Cold Fire

1

Holly changed planes in Denver, gained two time zones traveling west, and arrived at Los Angeles International at eleven o'clock Monday morning. Unencumbered by luggage, she retrieved her rental car from the parking garage, drove south along the coast to Laguna Niguel, and reached Jim Ironheart's house by twelve-thirty.

She parked in front of his garage, followed the tile-trimmed walkway directly to his front door, and rang the bell. He did not answer. She rang it again. He still did not answer. She rang it repeatedly, until a reddish impression of the button marked the pad of her right thumb.

Stepping back, she studied the first- and second-floor windows. Plantation shutters were closed over all of them. She could see the wide slats through the glass.

“I know you're in there,” she said quietly.

She returned to her car, put the windows down, and sat behind the steering wheel, waiting for him to come out. Sooner or later he would need food, or laundry detergent, or medical attention, or toilet paper, something, and then she would have him.

Unfortunately, the weather was not conducive to a long stakeout. The past few days had been warm but mild. Now the August heat had returned like a bad dragon in a storybook: scorching the land with its fiery breath. The palm trees drooped and the flowers began to wilt in the blistering sun. Behind all of the elaborate watering systems that maintained the lush landscaping, the dispossessed desert waited to reassert itself.

Baking as swiftly and evenly as a muffin in a convection oven, Holly finally put up the windows, started the car, and switched on the air conditioner. The cold draft was heavenly, but before long the car began to overheat; the needle rose swiftly toward the red section of the arc on the temperature gauge.

At one-fifteen, just three-quarters of an hour after she had arrived, Holly threw the car in reverse, backed out of the driveway, and returned to the Laguna Hills Motor Inn. She changed into tan shorts and a canary-yellow calypso blouse that left her belly bare. She put on her new running shoes, but without socks this time. At a nearby Sav-On drugstore, she bought a vinyl-strap folding lounge chair, beach towel, tube of tanning cream, picnic cooler, bag of ice, six-pack of diet soda, and a Travis McGee paperback by John D. MacDonald. She already had sunglasses.

She was back at Ironheart's house on Bougainvillea Way before two-thirty. She tried the doorbell again. He refused to answer.

Somehow she knew he was in there. Maybe she was a little psychic.

She carried the ice chest, folding lounger, and other items around the side of the house to the lawn in back. She set up the chair on the grass, just beyond the redwood-covered patio. In a few minutes, she was comfy.

In the MacDonald novel, Travis McGee was sweltering down there in Fort Lauderdale, where they were having a heatwave so intense it even took the bounce out of the beach bunnies. Holly had read the book before; she chose to reread it now because she had remembered that the plot unfolded against a background of tropical heat and humidity. Steamy Florida, rendered in MacDonald's vivid prose, made the dry air of Laguna Niguel seem less torrid by comparison, even though it had to be well over ninety degrees.

After about half an hour, she glanced at the house and saw Jim Ironheart standing at the big kitchen window. He was watching her.

She waved.

He did not wave back at her.

He walked away from the window but did not come outside.

Opening a diet soda, returning to the novel, she relished the feel of the sun on her bare legs. She was not worried about a burn. She already had a little tan. Besides, though blond and fair-skinned, she had a tanning gene that insured against a burn as long as she didn't indulge in marathon sunbathing.

After a while, when she got up to readjust the lounger so she could lie on her stomach, she saw Jim Ironheart standing on the patio, just outside the sliding glass door of his family room. He was in rumpled slacks and a wrinkled T-shirt, unshaven. His hair was lank and oily. He didn't look well.

He was about fifteen feet away, so his voice carried easily to her: “What do you think you're doing?”

“Bronzing up a little.”

“Please leave, Miss Thorne.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“We have nothing to talk about.”

“Hah!”

He went back inside and slid the door shut. She heard the latch click.

After lying on her stomach for almost an hour, dozing instead of reading, she decided she'd had enough sun. Besides, at three-thirty in the afternoon, the best tanning rays were past.

She moved the lounger, cooler, and the rest of her paraphernalia onto the shaded patio. She opened a second diet soda and picked up the MacDonald novel again.

At four o'clock she heard the family-room door sliding open again. His footsteps approached and stopped behind her. He stood there for a while, evidently looking down at her. Neither of them spoke, and she pretended to keep reading.

His continued silence was eerie. She began to think about his dark side — the eight shotgun rounds he had pumped into Norman Rink in Atlanta, for one thing — and she grew increasingly nervous until she decided that he was trying to spook her.

When Holly picked up her can of soda from the top of the cooler, took a sip, sighed with pleasure at the taste, and put the can down again all without letting her hand tremble even once, Ironheart at last came around the lounge chair and stood where she could see him. He was still slovenly and unshaven. Dark circles ringed his eyes. He had an unhealthy pallor.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“That'll take a while to explain.”

“I don't have a while.”

“How long do you have?”

“One minute,” he said.

She hesitated, then shook her head. “Can't do it in a minute. I'll just wait here till you've got more time.”

He stared at her intimidatingly.

She found her place in the novel.

He said, “I could call the police, have you put off my property.”

“Why don't you do that?” she said.

He stood there a few seconds longer, impatient and uncertain, then reentered the house. Slid the door shut. Locked it.

“Don't take forever,” Holly muttered. “In about another hour, I'm gonna have to use your bathroom.”

Around her, two hummingbirds drew nectar from the flowers, the shadows lengthened, and exploding bubbles made hollow ticking sounds inside her open can of soda.

Down in Florida, there were also hummingbirds and cool shadows, icy bottles of Dos Equis instead of diet cola, and Travis McGee was getting into deeper trouble by the paragraph.

Her stomach began to grumble. She had eaten breakfast at the airport in Dubuque, surprised that her appetite had not been suppressed forever by the macabre images burned into her mind at the crash scene. She had missed lunch, thanks to the stakeout; now she was famished. Life goes on.

Fifteen minutes ahead of Holly's bathroom deadline, Ironheart returned. He had showered and shaved. He was dressed in a blue boatneck shirt, white cotton slacks, and white canvas Top-Siders.

She was flattered by his desire to make a better appearance.

“Okay,” he said, “what do you want?”

“I need to use your facilities first.”

A long-suffering look lengthened his face. “Okay, okay, but then we talk, get it over with, and you go.”

She followed him into the family room, which was adjacent to an open breakfast area, which was adjacent to an open kitchen. The mismatched furniture appeared to have been purchased on the cheap at a warehouse clearance sale immediately after he had graduated from college and taken his first teaching job. It was clean but well worn. Hundreds of paperback books filled free-standing cases. But there was no artwork of any kind on the walls, and no decor pieces such as vases or bowls or sculptures or potted plants lent warmth to the room.

He showed her the powder room off the main entrance foyer. No wallpaper, white paint. No designer soaps shaped like rosebuds, just a bar of Ivory. No colorful or embroidered handtowels, just a roll of Bounty standing on the counter.

As she closed the door, she looked back at him and said, “Maybe we could talk over an early supper. I'm starved.”

When she finished in the bathroom, she peeked in his living room. It was decorated — to use the word as loosely as the language police would allow — in a style best described as Early Garage Sale, though it was even more Spartan than the family room. His house was surprisingly modest for a man who had won six million in the state lottery, but his furniture made the house seem Rockefellerian by comparison.

She went out to the kitchen and found him waiting at the round breakfast table.

“I thought you'd be cooking something,” she said, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite him.

He was not amused. “What do you want?”

“Let me start by telling you what I don't want,” she said. “I don't want to write about you, I've given up reporting, I've had it with journalism. Now, you believe that or not, but it's true. The good work you're doing can only be hampered if you're being hounded by media types, and lives will be lost that you might otherwise save. I see that now.”

“Good.”

“And I don't want to blackmail you. Anyway, judging by the unconscionably lavish style in which you live, I doubt you've got more than eighteen bucks left.”

He did not smile. He just stared at her with those gas flame-blue eyes.

She said, “I don't want to inhibit your work or compromise it in any way. I don't want to venerate you as the Second Coming, marry you, bear your children, or extract from you the meaning of life. Anyway, only Elvis Presley knows the meaning of life, and he's in a state of suspended animation in an alien vault in a cave on Mars.”

His face remained as immobile as stone. He was tough.

“What I want,” Holly said, “is to satisfy my curiosity, learn how you do what you do, and why you do it.” She hesitated. She took a deep breath. Here came the big one: “And I want to be part of it all.”

“What do you mean?”

She spoke fast, running sentences together, afraid he would interrupt her before she got it all out, and never give her another chance to explain herself. “I want to work with you, help you, contribute to your mission, or whatever you call it, however you think of it, I want to save people, at least help you save them.”

“There's nothing you could do.”

“There must be something,” she insisted.

“You'd only be in the way.”

“Listen, I'm intelligent—”

“So what?”

“—well-educated—”

“So am I.”

“—gutsy—”

“But I don't need you.”

“—competent, efficient—”

“Sorry.”

“Damn it!” she said, more frustrated than angry. “Let me be your secretary, even if you don't need one. Let me be your girl Friday, your good right hand — at least your friend.”

He seemed unmoved by her plea. He stared at her for so long that she became uncomfortable, but she would not look away from him. She sensed that he used his singularly penetrating gaze as an instrument of control and intimidation, but she was not easily manipulated. She was determined not to let him shape this encounter before it had begun.

At last he said, “So you want to be my Lois Lane.”

For a moment she had no idea what he was talking about. Then she remembered: Metropolis, the Daily Planet, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Lois Lane, Clark Kent, Superman.

Holly knew he was trying to irritate her. Making her angry was another way of manipulating her; if she became abrasive, he would have an excuse to turn her away. She was determined to remain calm and reasonably congenial in order to keep the door open between them.

But she could not sit still and control her temper at the same time. She needed to work off some of the energy of anger that was overcharging her batteries. She pushed her chair back, got up, and paced as she responded to him: “No, that's exactly what I don't want to be. I don't want to be your chronicler, intrepid girl reporter. I'm sick of journalism.” Succinctly, she told him why. “I don't want to be your swooning admirer, either, or that well-meaning but bumbling gal who gets herself in trouble all the time and has to rely on you to save her from the evil clutches of Lex Luthor. Something amazing is happening here, and I want to be part of it. It's also dangerous, yeah, but I still want to be a part of it, because what you're doing is so … so meaningful. I want to contribute any way I can, do something more worthwhile with my life than I've done so far.”

“Do-gooders are usually so full of themselves, so unconsciously arrogant, they do more damage than good,” he said.

“I'm not a do-gooder. That's not how I see myself. I'm not at all interested in being praised for my generosity and self-sacrifice. I don't need to feel morally superior. Just useful.”

“The world is full of do-gooders,” he said, refusing to relent. “If I needed an assistant, which I don't, why would I choose you over all the other do-gooders out there?”

He was an impossible man. She wanted to smack him.

Instead she kept moving back and forth as she said, “Yesterday, when I crawled back into the plane for that little boy, for Norby, I just … well, I amazed myself. I didn't know I had anything like that in me. I wasn't brave, I was scared to death the whole time, but I got him out of there, and I never felt better about myself.”

“You like the way people look at you when they know you're a hero,” he said flatly.

She shook her head. “No, that's not it. Aside from one rescue worker, no one knew I'd pulled Norby out of there. I liked the way I looked at me after I'd done it, that's all.”

“So you're hooked on risk, heroism, you're a courage junkie.”

Now she wanted to smack him twice. In the face. Crack, crack. Hard enough to set his eyes spinning. It would make her feel so good.

She restrained herself. “Okay, fine, if that's the way you want to see it, then I'm a courage junkie.”

He did not apologize. He just stared at her.

She said, “But that's better than inhaling a pound of cocaine up my nose every day, don't you think?”

He did not respond.

Getting desperate but trying not to show it, Holly said, “When it was all over yesterday, after I handed Norby to that rescue worker, you know what I felt? More than anything else? Not elation at saving him — that too, but not mainly that. And not pride or the thrill of defeating death myself. Mostly I felt rage. It surprised me, even scared me. I was so furious that a little boy almost died, that his uncle had died beside him, that he'd been trapped under those seats with corpses, that all of his innocence had been blown away and that he couldn't ever again just enjoy life the way a kid ought to be able to. I wanted to punch somebody, wanted to make somebody apologize to him for what he'd been through. But fate isn't a sleazeball in a cheap suit, you can't put the arm on fate and make it say it's sorry, all you can do is stew in your anger.”

Her voice was not rising, but it was increasingly intense. She paced faster, more agitatedly. She was getting passionate instead of angry, which was even more certain to reveal the degree of her desperation. But she couldn't stop herself:

“Just stew in anger. Unless you're Jim Ironheart. You can do something about it, make a difference in a way nobody ever made a difference before. And now that I know about you, I can't just get on with my life, can't just shrug my shoulders and walk away, because you've given me a chance to find a strength in myself I didn't know I had, you've given me hope when I didn't even realize I was longing for it, you've shown me a way to satisfy a need that, until yesterday, I didn't even know I had, a need to fight back, to spit in Death's face. Damn it, you can't just close the door now and leave me standing out in the cold!”

He stared at her.

Congratulations, Thorne, she told herself scornfully. You were a monument to composure and restraint, a towering example of self-control.

He just stared at her.

She had met his cool demeanor with heat, had answered his highly effective silences with an ever greater cascade of words. One chance, that was all she'd had, and she'd blown it.

Miserable, suddenly drained of energy instead of overflowing with it, she sat down again. She propped her elbows on the table and put her face in her hands, not sure if she was going to cry or scream. She didn't do either. She just sighed wearily.

“Want a beer?” he asked.

“God, yes.”

Like a brush of flame, the westering sun slanted through the tilted plantation shutters on the breakfast-nook window, slathering bands of copper-gold fire on the ceiling. Holly slumped in her chair, and Jim leaned forward in his. She stared at him while he stared at his half-finished bottle of Corona.

“Like I told you on the plane, I'm not a psychic,” he insisted. “I can't foresee things just because I want to. I don't have visions. It's a higher power working throughme.”

“You want to define that a little?”

He shrugged. “God.”

“God's talking to you?”

“Not talking. I don't hear voices, His or anybody else's. Now and then I'm compelled to be in a certain place at a certain time …”

As best he could, he tried to explain how he had ended up at the McAlbury School in Portland and at the sites of the other miraculous rescues he had performed. He also told her about Father Geary finding him on the floor of the church, by the sanctuary railing, with the stigmata of, Christ marking his brow, hands, and side.

It was off-the-wall stuff, a weird brand of mysticism that might have been concocted by an heretical Catholic and peyote-inspired Indian medicine man in association with a no-nonsense, Clint Eastwood-style cop. Holly was fascinated. But she said, “I can't honestly tell you I see God's big hand in this.”

“I do,” he said quietly, making it clear that his conviction was solid and in no need of her approval.

Nevertheless she said, “Sometimes you've had to be pretty damned violent, like with those guys who kidnapped Susie and her mother in the desert.”

“They got what they deserved,” he said flatly. “There's too much darkness in some people, corruption that could never be cleaned out in five lifetimes of rehabilitation. Evil is real, it walks the earth. Sometimes the devil works by persuasion. Sometimes he just sets loose these sociopaths who don't have a gene for empathy or one for compassion.”

“I'm not saying you didn't have to be violent in some of these situations. Far as I can see, you had no choice. I just meant — it's hard to see God encouraging his messenger to pick up a shotgun.”

He drank some beer. “You ever read the Bible?”

“Sure.”

“Says in there that God wiped out the evil people in Sodom and Gomorrah with volcanoes, earthquakes, rains of fire. Flooded the whole world once, didn't He? Made the Red Sea wash over the pharaoh's soldiers, drowned them all. I don't think He's going to be skittish about a little old shotgun.”

“I guess I was thinking about the God of the New Testament. Maybe you heard about Him — understanding, compassionate, merciful.”

He fixed her with those eyes again, which could be so appealing that they made her knees weak or so cold they made her shiver. A moment ago they had been warm; now they were icy. If she'd had any doubt, she knew from his frigid response that he had not yet decided to welcome her into his life. “I've met up with some people who're such walking scum, it'd be an insult to animals to call them animals. If I thought God always dealt mercifully with their kind, I wouldn't want anything to do with God.”

Holly stood at the kitchen sink, cleaning mushrooms and slicing tomatoes, while Jim separated egg whites from yolks to make a pair of comparatively low-calorie omelettes.

“All the time, people are dying conveniently, right in your own backyard. But often you go clear across the country to save them.”

“Once to France,” he said, confirming her suspicion that he had ventured out of the country on his missions. “Once to Germany, twice to Japan, once to England.”

“Why doesn't this higher power give you only local work?”

“I don't know.”

“Have you ever wondered what's so special about the people you save? I mean — why them and not others?”

“Yeah. I've wondered about it. I see stories on the news every week about innocent people being murdered or dying in accidents right here in southern California, and I wonder why He didn't choose to save them instead of some boy in Boston. I just figure the boy in Boston — the devil was conspiring to take him before his time, and God used me to prevent that.”

“So many of them are young.”

“I've noticed that.”

“But you don't know why?”

“Not a clue.”

The kitchen was redolent of cooking eggs, onions, mushrooms, and green peppers. Jim made one big omelette in a single pan, planning to cut it in half when it was done.

While Holly monitored the progress of the whole-wheat bread in the toaster, she said, “Why would God want you to save Susie and her mother out there in the desert — but not the girl's father?”

“I don't know.”

“The father wasn't a bad man, was he?”

“No. Didn't seem to be.”

“So why not save them all?”

“If He wants me to know, He'll tell me.”

Jim's certainty about being in God's good grace and under His guidance, and his easy acceptance that God wanted some people to die and not others, made Holly uneasy.

On the other hand, how could he react to his extraordinary experience in any other way? No point in arguing with God.

She recalled an old saying, a real chestnut that had become a cliche in the hands of the pop psych crowd: God grant me the courage to change those things I can't accept, to accept those things I can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference. Cliche or not, that was an eminently sane attitude.

When the two pieces of bread popped up, she plucked them from the toaster. As she toasted two more, she said, “If God wanted to save Nicholas O'Conner from being fried when that power-company vault went up, why didn't He just prevent it from exploding in the first place?”

“I don't know.”

“Doesn't it seem odd to you that God has to use you, run you clear across the country, throw you at the O'Conner boy an instant before that 17,000-volt line blows up? Why couldn't He just… oh, I don't know … just spit on the cable or something, fix it up with a little divine saliva before it went blooey? Or instead of sending you all the way to Atlanta to kill Norman Rink in that convenience store, why didn't God just tweak Norman's brain a little, give him a timely stroke?”

Jim artfully tilted the pan to turn over the omelette. “Why did He make mice to torment people and cats to kill the mice? Why did He create aphids that kill plants, then ladybugs to eat the aphids? And why didn't He give us eyes in the back of our head — when He gave us so many reasons to need them there?”

She finished lightly buttering the first two slices of toast. “I see what you're saying. God works in mysterious ways.”

“Very.”

They ate at the breakfast table. In addition to toast, they had sliced tomatoes and cold bottles of Corona with the omelettes.

The purple cloth of twilight slid across the world outside, and the undraped form of night began to reveal itself.

Holly said, “You aren't entirely a puppet in these situations.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You have some power to determine the outcome.”

“None.”

“Well, God sent you on Flight Two forty-six to save just the Dubroveks.”

“That's right.”

“But then you took matters into your own hands and saved more than just Christine and Casey. How many were supposed to die?”

“A hundred and fifty-one.”

“And how many actually died?”

“Forty-seven.”

“Okay, so you saved a hundred and two more lives than He sent you to save.”

“A hundred and three, counting yours — but only because He allowed me to do it, helped me to do it.”

“What — you're saying God wanted you to save just the Dubroveks, but then He changed His mind?”

“I guess so.”

“God isn't sure what He wants?”

“I don't know.”

“God is sometimes confused?”

“I don't know.”

“God is a waffler?”

“Holly, I just don't know.”

“Good omelette.”

“Thank you.”

“I have trouble understanding why God would ever change His mind about anything. After all, He's infallible, right? So He can't have made the wrong decision the first time.”

“I don't concern myself with questions like that. I just don't think about it.”

“Obviously,” she said.

He glared at her, and she felt the full effect of his eyes in their arctic mode. Then focusing on his food and beer, he refused to respond to Holly's next few conversational gambits.

She realized that she was no closer to winning his trust than she had been when he had reluctantly invited her in from the patio. He was still judging her, and on points she was probably losing. What she needed was a solid knockout punch, and she thought she knew what it was, but she didn't want to use it until the right moment.

When Jim finished eating, he looked up from his empty plate and said, “Okay, I've listened to your pitch, I've fed you, and now I want you to go.”

“No, you don't.”

He blinked. “Miss Thorne—”

“You called me Holly before.”

“Miss Thorne, please don't make me throw you out.”

“You don't want me to go,” Holly said, striving to sound more confident than she felt. “At all the scenes of these rescues, you've given only your first name. No one's learned anything more about you. Except me. You told me you lived in southern California. You told me your last name was Ironheart.”

“I never said you were a bad reporter. You're good at prying information—”

“I didn't pry. You gave it. And if it wasn't something you wanted to give, a grizzly bear with an engineering degree and crowbar couldn't pry it out of you. I want another beer.”

“I asked you to go.”

“Don't stir yourself. I know where you keep the suds.”

She got up, stepped to the refrigerator, and withdrew another bottle of Corona. She was walking on the wild side now, at least for her, but a third beer gave her an excuse — even if a flimsy one — to stay and argue with him. She had downed three bottles last night, at the motel cocktail lounge in Dubuque. But then she had still been saturated with adrenaline, as superalert and edgy as a Siamese cat on Benzedrine, which canceled out the alcohol as fast as it entered her bloodstream. Even so, she had hit the bed as hard as a lumberjack who'd downed a dozen boilermakers. If she passed out on Ironheart, she'd no doubt wake up in her car, out in the street, and she would never get inside his house again. She opened the beer and returned to the table with it.

“You wanted me to find you,” she said as she sat down.

He regarded her with all the warmth of a dead penguin frozen to an ice floe. “I did, huh?”

“Absolutely. That's why you told me your last name and where I could find you.”

He said nothing.

“And you remember your last words to me at the airport in Portland?”

“No.”

“It was the best come-on line any guy's ever dropped on me.”

He waited.

She made him wait a little longer while she took a sip of beer straight from the bottle. “Just before you closed the car door and went into the terminal, you said, 'So are you, Miss Thorne.'”

“Doesn't sound like much of a come-on line to me.”

“It was romantic as hell.”

“ 'So are you, Miss Thorne.' And what had you just said to me. 'You're an asshole, Mr. Ironheart'?”

“Ho, ho, ho,” she said. “Try to spoil it, go ahead, but you can't. I'd told you that your modesty was refreshing, and you said, 'So are you, Miss Thorne.' My heart just now went pitty-pat-pitty-pat again, remembering it. Oh, you knew just what you were doing, you smoothie. Told me your name, told me where you lived, gave me a lot of those eyes, those damned eyes, played coy, then hit me with 'So are you, Miss Thorne,' and walked away like Bogart.”

“I don't think you should have any more of that beer.”

“Yeah? Well, I think I'll sit here all night, drinking one of 'em after another.”

He sighed. “In that case, I'd better have another one myself.”

He got another beer and sat down again.

Holly figured she was making progress.

Or maybe he was setting her up. Maybe getting cozy over Corona was a trick of some kind. He was clever, all right. Maybe he was going to try to drink her under the table. Well, he'd lose that one, because she'd be under the table long before him!

“You wanted me to find you,” she told him.

He said nothing.

“You know why you wanted me to find you?”

He said nothing.

“You wanted me to find you because you really did think I was refreshing, and you're the loneliest, sorriest guy between here and Hardrock, Missouri.”

He said nothing. He was good at that. He was the best guy in the world at saying nothing at just the right time.

She said, “You make me want to smack you.”

He said nothing.

Whatever confidence the Corona had given her suddenly began to drain away. She sensed that she was losing again. For a couple of rounds, there, she had definitely been winning on points, but now she was being beaten back by his silence.

“Why are all these boxing metaphors running through my head?” she asked him. “I hate boxing.”

