The Presence (12 page)

Better just to leave it alone.

Still, it took a long time for him to get to sleep that night.

He could feel nothing except the still coolness around him.

It was dark, the kind of darkness that could wrap itself around you like a shroud, bringing with it claustrophobia. All around him was blackness, and he was suspended in midair.

Slowly, just as the space around him started closing in—so slowly Michael was at first uncertain that it was happening at all—the blackness began to fade into silvery gray.

The water!

He was back in the water again!

As if to prove the thought, a fish swam by. A beautiful fish, striped in startling hues of bloodred, electric-blue, and a green so bright it was almost blinding.

Michael had never seen such a fish, and he turned to look at it. As if sensing his interest, the fish circled slowly in the water, almost as if it were deliberately exhibiting itself to him. With a kick of his fins, Michael moved toward the fish, but it countered his move, pulling away from him at exactly the same speed with which he was approaching.

He stopped.

The fish stopped.

He swam closer, and this time the fish hesitated before moving away and dropping deeper into the water.

Michael tried the maneuver again, but this time moved very slowly, hoping the fish wouldn’t notice his careful approach.

He got within a few feet of the fish before it dived away and stopped below him, as if challenging him to follow.

Michael stayed where he was. Time itself seemed to slow as he floated in the water, gazing down at the fish, now as immobile as he. In the ghostly gray, silent water, he realized that his friends were gone.

He was alone.

Slowly, inexorably, the fish drew him deeper below the surface, moving closer to him whenever he hesitated, backing away from him just before he could quite reach it with his fingers.

Luring him.

The fish moved deeper into the water, and Michael, powerless to resist, dived after it. Deeper. Deeper and
deeper they went. Michael, mesmerized, followed the brilliantly colored fish. Then it stopped, abruptly twitched its tail, and disappeared.

Startled, Michael turned in the water, searching for the fish, but it was nowhere to be seen.

And suddenly he realized that the bottom seemed to have fallen away. No moonlight penetrated the water from above. The darkness had returned. The sea itself was pressing in on him. It was getting harder to breathe.

It felt as if metal bands were fastened around his chest, squeezing him. He struggled against the tightening bonds, but it didn’t help.

Panicking, he struggled harder.

Breathe.
Breathe!

But he couldn’t!

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get any air into his lungs.

The tanks!

Something had gone wrong with the tanks! He sucked at his regulator, trying to pull air from the tank on his back into his lungs, but nothing happened.

Empty!

The tank was empty!

But there was a reserve supply! All he had to do was reach back and turn the lever and he would have ten more minutes of air.

He started to reach back; his arms wouldn’t move.

He was sinking now, dropping into the darkness, into the great yawning void below—

He fought to reach the emergency valve, struggled to suck more air out of the tank, but now his lungs began to feel as if they were filling with water.

The surface. He had to get to the surface!

Drop the weight belt! Drop the weight belt, and pull the cord on the CO2 canister. His vest would inflate: he would pop to the surface.

But he couldn’t move!

He couldn’t even feel his fingers anymore.

Terrified, he struggled again, dislodging the regulator from his mouth.

He had to get it back in!

But his hands wouldn’t obey him. The regulator dangled from the air hoses, just out of reach.

If he could just get his mouth close enough …

He struggled to move his head, but even that was useless.

Now he could feel water seeping in through his nose. He tried to exhale, but there was nothing left in his lungs to expel.

His mouth opened and he tried to breathe.

Water flooded into his mouth, down his throat, into his already choking lungs.

He was going to die.

Die here, alone, deep under the surface of the sea.

No!

Loose! He had to get loose!

Even as he felt his lungs flooding and the blackness of death begin to close around him, Michael thrashed against the milky shroud that was still tightening around him, and a great scream built in his throat.

Frantic, he kicked out, twisting his body in a futile struggle to escape, struggling to gather enough energy for one last effort before the blackness closed around him forever.

Then, suddenly, the shriek in his throat erupted.

Michael jerked awake.

He was tangled in the bedding; the panic still clutched him. He could barely move, barely breathe.

