Cold Fire

1

Holly sat in the Ford, staring at the old windmill, scared and exhilarated. The exhilaration surprised her. Maybe she felt upbeat because for the first time in her life she had found something to which she was willing to commit herself. Not a casual commitment, either. Not an until-I-get-bored commitment. She was willing to put her life on the line for this, for Jim and what he could become if he could be healed, for what they could become together.

Even if he had told her she could go, and even if she had felt that his release of her was sincere, she would not have abandoned him. He was her salvation. And she was his.

The mill stood sentinel against the ashen sky. Jim had not appeared at the door. Perhaps he had not yet awakened.

There were still many mysteries within this mystery, but so much was painfully obvious now. He sometimes failed to save people — like Susie Jawolski's father — because he was not really operating on behalf of an infallible god or a prescient alien; he was acting on his own phenomenal but imperfect visions; he was just a man, special but only a man, and even the best of men had limits. He evidently felt that he had failed his parents somehow. Their deaths weighed heavily on his conscience, and he was trying to redeem himself by saving the lives of others: HE LOOKED LIKE MY FATHER, WHOM I FAILED TO SAVE.

It was now obvious, as well, why The Enemy broke through only when Jim was asleep: he was terrified of that dark aspect of himself, that embodiment of his rage, and he strenuously repressed it when he was awake. At his place in Laguna, The Enemy had materialized in the bedroom while Jim was sleeping and actually had been sustained for a while after Jim had awakened, but when it had crashed through the bathroom ceiling, it had simply evaporated like the lingering dream it was. Dreams are doorways, The Friend had warned, which had been a warning from Jim himself. Dreams were doorways, yes, but not for evil, mind-invading alien monsters; dreams were doorways to the subconscious, and what came out of them was all too human.

She had other pieces of the puzzle, too. She just didn't know how they fit together.

Holly was angry with herself for not having asked the correct questions on Monday, when Jim had finally opened his patio door and let her into his life. He'd insisted that he was only an instrument, that he had no powers of his own. She'd bought it too quickly. She should have probed harder, asked tougher questions. She was as guilty of amateurish interviewing technique as Jim had been when The Friend had first appeared to them.

She had been annoyed by his willingness to accept what The Friend said at face value. Now she understood that he had created The Friend for the same reason that other victims of multiple-personality syndrome generated splinter personalities: to cope in a world that confused and frightened them. Alone and afraid at the age of ten, he had taken refuge in fantasy. He created The Friend, a magical being, as a source of solace and hope. When Holly pressed The Friend to explain itself logically, Jim resisted her because her probing threatened a fantasy which he desperately needed to sustain himself.

For similar reasons of her own, she had not questioned him as toughly as she should have on Monday evening. He was her sustaining dream. He had come into her life like a heroic figure in a dream, saving Billy Jenkins with dream-like grace and panache. Until she had seen him, she had not realized how much she needed someone like him. And instead of probing deeply at him as any good reporter would have done, she had let him be what he wanted to pretend to be, for she had been reluctant to lose him.

Now their only hope was to press hard for the whole truth. He could not be healed until they understood why this particular and bizarre fantasy of his had evolved and how in the name of God he had developed the superhuman powers to support it.

She sat with her hands on the steering wheel, prepared to act but with no idea what to do. There seemed to be no one to whom she could turn for help. She needed answers that were to be found only in the past or in Jim's subconscious mind, two terrains that at the moment were equally inaccessible.

Then, hit by a thunderbolt of insight, she realized Jim already had given her a set of keys to unlock his remaining mysteries. When they had driven into New Svenborg, he had taken her on a tour of the town which, at the time, seemed like a tactic to delay their arrival at the farm. But she realized now that the tour had contained the most important revelations he had made to her. Each nostalgic landmark was a key to the past and to the remaining mysteries that, once unlocked, would make it possible for her to help him.

He wanted help. A part of him understood that he was sick, trapped in a schizophrenic fantasy, and he wanted out. She just hoped that he would suppress The Enemy until they had time to learn what they needed to know. That darkest splinter of his mind did not want her to succeed; her success would be its death, and to save itself, it would destroy her if it got the chance.

If she and Jim were to have a life together, or any life at all, their future lay in the past, and the past lay in New Svenborg.

She swung the wheel hard right, began to turn around to head out of the driveway to the county road — then stopped. She looked at the windmill again.

Jim had to be part of his own cure. She could not track down the truth and make him believe it. He had to see it himself.

She loved him.

She was afraid of him.

She couldn't do anything about the love; that was just part of her now, like blood or bone or sinew. But almost any fear could be overcome by confronting the cause of it.

Wondering at her own courage, she drove back along the graveled path to the foot of the windmill. She pumped three long blasts from the horn, then three more, waited a few seconds and hit it again, again.

Jim appeared in the doorway. He came out into the gray morning light, squinting at her.

Holly opened her door and stepped out of the car. “You awake?”

“Do I look like I'm sleepwalking?” he asked as he approached her. “What's going on?”

“I want to be damn sure you're awake, fully awake.”

He stopped a few feet away. “Why don't we open the hood, I'll put my head under it, then you can let out maybe a two-minute blast, just to be sure. Holly, what's going on?”

“We have to talk. Get in.”

Frowning, he went around to the passenger's side and got into the Ford with her.

When he settled into the passenger's seat, he said, “This isn't going to be pleasant, is it?”

“No. Not especially.”

In front of them, the sails of the windmill stuttered. They began to turn slowly, with much clattering and creaking, shedding chunks and splinters of rotten vanes.

“Stop it,” she said to Jim, afraid that the turning sails were only a prelude to a manifestation of The Enemy. “I know you don't want to hear what I have to say, but don't try to distract me, don't try to stop me.”

He did not respond. He stared with fascination at the mill, as if he had not heard her.

The speed of the sails increased.

“Jim, damn it!”

At last he looked at her, genuinely baffled by the anger underlying her fear. “What?”

Around, around, around-around-around, around-aroundaround. It turned like a haunted Ferris wheel in a carnival of the damned.

“Shit!” she said, her fear accelerating with the pace of the windmill sails. She put the car in reverse, looked over her shoulder, and backed at high speed around the pond.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Not far.”

Since the windmill lay at the center of Jim's delusion, Holly thought it was a good idea to put it out of sight while they talked. She swung the car around, drove to the end of the driveway, and parked facing out toward the county road.

She cranked down her window, and he followed suit.

Switching off the engine, she turned more directly toward him. In spite of everything she now knew — or suspected — about him, she wanted to touch his face, smooth his hair, hold him. He elicited a mothering urge from her of which she hadn't even known she'd been capable — just as he engendered in her an erotic response and passion that were beyond anything she had experienced before.

Yeah, she thought, and evidently he engenders in you a suicidal tendency. Jesus, Thorne, the guy as much as said he'll kill you!

But he also had said he loved her.

Why wasn't anything easy?

She said, “Before I get into it… I want you to understand that I love you, Jim.” It was the dumbest line in the world. It sounded so insincere. Words were inadequate to describe the real thing, partly because the feeling ran deeper than she had ever imagined it would, and partly because it was not a single emotion but was mixed up with other things like anxiety and hope. She said it again anyway: “I really do love you.”

He reached for her hand, smiling at her with obvious pleasure. “You're wonderful, Holly.”

Which was not exactly I-love-you-too-Holly, but that was okay. She didn't harbor romance-novel expectations. It was not going to be that simple. Being in love with Jim Ironheart was like being in love simultaneously with the tortured Max de Winter from Rebecca, Superman, and Jack Nicholson in any role he'd ever played. Though it wasn't easy, it wasn't dull either.

“The thing is, when I was paying my motel bill yesterday morning and you were sitting in the car watching me, I realized you hadn't said you loved me. I was going off with you, putting myself in your hands, and you hadn't said the words. But then I realized I hadn't said them either, I was playing it just as cool, holding back and protecting myself. Well, I'm not holding back any more, I'm walking out on that highwire with no net below — and largely because you told me you loved me last night. So you better have meant it.”

A quizzical expression overtook him.

She said, “I know you don't remember saying it, but you did. You have problems with the 'L' word. Maybe because you lost your folks when you were so young, you're afraid to get close to anyone for fear of losing them, too. Instant analysis. Holly Freud. Anyway, you did tell me you loved me, and I'll prove it in a little while, but right now, before I get into this mess, I want you to know I never imagined I could feel about anyone the way I feel about you. So if whatever I say to you in the next few minutes is hard to take, even impossible to take, just know where it comes from, only from love, from nothing else.”

He stared at her. “Yeah, all right. But Holly, this—”

“You'll get your turn.” She leaned across the seat, kissed him, then pulled back. “Right now, you've got to listen.”

She told him everything she had theorized, why she had crept out of the mill while he'd been asleep — and why she had returned. He listened with growing disbelief, and she repeatedly cut off his protests by lightly squeezing his hand, putting a hand to his lips, or giving him a quick kiss. The answer-tablet, which she produced from the back seat, stunned him and rendered his objections less vehement.

BECAUSE HE LOOKS LIKE MY FATHER WHOM I FAILED TO SAVE. His hands shook as he held the tablet and stared at that incredible line. He turned back to the other surprising messages, repeated page after page — HE LOVES YOU HOLLY/HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY — and the tremors in his hands became even more severe.

“I would never harm you,” he said shakily, staring down at the tablet. “Never.”'

“I know you'd never want to.”

Dr. Jekyll had never wanted to be the murderous Mr. Hyde.

“But you think I sent you this, not The Friend.”

“I know you did, Jim. It feels right.”

“So if The Friend sent it but the The Friend is me, a part of me, then you believe it really says 'I love you Holly.' ”

“Yes,” she said softly.

He looked up from the tablet, met her eyes. “If you believe the I-love-you part, why don't you believe the I-will-kill-you part?”

“Well, that's the thing. I do believe a small, dark part of you wants to kill me, yes.”

He flinched as if she had struck him.

She said, “The Enemy wants me dead, it wants me dead real bad, because I've made you face up to what's behind these recent events, brought you back here, forced you to confront the source of your fantasy.”

He started to shake his head in denial.

But she went on: “Which is what you wanted me to do. It's why you drew me to you in the first place.”

“No. I didn't—”

“Yes, you did.” Pushing him toward enlightenment was extremely dangerous. But that was her only hope of saving him. “Jim, if you can just understand what's happened, accept the existence of two other personalities, even the possibility of their existence, maybe that'll be the beginning of the end of The Friend and The Enemy.”

Still shaking his head, he said, “The Enemy won't go peacefully,” and immediately blinked in surprise at the words he had spoken and the implication that they conveyed.

“Damn,” Holly said, and a thrill coursed through her, not merely because he had just confirmed her entire theory, whether he could admit it or not, but because the five words he had spoken were proof that he wanted out of the Byzantine fantasy in which he had taken refuge.

He was as pale as a man who had just been told that a cancer was growing in him. In fact a malignancy did reside within him, but it was mental rather than physical.

A breeze wafted through the open car windows, and it seemed to wash new hope into Holly.

That buoyant feeling was short-lived, however, because new words suddenly appeared on the tablet in Jim's hands: YOU DIE.

“This isn't me,” he told her earnestly, in spite of the subtle admission he had made a moment ago. “Holly, this can't be me.”

On the tablet, more words appeared: I AM COMING. YOU DIE.

Holly felt as if the world had become a carnival fun-house, full of ghouls and ghosts. Every turn, any moment, without warning, something might spring at her from out of a shadow — or from broad daylight, for that matter. But unlike a carnival monster, this one would inflict real pain, draw blood, kill her if it could.

In hopes that The Enemy, like The Friend, would respond well to firmness, Holly grabbed the tablet from Jim's hand and threw it out the window. “To hell with that. I won't read that crap. Listen to me, Jim. If I'm right, The Enemy is the embodiment of your rage over the deaths of your parents. Your fury was so great, at ten, it terrified you, so you pushed it outside yourself, into this other identity. But you're a unique victim of multiple-personality syndrome because your power allows you to create physical existences for your other identities.”

Though acceptance had a toehold in him, he was still struggling to deny the truth. "What're we saying here? That I'm insane, that I'm some sort of socially functional lunatic, for Christ's sake?"

“Not insane,” she said quickly. “Let's say disturbed, troubled. You're locked in a psychological box that you built for yourself, and you want out, but you can't find the key to the lock.”

He shook his head. Fine beads of sweat had broken out along his hairline, and he was into whiter shades of pale. “No, that's putting too good a face on it. If what you think is true, then I'm all the way off the deep end, Holly, I should be in some damned rubber room, pumped full of Thorazine.”

She took both of his hands again, held them tight. “No. Stop that. You can find your way out of this, you can do it, you can make yourself whole again, I know you can.”

“How can you know? Jesus, Holly, I—”

“Because you're not an ordinary man, you're special,” she said sharply. “You have this power, this incredible force inside you, and you can do such good with it if you want. The power is something you can draw on that ordinary people don't have, it can be a healing power. Don't you see? If you can cause ringing bells and alien heartbeats and voices to come out of thin air, if you can turn walls into flesh, project images into my dreams, see into the future to save lives, then you can make yourself whole and right again.”

Determined disbelief lined his face. “How could any man have the power you're talking about?”

“I don't know, but you've got it.”

“It has to come from a higher being. For God's sake, I'm not Superman.”

