John Saul - The Presence

His hands dropping away from Katharine, Rob twisted around and slid his window open. Instead of the fresh sea air Katharine would have expected, the air that filled the cabin was so laden with volcanic fumes that her eyes immediately began stinging.

“Bingo!” the pilot yelled. “Don’t you love that vog?”

As the helicopter finished its swing, Katharine searched for the great mass of the Big Island that should be rising out of the sea ahead, but Rob, reading her mind, shook his head. “You won’t be able to see it through the haze. But wait ten or fifteen minutes. Believe me, it’s still there.” Then he said to her son: “Well, what about it, Michael? Can you breathe, or did we take the wrong gamble?”

Katharine turned to look at Michael. Once more, as he had shortly after the helicopter took off, he exhaled the fumes from the bag and inhaled the cabin’s air. He coughed once, hesitated, and tried again. After a long pause, while Katharine waited anxiously, he stuck his right hand out, thumb up. “It’s not great,” he said. “But I’m not feeling as bad as I did at school yesterday.”

“Hang on to the bag, but just use it when you have to,” Rob told him. Then he grinned at Katharine. “And as for you, I forgive you your suspicions,” he said, as he drew her close.

Half an hour later the helicopter, with both its windows wide open, was cruising along the Kalapana Coast southwest of Hilo. The entire mountainside was pocked with glowing vents, and Michael gazed in awe at the lava flows that oozed down the mountain’s flank like slithering, flaming serpents.

Bathed in the eerie silver light of the moon, he could see the stone cliffs of the coastline being battered by the heaving ocean — an ocean made angry by the mountain’s attempt to invade its realm with spreading fingers of molten rock. The Pacific was waging an unending counterattack, hurling vast masses of water against the intruding rock and casting spume high into the sky like spent artillery shells being ejected from machine guns.

Here and there along the battle’s front line, enormous plumes of steam gushed up where the ocean quenched the mountain’s fire, and from behind the lines, on the mountain’s slopes, clouds of smoke arose.

The helicopter crossed the coastline and began moving up the flank of the mountain. Below, most of the terrain was barren lava without so much as an inch of topsoil covering it, though here and there a few scrubby bushes had gained a foothold. Almost everywhere Michael looked, steam or smoke belched forth from deep within the mountain’s bowels. The air reeked with the acrid smell of sulfur.

He sucked it deep into his lungs, feeling the warmth that spread through his body as he absorbed the fumes. “Where are we going?” he shouted.

“The pilot says there’s a clearing where he can set the chopper down,” Rob told them. “The idea’s to get you as close to these vents as possible.”

In the distance, and two hundred feet above them, flames rose out of a crater like a beacon. As the pilot guided the chopper higher, rising above the caldera, they saw for the first time its demonic contents. Lava boiled with the fury of hell, flames leaped across its surface, evil fountains of molten rock shot high into the air, some of them breaking apart to drop back into the churning cauldron, others exploding into brilliant bursts of sparkling embers that drifted on the wind before cooling to the point where their fiery glow died away.

The heat rose in waves, and above the gaping, hellish maw into which Michael was gazing, the air itself shimmered and danced. The flames took on a hypnotic quality that wrapped itself around Michael’s mind until he was staring at the spectacle with unblinking fascination.

Only when the helicopter began to drop down toward the ground, and the lip of the caldera once more hid its fires from his view, did Michael finally turn away to see where they were going. A minute later the helicopter settled into something that seemed to him like an oasis in the desert of fire and lava. Somehow, in the vagaries of its flow, the lava had left a clearing in which stood a grove of scraggly kiave trees. On the ground, miraculously, a thin covering of grass still survived.

Near the center of the clearing there was a fire pit, built of a circle of rocks very much like the one in the ravine where his mother had uncovered the skeleton.

Beyond the fire pit were the ruins of a hut, its walls also built of lava, its roof long since caved in.

The chopper settled onto the ground and the pilot cut the engine. As the roar died away and the great rotor slowed to a stop, an eerie silence fell over the four people inside.

“What is this place?” Michael finally asked.

“Used to be a campground,” the pilot explained. “This is all that’s left of it. It’s about the only place around here that’s still safe to land. Everywhere else, you don’t know what’s under you.”

Katharine, feeling oddly disoriented by the sudden quiet, looked uncertainly at Michael, as if perhaps his breathing might have been somehow dependent on the power of the helicopter’s engine. “Well?” she asked.

Pushing open the door, Michael scrambled out of the cabin and dropped to the ground, then turned and grinned at his mother. “I can breathe!” he yelled. “It worked! I can breathe!” Almost as quickly as his grin had come, though, it faded. His eyes flicked around the desolate landscape, taking in the darkness that was laced with patches of glowing fire and swirling smoke and fumes. “Is this the way it’s going to be from now on?” he asked, his voice quavering despite his effort to control it. “Is this where I’m going to have to live the rest of my life?”

Katharine’s eyes met Michael’s and she felt a terrible sense of dread come over her.

She had no answer for him.

Katharine and Rob sat side by side, very close together, a few feet from the small campfire the helicopter pilot had built. The pilot himself was hunkered down opposite them, poking at the fire with a stick. He was a lanky man, tall and skinny, named Arnold Berman—“but everybody calls me Puna”—whom Katharine judged to be in his mid-twenties.

The wind had shifted, flushing some of the fumes from the small clearing, and Michael, his chest starting to hurt, had gone off in search of a fumarole, where the smoke and gases boiling up from deep beneath the crust of the earth would ease the pain in his lungs and give him the strength that oxygen no longer could. Katharine, terrified of losing sight of him even for a moment, wanted to go with him, but Rob stopped her.

“Let him be, Kath,” he’d said. “Whatever happens to him — however this turns out — he’s going to have to deal with it. And so are you and I.”

As exhausted mentally as she was physically, Katharine had reluctantly settled back, but ten minutes later she wished she hadn’t, for as the first flush of victory at having rescued Michael from Takeo Yoshihara’s estate began to fade, the full horror of her son’s condition set in. The alien landscape seemed to be closing in on her, with its perimeters oddly lit by tongues of flame that flicked up from the fire pits, while all around her there was a strange pulsating glow from the lava flows. When Puna had built the small fire, she’d been drawn to it less for its warmth than for its familiarity, and as the little fire seemed to hold the demons surrounding them at bay, she looked at the man who had flown them here, studying him for the first time.

His dirty-blond hair was long, and he wore the standard Maui uniform of shorts, T-shirt, and sandals. He looked far more like a beach bum than a helicopter pilot. “Is there any way I can ever thank you enough for what you did tonight?”