually going to go out for a team.

He made up his mind during gym class. He’d been checking his breathing all day, and there hadn’t been any problems. In fact, he felt better than ever. “Just wait,” Josh Malani told him as they’d jogged around the track. “Sometimes the trades die down, and they start burnin’ the cane fields, and the mountain on the Big Island goes off. Man, you could choke to death around here!”

But his breathing had been deep and easy, and even after he’d finished three laps, he barely felt it. So when he’d seen the track team practice schedule posted on the bulletin board in the locker room, he decided. Today was the day.

Now, as the final bell sounded and he left his last class, instead of heading out to the side of the school where the buses — and the two guys — would be waiting, Michael went the other way, toward the locker room.

Stripping off his clothes, he put on his gym shorts, still damp from P.E. class that morning. He laced up his shoes carefully, making sure they weren’t so tight his feet would start swelling before he even got warmed up, then left the locker room and trotted out to the field, where the track team was already starting their warm-up calisthenics.

Should he go over and join them, or warm up by himself?

What if he went over just like he was one of them, and then didn’t make the team when he tried out? Better just to take a couple of laps around the track.

He finished the first lap and was a hundred feet into the second when he felt a sharp elbow dig into the ribs on his right side.

“What do you think you’re doin’, jerk?” a familiar voice said.

Michael glanced over without turning his head. It was the bigger of the two guys from the bus. And he was wearing a track suit.

Saying nothing, Michael kept running.

The other boy, towering half a foot over Michael, shortened his stride enough to match Michael’s pace. “Can’t you talk, asshole?”

Michael remained silent, but kept running, concentrating only on his pace, determined neither to change it nor to break stride. If the guy was going to shove him off the track, so be it. But he wasn’t going to quit.

They rounded the last turn. As Michael dropped his pace back to a walk and approached the coach, the other boy kept going, stepping up his own stride with an ease that made Michael question whether he shouldn’t just head back to the locker room, take a shower, and go home. Then he saw the other guy from the bus, his lips curled into a contemptuous sneer, as if the guy knew exactly what was going through his mind.

With perfect clarity, Michael knew that if he walked off the field now, he’d hate every single day he had to come back to Bailey High. Taking a deep breath, he walked up to the coach. “I’m Michael Sundquist,” he said. “I want to try out for the team.” He felt the coach look him over with appraising eyes, and easily read the doubt in his face. “I’m a sprinter.”

“I think I can make up my own mind about what you can do,” the coach said. The team, except for the one guy who was still running around the track, laughed, and Michael tried to ignore the burning in his face. But when he didn’t flinch from the words, the coach relented. “Okay, what do you want to try?”

“The hundred meter, or the two hundred,” Michael offered.

“How about the four hundred?” the coach asked.

Michael bit his lip, then decided he’d better tell the truth. “I had asthma. I’m not sure I can last that long, full-out.”

The coach raised a brow, but when he spoke, his voice carried no note of judgment. “Okay. I’ll tell you when to go.” Pulling a stopwatch out of his pocket, he set it, then handed it to the second of the guys from the bus. When the timer had reached the mark a hundred meters down the track, the coach nodded to Michael, who moved out to the starting blocks. “On your mark.”

Michael dropped to a crouch, putting his left foot against the block.

“Set.”

Michael tensed, ready for the coach to utter the final word.

And waited.

What on earth was going on? Was the coach pulling some kind of joke on him? His legs began to ache. Jaw clenched, determination tensing every muscle, he crouched low to the track. His left foot still braced, he remained tensed to take off. Then, as he heard feet approaching from behind him, he understood.

Sure enough, just as the guy who’d elbowed him a few minutes ago passed him, the coach shouted, “Go!”

As Michael launched himself off the block, he could see the bigger boy, already ahead of him, increase his pace. Swell! Not only was he going to have to try to catch up with someone who had a head start and was bigger, but he was going to have to eat dust, too.

Well, if that was the game they wanted to play, fine!

Sucking air deep into his lungs, Michael lunged forward, hitting his full stride in the first two steps, then pouring on as much speed as he could muster.

After he’d gone ten steps he realized the runner ahead of him was no longer widening the distance.

In fact, the gap was narrowing.