Holly pounded a fist against the horn ring and said, “You're telepathic, telekinetic, tele-fucking-everything! All right, you can't fly, you don't have X-ray vision, you can't bend steel with your bare hands, and you can't race faster than a speeding bullet. But you're as close to Superman as any man's likely to get. In fact, in some ways you've got him beat because you can see into the future. Maybe you see only bits and pieces of it, and only random visions when you aren't trying for them, but you can see the future.”

He was shaken by her conviction. “So where'd I get all this magic?”

“I don't know.”

“That's where it falls apart.”

“It doesn't fall apart just because I don't know,” she said frustratedly. “Yellow doesn't stop being yellow just because I don't know anything about why the eye sees different colors. You have the power. You are the power, not God or some alien under the millpond.”

He pulled his hands from hers and looked out the windshield toward the county road and the dry fields beyond. He seemed afraid to face up to the tremendous power he possessed — maybe because it carried with it responsibilities that he was not sure he could shoulder.

She sensed that he was also shamed by the prospect of his own mental illness, and unable to meet her eyes any longer. He was so stoic, so strong, so proud of his strength that he could not accept this suggested weakness in himself. He had built a life that placed a high value on self-control and self-reliance, that made a singular virtue out of self-imposed solitude, in the manner of a monk who needed no one but himself and God. Now she was telling him that his decision to become an iron man and a loner was not a well-considered choice, that it was a desperate attempt to deal with emotional turmoil that had threatened to destroy him, and that his need for self-control had carried him over the line of rational behavior.

She thought of the words on the tablet: I AM COMING. YOU DIE.

She switched on the engine.

He said, “Where are we going?”

As she put the car in gear, pulled out onto the county road, and turned right toward New Svenborg, she did not answer him. Instead, “Was there anything special about you as a boy?”

“No,” he said a little too quickly, too sharply.

“Never any indication that you were gifted or—”

“No, hell, nothing like that.”

Jim's sudden nervous agitation, betrayed by his restless movement and his trembling hands, convinced Holly that she had touched on a truth. He had been special in some way, a gifted child. Now that she had reminded him of it, he saw in that early gift the seeds of the powers that had grown in him. But he didn't want to face it. Denial was his shield.

“What have you just remembered?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Jim.”

“Nothing, really.”

She didn't know where to go with that line of questioning, so she could only say, “It's true. You're gifted. No aliens, only you.”

Because of whatever he had just remembered and was not willing to share with her, his adamancy had begun to dissolve. “I don't know.”

“It's true.”

“Maybe.”

“It's true. Remember last night when The Friend told us it was a child by the standards of its species? Well, that's because it is a child, a perpetual child, forever the age at which you created it — ten years old. Which explains its childlike behavior, its need to brag, its poutiness. Jim, The Friend didn't behave like a ten-thousand-year-old alien child, it just behaved like a ten-year-old human being.”

He closed his eyes and leaned back, as if it was exhausting to consider what she was telling him. But his inner tension remained at a peak, revealed by his hands, which were fisted in his lap.

“Where are we going, Holly?”

“For a little ride.” As they passed through the golden fields and hills, she kept up a gentle attack: “That's why the manifestation of The Enemy is like a combination of every movie monster that ever frightened a ten-year-old boy. The thing I caught a glimpse of in my motel-room doorway wasn't a real creature, I see that now. It didn't have a biological structure that made sense, it wasn't even alien. It was too familiar, a ten-year-old boy's hodgepodge of boogeymen.” He did not respond. She glanced at him. “Jim?” His eyes were still closed. Her heart began to pound. “Jim!” At the note of alarm in her voice, he sat up straighter and opened his eyes. “What?”

“For God's sake, don't close your eyes that long. You might've been asleep, and I wouldn't have realized it until—”

“You think I can sleep with this on my mind?”

“I don't know. I don't want to take the chance. Keep your eyes open, okay? You obviously suppress The Enemy when you're awake, it only comes through all the way when you're asleep.”

In the windshield glass, like a computer readout in a fighter-plane cockpit, words began to appear from left to right, in letters about one inch high: DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD.

Scared but unwilling to show it, she said, “To hell with that,” and switched on the windshield wipers, as if the threat was dirt that could be scrubbed away. But the words remained, and Jim stared at them with evident dread.

As they passed a small ranch, the scent of new-mown hay entered with the wind through the windows. “Where are we going?” he asked again.

“Exploring.”

“Exploring what?”

“The past.”

Distressed, he said, “I haven't bought this scenario yet. I can't. How the hell can I? And how can we ever prove it's true or isn't?”

“We go to town,” she said. “We take that tour again, the one you took me on yesterday. Svenborg — port of mystery and romance. What a dump. But it's got something. You wanted me to see those places, your subconscious was telling me answers can be found in Svenborg. So let's go find them together.”

New words appeared under the first six: DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD DEAD.

Holly knew that time was running out. The Enemy wanted through, wanted to gut her, dismember her, leave her in a steaming heap of her own entrails before she had a chance to convince Jim of her theory — and it did not want to wait until Jim was asleep. She was not certain that he could repress that dark aspect of himself as she pushed him closer to a confrontation with the truth. His self-control might crack, and his benign personalities might sink under the rising dark force.

“Holly, if I had this bizarre multiple personality, wouldn't I be cured as soon as you explained it to me, wouldn't the scales immediately fall off my eyes?”

“No. You have to believe it before you can hope to deal with it. Believing that you suffer an abnormal mental condition is the first step toward an understanding of it, and understanding is only the first painful step toward a cure.”

“Don't talk at me like a psychiatrist, you're no psychiatrist.”

He was taking refuge in anger, in that arctic glare, trying to intimidate her as he had tried on previous occasions when he'd not wanted her to get any closer. Hadn't worked then, wouldn't work now. Sometimes men could be so dense.

She said, “I interviewed a psychiatrist once.”

“Oh, terrific, that makes you a qualified therapist.”

“Maybe it does. The psychiatrist I interviewed was crazy as a loon himself, so what does a university degree matter?”

He took a deep breath and let it out with a shudder. “Okay, suppose you're right and somehow we do turn up undeniable proof that I'm crazy as a loon—”

“You aren't crazy, you're—”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm disturbed, troubled, in a psychological box. Call it whatever you want. If we find proof somehow — and I can't imagine how — then what happens to me? Maybe I just smile and say, 'Oh, yes, of course, I made it all up, I was living in a delusion, I'm ever so much better now, let's have lunch.' But I don't think so. I think what happens is … I blow apart, into a million pieces.”

“I can't promise you that the truth, if we find it, will be any sort of salvation, because so far I think you've found your salvation in fantasy not in truth. But we can't go on like this because The Enemy resents me, and sooner or later it'll kill me. You warned me yourself.”

He looked at the words on the windshield, and said nothing. He was running out of arguments, if not resistance.

The words quickly faded, then vanished.

Maybe that was a good sign, an indication of his subconscious accommodation to her theory. Or maybe The Enemy had decided that she could not be intimidated with threats — and was struggling to burst through and savage her.

She said, “When it's killed me, you'll realize it is part of you. And if you love me, like you told me you did through The Friend last night, then what's that going to do to you? Isn't that going to destroy the Jim I love? Isn't that going to leave you with just one personality — the dark one, The Enemy? I think it's a damned good bet. So we're talking your survival here as well as mine. If you want to have a future, then let's dig to the bottom of this.”

“Maybe we dig and dig — but there is no bottom. Then what?”

“Then we dig a little deeper.”

As they were entering town, making the abrupt transition from dead-brown land to tightly grouped pioneer settlement, Holly suddenly said aloud: “Robert Vaughn.”

Jim twitched with surprise, not because she had said something mystifying but because that name made an immediate connection for him.

“My God,” he said, “that was the voice.”

“The voice of The Friend,” she said, glancing at him. “So you realized it was familiar, too.”

Robert Vaughn, the wonderful actor, had been the hero of television's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and exquisitely oily villain of countless films. He possessed one of those voices with such a rich timbre and range that it could be as threatening, or as fatherly and reassuring, as he chose to make it.

“Robert Vaughn,” Holly said. “But why? Why not Orson Welles or Paul Newman or Sean Connery or Fred Flintstone? It's too quirky a choice not to be meaningful.”

“I don't know,” Jim said thoughtfully, but he had the unnerving feeling he should know. The explanation was within his grasp.

Holly said, “Do you still think it's an alien? Wouldn't an alien just manufacture a nondescript voice? Why would it imitate any one particular actor?”

“I saw Robert Vaughn once,” Jim said, surprised by a dim memory stirring within him. “I mean, not on TV or in the movies, but for real, up close. A long time ago.”

“Where, when?”

“I can't … it won't … won't come to me.”

Jim felt as if he were standing on a narrow spine of land between two precipices, with safety to neither side. On the one hand was the life he had been living, filled with torment and despair that he had tried to deny but that had overwhelmed him at times, as when he had taken his spiritual journey on the Harley into the Mojave Desert, looking for a way out even if the way was death. On the other hand lay an uncertain future that Holly was trying to paint in for him, a future that she insisted was one of hope but which looked to him like chaos and madness. And the narrow spine on which he stood was crumbling by the minute.

He remembered an exchange they'd had as they lay side by side in his bed two nights ago, before they had made love for the first time. He'd said, People are always more … complex than you figure.

Is that just an observation … or a warning?

Warning?

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

After a long pause, he had said, Maybe.

And after her own long pause, she had said, I guess I don't care.

He was sure, now, that he had been warning her. A small voice within told him that she was right in her analysis, that the entities at the mill had only been different aspects of him. But if he was a victim of multiple-personality syndrome, he did not believe that his condition could be casually described as a mere mental disturbance or a troubled state of mind, as she had tried to portray it. Madness was the only word that did it justice.

They entered Main Street. The town looked strangely dark and threatening — perhaps because it held the truth that would force him to step off his narrow mental perch into one world of chaos or another.

He remembered reading somewhere that only mad people were dead-certain of their sanity. He was dead-certain of nothing, but he took no comfort from that. Madness was, he suspected, the very essence of uncertainty, a frantic but fruitless search for answers, for solid ground. Sanity was that place of certainty above the whirling chaos.

Holly pulled to the curb in front of Handahl's Pharmacy at the east end of Main Street. “Let's start here.”

“Why?”

“Because it's the first stop we made when you were pointing out places that had meant something to you as a kid.”

He stepped out of the Ford under the canopy of a Wilson magnolia, one of several interspersed with other trees along both sides of the street. That landscaping softened the hard edges but contributed to the unnatural look and discordant feeling of the town.

When Holly pushed open the front door of the Danish-style building, its glass panes glimmered like jewels along their beveled edges, and a bell tinkled overhead. They went inside together.

Jim's heart was hammering. Not because the pharmacy seemed likely to be a place where anything significant had happened to him in his childhood, but because he sensed it was the first stone on a path to the truth.

The cafe and soda fountain were to the left, and through the archway Jim saw a few people at breakfast. Immediately inside the door was the small newsstand, where morning papers were stacked high, mostly the Santa Barbara daily; there were also magazines, and to one side a revolving wire rack filled with paperback books.

“I used to buy paperbacks here,” he said. “I loved books even back then, couldn't get enough of them.”

The pharmacy was through another archway to the right. It resembled any modern American pharmacy in that it stocked more cosmetics, beauty aids, and hair-care products than patent medicines. Otherwise, it was pleasantly quaint: wood shelves instead of metal or fiberboard; polished-granite counters; an appealing aroma composed of bayberry candles, nickel candy, cigar-tobacco effluvium filtering from the humidified case behind the cash register, faint traces of ethyl alcohol, and sundry Pharmaceuticals.

Though the hour was early, the pharmacist was on duty, serving as his own checkout clerk. It was Corbett Handahl himself, a heavy wide-shouldered man with a white mustache and white hair, wearing a crisp blue shirt under his starched white lab jacket.

He looked up and said, “Jim Ironheart, bless my soul. How long's it been — at least three, four years?”

They shook hands.

“Four years and four months,” Jim said. He almost added, since grandpa died, but checked himself without quite knowing why.

Spritzing the granite prescription-service counter with Windex, Corbett wiped it with paper towels. He smiled at Holly. “And whoever you are, I am eternally grateful to you for bringing beauty into this gray morning.”

Corbett was the perfect smalltown pharmacist: just jovial enough to seem like ordinary folks in spite of being placed in the town's upper social class by virtue of his occupation, enough of a tease to be something of a local character, but with an unmistakable air of competence and probity that made you feel the medicines he compounded would always be safe. Townfolk stopped in just to say hello, not only when they needed something, and his genuine interest in people served his commerce. He had been working at the pharmacy for thirty-three years and had been the owner since his father's death twenty-seven years ago.

Handahl was the least threatening of men, yet Jim suddenly felt threatened by him. He wanted to get out of the pharmacy before …

Before what?

Before Handahl said the wrong thing, revealed too much.

But what could he reveal?

“I'm Jim's fiancee,” Holly said, somewhat to Jim's surprise.

“Congratulations, Jim,” Handahl said. “You're a lucky man. Young lady, I just hope you know, the family changed its name from Ironhead, which was more descriptive. Stubborn group.” He winked and laughed.

Holly said, “Jim's taking me around town, showing me favorite places. Sentimental journey, I suppose you'd call it.”

Frowning at Jim, Handahl said, “Didn't think you ever liked this town well enough to feel sentimental about it.”

