The Presence (25 page)

Could what she’d seen on the video have been a mutated human child?

Mutated by what? Pollution?

Even as the question formed in her mind, so did a possible answer.
Mount Pinatubo.

The volcano that had erupted in the Philippines less than ten years ago, spewing enough ash and poisonous gas into the atmosphere to make dozens of villages uninhabitable.

If alcohol and tobacco could harm a fetus, what might the gases disgorged from an active volcano do? Katharine’s eyes fixed once more on the skeleton on the table, but now her mind’s eye no longer saw the fire pit next to which the body had been buried, but the sulfurous vent a little farther up the ravine. What if the remains she’d unearthed were of someone who’d been born only months after an eruption of Haleakala?

Suddenly it became imperative to determine the age of the bones as exactly as possible, and try to correlate them to one of the last eruptions on Maui.

Or on the Big Island, where even now new vents were opening, releasing gases from the bowels of the planet?

She worked for three more hours, preparing bone samples and searching the Internet for the labs that could do the work most quickly and efficiently.

And now her mind was starting to fog with exhaustion and her whole body ached.

And she was already hours later than she’d promised Michael.

Leaving everything as it was, Katharine began closing up the workroom. She’d just turned the lights off and was
about to lock the door when a sweep of headlights across the window caught her eye.

Leaving the lights off, she went to the window and looked out.

Michael sat staring at the television, trying to concentrate on the characters on the screen but unable to keep his attention on the movie for more than a few seconds at a time.

He kept thinking about Josh, clutching the bottle of ammonia in the rest room, sucking the fumes deep into his lungs, struggling to hang on to it when he’d taken it away from him.

And he remembered the look in Josh’s eyes just before he’d fled from the locker room. For a moment Michael hadn’t been able to recognize his friend at all. Josh had completely disappeared, replaced by …

What?

A wild animal.

The words came unbidden into Michael’s mind, but the more he thought about them, the more he realized that was exactly what Josh had looked like: a trapped animal, searching for a way to escape.

And for just a second, Michael recalled, he’d been afraid Josh was going to attack him, going to try to recover the bottle he’d yanked from Josh’s hands.

After school Michael had waited as long as he could, hoping Josh would come back, but when the bus had been ready to leave, he’d finally climbed onto it. All the way home he’d kept half an eye out, thinking he might see Josh’s truck racing up to overtake the bus, hear his horn blaring, and then find him waiting at the stop where
he got off. But another part of him was just as sure that Josh’s pickup was not going to appear, that something terrible had happened to his friend.

Should he call the police?

And tell them what?

Repeat the weird story Josh had told him about Jeff’s strange behavior and his own flight from the cane field last night? But that would only get Josh in even more trouble than he was already in. And if something had happened to Jeff Kina in the cane field, wouldn’t someone have heard about it? After all, he’d heard the names of the two men who had died in the cane fire before he’d left school: fire workers on a routine patrol, killed in a freak accident. One of them had been the uncle of one of the guys on the track team. But nobody had heard anything about Jeff Kina.

When he got home, he called Josh’s house, but Sam Malani answered, sounding drunk, and ranting that when Josh got home he was going to beat the crap out of him.

Michael hadn’t called again.

Then, about an hour ago, he started feeling kind of funny again. It wasn’t too bad—not at all like when he’d had asthma—but for a minute he’d been tempted to call his mother. He’d chucked that idea as soon as it crossed his mind. If she didn’t make him go to the hospital tonight—“Better to be safe than sorry”—she’d definitely drag him back to Dr. Jameson tomorrow.

Better not say anything; he’d probably be fine by morning anyway.

He scrunched lower on the sofa and once more tried to focus his mind on the movie he was staring at.

Stop it,
he told himself.
Just stop it. Nothing’s wrong
with your lungs, and Josh is just pissed off, and you hardly even know Jeff Kina.

Except no matter how much he tried to tell himself that nothing was wrong, he kept remembering the one thing that gave the lie to that thought.

Kioki Santoya had died the night before last.

What if Jeff and Josh were dead, too?

What then?

To that question, he had no answer.

By the time Katharine’s eyes adjusted to the dim lights that illuminated the grounds of Takeo Yoshihara’s estate at night, the vehicle had stopped near one of the doors in the other wing of the building. As Katharine watched, the security guard who normally sat at the desk in the lobby emerged from the building and walked quickly to the vehicle, which Katharine could now see was a small van. As two men got out of the van, a second man came out of the building, and a moment later the four men had opened the back doors of the van and were unloading a box from it.

A box that appeared to be about three feet wide, three feet high, and perhaps seven feet long.

The image of a coffin came instantly into Katharine’s mind, and though she tried to reject it, the image wouldn’t let itself be so easily banished. Instead, the vision of the coffin was immediately reinforced by her recollection of the skeleton in the next room.

The skeleton that, though not of the species Homo sapiens, had been laid out for burial as if it were.

Leaving her office, Katharine strode down the long corridor to the lobby, then hesitated.

What was she going to do? Walk down the opposite
hall, trying doors until she found one that was unlocked, and go in? Hardly, since the fact of the van arriving in the middle of the night suggested that her presence might not be welcomed.

The same reasoning also precluded going outside and simply walking up to the van to ask what was going on.

Changing course, she moved toward the security officer’s desk, a big wooden cube whose surface was bare save for two identical computer monitors. Circling the desk as warily as if it were a tiger ready to spring at her, Katharine perched nervously on the guard’s chair and studied the two monitors.

The first one—on the left—displayed a view of the area just inside the estate’s main gates. Though she could remember no light fixtures around the gates, the image on the screen was almost as bright as if it were full daylight.

