John Saul Read online

  Praise for John Saul’s

  previous New York Times bestsellers

  GUARDIAN

  “All the right scares in all the right places.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Tension and terror … A suspense-filled and logical tale.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  THE HOMING

  “Intense action … The sort of old-fashioned terrors that have made him the most consistently bestselling horror writer next to King and Koontz.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “[A] fast-paced thriller … Creepily compelling.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  BLACK LIGHTNING

  “Electrifyingly scary.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  By John Saul:

  SUFFER THE CHILDREN

  PUNISH THE SINNERS

  CRY FOR THE STRANGERS

  COMES THE BLIND FURY

  WHEN THE WIND BLOWS

  THE GOD PROJECT

  NATHANIEL

  BRAINCHILD

  HELLFIRE

  THE UNWANTED

  THE UNLOVED

  CREATURE

  SECOND CHILD

  SLEEPWALK

  DARKNESS

  SHADOWS

  GUARDIAN*

  THE HOMING*

  BLACK LIGHTNING*

  THE BLACKSTONE CHRONICLES:

  Part 1—AN EYE FOR AN EYE: THE DOLL*

  Part 2—TWIST OF FATE: THE LOCKET*

  Part 3—ASHES TO ASHES: THE DRAGON’S FLAME*

  Part 4—IN THE SHADOW OF EVIL: THE HANDKERCHIEF*

  Part 5—DAY OF RECKONING: THE STEREOSCOPE*

  Part 6—ASYLUM*

  THE PRESENCE*

  THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL

  NIGHTSHADE*

  THE MANHATTAN HUNT CLUB*

  MIDNIGHT VOICES*

  *Published by Ballantine Books

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1997 by John Saul

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-97181

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77508-5

  v3.1

  To all my friends on Maui, and especially to the Maui Writers Conference and School, which has enriched my life not only as a writer, but in every other way as well.

  As all of us know, Maui No Ka Oi—Maui truly is the best, a paradise on earth.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Discovery

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  THE DISCOVERY

  From above, the day was perfect.

  A sky of sapphire blue, a sea of sparkling turquoise. A scattering of marshmallow clouds drifted across a vast expanse of azure.

  The wind had died, and the ocean rose and fell gently against the shattered end of a lava flow that extended from the sea to a vent nearly halfway up Kilauea on the island of Hawaii.

  The Big Island. Bigger by far than all the rest of the Hawaiian islands put together.

  And growing bigger every year.

  Today, though, even the earth seemed to have fallen in with the torpor of the air and water. The fires burning deep within the island’s core seemed to have settled to a slight simmering, as if waiting for another time to push up through the rocky crust above and send trails of glowing magma snaking down the mountain’s flank to push farther into the sea.

  The kind of day for which the diving team had been waiting.

  An hour after dawn, they were aboard the tug and barge that carried them out of Hilo Bay. Now the barge was anchored two hundred yards off the end of the lava flow, held in place by three anchors chained to heavy hawsers. The tug itself needed nothing more than a lunch hook to hold its position, and the surface crew—with little to do until the divers in the water signaled them—relaxed on deck, drinking beer and playing cards, as somnolent as the weather itself.

  Perhaps if the wind and the sea hadn’t conspired against them, someone would have felt the seismic blip and realized that the idyllic day’s serenity was an illusion.

  Beneath the thick tongue of lava that wound down from the distant vent, the pressure from the hot core far below the crust of the earth had built, cracking apart a great slab of rock.

  It wasn’t an explosive crack—nothing like the displacement that occurs when the locked edges of continental plates suddenly break free and hundreds of miles of solid-seeming earth jerk abruptly in opposite directions.

  Nor was it the kind of crack in which, without warning, the floor of the sea heaves upward, sending a great tidal wave thousands of miles in every direction, towering over land, to drown whatever stands in its way.

  This crack, occurring just below the surface, caused only the smallest of blips on the seismographs that monitored the mountain’s movements. If anyone on the island felt it at all, it was to wonder a moment later if perhaps he had merely imagined it.

  Beneath the lava flow, the fissure in the rock provided just enough room for a glowing column of molten rock to begin its rise to the surface, heat and pressure widening its path as it went, until at last the white-hot magma broke into the empty tunnel under the broad strip of lava on the top, where years ago the still-molten interior of the flow had simply drained out of the tube formed by its own fast-cooling surface.