Jim shrugged. “Attitudes change.”

“Glad to hear it.” Handahl turned to Holly again. “He started coming in here soon after he moved in with his grandfolks, every Tuesday and Friday when new books and magazines arrived from the distributor in Santa Barbara.” He had put aside the Windex. He was arranging counter displays of chewing gum, breath mints, disposable lighters, and pocket combs. “Jim was a real reader then. You still a real reader?”

“Still am,” Jim said with growing uneasiness, terrified of what Handahl might say next. Yet for the life of him, he did not know what the man could say that would matter so much.

“Your tastes were kinda narrow, I remember.” To Holly: “Used to spend his allowance buying most every science fiction or spook-'em paperback that came in the door. Course, in those days, a two-dollar-a-week allowance went pretty far, if you remember that a book was about forty-five or fifty cents.”

Claustrophobia settled over Jim, thick as a heavy shroud. The pharmacy began to seem frighteningly small, crowded with merchandise, and he wanted to get out of there.

It's coming, he thought, with a sudden quickening of anxiety. It's coming.

Handahl said, “I suppose maybe he got his interest in weird fiction from his mom and dad.”

Frowning, Holly said, “How's that?”

“I didn't know Jamie, Jim's dad, all that well, but I was only one year behind him at county high school. No offense, Jim, but your dad had some exotic interests — though the way the world's changed, they probably wouldn't seem as exotic now as back in the early fifties.”

“Exotic interests?” Holly prodded.

Jim looked around the pharmacy, wondering where it would come from, which route of escape might be blocked and which might remain open. He was swinging between tentative acceptance of Holly's theory and rejection of it, and right now, he was sure she had to be wrong. It wasn't a force inside him. It was entirely a separate being, just as The Friend was. It was an evil alien, just as The Friend was good, and it could go anywhere, come out of anything, at any second, and it was coming, he knew it was coming, it wanted to kill them all.

“Well,” Handahl said, “when he was a kid, Jamie used to come in here — it was my dad's store then — and buy those old pulp magazines with robots, monsters, and scanty-clad women on the covers. He used to talk a lot about how we'd put men on the moon someday, and everyone thought he was a little strange for that, but I guess he was right after all. Didn't surprise me when I heard he'd given up being an accountant, found a showbiz wife, and was making his living doing a mentalist act.”

“Mentalist act?” Holly said, glancing at Jim. “I thought your dad was an accountant, your mom was an actress.”

“They were,” he said thinly. “That's what they were — before they put together the act.”

He had almost forgotten about the act, which surprised him. How could he have forgotten the act? He had all the photographs from the tours, so many of them on his walls; he looked at them every day, yet he'd pretty much forgotten that they had been taken during travels between performances.

It was coming very fast now.

Close. It was very close.

He wanted to warn Holly. He couldn't speak.

Something seemed to have stolen his tongue, locked his jaws.

It was coming.

It didn't want him to warn her. It wanted to take her by surprise.

Arranging the last of the counter displays, Handahl said, “It was a tragedy, what happened to them, all right. Jim, when you first came to town to stay with your grandfolks, you were so withdrawn, nobody could get two words out of you.”

Holly was watching Jim rather than Handahl. She seemed to sense that he was in grave distress.

“Second year, after Lena died,” Handahl said, “Jim pretty much clammed up altogether, totally mute, like he was never going to talk another word as long as he lived. You remember that, Jim?”

In astonishment, Holly turned to Jim and said, “Your grandmother died the second year you were here, when you were only eleven?”

I told her five years ago, Jim thought. Why did I tell her five years ago when the truth is twenty-four?

It was coming.

He sensed it.

Coming.

The Enemy.

He said, “Excuse me, gotta get some fresh air.” He hurried outside and stood by the car, gasping for breath.

Looking back, he discovered that Holly had not followed him. He could see her through a pharmacy window, talking to Handahl.

It was coming.

Holly, don't talk to him, Jim thought. Don't listen to him, get out of there.

It was coming.

Leaning against the car, he thought: the only reason I fear Corbett Handahl is because he knows more about my life in Svenborg than I remember myself.

Lub-dub-DUB.

It was here.

Handahl stared curiously after Jim.

Holly said, “I think he's never gotten over what happened to his parents … or to Lena.”

Handahl nodded. “Who could get over a horrible thing like that? He was such a nice little kid, it broke your heart.” Before Holly could ask anything more about Lena, Handahl said, “Are you two moving into the farmhouse?”

“No. Just staying for a couple of days.”

“None of my business, really, but it's a shame that land isn't being farmed.”

“Well, Jim's not a farmer himself,” she said, “and with nobody willing to buy the place—”

“Nobody willing to buy it? Why, young lady, they'd stand twenty deep to buy it if Jim would put it on the market.”

She blinked at him.

He went on: “You have a real good artesian well on that property, which means you always have water in a county that's usually short of it.” He leaned against the granite counter and folded his arms across his chest. “The way it works — when that big old pond is full up, the weight of all that water puts pressure on the natural wellhead and slows the inflow of new water. But you start pumping it out of there to irrigate crops, and the flow picks up, and the pond is pretty much always full, like the magic pitcher in that old fairytale.” He tilted his head and squinted at her. “Jim tell you he couldn't sell it?”

“Well, I assumed—”

“Tell you what,” Handahl said, “maybe that man of yours is more sentimental than I'd thought. Maybe he doesn't want to sell the farm because it has too many memories for him.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But there're bad as well as good memories out there.”

“You're right about that.”

“Like his grandmother dying,” she noodged, trying to get him back on that subject. “That was—”

A rattling sound interrupted her. She turned and saw bottles of shampoo, hairspray, vitamins, and cold medicines jiggling on their shelves.

“Earthquake,” Handahl said, looking up worriedly at the ceiling, as if he thought it might tumble in on them.

The containers rattled more violently than ever, and Holly knew they were disturbed by something worse than an earthquake. She was being warned not to ask Handahl any more questions.

Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB.

The cozy world of the quaint pharmacy started coming apart. The bottles exploded off the shelves, straight at her. She swung away, drew her arms over her head. The containers hammered her, flew past her and pelted Handahl. The humidor, which stood behind the counter, was vibrating. Instinctively Holly dropped to the floor. Even as she went down, the glass door of that case blew outward. Glass shrapnel cut the air where she had been standing. She scrambled toward the exit as glittering shards rained to the floor. Behind her the heavy cash register crashed off the granite counter, missing her by inches, barely sparing her a broken spine. Before the walls could begin to blister and pulse and bring forth an alien form, she reached the door, fled through the newsstand, and went into the street, leaving Handahl in what he no doubt assumed was earthquake rubble.

The tripartite beat was throbbing up from the brick walkway beneath her feet.

She found Jim leaning against the car, shuddering and wheyfaced, with the expression of a man standing on a precipice, peering into a gulf — longing to jump. He did not respond to her when she said his name. He seemed on the verge of surrendering to the dark force that he'd held within — and nurtured — all these years and that now wanted its freedom.

She jerked him away from the car, put her arms around him, held him tight, tighter, repeating his name, expecting the sidewalk to erupt in geysers of brick, expecting to be seized by serrated pincers, tentacles, or cold damp hands of inhuman design. But the triple-thud heartbeat faded, and after a while Jim raised his arms and put them around her.

The Enemy had passed.

But it was only a temporary reprieve.

Svenborg Memorial Park was adjacent to Tivoli Gardens. The cemetery was separated from the park by a spearpoint wrought-iron fence and a mix of trees — mostly white cedars and spreading California Peppers.

Jim drove slowly along the service road that looped through the graveyard. “Here.” He pulled to the side and stopped.

When he got out of the Ford, he felt almost as claustrophobic as he had in the pharmacy, even though he was standing in the open air. The slate-dark sky seemed to press down toward the gray granite monuments, while those rectangles and squares and spires strained up like the knobs of ancient time-stained bones half buried in the earth. In that dreary light, the grass looked gray-green. The trees were gray-green, too, and seemed to loom precariously, as if about to topple on him.

Going around the car to Holly's side, he pointed north. “There.”

She took his hand. He was grateful to her for that.

Together they walked to his grandparents' gravesite. It was on a slight rise in the generally flat cemetery. A single rectangular granite marker served both plots.

Jim's heart was beating hard, and he had difficulty swallowing.

Her name was chiseled into the right-hand side of the monument. LENA LOUISE IRONHEART.

Reluctantly he looked at the dates of her birth and death. She had been fifty-three when she died. And she had been dead twenty-four years.

This must be what it felt like to have been brainwashed, to have had one's memory painted over, false memories air-brushed into the blanks. His past seemed like a fogbound landscape revealed only by the eerie and inconstant luminescent face of a cloud-shrouded moon. He suddenly could not see back through the years with the same clarity he had enjoyed an hour ago, and he could not trust the reality of what he still did see; clear recollections might prove to be nothing more than tricks of fog and shadow when he was forced to confront them closely.

Disoriented and afraid, he held fast to Holly's hand.

“Why did you lie to me about this, why did you say five years?” she asked gently.

“I didn't lie. At least… I didn't realize I was lying.” He stared at the granite as if its polished surface was a window into the past, and he struggled to remember. “I can recall waking up one morning and knowing that my grandmother was dead. Five years ago. I was living in the apartment then, down in Irvine.” He listened to his own voice as if it belonged to someone else, and the haunted tone of it gave him a chill. “I dressed … drove north … bought flowers in town … then came here….”

After a while, when he did not continue, Holly said, “Do you remember a funeral that day?”

“No.”

“Other mourners?”

“No.”

“Other flowers on the grave?”

“No. All I remember is … kneeling at the headstone with the flowers I'd brought for her … crying … I cried for a long time, couldn't stop crying.”

Passing him on the way to other graves, people had looked at him with sympathy, then with embarrassment as they had realized the extent of his emotional collapse, then with uneasiness as they had seen a grief in him so wild that it made him seem unbalanced. He could even now remember how wild he had felt that day, glaring back at those who stared at him, wanting nothing more than to claw his way down into the earth and pull it over him as if it were a blanket, taking rest in the same hole as his grandmother. But he could not remember why he had felt that way or why he was beginning to feel that way again.

He looked at the date of her death once more — September 25—and he was too frightened now to cry.

“What is it? Tell me,” Holly urged.

“That's when I came with the flowers, the only other time I've ever come, the day I remember as the day she died. September twenty-fifth … but five years ago, not twenty-four. It was the nineteenth anniversary of her death … but at the time it seemed to me, and always has, that she'd only just then died.”

They were both silent.

Two large blackbirds wheeled across the somber sky, shrieking, and disappeared over the treetops.

Finally Holly said, “Could it be, you denied her death, refused to accept it when it really happened, twenty-four years ago? Maybe you were only able to accept it nineteen years later … the day you came here with the flowers. That's why you remember her dying so much more recently than she did. You date her death from the day you finally accepted it.”

He knew at once that she had hit upon the truth, but the answer did not make him feel better. “But Holly, my God, that is madness.”

“No,” she said calmly. “It's self-defense, part of the same defenses you erected to hide so much of that year when you were ten.” She paused, took a deep breath, and said, “Jim, how did your grandma die?”

“She …” He was surprised to realize that he could not recall the cause of Lena Ironheart's death. One more fog-filled blank. “I don't know.”

“I think she died in the mill.”

He looked away from the tombstone, at Holly. He tensed with alarm, although he did not know why. “In the windmill? How? What happened? How can you know?”

“The dream I told you about. Climbing the mill stairs, looking through the window at the pond below, and seeing another woman's face reflected in the glass, your grandmother's face.”

“It was only a dream.”

Holly shook her head. “No, I think it was a memory, your memory, which you projected from your sleep into mine.”

His heart fluttered with panic for reasons he could not quite discern. “How can it have been my memory if I don't have it now?”

“You have it.”

He frowned. “No. Nothing like that.”

“It's locked down in your subconscious, where you can access it only when you're dreaming, but it's there, all right.”

If she had told him that the entire cemetery was mounted on a carousel, and that they were slowly spinning around under the bleak gun-metal sky, he would have accepted what she said more easily than he could accept the memory toward which she was leading him. He felt as if he were spinning through light and darkness, light and darkness, fear and rage….

With great effort, he said, “But in your dream … I was in the high room when grandma got there.”

“Yes.”

“And if she died there …”

“You witnessed her death.”

He shooked his head adamantly. “No. My God, I'd remember that, don't you think?”

“No. I think that's why you needed nineteen years even to admit to yourself that she died. I think you saw her die, and it was such a shock that it threw you into long-term amnesia, which you overlaid with fantasies, always more fantasies.”

A breeze stirred, and something crackled around his feet. He was sure it was the bony hands of his grandmother clawing out of the earth to seize him, but when he looked down he saw only withered leaves rattling against one another as they blew across the grass.

With each heartbeat now like a fist slamming into a punching bag, Jim turned away from the grave, eager to get back to the car.

Holly put a hand on his arm. “Wait.”

He tore loose of her, almost shoved her away. He glared at her and said, “I want to get out of here.”

Undeterred, she grabbed and halted him again. “Jim, where is your grandfather? Where is he buried?”

Jim pointed to the plot beside his grandmother's. “He's there, of course, with her.”