Then he heard a voice yelling from the bleachers and glanced over to see Josh Malani jumping up and down. “Go, Mike! Go!”

Clenching his fists as if to squeeze even more energy out of his body, Michael focused on closing the gap. After they had run forty meters, there were only four meters between them.

At seventy meters, Michael was only a foot behind.

He came abreast of the other runner at eighty meters, and when he crossed the finish line he was at least a full meter ahead.

Slowing down, he waited for the consequences. The guy already hated him just because of the color of his skin, and now he’d beaten him in front of his friends. Great!

Josh Malani was out of the bleachers, jogging across the track. “Way to go, Mike! You left him in the dust!”

Without warning, the guy he’d just beaten, who’d earlier looked as if he was ready to smash Michael’s face, stopped short, his expression confused. “You’re Mike Sundquist?” he demanded.

“Michael,” Josh said immediately. “He hates it if you call him Mike.”

“So that’s why you call him Mike?” the guy with the stopwatch demanded. “I thought he pulled you out of the reef!”

“He did.”

“So show a little respect!” He turned to Michael. “Malani gives you any trouble, you let me know. I been wantin’ to kick the shit out of him for years, but he’s too small to bother with. Even smaller than you. But he can’t run!”

Michael’s head was swimming. What was going on?

“How’d you do that?” the defeated runner was asking now. “Jesus, man! I was ten meters ahead of you, and goin’ full speed when you started!” Slinging an arm around Michael’s shoulders, he started back toward the coach and the rest of the team, calling out to the boy with the stopwatch. “Hey, Rick, how fast did he do that hundred?”

“A little more than eleven seconds,” the timer replied.

“That’s a whole second faster than anyone we’ve ever had,” the other one said. “I can do the long stuff, but it’s a bitch getting up to speed.”

Michael eyed him suspiciously. “I thought I was supposed to eat shit!”

The huge boy grinned. “That was when you were nothin’ but a stinkin’ haole. I’m Jeff Kina.” He stuck out his hand, then turned to call to the coach, “Hey, Mr. Peters, he’s on the team, isn’t he?”

“He is, but I don’t know how much longer you will be. How’d you get beaten by someone half a foot smaller than you, when you had a head start?”

An enormous laugh rumbled from Jeff Kina’s throat. “Hey, I can’t do everything, can I? So what I can’t do, Michael will take care of, and this year we’ll kick everyone’s ass. Right?”

For the first time, Michael began to think that coming to Maui might not have been such a bad idea after all, and when he called home an hour later — his first track practice behind him — he didn’t even bother to pretend to be cool.

“It’s me, Mom,” he said when the answering machine picked up his call. “Guess what? I did it! I made the track team! Can you believe it? I made it!” He paused for a second, then rushed on, his words spewing out in a torrent of excitement. “I’ve met a whole bunch of new guys, and they’re really great. Except that one of them was gonna—” He cut himself short, then quickly changed course. No use getting his mother all upset by telling her someone had threatened to beat him up this morning. Besides, that was all over now. “Anyway, I’m gonna go out with Josh and a bunch of guys from the team. We’re going over to Kihei and grab a burger and go to a movie or something, to celebrate. I’ll be home by ten-thirty, maybe eleven. Isn’t it great that I made it? See you later!” Hanging up the phone, Michael grinned at Josh Malani and Jeff Kina, who were waiting for him by the door. “Where’re the other guys?”

“They took off already,” Josh told him.

“Then let’s go!” Michael said, picking up his book bag. “Anybody know what movies are playing?”

But as they were leaving the locker room and heading toward the parking lot, Josh Malani came up with another suggestion — one that had nothing to do with movies. As he listened, Michael felt a knot forming in his stomach.

Part of it, he knew, was excitement at the idea Josh was proposing.

But another part of it was fear.

“Night diving?” he asked as he tossed his book bag into the back of Josh’s Chevy pickup. “Isn’t it dangerous?”

Josh grinned at him. “A little, maybe. But so what? You’re gonna love it!”

Maybe I should call Mom back, Michael thought as he and the two other boys piled into Josh’s rusting pickup truck. Maybe I should tell her what we’re really doing. After all, if something happens …

Forget it, he told himself. All she’ll do is worry.