  Now, as the tug bobbed peacefully at the end of the flow, and the divers below worked in blissful innocence, the liquid fire streamed downhill, both hidden and insulated by the black rock above it.

  Coming to the end of the tube, to the closed chamber where the last flow had finally been frozen by the sea, the lava pooled, more and more of it pouring in every minute, its weight building against the interior of the cliff’s face, its heat relentlessly burning away the wall of stone that kept the boiling magma from the sea.

  One hundred feet below the surface, the two divers, a man and a woman, worked with intense concentration to retrieve the object they had discovered a week ago.

  Embedded in the layer of lava that covered the ocean floor, it was almost perfectly spherical, its color so close to that of the lava itself that the divers, coming upon it for the first time, almost missed it completely. Its shape was what had caught the woman’s eye—a curve caught in her peripheral vision.

  She had paused to take a cl
oser look, because it struck her as an interesting formation of lava. Seconds after she bent to investigate it, her partner, sensing that she was no longer in her customary position to his right, turned back to make certain she was all right. Within less than a minute, he had become as interested in the sphere as she.

  For nearly ten minutes they’d examined it. Though it was firmly anchored in the lava, they could see that it was not quite part of it. A geode of some sort. After photographing it and recording its exact position, they finished their dive, and later on that day reported the find to their employer.

  Now, they had returned to the site of their discovery. They had been underwater for nearly an hour, carefully working a custom-made net around the sphere and fastening the net itself to a hook suspended from the end of a large crane mounted in the center of the barge’s deck. The basket net, designed specifically for this purpose, resembled the macramé seines that generations of Japanese fishermen had once secured around glass floats, but it was woven from a plastic fiber stronger even than steel.

  Having secured their net, and satisfied that the heavy mesh would not slip, the woman activated a signaling device fastened to her weight belt.

  On the tug, the crew set to work to lift the geode from the ocean floor.

  One of the men, catching a whiff of sulfur in the air, wrinkled his nose, then decided it was nothing more than the noxious odor the tug’s bank of batteries sometimes threw off.

  As they concentrated on operating the crane, none of the crew noticed the smoke that was starting to drift through the first tiny rifts in the face of the cliff two hundred yards away.

  A hundred feet down, the two divers backed thirty feet away from the geode, then turned to watch as the cable from the crane tightened. For a breath-held moment nothing moved. Then the geode—nearly three feet across—abruptly came free from the lava, shooting upward a few yards before dropping instantly back almost to the bottom, like a yo-yo on a string. A momentary pause. Then it began a slow, steady vertical journey toward the surface, while the two divers made their way back to the place where it had lain.

  The crane was just swinging the geode onto the deck of the barge when the face of the cliff gave way. As a gout of brilliant yellow lava spewed out, exploding into millions of fragments when it hit the surface of the sea a split second later, the crane operator screamed a warning. Within seconds the hawsers had been cut, the anchors and their chains abandoned, and the tug was running directly out to sea.

  The water, dead calm only a few seconds before, churned around the tug, reacting to the explosive force of the fast-growing gush of lava now pouring forth from the crumbling face of the cliff.

  “What about the divers?” someone yelled.

  But even as he spoke, the terrified crewman knew the answer to his question.

  The divers were just peering into the depression in which the geode had rested when they felt the first subsonic vibration. In the instant that surprise became panic and they reached for their belts to release their weights and make an emergency ascent, it was already far too late.

  A rift suddenly opened in the ocean floor, and as the boiling magma burst into the sea, the water itself seemed to explode into a hellfire cauldron of sulfuric acid, boiling water, and steam. A fusillade of shrapnel-size fragments of volcanic glass shot in every direction. An instant after the divers had been killed by the steam, acid, and boiling seawater, their bodies were shredded by the silicate fragments, which tore through them like millions of white-hot scalpels.

  Within seconds, nothing was left of them.

  A mile out to sea, the crew of the tug gazed in awe at the spectacle behind them.

  The shoreline had disappeared, lost in a dense fog of steam mixed with poisonous gases and volcanic ash that hung like a curtain where only a few minutes ago the face of the cliff had been. The sea, whipped by a building wind, was heaving, and overhead dark clouds gathered as if the forces that had unleashed the fury of the mountain now had summoned a storm.