Then he saw the left half of the granite monument. He had been so intently focused on the right half, on the impossible date of his grandmother's death, that he had not noticed what was missing from the left side. His grandfather's name was there, as it should be, engraved at the same time that Lena's had been: HENRY JAMES IRONHEART. And the date of his birth. But that was all. The date of his death had never been chiseled into the stone.

The iron sky was pressing lower.

The trees seemed to be leaning closer, arching over him.

Holly said, “Didn't you say he died eight months after Lena?”

His mouth was dry. He could hardly work up enough spit to speak, and the words came out in dry whispers like susurrant bursts of sand blown against desert stone. “What the hell do you want from me? I told you … eight months … May twenty-fourth of the next year….”

“How did he die?”

“I … I don't … I don't remember.”

“Illness?”

Shut up, shut up!

“I don't know.”

“An accident?”

“I… just… I think … I think it was a stroke.” Large parts of the past were mists within a mist. He realized now that he rarely thought about the past. He lived totally in the present. He had never realized there were huge holes in his memories simply because there were so many things he had never before tried to remember.

“Weren't you your grandfather's nearest relative?” Holly asked.

“Yes.”

“Didn't you attend to the details of his funeral?”

He hesitated, frowning. “I think … yes …”

“Then did you just forget to have the date of his death added to the headstone?”

He stared at the blank spot in the granite, frantically searching an equally blank spot in his memory, unable to answer her. He felt sick. He wanted to curl up and close his eyes and sleep and never wake up, let something else wake up in his place….

She said, “Or did you bury him somewhere else?” Across the ashes of the burnt-out sky, the shrieking blackbirds swooped again, slashing calligraphic messages with their wings, their meaning no more decipherable than the elusive memories darting through the deeper grayness of Jim's mind.

Holly drove them around the corner to Tivoli Gardens.

When they had left the pharmacy, Jim had wanted to drive to the cemetery, worried about what he would find there but at the same time eager to confront his misremembered past and wrench his recollections into line with the truth. The experience at the gravesite had shaken him, however, and now he was no longer in a rush to find out what additional surprises awaited him. He was content to let Holly drive, and she suspected that he would be happier if she just drove out of town, turned south, and never spoke to him of New Svenborg again.

The park was too small to have a service road. They left the car at the street and walked in.

Holly decided that Tivoli Gardens was even less inviting close up than it had been when glimpsed from a moving car yesterday. The dreary impression it made could not be blamed solely on the overcast sky. The grass was half parched from weeks of summer sun, which could be quite intense in any central California valley. Leggy runners had sprouted unchecked from the rose bushes; the few remaining blooms were faded and dropping petals in the thorny sprawl. The other flowers looked wilted, and the two benches needed painting.

Only the windmill was well maintained. It was a bigger, more imposing mill than the one at the farm, twenty feet higher, with an encircling deck about a third of the way up.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

“Don't ask me. You're the one who wanted to come.”

“Don't be thick, babe,” she said.

She knew that pushing him was like kicking a package of unstable dynamite, but she had no choice. He was going to blow anyway, sooner or later. Her only hope of survival was to force him to acknowledge that he was The Enemy before that personality seized control of him permanently. She sensed that she was running out of time.

She said, “You're the one who put it on the itinerary yesterday. You said they'd made a movie here once.” She was jolted by what she had just said. “Wait a sec — is this where you saw Robert Vaughn? Was he in the movie they made here?”

With a bewildered expression that slowly gave way to a frown, Jim turned in place, surveying the small park. At last he headed toward the windmill, and she followed him.

Two historical-marker lecterns flanked the flagstone path in front of the mill door. They were all-weather stone stands. The reading material on the slanted tops was protected behind sheets of Plexiglas in watertight frames. The lectern on the left, to which they stepped first, provided background information about the use of windmills for grain milling, water pumping, and electricity production in the Santa Ynez Valley from the 1800s until well into the twentieth century, followed by a history of the preserved mill in front of them, which was called, rather aptly, the New Svenborg Mill.

That material was as dull as dirt, and Holly turned to the second lectern only because she still had some of the doggedness and appetite for facts that had made her a passable journalist. Her interest was instantly piqued by the title at the top of the second plaque — THE BLACK WINDMILL: BOOK AND MOVIE.

“Jim, look at this.”

He joined her by the second marker.

There was a photograph of the jacket of a young-adult novel—The Black Windmill by Arthur J. Willott, and the illustration on it was obviously based on the New Svenborg Mill. Holly read the lectern text with growing astonishment. Willott, a resident of the Santa Ynez Valley — Solvang, not Svenborg — had been a successful author of novels for young adults, turning out fifty-two titles before his death in 1982, at the age of eighty. His most popular and enduring book, by far, had been a fantasy-adventure about a haunted old mill and a boy who discovered that the ghosts were actually aliens from another world and that under the millpond was a spaceship which had been there for ten thousand years.

“No,” Jim said softly but with some anger, “no, this makes no sense, this can't be right.”

Holly recalled a moment from the dream in which she had been in Lena Ironheart's body, climbing the mill stairs. When she had reached the top, she had found ten-year-old Jim standing with his hands fisted at his sides, and he had turned to her and said, “I'm scared, help me, the walls, the walls!” At his feet had been a yellow candle in a blue dish. Until now she'd forgotten that beside the dish lay a hardcover book in a colorful dustjacket. It was the same dust-jacket reproduced on the lectern: The Black Windmill.

“No,” Jim said again, and he turned away from the plaque. He stared around worriedly at the breeze-ruffled trees.

Holly read on and discovered that twenty-five years ago, the very year that ten-year-old Jim Ironheart had come to town, The Black Windmill had been made into a motion picture. The New Svenborg Mill had served as the primary location. The motion-picture company had created a shallow but convincing millpond around it, then paid to restore the land after filming and to establish the current pocket park.

Still turning slowly around, frowning at the trees and shrubs, at the gloom beneath them that the overcast day could not dispel, Jim said, “Something's coming.”

Holly could see nothing coming, and she believed that he was just trying to distract her from the plaque. He did not want to accept the implications of the information on it, so he was trying to make her turn away from it with him.

The movie must have been a dog, because Holly had never heard of it. It appeared to have been the kind of production that was big news nowhere but in New Svenborg and, even there, only because it was based on a book by a valley resident. On the historical marker, the last paragraph of copy listed, among other details of the production, the names of the five most important members of the cast. No big box-office draws had appeared in the flick. Of the first four names, she recognized only M. Emmet Walsh, who was a personal favorite of hers. The fifth cast member was a young and then-unknown Robert Vaughn.

She looked up at the looming mill.

“What is happening here?” she said aloud. She lifted her gaze to the dismal sky, then lowered it to the photo of the dustjacket for Willott's book. “What the hell is happening here?”

In a voice quaking with fear but also with an eerie note of desire, Jim said, “It's coming!”

She looked where he was staring, and saw a disturbance in the earth at the far end of the small park, as if something was burrowing toward them, pushing up a yard-wide hump of dirt and sod to mark its tunnel, moving fast, straight at them.

She whirled on Jim, grabbed him. “Stop it!”

“It's coming,” he said, wide-eyed.

“Jim, it's you, it's only you.”

“No … not me … The Enemy.” He sounded half in a trance.

Holly glanced back and saw the thing passing under the concrete walkway, which cracked and heaved up in its wake.

“Jim, damn it!”

He was staring at the approaching killer with horror but also with, she thought, a sort of longing.

One of the park benches was knocked over as the earth bulged then sank under it.

The Enemy was only forty feet from them, coming fast.

She grabbed Jim by the shirt, shook him, tried to make him look at her. “I saw this movie when I was a kid. What was it called, huh? Wasn't it Invaders from Mars, something like that, where the aliens open doors in the sand and suck you down?”

She glanced back. It was thirty feet from them.

“Is that what's going to kill us, Jim? Something that opens a door in the sand, sucks us down, something from a movie to give ten-year-old boys nightmares?”

Twenty feet away.

Jim was sweating, shuddering. He seemed to be beyond hearing anything Holly said.

She shouted in his face anyway: “Are you going to kill me and yourself, suicide like Larry Kakonis, just stop being strong and put an end to it, let one of your own nightmares pull you in the ground?”

Ten feet.

Eight.

“Jim!”

Six.

Four.

Hearing a monstrous grinding of jaws in the ground under them, she raised her foot, rammed the heel of her shoe down across the front of his shin, as hard as she could, to make him feel it through his sock. Jim cried out in pain as the ground shifted under them, and Holly looked down in horror at the rupturing earth. But the burrowing stopped simultaneously with his sharp cry. The ground didn't open. Nothing erupted from it or sucked them down.

Shaking, Holly stepped back from the ripped sod and cracked earth on which she had been standing.

Jim looked at her, aghast. “It wasn't me. It can't have been.”

Back in the car, Jim slumped in his seat.

Holly folded her arms on the steering wheel, put her forehead on her arms.

He looked out the side window at the park. The giant mole trail was still there. The sidewalk was cracked and tumbled. The bench lay on its side.

He just couldn't believe that the thing beneath the park had been only a figment of his imagination, empowered only by his mind. He had been in control of himself all his life, living a Spartan existence of books and work, with no vices or indulgences. (Except a frighteningly convenient forgetfulness, he thought sourly.) Nothing about Holly's theory was harder for him to accept than that a wild and savage part of him, beyond his conscious control, was the only real danger that they faced.

He was beyond ordinary fear now. He was no longer perspiring or shivering. He was in the grip of a primal terror that left him rigid and Dry-Ice dry.

“It wasn't me,” he repeated.

“Yes, it was.” Considering that she believed he'd almost killed her, Holly was surprisingly gentle with him. She did not raise her voice; it was softened by a note of great tenderness.

He said, “You're still on this split-personality kick.”

“Yes.”

“So it was my dark side.”

“Yes.”

“Embodied in a giant worm or something,” he said, trying to hone a sharp edge on his sarcasm, failing. “But you said The Enemy only broke through when I was sleeping, and I wasn't sleeping, so even if I am The Enemy, how could I have been that thing in the park?”

“New rules. Subconsciously, you're getting desperate. You're not able to control that personality as easily as before. The closer you're forced to the truth, the more aggressive The Enemy's going to become in order to defend itself.”

“If it was me, why wasn't there an alien heartbeat like before?”

“That's always just been a dramatic effect, like the bells ringing before The Friend put in an appearance.” She raised her head from her arms and looked at him. “You dropped it because there wasn't time for it. I was reading that plaque, and you wanted to stop me as fast as you could. You needed a distraction. Let me tell you, babe, it was a lulu.”

He looked out the window again, toward the windmill and the lectern that held the information about The Black Windmill.

Holly put a hand on his shoulder. “You were in a black despair after your parents died. You needed to escape. Evidently a writer named Arthur Willott provided you with a fantasy that fit your needs perfectly. To one extent or another, you've been living in it ever since.”

Though he could not admit it to her, he had to admit to himself that he was groping toward understanding, that he was on the brink of seeing his past from a new perspective that would make all of the mysterious lines and angles fall into a new and comprehensible shape. If selective amnesia, carefully constructed false memories, and even multiple personalities were not indications of madness but only the hooks he had used to hold on to sanity — as Holly insisted — then what would happen to him if he let go of those hooks? If he dug up the truth about his past, faced the things he had refused to face when he had turned to fantasy as a child, would the truth drive him mad this time? What was he hiding from?

“Listen,” she said, “the important thing is that you shut it down before it reached us, before it did any harm.”

“My shin hurts like hell,” he said, wincing.

“Good,” she said brightly. She started the engine.

“Where are we going now?” he asked;

“Where else? The library.”

Holly parked on Copenhagen Lane in front of the small Victorian house that served as the New Svenborg library.

She was pleased that her hands were not shaking, that her voice was level and calm, and that she had been able to drive from Tivoli Gardens without weaving all over the road. After the incident in the park, she was amazed that her pants were still clean. She had been reduced to raw terror — a pure, intense emotion untainted by any other. Diluted now, it was still with her, and she knew it would remain with her until they were out of these spooky old woods — or dead. But she was determined not to reveal the depth of her fear to Jim, because he had to be worse off than she was. After all, it was his life that was turning out to be a collage of flimsy lies. He needed to lean on her.

As she and Jim went up the front walk to the porch (Jim limping), Holly noticed he was studying the lawn around him, as if he thought something might start burrowing toward them.

Better not, she thought, or you'll have two bleeding shins.

But as she went through the front door, she wondered if a jolt of pain would work a second time.

In the paneled foyer, a sign announced NONFICTION SECOND FLOOR. An arrow pointed to a staircase on her right.

The foyer funneled into a first-floor hallway off which lay two large rooms. Both were filled with bookshelves. The chamber on the left also contained reading tables with chairs and a large oak desk.

The woman at the desk was a good advertisement for country living: flawless complexion, lustrous chestnut hair, clear hazel eyes. She looked thirty-five but was probably twelve years older.

The nameplate in front of her said ELOISE GLYNN.

Yesterday, when Holly had wanted to come into the library to see if the much-admired Mrs. Glynn was there, Jim had insisted that she would be retired, that she had been “quite old” twenty-five years ago, when in fact she obviously had been fresh out of college and starting her first job.

By comparison with previous discoveries, this was onlya minor surprise. Jim hadn't wanted Holly to come into the library yesterday, so he'd simply lied. And from the look on his face now, it was clear that Eloise Glynn's youth was no surprise to him either; he had known, yesterday, that he was not telling the truth, though perhaps he had not understood why he was lying.

