The Presence (8 page)

Katharine exhaled sharply.

Bones.

No more deeply excavated than the fire pit, they barely showed above the surface, but even what little earth had been peeled away revealed what Katharine instantly recognized as the occipital area of a skull and part of a jaw. When she dropped down to her hands and knees to explore the bones with a slender dental pick she fished out of her backpack, Rob crouched down next to her.

“What do you think?” he asked.

Katharine, already concentrating on the nearly buried bones, hardly heard him, and several seconds passed before she answered his question.

Seconds during which a strange feeling gripped her.

Though she had no clear idea why, and though she could barely see them yet, she was certain that there was something wrong with these bones.

Something very wrong.

“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.