He slugged down some of his Corona and, with a nod, indicated her bottle, from which she had drunk only a third. “You really insist on finishing that?”

“Hell, yes.” She was aware that the brewski was beginning to affect her, perhaps dangerously, but she was still plenty sober enough to recognize that the moment had come for her knockout punch. “If you don't tell me about that place, I'm going to sit here and drink myself into a fat, slovenly, alcoholic old crone. I'm going to die here at the age of eighty-two, with a liver the size of Vermont.”

“Place?” He looked baffled. “What place?”

Now. She chose a soft but clear whisper in which to deliver the punch: “The windmill.”

He didn't exactly fall to the canvas, and no cartoon stars swarmed around his head, but Holly could see that he had been rocked.

“You've been to the windmill?” he asked.

“No. You mean it's a real place?”

“If you don't know that much, then how could you know about it at all?”

“Dreams. Windmill dreams. Each of the last three nights.”

He paled. The overhead light was not on. They were sitting in shadows, illuminated only by the secondhand glow of the rangehood and sink lights in the kitchen and by a table lamp in the adjacent family room, but Holly saw him go pale under his tan. His face seemed to hover before her in the gloom like the face-shaped wing configuration of a big snow-white moth.

The extraordinary vividness and unusual nature of the nightmare — and the fact that the effects of the dream had continued after she had awakened in her motel room — had encouraged her to believe that it was somehow connected with Jim Ironheart. Two encounters with the paranormal in such close succession had to be linked. But she was relieved, all the same, when his stunned reaction confirmed her suspicion.

“Limestone walls,” she said. “Wooden floor. A heavy wooden door, banded in iron, that opens on some limestone steps. A yellow candle in a blue dish.”

“I've dreamed about it for years,” he said softly. “Once or twice a month. Never more often than that. Until the last three nights. But how can we be having the same dream?”

“Where's the real windmill?”

“On my grandparents' farm. North of Santa Barbara. In the Santa Ynez Valley.”

“Did something terrible happen to you there, or what?”

He shook his head. “No. Not at all. I loved that place. It was … a sanctuary.”

“Then why did you go pale when I mentioned it?”

“Did I?”

“Picture an albino cat chasing a mouse around a corner and running into a Doberman. That pale.”

“Well, when I dream of the mill, it's always frightening—”

“Don't I know it. But if it was a good place in your life, a sanctuary like you say, then why does it feature in nightmares?”

“I don't know.”

“Here we go again.”

“I really don't,” he insisted. “Why did you dream about it, if you've never even been there?”

She drank more beer, which did not clarify her thinking. “Maybe because you're projecting your dream at me. As a way to sort of make a connection between us, draw me to you.”

“Why would I want to draw you to me?”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Anyway, like I told you before, I'm no psychic, I don't have abilities like that. I'm just an instrument.”

“Then it's this higher power of yours,” she said. “It's sending me the same dream because it wants us to connect.”

He wiped one hand down his face. “This is too much for me right now. I'm so damned tired.”

“Me, too. But it's only nine-thirty, and we've still got a lot to talk about.”

“I only slept about an hour last night,” he said.

He really did look exhausted. A shave and a shower had made him presentable, but the bruise-dark rings around his eyes were getting darker; and he had not regained color in his face after turning pale at the mention of her windmill dreams.

He said, “We can pick this up in the morning.”

She frowned. “No way. I'll come back in the morning, and you won't let me in.”

“I'll let you in.”

“That's what you say now.”

“If you're having that dream, then you're part of this whether I like it or not.”

His tone of voice had gone from cool to cold again, and it was clear that what he meant by “whether I like it or not” was really “even though I don't like it.”

He was a loner, evidently always had been. Viola Moreno, who had great affection for him, claimed he was well-liked by his students and colleagues. She'd spoken of a fundamental sadness in him, however, that separated him from other people, and since quitting his teaching position, he had seen little of Viola or his other friends from that life. Though intrigued by the news that he and Holly were sharing a dream, though he had called her “refreshing,” though he was to some degree attracted to her, he obviously resented her intrusion into his solitude.

Holly said, “No good. You'll be gone when I get here in the morning, I won't know where you went, maybe you'll never come back.”

He had no energy for resistance. “Then stay the night.”

“You have a spare bedroom?”

“Yeah. But there's no spare bed. You can sleep on the family-room couch, I guess, but it's damned old and not too comfortable.”

She carried her half-empty beer into the adjacent family room, and tested the sagging, brown sofa. “It'll be good enough.”

“Whatever you want.” He seemed indifferent, but she sensed that his indifference was a pretense.

“You have any spare pajamas?”

“Jesus.”

“Well, I'm sorry, but I didn't bring any.”

“Mine'll be too big for you.”

“Just makes them more comfortable. I'd like to shower, too. I'm sticky from tanning lotion and being in the sun all afternoon.”

With the put-upon air of a man who had found his least favorite relative standing on his doorstep unannounced, he took her upstairs, showed her the guest bath, and got a pair of pajamas and a set of towels for her.

“Try to be quiet,” he said. “I plan to be sound asleep in five minutes.”

Luxuriating in the fall of hot water and clouds of steam, Holly was pleased that the shower did not take the edge off her beer buzz. Though she had slept better last night than Ironheart claimed to have, she had not gotten a solid eight hours in the past few days, and she was looking forward to a Corona-induced sleep even on the worn and lumpy sofa.

At the same time, she was uneasy about the continued fuzziness of her mind. She needed to keep her wits about her. After all, she was in the house of an undeniably strange man who was largely a cipher to her, a walking mystery. She understood little of what was in his heart, which pumped secrets and shadows in greater quantity than blood. For all his coolness toward her, he seemed basically a good man with benign intentions, and it was difficult to believe that he was a threat to her. On the other hand, it was not unusual to see a news story about a berserk mass murderer who — after brutally slaying his friends, family, and coworkers — was described by his astonished neighbors as “a really nice guy.” For all she knew, in spite of his claim to be the avatar of God, by day Jim Ironheart heroically risked his own life to save the lives of strangers — and, by night, tortured kittens with maniacal glee.

Nevertheless, after she dried off on the clean-smelling, fluffy bath towel, she took another long swallow of her Corona. She decided that a full night of deep and dreamless sleep was worth the risk of being butchered in her bed.

She put on his pajamas, rolled up the cuffs of the pants and the sleeves.

Carrying her bottle of Corona, which still contained a swallow or two, she quietly opened the bathroom door and stepped into the second-floor hallway. The house was eerily silent.

Heading toward the stairs, she passed the open door of the master bedroom and glanced inside. Extension-arm brass reading lamps were mounted on the wall on both sides of the bed, and one of them cast a narrow wedge of amber light on the rumpled sheets. Jim was lying on his back in bed, his arms folded on the two pillows under his head, and he seemed to be awake.

She hesitated, then stepped into the open doorway. “Thanks,” she said, speaking softly in case he was asleep, “I feel a lot better.”

“Good for you.”

Holly entered the room and moved close enough to the bed to see his blue eyes shining in the backsplash of the lamp. The covers were pulled up past his navel, but he was not wearing pajama tops. His chest and arms were lean but well-muscled.

She said, “Thought you'd be asleep by now.”

“Want to be, need to be, but I can't shut my mind off.”

Looking down at him, she said, “Viola Moreno says there's a deep sadness in you.”

“Been busy, haven't you?”

She took a small swallow of Corona. One left. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Do your grandparents still have the farm with the windmill?”

“They're dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Grandma died five years ago, Grandpa eight months later — as if he really didn't want to go on without her. They had good, full lives. But I miss them.”

“You have anybody?”

“Two cousins in Akron,” he said.

“You stay in touch?”

“Haven't seen them in twenty years.”

She drank the last of the Corona. She put the empty bottle on the nightstand.

For a few minutes neither of them spoke. The silence was not awkward. Indeed, it was comfortable.

She got up and went around to the other side of the bed.

She pulled back the covers, stretched out beside him, and put her head on the other two pillows.

Apparently, he was not surprised. Neither was she.

After a while, they held hands, lying side by side, staring at the ceiling.

She said, “Must've been hard, losing your parents when you were just ten.”

“Real bad.”

“What happened to them?”

He hesitated. “A traffic accident.”

“And you went to live with your grandparents?”

“Yeah. The first year was the hardest. I was … in bad shape. I spent a lot of time in the windmill. It was my special place, where I went to play … to be alone.”

“I wish we'd been kids together,” she said.

“Why?”

She thought of Norby, the boy she had pulled from the sarcophagus under the DC-10's overturned seats. “So I could've known you before your parents died, what you were like then, untouched.”

Another stretch of time passed in silence.

When he spoke, his voice was so low that Holly could barely hear it above the thumping of her own heart: “Viola has a sadness in her, too. She looks like the happiest lady in the world, but she lost her husband in Vietnam, never got over it. Father Geary, the priest I told you about, he looks like every devout parish rector from every old sentimental Catholic movie ever made in the thirties and forties, but when I met him he was weary and unsure of his calling. And you… well, you're pretty and amusing, and you have an air of efficiency about you, but I'd never have guessed that you could be as relentless as you are. You give the impression of a woman who moves easy through life, interested in life and in her work, but never moving against a current, always with it, easy. Yet you're really like a bulldog when you get your teeth in something.”

Staring at the dapple of light and shadow on the ceiling, holding his strong hand, Holly considered his statement for a while. Finally she said, “What's your point?”

“People are always more … complex than you figure.”

“Is that just an observation … or a warning?”

He seemed surprised by her question. “Warning?”

“Maybe you're warning me that you're not what you seem to be.”

After another long pause, he said, “Maybe.”

She matched his silence. Then she said, “I guess I don't care.”

He turned toward her. She moved against him with a shyness that she had not felt in many years. His first kiss was gentle, and more intoxicating than three bottles or three cases of Corona.

Holly realized she'd been deceiving herself. She had needed the beer not to soothe her nerves, not to insure an uninterrupted night of sleep, but to give her the courage to seduce him — or to be seduced. She had sensed that he was abysmally lonely, and she had told him so. Now she understood that her loneliness had exceeded his, and that only the smallest part of her desolation of spirit had resulted from her disenchantment with journalism; most of it was simply the result of being alone, for the most part, all of her adult life.

Two pajama bottoms and one top seemed to dissolve between them like clothes sometimes evaporate in erotic dreams. She moved her hands over him with increasing excitement, marveling that the sense of touch could convey such intricacies of shape and texture, or give rise to such exquisite longings.

She had a ridiculously romantic idea of what it would be like to make love to him, a dreamy-eyed girl's fantasy of unmatched passion, of sweet tenderness and pure hot sex in perfect balance, every muscle in both of them flexing and contracting in sublime harmony or, at times, in breathless counterpoint, each invasive stroke a testament to mutual surrender, two becoming one, the outer world of reason overwhelmed by the inner world of feeling, no wrong word spoken, no sigh mistimed, bodies moving and meshing in precisely the same mysterious rhythms by which the great invisible tidal forces of the universe ebbed and flowed, elevating the act above mere biology and making of it a mystical experience. Her expectations proved, of course, to be ridiculous. In reality, it was more tender, more fierce, and far better than her fantasy.

They fell asleep like spoons in a drawer, her belly against his back, her loins against his warm bottom. Hours later, in those reaches of the night that were usually — but no longer — the loneliest of all, they woke to the same quiet alarm of renewed desire. He turned to her, she welcomed him, and this time they moved together with an even greater urgency, as if the first time had not taken the edge off their need but had sharpened it the way one dose of heroin only increases the addict's desire for the next.

At first, looking up into Jim's beautiful eyes, Holly felt as if she were gazing into the pure fire of his soul. Then he gripped her by the sides, half lifting her off the mattress as he eased deep into her, and she felt the scratches burning in her flanks and remembered the claws of the thing that had stepped magically out of a dream. For an instant, with pain flashing in her shallow wounds, her perception shifted, and she had the queer feeling that it was a cold blue fire into which she gazed, burning without heat. But that was only a reaction to the stinging scratches and the pain-engendered memory of the nightmare. When he slid his hands off her sides and under her, lifting, she rose to meet him, and he was all warmth now, not the faintest chill about him. Together they generated enough heat to sear away that brief image of a soul on ice.

The frost-pale glow of the unseen moon backlit banks of coaly clouds that churned across the night sky.

Unlike in other recent dreams, Holly was standing outside on a graveled path that led between a pond and a cornfield toward the door in the base of the old windmill. The limestone structure rose above her at a severe angle, recognizably a mill but nonetheless an alien place, unearthly.

The huge sails, ragged with scores of broken or missing vanes, were silhouetted against the foreboding sky and angled like a tilted cross. Although a blustery wind sent moon-silvered ripples across the ink-dark pond and rattled the nearby cornstalks, the sails were still. The mill obviously had been inoperable for many years, and the mechanisms were most likely too rusted to allow the sails to turn.

A spectral muddy-yellow light flickered at the narrow windows of the upper room. Beyond the glass, strange shadows moved across the interior limestone walls of that high chamber.

She didn't want to get any closer to the building, had never been more frightened of a place in her life, but she was unable to halt herself. She was drawn forward as if she were the spellbound thrall of some powerful sorcerer.

In the pond to her left, something was wrong with the moon-cast reflection of the windmill, and she turned to look at it. The pattern of light and shade on the water was reversed from what it should have been. The mill shadow was not a dark geometric form imposed on the water over the filigree of moonlight; instead, the image of the mill was brighter than the surface of the pond around it, as if the mill were luminous, the brightest object in the night, when in fact its stones rose in an ebony and forbidding pile. Where the high windows were filled with lambent light in the real mill, black rectangles floated in the impossible reflection, like the empty eyeholes in a fleshless skull.

Creak … creak … creak…

She looked up.

The massive sails were trembling in the wind and beginning to move. They forced the corroded gears that drove the windshaft and, in turn, the grinding stones in the mill-room at its base.

Wanting only to wake up or, failing that, to flee back along the gravel path over which she had come, Holly drifted inexorably forward. The giant sails began to turn clockwise, gaining speed, producing less creaking as the gears unfroze. It seemed to her that they were like the fingers of a monstrous hand, and the jagged end of every broken vane was a claw.

She reached the door.

She did not want to go inside. She knew that within lay a hell of some kind, as bad as the pits of torture described by any fire-and-brimstone preacher who had ever thundered a sermon in old Salem. If she went in there, she would never come out alive.

The sails swooped down at her, passing just a couple of feet over her head, the splintered wood reaching for her: Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

In the grip of a trance even more commanding than her terror, she opened the door. She stepped across the threshold. With the malevolent animation that objects possessed only in dreams, the door pulled out of her hand, slammed shut behind her.

Ahead lay the lightless lower room of the mill, in which the worn stone wheels ground against each other.

To her left, barely visible in the gloom, stairs led up. Ululant squeals and haunting cries echoed from above, like the night concert performed by the wildlife in a jungle, except none of these voices was quite that of a panther or monkey or bird or hyena. Electronic sounds were part of the mix, and what seemed to be the brittle shrieks of insects passed through a stereo amplifier. Underlying the cacophony was a monotonous, throbbing, three-note bass refrain that reverberated in the stone walls of the stairwell and, before she had climbed halfway to the second floor, in Holly's bones as well.

She passed a narrow window on her left. An extended series of lightning bolts crackled across the vault of the night, and at the foot of the mill, like a trick mirror in a funhouse, the dark pond turned transparent. Its depths were revealed, as though the lightning came from under the water, and Holly saw an infinitely strange shape resting on the bottom. She squinted, trying to get a better look at the object, but the lightning sputtered out.

The merest glimpse of the thing, however, sent a cold wind through the hollows of her bones.

She waited, hoping for more lightning, but the night remained as opaque as tar, and black rain suddenly spattered against the window. Because she was halfway to the second floor of the mill, more muddy-orange and yellow light flickered around her than had reached her at the foot of the stairs. The window glass, backed by utter darkness now and painted with sufficient luminescence to serve as a dim mirror, presented her reflection.

But the face she possessed in this dream was not her own. It belonged to a woman twenty years older than Holly, to whom she bore no resemblance.

She'd never before had a dream in which she occupied the body of another person. But now she understood why she had been unable to turn back from the mill when she'd been outside, and why she was unable to stop herself from climbing to the high room even though, on one level, she knew she was dreaming. Her lack of control was not the usual helplessness that transformed dreams into nightmares, but the result of sharing the body of a stranger.

The woman turned from the window and continued upward toward the unearthly shrieks, cries, and whispers that echoed down to her with the fluctuant light. Around her the limestone walls pounded with the tripartite bass beat, as if the mill were alive and had a massive three-chambered heart.

Stop, turn back, you're going to die up there, Holly shouted, but the woman could not hear her. Holly was only an observer in her own dream, not an active participant, unable to influence events.

Step by step. Higher.

The iron-bound timber door stood open.

She crossed the threshold. Into the high room.

The first thing she saw was the boy. He was standing in the middle of the room, terrified. His small hands, curled in fists, were at his sides. A three-inch-diameter decorative candle stood in a blue dish at his feet. A hardcover book lay beside the dish, and she glimpsed the word “mill” on the colorful dustjacket.

Turning to look at her, his beautiful blue eyes darkened by terror, the boy said, “I'm scared, help me, the walls, the walls!”

She realized that the single candle was not producing all of the peculiar glow suffusing the room. Other light glimmered in the walls, as if they were not made of solid limestone but of semitransparent and magically radiant quartz in shades of amber. At once she saw that something was alive within the stone, something luminous which could move through solid matter as easily as a swimmer could move through water.

The wall swelled and throbbed.

“It's coming,” the boy said with evident fear but also with what might have been a perverse excitement, “and nobody can stop it!”

Suddenly it was born out of the wall. The curve of mortared blocks split like the spongy membrane of an insect's egg. And taking shape from a core of foul muck where limestone should have been—

“No!”

Choking on a scream, Holly woke.

She sat up in bed, something touched her, and she wrenched away from it. Because the room was awash in morning light, she saw that it was only Jim.

A dream. Just a dream.

As had happened two nights ago in the Laguna Hills Motor Inn, however, the creature of the dream was trying to force its way into the waking world. It was not coming through a wall this time. The ceiling. Directly over the bed. The white-painted drywall was no longer white or dry, but mottled amber and brown, semitransparent and luminous as the stone in the dream had been, oozing a noxious mucus, bulging as some shadowy entity struggled to be born into the bedroom.

The dream-thing's thunderous three-part heartbeat—lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB—shuddered through the house.

Jim rolled off the bed and onto his feet. He had slipped into his pajama bottoms again during the night, just as Holly had slipped into the roomy top which hung halfway to her knees. She scrambled to his side. They stared up in horror at the pulsing birth sac which the ceiling had become, and at the shadowy writhing form struggling to breach that containing membrane.

Most frightening of all — this apparition was in daylight. The plantation shutters had not been completely closed over the windows, and slats of morning sunshine banded the room. When something from Beyond found you in the dead hours of the night, you half expected it. But sunshine was supposed to banish all monsters.

Jim put a hand against Holly's back, pushed her toward the open door to the hallway. “Go, get out!”

She took only two steps in that direction before the door slammed shut of its own accord. As if an exceptionally powerful poltergeist were at work, a mahogany highboy, as old and well-used as everything in the house, erupted away from the wall beside her, almost knocking her down. It flew across the bedroom, slammed into the door. A dresser and a chair followed that tall chest of drawers, effectively barricading the only exit.

The windows in the far wall presented an avenue of escape, but they would have to crouch to slip under the increasingly distended central portion of the ceiling. Having accepted the illogic of the waking nightmare, Holly was now loath to press past that greasy and obscenely throbbing pouch, for fear that it would split open as she moved under it, and that the creature within would seize her.

Jim pulled her back with him into the adjoining bathroom. He kicked the door shut.

Holly swung around, searching. The only window was set high and was too small to provide a way out.

The bathroom walls were untainted by the organic transformation that had overcome the bedroom, but they still shook with the triple bass thud of the inhuman heartbeat.

“What the hell is that?” he demanded.

“The Enemy,” she said at once, surprised that he didn't know. “The Enemy, from the dream.”

Above them, starting from the partition that the bath shared with the bedroom, the white ceiling began to discolor as if abruptly saturated with red blood, brown bile. The sheen of semigloss paint on drywall metamorphosed into a biological surface and began to throb in time with the thunderous heartbeat.

Jim pulled her into a corner by the vanity, and she huddled helplessly against him. Beyond the pregnant droop of the lowering ceiling, she saw repulsive movement like the frenzied squirming of a million maggots.

The thudding heartbeat increased in volume, booming around them.

She heard a wet, tearing sound. None of this could be happening, yet it was, and that sound made it more real than the things she was seeing with her own eyes, because it was such a filthy sound and so hideously intimate, too real for a delusion or a dream.

The door crashed open, and the ceiling burst overhead, showering them with debris.

But with that implosion, the power of the lingering nightmare was exhausted, and reality finally, fully reasserted itself. Nothing monstrous surged through the open door; only the sun-filled bedroom lay beyond. Although the ceiling had looked entirely organic when it had burst in upon them, no trace of its transformed state remained; it was only a ceiling again. The rain of debris included chunks of wallboard, flaked and powdered drywall paste, splinters of wood, and wads of fluffy Fiberglas insulation — but nothing alive.

The hole itself was astonishing enough to Holly.

Two nights ago, in the motel, though the wall had bulged and rippled as if alive, it had returned to its true composition without a crack. No evidence of the dream-creature's intrusion had been left behind except the scratches in her sides, which a psychologist might have said were self-inflicted. When the dust settled, everything might have been just a fantastically detailed delusion.

But the mess in which they were now standing was no delusion. The pall of white dust in the air was real.

In a state of shock, Jim took her hand and led her out of the bathroom. The bedroom ceiling had not crashed down. It was as it had been last night: smooth, white. But the furniture was piled up against the door as if washed there by a flood.

Madness favored darkness, but light was the kingdom of reason. If the waking world provided no sanctuary from nightmares, if daylight offered no sanctuary from unreason, then there was no sanctuary anywhere, anytime, for anyone.

2

The attic light, a single sixty-watt bulb dangling from a beam, did not illuminate every corner of that cramped and dusty space. Jim probed into the many recesses with a flashlight, edged around heating ducts, peered behind each of the two fireplace chimneys, searching for … whatever had torn apart the bathroom ceiling. He had no idea what he expected to find. Besides the flashlight, he carried a loaded revolver. The thing that destroyed the ceiling had not descended into the bathroom, so it had to be in the attic above. However, because he lived with a minimum of possessions, Jim had nothing to store up there under the roof, which left few possible hiding places. He was soon satisfied that those high reaches of his house were untenanted except by spiders and by a small colony of wasps that had constructed a nest in a junction of rafters.

Nothing could have escaped those confines, either. Aside from the trapdoor by which he had entered, the only exits from the attic were the ventilation cut-outs in opposing eaves. Each was about two feet long and twelve inches high, covered with tightly fitted screens that could be removed only with a screwdriver. Both screens were secure.

Part of that space had plank flooring, but in some places nothing but insulation lay between the exposed floor studs, which were also the ceiling studs of the rooms below. Duck-walking on those parallel supports, Jim cautiously approached the rupture above the master bathroom. He peered down at the debris-strewn floor where he and Holly had been standing.

What in the hell had happened?

At last conceding that he would find no answers up there, he returned to the open access and climbed down into the second-floor linen closet. He folded up the accordion ladder into the closet ceiling, which neatly closed off the attic entrance.

Holly was waiting for him in the hallway. “Well?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“I knew there wouldn't be.”

“What happened here?”

“It's like in the dream.”

“What dream?” he demanded.

“You said you've had the windmill dreams, too.”

“I do.”

“Then you know about the heartbeat in the walls.”

“No.”

“And the way the walls change.”

“No, none of that, for Christ's sake! In my dream, I'm in the high room of the windmill, there's a candle, rain at the windows.”

She remembered how surprised he had been at the sight of the bedroom ceiling distended and strange above them.

He said, “In the dream, I have a sense that something's coming, something frightening and terrible—”

“The Enemy,” she said.

“Yes! Whatever that might be. But it never comes, not in my dreams. I always wake up before it comes.”

He stalked down the hall and into the master bedroom, and she followed him. Standing beside the battered furniture that he had shoved away from the door, he stared up in consternation at the undamaged ceiling.