The librarian did not recognize Jim. Either he had been one of those kids who left little impression or, more likely he had been telling the truth when he'd said he had not been to the library since he'd left for college eighteen years ago.

Eloise Glynn had the bouncy manner and attitude of a girls' sports coach that Holly remembered from high school. “Willott?” she said in answer to Holly's question. “Oh, yes, we've got a truckload of Willott.” She bounced up from her chair. “I can show you right where he's at.” She came around her desk, stepping briskly, and Holly and Jim across the hall to the other large room. “He was local, as I'm sure you know. Died a decade ago, but two-thirds of his books are still in print.” She stopped in front of the young-adult section and made a sweeping gesture with one hand to indicate two three-foot shelves of Willott titles. “He was a productive man, Artie Willott, so busy that beavers hung their heads in shame when he walked by.”

She grinned at Holly, and it was infectious. Holly grinned back at her. “We're looking for The Black Windmill.”

“That's one of his most popular titles, never met a kid didn't love it.” Mrs. Glynn plucked the book off the shelf almost without looking to see where it was, handed it to Holly. “This for your kid?”

“Actually for me. I read about it on the plaque over in Tivoli Gardens.”

“I've read the book,” Jim said. “But she's curious.”

With Jim, Holly returned to the main room and sat at the table farthest from the desk. With the book between them, they read the first two chapters.

She kept touching him — his hand, shoulder, knee — gentling him. Somehow she had to hold him together long enough for him to learn the truth and be healed by it, and the only glue she could think of was love. She had convinced herself that each small expression of love — each touch, smile, affectionate look or word — was a bonding agent that prevented him from shattering completely.

The novel was well and engagingly written. But what it revealed about Jim Ironheart's life was so astonishing that Holly began to skim and spot read, whispering passages to him urgently seeking the next startling revelation.

The lead character was named Jim, not Ironheart but Jamison. Jim Jamison lived on a farm that had a pond and an old windmill. The mill was supposedly haunted, but after witnessing a number of spooky incidents, Jim discovered that an alien presence, not a spirit, was quartered in a spacecraft under the pond and was manifesting itself in The mill. It revealed itself to Jim as a soft light that glowed within the mill walls. Communication between Jim and the alien was achieved with the use of two lined, yellow tablets — one for Jim's questions, and one for the alien's answers, which appeared as if by magic. According to the terrestrial, it was a being of pure energy and was on earth “TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND.” It referred to itself as THE FRIEND.

Marking her place with a finger, Holly flipped through the rest of the book to see if The Friend continued to use the awkward tablets for communication all the way to the end. It did. In the story on which Jim Ironheart had based his fantasy, the alien never vocalized.

“Which is why you doubted that your alien could vocalize and why you resisted my suggestion that we refuse to play along with the tablet system.”

Jim was beyond denial now. He stared at the book with wonder.

His response gave Holly hope for him. In the cemetery, he had been in such distress, his eyes so cold and bleak, that she had begun to doubt if, indeed, he could turn his phenomenal power inward to heal himself. And in the park, for one terrible moment, she had thought that his fragile shell of sanity would crack and spill the yolk of madness. But he had held together, and now his curiosity seemed to be overcoming his fear.

Mrs. Glynn had gone off to work in the stacks. No other patrons had come in to browse.

Holly returned to the story, skim-reading. At the midpoint of the tale, just after Jim Jamison and the alien had their second encounter, the ET explained that it was an entity that lived “IN ALL ASPECTS OF TIME,” could perceive the future, and wanted to save the life of a man who was fated to die.

“I'll be damned,” Jim said softly.

Without warning, a vision burst in Holly's mind with such force and brilliance that the library vanished for a moment and her inner world became the only reality: she saw herself naked and nailed to a wall in an obscene parody of a crucifix, blood streaming from her hands and feet (a voice whispering: die, die, die), and she opened her mouth to scream but, instead of sound, swarms of cockroaches poured out between her lips, and she realized she was already dead (die, die, die), her putrid innards crawling with pests and vermin—

The hateful phantasm flickered off the screen of her mind as suddenly as it had appeared, and she snapped back into the library with a jolt.

“Holly?” Jim was looking at her worriedly.

A part of him had sent the vision to her, no question about that. But the Jim she was looking at now was not the Jim who had done it. The dark child within him, The Enemy, hate-filled and murderous, was striking at her with a new weapon.

She said, “It's okay. It's all right.”

But she didn't feel all right. The vision had left her nauseous and somewhat disoriented.

She had to struggle to refocus on The Black Windmill:

The man Jim Jamison had to save, The Friend explained, was a candidate for the United States Presidency, soon to pass through Jim's hometown, where he was going to be assassinated. The alien wanted him to live, instead, because “HE IS GOING TO BE A GREAT STATESMAN AND PEACEMAKER WHO WILL SAVE THE WORLD FROM A GREAT WAR.” Because it had to keep its presence on earth a secret, The Friend wanted to work through Jim Jamison to thwart the assassins: “YOU WILL THROW HIM A LIFE LINE, JIM.”

The novel did not include an evil alien. The Enemy had been entirely Jim Ironheart's embellishment, an embodiment of his own rage and self-hatred, which he had needed to separate from himself and control.

With a crackle of inner static, another vision burst across her mind-screen, so intense that it blotted out the real world: she was in a coffin, dead but somehow still in possession of all her senses; she could feel worms churning in her (die, die, die, die), could smell the vile stench of her own decaying body, could see her rotted face reflected on the inside of the coffin lid as if it was lit and mirrored. She raised skeletal fists and beat on the lid, heard the blows reverberating into the yards of compacted earth above her—

The library again.

“Holly, for God's sake, what's happening?”

“Nothing.”

“Holly?”

“Nothing,” she said, sensing that it would be a mistake to admit that The Enemy was rattling her.

She finished skimming The Black Windmill:

At the end of the novel, when Jim Jamison had saved the future president, The Friend had subsided into quiescence under the pond, instructing Jim to forget that their encounter had ever taken place, and to remember only that he had saved the politician on his own initiative. If a repressed memory of the alien ever surfaced in Jim's mind, he was told that he would “REMEMBER ME ONLY AS A DREAM, AN ENTITY IN A DREAM YOU ONCE HAD.” When the alien light faded out of the wall for the last time, the messages on the tablet vanished, leaving no trace of the contact.

Holly closed the book.

She and Jim sat for a while, staring at the dustjacket.

Around her, thousands of times and places, people and worlds, from Mars to Egypt to Yoknapatawpha County, were closed up in the bindings of books like the shine trapped under the tarnished veneer of a brass lamp. She could almost feel them waiting to dazzle with the first turn of a page, come alive with brilliant colors and pungent odors and delicious aromas, with laughter and sobbing and cries and whispers. Books were packaged dreams.

“Dreams are doorways,” she told Jim, “and the story in any novel is a kind of dream. Through Arthur Willott's dream of alien contact and adventure, you found a doorway out of your despair, an escape from a crushing sense of having failed your mother and father.”

He had been unrelievedly pale since she had shown him the tablet with The Friend's answers. HE LOVES YOU HOLLY/HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY. Now some color had returned to his face. His eyes were still ghost-ridden, and worry clung to him like shadows to the night, but he seemed to be feeling his way toward an accommodation with all the lies that were his life.

Which was what frightened The Enemy in him. And made it desperate.

Mrs. Glynn had returned from the stacks. She was working at her desk.

Lowering her voice even further, Holly said to Jim, “But why would you hold yourself to blame for the traffic accident that killed them? And how could any kid that age have such a tremendously heavy sense of responsibility?”

He shook his head. “I don't know.”

Remembering what Corbett Handahl had told her, Holly put a hand on Jim's knee and said, “Think, honey. Did the accident happen when they were on the road with this mentalist act of theirs?”

He hesitated, frowned. “Yes … on the road.”

“You traveled with them, didn't you?”

He nodded.

Recalling the photograph of his mother in a glittery gown, Jim and his father in tuxedos, Holly said, “You were part of the act.”

Some of his memories apparently were rising like the rings of light had risen in the pond. The play of emotions in his face could not have been faked; he was genuinely astonished to be moving out of a life of darkness.

Holly felt her own excitement growing with his. She said, “What did you do in the act?”

“It was … a form of stage magic. My mom would take objects from people in the audience. My dad would work with me, and we would … I would hold the objects and pretend to have psychic impressions, tell the people things about themselves that I couldn't know.”

“Pretend?” she asked.

He blinked. “Maybe not. It's so strange … how little I remember even when I try.”

“It wasn't a trick. You could really do it. That's why your folks put together the act in the first place. You were a gifted child.”

He ran his fingers down the Bro Dart-protected jacket of The Black Windmill. “But …”

“But?”

“There's so much I still don't understand….”

“Oh, me too, kiddo. But we're getting closer, and I have to believe that's a good thing.”

A shadow, cast from within, stole across his face again.

Not wanting to see him slip back into a darker mood, Holly said, “Come on.” She picked up the book and took it to the librarian's desk. Jim followed her.

The energetic Mrs. Glynn was drawing on posterboard with a rainbow of colored pencils and magic markers. The colorful images were of well-rendered boys and girls dressed as spacemen, spelunkers, sailors, acrobats, and jungle explorers. She had penciled in but not yet colored the message: THIS IS A LIBRARY. KIDS AND ADVENTURERS WELCOME. ALL OTHERS STAY OUT!

“Nice,” Holly said sincerely, indicating the poster. “You really put yourself into this job.”

“Keeps me out of barrooms,” Mrs. Glynn said, with a grin that made it clear why any kid would like her.

Holly said, “My fiancee here has spoken so highly of you. Maybe you don't remember him after twenty-five years.”

Mrs. Glynn looked speculatively at Jim.

He said, “I'm Jim Ironheart, Mrs. Glynn.”

“Of course I remember you! You were the most special little boy.” She got up, leaned across the desk, and insisted on getting a hug from Jim. Releasing him, turning to Holly, she said, “So you're going to be marrying my Jimmy. That's wonderful! A lot of kids have passed through here since I've been running the place, even for a town this small, and I can't pretend I'd remember all of them. But Jimmy was special. He was a very special boy.”

Holly heard, again, how Jim had had an insatiable appetite for fantasy fiction, how he'd been so terribly quiet his first year in town, and how he'd been totally mute during his second year, after the sudden death of his grandmother.

Holly seized that opening: “You know, Mrs. Glynn, one of the reasons Jim brought me back here was to see if we might like to live in the farmhouse, at least for a while—”

“It's a nicer town than it looks,” Mrs. Glynn said. “You'd be happy here, I'll guarantee it. In fact, let me issue you a couple of library cards!” She sat down and pulled open a desk drawer.

As the librarian withdrew two cards from the drawer and picked up a pen, Holly said, “Well, the thing is … there're as many bad memories for him as good, and Lena's death is one of the worst.”

“And the thing is,” Jim picked up, “I was only ten when she died — well, almost eleven — and I guess maybe I made myself forget some of what happened. I'm not too clear on how she died, the details, and I was wondering if you remember …”

Holly decided that he might make a decent interviewer after all.

Mrs. Glynn said, “I can't say I recall the details of it. And I guess nobody'll ever know what on earth she was doing out in that old mill in the middle of the night. Henry, your grandpa, said she sometimes went there just to get away from things. It was peaceful and cool, a place she could do a little knitting and sort of meditate. And, of course, in those days it wasn't quite the ruin it's become. Still … it seemed odd she'd be out there knitting at two o'clock in the morning.”

As the librarian recounted what she could recall of Lena's death, confirming that Holly's dream had really been Jim's memory, Holly was touched by both dread and nausea. What Eloise Glynn did not seem to know, what perhaps no one knew, was that Lena had not been in that mill alone.

Jim had been there, too.

And only Jim had come out of it alive.

Holly glanced at him and saw that he had lost all color in his face again. He was not merely pale now. He was as gray as the sky outside.

Mrs. Glynn asked Holly for her driver's license, to complete the library card, and even though Holly didn't want the card, she produced the license.

The librarian said, “Jim, I think what got you through all that pain and loss, more than anything, was books. You pulled way into yourself, read all the time, and I think you used fantasy as sort of a painkiller.” She handed Holly the license and library card, and said to her: “Jim was an awfully bright boy. He could get totally into a book, it became real for him.”

Yeah, Holly thought, did it ever.

“When he first came to town and I heard he'd never been to a real school before, been educated by his parents, I thought that was just terrible, even if they did have to travel all the time with that nightclub act of theirs—”

Holly recalled the gallery of photographs on Jim's study walls in Laguna Niguel: Miami, Atlantic City, New York, London, Chicago, Las Vegas …

“—but they'd actually done a pretty fine job. At least they'd turned him into a booklover, and that served him well later.” She turned to Jim. “I suppose you haven't asked your grandpa about Lena's death because you figure it might upset him to talk about it. But I think he's not as fragile as you imagine, and he'd know more about it than anyone, of course.” Mrs. Glynn addressed Holly again: “Is something wrong, dear?”

Holly realized she was standing with the blue library card in her hand, statue-still, like one of those waiting-to-be-reanimated people in the worlds within the books upon the shelves within these rooms. For a moment she could not respond to the woman's question.

Jim looked too stunned to pick up the ball this time. His grandfather was alive somewhere. But where?