Then, slowly, he began to understand.

A dream.

It had been nothing but a terrible dream.

The light in the middle of the ceiling flashed on, blinding him.

“Michael?” he heard his mother say. “Honey, are you okay?”

His chest still felt as if it were constricted by the bands that had tightened on him in the dream, and Michael wasn’t sure if he could speak. When he finally formed the words, his voice was barely audible. “A nightmare,” he said. “It was terrible. I—” He cut his words short as he realized where the dream had come from, what had triggered it.

“You were having trouble breathing,” Katharine said, coming over to the bed to gaze anxiously at her son’s face. “I was afraid you were having an attack—”

“I’m not,” Michael told her, working himself loose from the sheets and sitting up, sucking the fresh night air so deep into his lungs that he started coughing. A moment later, though, he got through the coughing fit and flopped back against the pillow. “It’s okay, Mom,” he insisted as she started to speak. “It was just a bad dream, that’s all.”

Katharine leaned over and kissed his forehead. “You’re sure?” she asked, her eyes still worried. “I know you thought you were all over it, but—”

“But nothing,” Michael told her. “I’m fine.” He glanced over at the clock on the nightstand; it was nearly five, and outside the window it was almost as dark as it had been at the end of the nightmare. “Let’s just go back to sleep, okay?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have stayed out quite so late last night,” Katharine suggested, but laid a hand on Michael’s cheek to keep the words from stinging.

Michael sank lower in the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess when I knew I was going to be late I should have found a phone. Okay?”

“And I’m sorry I overreacted,” Katharine told him. “And congratulations on making the team. I’m really proud of you.” For the first time since he’d come home, a smile came to his lips. “Sleep tight.” She kissed him once more, and turned the light off as she left the room. But as she went back to her own room, the worry stayed with her. Had it really been only a bad dream that awakened him? Or was it the beginning of yet another siege of the disease they both had thought he’d conquered?

She got back into bed, but for a long time didn’t sleep. Instead, she listened, silently praying not to hear the rasping sound of asthmatic lungs struggling to fill themselves with air.

In his room, Michael was no longer in his bed.

Instead he was sitting beside the open window, breathing deeply of the fresh night air, trying to rid himself of the terrible choking feeling he’d had in the dream.

Yet even now that he was wide-awake, he still couldn’t quite get rid of it, couldn’t quite catch his breath.

Alice Santoya slid the stack of pancakes onto her son’s plate, put the plate on the table, then called out for the fourth time, “If you don’t get up right now, Kioki, you’re never gonna get the bus, and I’m not gonna drive you!” When she still got no answer, she went to her son’s door, rapped loudly on it, then shoved it open. “Kioki, I’m tell—”

The words died on her lips as she saw the empty bed and realized that he hadn’t come home at all last night.

But Kioki always came home! He was a good boy, not like that Josh Malani he hung around with sometimes. And when he’d called, he promised to be home early. He was just going to a movie with Rick Pieper and Josh and—

Josh!

She’d bet every penny she had that Josh Malani had gotten hold of some beer and talked Kioki into going out to a beach somewhere and getting drunk. And then he’d been scared to come home.

Just wait till she got her hands on him!

Going back to the kitchen, Alice picked up the phone and called Rick Pieper’s house. “Maria?” she said when Rick’s mother picked up the phone. “It’s Alice. Did Kioki
come home with Rick last night?” A moment later, when Rick came on the line and told her he’d dropped Kioki off at the intersection, her anger dissolved into fear. If they’d been drinking …

“Did you boys get drunk?” she demanded. “If that Josh Malani got my son drunk—”

“He didn’t,” Rick Pieper insisted, then Maria Pieper was back on the line.

“Rick came in just before midnight,” she told Alice. “Believe me, I know. I was waiting up for him. He said they were playing video games and lost track of time.”

“Hah! If Josh Malani was with them—”

“They weren’t drinking, Alice,” Maria Pieper assured her. “Rick was fine when he got home.”