“I saw it,” he said, as if she had called him a liar.

“I know you did,” she said. “I saw it, too.”

He turned to her, looking more desperate than she had seen him even aboard the doomed DC-10. “Tell me about your dreams, I want to hear all of them, every detail.”

“Later, I'll tell you everything. First let's shower and get dressed. I want out of this place.”

“Yeah, okay, me too.”

“I guess you realize where we've got to go.”

He hesitated.

She answered for him, “The windmill.”

He nodded.

They showered together in the guest bathroom, only to save time — and because both of them were too edgy to be alone at the moment. She supposed that, in a different mood, she would have found the experience pleasantly erotic. But it was surprisingly platonic, considering the fierce passion of the night just passed.

He touched her only when they had stepped out of the shower and were hurriedly toweling dry. He leaned close, kissed the corner of her mouth, and said, “What have I gotten you into, Holly Thorne?”

Later, while Jim hurriedly packed a suitcase, Holly wandered only as far as the upstairs study, which was next to his bedroom. The place had a disused look. A thin layer of dust covered the top of the desk.

Like the rest of the house, his study was humble. The cheap desk had probably been purchased at a cut-rate office-supplies warehouse. The other furniture included just two lamps, an armchair on a wheel-and-swivel base, two free-standing bookcases overflowing with worn volumes, and a worktable as bare as the long-unused desk.

All of the two hundred or more books were about religion: fat histories of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Taoism, Shintoism, and others; the collected works of St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther; Scientists and Their Gods; the Bible in several versions — Douay, King James, American Standard; the Koran; the Torah, including the Old Testament and the Talmud; the Tripitaka of Buddhism, the Agama of Hinduism, the Zend-Avesta of Zoroastrianism, and the Veda of Brahmanism.

In spite of the curious completeness of that part of his personal library, the most interesting thing in the room was the gallery of photographs that occupied two walls. Of the thirty-some 8 x 10 prints, a few were in color but most were black and white. The same three people featured in all of them: a strikingly lovely brunette, a good-looking man with bold features and thinning hair, and a child who could be no one but Jim Ironheart. Those eyes. One photograph showed Jim with the couple — obviously his parents — when he was only an infant swaddled in a blanket, but in the others he was not much younger than four and never older than about ten.

When he'd been ten, of course, his parents had died.

Some photos showed young Jim with his dad, some with his mom, and Holly assumed the missing parent had always been the one with the camera. A handful included all three Ironhearts. Over the years, the mother only grew more striking; the father's hair continued to thin, but he appeared to be happier as time passed; and Jim, taking a lesson from his mother, became steadily better looking.

Often the backdrop of the picture was a famous landmark or the sign for one. Jim and both parents in front of Radio City Music Hall when he'd been about six. Jim and his father on the boardwalk at Atlantic City when Jim was four or five. Jim and his mother at a sign for Grand Canyon National Park, with a panoramic vista behind them. All three Ironhearts in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle in the heart of Disneyland, when Jim was only seven or eight. Beale Street in Memphis. The sun-splashed Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. An observation deck overlooking the faces of Mount Rushmore. Buckingham Palace in London. The Eiffel Tower. The Tropicana Hotel, Las Vegas. Niagara Falls. They seemed to have been everywhere.

In every case, no matter who was holding the camera or where they were, those in the shot looked genuinely happy. Not one face in one print was frozen in an insincere smile, or caught with one of those snap-the-damn-picture expressions of impatience that could be found in abundance in most family photo albums. Often, they were laughing instead of merely smiling, and in several instances they were caught in the middle of horseplay of one kind or another. All three were touchers, too, not simply standing side by side or in brittle poses. They were usually shown with their arms around one another, sometimes hugging, occasionally kissing one another on the cheek or casually expressing affection in some fashion.

The boy in the photographs revealed no hint of the sometimes moody adult he would become, and Holly could see that the untimely death of his parents had changed him profoundly. The carefree, grinning boy in the photographs had been lost forever.

One black-and-white particularly arrested her. It showed Mr. Ironheart sitting on a straight-backed chair. Jim, maybe seven years old, was on his father's lap. They were in tuxedos. Mrs. Ironheart stood behind her husband, her hand on his shoulder, wearing a slinky sequined cocktail dress that emphasized her wonderful figure. They faced the camera directly. Unlike the other shots, this one was carefully posed, with nothing but a piece of artfully draped cloth as a backdrop, obviously set up by a professional photographer.

“They were wonderful,” Jim said from the doorway. She had not heard him approaching. “No kid ever had better folks than them.”

“You traveled a lot.”

“Yeah. They were always going somewhere. They loved to show me new places, teach me things firsthand. They would've made wonderful schoolteachers, let me tell you.”

“What work did they do?”

“My dad was an accountant at Warner Brothers.”

“The movie studio?”

“Yeah.” Jim smiled. “We lived in L.A. Mom — she wanted to be an actress, but she never got a lot of jobs. So mostly she was a hostess at a restaurant on Melrose Avenue, not far from the Paramount lot.”

“You were happy, weren't you?”

“Always.”

She pointed to the photo in which the three of them were dressed with glittery formality. “Special occasion?”

“Times just the two of them should have celebrated, like wedding anniversaries, they insisted on including me. They always made me feel special, wanted, loved. I was seven years old when that photo was taken, and I remember them making big plans that night. They were going to be married a hundred years, they said, and be happier each year than the one before, have lots more children, own a big house, see every corner of the world before they died together in their sleep. But just three years later they were … gone.”

“I'm sorry, Jim.”

He shrugged. “It's a long time ago. Twenty-five years.” He looked at his wristwatch. “Come on, let's go. It'll take us four hours to reach the farm, and it's already nine o'clock.”

At the Laguna Hills Motor Inn, Holly quickly changed into jeans and a blue-checkered blouse, then packed the rest of her belongings. Jim put her suitcase in the trunk of his car.

While she returned her room key and paid her bill at the front desk in the motel office, she was aware of him watching her from behind the wheel of his Ford. She would have been disappointed, of course, if he had not liked to watch her. But every time she looked through the plate-glass window at him, he was so motionless, so cool and expressionless behind his heavily tinted sunglasses, that his undivided attention was disconcerting.

She wondered if she was doing the right thing by going with him to the Santa Ynez Valley. When she walked out of the office and got in the car with him, he would be the only person in the world who knew where she was. All of her notes about him were in her suitcase; they could disappear with her. Then she would be just a woman, alone, who had vanished while on vacation.

As the clerk finished filling out the credit-card form, Holly considered phoning her parents in Philadelphia to let them know where she was going and with whom. But she would only alarm them and be on the phone half an hour trying to reassure them that she was going to be just fine.

Besides, she had already decided that the darkness in Jim was less important than the light, and she had made a commitment to him. If he occasionally made her uneasy … well, that was part of what had drawn her to him in the first place. A sense of danger sharpened the edge of his appeal. At heart, he was a good man.

It was foolish to worry about her safety after she had already made love to him. For a woman, in a way that could never be true for a man, the first night of sexual surrender involved one of the moments of greatest vulnerability in a relationship. Assuming, of course, that she had surrendered not solely because of physical need but because she loved him. And Holly loved him.

“I'm in love with him,” she said aloud, surprised because she had convinced herself that his appeal was largely the result of his exceptional male grace, animal magnetism, and mystery.

The clerk, ten years younger than Holly and therefore more inclined to think that love was everywhere and inevitable, grinned at her. “It's great, isn't it?”

Signing the charge slip, Holly said, “Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“Why not?”

“Well, it's not first sight, really. I've known the guy since August twelfth, which is … sixteen days.”

“And you're not married yet?” the clerk joked.

When Holly went out to the Ford and got in beside Jim, she said, “When we get where we're going, you won't carve me up with a chainsaw and bury me under the windmill, will you?”

Apparently he understood her sense of vulnerability and took no offense, for he said with mock solemnity, “Oh, no. It's full-up under the mill. I'll have to bury pieces of you all over the farm.”

She laughed. She was an idiot for fearing him.

He leaned over and kissed her. It was a lovely, lingering kiss.

When they parted, he said, “I'm taking as big a risk as you are.”

“Let me assure you, I've never hacked anyone to bits with an ax.”

“I mean it. I haven't been lucky in love.”

“Me neither.”

“This time will be different for both of us.”

He gave her another kiss, shorter and sweeter than the first one, then started the car and backed out of the parking space.

In a determined attempt to keep the dying cynic in her alive, Holly reminded herself that he had not actually said he loved her. His commitment had been carefully and indirectly phrased. He might be no more reliable than other men she had trusted over the years.

On the other hand, she had not actually said that she loved him, either. Her commitment had been no more effusively stated than his. Perhaps because she still felt the need to protect herself to some extent, she had found it easier to reveal her heart to the motel clerk than to Jim.

Washing down blueberry muffins with black coffee, for which they had stopped at a convenience store, they traveled north on the San Diego Freeway. The Tuesday-morning rush hour had passed, but at some places traffic still clogged all lanes and moved like a snail herd being driven toward a gourmet restaurant.

Comfortably ensconced in the passenger seat, Holly told Jim about her four nightmares, as promised. She started with the initial dream of blindness on Friday night, concluding with last night's spookshow, which had been the most bizarre and fearful of all.

He was clearly fascinated that she had dreamed about the mill without even knowing of its existence. And on Sunday night, after surviving the crash of Flight 246, she had dreamed of him at the mill as a ten-year-old boy, when she could not yet have known either that the mill was a familiar place to him or that he had spent a lot of time there when he was ten.

But the majority of his questions related to her most recent nightmare. Keeping his eyes on the traffic ahead, he said, “Who was the woman in the dream if she wasn't you?”

“I don't know,” Holly said, finishing the final bite of the last muffin. “I had no sense of her identity.”

“Can you describe her?”

“I only saw her reflection in that window, so I can't tell you much, I'm afraid.” She drank the last of the coffee from her big Styrofoam cup, and thought a moment. It was easier to visualize the scenes of that dream than it should have been, for dreams were usually quick to fade from memory. Images from that one returned to her quite vividly, however, as if she had not dreamed them but experienced them in real life. “She had a broad clear face, more handsome in a womanly way than pretty. Wide-set eyes, full mouth. A beauty mark high on her right cheek, I don't think it could've been a spot on the glass, just a little round dot. Curly hair. Do you recognize her?”

“No,” he replied. “Can't say that I do. Tell me what you saw at the bottom of the pond when the lightning flashed.”

“I'm not sure what it was.”

“Describe it as best you can.”

She pondered for a moment, then shook her head. “I can't. The woman's face was fairly easy to recall because when I saw it in the dream I knew what it was, a face, a human face. But whatever was lying at the bottom of the pond… that was strange, like nothing I'd ever seen before. I didn't know what I was looking at, and I had such a brief glimpse of it and … well, now it's just gone. Is there really something peculiar under that pond?”

“Not that I know of,” he said. “Could it've been a sunken boat, a rowboat, anything like that?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing at all like that. Much bigger. Did a boat sink in the pond once?”

“I never heard of it, if one did. It's a deceptive-looking bit of water, though. You expect a millpond to be shallow, but this one is deep, forty or fifty feet toward the center. It never dries out, and it doesn't shrink during dry years, either, because it's formed over an artesian well, not just an aquifer.”

“What's the difference?”

“An aquifer is what you drill into when you're sinking a well, it's sort of a reservoir or stream of underground water. Artesian wells are rarer. You don't drill into one to find water, 'cause the water is already coming to the surface under pressure. You'd have the devil's own time trying to stop the stuff from percolating up.”

The snarl of traffic began to loosen, but Jim did not take full advantage of opportunities to change lanes and swing around slower-moving vehicles. He was more interested in her answers than in making better time.

He said, “And in the dream, when you got to the top of the stairs — or when this woman got to the top of the stairs — you saw a ten-year-old boy standing there, and somehow you knew he was me.”

“Yes.”

“I don't look much like I looked when I was ten, so how'd you recognize me?”

“Mostly it was your eyes,” Holly said. “They haven't changed much in all these years. They're unmistakable.”

“Lots of people have blue eyes.”

“Are you serious? Honey, your blue eyes are to other blue eyes what Sinatra's voice is to Donald Duck's.”

“You're prejudiced. What did you see in the wall?”

She described it again.

“Alive in the stone? This just gets stranger and stranger.”

“I haven't been bored in days,” she agreed.

Beyond the junction with Interstate 10, traffic on the San Diego Freeway became even lighter, and finally Jim began to put some of his driving skills to use. He handled the car the way a first-rate jockey handled a thoroughbred horse, finessing from it that extra degree of performance that won races. The Ford was only a stock model with no modification, but it responded to him as if it wanted to be a Porsche.

After a while Holly began to ask questions of her own. “How come you're a millionaire but you live relatively cheap?”

“Bought a house, moved out of my apartment. Quit my job.”

“Yeah, but a modest house. And your furniture's falling apart.”

“I needed the privacy of my own house to meditate and rest between … assignments. But I didn't need fancy furniture.”

Following a few minutes of mutual silence, she said, “Did I catch your eye the way you caught mine, right off the bat, up in Portland?”

He smiled but didn't look away from the highway. “ 'So are you, Miss Thorne.'”

“So you admit it!” Holly said, pleased. “It was a come-on line.”

They made excellent time from the west side of Los Angeles all the way to Ventura, but then Jim began to slack off again. Mile by mile, he drove with less aggression.

Initially Holly thought he was lulled by the view. Past Ventura, Route 101 hugged beautiful stretches of coastline. They passed Pitas Point, then Rincon Point, and the beaches of Carpinteria. The blue sea rose, the blue sky fell, the golden land wedged itself between them, and the only visible turbulence in the serene summer day was the white-capped surf, which slipped to the shore in low combers and broke with a light, foamy spray.

But there was a turbulence in Jim Ironheart, too, and Holly only became aware of his new edginess when she realized that he was not paying any attention to the scenery. He had slowed down not to enjoy the view but, she suspected, to delay their arrival at the farm.

By the time they left the superhighway, turned inland at Santa Barbara, crossed the city, and headed into the Santa Ynez Mountains, Jim's mood was undeniably darker. His responses to her conversational sallies grew shorter, more distracted.

State Route 154 led out of the mountains into an appealing land of low hills and fields painted gold by dry summer grass, clusters of California live oaks, and horse ranches with neat white fencing. This was not the farming-intense, agribusiness atmosphere of the San Joaquin and certain other valleys; there were serious vineyards here and there, but the occasional farms appeared to be, as often as not, gentlemen's operations maintained as getaways for rich men in Los Angeles, more concerned with cultivating a picturesque alternate lifestyle than with real crops.

“We'll need to stop in New Svenborg to get a few things before we head out to the farm,” Jim said.

“What things?”

“I don't know. But when we stop … I'll know what we need.”

Lake Cachuma came and went to the east. They passed the road to Solvang on the west, then skirted Santa Ynez itself. Before Los Olivos, they headed east on another state route, and finally into New Svenborg, the closest town to Ironheart Farm.

In the early nineteen hundreds, groups of Danish-Americans from the Midwest had settled in the Santa Ynez Valley, many of them with the intention of establishing communities that would preserve Danish folk arts and customs and, in general, the ways of Danish life. The most successful of these settlements was Solvang, about which Holly had once written a story; it had become a major tourist attraction because of its quaint Danish architecture, shops, and restaurants.

New Svenborg, with a population of fewer than two thousand, was not as elaborately, thoroughly, authentically, insistently Danish as Solvang. Depressing desert-style stucco buildings with white-rock roofs, weathered clapboard buildings with unpainted front porches that reminded Holly of parts of rural Texas, Craftsman bungalows, and white Victorian houses with lots of gingerbread and wide front porches stood beside structures that were distinctly Danish with half-timbered walls and thatched roofs and leaded-glass windows. Half a dozen windmills dotted the town, their vanes silhouetted against the August sky. All in all, it was one of those singular California mixes that sometimes resulted in delightful and unexpected harmonies; but in New Svenborg, the mix did not work, and the mood was discordancy.

“I spent the end of my childhood and my entire adolescence here,” Jim said as he drove slowly down the quiet, shadowy main street.

She figured that his moodiness could be attributed as much to New Svenborg as to his tragic family history.

To an extent, that was unfair. The streets were lined with big trees, the charming streetlamps appeared to have been imported from the Old Country, and most of the sidewalks were gracefully curved and time-hoved ribbons of well-worn brick. About twenty percent of the town came straight from the nostalgic Midwest of a Bradbury novel, but the rest of it still belonged in a David Lynch film.

“Let's take a little tour of the old place,” he said.

“We should be getting to the farm.”

“It's only two miles north of town, just a few minutes away.”

That was all the more reason to get there, as far as Holly was concerned. She was tired of being on the road.

But she sensed that for some reason he wanted to show her the town — and not merely to delay their arrival at Ironheart Farm. Holly acquiesced. In fact she listened with interest to what he had to tell her. She had learned that he found it difficult to talk about himself and that he sometimes made personal revelations in an indirect or even casual manner.

He drove past Handahl's Pharmacy on the east end of Main Street, where locals went to get a prescription filled, unless they preferred to drive twenty miles to Solvang. Handahl's was also one of only two restaurants in town, with (according to Jim) “the best soda fountain this side of 1955.” It was also the post office and only newsstand. With its multiply peaked roof, verdigris-copper cupola, and beveled-glass windows, it was an appealing enterprise.

Without shutting the engine off, Jim parked across the street from the library on Copenhagen Lane, which was quartered in one of the smaller Victorian houses with considerably less gingerbread than most. The building was freshly painted, with well-tended shrubbery, and both the United States and California flags fluttered softly on a tall brass pole along the front walkway. It looked like a small and sorry library nonetheless.

“A town this size, it's amazing to find a library at all,” Jim said. “And thank God for it. I rode my bike to the library so often … if you added up all the miles, I probably pedaled halfway around the world. After my folks died, books were my friends, counselors, psychiatrists. Books kept me sane. Mrs. Glynn, the librarian, was a great lady, she knew just how to talk to a shy, mixed-up kid without talking down to him. She was my guide to the most exotic regions of the world and distant times — all without leaving her aisles of books.”

Holly had never heard him speak so lovingly or half so lyrically of anything before. The Svenborg library and Mrs. Glynn had clearly been lasting and favorable influences on his life.

“Why don't we go in and say hello to her?” Holly suggested.

Jim frowned. “Oh, I'm sure she's not the librarian any more, most likely not even alive. That was twenty-five years ago when I started coming here, eighteen years ago when I left town to go to college. Never saw her after that.”

“How old was she?”

He hesitated. “Quite old,” he said, and put an end to the talk of a nostalgic visit by slipping the Ford into gear and driving away from there.

They cruised by Tivoli Gardens, a small park at the corner of Main and Copenhagen, which fell laughably short of its namesake. No fountains, no musicians, no dancing, no games, no beer gardens. There were just some roses, a few beds of late-summer flowers, patchy grass, two park benches, and a well-maintained windmill in the far corner.

“Why aren't the sails moving?” she asked. “There's some wind.”

“None of the mills actually pumps water or grinds grain any more,” he explained. “And since they're largely decorative, no sense in having to live with the noise they make. Brakes were put on the mechanisms long ago.” As they turned the corner at the end of the park, he added: “They made a movie here once.”

“Who did?”

“One of the studios.”

“Hollywood studio?”

“I forget which.”

“What was it called?”

“Don't remember.”

“Who starred in it?”

“Nobody famous.”

Holly made a mental note about the movie, suspecting that it was more important to Jim and to the town than he had said. Something in the offhanded way he'd mentioned it, and his terse responses to her subsequent questions, alerted her to an unspoken subtext.

Last of all, at the southeast corner of Svenborg, he drove slowly past Zacca's Garage, a large corrugated-steel Quonset hut perched on a cement-block foundation, in front of which stood two dusty cars. Though the building had been painted several times during its history, no brush had touched it in many years. Its numerous coats of paint were worn in a random patchwork and marked by liberal encrustations of rust, which created an unintended camouflage finish. The cracked blacktop in front of the place was pitted with potholes that had been filled with loose gravel, and the surrounding lot bristled with dry grass and weeds.

“I went to school with Ned Zacca,” Jim said. “His dad, Vernon, had the garage then. It was never a business to make a man rich, but it looked better than it does now.”

The big airplane hangar-style roll-aside doors were open, and the interior was clotted with shadows. The rear bumper of an old Chevy gleamed dully in the gloom. Although the garage was seedy, nothing about it suggested danger. Yet the queerest chill came over Holly as she peered through the hangar doors into the murky depths of the place.

“Ned was one mean sonofabitch, the school bully,” Jim said. “He could sure make a kid's life hell when he wanted to. I lived in fear of him.”

“Too bad you didn't know Tae Kwon Do then, you could've kicked his ass.”

He did not smile, just stared past her at the garage. His expression was odd and unsettling. “Yeah. Too bad.”

When she glanced at the building again, she saw a man in jeans and a T-shirt step out of the deepest darkness into gray half-light, moving slowly past the back of the Chevy, wiping his hands on a rag. He was just beyond the infall of sunshine, so she could not see what he looked like. In a few steps he rounded the car, fading into the gloom again, hardly more material than a specter glimpsed in a moonlit graveyard.

Somehow, she knew the ghostly presence in the Quonset was Ned Zacca. Curiously, though he had been a menacing figure to Jim, not to her, Holly felt her stomach twist and her palms turn damp.

Then Jim touched the accelerator, and they were past the garage, heading back into town.

“What did Zacca do to you exactly?”

“Anything he could think of. He was a regular little sadist. He's been in prison a couple of times since those days. But I figured he was back.”

“Figured? How?”

He shrugged. “I just sensed it. Besides, he's one of those guys who never gets caught at the big stuff. Devil's luck. He might do a fall every great once in a while, but always for something small-time. He's dumb but he's clever.”

“Why'd you want to go there?”

“Memories.”

“Most people, when they want a little nostalgia, they're only interested in good memories.”

Jim did not reply to that. Even before they arrived in Svenborg, he had settled into himself like a turtle gradually withdrawing into its shell. Now he was almost back into that brooding, distant mood in which she had found him yesterday afternoon.

The brief tour had given her not a comfortable feeling of small-town security and friendliness, but a sense of being cut off at the back end of nowhere. She was still in California, the most populous state in the union, not much farther than sixty miles from the city of Santa Barbara. Svenborg had almost two thousand people of its own, which made it bigger than a lot of gas-and-graze stops along the interstate highways. The sense of isolation was more psychological than real, but it hovered over her.

Jim stopped at The Central, a prospering operation that included a service station selling generic gasoline, a small sporting-goods outlet peddling supplies to fishermen and campers, and a well-stocked convenience store with groceries, beer, and wine. Holly filled the Ford's tank at the self-service pump, then joined Jim in the sporting-goods shop.

The store was cluttered with merchandise, which overflowed the shelves, hung from the ceiling, and was stacked on the linoleum floor. Wall-eyed fishing lures dangled on a rack near the door. The air smelled of rubber boots.

At the check-out counter, Jim already had piled up a pair of high-quality summerweight sleeping bags with air-mattress liners, a Coleman lantern with a can of fuel, a sizable Thermos ice chest, two big flashlights, packages of batteries for the flashes, and a few other items. At the cash register, farther along the counter from Jim, a bearded man in spectacles as thick as bottle glass was ringing up the sale, and Jim was waiting with an open wallet.

“I thought we were going to the mill,” Holly said.

“We are,” Jim said. “But unless you want to sleep on a wooden floor without benefit of any conveniences, we need this stuff.”

“I didn't realize we were staying overnight.”

“Neither did I. Until I walked in here and heard myself asking for these things.”

“Couldn't we stay at a motel?”

“Nearest one's clear over to Santa Ynez.”

“It's a pretty drive,” she said, much preferring the commute to spending a night in the mill.

Her reluctance arose only in part from the fact that the old mill promised to be uncomfortable. The place was, after all, the locus of both their nightmares. Besides, since arriving in Svenborg, she had felt vaguely … threatened.

“But something's going to happen,” he said. “I don't know what. Just… something. At the mill. I feel it. We're going to … get some answers. But it might take a little time. We've got to be ready to wait, be patient.”