“No,” Holly said, “nothing's wrong. I just realized how late it's getting—”

A shatter of static, a vision: her severed head screaming, her severed hands crawling like spiders across a floor, her decapitated body writhing and twisting in agony; she was dismembered but not dead, impossibly alive, in a thrall of horror beyond endurance—

Holly cleared her throat, blinked at Mrs. Glynn, who was staring at her curiously. “Uh, yeah, quite late. And we're supposed to go see Henry before lunch. It's already ten. I've never met him.” She was babbling now, couldn't stop. “I'm really looking forward to it.”

Unless he really did die over four years ago, like Jim had told her, in which case she wasn't looking forward to it at all. But Mrs. Glynn did not appear to be a spiritualist who would blithely suggest conjuring up the dead for a little chat.

“He's a nice man,” Eloise Glynn said. “I know he must've hated having to move off the farm after his stroke, but he can be thankful it didn't leave him worse than he is. My mother, God rest her soul, had a stroke, left her unable to walk, talk, blind in one eye, and so confused she couldn't always recognize her own children. At least poor Henry has his wits about him, as I understand it. He can talk, and I hear he's the leader of the wheelchair pack over there at Fair Haven.”

“Yes,” Jim said, sounding as wooden as a talking post, “that's what I hear.”

“Fair Haven's such a nice place,” Mrs. Glynn said, “it's good of you to keep him there, Jim. It's not a snakepit like so many nursing homes these days.”

The Yellow Pages at a public phone booth provided an address for Fair Haven on the edge of Solvang. Holly drove south and west across the valley.

“I remember he had a stroke,” Jim said. “I was in the hospital with him, came up from Orange County, he was in the intensive-care unit. I hadn't… hadn't seen him in thirteen years or more.”

Holly was surprised by that, and her look generated a hot wave of shame that withered Jim. “You hadn't seen your own grandfather in thirteen years?”

“There was a reason….”

“What?”

He stared at the road ahead for a while, then let out a guttural sound of frustration and disgust. “I don't know. There was a reason, but I can't remember it. Anyway, I came back when he had his stroke, when he was dying in the hospital. And I remember him dead, damn it.”

“Clearly remember it?”

“Yes.”

She said, “You remember the sight of him dead in the hospital bed, all his monitor lines flat?”

He frowned. “No.”

“Remember a doctor telling you he'd passed away?”

“No.”

“Remember making arrangements for his burial?”

“No.”

“Then what's so clear about this memory of him being dead?”

Jim brooded about that awhile as she whipped the Ford around the curving roads, between gentle hills on which scattered houses stood, past white-fenced horse pastures green as pictures of Kentucky. This part of the valley was lusher than the area around New Svenborg. But the sky had become a more somber gray, with a hint of blue-black in the clouds — bruised.

At last he said, “It isn't clear at all, now that I look close at it. Just a muddy impression … not a real memory.”

“Are you paying to keep Henry at Fair Haven?”

“No.”

“Did you inherit his property?”

“How could I inherit if he's alive?”

“A conservatorship then?”

He was about to deny that, as well, when he suddenly remembered a hearing room, a judge. The testimony of a doctor. His granddad's counsel, appearing on the old man's behalf to testify that Henry was of sound mind and wanted his grandson to manage his property.

“Good heavens, yes,” Jim said, shocked that he was capable not only of forgetting events from the distant past but from as recently as four years ago. As Holly swung around a slow-moving farm truck and accelerated along a straight stretch of road, Jim told her what he had just remembered, dim as the recollection was. “How can I do this, live this way? How can I totally rewrite my past when it suits me?”

“Self-defense,” she said, as she had said before. She swung in front of the truck. “I'd bet that you remember a tremendous amount of precise detail about your work as a teacher, about your students over the years, colleagues you've taught with—”

It was true. As she spoke, he could flash back, at will, through his years in the classroom, which seemed so vivid that those thousands of days might have occurred concurrently only yesterday.

“—because that life held no threat for you, it was filled with purpose and peace. The only things you forget, push relentlessly down into the deepest wells of memory, are those things having to do with the death of your parents, the death of Lena Ironheart, and your years in New Svenborg. Henry Ironheart is part of that, so you continue to wipe him from your mind.”

The sky was contusive.

He saw blackbirds wheeling across the clouds, more of them now than he had seen in the cemetery. Four, six, eight. They seemed to be paralleling the car, following it to Solvang.

Strangely, he recalled the dream with which he had awakened on the morning that he had gone to Portland, saved Billy Jenkins, and met Holly. In the nightmare, a flock of large blackbirds shrieked around him in a turbulent flapping of wings and tore at him with hooked beaks as precision-honed as surgical instruments.

“The worst is yet to come,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know.”

“You mean what we learn at Fair Haven?”

Above, the blackbirds swam through the high, cold currents.

Without having a clue as to what he meant, Jim said, “Something very dark is coming.”

2

Fair Haven was housed in a large, U-shaped, single-story building outside the town limits of Solvang, with no trace of Danish influence in its architecture. It was strictly off-the-rack design, functional and no prettier than it had to be: cream-tinted stucco, concrete-tile roof, boxy, flat-walled, without detail. But it was freshly painted and in good repair; the hedges were neatly trimmed, the lawn recently mown, and the sidewalks swept clean.

Holly liked the place. She almost wished she lived there, was maybe eighty, watching some TV every day, playing some checkers, with no worry bigger than trying to figure out where she had put her false teeth when she'd taken them out last night.

Inside, the hallways were wide and airy, with yellow vinyl-tile floors. Unlike in many nursing homes, the air was neither tainted with the stench of incontinent patients left unclean by inattentive staff nor with a heavy aerosol deodorant meant to eliminate or mask that stench. The rooms she and Jim passed looked attractive, with big windows opening to valley views or a garden courtyard. Some of the patients lay in their beds or slumped in their wheelchairs with vacant or mournful expressions on their faces, but they were the unfortunate victims of major strokes or late-stage Alzheimer's disease, locked away in memories or torment, largely unconnected to the world around them.

Everyone else appeared happy; and patients' laughter actually could be heard, a rarity in such places.

According to the supervisor on duty at the nurses' station, Henry Ironheart had been a resident of Fair Haven for over four years.

Mrs. Danforth, the administrator into whose office they were shown, was new since Henry Ironheart had been checked in. She had the slightly plump, well-groomed, and inoffensively self-satisfied look of a minister's wife in a prosperous parish. Though she could not understand why they needed her to verify something that Jim knew already, she checked her records and showed them that, indeed, Henry Ironheart's monthly bill was always promptly paid by James Ironheart, of Laguna Niguel, by check.

“I'm glad you've come to visit at last, and I hope you'll have a pleasant time,” Mrs. Danforth said, with genteel reproach meant to make him feel guilty for not visiting his grandfather more often while at the same time not directly offending him.

After they left Mrs. Danforth, they stood in a corner of the main hallway, out of the bustle of nurses and wheelchair-bound patients.

“I can't just walk in on him,” Jim said adamantly. “Not after all this time. I feel … my stomach's clutched up, cramped. Holly, I'm afraid of him.”

“Why?”

“I'm not sure.” Desperation, bordering on panic, made his eyes so disquieting that she did not want to look into them.

“When you were little, did he ever harm you?”

“I don't think so.” He strained to see back through the clouds of memory, then shook his head. “I don't know.”

Largely because she was afraid to leave Jim alone, Holly tried to convince him that it would be better for them to meet the old man together.

But he insisted she go first. “Ask him most of what we need to know, so when I come into it, we won't have to stay much longer if we don't want to… in case it goes bad, gets awkward, unpleasant. Prepare him for seeing me, Holly. Please.”

Because he appeared ready to bolt if she did not play things his way, Holly finally agreed. But watching Jim walk into the courtyard to wait there, she already regretted letting him move out of her sight. If he started to lose control again, if The Enemy began to break through, nobody would be with him to encourage him to resist the onslaught.

A friendly nurse helped Holly find Henry Ironheart when he proved not to be in his room. She pointed him out at a card table in the cheery recreation center, at the other end of which a half-dozen residents were watching a game show on television.

Henry was playing poker with his cronies. Four of them were at a table designed to accommodate wheelchairs, and none wore the standard nursing-home attire of pajamas or sweatsuits. Besides Henry, there were two fragile-looking elderly men — one in slacks and a red polo shirt; the other in slacks, white shirt, and bow tie — and a birdlike woman with snow-white hair, who was in a bright-pink pantsuit. They were halfway through a hotly contested hand, with a substantial pile of blue plastic chips in the pot, and Holly waited to one side, reluctant to interrupt them. Then one by one, exhibiting a flair for drama, they revealed their cards, and with a whoop of delight the woman — Thelma, her name was — raked in her winnings, theatrically gloating as the men goodnaturedly questioned her honesty.

Finally intruding into their banter, Holly introduced herself to Henry Ironheart, though without identifying herself as Jim's fiancee. “I'd like to have a few minutes to talk with you about something if I could.”

“Jesus, Henry,” the man in the polo shirt said, “she's less than half your age!”

“He always was an old pervert,” said the guy in the bow tie.

“Oh, get a life, Stewart,” Thelma said, speaking to Mr. Bow Tie. “Henry's a gentleman, and he's never been anything else.”

“Jesus, Henry, you're gonna be married for sure before you get out of this room today!”

“Which you certainly won't be, George,” Thelma continued. “And as far as I'm concerned”—she winked—“if it's Henry, marriage doesn't have to be part of it.”

They all roared at that, and Holly said, “I can see I'm going to be aced out of this one.”

George said, “Thelma gets what she's after more often than not.”

Noticing that Stewart had gathered the cards up and was shuffling the deck, Holly said, “I don't mean to interrupt your game.”

“Oh, don't worry yourself,” Henry said. His words were slightly slurred as a result of his stroke, but he was quite intelligible. “We'll just take a bathroom break.”

“At our age,” George said, “if we didn't coordinate our bathroom breaks, there'd never be more than two of us at the card table at any one time!”

The others wheeled away, and Holly pulled up a chair to sit near Henry Ironheart.

He was not the vital-looking, square-faced man she had seen in the photograph on the living-room wall of the farmhouse last evening, and without help Holly might not have recognized him. His stroke had left his right side weak, though not paralyzed, and a lot of the time he held that arm curled against his chest, the way an injured animal might favor a paw. He had lost a lot of weight and was no longer a burly man. His face was not gaunt but nearly so, though his skin had good color; the facial muscles on the right side were unnaturally relaxed, allowing his features to droop a little.

His appearance, combined with the slur that thickened every word he spoke, might have sent Holly into a depression over the inevitable direction of every human life — if not for his eyes, which revealed an unbowed soul. And his conversation, though slowed somewhat by his impediment, was that of a bright and humorous man who would not give the fates the satisfaction of his despair; his treacherous body was to be cursed, if at all, in private.

“I'm a friend of Jim's,” she told him.

He made a lopsided “O” of his mouth, which she decided was an expression of surprise. At first he did not seem to know what to say, but then he asked, “How is Jim?”

Deciding to opt for the truth, she said, “Not so good, Henry. He's a very troubled man.”

He looked away from her, at the pile of poker chips on the table. “Yes,” he said softly.

Holly had half expected him to be a child-abusing monster who had been at least in part responsible for Jim's withdrawal from reality. He seemed anything but that.

“Henry, I wanted to meet you, talk to you, because Jim and I are more than friends. I love him, and he's said that he loves me, and it's my hope that we're going to be together a long, long time.”

To her surprise, tears brimmed up and slipped from Henry's eyes, forming bright beads in the soft folds of his aged face.

She said, “I'm sorry, have I upset you?”

“No, no, good lord, no,” he said, wiping at his eyes with his left hand. “Excuse me for being an old fool.”

“I can tell you're anything but that.”

“It's just, I never thought … Well, I figured Jim was going to spend his life alone.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Well…”

He seemed distressed at having to say anything negative about his grandson, completely dispelling her lingering expectations that he would be a tyrant of some kind.

Holly helped him. “He does have a way of keeping people at arm's length. Is that what you mean?”

Nodding, he said, “Even me. I've loved him with all my heart, all these years, and I know he loves me in his way, though he's always had real trouble showing it, and he could never say it.” As Holly was about to ask him a question, he suddenly shook his head violently and wrenched his distorted face into an expression of anguish so severe that for an instant she thought he was having another stroke. “It's not all him. God knows, it's not.” The slur in his voice thickened when he grew more emotional. “I've got to face it — part of the distance between us is me, my fault, the blame I put on him that I never should've.”

“Blame?”

“For Lena.”

A shadow of fear passed across her heart and induced a quiver of angina-like pain.

She glanced at the window that looked out on a corner of the courtyard. It was not the corner to which Jim had gone. She wondered where he was, how he was… who he was.

“For Lena? I don't understand,” she said, though she was afraid that she did.

“It seems unforgivable to me now, what I did, what I allowed myself to think.” He paused, looking not at her but through her now, toward a distant time and place. “But he was just so strange in those days, not the child he had been. Before you can even hope to understand what I did, you have to know that, after Atlanta, he was so very strange, all locked up inside.”

Immediately Holly thought of Sam and Emily Newsome, whose lives Jim had saved in an Atlanta convenience store — and Norman Rink, into whom he had pumped eight rounds from a shotgun in a blind rage. But Henry obviously was not talking about a recent event in Atlanta; he was referring to some previous incident, much further in the past.