As she hung up the phone, Alice Santoya tried to tell herself that there were a dozen good reasons why Kioki might not have come home last night.

But she couldn’t think of a single one.

The one image that kept flashing into her mind, though, was of her husband, who had been walking home from the night shift at the mill in Puunene. They’d lived only two blocks from the mill, and it should have been safe.

But that night as he’d been crossing the road from Kihei—only half a block from the house—a car had come out of nowhere and smashed into Keali’i, killing him instantly.

Kids, getting drunk in the cane fields.

Like the cane fields all around this house.

Her anxiety mounting, Alice Santoya left her house and got into her car. She was going to be late for her job at the hotel out in Wailea, but it didn’t matter. If Kioki was lying out there somewhere by the side of the road—

No!

He was all right!

Something else had happened, and he was fine!

But as she drove along the narrow track that led to the road half a mile away, she began to get a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, a feeling of foreboding that she could not shake off.

It had rained during the night, and the road was slick with red mud. Apprehension tightened her hands on the wheel.

And then she saw him.

He was on the left, maybe fifty yards away.

He was lying facedown, his arms stretched up over his head, his legs in the irrigation ditch.

Choking back a scream, she braked to a stop a few feet from Kioki. Leaving the engine running, she scrambled out of the car and ran over to her son. “Kioki!” she cried. “You’re all right! You’re going to be—”

Kioki didn’t move.

Unconscious!

He was unconscious and couldn’t hear her. Dropping down onto her knees in the mud, she reached out and touched him. “Kioki, it’s Mama.…”

Her voice died away as she felt the coldness of his skin.

“Kioki?”

For a long time Alice Santoya crouched on her knees in the mud, willing her son to wake up, to move, to whimper, to do anything that would be a sign telling her that what she knew to be true wasn’t true at all.

An image of her husband flashed into her mind, but now, instead of seeing Keali’i’s face, it was Kioki who stared at her through a mask of death.

“No …” she finally moaned. “Oh, no, Kioki. Oh, no, please …”

Slipping her hands under her son’s shoulders, she pulled him from the irrigation ditch. Sitting in the mud, she cradled his head in her lap, stroking his forehead with her fingers, tears flowing down her face, a keening sound issuing from her throat.

After a while a car approached, slowed to a stop, and its driver got out. Then another car arrived, and another.

A little while after that, the police arrived, and an ambulance.

But Alice Santoya was barely aware of the activity around her.

Her heart broken, her spirit destroyed, she sat in the mud and cradled her dead son in her arms.

Ken Richter knew something was wrong the minute he unlocked the back door of the shop that morning. A methodical man—who had christened himself “Kihei Ken” when he’d opened the dive shop two years ago on the strength of his reputation and a loan from Takeo Yoshihara—he had always believed that there was a place for everything, and that everything should be in its place.

This morning, everything was not in its place.

It was nothing obvious; indeed, when he first stepped into the back room of his store, it was little more than a feeling. But when he turned on the lights and looked around, the feeling grew stronger.

Then he saw the puddle in the middle of the floor.

Ken Richter did not leave puddles in the middle of floors.

Finding a towel, he began mopping the puddle up, already rehearsing the speech he would give to Nick Grieco for locking up last night without making sure the place was clean.

He and Nick had arrived on Maui as surfing buddies a dozen years ago, and though they were still friends, Nick now worked for Ken, spending just enough hours each day tending to the shop or taking tourists out on dives to pay the rent on his one-room apartment in Kihei and keep gas in the rusty Volkswagen van that took him and his surfboard out to wherever the waves were breaking best, the perfect wave being his single-minded pursuit. Last night he obviously hadn’t been working much. Not only was there a puddle in the middle of the floor, but the equipment that should have been ready for this morning’s dive didn’t look as if it had been checked over.

Which annoyed Ken Richter even more, since he’d told Nick just before taking off for Lanai yesterday afternoon to double-check everything. The last thing he needed was to mess up a dive that had been arranged by Takeo Yoshihara’s office. This one was important enough that a truck had arrived yesterday with brand-new equipment.