Though Holly was the one who had suggested going to the mill, she suddenly didn't want answers. In a dim premonition of her own, she perceived an undefined but oncoming tragedy, blood, death, and darkness.

Jim, on the other hand, seemed to shed the lead weight of his previous apprehension and take on a new buoyancy. “It's good — what we're doing, where we're going. I sense that, Holly. You know what I mean? I'm being told we made the right move in coming here, that there's something frightening ahead of us, yes, something that's going to shock the hell out of us, maybe very real danger, but there's also something that's going to lift us up.” His eyes were shining and he was excited. She had never seen him like this, not even when they had been making love. In whatever obscure way it touched him, this higher power of his was in contact with him now. She could see his quiet rapture. “I feel a … a strange sort of jubilation coming, a wonderful discovery, revelations …”

The bespectacled clerk had stepped away from the cash register to show them the total on the tape. Grinning, he said, “Newlyweds?”

At the convenience store next door, they bought ice for the chest, then orange juice, diet soda, bread, mustard, bologna-olive loaf, and pre-packaged cheese slices.

“Olive loaf,” Holly said wonderingly. “I haven't eaten this stuff since I was maybe fourteen and I learned I had arteries.”

“And how about these,” he said, snatching a box of chocolate-covered doughnuts off a shelf, adding it to the market basket that he was carrying. “Bologna sandwiches, chocolate doughnuts … and potato chips, of course. Wouldn't be a picnic without chips. The crinkled kind, okay? Some cheese twists, too. Chips and cheese twists, they go together.”

Holly had never seen him like this: almost boyish, with no apparent weight on his shoulders. He might have been setting out on a camping trip with friends, a little adventure.

She wondered if her own apprehension was justified. Jim was, after all, the one whose presentiments had proven to be accurate. Maybe they were going to discover something wonderful at the mill, unravel the mystery behind the last-minute rescues he had performed, maybe even encounter this higher power to which he referred. Perhaps The Enemy, in spite of its ability to reach out of a dream into the real world, was not as formidable as it seemed.

At the cash register, after the clerk finished bagging their purchases and was making change, Jim said, “Wait a minute, one more thing,” and hurried to the rear of the store. When he returned, he was carrying two lined yellow tablets and one black, fine-point felt-tip pen. To Holly, he said, “We'll be needing these tonight.”

When they had loaded the car and pulled out of the parking lot at The Central, heading for the Ironheart Farm, Holly indicated the pen and tablets, which she was holding in a separate bag. “What'll we be needing these for?”

“I haven't the slightest idea. I just suddenly knew we have to have them.”

“That's just like God,” she said, “always being mysterious and obscure.”

After a silence, he said, “I'm not so sure any more that it's God talking to me.”

“Oh? What changed your mind?”

“Well, the issues you raised last evening, for one thing. If God didn't want little Nick O'Conner to die up there in Boston, why didn't He just stop that vault from exploding? Why chase me clear across the country and 'throw' me at the boy, as you put it? And why would He up and change His mind about the people on the airliner, let more of them live, just because I decided they should? They were all questions I'd asked myself, but you weren't willing to settle for the easy answers that satisfied me.” He looked away from the street for a moment as they reached the edge of town, smiled at her, and repeated one of the questions she had asked him yesterday when she had been needling him: “Is God a waffler?”

“I would've expected …”

“What?”

“Well, you were so sure you could see a divine hand in this, it must be a bit of a letdown to consider less exalted possibilities. I'd expect you to be a little bummed out.”

He shook his head. “I'm not. You know, I always had trouble accepting that it was God working through me, it seemed like such a crazy idea, but I lived with it just because there wasn't any better explanation. There still isn't a better explanation, I guess, but another possibility has occurred to me, and it's something so strange and wonderful in its way that I don't mind losing God from the team.”

“What other possibility?”

“I don't want to talk about it just yet,” he said as sunlight and tree shadows dappled the dusty windshield and played across his face. “I want to think it through, be sure it makes sense, before I lay it out for you, 'cause I know now you're a hard judge to convince.”

He seemed happy. Really happy. Holly had liked him pretty much since she had first seen him, regardless of his moodiness. She had perceived a hopefulness beneath his glower, a tenderness beneath his gruffness, a better man beneath the exterior of a lesser one, but in his current buoyant mood, she found him easier than ever to like.

She playfully pinched his cheek.

“What?” he said.

“You're cute.”

As they drove out of Svenborg, it occurred to Holly that the distribution pattern of the houses and other buildings was more like a pioneer settlement than like a modern community. In most towns, buildings were concentrated more densely in the center, with larger lots and increasing open space toward the perimeter, until finally the last structures gave way to rural precincts. But when they came to the city limits of Svenborg, the delineation between town and country was almost ruler-straight and unmistakable. Houses stopped and brushland began, with only an intervening firebreak, and Holly could not help but think of pioneers in the Old West constructing their outposts with a wary eye toward the threats that might arise out of the lawless badlands all around them.

Inside its boundaries, the town seemed ominous and full of dark secrets. Seen from the outside — and Holly turned to stare back at it as the road rose toward the brow of a gentle hill — it looked not threatening but threatened, as if its residents knew, in their bones, that something frightful in the golden land around them was waiting to claim them all.

Perhaps fire was all they feared. Like much of California, the land was parched where human endeavor had not brought water to it.

Nestled between the Santa Ynez Mountains to the west and the San Rafael Mountains to the east, the valley was so broad and deep that it contained more geographical variety than some entire states back East — though at this time of year, untouched by rain since early spring, most of it was brown and crisp. They traveled across rounded golden hills, brown meadows. The better vantage points on their two-mile route revealed vistas of higher hills overgrown with chaparral, valleys within the valley where groves of California live oaks flourished, and small green vineyards encircled by vast sere fields.

“It's beautiful,” Holly said, taking in the pale hills, shining-gold meadows, and oily chaparral. Even the oaks, whose clusters indicated areas with a comparatively high water table, were not lush but a half-parched silver-green. “Beautiful, but a tinderbox. How would they cope with a fire out here?”

Even as she posed that question, they came around a bend in the road and saw a stretch of blackened land to the right of the two-lane county road. Brush and grass had been reduced to veins of gray-white ash in coal-black soot. The fire had taken place within the past couple of days, for it was still recent enough to lend a burnt odor to the August air.

“That one didn't get far,” he said. “Looks like ten acres burned at most. They're quick around here, they jump at the first sign of smoke. There's a good volunteer group in town, plus a Department of Forestry station in the valley, lookout posts. If you live here, you don't forget the threat — you just realize after a while that it can be dealt with.”

Jim sounded confident enough, and he had lived there for seven or eight years, so Holly tried to suppress her pyrophobia. Nevertheless, even after they had passed the charred land and could no longer smell the scorched brush, Holly had an image in her mind of the huge valley at night, aflame from end to end, vortexes of red-orange-white fire whirling like tornadoes and consuming everything that lay between the ramparts of the two mountain ranges.

“Ironheart Farm,” he said, startling her.

As Jim slowed the Ford, Holly looked to the left of the blacktop county route.

A farmhouse stood a hundred feet back from the road, behind a withered lawn. It was of no particular architectural style, just a plain but cozy-looking two-story farmhouse with white aluminum siding, a red-shingle roof, and a commodious front porch. It might have been lifted off its foundation anywhere in the Midwest and plunked down on new footings here, for there were thousands like it in those cornbelt states.

Maybe a hundred yards to the left of the house, a red barn rose to a tarnished horse-and-carriage weather vane at the pinnacle of its peaked roof. It was not huge, only half again as large as the unimposing house.

Behind the house and barn, visible between them, was the pond, and the structure at its far side was the most arresting sight on the farm. The windmill.

3

Jim stopped in the driveway turnaround between house and barn, and got out of the Ford. He had to get out because the sight of the old place hit him harder than he had expected, simultaneously bringing a chill to the pit of his stomach and a flush of heat to his face. In spite of the cool draft from the dashboard vents, the air in the car seemed warm and stale, too low in oxygen content to sustain him. He stood in the fresh summer air, drawing deep breaths, and tried not to lose control of himself.

The blank-windowed house held little power over him. When he looked at it, he felt only a sweet melancholy that might, given time, deepen into a more disturbing sadness or even despair. But he could stare at it, draw his breath normally, and turn away from it without being seized by a powerful urge to look at it again.

The barn exerted no emotional pull on him whatsoever, but the windmill was another story. When he turned his gaze on that cone of limestone beyond the wide pond, he felt as though he were being transformed into stone himself, as had been the luckless victims of the mythological serpent-haired Medusa when they had seen her snake-ringed face.

He'd read about Medusa years ago. In one of Mrs. Glynn's books. That was in the days when he wished with all his heart that he, too, could see the snake-haired woman and be transformed into unfeeling rock….

“Jim?” Holly said from the other side of the car. “You okay?”

With its high-ceilinged rooms — highest on the first floor — the two-story mill was actually four stories in height. But to Jim, at that moment, it looked far taller, as imposing as a twenty-story tower. Its once-pale stones had been darkened by a century of grime. Climbing ivy, roots nurtured by the pond that abutted one flank of the mill, twined up the rough stone face, finding easy purchase in deep-mortared joints. With no one to perform needed maintenance, the plant had covered half the structure, and had grown entirely over a narrow first-floor window near the timbered door. The wooden sails looked rotten. Each of those four arms was about thirty feet in length, making a sixty-foot spread across adjoining spans, and each was five feet wide with three rows of vanes. Since he had last seen the mill, more vanes had cracked or fallen away altogether. The time-frozen sails were stopped not in a cruciform but in an X, two arms reaching toward the pond and two toward the heavens. Even in hot bright daylight, the windmill struck Jim as menacing and seemed like a monstrous, ragged-armed scarecrow clawing at the sky with skeletal hands.

“Jim?” Holly said, touching his arm.

He jumped as if he had not known who she was. In fact, for an instant, as he looked down at her, he saw not only Holly but a long-dead face, the face of…

But the moment of disorientation passed. She was only Holly now, her identity no longer entwined with that of another woman as it had been in her dream last night.

“You okay?” she asked again.

“Yeah, sure, just … memories.”

Jim was grateful when Holly directed his attention from the mill to the farmhouse. She said, “Were you happy with your grandparents?”

“Lena and Henry Ironheart. Wonderful people. They took me in. They suffered so much for me.”

“Suffered?” she said.

He realized that it was too strong a word, and he wondered why he had used it. “Sacrificed, I mean. In lots of ways, little things, but they added up.”

“Taking on the support of a ten-year-old boy isn't something anyone does lightly,” Holly said. “But unless you demanded caviar and champagne, I wouldn't think you'd have been much of a hardship to them.”

“After what happened to my folks, I was … withdrawn, in bad shape, uncommunicative. They put in a lot of time with me, a lot of love, trying to bring me back … from the edge.”

“Who lives here these days?”

“Nobody.”

“But didn't you say your grandparents died five years ago?”

“The place wasn't sold. No buyers.”

“Who owns it now?”

“I do. I inherited it.”

She surveyed the property with evident bewilderment. “But it's lovely here. If the lawn was being watered and kept green, the weeds cut down, it would be charming. Why would it be so hard to sell?”

“Well, for one thing, it's a damned quiet life out here, and even most of the back-to-nature types who dream of living on a farm really mean a farm close to a choice of movie theaters, bookstores, good restaurants, and dependable European-car mechanics.”

She laughed at that. “Baby, there's an amusing little cynic lurking in you.”

“Besides, it's hardscrabble all the way, trying to earn a living on a place like this. It's just a little old hundred-acre farm, not big enough to make it with milk cows or a beef herd — or any one crop. My grandpa and grandma kept chickens, sold the eggs. And thanks to the mild weather, they could get two crops. Strawberries came into fruit in February and all the way into May. That was the money crop — berries. Then came corn, tomatoes—real tomatoes, not the plastic ones they sell in the markets.”

He saw that Holly was still enamored of the place. She stood with her hands on her hips, looking around as if she might buy it herself.

She said, “But aren't there people who work at other things, not farmers, would just like to live here for the peace and quiet?”

“This isn't a real affluent area, not like Newport Beach, Beverly Hills. Locals around here don't have extra money just to spend on lifestyle. The best hope of selling a property like this is to find some rich movie producer or recording executive in L.A. who wants to buy it for the land, tear it down, and put up a showplace, so he can say he has a getaway in the Santa Ynez Valley, which is the trendy thing to have these days.”

As they talked, he grew increasingly uneasy. It was three o'clock. Plenty of daylight left. But suddenly he dreaded nightfall.

Holly kicked at some wiry weeds that had pushed up through one of the many cracks in the blacktop driveway. “It needs a little cleanup, but everything looks pretty good. Five years since they died? But the house and barn are in decent shape, like they were painted only a year or two ago.”

“They were.”

“Keep the place marketable, huh?”

“Sure. Why not?”

The high mountains to the west would eat the sun sooner than the ocean swallowed it down in Laguna Niguel. Twilight would come earlier here than there, although it would be prolonged. Jim found himself studying the lengthening purple shadows with the fearfulness of a man in a vampire movie hastening toward shelter before the coffin lids banged open.

What's wrong with me? he wondered.

Holly said, “You think you'd ever want to live here yourself?”

“Never!” he said so sharply and explosively that he startled not only Holly but himself. As if overcome by a dark magnetic attraction, he looked at the windmill again. A shudder swept through him.

He was aware that she was staring at him.

“Jim,” she said softly, “what happened to you here? What in the name of God happened twenty-five years ago in that mill?”

“I don't know,” he said shakily. He wiped one hand down his face. His hand felt warm, his face cold. “I can't remember anything special, anything odd. It was where I played. It was … cool and quiet… a nice place. Nothing happened there. Nothing.”

“Something,” she insisted. “Something happened.”

Holly had not been close to him long enough to know if he was frequently on an emotional roller coaster as he had been since they had left Orange County, or if his recent rapid swings in mood were abnormal. In The Central, buying food for a picnic, he'd soared out of the gloom that had settled over him when they crossed the Santa Ynez Mountains, and he'd been almost jubilant. Then the sight of the farm was like a plunge into cold water for him, and the windmill was the equivalent of a drop into an ice chasm.

He seemed as troubled as he was gifted, and she wished that she could do something to ease his mind. She wondered if urging him to come to the farm had been wise. Even a failed career in journalism had taught her to leap into the middle of unfolding events, seize the moment, and run with it. But perhaps this situation demanded greater caution, restraint, thought, and planning.

They got back into the Ford and drove between the house and barn, around the big pond. The graveled path, which she remembered from last night's dream, had been made wide enough for horses and wagons in another era. It easily accommodated the Ford, allowing them to park at the base of the windmill.

When she stepped from the car again, she was beside a cornfield. Only a few parched wild stalks thrust up from that abandoned plot of earth beyond the split-rail fence. She walked around the back of the car, across the gravel, and joined Jim where he stood on the bank of the pond.

Mottled blue-green-gray, the water resembled a slab of slate two hundred feet in diameter. It was almost as still as a piece of slate, as well. Dragonflies and other insects, alighting briefly on the surface, caused occasional dimples. Languid currents, far too subtle to produce ripples, made the water shimmer almost imperceptibly near the shore, where green weeds and a few clusters of white-plumed pampas grass thrived.

“Still can't remember quite what you saw in that dream?” Jim asked.

“No. It probably doesn't matter anyway. Not everything in a dream is significant.”

In a low voice, almost as if speaking to himself, he said, “It was significant.”

Without turbulence to stir up sediment, the water was not muddy, but neither was it clear. Holly figured she could see only a few feet below the surface. If it actually was fifty or sixty feet deep at the center, as Jim had said, that left a lot of volume in which something could remain hidden.

“Let's have a look in the mill,” she said.

Jim got one of the new flashlights from the car and put batteries in it. “Even in daylight, it can be kind of dark in there.”

The door was in an antechamber appended to the base of the conical main structure of the mill, much like the entrance to an Eskimo igloo. Although unlocked, the door was warped, and the hinges were rusted. For a moment it resisted Jim, then swung inward with a screech and a brittle splintering sound.

The short, arched antechamber opened onto the main room of the mill, which was approximately forty feet in diameter. Four windows, evenly spaced around the circumference, filtered sunlight through filthy panes, leeching the summer-yellow cheer from it and imparting a wintry gray tint that did little to alleviate the gloom. Jim's big flashlight revealed dust- and cobweb-shrouded machinery that could not have appeared more exotic to Holly if it had been the turbine room of a nuclear submarine. It was the cumbersome low technology of another century — massive wooden gears, cogs, shafts, grinding stones, pulleys, old rotting lengths of rope — so oversized and complicated that it all seemed like the work not merely of human beings from another age but of a different and less evolved species altogether.

Because he had grown up around mills, even though they had not been in use since before his birth, Jim knew the names of everything. Pointing with the flashlight beam, he tried to explain how the mill had functioned, talking about the spurwheel and the quant, the mace and the rynd, the runner stone and the bed stone. “Ordinarily you couldn't look up through the mechanisms quite like this. But, see, the floor of the spurwheel loft is rotted out, not much of it left, and the bridge floor gave way when those huge stones broke loose and fell.”

Though he had regarded the mill with fear when they had stood outside, his mood had begun to change after they entered it. To Holly's surprise, as Jim tried to explain the millworks to her, he began to exhibit some of that boyish enthusiasm that she had first seen when they had been grocery shopping at The Central in Svenborg. He was pleased by his knowledge, and he wanted to show it off a little, the way a bookish kid was always happy to demonstrate what he had learned at the library while others his age were out playing baseball.

He turned to the limestone stairs on their left and climbed without hesitation, running one hand lightly along the curved wall as he went. There was a half-smile on his face as he looked around, as if only the good memories were flooding in on him now.

Puzzled by his extremely mercurial mood, trying to imagine how the mill could frighten and delight him simultaneously, Holly somewhat reluctantly followed him up toward what he had called “the high room.” She had no good memories to associate with the mill, only the fearful images of her nightmares, and those returned to her as she ascended behind Jim. Thanks to her dream, the narrow twist of stairs was familiar to her, though she was climbing it for the first time — which was an uncanny feeling, far eerier than mere deja vu.

Halfway up the stairs, she stopped at the window that overlooked the pond. The glass was frosted with dust. She used her hand to wipe one pane, and squinted at the water below. For an instant she thought she saw something strange beneath the placid surface — then realized she was seeing only the reflection of a cloud drifting across the sky.

“What is it?” Jim asked with boyish eagerness. He had stopped a few steps above her.

“Nothing. A shadow.”

They continued all the way to the upper chamber, which proved to be an unremarkable room, about twelve or fourteen feet in diameter, less than fifteen feet high at its apex. The curved limestone wall wrapped around to meet itself, and curved up to form the ceiling, so it seemed as if they were standing inside the domed nose cone of a rocket. The stone was not semitransparent as it had been in her dream, and no strange amber lights played within it. An arcane mechanism was offset in the dome, through which the motion of the wind-turned sails outside was translated into horizontal movement to crank a vertical wood shaft. The thick shaft disappeared through a hole in the center of the floor.

Remembering how they had stood downstairs and looked up through the buckled and broken decks within the multi-level millworks, Holly gingerly tested the wood floor. No rot was visible. The planks and the joists under them seemed sturdy.

“Lots of dust,” Jim said, as their feet stirred up little clouds with each step.

“And spiders,” Holly noted.

Wrinkling her face in disgust, she peered up at the husks of sucked-dry insects dangling in the elaborate webs that had been spun around the long-stilled mechanism overhead. She didn't fear spiders, but she didn't like them either.

“We need to do some cleaning before we set up camp,” he said.

“Should've bought a broom and a few other things while we were in town.”

“There're cleaning materials at the house. I'll bring them here while you start unloading the car.”

“The house!” Holly was exhilarated by a lovely inspiration. “When we set out for the mill, I didn't realize this property was still yours, no one living here. We can put the sleeping bags in the house, stay there, and visit this room as often as we need to.”

“Nice thought,” Jim said, “but it's not that easy. Something's going to happen here, Holly, something that'll give us answers or put us on the road to finding them. I feel it. I know it… well, just the way I know these things. But we can't pick the time for the revelation. It doesn't work that way. We can't ask God — or whatever is behind this — to punch a time clock and deliver revelations only between regular business hours. We have to stay here and be patient.”

She sighed. “Okay, yeah, if you—”

Bells interrupted her.

It was a sweet silvery ringing, neither heavy nor clangorous, lasting only two or three seconds, pleasingly musical. It was so light and gay, in fact, that it should have seemed a frivolous sound against the backdrop of that ponderous stone structure. It was not in the least frivolous, however, because inexplicably it triggered in Holly serious associations — thoughts of sin and penitence and redemption.

The trilling faded even as she turned in search of the source. But before she could ask Jim what it had been, it came again.

This time, Holly understood why she associated the sound with issues of spirituality. It was the precise tone of the bells that an altarboy rang during Mass. The sweet ringing brought back to her the smell of spikenard and myrrh from her college days when she had toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism.

The bells faded again.

She turned to Jim and saw him grinning.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I forgot all about this,” he said wonderingly. “How could I have forgotten all about this?”

The bells tinkled again, silvery and pure.

“Forgot what?” she asked. “What're those bells?”

“Not bells,” he said as they faded. He hesitated, and as the sound returned a fourth time, he finally said, “The ringing is in the stone.”

“Ringing stone?” she said in bewilderment.

As the bells sounded twice again, she circled the room, cocking her head this way and that, until it seemed to her that the music did, indeed, originate from the limestone wall, pealing out not from any single location but equally from every block of that curved surface, no louder at one point than another.

She told herself that stone could not ring, certainly not in such a dulcet voice. A windmill was an unusual structure and could have tricky acoustics. From a high-school class trip to Washington, she remembered a tourguide showing them a spot in the Capitol's rotunda from which even a whispered conversation was picked up and, by a quirk of architecture, transmitted across the huge dome to the far side of that great space, where eavesdroppers could hear it with perfect clarity. Perhaps something similar was at work here. If bells were rung or other sounds made at a particular place in a far corner of the first floor of the mill, a peculiarity of acoustics might transmit it in equal volume along all the walls on every floor. That explanation was more logical than the concept of magical, ringing stone — until she tried to imagine who would be secretly ringing the bell, and why.

She put one hand against the wall.

The limestone was cool. She detected faint vibrations in it.

The bell fell silent.

The vibrations in the wall subsided.

They waited.

When it was clear that the ringing would not resume, Holly said, “When did you hear it before?”

“When I was ten.”

“And what happened after the ringing, what did it signify?”

“I don't know.”

“But you said you just remembered it.”

His eyes were shining with excitement. “Yeah. I remember the ringing. But not what caused it or what followed it. Though I think … it's a good sign, Holly.” A note of rapture entered his voice. “It means something very fine is going to happen, something … wonderful.”

Holly was frustrated. In spite of the mystical aspect of Jim's life-saving missions — and in spite her own paranormal experiences with dreams and the creatures in them — she had come to the farm with the hope of finding logical answers to all that had transpired. She had no idea what those answers could be. But she'd had an unspoken faith in the scientific method. Rigorous investigative procedures combined with careful thought, the use of deductive and inductive reasoning as needed, would lead to solutions. But now it seemed that logic was out the window. She was perturbed by Jim's taste for mysticism, though she had to admit that he had embraced illogic from the start, with all his talk of God, and had taken no pains to conceal it.

She said, “But, Jim, how could you have forgotten anything as weird as ringing stones or any of the rest of whatever happened to you here?”

“I don't think I just forgot. I think I was made to forget.”

“By whom?”

“By whomever or whatever just made the stone ring again, by whatever's behind all these recent events.” He moved toward the open door. “Come on, let's get this place cleaned up, move in. We want to be ready for whatever's going to happen next.”

She followed him to the head of the steps but stopped there and watched him descend two at a time, with the air of a kid excited by the prospect of adventure. All of his misgivings about the mill and his fear of The Enemy seemed to have evaporated like a few beads of water on a red-hot griddle. His emotional roller coaster was cresting the highest point on the track thus far.

Sensing something above her head, Holly looked up. A large web had been spun above the door, across the curve where the wall became the ceiling. A fat spider, its body as big around as her thumbnail and its spindly legs almost as long as her little finger, greasy as a dollop of wax and dark as a drop of blood, was feeding greedily on the pale quivering body of a snared moth.