“You don't know about Atlanta?” he asked, reacting to her evident mystification.

A queer sound chittered through the room, alarming Holly. For an instant she could not identify the noise, then realized it was several birds shrieking the way they did when protecting their nests. No birds were in the room, and she supposed their cries were echoing down the fireplace chimney from the roof. Just birds. Their chatter faded.

She turned to Henry Ironheart again. “Atlanta? No, I guess I don't know about that.”

“I didn't think you did. I'd be surprised if he talked about it, even to you, even if he loves you. He just doesn't talk about it.”

“What happened in Atlanta?”

“It was a place called the Dixie Duck—”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered. She had been there in the dream.

“Then you do know some of it,” he said. His eyes were pools of sorrow.

She felt her face crumple in grief, not for Jim's parents, whom she had never known, and not even for Henry, who presumably had loved them, but for Jim. “Oh, my God.” And then she couldn't say any more because her words backed up behind her own tears.

Henry reached out to her with one liver-spotted hand, and she took it, held it, waiting until she could speak again.

At the other end of the room, bells were ringing, horns blaring, on the TV game show.

No traffic accident had killed Jim's parents. That story was his way of avoiding a recounting of the terrible truth.

She had known. She had known, and refused to know.

Her latest dream had not been a warning prophecy but another memory that Jim had projected into her mind as they had both slept. She had not been herself in the dream. She had been Jim. Just as she had been Lena in a dream two nights ago. If a mirror had given her a look at her face, she would have seen Jim's countenance instead of her own, as she had seen Lena's in the windmill window. The horror of the blood-drenched restaurant returned to her now in vivid images that she could not block from memory, and she shuddered violently.

She looked toward the window, the courtyard, frightened for him.

“They were performing for a week at a club in Atlanta,” Henry said. “They went out for lunch to Jimmy's favorite place, which he remembered from the last time they'd played Atlanta.”

Voice trembling, Holly said, “Who was the gunman?”

“Just a nut. That's what made it so hard. No meaning to it. Just a crazy man.”

“How many people died?”

“A lot.”

“How many, Henry?”

“Twenty-four.”

She thought of young Jim Ironheart in that holocaust, scrambling for his life through the shattered bodies of the other customers, the room filled with cries of pain and terror, reeking with the stench of blood and vomit, bile and urine from the slaughtered corpses. She heard the heavy sound of the automatic weapon again, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chnda-chuda, and the please-please-please-please of the terrified young waitress. Even as a dream, it had been almost beyond endurance, all the random horror of existence and all the cruelty of humankind boiled down to one devastating experience, a savage ordeal from which full psychological recovery, even for an adult, would take a lifetime of struggle. For a ten-year-old boy, recovery might seem impossible, reality intolerable, denial necessary, and fantasy the only tool with which to hold on to a shred of sanity.

“Jimmy was the only survivor,” Henry said. “If the police had gotten there a few seconds later, Jimmy wouldn't have made it either. They shot the man down.” Henry's grip tightened slightly on Holly's hand. “They found Jim in a corner, in Jamie's lap, in his daddy's lap, his daddy's arms, all covered with … with his daddy's blood.”

Holly remembered the end of the dream—

— the crazyman is coming straight at her, knocking tables and chairs aside, so she scrambles away and into a corner, on top of a dead body, and the crazyman is coming closer, closer, raising his gun, she can't bear to look at him the way the waitress looked at him and then died, so she turns her face to the corpse—

— and she remembered awakening with a jolt, gagging in revulsion.

If she'd had time to look into the face of the corpse, she would have seen Jim's father.

The avian shriek shrilled through the recreation room again. It was louder this time. A couple of the ambulatory residents went to the fireplace to see if any birds were caught behind the damper in the chimney.

“In his daddy's blood,” Henry repeated softly. It was clear that, even after all these years, the consideration of that moment was intolerably painful to him.

The boy had not only been in his dead father's arms but surely had known that his mother lay dead among the ruins, and that he was orphaned, alone.

Jim sat on a redwood bench in the Fair Haven courtyard. He was alone.

For a day late in August, when the seasonal drought should have been at its peak, the sky was unusually heavy with unshed moisture, yet it looked like an inverted bowl of ashes. Mixes of late-summer flowers, cascading from planting beds onto the wide concrete walkways, were missing half their color without the enhancement of sunshine. The trees shivered as if chilled by the mild August breeze.

Something was coming. Something bad was coming.

He clung to Holly's theory, told himself that nothing would come unless he caused it to appear. He only had to control himself, and they would all survive.

But he still felt it coming.

Something.

He heard the screaky cries of birds.

The birds had fallen silent.

After a while Holly let go of Henry Ironheart's hand, took some Kleenex from her purse, blew her nose, and blotted her eyes. When she could speak, she said, “He blames himself for what happened to his mom and dad.”

“I know. He always did. He'd never talk about it, but there were ways it showed, how he blamed himself, how he thought he should have saved them.”

“But why? He was only ten years old, a small boy. He couldn't have done anything about a grown man with a submachine gun. For God's sake, how could he feel responsible?”

For the moment, the brightness had gone out of Henry's eyes. His poor lopsided face, already pulled down to the right, was pulled down farther by an inexpressible sadness.

At last he said, “I talked to him about it lots of times, took him on my lap and held him and talked about it, like Lena did, too, but he was so much locked in himself, wouldn't open up, wouldn't say why he blamed himself — hated himself.”

Holly looked at her watch.

She had left Jim alone too long.

But she could not interrupt Henry Ironheart in the middle of the revelations that she had come to hear.

“I've thought about it all these long years,” Henry continued, “and maybe I figured it out a little. But by the time I started to understand, Jim was grown up, and we'd stopped talking about Atlanta so many years ago. To be completely honest, we'd stopped talking about everything by then.”

“So what is it you figured out?”

Henry put his weak right hand in his strong left and stared down at the gnarled lumps that his knuckles made within his time-thinned skin. From the old man's attitude, Holly sensed that he was not sure he should reveal what he needed and wanted to reveal.

“I love him, Henry.”

He looked up and met her eyes.

She said, “Earlier you said I'd come here to learn about Atlanta because Jim wouldn't talk about it, and in a way you were right. I came to find out a number of things, because he's frozen me out of some areas of his life. He really loves me, Henry, I've no doubt of that, but he's clenched up like a fist, he can't let loose of certain things. If I'm going to marry him, if it's going to come to that, then I've got to know all about him — or we'll never have a chance to be happy. You can't build a life together on mysteries.”

“Of course, you're right.”

“Tell me why Jim blames himself. It's killing him, Henry. If I have any hope of helping him, I've got to know what you know.”

He sighed and made up his mind. “What I've got to say will sound like superstitious nonsense, but it isn't. I'll make it simple and short, 'cause it sounds even screwier if I dress it up at all. My wife, Lena, had a power. Presentiment, you'd call it, I guess. Not that she could see the future, tell you who would win a horserace or where you'd be a year from now or anything like that. But sometimes … well, you might invite her to a picnic Sunday a week, and without thinking, she'd say it was going to rain like-for-Noah come Sunday a week. And by God it would. Or some neighbor would be pregnant, and Lena would start referring to the baby as either a 'he' or a 'she,' when there was no way for her to know which it would be — and she was always right.”

Holly sensed some of the last pieces of the puzzle falling into place. When Henry gave her a maybe-you-think-I'm-an-old-fool look, she took his bad hand and held it reassuringly.

After studying her a moment, he said, “You've seen something special Jim did, haven't you, something like magic?”

“Yes.”

“So you maybe know where this is going.”

“Maybe.”

The unseen birds began to screech again. The residents at the television set turned the sound off and looked around, trying to identify the source of the squealing.

Holly looked toward the courtyard window. No birds there. But she knew why their cries made the hair stand up on the back of her neck: they were somehow connected with Jim. She remembered the way he had looked up at them in the graveyard and how he had studied them in the sky during the drive to Solvang.

“Jamie, our son, was like his mother,” Henry said, as if he did not even hear the birds. “He just sometimes knew things. Fact is, he was a little more gifted than Lena. And after Jamie had been married to Cara for a while, when she got pregnant, Lena just one day up and said, 'The baby's going to be special, he's going to be a real mage.' ”

“Mage?”

“Country talk for someone with a power, with something special about him the way Lena had something special and Jamie, too. Only she meant real special. So Jim was born, and by the time he was four … well, he was doing things. Like once he touched my pocket comb, which I'd bought at the local barbershop here, and he started talking about things that were in the shop, though he'd never been in there in his life 'cause he lived with Jamie and Cara down in Los Angeles.”

He paused and took a few deep breaths. The slur in his voice had begun to thicken. His right eyelid drooped. Talking seemed to tire him as if it were a physical labor.

A male nurse with a flashlight was at the fireplace. He was squinting up into the flue, past the cracks around the damper, trying to see if any birds were trapped up in there.

The shrieking was now overlaid by the frenzied flapping of wings.

“Jimmy would touch an item and know where it'd been, bits and pieces about who owned it. Not everything about them, mind you. He just knew whatever he knew, that was it. Maybe he'd touch a personal item of yours and know the names of your parents, what you did for a living. Then he'd touch a personal item from someone else and only know where they'd gone to school, names of their children. Always different things, he couldn't control it. But he always came up with something when he tried.”

The nurse, trailed by three patients offering advice, had moved away from the fireplace and was frowning up at the air-conditioning vents. The quarrelsome sound of birds still echoed through the room.

“Let's go out to the courtyard,” Holly said, getting up.

“Wait,” Henry said with some distress, “let me finish this, let me tell you.”

Jim, for God's sake, Holly thought, hold on another minute, just another minute or two.

Reluctantly she sat down.

Henry said, “Jim's specialness was a family secret, like Lena's and Jamie's. We didn't want the world to know, come snooping around, call us freaks and God knows what. But Cara, she always wanted so bad to be in show business. Jamie worked down there at Warner Brothers, which was where'd he'd met her, and he wanted what Cara wanted. They decided they could form an act with Jimmy, call him the boy-wonder mentalist, but nobody would ever suspect he really had a power. They played it as a trick, lots of winking at the audience, daring them to figure out just how it was all done — when all the time it was real. They made a good living at it, too, and it was good for them as a family, kept them together every day. They'd been so close before the act, but they were closer than ever after they went on the road. No parents ever loved their child more than they loved Jim — or ever got more love given back to them. They were so close … it was impossible to think of them ever being apart.”

Blackbirds streaked across the bleak sky.

Sitting on the redwood bench, Jim stared up at them.

They almost vanished into the eastern clouds, then turned sharply and came back.

For a while they kited overhead.

Those dark, jagged forms against the sere sky composed an image that might have come from some poem by Edgar Allan Poe. As a kid he'd had a passion for Poe and had memorized all of the more macabre pieces of his poetry. Morbidity had its fascination.

The bird shrieks suddenly stopped. The resulting quiet was a blessing, but Holly was, oddly, more frightened by the cessation of the cries than she had been by the eerie sound of them.

“And the power grew,” Henry Ironheart said softly, thickly. He shifted in his wheelchair, and his right side resisted settling into a new position. For the first time he showed some frustration at the limitations of his stroke-altered body. “By the time Jim was six, you could put a penny on the table, and he could move it just by wanting it to move, slide it back and forth, make it stand on end. By the time he was eight, he could pitch it in the air, float it there. By the time he was ten, he could do the same with a quarter, a phonograph record, a cake tin. It was the most amazing thing you ever saw.”

You should see what he can do at thirty-five, Holly thought.

“They never used any of that in their act,” Henry said, “they just stuck to the mentalism, taking personal items from members of the audience, so Jim could tell them things about themselves that just, you know, astonished them. Jamie and Cara figured to include some of his levitations eventually, but they just hadn't figured out how to do it yet without giving the truth away. Then they went to the Dixie Duck down in Atlanta … and that was the end of everything.”

Not the end of everything. It was the end of one thing, the dark beginning of another.

She realized why the absence of the birds' screams was more disturbing than the sound itself. The cries had been like the hiss of a sparking fuse as it burned down toward an explosive charge. As long as she could hear the sound, the explosion was still preventable.

“And that's why I figure Jim thought he should've been able to save them,” Henry said. “Because he could do those little things with his mind, float and move things, he thought he should've been able maybe to jam the bullets in that crazy man's gun, freeze the trigger, lock the safety in place, something, something …”

“Could he have done that?”

“Yeah, maybe. But he was just a scared little boy. To do those things with pennies and records and cake tins, he had to concentrate. No time to concentrate when the bullets started flying that day.”

Holly remembered the murderous sound: chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda …

“So when we brought him back from Atlanta, he would hardly talk, just a word or two now and then. Wouldn't meet your eyes. Something died in him when Jamie and Cara died, and we could never bring it back again, no matter how much we loved him and how hard we tried. His power died, too. Or seemed to. He never did one of his tricks again, and after a lot of years it was sometimes hard to believe he'd ever done those strange things when he was little.”

In spite of his good spirits, Henry Ironheart had looked every one of his eighty years. Now he appeared to be far older, ancient.

He said, “Jimmy was so strange after Atlanta, so unreachable and full of rage … sometimes it was possible to love him and still be a little afraid of him. Later, God forgive me, I suspected him of…”

“I know,” Holly said.

His slack features tightened, and he looked sharply at her.

“Your wife,” she said. “Lena. The way she died.”