  Using binoculars, the crew scanned the water for any sign of the two divers, but even as they searched, they knew they were bound to fail. They had barely escaped with their own lives. As the storm built and the seas became great, heaving swells, the captain of the tug turned back toward Hilo and the safety of the harbor.

  On the barge, three men secured the geode to the deck, silently wondering if it had been worth the lives it had cost to collect it.

  PROLOGUE

  LOS ANGELES

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  Everything was supposed to be getting better, not worse.

  They’d promised him—everyone had promised him.

  First the doctor: “If you take the pills, you’ll feel better.”

  Then his coach: “Just try a little harder. No pain, no gain.”

  Even his mom: “Just take it one day at a time, and don’t try to do everything at once.”

  So he’d taken the pills, and tried harder, but also tried not to do too much. And for a while last week things actually seemed to improve. Although smog had settled over the city so heavily that most of his friends had cut out of school early and headed for the beach, where an offshore wind might bring fresh air in from the ocean, he’d gone to all his classes. After the last bell he’d stripped out of his clothes in the locker room and donned his gym shorts before jogging out to the track to do the four warm-up laps that always preceded the more serious work of the high hurdles.

  The event that just might, with a little more work, make him a State Champion on his eighteenth birthday.

  One day last week, when he was alone on the field, the pills had at last seemed to kick in. He’d been expecting to lose his wind halfway around the first lap, but even as he rounded the final turn, he felt his body surging with energy, his lungs pumping air easily, his heartbeat barely above normal. On the second and third laps he’d kicked his pace up a notch, but still felt good—really good. So on the fourth lap he’d gone all out, and it was like a few months ago, when he’d still felt great all the time. That day last week, he felt greater than ever: his lungs had been sucking huge volumes of air, and his whole body had responded. Instead of the slow burn of pain he usually felt toward the end of the warm-up mile, his muscles had merely tingled pleasurably, his chest expanding and contracting in an easy rhythm that synched perfectly with his steady heartbeat. His whole body had been functioning in harmony. He’d even taken a couple of extra laps that day, exulting in the strength of his body, euphoric that finally the pills and the exercise were working. He’d set up the hurdles then, spacing them precisely, but setting them a little higher than usual.

  He’d soared over them one after the other, clearing the crossbars easily, feeling utterly weightless as his body floated over one barricade after another.

  When he’d started back to the locker room two hours after he began, he was barely out of breath, his heart beating easily and his legs feeling as if he’d only been strolling for half an hour instead of running and jumping full-out for two.

  The next day it had all crashed in on him.

  A quarter of the way around the first lap, he’d felt the familiar constrictions around his lungs, and his heart began pounding as if he were in the last stretch of a 10K run. He kept going, telling himself it was nothing more than a reaction from the day before, when he’d worked far harder than he should have. But by the time he finished the first lap, he knew it wasn’t going to work. Swerving off the hard-packed earth of the track, he flopped down onto the grass, rolling over to stare up into the blue of the sky, squinting against the glare of the afternoon sun. What the hell was wrong? Yesterday he’d felt great! Today he felt like an old man.

  He’d refused to give in to the pain in his lungs, the pounding of his heart, the agony in his legs. When his coach had come over to find out if he was all right, he’d tossed it off, claiming he’d just gotten a cramp, then rubbing the muscles of his right calf as if to prove the lie. The coach had bought it—or at l
east pretended to, which was just as good—and he’d gotten up and gone back to the track.

  He made it through the four laps, but by the last one he’d only been able to maintain a pace that was little more than a fast walk.

  The coach had told him to try harder or go home.

  He’d tried harder, but in the end he’d gone home.

  And each day since then it had grown worse.

  Each day he’d struggled a little harder against the pain.

  The day before yesterday, he’d gone to the doctor for the fourth time since New Year’s, and once again the doctor hadn’t been able to find anything wrong. Once again he’d answered all the questions: Yes, he was fine when he came back from Maui with his mom after New Year’s. No, his father hadn’t been there; he’d gone to Grand Cayman with his new wife and their baby. No, it didn’t bother him that his dad hadn’t gone to Maui with them—in fact, he was glad his mom had dumped his dad, since his dad seemed to like hitting both of them when he got drunk, which had been practically every night the last couple of years before he finally left. No, he didn’t hate his dad. He didn’t like him much, and was glad he was gone, but he didn’t hate him.

  What he hated was the way he felt.