4

With a broom, dustpan, bucket of water, mop, and a few rags, they made the small upper chamber livable in short order. Jim even brought some Windex and paper towels from the store of cleaning supplies at the house, so they could scrub the grime off the windows, letting in a lot more light. Holly chased down and killed not only the spider above the door but seven others, checking darker corners with one of the flashlights until she was sure she had found them all.

Of course the mill below them was surely crawling with countless other spiders. She decided not to think about that.

By six o'clock, the day was waning but the room was bright enough without the Coleman lantern. They were sitting Indian fashion on their inflatable-mattress sleeping bags, with the big cooler between them. Using the closed lid as a table, they made thick sandwiches, opened the potato chips and cheese twists, and popped the tops off cans of root beer. Though she had missed lunch, Holly had not thought about food until they'd begun to prepare it. Now she was hungrier than she would have expected under the circumstances. Everything was delicious, better than gourmet fare. Olive loaf and cheese on white bread, with mustard, recalled for her the appetites of childhood, the intense flavors and forgotten innocent sensuality of youth.

They did not talk much as they ate. Silences did not make either of them feel awkward, and they were taking such primal pleasure from the meal that no conversation, regardless of how witty, could have improved the moment. But that was only part of the reason for their mutual reticence. Holly, at least, was also unable to think what to say under these bizarre circumstances, sitting in the high room of a crumbling old mill, waiting for an encounter with something supernatural. No small talk of any kind felt adequate to the moment, and a serious discussion of just about anything would seem ludicrous.

“I feel sort of foolish,” she said eventually.

“Me, too,” he admitted. “Just a little.”

At seven o'clock, when she was opening the box of chocolate-covered doughnuts, she suddenly realized the mill had no lavatory. “What about a bathroom?”

He picked up his ring of keys from the floor and handed them to her. “Go on over to the house. The plumbing works. There's a half-bath right off the kitchen.”

She realized the room was filling with shadows, and when she glanced at the window, she saw that twilight had arrived. Putting the doughnuts aside, she said, “I want to zip over there and get back before dark.”

“Go ahead.” Jim raised one hand as if pledging allegiance to the flag. “I swear on all that I hold sacred, I'll leave you at least one doughnut.”

“Half the box better be there when I get back,” she said, “or I'll kick your butt all the way into Svenborg to buy more.”

“You take your doughnuts seriously.”

“Damn right.”

He smiled. “I like that in a woman.”

Taking a flashlight to negotiate the mill below, she rose and went to the door. “Better start up the Coleman.”

“Sure thing. When you get back, it'll be a right cozy little campsite.”

Descending the narrow stairs, Holly began to worry about being separated from Jim, and step by step her anxiety increased. She was not afraid of being alone. What bothered her was leaving him by himself. Which was ridiculous. He was a grown man and far more capable of effective self-defense than was the average person.

The lower floor of the mill was much darker than when she had first seen it. Curtained with cobwebs, the dirty windows admitted almost none of the weak light of dusk.

As she crossed toward the arched opening to the antechamber, she was overcome by a creepy sense of being watched. She knew they were alone in the mill, and she chided herself for being such a ninny. But by the time she reached the archway, her apprehension had swelled until she could not resist the urge to turn and shine the flashlight into the chamber behind her. Shadows were draped across the old machinery as copiously as black crepe in an amusement-park haunted house; they slid aside when the flashlight beam touched them, fell softly back into place as the beam moved on. Each corner, undraped, revealed no spy. Someone could be sheltering behind one part of the mill-works or another, and she considered prowling through the ruins in search of an intruder.

But abruptly she felt foolish, too easily spooked. Wondering what had happened to the intrepid reporter she had once been, Holly left the mill.

The sun was beyond the mountains. The sky was purple and that deep iridescent blue seen in old Maxfield Parrish paintings. A few toads were croaking from their shadowy niches along the banks of the pond.

All the way around the water, past the barn, to the back door of the house, Holly continued to feel watched. However, though it was possible that someone might be lurking in the mill, it was not too likely that a virtual platoon of spies had taken up positions in the barn, the surrounding fields, and the distant hills, intent on observing her every move.

“Idiot,” she said self-mockingly as she used one of Jim's keys to open the back door.

Though she had the flashlight, she tried the wall switch unthinkingly. She was surprised to discover that the electrical service was still connected.

She was more surprised, however, by what the light revealed: a fully furnished kitchen. A breakfast table and four chairs stood by the window. Copper pots and pans dangled from a ceiling fixture, and twin racks of knives and other utensils hung on the wall near the cooktop. A toaster, toaster oven, and blender stood on the counters. A shopping list of about fifteen items was affixed to the refrigerator with a magnet in the shape of a can of Budweiser.

Hadn't Jim gotten rid of his grandparents' belongings when they had died five years ago?

Holly ran a finger along one of the counters, drawing a line through the thin coat of dust. But it was, at most, a three-month accumulation, not five years' worth of dirt.

After she used the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, she wandered along the hallway, through the dining room and living room, where a full complement of furniture also stood under a light shroud of dust. Some of the paintings hung aslant. Crocheted antimacassars protected the backs and arms of the chairs and sofas. Long unwound, the tall grandfather clock was not ticking. In the living room, the magazine rack beside the La-Z-Boy recliner was crammed full of publications, and inside a mahogany display case, bibelots gleamed dully beneath their own skin of dust.

Her first thought was that Jim had left the house furnished in order to be able to rent it out while searching for a buyer. But on one wall of the living room were framed 8 x 10 photographs that would not have been left to the mercy of a tenant: Jim's father as a young man of about twenty-one; Jim's father and mother in their wedding finery; Jim at the age of five or six, with both parents.

The fourth and final picture was a two-shot, head and shoulders, of a pleasant-looking couple in their early fifties. The man was on the burly side, with bold square features, yet recognizably an Ironheart; the woman was more handsome, in a female way, than pretty, and elements of her face could also be seen in Jim and his father. Holly had no doubt that they were Jim's paternal grandparents, Lena and Henry Ironheart.

Lena Ironheart was the woman in whose body Holly had ridden like a spirit during last night's dream. Broad, clear face. Wide-set eyes. Full mouth. Curly hair. A natural beauty spot, just a little round dot of skin discoloration, marked the high curve of her right cheek.

Though Holly had described this woman accurately to Jim, he had not recognized her. Maybe he didn't think of her eyes as being wide-set or her mouth as being full. Maybe her hair had been curly only during part of her life, due to the attentions of a beautician. But the beauty spot had to have clicked a switch in his memory, even five years after his grandmother's death.

The sense of being watched had not entirely left Holly even after she had entered the house. Now, as she stared at Lena Ironheart's face in the photograph, the feeling of being under observation grew so acute that she abruptly wheeled around and looked back across the living room.

She was alone.

She stepped quickly to the archway and through it into the front hall. Deserted.

A dark mahogany staircase led up to the second floor. The dust on the newel post and bannister was undisturbed: no palm marks, no fingerprints.

Looking up the first flight, she said, “Hello?” Her voice sounded queerly flat in the empty house.

No one responded to her.

Hesitantly, she started to climb the stairs.

“Who's there?” she called.

Only silence answered her.

Frowning, she stopped on the third step. She glanced down into the front hall, then up toward the landing again.

The silence was too deep, unnatural. Even a deserted house had some noise in it, occasional creaks and ticks and pops from old wood swelling or contracting, a rattle from a loose windowpane tapped by a finger of wind. But the Ironheart house was so hushed, Holly might have thought that she'd gone deaf, except that she could hear the sounds she made herself.

She climbed two more steps. Stopped again.

She still felt she was under observation. It was as if the old house itself watched her with malevolent interest, alive and sentient, possessed of a thousand eyes hidden in the wood moldings and in the pattern of the wallpaper.

Dust motes drifted in the rays of the landing light above.

Twilight pressed its purple face to the windows.

Standing just four steps below the landing, partly under the second flight that led into the unseen upstairs hallway, she became convinced that something was waiting for her on the second floor. It was not necessarily The Enemy up there, not even anything alive and hostile — but something horrible, the discovery of which would shatter her.

Her heart was hammering. When she swallowed, she found a lump in her throat. She drew breath with a startling, ragged sound.

The feeling of being watched and of trembling on the brink of a monstrous revelation became so overpowering that she turned and hurried down the steps. She did not flee pell-mell out of the house; she retraced her path and turned off all the lights as she went; but she did not dally, either.

Outside, the sky was purple-black where it met the mountains in the east, purplish-red where it touched the mountains in the west, and sapphire-blue between. The golden fields and hills had changed to pale gray, fading to charcoal, as if a fire had swept them while she was in the house.

As she crossed the yard and moved past the barn, the conviction that she was under observation only grew more intense. She glanced apprehensively at the open black square of the hay loft, the windows on either side of the big red double doors. It was a gut-clenching sensation of such primitive power that it transcended mere instinct. She felt as if she were a guinea pig in a laboratory experiment, with wires hooked into her brain, while scientists sent pulses of current directly into the raw cerebral tissues that controlled the fear reflex and generated paranoid delusions. She had never experienced anything like it, knew that she was teetering on the thin edge of panic, and struggled to get a grip on herself.

By the time she reached the graveled drive that curved around the pond, she was running. She held the extinguished flashlight like a club, prepared to swing it hard at anything that darted toward her.

The bells rang. Even above her frantic breathing, she heard the pure, silvery trilling of clappers rapidly striking the inner curves of perfectly tuned bells.

For an instant she was amazed that the phenomenon was audible outside the windmill and at a distance, as the building was halfway around the pond from her. Then something flickered in her peripheral vision even before the first spell of ringing ended, and she looked away from the mill, toward the water.

Pulses of blood-red light, originating at the center of the pond, spread outward toward the banks in tight concentric circles, like the measured ripples that radiated from the point at which a dropped stone struck deep water. That sight brought Holly to a stumbling halt; she almost went to her knees as gravel rolled under her feet.

When the bells fell silent, the crimson light in the pond was immediately snuffed out. The water was much darker now than when she had first seen it in mid-afternoon. It no longer had all the somber hues of slate, but was as black as a polished slab of obsidian.

The bells rang again, and the crimson light pulsed from the heart of the pond, radiating outward. She could see that each new bright blossom was not born on the surface of the water but in its depths, dim at first but swiftly rising, almost bursting like an overheated incandescent bulb when it neared the surface, casting waves of light toward the shore.

The ringing ceased.

The water darkened.

The toads along the shoreline were not croaking any more. The ever-murmuring world of nature had fallen as silent as the interior of the Ironheart farmhouse. No coyote howl, no insect cry, no owl hoot, no bat shriek or flap of wing, no rustling in the grass.

The bells sounded again, and the light returned, but this time it was not as red as gore, more of an orange-red, though it was brighter than before. At the water's edge, the feathery white panicles of the pampas grass caught the curious radiance and glowed like plumes of iridescent gas.

Something was rising from the bottom of the pond.

As the throbbing luminescence faded with the next cessation of the bells, Holly stood in the grip of awe and fear, knowing she should run but unable to move.

Ringing.

Light. Muddy-orange this time. No red tint at all. Brighter than ever.

Holly broke the chains of fear and sprinted toward the windmill.

On all sides, the palpitant light enlivened the dreary dusk. Shadows leapt rhythmically like Apaches dancing around a war fire. Beyond the fence, dead cornstalks bristled as repulsively as the spiny legs and plated torsos of praying mantises. The windmill appeared to be in the process of changing magically from stone to copper or even to gold.

The ringing stopped and the light went out as she reached the open door of the mill.

She raced across the threshold, then skidded to a stop in the darkness, on the brink of the lower chamber. No light at all came through the windows now. The blackness was tarry, cloying. As she fumbled for the switch on the flashlight, she found it hard to draw breath, as if the darkness itself had begun flowing into her lungs, suffocating her.

The flashlight came on just as the bells began to ring again. She slashed the beam across the room and back, to be sure nothing was there in the gloom, reaching for her. Then she found the stairs to her left and hurried toward the high room.

When she reached the window at the halfway point, she put her face to the pane of glass that she had wiped clean with her hand earlier in the day. In the pond below, the rippling bull's-eye of light was brighter still, now amber instead of orange.

Calling for Jim, Holly ran up the remaining stairs.

As she went, lines of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry, studied an age ago in junior high school and thought forgotten, rang crazily through her mind:

She burst into the high room, where Jim stood in the soft winter-white glow of the Coleman gas lantern. He was smiling, turning in a circle and looking expectantly at the walls around him.

As the bells died away, she said, “Jim, come look, come quick, something's in the lake.”

She dashed to the nearest window, but it was just far enough around the wall from the pond to prevent her seeing the water. The other two windows were even more out of line with the desired view, so she did not even try them.

“The ringing in the stone,” Jim said dreamily.

Holly returned to the head of the stairs as the bells began to ring again. She paused and looked back just long enough to be sure that Jim was following her, for he seemed in something of a daze.

Hurrying down the stairs, she heard more lines of Poe's poem reverberating in her mind:

She had never been the kind of woman to whom sprang lines of verse appropriate to the moment. She couldn't recall quoting a line of poetry or even reading any — other than Louise Tarvohl's treacle! — since college.

When she reached the window, she scrubbed frantically at another pane with the palm of her hand, to give them a better view of the spectacle below. She saw that the light was blood-red again and dimmer, as if whatever had been rising through the water was now sinking again.

It seemed crazy to be mentally reciting poetry in the midst of these wondrous and frightening events, but she had never been under such stress before. Maybe this was the way the mind worked — giddily dredging up long-forgotten knowledge — when you were about to meet a higher power. Because that's just what she felt was about to happen, an encounter with a higher power, perhaps God but most likely not. She didn't really think God lived in a pond, although any minister or priest would probably tell her that God lived everywhere, in all things. God was like the eight-hundred-pound gorilla who could live anywhere he wanted.

Just as Jim reached her, the ringing stopped, and the crimson light in the pond quickly faded. He squeezed in beside her and put his face to the glass.

They waited.

Two seconds ticked by. Two more.

“No,” she said. “Damn it, I wanted you to see.”

But the ringing did not resume, and the pond remained dark out there in the steadily dimming twilight. Night would be upon them within a few minutes.

“What was it?” Jim asked, leaning back from the window.

“Like something in a Spielberg film,” she said excitedly, “rising up out of the water, from deep under the pond, light throbbing in time with the bells. I think that's where the ringing originates, from the thing in the pond, and somehow it's transmitted through the walls of the mill.”

“Spielberg film?” He looked puzzled.

She tried to explain: “Wonderful and terrifying, awesome and strange, scary and damned exciting all at once.”

“You mean like in Close Encounters? Are you talking a starship or something?”

“Yes. No. I'm not sure. I don't know. Maybe something weirder than that.”

“Weirder than a starship?”

Her wonder, and even her fear, subsided in favor of frustration. She was not accustomed to finding herself at a complete loss for words to describe things that she had felt or seen. But with this man and the incomparable experiences in which he became entangled, even her sophisticated vocabulary and talent for supple phrase-making failed her miserably.

“Shit, yes!” she said at last. “Weirder than a starship. At least weirder than the way they show them in the movies.”

“Come on,” he said, ascending the stairs again, “let's get back up there.” When she lingered at the window, he returned to her and took her hand. “It isn't over yet. I think it's just beginning. And the place for us to be is the upper room. I know it's the place. Come on, Holly.”

5

They sat on the inflatable-mattress sleeping bags again.

The lantern cast a pearly-silver glow, whitewashing the yellow-beige blocks of limestone. In the baglike wicks inside the glass chimney of the lamp, the gas burned with a faint hiss, so it seemed as if whispering voices were rising through the floorboards of that high room.

Jim was poised at the apex of his emotional roller coaster, full of childlike delight and anticipation, and this time Holly was right there with him. The light in the pond had terrified her, but it had also touched her in other ways, sparking deep psychological responses on a primitive sub-subconscious level, igniting fuses of wonder and hope which were fizzing-burning unquenchably toward some much-desired explosion of faith, emotional catharsis.

She had accepted that Jim was not the only troubled person in the room. His heart might contain more turmoil than hers, but she was as empty, in her own way, as he was in his. When they'd met in Portland, she had been a burnt-out cynic, going through the motions of a life, not even trying to identify and fill the empty spaces in her heart. She had not experienced the tragedy and grief that he had known, but now she realized that leading a life equally devoid of tragedy and joy could breed despair. Passing days and weeks and years in the pursuit of goals that had not really mattered to her, driven by a purpose she had not truly embraced, with no one to whom she was profoundly committed, she had been eaten by a dry-rot of the soul. She and Jim were the two pieces of a yin-yang puzzle, each shaped to fill the hollowness in the other, healing each other merely by their contact. They fit together astonishingly well, and the match seemed inevitable; but the puzzle might never have been solved if the halves of it had not been brought together in the same place at the same time.

Now she waited with nervous excitement for contact with the power that had led Jim to her. She was ready for God or for something quite different but equally benign. She could not believe that what she had seen in the pond was The Enemy. That creature was apart from this, connected somehow but different. Even if Jim had not told her that something fine and good was coming, she eventually would have sensed, on her own, that the light in the water and the ringing in the stone heralded not blood and death but rapture.

They spoke tersely at first, afraid that voluble conversation would inhibit that higher power from initiating the next stage of contact.

“How long has the pond been here?” she asked.

“A long time.”

“Before the Ironhearts?”

“Yeah.”

“Before the farm itself?”

“I'm sure it was.”

“Possibly forever?”

“Possibly.”

“Any local legends about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ghost stories, Loch Ness, that kind of stuff.”

“No. Not that I've ever heard.”

They were silent. Waiting.

Finally Holly said, “What's your theory?”

“Huh?”

“Earlier today you said you had a theory, something strange and wonderful, but you didn't want to talk about it till you'd thought it through.”

“Oh, right. Now maybe it's more than a theory. When you said you'd seen something under the pond in your dream … well, I don't know why, but I started thinking about an encounter….”

“Encounter?”

“Yeah. Like what you said. Something … alien.”

“Not of this world,” Holly said, remembering the sound of the bells and the light in the pond.

“They're out there in the universe somewhere,” he said with quiet enthusiasm. “It's too big for them not to be out there. And someday they'll be coming. Someone will encounter them. So why not me, why not you?”

“But it must've been there under the pond when you were ten.”

“Maybe.”

“Why would it be there all this tune?”

“I don't know. Maybe it's been there a lot longer. Hundreds of years. Thousands.”

“But why a starship at the bottom of a pond?”

“Maybe it's an observation station, a place where they monitor human civilization, like an outpost we might set up in Antarctica to study things there.”

Holly realized they sounded like kids sitting under the stars on a summer night, drawn like all kids to the contemplation of the unknown and to fantasies of exotic adventure. On one level she found their musings absurd, even laughable, and she was unable to believe that recent events could have such a neat yet fanciful explanation. But on another level, where she was still a child and always would be, she desperately wanted the fantasy to be made real.

Twenty minutes passed without a new development, and gradually Holly began to settle down from the heights of excitement and nervous agitation to which the lights in the pond had catapulted her. Still filled with wonder but no longer mentally numbed by it, she remembered what had happened to her just prior to the appearance of the radiant presence in the millpond: the overwhelming, preternatural, almost panic-inducing awareness of being watched. She was about to mention it to Jim when she recalled the other strange things she had found at the farmhouse.

“It's completely furnished,” she said. “You never cleaned the house out after your grandfather died.”

“I left it furnished in case I was able to rent it while waiting for a buyer.”

Those were virtually the same words she had used, standing in the house, to explain the curious situation to herself. “But you left all their personal belongings there, too.”

He did not look at her but at the walls, waiting for some sign of a superhuman presence. “I'd have taken that stuff away if I'd ever found a renter.”

“You've left it there for almost five years?”

He shrugged.

She said, “It's been cleaned more or less regularly since then, though not recently.”

“A renter might always show up.”

“It's sort of creepy, Jim.”

Finally he looked at her. “How so?”

“It's like a mausoleum.”

His blue eyes were utterly unreadable, but Holly had the feeling she was annoying him, perhaps because this mundane talk of renters and house cleaning and real estate was pulling him away from the more pleasurable contemplation of alien encounters.

He sighed and said, “Yeah, it is creepy, a little.”

“Then why …?”

He slowly twisted the lantern control, reducing the flow of gas to the wicks. The hard white light softened to a moon-pale glow, and the shadows eased closer. “To tell you the truth, I couldn't bear to pack up my granddad's things. Together, we'd sorted through grandma's belongings only eight months earlier, when she'd died, and that had been hard enough. When he … passed away so soon after her, it was too much for me. For so long, they'd been all I had. Then suddenly I didn't even have them.”

A tortured expression darkened the blue of his eyes.

As a flood of sympathy washed through Holly, she reached across the ice chest and took his hand.

He said, “I procrastinated, kept procrastinating, and the longer I delayed sorting through his things, the harder it became to ever do it.” He sighed again. “If I'd have found a renter or a buyer, that would have forced me to put things in order, no matter how unpleasant the job. But this old farm is about as marketable as a truckload of sand in the middle of the Mojave.”

Closing the house upon the death of his grandfather, touching nothing in it for four years and four months, except to clean it once in a while — that was eccentric. Holly couldn't see it any other way. At the same time, however, it was an eccentricity that touched her, moved her. As she had sensed from the start, he was a gentle man beneath his rage, beneath his steely superhero identity, and she liked the soft-hearted part of him, too.

“We'll do it together,” Holly said. “When we've figured out what the hell is happening to us, wherever and however we go on from here, there'll be time for us to sort through your grandfather's things. It won't be so difficult if we do it together.”

He smiled at her and squeezed her hand.

She remembered something else. “Jim, you recall the description I gave you of the woman in my dream last night, the woman who came up the mill stairs?”

“Sort of.”

“You said you didn't recognize her.”

“So?”

“But there's a photo of her in the house.”

“There is?”

“In the living room, that photograph of a couple in their early fifties — are they your grandparents, Lena and Henry?”

“Yeah. That's right.”

“Lena was the woman in my dream.”

He frowned. “Isn't that odd …?”

“Well, maybe. But what's odder is, you didn't recognize her.”

“I guess your description wasn't that good.”

“But didn't you hear me say she had a beauty mark—”

His eyes narrowed, and his hand tightened around hers. “Quick, the tablets.”

Confused, she said, “What?”

“Something's about to happen, I feel it, and we need the tablets we bought at The Center.”

He let go of her hand, and she withdrew the two yellow, lined tablets and felt-tip pen from the plastic bag at her side. He took them from her, hesitated, looking around at the walls and at the shadows above them, as if waiting to be told what to do next.

The bells rang.

That musical tintinnabulation sent a thrill through Jim. He knew that he was on the verge of discovering the meaning not merely of the events of the past year but of the last two and a half decades. And not just that, either. More. Much more. The ringing heralded the revelation of even greater understanding, transcendental truths, an explanation of the fundamental meaning of his entire life, past and future, origins and destiny, and of the meaning of existence itself. Grandiose as such a notion might be, he sensed that the secrets of creation would be revealed to him before he left the windmill, and that he would reach the state of enlightenment he had sought — and failed to find — in a score of religions.

As the second spell of ringing began, Holly started to get up.

Jim figured she intended to descend to the window on the stairs and look into the pond. He said, “No, wait. It's going to happen here this time.”

She hesitated, then sat down.

As the ringing stopped again, Jim felt compelled to push the ice chest out of the way and put one of the yellow, lined tablets on the floor between him and Holly. He was not sure what he was expected to do with the other tablet and the pen, but after a brief moment of indecision, he held on to them.

When the melodic ringing began a third time, it was accompanied by an impossible pulse of light within the limestone walls. The red glow seemed to well up from inside the stone at a point directly in front of them, then suddenly raced around the room, encircling them with a throbbing band of luminescence.

Even as the strange flare whipped around them, Holly issued a wordless sound of fear, and Jim remembered what she had told him of her dream last night. The woman — whether it had been his grandmother or not — had climbed the stairs into the high room, had seen an amber emanation within the walls, as if the mill was made of colored glass, and had witnessed something unimaginably hostile being born out of those mortared blocks.