So, the security cameras were equipped with a light-amplifying device, she realized, making the darkness around the gates utterly deceptive.

The other screen displayed nothing more than a series of images of sculpted buttons, some of them labeled, others bearing nothing more than graphics that identified their use in manipulating the camera. Reaching out, Katharine touched the screen where a button framing a magnifying glass was displayed.

Instantly the image on the other screen enlarged as the camera’s lens zoomed closer to the gate.

Now Katharine examined the labeled buttons, touching the one marked “North Wing.”

All the buttons except those that controlled the cameras disappeared, and in their place appeared a floor plan of the building’s north wing. Picking a room she thought
was close to the area where the van had parked, Katharine touched the screen again.

The display monitor immediately responded, showing the interior of Stephen Jameson’s office.

His empty office.

She touched the room two doors farther down the corridor, and was rewarded by a view of the two men from the van and the two security guards placing the box onto a gurney. As the men from the van departed, the guards pushed the coffinlike box through the office and into the corridor. Switching the monitor to a view of the north corridor, Katharine froze as she saw the guards, one at each end of the gurney, apparently moving straight toward her. A split second later, when the guard who would normally be sitting in the seat she herself was now occupying looked directly into the camera, Katharine had the horrible sensation that he could see her as clearly as she could see him. Her heart pounded and she had to fight an urge to bolt in the opposite direction, fleeing back to her office. But when the guards and the box disappeared from her view—and didn’t come through the double doors at the end of the lobby—she realized they hadn’t been coming toward her at all. In fact, they were moving in exactly the opposite direction.

But where?

She studied the control screen again, and discovered a button marked “LL.”

Lower Level? Of course! The “downstairs” Dr. Jameson had mentioned just this morning.

She touched the button. It seemed to produce no effect.

The same floor plan and control buttons showed on the right-hand monitor, and the same image of an empty corridor was displayed on the screen on the left.

Yet she’d been all but certain that both screens had flickered slightly, as if their displays had in fact responded to her touch. Then, as she examined the control screen more closely, she realized that one thing had changed: the “LL” button was now labeled “UL.”

So there
was
another level beneath this one.

As if to confirm the thought, the two guards reappeared, now moving in the opposite direction, away from the camera. Halfway down the corridor a door opened, and the guards maneuvered the box through it. Once again Katharine had to press two of the rooms depicted on the control monitor before she found the right one, and the image on the camera monitor changed again.

The room was obviously a laboratory of some kind. As Katharine watched, two men wearing orderly uniforms started to unscrew the top of the box. Katharine’s fingers moved to the buttons that gave her control over the camera, and she zoomed in on the box. As the lid was raised, wisps of fog curled from the container.

Dry ice?

The lid came free, and Katharine could see that whatever was in the box was wrapped in plastic.

She watched as four hands, clad in rubber surgical gloves, worked at the plastic, loosening it.

Four hands.

Where were the other four, the hands that belonged to the security guards?

Katharine zoomed the camera to its widest angle.

The two guards were gone.

Touching the control screen again, she found them.

In the corridor, once again walking toward her.

No! Away from her, by the far end, where apparently there was an elevator. How long did she have before they
would be back on this level and coming toward the lobby?

A minute?

Two?

Certainly no more.

She touched the screen again, and once more the orderlies appeared. They had finished unwrapping the outer layer of plastic and were taking out what was left of the dry ice the contents of the box had been packed in. Silently urging them to work faster, wanting to reach through the camera and tear the second layer of plastic from whatever lay within, Katharine could barely contain her impatience.

Her nerves screaming, she switched back to the corridor. The security guards were still standing there, waiting for the elevator. Then, just as she was about to click back to the room where the orderlies were working, the guards stepped out of her view.

They were in the elevator, and the elevator would already be moving.

How fast?

She had no idea.

She switched the screen back to the laboratory. At last, the orderlies seemed to have finished with the dry ice. Unconsciously holding her breath, Katharine gazed into the container. One of the orderlies reached for the layers of almost transparent plastic—all that remained to block Katharine’s view of whatever had arrived at the estate in the middle of the night. Then, in a movement that made her want to scream with frustration, the orderly suddenly pulled away.

The zoom!

Her fingers trembling, she touched the adjustment buttons
for the camera. It zoomed in and refocused slightly. For just a moment, before one of the orderlies abruptly leaned in and blocked her view completely, she thought she saw something.

A face.

A human face?

The glimpse had been too brief, the distortion of the wrinkled plastic too much.

How much time did she have left? If she could get just one more look—

She touched the UL button, then the hallway.

The guards were on their way back down the hall!

Her heart racing, Katharine rose from the chair and started back toward the double doors leading to the south corridor and Rob’s office.

The display! As soon as the guards came in, they’d see what she’d been doing! Whirling around, nearly stumbling in her haste to get back to the desk, she searched the screen again, finding a button marked “Main.” She hit it, and instantly the menu that had been displayed when she’d come in no more than five minutes earlier reappeared.

The gate!

Where was the button for the gate?

There—down near the bottom, at the right!

She stabbed at it, waited just long enough to see the image on the display monitor change, then fled across the lobby. Pushing her way through the double doors, she paused to make them stop swinging, then dashed down the hall to Rob’s office, slipped inside, and switched the lights back on.

Leaning heavily against the desk, she waited for her heartbeat to return to normal and her breathing to even out, then picked up her purse. Switching the lights out,
she left the office for the second time in ten minutes, locked it, and started toward the double doors.

For a moment she had the terrible feeling that the two guards would be waiting for her, knowing what she’d been doing. If they questioned her, what could she say? That she’d been worried when the guard hadn’t been at his post and was looking for him?