“It's okay.” He was eager to reassure her. “This isn't The Enemy. It's something else. There's no danger here. This is a different light.”

He was only sharing with her the reassurances that were flooding into him from a higher power. He hoped to God that he was correct, that no threat was imminent, for he remembered too well the hideous biological transformation of his own bedroom ceiling in Laguna Niguel little more than twelve hours ago. Light had pulsed within the oily, insectile birth sac that had blistered out of ordinary drywall, and the shadowy form within, writhing and twitching, had been nothing he would ever want to see more directly.

During two more bursts of melodic ringing, the color of the light changed to amber. But otherwise it in no way resembled the menacing radiance in his bedroom ceiling, which had been a different shade of amber altogether — the vile yellow of putrescent matter or of rich dark pus — and which had throbbed in sympathy with an ominous tripartite heartbeat that was not audible now.

Holly looked scared nonetheless.

He wished he could pull her close, put his arm around her. But he needed to give his undivided attention to the higher power that was striving to reach him.

The ringing stopped, but the light did not fade. It quivered, shimmered, dimmed, and brightened. It moved through the otherwise dark wall in scores of separate amoeba-like forms that constantly flowed together and separated into new shapes; it was like a one-dimensional representation of the kaleidoscopic display in one of those old Lava lamps. The ever-changing patterns evolved on all sides of them, from the base of the wall to the apex of the domed ceiling.

“I feel like we're in a bathysphere, all glass, suspended far, far down in the ocean,” Holly said. “And great schools of luminescent fish are diving and soaring and swirling past us on all sides, through the deep black water.”

He loved her for putting the experience into better words than he could summon, words that would not let him forget the images they described, even if he lived a hundred years.

Unquestionably, the ghostly luminosity lay within the stone, not merely on the surface of it. He could see into that now-translucent substance, as if it had been alchemized into a dark but well-clarified quartz. The amber radiance brightened the room more than did the lantern, which he had turned low. His trembling hands looked golden, as did Holly's face.

But pockets of darkness remained, and the constantly moving light enlivened the shadows as well.

“What now?” Holly asked softly.

Jim noticed that something had happened to the yellow tablet on the floor between them. “Look.”

Words had appeared on the top third of the first page. They looked as if they had been formed by a finger dipped in ink:

6

Holly had been distracted — to say the least! — by the light-show, but she did not think that Jim could have leaned to the tablet and printed the words with the felt-tip pen or any other instrument without drawing her attention. Yet she found it hard to believe that some disembodied presence had conveyed the message.

“I think we're being encouraged to ask questions,” Jim said.

“Then ask it what it is,” she said at once.

He wrote a question on the second tablet, which he was holding, and showed it to her:

Who are you?

As they watched, the answer appeared on the first tablet, which lay between and slightly in front of them at such an angle that they could both read it. The words were not burnt onto the paper and were not formed by ink that dripped magically from the air. Instead, the irregular, wavery letters appeared as dim gray shapes and grew darker as they seemed to float up out of the paper, as though a page of the tablet were not one-five-hundredth of an inch thick but a pool of liquid many feet deep. She recognized immediately that this was similar to the effect she had seen earlier when the balls of light had risen to the center of the pond before bursting and casting concentric rings of illumination outward through the water; this was, as well, how the light had first welled up in the limestone walls before the blocks had become thoroughly translucent.

THE FRIEND.

Who are you? The Friend.

It seemed to be an odd self-description. Not “your friend” or “a friend” but The Friend.

For an alien intelligence, if indeed that's all it was, the name had curious spiritual implications, connotations of divinity. Men had given God many names — Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Zeus, Aesir — but even more titles. God was The Almighty, The Eternal Being, The Infinite, The Father, The Savior, The Creator, The Light. The Friend seemed to fit right into that list.

Jim quickly wrote another question and showed it to Holly: Where do you come from?

ANOTHER WORLD.

Which could mean anything from heaven to Mars.

Do you mean another planet?

YES.

“My God,” Holly said, awed in spite of herself.

So much for the great hereafter.

She looked up from the tablet and met Jim's eyes. They seemed to shine brighter than ever, although the chrome-yellow light had imparted to them an exceptional green tint.

Restless with excitement, she rose onto her knees, then eased back again, sitting on her calves. The top tablet page was filled with the entity's responses. Holly equivocated only briefly, then tore it off and set it aside, so they could see the second page. She glanced back and forth between Jim's questions and the rapidly appearing answers.

From another solar system?

YES.

From another galaxy?

YES.

Is it your vessel we've seen in the pond?

YES.

How long have you been here?

10,000 YEARS.

As she stared at that figure, it seemed to Holly that this moment was more like a dream than some of the actual dreams she'd been having lately. After so much mystery, there were answers — but they seemed to be coming too easily. She did not know what she had expected, but she had not imagined that the murkiness in which they had been operating would clear as quickly as if a drop of a magical universal detergent had been dropped into it.

“Ask her why she's here,” Holly said, tearing off the second sheet and putting it with the first.

Jim was surprised. “She?”

“Why not?”

He brightened. “Why not?” he agreed.

He turned to a new page in his own tablet and wrote her question: Why are you here?

Floating up through the paper to the surface: TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND.

“You know what this is like?” Holly said.

“What's it like?”

“An episode of Outer Limits.”

“The old TV show?”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn't that before your time?”

“It's on cable.”

“But what do you mean it's like an episode of Outer Limits!”

She frowned at TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND and said, “Don't you think it's a little … trite?”

“Trite?” He was irritated. “No, I don't. Because I haven't any idea what alien contact should be like. I haven't had a whole lot of experience with it, certainly not enough to have expectations or be jaded.”

“I'm sorry. I don't know … it's just… okay, let's see where this leads.”

She had to admit that she was no less awed than she had been when the light had first appeared in the walls. Her heart continued to thud hard and fast, and she was still unable to draw a really deep breath. She still felt that they were in the presence of something superhuman, maybe even a higher power by one definition or another, and she was humbled by it. Considering what she had seen in the pond, the pulsing luminescence even now swimming through the wall, and the words that kept shimmering into view on the tablet, she would have been hopelessly stupid if she had not been awed.

Undeniably, however, her sense of wonder was dulled by the feeling that this entity was structuring the encounter like an old movie or TV script. With a sarcastic note in his voice, Jim had said that he had too little experience with alien contact to have developed any expectations that could be disappointed. But that was not true. Having grown up in the sixties and seventies, he had been as media-saturated as she had been. They'd been exposed to the same TV shows and movies, magazines and books; science fiction had been a major influence in popular culture all their lives. He had acquired plenty of detailed expectations about what alien contact would be like — and the entity in the wall was playing to all of them. Holly's only conscious expectation had been that a real close encounter of the third kind would be like nothing the novelists and screenwriters imagined in all their wildest flights of fantasy, because when referring to life from another world, alien meant alien, different, beyond easy comparison or comprehension.

“Okay,” she said, “maybe familiarity is the point. I mean, maybe it's using our modern myths as a convenient way to present itself to us, a way to make itself comprehensible to us. Because it's probably so radically different from us that we could never understand its true nature or appearance.”

“Exactly,” Jim said. He wrote another question: What is the light we see in the walls?

THE LIGHT IS ME.

Holly didn't wait for Jim to write the next question. She addressed the entity directly: “How can you move through a wall?”

Because the alien seemed such a stickler about form, she was somewhat surprised when it did not insist on hewing to the written question-reply format. It answered her at once: I CAN BECOME PART OF ANYTHING, MOVE WITHIN IT, TAKE SHAPE FROM IT WHENEVER I CHOOSE.

“Sounds a little like bragging,” she said.

“I can't believe you can be sarcastic at a time like this,” Jim said impatiently.

“I'm not being sarcastic,” she explained. “I'm just trying to understand.”

He looked doubtful.

To the alien presence, she said, “You understand the problems I'm having with this, don't you?”

On the tablet: YES.

She ripped away that page, revealing a fresh one. Increasingly restless and nervous, but not entirely sure why, Holly got to her feet and turned in a circle, looking at the play of light in the walls as she formulated her next question. “Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

No answer appeared on the tablet.

She repeated the question.

The tablet remained blank.

Holly said, “Trade secret, I guess.”

She felt a bead of cold sweat trickle out of her right armpit and down her side, under her blouse. A childlike wonder still worked in her, but fear was on the rise again. Something was wrong. Something more than the cliched nature of the story the entity was giving them. She couldn't quite put her finger on what spooked her.

On his own tablet, Jim quickly wrote another question, and Holly leaned down to read it: Did you appear to me in this room when I was ten years old?

YES. OFTEN.

Did you make me forget it?

YES.

“Don't bother writing your questions,” Holly said. “Just ask them like I do.”

Jim was clearly startled by her suggestion, and she was surprised that he had persisted with his pen and tablet even after seeing that the questions she asked aloud were answered. He seemed reluctant to put aside the felt-tip and the paper, but at last he did. “Why did you make me forget?”

Even standing, Holly could easily read the bold words that appeared on the yellow tablet:

YOU WERE NOT READY TO REMEMBER.

“Unnecessarily cryptic,” she muttered. “You're right. It must be male.”

Jim tore off the used page, put it with the others, and paused, chewing his lip, evidently not sure what to ask next. Finally he said, “Are you male or female?”

I AM MALE.

“More likely,” Holly said, “it's neither. It's alien, after all, and it's as likely to reproduce by parthenogenesis.”

I AM MALE, it repeated.

Jim remained seated, legs folded, an undiminished look of wonder on his face, more boylike now than ever.

Holly did not understand why her anxiety level was soaring while Jim continued to bounce up and down — well, virtually — with enthusiasm and delight.

He said, “What do you look like?”

WHATEVER I CHOOSE TO LOOK LIKE.

“Could you appear to us as a man or woman?” Jim asked.

YES

“As a dog?”

YES.

“As a cat?”

YES.

“As a beetle?”

YES.

Without the security of his pen and tablet, Jim seemed to have been reduced to inane questions. Holly half expected him to ask the entity what its favorite color was, whether it preferred Coke or Pepsi, and if it liked Barry Manilow music.

But he said, “How old are you?”

I AM A CHILD.

“A child?” Jim responded. “But you told us you've been on our world for ten thousand years.”

I AM STILL A CHILD.

Jim said, “Then is your species very long-lived?”

WE ARE IMMORTAL.

“Wow.”

“It's lying,” Holly told him.

Appalled by her effrontery, he said, “Jesus, Holly!”

“Well, it is.”

And that was the source of her renewed fear — the fact that it was not being straight with them, was playing games, deceiving. She had a sense that it regarded them with enormous contempt. In which case, she probably should have shut up, been meekly adoring before its power, and tried not to anger it.

Instead she said, “If it were really immortal, it wouldn't think of itself as a child. It couldn't think that way about itself. Infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood — those are age categories a species concerns itself with if it has a finite lifespan. If you're immortal, you might be born innocent, ignorant, uneducated, but you aren't born young because you're never really going to get old.”

“Aren't you splitting hairs?” Jim asked almost petulantly.

“I don't think so. It's lying to us.”

“Maybe its use of the word 'child' was just another way it was trying to make its alien nature more understandable.”

YES

“Bullshit,” Holly said.

“Damn it, Holly!”

As Jim removed another page from the tablet, detaching it neatly along its edge, Holly moved to the wall and studied the patterns of light churning through it. Seen close up, they were quite beautiful and strange, not like a smooth-flowing phosphorescent fluid or fiery streams of lava, but like scintillant swarms of fireflies, millions of spangled points not unlike her analogy of luminous, schooling fish.

Holly half expected the wall in front of her to bulge suddenly. Split open. Give birth to a monstrous form.

She wanted to step back. Instead she moved closer. Her nose was only an inch from the transmuted stone. Viewed this intimately, the surge and flux and whirl of the millions of bright cells was dizzying. There was no heat from it, but she imagined she could feel the flicker of light and shadow across her face.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?” she asked.

After a few seconds, Jim spoke from behind her: “No answer.”

The question seemed innocent enough, and one that they should logically be expected to ask. The entity's unwillingness to answer alerted her that the ringing must be somehow vitally important. Understanding the bells might be the first step toward learning something real and true about this creature.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

Jim reported: “No answer. I don't think you should ask that question again, Holly. It obviously doesn't want to answer, and there's nothing to be gained by aggravating it. This isn't The Enemy, this is—”

“Yeah, I know. It's The Friend.”

She remained at the wall and felt herself to be face-to-face with an alien presence, though it had nothing that corresponded to a face. It was focused on her now. It was right there.

Again she said, “Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

Instinctively she knew that her innocent question and her not-so-innocent repetition of it had put her in great danger. Her heart was thudding so loud that she wondered if Jim could hear it. She figured The Friend, with all its powers, could not only hear her hammering heart but see it jumping like a panicked rabbit within the cage of her chest. It knew she was afraid, all right. Hell, it might even be able to read her mind. She had to show it that she would not allow fear to deter her.

She put one hand on the light-filled stone. If those luminous clouds were not merely a projection of the creature's consciousness, not just an illusion or representation for their benefit, if the thing was, as it claimed, actually alive in the wall, then the stone was now its flesh. Her hand was upon its body.

Faint vibrations passed across the wall in distinctive, whirling vortexes. That was all she felt. No heat. The fire within the stone was evidently cold.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

“Holly, don't,” Jim said. Worry tainted his voice for the first time. Perhaps he, too, had begun to sense that The Friend was not entirely a friend.

But she was driven by a suspicion that willpower mattered in this confrontation, and that a demonstration of unflinching will would set a new tone in their relationship with The Friend. She could not have explained why she felt so strongly about it. Just instinct — not a woman's but an ex-reporter's.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

She thought she detected a slight change in the vibrations that tingled across her palm, but she might have imagined it, for they were barely perceptible in the first place. Through her mind flickered an image of the stone cracking open in a jagged mouth and biting off her hand, blood spurting, white bone bristling from the ragged stump of her wrist.

Though she was shaking uncontrollably, she did not step back or lift her hand off the wall.

She wondered if The Friend had sent her that horrifying image.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

“Holly, for Christ's sake—” Jim broke off, then said, “Wait, an answer's coming.”

Willpower did matter. But for God's sake, why? Why should an all-powerful alien force from another galaxy be intimidated by her unwavering resolution?

Jim reported the response: “It says … 'For drama?' ”

“For drama?” she repeated.

“Yeah. F-O-R, then D-R-A-M-A, then a question mark.”

To the thing in the wall, she said, “Are you telling me the bells are just a bit of theater to dramatize your apparitions?”

After a few seconds, Jim said, “No answer.”

“And why the question mark?” she asked The Friend. “Don't you know what the bells mean yourself, where the sound comes from, what makes it, why? Are you only guessing when you say 'for drama'? How can you not know what it is if it always accompanies you?”

“Nothing,” Jim told her.

She stared into the wall. The churning, schooling cells of light were increasingly disorienting her, but she did not close her eyes.

“A new message,” Jim said. “ 'I am going.'”

“Chicken,” Holly said softly into the amorphous face of the thing in the wall. But she was sheathed in cold sweat now.

The amber light began to darken, turn orange.

Stepping away from the wall at last, Holly swayed and almost fell. She moved back to her bedroll and dropped to her knees.

New words appeared on the tablet: I WILL BE BACK.

“When?” Jim asked.

WHEN THE TIDE IS MINE.

“What tide?”

THERE IS A TIDE IN THE VESSEL, AN EBB AND FLOW, DARKNESS AND LIGHT. I RISE WITH THE LIGHT TIDE, BUT HE RISES WITH THE DARK.

“He?” Holly asked.

THE ENEMY.

The light in the walls was red-orange now, dimmer, but still ceaselessly changing patterns around them.

Jim said, “Two of you share the starship?”

YES. TWO FORCES. TWO ENTITIES.

It's lying, Holly thought. This, like all the rest of its story, is just like the bells: good theater.

WAIT FOR MY RETURN.

“We'll wait,” Jim said.

DO NOT SLEEP.

“Why can't we sleep?” Holly asked, playing along.

YOU MIGHT DREAM.

The page was full. Jim ripped it off and stacked it with the others.

The light in the walls was blood-red now, steadily fading.

DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS.

“What are you telling us?”

The same three words again: DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS.

“It's a warning,” Jim said.

DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS.

No, Holly thought, it's a threat.

7

The windmill was just a windmill again. Stones and timbers. Mortar and nails. Dust sifting, wood rotting, iron rusting, spiders spinning in secret lairs.

Holly sat directly in front of Jim, in powwow position, their knees touching. She held both his hands, partly because she drew strength from his touch, and partly because she wanted to reassure him and take the sting out of what she was about to say.

“Listen, babe, you're the most interesting man I've ever known, the sexiest, for sure, and I think, at heart, the kindest. But you do a lousy interview. For the most part, your questions aren't well-thought-out, you don't get at the meat of an issue, you follow up on irrelevancies but generally fail to follow up on the really important answers. And you're a naive enough reporter to think that the subject is always being straight with you, when they're almost never straight with an interviewer, so you don't probe the way you should.”

He did not seem offended. He smiled and said, “I didn't think of myself as a reporter doing an interview.”

“Well, kiddo, that's exactly what the situation was. The Friend, as he calls himself, has information, and we need information to know where we stand, to do our job.”

“I thought of it more as … I don't know … as an epiphany. When God came to Moses with the Ten Commandments, I figure He just told Moses what they were, and if Moses had other questions he didn't feel he had to grill the Big Guy.”

“This wasn't God in the walls.”

“I know that. I'm past that idea now. But it was an alien intelligence so superior to us that it almost might as well be God.”

“We don't know that,” she said patiently.

“Sure we do. When you consider the high degree of intelligence and the millennia needed to build a civilization capable of traveling across galaxies — good heavens, we're only monkeys by comparison!”

“There, you see, that's what I'm talking about. How do you know it's from another galaxy? Because you believe what it told you. How do you know there's a spaceship under the pond? Because you believe what it told you.”

Jim was getting impatient now. “Why would it lie to us, what would it have to gain from lies?”

“I don't know. But we can't be sure that it isn't manipulating us. And when it comes back, like it promised, I want to be ready for it. I want to spend the next hour or two or three — however long we've got — making a list of questions, so we can put it through a carefully planned inquisition. We've got to have a strategy for squeezing real information from it, facts not fantasies, and our questions have to support that strategy.” When he frowned, she hastened on before he could interrupt. “Okay, all right, maybe it's incapable of lying, maybe it's noble and pure, maybe everything it's told us is the gospel truth. But listen, Jim, this is not an epiphany. The Friend set the rules by influencing you to buy the tablets and pen. It established the question-and-answer format. If it didn't want us to make the best of that format, it would've just told you to shut up and would've blabbered at you from a burning bush!”

He stared at her. He chewed his lip thoughtfully.

He shifted his gaze to the walls where the creature of light had swum in the stone.

Pressing her point, Holly said, “You never even asked it why it wants you to save people's lives, or why some people and not others.”

He looked at her again, obviously surprised to realize that he had not pursued the answer to the most important question of all. In the lactescent glow of the softly hissing gas lantern, his eyes were blue again, not green as the amber light had temporarily made them. And troubled.

“Okay,” he said. “You're right. I guess I was just swept away by it all. I mean, Holly, whatever the hell it is — it's astounding.”

“It's astounding,” she acknowledged.

“We'll do what you want, make up a list of carefully thought-out questions. And when it comes back, you should be the one to ask all of them, 'cause you'll be better at ad-libbing other questions if it says anything that needs follow-up.”

“I agree,” she said, relieved that he had suggested it without being pressured.

She was better schooled at interviewing than he was, but she was also more trustworthy in this particular situation than Jim could ever be. The Friend had a long past relationship with him and had, admittedly, already messed with his memory by making him forget about the encounters they'd had twenty-five years ago. Holly had to assume that Jim was co-opted, to one degree or another corrupted, though he could not realize it. The Friend had been in his mind, perhaps on scores or hundreds of occasions, when he had been at a formative age, and when he had been particularly vulnerable due to the loss of his parents, therefore even more susceptible to manipulation and control than most ten-year-old boys. On a subconscious level, Jim Ironheart might be programmed to protect The Friend's secrets rather than help to reveal them.

Holly knew she was walking a thread-thin line between judicious precaution and paranoia, might even be treading more on the side of the latter than the former. Under the circumstances, a little paranoia was a prescription for survival.

When he said he was going outside to relieve himself, however, she much preferred to be with him than alone in the high room. She followed him downstairs and stood by the Ford with her back to him while he peed against the split-rail fence beside the cornfield.

She stared out at the deep black pond.

She listened to the toads, which were singing again. So were the cicadas. The events of the day had rattled her. Now even the sounds of nature seemed malevolent.

She wondered if they had come up against something too strange and too powerful to be dealt with by just a failed reporter and an ex-schoolteacher. She wondered if they ought to leave the farm right away. She wondered if they would be allowed to leave.

Since the departure of The Friend, Holly's fear had not abated. If anything, it had increased. She felt as if they were living under a thousand-ton weight that was magically suspended by a single human hair, but the magic was weakening and the hair was stretched as taut and brittle as a filament of glass.

By midnight, they had eaten six chocolate doughnuts and composed seven pages of questions for The Friend. Sugar was an energizer and a consolation in times of trouble, but it was no help to already-frayed nerves. Holly's anxiety had a sharp refined-sugar edge to it now, like a well-stropped razor.

Pacing with the tablet in her hand, Holly said, “And we're not going to let it get away with written answers this time. That just slows down the give and take between interviewer and interviewee. We're going to insist that it talk to us.”

Jim was lying on his back, his hands folded behind his head. “It can't talk.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, I'm assuming it can't, or otherwise it would've talked right from the start.”

“Don't assume anything,” she said. “If it can mix its molecules with the wall, swim through stone — through anything, if it's to be believed — and if it can assume any form it wishes, then it can sure as hell form a mouth and vocal cords and talk like any self-respecting higher power.”

“I guess you're right,” he said uneasily.

“It already said that it could appear to us as a man or woman if it wanted, didn't it?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I'm not even asking for a flashy materialization. Just a voice, a disembodied voice, a little sound with the old lightshow.”

Listening to herself as she talked, Holly realized that she was using her edginess to pump herself, to establish an aggressive tone that would serve her well when The Friend returned. It was an old trick she had learned when she had interviewed people whom she found imposing or intimidating.

Jim sat up. “Okay, it could talk if it wanted to, but maybe it doesn't want to.”

“We already decided we can't let it set all the rules, Jim.”

“But I don't understand why we have to antagonize it.”

“I'm not antagonizing it.”

“I think we should be at least a little respectful.”

“Oh, I respect the hell out of it.”

“You don't seem to.”

“I'm convinced it could squash us like bugs if it wanted to, and that gives me tremendous respect for it.”

“That's not the kind of respect I mean.”

“That's the only kind of respect it's earned from me so far,” she said, pacing around him now instead of back and forth. “When it stops trying to manipulate me, stops trying to scare the crap out of me, starts giving me answers that ring true, then maybe I'll respect it for other reasons.”

“You're getting a little spooky,” he said.

“Me?”

“You're so hostile.”

“I am not.”

He was frowning at her. “Looks like blind hostility to me.”

“It's adversarial journalism. It's the modern reporter's tone and theme. You don't question your subject and later explain him to readers, you attack him. You have an agenda, a version of the truth you want to report regardless of the full truth, and you fulfill it. I never approved of it, never indulged in it, which is why I was always losing out on stories and promotions to other reporters. Now, here, tonight, I'm all for the attack part. The big difference is, I do care about getting to the truth, not shaping it, and I just want to twist and yank some real facts out of this alien of ours.”

“Maybe he won't show up.”

“He said he would.”

Jim shook his head. “But why should he if you're going to be like this?”

“You're saying he might be afraid of me? What kind of higher power is that?”

The bells rang, and she jumped in alarm.

Jim got to his feet. “Just take it easy.”

The bells fell silent, rang again, fell silent. When they rang a third time, a sullen red light appeared at one point in the wall. It grew more intense, assumed a brighter shade, then suddenly burst across the domed room like a blazing fireworks display, after which the bells stopped ringing and the multitude of sparks coalesced into the pulsing, constantly moving amoeba-like forms that they had seen before.

“Very dramatic,” Holly said. As the light swiftly progressed from red through orange to amber, she seized the initiative. “We would like you to dispense with the cumbersome way you answered our questions previously and simply speak to us directly.”

The Friend did not reply.

“Will you speak to us directly?”

No response.

Consulting the tablet that she held in one hand, she read the first question. “Are you the higher power that has been sending Jim on life-saving missions?”

She waited.

Silence.

She tried again.

Silence.

Stubbornly, she repeated the question.

The Friend did not speak, but Jim said, “Holly, look at this.”

She turned and saw him examining the other tablet. He held it toward her, flipping through the first ten or twelve pages. The eerie and inconstant light from the stone was bright enough to show her that the pages were filled with The Friend's familiar printing.

Taking the tablet from him, she looked at the first line on the top page: YES. I AM THAT POWER.

Jim said, “He's already answered every one of the questions we've prepared.”

Holly threw the tablet across the room. It hit the far window without breaking the glass, and clattered to the floor.

"Holly, you can't—"

She cut him off with a sharp look.

The light moved through the transmuted limestone with greater agitation than before.

To The Friend, Holly said, “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone, yeah, but He also had the courtesy to talk to him. If God can humble Himself to speak directly with human beings, then so can you.”

She did not look to see how Jim was reacting to her adversarial tack. All she cared about was that he not interrupt her.

When The Friend remained silent, she repeated the first question on her list. “Are you the higher power that has been sending Jim on life-saving missions?”

“Yes. I am that power.” The voice was a soft, mellifluous baritone. Like the ringing of the bells, it seemed to come from all sides of them. The Friend did not materialize out of the wall in human form, did not sculpt a face from the limestone, but merely produced its voice out of thin air.

She asked the second question on her list. “How can you know these people are about to die?”

“I am an entity that lives in all aspects of time.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Past, present, and future.”

“You can foresee the future?”

“I live in the future as well as in the past and present.”

The light was coruscating through the walls with less agitation now, as if the alien presence had accepted her conditions and was mellow again.

Jim moved to her side. He put a hand on her arm and squeezed gently, as if to say “good work.”

She decided not to ask for any more clarification on the issue of its ability to see the future, for fear they would be off on a tangent and never get back on track before the creature next announced that it was departing. She returned to the prepared questions. “Why do you want these particular people saved?”

“To help mankind,” it said sonorously. There might have been a note of pomposity in it, too, but that was hard to tell because the voice was so evenly modulated, almost machinelike.

“But when so many people are dying every day — and most of them are innocents — why have you singled out these particular people to be rescued?”

“They are special people. ”

“In what way are they special?”

“If allowed to live, each of them will make a major contribution to the betterment of mankind.”

Jim said, “I'll be damned.”

Holly had not been expecting that answer. It had the virtue of being fresh. But she was not sure she believed it. For one thing, she was bothered that The Friend's voice was increasingly familiar to her. She was sure she had heard it before, and in a context that undermined its credibility now, in spite of its deep and authoritative tone. “Are you saying you not only see the future as it will be but as it might have been?”

“Yes.”

“Aren't we back to your being God now?”

“No. I do not see as clearly as God. But I see.”

In his boyish best humor again, Jim smiled at the kaleidoscopic patterns of light, obviously excited and pleased by all that he was hearing.

Holly turned away from the wall, crossed the room, squatted beside her suitcase, and opened it.

Jim loomed over her. “What're you doing?”

“Looking for this,” she said, producing the notebook in which she had chronicled the discoveries she'd made while researching him. She got up, opened the notebook, and paged to the list of people whose lives he had saved prior to Flight 246. Addressing the entity throbbing through the limestone, she said, “May fifteenth. Atlanta, Georgia. Sam Newsome and his five-year-old daughter Emily. What are they going to contribute to humanity that makes them more important than all the other people who died that day?”

No answer was forthcoming.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Emily will become a great scientist and discover a cure for a major disease.” Definitely a note of pomposity this time.

“What disease?”

“Why do you not believe me, Miss Thorne?” The Friend spoke as formally as an English butler on duty, yet in that response, Holly felt she heard the subtle pouting tone of a child under the dignified, reserved surface.

She said, “Tell me what disease, and maybe I'll believe you.”

“Cancer.”

“Which cancer? There are all types of cancer.”

“All cancers.”

She referred to her notebook again. “June seventh. Corona, California. Louis Andretti.”

“He will father a child who will grow up to become a great diplomat.”

Better than dying of multiple rattlesnake bites, she thought.

She said, “June twenty-first. New York City. Thaddeus—”

“He will become a great artist whose work will give millions of people hope.”

“He seemed like a nice kid,” Jim said happily, buying into the whole thing. “I liked him.”

Ignoring him, Holly said, “June thirtieth. San Francisco—”

“Rachael Steinberg will give birth to a child who will become a great spiritual leader. ”

That voice was bugging her. She knew she had heard it before. But where?

“July fifth—”

“Miami, Florida. Carmen Diaz. She will give birth to a child who will become president of the United States.”

Holly fanned herself with the notebook and said, “Why not president of the world?”

“July fourteenth. Houston, Texas. Amanda Cutter. She will give birth to a child who will be a great peacemaker. ”

“Why not the Second Coming?” Holly asked.

Jim had moved away from her. He was leaning against the wall between two windows, the display of light quietly exploding around him. “What's the matter with you?” he asked.

“It's all too much,” she said.

“What is?”

“Okay, it says it wants you to save special people.”

“To help mankind.”

“Sure, sure,” Holly said to the wall.

To Jim she said, “But these people are all just too special, don't you think? Maybe it's me, but it all seems overblown, it's gotten trite again. Nobody's growing up to be just a damned good doctor, or a businessman who creates a new industry and maybe ten thousand jobs, or an honest and courageous cop, or a terrific nurse. No, they're great diplomats, great scientists, great politicians, great peacemakers. Great, great, great!”

“Is this adversarial journalism?”

“Damn right.”

He pushed away from the wall, used both hands to smooth his thick hair back from his forehead, and cocked his head at her. “I see your point, why it's starting to sound like another episode of Outer Limits to you, but let's think about this. It's a crazy, extravagant situation. A being from another world, with powers that seem godlike to us, decides to use me to better the chances of the human race. Isn't it logical that he'd send me out to save special, really special people instead of your theoretical business tycoon?”

“Oh, it's logical,” she said. “It just doesn't ring true to me, and I've got a fairly well-developed nose for deception.”

“Is that why you were a great success as a reporter?”

She might have laughed at the image of an alien, vastly superior to human beings, stooping to engage in a bickering match. But the impatience and poutiness she'd thought she detected as an undercurrent in some of its previous answers was now unmistakable, and the concept of a hypersensitive, resentful creature with godlike power was too unnerving to be funny at the moment.

“How's that for a higher power?” she asked Jim. “Any second now, he's going to call me a bitch.”

The Friend said nothing.

Consulting her notebook again, she said, “July twentieth. Steven Aimes. Birmingham, Alabama.”

Schools of light swam through the walls. The patterns were less graceful and less sensuous than before; if the lightshow had been the visual equivalent of one of Brahms's most pacific symphonies, it was now more like the discordant wailing of bad progressive jazz.

“What about Steven Aimes?” she demanded, scared but remembering how an exertion of will had been met with respect before.

“I am going now.”

“That was a short tide,” she said.

The amber light began to darken.

“The tides in the vessel are not regular or of equal duration. But I will return.”

“What about Steven Aimes? He was fifty-seven, still capable of siring a great something-or-other, though maybe a little long in the tooth. Why did you save Steve?”

The voice grew somewhat deeper, slipping from baritone toward bass, and it hardened. “It would not be wise for you to attempt to leave.”

She had been waiting for that. As soon as she heard the words, she knew she had been tensed in expectation of them.

Jim, however, was stunned. He turned, looking around at the dark-amber forms swirling and melding and splitting apart again, as if trying to figure out the biological geography of the thing, so he could look it in the eyes. “What do you mean by that? We'll leave any time we want.”

“You must wait for my return. You will die if you attempt to leave.”

“Don't you want to help mankind anymore?” Holly asked sharply.

“Do not sleep.”

Jim moved to Holly's side. Whatever estrangement she had caused between her and Jim, by taking an aggressive stance with The Friend, was apparently behind them. He put an arm around her protectively.

“You dare not sleep. ”

The limestone was mottled with a deep red glow.

“Dreams are doorways.”

The bloody light went out.

The lantern provided the only illumination. And in the deeper darkness that followed The Friend's departure, the quiet hiss of the burning gas was the only sound.

8

Holly stood at the head of the stairs, shining a flashlight into the gloom below. Jim supposed she was trying to make up her mind whether they really would be prevented from leaving the mill — and if so, how violently.

Watching her from where he sat on his sleeping bag, he could not understand why it was all turning sour.

He had come to the windmill because the bizarre andfrightening events in his bedroom in Laguna Niguel, over eighteen hours ago, had made it impossible to continue ignoring the dark side to the mystery in which he had become enwrapped. Prior to that, he had been willing to drift along, doing what he was compelled to do, pulling people out of the fire at the last minute, a bemused but game superhero who had to rely on airplanes when he wanted to fly and who had to do his own laundry. But the increasing intrusion of The Enemy — whatever the hell it was — its undeniable evil and fierce hostility, no longer allowed Jim the luxury of ignorance. The Enemy was struggling to break through from some other place, another dimension perhaps, and it seemed to be getting closer on each attempt. Learning the truth about the higher power behind his activities had not been at the top of his agenda, because he had felt that enlightenment would be granted to him in time, but learning about The Enemy had come to seem urgently necessary for his survival — and Holly's.

Nevertheless, he had traveled to the farm with the expectation that he would encounter good as well as evil, experience joy as well as fear. Whatever he learned by plunging into the unknown should at least leave him with a greater understanding of his sacred life-saving mission and the supernatural forces behind it. But now he was more confused than before he'd come. Some developments had filled him with the wonder and joy for which he longed: the ringing in the stone, for one; and the beautiful, almost divine, light that was the essence of The Friend. He had been moved to rapture by the revelation that he was not merely saving lives but saving people so special that their survival would improve the fate of the entire human race. But that spiritual bliss had been snatched away from him by the growing realization that The Friend was either not telling them the whole truth or, worst case, was not telling them anything true at all. The childish petulance of the creature was unnerving in the extreme, and now Jim was not sure that anything he had done since saving the Newsomes last May was in the service of good rather than evil.

Yet his fear was still tempered by hope. Though a splinter of despair had lodged in his heart and begun to fester, that spiritual infection was held in check by the core of optimism, however fragile, that had always been at the center of him.

Holly switched off the flashlight, returned from the open door, and sat down on her mattress. “I don't know, maybe it was an empty threat, but there's no way of telling till we try to leave.”

“You want to?”

She shook her head. “What's the point in getting off the farm anyway? From everything we know, it can reach out to us anywhere we go. Right? I mean it reached you in Laguna Niguel, sent you on these missions, reached you out there in Nevada and sent you on to Boston to rescue Nicholas O'Conner.”

“I've felt it with me, at times, no matter where I've gone. In Houston, in Florida, in France, in England — it guided me, let me know what was coming, so I could do the job it wanted done.”

Holly looked exhausted. She was drawn and paler than the eerie glow of the gas lantern could account for, and her eyes were shadowed with rings of weariness. She closed her eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, a strained look on her face, as if she was trying to suppress a headache.

With all his heart, Jim regretted that she had been drawn into this. But like his fear and despair, his regret was impure, tempered by the deep pleasure he took in her very presence. Though it was a selfish attitude, he was glad that she was with him, no matter where this strange night led them. He was no longer alone.

Still pinching the bridge of her nose, the lines in her forehead carved deep by her scowl, Holly said, “This creature isn't restricted to the area near the pond, or just to psychic contact across great distances. It can manifest itself anywhere, judging by the scratches it left in my sides and the way it entered the ceiling of your bedroom this morning.”

“Well, now wait,” he said, “we know The Enemy can materialize over considerable distance, yes, but we don't know that The Friend has that ability. It was The Enemy that came out of your dream and The Enemy that tried to reach us this morning.”

Holly opened her eyes and lowered her hand from her face. Her expression was bleak. “I think they're one and the same.”

“What?”

“The Enemy and The Friend. I don't believe two entities are living under the pond, in that starship, if there is a starship, which I guess there is. I think there's only a single entity. The Friend and The Enemy are nothing more than different aspects of it.”

Holly's implication was clear, but it was too frightening for Jim to accept immediately. He said, “You can't be serious? You might as well be saying … it's insane.”

“That is what I'm saying. It's suffering the alien equivalent of a split personality. It's acting out both personalities, but isn't consciously aware of what it's doing.” Jim's almost desperate need to believe in The Friend as a separate and purely benign creature must have been evident in his face, for Holly took his right hand, held it in both hers, and hurried on before he could interrupt: “The childish petulance, the grandiosity of its claim to be reshaping the entire destiny of our species, the flamboyance of its apparitions, its sudden fluctuations between an attitude of syrupy goodwill and sullen anger, the way it lies so damned transparently yet deludes itself into believing it's clever, its secretiveness about some issues when there is no apparent reason to be secretive — all of that makes sense if you figure we're dealing with an unbalanced mind.”

He looked for flaws in her reasoning, and found one. “But you can't believe an insane person, an insane alien individual, could pilot an unimaginably complex spacecraft across lightyears through countless dangers, while completely out of its mind.”

“It doesn't have to be like that. Maybe the insanity set in after it got here. Or maybe it didn't have to pilot the ship, maybe the ship is essentially automatic, an entirely robotic mechanism. Or maybe there were others of its kind aboard who piloted it, and maybe they're all dead now. Jim, it's never mentioned a crew, only The Enemy. And assuming you buy its extraterrestrial origins, does it really ring true that only two individuals would set out on an intergalactic exploration? Maybe it killed the others.”

Everything she was theorizing could be true, but then anything she theorized could be true. They were dealing with the Unknown, capital “U,” and the possibilities in an infinite universe were infinite in number. He remembered reading somewhere — even many scientists believed that anything the human imagination conceived, regardless of how fanciful, could conceivably exist somewhere in the universe, because the infinite nature of creation meant that it was no less fluid, no less fertile than any man's or woman's dreams.

Jim expressed that thought to Holly, then said, “But what bothers me is that you're doing now what you rejected earlier. You're trying hard to explain it in human terms, when it may be too alien for us to understand it at all. How can you assume that an alien species can even suffer insanity the way we can, or that it's capable of multiple personalities? These are all strictly human concepts.”

She nodded. “You're right, of course. But at the moment, this theory's the only one that makes sense to me. Until something happens to disprove it, I've got to operate on the assumption that we're not dealing with a rational being.”

With his free hand, he reached out and increased the gas flow to the wicks in the Coleman lantern, providing more light. “Jesus, I've got a bad case of the creeps,” he said, shivering.

“Join the club.”

“If it is schizo, and if it slips into the identity of The Enemy and can't get back out… what might it do to us?”

“I don't even want to think about that,” Holly said. “If it's as intellectually superior to us as it seems to be, if it's from a long-lived race with experience and knowledge that makes the whole of the human experience seem like a short story compared to the Great Books of the Western World, then it sure as hell knows some tortures and cruelties that would make Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot look like Sunday-school teachers.”

He thought about that for a moment, even though he tried not to. The chocolate doughnuts he had eaten lay in an undigested, burning wad in his stomach.

Holly said, “When it comes back—”

“For God's sake,” he interrupted, “no more adversarial tactics!”

“I screwed up,” she admitted. “But the adversarial approach was the correct one, I just carried it too far. I pushed too hard. When it comes back, I'll modify my technique.”

He supposed he had more fully accepted her insanity theory than he was willing to acknowledge. He was now in a cold sweat about what The Friend might do if their behavior tipped it into its other, darker identity. “Why don't we jettison confrontation altogether, play along with it, stroke its ego, keep it as happy as we—”

“That's no good. You can't control madness by indulging it. That only creates more and deeper madness. I suspect any nurse in a mental institution would tell you the best way to deal with a potentially violent paranoid is to be nice, respectful, but firm.”

He withdrew his hand from hers because his palms were clammy. He blotted them on his shirt.

The mill seemed unnaturally silent, as if it were in a vacuum where sound could not travel, sealed in an immense bell jar, on display in a museum in a land of giants. At another time Jim might have found the silence disturbing, but now he embraced it because it probably meant The Friend was sleeping or at least preoccupied with concerns other than them.

“It wants to do good,” he said. “It might be insane, and it might be violent and even evil in its second identity, a regular Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But like Dr. Jekyll it really wants to do good. At least we've got that going for us.”

She thought about it a moment. “Okay, I'll give you that one. And when it comes back, I'll try to pry some truth out of it.”

“What scares me most — is there really anything we can learn from it that could help us? Even if it tells us the whole truth about everything, if it's insane it's going to turn to irrational violence sooner or later.”

She nodded. “But we gotta try.”

They settled into an uneasy silence.

When he looked at his watch, Jim saw that it was ten minutes past one in the morning. He was not sleepy. He didn't have to worry about drifting off and dreaming and thereby opening a doorway, but he was physically drained. Though he had not done anything but sit in a car and drive, then sit or stand in the high room waiting for revelations, his muscles ached as if he had put in ten hours of heavy manual labor. His face felt slack with weariness, and his eyes were hot and grainy. Extreme stress could be every bit as debilitating as strenuous physical activity.

He found himself wishing The Friend would never return, wishing not in an idle way but with the wholehearted commitment of a young boy wishing that an upcoming visit to the dentist would not transpire. He put every fiber of his being into the wish, as if convinced, the way a kid sometimes could be, that wishes really did now and then come true.

He remembered a quote from Chazal, which he had used when teaching a literature unit on the supernatural fiction of Poe and Hawthorne: Extreme terror gives us back the gestures of our childhood. If he ever went back into the classroom, he would be able to teach that unit a hell of a lot better, thanks to what had happened to him in the old windmill.

At 1:25 The Friend disproved the value of wishing by putting in a sudden appearance. This time no bells heralded its approach. Red light blossomed in the wall, like a burst of crimson paint in clear water.

Holly scrambled to her feet.

So did Jim. He could no longer sit relaxed in the presence of this mysterious being, because he was now more than half-convinced that at any moment it might strike at them with merciless brutality.

The light separated into many swarms, surged all the way around the room, then began to change from red to amber.

The Friend spoke without waiting for a question: “August first. Seattle, Washington. Laura Lenaskian, saved from drowning. She will give birth to a child who will become a great composer and whose music will give solace to many people in times of trouble. August eighth. Peoria, Illinois. Doogie Burkette. He will grow up to be a paramedic in Chicago, where he will do much good and save many lives. August twelfth. Portland, Oregon. Billy Jenkins. He will grow up to be a brilliant medical technologist whose inventions will revolutionize medical care—”

Jim met Holly's eyes and did not even have to wonder what she was thinking: the same thing he was thinking. The Friend was in its testy, I'll-show-you mode, and it was providing details which it expected would lend credibility to its extravagant claim to be altering human destiny. But it was impossible to know if what it said was true — or merely fantasies that it had worked up to support its story. The important thing, perhaps, was that it seemed to care deeply that they believe it. Jim had no idea why his or Holly's opinion should matter at all to a being as intellectually superior to them as they were to a field mouse, but the fact that it did evidently matter seemed to be to their advantage.

“—August twentieth. The Mojave Desert, Nevada. Lisa and Susan Jawolski. Lisa will provide her daughter with the love, affection, and counseling that will make it possible for the girl eventually to overcome the severe psychological trauma of her father's murder and grow up to be the greatest woman statesman in the entire history of the world, a force for enlightenment and compassionate government policies. August twenty-third. Boston, Massachusetts. Nicholas O'Conner, saved from an electrical-vault explosion. He will grow up to become a priest who will dedicate his life to caring for the poor in the slums of India—”

The Friend's attempt to answer Holly's criticism and present a less grandiose version of its work was childishly transparent. The Burkette boy was not going to save the world, just be a damned good paramedic, and Nicholas O'Conner was going to be a humble man leading a self-effacing existence among the needy — but the rest of them were still great or brilliant or staggeringly talented in one way or another. The entity now recognized the need for credibility in its tale of grandeur, but it could not bring itself to significantly water down its professed accomplishments.

And something else was bothering Jim: that voice. The longer he listened to it, the more he became convinced that he had heard it before, not in this room twenty-five years ago, not within its current context at all. The voice had to be appropriated, of course, because in its natural condition the alien almost certainly did not possess anything similar to human vocal cords; its biology would be inhuman. The voice it was imitating, as if it were an impersonator performing in a cosmic cocktail lounge, was that of a person Jim had once known. He could not quite identify it.

“—August twenty-sixth. Dubuque, Iowa. Christine and Casey Dubrovek. Christine will give birth to another child who will grow up to be the greatest geneticist of the next century. Casey will become an exceptional schoolteacher who will tremendously influence the lives of her students, and who will never fail one of them to the extent that a suicide results.”

Jim felt as if he had been hit in the chest with a hammer. That insulting accusation, directed at him and referring to Larry Kakonis, shook his remaining faith in The Friend's basic desire to do good.

Holly said, “Shit, that was low.”

The entity's pettiness sickened Jim, because he wanted so badly to believe in its stated purpose and goodness.

The scintillant amber light swooped and swirled through the walls, as if The Friend was delighted by the effect of the blow it had struck.

Despair welled so high in Jim that for a moment he even dared to consider that the entity under the pond was not good at all but purely evil. Maybe the people he had saved since May fifteenth were not destined to elevate the human condition but debase it. Maybe Nicholas O'Conner was really going to grow up to be a serial killer. Maybe Billy Jenkins was going to be a bomber pilot who went rogue and found a way to override all the safeguards in the system in order to drop a few nuclear weapons on a major metropolitan area; and maybe instead of being the greatest woman statesman in the history of the world, Susie Jawolski was going to be a radical activist who planted bombs in corporate boardrooms and machine-gunned those with whom she disagreed.

But as he swayed precariously on the rim of that black chasm, Jim saw in memory the face of young Susie Jawolski, which had seemed to be the essence of innocence. He could not believe that she would be anything less than a positive force in the lives of her family and neighbors. He had done good works; therefore The Friend had done good works, whether or not it was insane, and even though it had the capacity to be cruel.

Holly addressed the entity within the wall: “We have more questions.”

“Ask them, ask them.”

Holly glanced at her tablet, and Jim hoped she would remember to be less aggressive. He sensed that The Friend was more unstable than at any previous point during the night.

She said, “Why did you choose Jim to be your instrument?”

“He was convenient.”

“You mean because he lived on the farm?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever worked through anyone else the way you've been working through Jim?”

“No.”

“Not in all these ten thousand years?”

“Is this a trick question? Do you think you can trick me? Do you still not believe me when I tell you the truth?”

Holly looked at Jim, and he shook his head, meaning that this was no time to be argumentative, that discretion was not only the better part of valor but their best hope of survival.

Then he wondered if this entity could read his mind as well as intrude into it and implant directives. Probably not. If it could do that, it would flare into anger now, incensed that they still thought it insane and were patronizing it.

“I'm sorry,” Holly said. “It wasn't a trick question, not at all. We just want to know about you. We're fascinated by you. If we ask questions that you find offensive, please understand that we do so unintentionally, out of ignorance.”

The Friend did not reply.

The light pulsed more slowly through the limestone, and though Jim knew the danger of interpreting alien actions in human terms, he felt that the changed patterns and tempo of the radiance indicated The Friend was in a contemplative mood. It was chewing over what Holly had just said, deciding whether or not she was sincere.

Finally the voice came again, more mellow than it had been in a while: “Ask your questions.”

Consulting her tablet again, Holly said, “Will you ever release Jim from this work?”

“Does he want to be released?”

Holly looked at Jim inquiringly.

Considering what he had been through in the past few months, Jim was a bit surprised by his answer: “Not if I'm actually doing good.”

“You are. How can you doubt it? But regardless of whether you believe my intentions to be good or evil, I would never release you.”

The ominous tone of that last statement mitigated the relief Jim felt at the reassurance that he had not saved the lives of future murderers and thieves.

Holly said, “Why have you—”

The Friend interrupted. “There is one other reason that I chose Jim Ironheart for this work.”

“What's that?” Jim asked.

“You needed it.”

“I did?”

“Purpose.”

Jim understood. His fear of The Friend was as great as ever, but he was moved by the implication that it had wanted to salvage him. By giving meaning to his broken and empty life, it had redeemed him just as surely as it had saved Billy Jenkins, Susie Jawolski, and all the others, though they had been rescued from more immediate deaths than the death of the soul that had threatened Jim. The Friend's statement seemed to reveal a capacity for pity. And Jim knew he'd deserved pity after the suicide of Larry Kakonis, when he had spiraled into an unreasonable depression. This compassion, even if it was another lie, affected Jim more strongly than he would have expected, and a shimmer of tears came to his eyes.

Holly said, “Why have you waited ten thousand years to decide to use someone like Jim to shape human destinies?”

“I had to study the situation first, collect data, analyze it, and then decide if my intervention was wise.”

“It took ten thousand years to make that decision? Why? That's longer than recorded history.”

No reply.

She tried the question again.

At last The Friend said, “I am going now.” Then, as if it did not want them to interpret its recent display of compassion as a sign of weakness, it added: “If you attempt to leave, you will die. ”

“When will you be back?” Holly asked.

“Do not sleep.”

“We're going to have to sleep sooner or later,” Holly said as the amber light turned red and the room seemed to be washed in blood.

“Do not sleep.”

“It's two in the morning,” she said.

“Dreams are doorways.”

Holly flared up: “We can't stay awake forever, damn it!”

The light in the limestone was snuffed out.

The Friend was gone.

Somewhere people laughed. Somewhere music played and dancers danced, and somewhere lovers strained toward ecstasy.

But in the high room of the mill, designed for storage and now stacked to the ceiling with an anticipation of violence, the mood was decidedly grim.

Holly loathed being so helpless. Throughout her life she had been a woman of action, even if the actions she took were usually destructive rather than constructive. When a job turned out to be less satisfying than she had hoped, she never hesitated to resign, move on. When a relationship soured or just proved uninteresting, she was always quick to terminate it. If she had often retreated from problems — from the responsibilities of being a conscientious journalist when she had seen that journalism was as corrupt as anything else, from the prospect of love, from putting down roots and committing to one place — well, at least retreat was a form of action. Now she was denied even that.

The Friend had that one good effect on her. It was not going to let her retreat from this problem.

For a while she and Jim discussed the latest visitation and went over the remaining questions on her list, to which they made changes and additions. The most recent portion of her ongoing interview with The Friend had resulted in some interesting and potentially useful information. It was only potentially useful, however, because they both still felt that nothing The Friend said could be relied upon to be true.

By 3:15 in the morning, they were too weary to stand and too bottom-sore to continue sitting. They pulled their sleeping bags together and stretched out side by side, on their backs, staring at the domed ceiling.

To help guard against sleep, they left the gas lantern at its brightest setting. As they waited for The Friend to return, they kept talking, not about anything of importance, small talk of every kind, anything to keep their minds occupied. It was difficult to doze off in the middle of a conversation; and if one did slip away, the other would know it by the lack of a response. They also held hands, her right in his left — the logic being that even during a brief pause in the conversation, if one of them started to take a nap, the other would be warned by the sudden relaxation of the sleeper's grip.

Holly did not expect to have difficulty staying awake. In her university days she had pulled all-nighters before exams or when papers were due, and had stayed awake for thirty-six hours without much of a struggle. During her early years as a reporter, when she'd still believed that journalism mattered to her, she had labored away all night on a story, poring over research or listening yet again to interview tapes or sweating over the wording of a paragraph. She had missed nights of sleep in recent years, as well, if only because she was occasionally plagued by insomnia. She was a night owl by nature anyway. Piece of cake.

But though she had not yet been awake twenty-four hours since bolting out of bed in Laguna Niguel yesterday morning, she felt the sandman sliding up against her, whispering his subliminal message of sleep, sleep, sleep. The past few days had been a blur of activity and personal change, both of which could be expected to take a toll of her resources. And some nights she had gotten too little rest, only in part because of the dreams. Dreams are doorways. Sleep was dangerous, she had to stay awake. Damn it, she shouldn't need sleep this badly yet, no matter how much stress she had been under lately. She struggled to keep up her end of the conversation with Jim, even though at times she realized that she was not sure what they were talking about and did not fully understand the words that came out of her own mouth. Dreams are doorways. It was almost as if she had been drugged, or as if The Friend, after warning them against sleep, was secretly exerting pressure on a narcoleptic button in her brain. Dreams are doorways. She fought against the descending oblivion, but she found that she did not possess the strength or will to sit up … or to open her eyes. Her eyes were closed. She had not realized that her eyes were closed. Dreams are doorways. Panic could not arouse her. She continued to drift deeper under the sandman's spell even as she heard her heart pound harder and faster. She felt her hand loosening its grip on Jim's hand, and she knew he would respond to that warning, would keep her awake, but she felt his grip loosening on her hand, and she realized they were succumbing to the sandman simultaneously.

She drifted in darkness.

She felt that she was being watched.

It was both a reassuring and a frightening feeling.

Something was going to happen. She sensed it.

For a while, however, nothing happened. Except darkness.

Then she became aware that she had a mission to perform.

But that couldn't be right. Jim was the one who was sent on missions, not her.

A mission. Her mission. She would be sent on a mission of her own. It was vitally important. Her life depended on how well she performed. Jim's life depended on it as well. The whole world's continued existence depended on it.

But the darkness remained.

She just drifted. It felt nice.

She slept and slept.

At some point during the night, she dreamed. As nightmares went, this one was a lulu, all the stops pulled out, but it was nothing like her recent dreams of the mill and The Enemy. It was worse than those because it was painted in excruciating detail and because throughout the experience she was in the grip of anguish and terror so intense that nothing in her experience prepared her for it, not even the crash of Flight 246.

Lying on a tile floor, under a table. On her side. Peering out at floor level. Directly ahead is a chair, tubular metal and orange plastic, under the chair a scattering of golden french fries and a cheeseburger, the meat having slid halfway out of the bun on a skid of ketchup-greased lettuce. Then a woman, an old lady, also lying on the floor, head turned toward Holly. Looking through the tubular legs of the chair, across the fries and disarranged burger, the lady stares at her, a look of surprise, stares and stares, never blinking, and then Holly sees that the lady's eye nearest the floor isn't there anymore, an empty hole, blood leaking out. Oh, lady. Oh, lady, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Holly hears a terrible sound, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, doesn't recognize it, hears people screaming, a lot of people, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, still screaming but not as much as before, glass shattering, wood breaking, a man shouting like a bear, roaring, very angry and roaring, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda. She knows now that its gunfire, the heavy rhythmic pounding of an automatic weapon, and she wants to get out of there. So she turns in the opposite direction from which she's been facing because she doesn't want to — can't, just can't! — crawl by the old lady whose eye has been shot out. But behind her is a little girl, about eight, lying on the floor in a pink dress with black patent-leather shoes and white socks, a little girl with white-blond hair, a little girl with, a little girl with, a little girl with patent-leather shoes, a little girl with, a little girl with, a little girl with white socks, a little girl with, a little girl with with with with with half her face shot off! A red smile. Broken white teeth in a red, lopsided smile. Sobbing, screaming, and still more chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, it's never going to stop, it's going to go on forever, that terrible sound, chuda-chuda-chuda. Then Holly's moving, scrambling on her hands and knees, away from both the old lady and the little girl with half a face. Unavoidably her hands slap-skip-skid-slide through warm french fries, a hot fish sandwich, a puddle of mustard, as she moves, moves, staying under the tables, between the chairs, then she puts her hand down in the icy slush of a spilled Coke, and when she sees the image of Dixie Duck on the large paper cup from which the soda has spilled, she knows where she is, she's in a Dixie Duck Burger Palace, one of her favorite places in the world. Nobody's screaming now, maybe they realize that a Dixie Duck is not a place you should scream, but somebody is sobbing and groaning, and somebody else is saying please-please-please-please over and over again. Holly starts to crawl out from under another table, and she sees a man in a costume standing a few feet from her, turned half away from her, and she thinks maybe this is all just a trick, trick-or-treat, a Halloween performance. But it isn't Halloween. Yet the man is in a costume, he's wearing combat boots like G.I. Joe and camouflage pants and a black T-shirt and a beret, like the Green Berets wear, only this one is black, and it must be a costume because he isn't really a soldier, can't be a soldier with that big sloppy belly overhanging his pants, and he hasn't shaved in maybe a week, soldiers have to shave, so he's only wearing soldier stuff. This girl is kneeling on the floor in front of him, one of the teenagers who works at Dixie Duck, the pretty one with the red hair, she winked at Holly when she took her order, now she's kneeling in front of the guy in the soldier costume, with her head bowed like she's praying, except what she's saying is please-please-please-please. The guy is shouting at her about the CIA and mind control and secret spy networks operated out of the Dixie Duck storeroom. Then the guy stops shouting and he looks at the red-haired girl awhile, just looks down at her, and then he says look-at-me, and she says please-please-don't, and he says look-at-me again, so she raises her head and looks at him, and he says what-do-you-think-I-am-stupid? The girl is so scared, she is just so scared, and she says no-please-I-don't-know-anything-about-this, and he says like-shit-you-don't, and he lowers the big gun, he puts the big gun right there in her face, just maybe an inch or two from her face. She says oh-my-god-oh-my-god, and he says you're-one-of-the-rat-people, and Holly is sure the guy will now throw the gun aside and laugh, and everyone playing dead people will get up and laugh, too, and the manager will come out and take bows for the Halloween performance, except it isn't Halloween. Then the guy pulls the trigger, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, and the red-haired girl dissolves. Holly eels around and heads back the way she came, moving so fast, trying to get away from him before he sees her, because he's crazy, that's what he is, he's a crazyman. Holly is splashing through the same spilled food and drinks that she splashed through before, past the little girl in the pink dress and right through the girl's blood, praying the crazyman can't hear her scuttling away from him. CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDA! But he must be shooting the other direction, because no bullets are smashing into anything around her, so she keeps going, right across a dead man with his insides coming out, hearing sirens now, sirens wailing outside, the cops'll get this crazyman. Then she hears a crash behind her, a table being overturned, and it sounds so close, she looks back, she sees him, the crazyman, he's coming straight toward her, pushing tables out of his way, kicking aside chairs, he sees her. She clambers over another dead woman and then she's in a corner, on top of a dead man who's slumped in the corner, she's in the lap of the dead man, in the arms of the dead man, and no way to get out of there because the crazyman is coming. The crazyman looks so scary, so bad and scary, that she can't watch him coming, doesn't want to see the gun in her face the way the red-haired girl saw it, so she turns her head away, turns her face to the dead man—

She woke from the dream as she had never awakened from another, not screaming, not even with an unvoiced cry caught in her throat, but gagging. She was curled into a tight ball, hugging herself, dry-heaving, choking not on anything she had eaten but on sheer throat-clogging repulsion.

Jim was turned away from her, lying on his side. His knees were drawn up slightly in a modified fetal position. He was still sound asleep.

When she could get her breath, she sat up. She was not merely shaking, she was rattling. She was convinced she could hear her bones clattering against one another.

She was glad that she had not eaten anything after the doughnuts last evening. They had passed through her stomach hours ago. If she had eaten anything else, she'd be wearing it now.

She hunched forward and put her face in her hands. She sat like that until the rattling quieted to a shudder and the shudder faded to spasms of shivering.

When she raised her face from her hands, the first thing she noticed was daylight at the narrow windows of the high room. It was opalescent gray-pink, a weak glow rather than a sunny-blue glare, but daylight nonetheless. Seeing it, she realized that she had not been convinced she would ever see daylight again.

She looked at her wristwatch. 6:10. Dawn must have broken only a short while ago. She could have been asleep only two to two and a half hours. It had been worse than no sleep at all; she did not feel in the least rested.

The dream. She suspected that The Friend had used its telepathic power to push her down into sleep against her will. And because of the unusually intense nature of the nightmare, she was convinced it had sent her that gruesome reel of mind-film.

But why?

Jim murmured and stirred, then grew still again, breathing deeply but quietly. His dream must not be the same one she'd had; if it was, he would be writhing and crying out like a man on the rack.

She sat for a while, considering the dream, wondering if she had been shown a prophetic vision. Was The Friend warning her that she was going to wind up in a Dixie Duck Burger Palace scrambling for her life through food and blood, stalked by a raving maniac with an automatic carbine? She had never even heard of Dixie Duck, and she couldn't imagine a more ludicrous place to die.

She was living in a society where the streets were crawling with casualties of the drug wars, some of them so brain-blasted that they might well pick up a gun and go looking for the rat people who were working with the CIA, running spy networks out of burger restaurants. She had worked on newspapers all her adult life. She had seen stories no less tragic, no more strange.

After about fifteen minutes, she couldn't bear to think about the nightmare any more, not for a while. Instead of getting a handle on it through analysis, she became more confused and distressed the longer she dwelt on it. In memory, the images of slaughter did not fade, as was usually the case with a dream, but became more vivid. She didn't need to puzzle it out right now.

Jim was sleeping, and she considered waking him. But he needed his rest as much as she did. There was no sign of The Enemy making use of a dream doorway, no change in the limestone walls or the oak-plank floor, so she let Jim sleep.

As she had looked around the room, studying the walls, she had noticed the yellow tablet lying on the floor under the far window. She had pitched it aside last evening when The Friend had resisted vocalizing its answers and had tried, instead, to present her with responses to all her written questions at once, before she was able to read them aloud. She'd never had a chance to ask it all of the questions on her list, and now she wondered what might be on that answer-tablet.

She eased off her bedding as quietly as possible, rose, and walked carefully across the room. She tested the floorboards as she went to make sure they weren't going to squeak when she put her full weight on them.

As she stooped to pick up the tablet, she heard a sound that froze her. Like a heartbeat with an extra thump in it.

She looked around at the walls, up at the dome. The light from the high-burning lantern and the windows was sufficient to be certain that the limestone was only limestone, the wood only wood.

Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB …

It was faint, as if someone was tapping the rhythm out on a drum far away, outside the mill, somewhere up in the dry brown hills.

But she knew what it was. No drum. It was the tripartite beat that always preceded the materialization of The Enemy. Just as the bells had, until its final visit, preceded the arrival of The Friend.

As she listened, it faded away.

She strained to hear it.

Gone.

Relieved but still trembling, she picked up the tablet. The pages were rumpled, and they made some noise falling into place.

Jim's steady breathing continued to echo softly around the room, with no change of rhythm or pitch.

Holly read the answers on the first page, then the second. She saw that they were the same responses The Friend had vocalized — although without the spur-of-the-moment questions that she had not written down on the question-tablet. She skimmed down the third and fourth pages, on which it had listed the people Jim had saved — Carmen Diaz, Amanda Cutter, Steven Aimes, Laura Lenaskian—

explaining what great things each of them was destined to achieve.

Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB…

She snapped her head up.

The sound was still distant, no louder than before.

Jim groaned in his sleep.

Holly took a step away from the window, intending to wake him, but the dreaded sound faded away again. Evidently The Enemy was in the neighborhood, but it had not found a doorway in Jim's dream. He had to get his sleep, he couldn't function without it. She decided to let him alone.

Easing back to the window again, Holly held the answer-tablet up to the light. She turned to the fifth page — and felt the flesh on the nape of her neck go as cold and nubbly as frozen turkey skin.

Peeling the pages back with great delicacy, so as not to rustle them more than absolutely necessary, she checked the sixth page, the seventh, the eighth. They were all the same. Messages were printed on them in the wavery hand that The Friend had used when pulling its little words-rising-as-if-through-water trick. But they were not answers to her questions. They were two alternating statements, unpunctuated, each repeated three times per page:

Staring at those obsessively repeated statements, she knew that “he” could be no one but Jim. She focused only on the five hateful words, trying to understand.

And suddenly she thought that she did. The Friend was warning her that in its madness it would act against her, perhaps because it hated her for bringing Jim to the mill, for making him seek answers, and for being a distraction from his mission. If The Friend, which was the sane half of the alien consciousness, could reach into Jim's mind and compel him to undertake life-saving missions, was it possible that The Enemy, the dark half, could reach into his mind and compel him to kill? Instead of the insane personality materializing in monstrous form as it had done for an instant at the motel Friday night and as it attempted to do in Jim's bedroom yesterday, might it choose to use Jim against her, take command of him to a greater extent than The Friend had ever done, and turn him into a killing machine? That might perversely delight the mad-child aspect of the entity.

She shook herself as if casting off a pestering wasp.

No. It was impossible. All right, Jim could kill in the defense of innocent people. But he was incapable of killing someone innocent. No alien consciousness, no matter how powerful, could override his true nature. In his heart he was good and kind and caring. His love for her could not be subverted by this alien force, no matter how strong it was.

But how did she know that? She was engaging in wishful thinking. For all she knew, The Enemy's powers of mental control were so awesome that it could reach into her brain right now and tell her to drown herself in the pond, and she would do as told.

She remembered Norman Rink. The Atlanta convenience store. Jim had pumped eight rounds from a shotgun into the guy, blasting at him again and again, long after he was dead.

Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB …

Still far away.

Jim groaned softly.

She moved away from the window again, intent on waking him, and almost called out his name, before she realized that The Enemy might be in him already. Dreams are doorways. She didn't have a clue as to what The Friend meant by that, or if it was anything more than stage dressing like the bells. But maybe what it had meant was that The Enemy could enter the dreamer's dream and thus the dreamer's mind. Maybe this time The Enemy did not intend to materialize from the wall but from Jim, in the person of Jim, in total control of Jim, just for a murderous little lark.

Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB …

A little louder, a little closer?

Holly felt that she was losing her mind. Paranoid, schizoid, flat-out crazy. No better than The Friend and his other half. She was frantically trying to understand a totally alien consciousness, and the more she pondered the possibilities, the stranger and more varied the possibilities became. In an infinite universe, anything can happen, any nightmare can be made flesh. In an infinite universe, life was therefore essentially the same as a dream. Contemplation of that, under the stress of a life-or-death situation, was guaranteed to drive you bugshit.

Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB …

She could not move.

She could only wait.

The tripartite beat faded again.

Letting her breath out in a rush, she backed up against the wall beside the window, less afraid of the limestone now than she was of Jim Ironheart. She wondered if it was all right to wake him when the three-note heartbeat was not audible. Maybe The Enemy was only in his dream — and therefore in him — when that triple thud could be heard.

Afraid to act and afraid not to act, she glanced down at the tablet in her hand. Some of the pages had fallen shut, and she was no longer looking at the HE LOVES YOU HOLLY/HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY litany. Before her eyes, instead, was the list of people who had been saved by Jim, along with The Friend's grandiose explanations of their importance.

She saw “Steven Aimes” and realized at once that he was the only one on the list whose fate The Friend had not vocalized during one or another of their conversations last night. She remembered him because he was the only older person on the list, fifty-seven. She read the words under his name, and the chill that had touched her nape earlier was nothing compared to the spike of ice that drove through it now and pierced her spine.

Steven Aimes had not been saved because he would father a child who would be a great diplomat or a great artist or a great healer. He had not been saved because he would make an enduring contribution to the welfare of mankind. The reason for his salvation was expressed in just eleven words, the most horrifying eleven words that Holly had ever read or hoped to read: BECAUSE HE LOOKS LIKE MY FATHER WHOM I FAILED TO SAVE. Not “like Jim's father” which The Friend would have said. Not “whom he failed to save,” as the alien would surely have put it. MY FATHER. I FAILED. MY. I.

The infinite universe just kept expanding, and now an entirely new possibility presented itself to her, revealed in the telling words about Steven Aimes. No starship rested under the pond. No alien had been in hiding on the farm for ten thousand years, ten years, or ten days. The Friend and The Enemy were real enough: they were thirds, not halves, of the same personality, three in one entity, an entity with enormous and wonderful and terrifying powers, an entity both godlike and yet as human as Holly was. Jim Ironheart. Who had been shattered by tragedy when he was ten years old. Who had painstakingly put himself together again with the help of a complex fantasy about star-traveling gods. Who was as insane and dangerous as he was sane and loving.

She did not understand where he had gotten the power that he so obviously possessed, or why he was not aware whatsoever that the power was within him rather than coming from some imaginary alien presence. The realization that he was everything, that the end and beginning of this mystery lay solely in him and not beneath the pond, raised more questions than it answered. She didn't understand how such a thing could be true, but she knew it was, at last, the truth. Later, if she survived, she might have the time to seek a better understanding.

Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB …

Closer but not close.

Holly held her breath, waiting for the sound to get louder.

Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB …

Jim shifted in his sleep. He snorted softly and smacked his lips, just like any ordinary dreamer.

But he was three personalities in one, and at least two of them possessed incredible power, and at least one of them was deadly. And it was coming.

Lub-dub-DUB…

Holly pressed back against the limestone. Her heart was pounding so hard that it seemed to have hammered her throat half shut; she had trouble swallowing.

The tripartite beat faded.

Silence.

She moved along the curved wall. Easy little steps. Sideways. Toward the timbered, ironbound door. She eased away from the wall just far enough to reach out and snare her purse by its straps.

The closer she got to the head of the stairs, the more certain she became that the door was going to slam shut before she reached it, that Jim was going to sit up and turn to her. His blue eyes would not be beautiful but cold, as she had twice glimpsed them, filled with rage but cold.

She reached the door, eased through it backward onto the first step, not wanting to take her eyes off Jim. But if she tried to back down those narrow stairs without a handrail, she would fall, break an arm or leg. So she turned away from the high room and hurried toward the bottom as quickly as she dared, as quietly as she could.

Though the velvety-gray morning light outlined the windows, the lower chamber was treacherously dark. She had no flashlight, only the extra edge of an adrenaline rush. Unable to remember if any rubble was stacked along the wall that might set up a clatter when she knocked it over, she moved slowly along that limestone curve, her back to it, edging sideways again. The antechamber archway was somewhere ahead on her right. When she looked to her left, she could barely see the foot of the stairs down which she had just descended.

Feeling the wall ahead of her with her right hand, she discovered the corner. She stepped through the archway and into the antechamber. Though that space had been blind-dark last night, it was dimly lit now by the pale post-dawn glow that lay beyond the open outside door.

The morning was overcast. Pleasantly cool for August.

The pond was still and gray.

Morning insects issued a thin, almost inaudible background buzz, like faint static on a radio with the volume turned nearly off.

She hurried to the Ford and stealthily opened the door.

Another panic hit her as she thought of the keys. Then she felt them in a pocket of her jeans, where she had slipped them last night after using the bathroom at the farmhouse. One key for the farmhouse, one key for his house in Laguna Niguel, two keys for the car, all on a simple brass-bead chain.

She threw the purse and tablet into the back seat and got behind the wheel, but didn't close the door for fear the sound would wake him. She was not home free yet. He might burst out of the windmill, The Enemy in charge of him, leap across the short expanse of gravel, and drag her from the car.

Her hands shook as she fumbled with the keys. She had trouble inserting the right one in the ignition. But then she got it in, twisted it, put her foot on the accelerator, and almost sobbed with relief when the engine turned over with a roar.

She yanked the door shut, threw the Ford in reverse, and backed along the gravel path that circled the pond. The wheels spun up a hail of gravel, which rattled against the back of the car as she reversed into it.

When she reached the area between the barn and the house, where she could turn around and head out of the driveway front-first, she jammed on the brakes instead. She stared at the windmill, which was now on the far side of the water.

She had nowhere to run. Wherever she went, he would find her. He could see the future, at least to some extent, if not as vividly or in as much detail as The Friend had claimed. He could transform drywall into a monstrous living organism, change limestone into a transparent substance filled with whirling light, project a beast of hideous design into her dreams and into the doorway of her motel, track her, find her, trap her. He had drawn her into his mad fantasy and most likely still wanted her to play out her role in it. The Friend in Jim — and Jim himself — might let her go. But the third personality — the murderous part of him, The Enemy — would want her blood. Maybe she would be fortunate, and maybe the two benign thirds of him would prevent the other third from taking control and coming after her. But she doubted it. Besides, she could not spend the rest of her life waiting for a wall to bulge outward unexpectedly, form into a mouth, and bite her hand off.

And there was one other problem.

She could not abandon him. He needed her.