More thickly than usual, he said, “You know so much.”

“Too much,” she said. “Which is funny. Because all my life I've known too little.”

Henry looked down at his culpable hands again. “How could I believe that a boy of ten, even a disturbed boy, could've shoved her down the mill stairs when he loved her so much? Too many years later, I saw that I'd been so damned cruel to him, so unfeeling, so damned stupid. By then, he wouldn't give me the chance to apologize for what I'd done … what I'd thought. After he left for college, he never came back. Not once in more than thirteen years, until I had my stroke.”

He came back once, Holly thought, nineteen years after Lena's death, to face up to it and put flowers on her grave.

Henry said, “If there was some way I could explain to him, if he'd just give me one chance….”

“He's here now,” Holly said, getting up again.

The weight of fear that pulled on the old man's face made him appear even more gaunt than he had been. “Here?”

“He's come to give you that chance,” was all that Holly could say. “Do you want me to take you to him?”

The blackbirds were flocking. Eight of them had gathered now in the sky above, circling.

To the real birds above, Jim whispered, “ 'Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.'”

He heard a soft rhythmic creaking, as of a wheel going around and around, and footsteps. When he looked up, he saw Holly pushing his wheelchair-bound grandfather along the walkway toward the bench.

Eighteen years had passed since he had gone away to school, and he had seen Henry only once before in all this time. Initially, there had been a few telephone calls, but soon Jim stopped making those and, eventually, stopped accepting them as well. When letters came, he threw them away unopened. He remembered all of that now — and he was beginning to remember why.

He began to rise. His legs would not support him. He remained on the bench.

Holly parked the wheelchair facing Jim, then sat beside him. “How you doing?” Nodding dumbly, he glanced up at the birds circling against the ashen clouds, rather than face his grandfather.

The old man could not look at Jim, either. He studied the beds of flowers intently, as if he had been in a great rush to get outside and have a look at those blooms and nothing else.

Holly knew this was not going to be easy. She was sympathetic toward each of the men and wanted to do her best to bring them together at last.

First, she had to burn away the tangled weeds of one last lie that Jim had told her and that, consciously if not subconsciously, he had successfully told himself. “There was no traffic accident, honey,” she said, putting a hand on his knee. “That isn't how it happened.”

Jim lowered his eyes from the blackbirds and regarded her with nervous expectation. She could see that he longed to know the truth and dreaded hearing it.

“It happened in a restaurant—”

Jim slowly shook his head in denial.

“—down in Atlanta, Georgia—”

He was still shaking his head, but his eyes were widening.

“—you were with them—”

He stopped denying, and a terrible expression stained his face.

“—it was called the Dixie Duck,” she said.

When the memory exploded back to him with pile-driver force, he hunched forward on the bench as if he might vomit, but he did not. He curled his hands into fists on his knees, and his face tightened into a clench of pain, and he made small inarticulate sounds that were beyond grief and horror.

She put an arm around his bent shoulders.

Henry Ironheart looked at her and said, “Oh, my God,” as he began to realize the extremity of denial to which his grandson had been driven. “Oh, my God.” As Jim's strangled gasps of pain changed into quiet sobs, Henry Ironheart looked at the flowers again, then at his aged hands, then at his feet on the tilted braces of the wheelchair, everywhere he could think to look to avoid Jim and Holly, but at last he met Holly's eyes again. “He had therapy,” he said, trying hard to expiate his guilt. “We knew he might need therapy. We took him to a psychiatrist in Santa Barbara. Took him there several times. We did what we could. But the psychiatrist — Hemphill, his name was — he said Jim was all right, he said there was no reason to bring him any more, just after six visits, he said Jim was all right.”

Holly said, “What do they ever know? What could Hemphill have done when he didn't really know the boy, didn't love him?”

Henry Ironheart flinched as if she had struck him, though she had not meant her comment to be a condemnation of him.

“No,” she said quickly, hoping he would believe her, “what I meant was, there's no mystery why I've gotten farther than Hemphill ever could. It's just because I love him. It's the only thing that ever leads to healing.” Stroking Jim's hair, she said, “You couldn't have saved them, baby. You didn't have the power then, not like you have it now. You were lucky to get out alive. Believe me, honey, listen and believe me.”

For a moment they sat unspeaking, all of them in pain.

Holly noticed more blackbirds had gathered in the sky. Maybe a dozen of them now. She didn't know how Jim was drawing them there — or why — but she knew that he was, and regarded them with growing dread.

She put a hand over one of Jim's hands, encouraging him to relax it. Though he slowly stopped crying, he kept his fist as tight as a fist of sculpted stone.

To Henry, she said, “Now. This is your chance. Explain why you turned away from him, why you did … whatever you did to him.”

Clearing his throat, wiping nervously at his mouth with his weak right hand, Henry spoke at first without looking at either of them. “Well… you have to know … how it was. A few months after he came back from Atlanta, there was this film company in town, shooting a movie—”

“The Black Windmill,” Holly said.

“Yeah. He was reading all the time….” Henry stopped, closed his eyes as if to gather strength. When he opened them, he stared at Jim's bowed head and seemed prepared to meet his eyes if he looked up. “You was reading all the time, going through the library shelf by shelf, and because of the film you read the Willott book. For a while it became … hell, I don't know … I guess maybe you'd have to say it was an obsession with you, Jim. It was the only thing that brought you out of your shell, talking about that book, so we encouraged you to go watch them shoot the picture. Remember? After a while, you started telling us an alien was in our pond and windmill, just like in the book and movie. At first we thought you was just play-acting.”

He paused.

The silence lengthened.

About twenty birds in the sky above.

Circling. Silent.

To Henry, Holly said, “Then it began to worry you.”

Henry wiped one shaky hand down his deeply lined face, not so much as if he was trying to scrub away his weariness but as if he was trying to slough off the years and bring that lost time closer. “You spent more and more hours in the mill, Jim. Sometimes you'd be out there all day. And evenings, too. Sometimes we'd get up in the middle of the night to use the john, and we'd see a light out there in the mill, two or three or four o'clock in the morning. And you wouldn't be in your room.”

Henry paused more often. He wasn't tired. He just didn't want to dig into this part of the long-buried past.

“If it was the middle of the night, we'd go out there to the mill and bring you in, either me or Lena. And you'd be telling us about The Friend in the mill. You started spooking us, we didn't know what to do … so I guess … we didn't do anything. Anyway, that night … the night she died … a storm was coming up—”

Holly recalled the dream:

… a fresh wind blows as she hurries along the gravel path …

“—and Lena didn't wake me. She went out there by herself and up to the high room—”

… she climbs the limestone stairs …

“—pretty good thunderstorm, but I used to be able to sleep through anything—”

… the heavens flash as she passes the stairwell window, and through the glass she sees an object in the pond below …

“—I guess, Jim, you was just doing what we always found you doing out there at night, reading that book by candlelight—”

… inhuman sounds from above quicken her heart, and she climbs to the high room, afraid, but also curious and concerned for Jim …

“—a crash of thunder finally woke me—”

… she reaches the top of the stairs and sees him standing, hands fisted at his sides, a yellow candle in a blue dish on the floor, a book beside the candle …

“—I realized Lena was gone, looked out the bedroom window, and saw that dim light in the mill—”

… the boy turns to her and cries out, I'm scared, help me, the walls, the walls!..

“—and I couldn't believe my eyes because the sails of the mill were turning, and even in those days the sails hadn't turned in ten or fifteen years, been frozen up—”

… she sees an amber light within the walls, the sour shades of pus and bile; the limestone bulges, and she realizes something is impossibly alive in the stone …

“—but they were spinning like airplane propellers, so I pulled on my pants, and hurried downstairs—”

… with fear but also with perverse excitement, the boy says, It's coming, and nobody can stop it!..

“—I grabbed a flashlight and ran out into the rain—”

… the curve of mortared blocks splits like the spongy membrane of an insect's egg; taking shape from a core of foul muck, where limestone should have been, is the embodiment of the boy's black rage at the world and its injustice, his self-hatred made flesh, his own death-wish given a vicious and brutal form so solid that it is an entity itself, quite separate from him …

“—I reached the mill, couldn't believe how those old sails were spinning, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!—”

Holly's dream had ended there, but her imagination too easily supplied a version of what might have happened thereafter. Horrified at the materialization of The Enemy, stunned that the boy's wild tales of aliens in the mill were true, Lena had stumbled backward and fallen down the winding stone stairs, unable to arrest her fall because there was no handrail at which to grab. Somewhere along the way she broke her neck.

“—went inside the mill… found her at the bottom of the stairs all busted up, neck twisted … dead.”

Henry paused for the first time in a while and swallowed hard. He had not looked at Holly once throughout his account of that stormy night, only at Jim's bowed head. With less of a slur in his voice, as if it were vitally important to him to tell the rest of it as clearly as he could, he said:

“I went up the steps and found you in the high room, Jimmy. Do you remember that? Sitting by the candle, holding the book in your hands so tight it couldn't be taken from you till hours later. You wouldn't speak.” The old man's voice quavered now. “God forgive me, but all I could think about was Lena being dead, my dear Lena gone, and you being such a strange child all year, and still strange even at that moment, with your book, refusing to talk to me. I guess … I guess I went a little mad right then, for a while. I thought you might've pushed her, Jimmy. I thought you might've been in one of your … upsets … and maybe you pushed her.”

As if it had become too much for him to address himself to his grandson any longer, Henry shifted his gaze to Holly. “That year after Atlanta, he'd been a strange boy … almost like a boy we didn't know. He was quiet, like I said, but there was rage in him, too, a fury like no child should ever have. It sometimes scared us. The only time he ever showed it was in his sleep … dreaming … we'd hear him screeching, and we'd go down the hall to his room … and he'd be kicking and punching at the mattress, the pillows, clawing at the sheets, furious, taking it all out on something in his dreams, and we'd have to wake him.”

Henry paused and looked away from Holly, down at his bent right hand, which lay half useless in his lap.

Jim's fist, under Holly's hand, remained vise-tight.

“You never struck out at Lena or me, Jimmy, you was a good boy, never gave us that kind of trouble. But in the mill that night, I grabbed you and shook you, Jimmy, tried to make you admit how you'd pushed her down the stairs. There was no excuse for what I did, how I behaved … except I was grief-crazy over Jamie and Cara, and now over Lena, everyone dying around me, and there was only you, and you were so strange, so strange and locked up in yourself that you scared me, so I turned on you when I should have been taking you in my arms. Turned on you that night… and didn't realize what I'd done until a lot of years later … too late.”

The birds were in a tighter circle now. Directly overhead.

“Don't,” she said softly to Jim. “Please don't.”

Until Jim responded, Holly could not know if these revelations were for better or worse. If he had blamed himself for his grandma's death merely because Henry had instilled the guilt in him, then he would get past this. If he blamed himself because Lena had come into the high room, had seen The Enemy materializing from the wall, and had stumbled backward down the stairs in terror, he might still overcome the past. But if The Enemy had torn itself free of the wall and pushed her …

“I treated you like a murderer for the next six years, until you went away to school,” Henry said. “When you was gone … well, in time, I started to think about it with a clearer head, and I knew what I'd done. You'd had nowhere to turn for comfort. Your mom and dad were gone, your grandma. You went into town to get books, but you couldn't join in with other kids because that little Zacca bastard, Ned Zacca, he was twice your size and wouldn't ever let you alone. You had no peace except in books. I tried to call you, but you wouldn't take the calls. I wrote but I think you never read the letters.”

Jim sat unmoving.

Henry Ironheart shifted his attention to Holly. “He came back at last when I had my stroke. He sat beside me when I was in intensive care. I couldn't speak right, couldn't say what I tried to say, the wrong words kept coming out, making no sense—”

“Aphasia,” Holly said. “A result of the stroke.”

Henry nodded. “Once, hooked up to all those machines, I tried to tell him what I'd known for almost thirteen years — that he wasn't a killer and that I'd been cruel to him.” New tears flooded his eyes. “But when it came out, it wasn't right at all, not what I meant, and he misunderstood it, thought I'd called him a murderer and was afraid of him. He left, and now's the first I've seen him since. More than four years.”

Jim sat with his head bowed.

Hands fisted.

What had he remembered of that night in the mill, the part that no one but him could know?

Holly got up from the bench, unable to endure the wait for Jim's reaction. She stood there, with no idea where to go. At last she sat down again. She put her hand over his fist, as before.

She looked up.

More birds. Maybe thirty of them now.

“I'm afraid,” Jim said, but that was all.

“After that night,” Henry said, “he never went into the mill again, never mentioned The Friend or the Willott book. And at first I thought it was good he turned away from that obsession … he seemed less strange. But later I've wondered … maybe he lost the one comfort he had.”

“I'm afraid to remember,” Jim said.

She knew what he meant: only one last long-hidden memory waited to be revealed. Whether his grandmother had died by accident. Or whether The Enemy had killed her. Whether he, as The Enemy, had killed her.

Unable to stare at Jim's bowed head a moment longer, unable to bear Henry Ironheart's wretched look of guilt and fragile hope, Holly glanced up at the birds again — and saw them coming. More than thirty of them now, dark knives slicing down through the somber sky, still high up but coming straight toward the courtyard.

“Jim, no!”

Henry looked up.

Jim lifted his face, too, but not to see what was coming. He knew what was coming. He raised his face as if to offer his eyes to their sharp beaks and frenzied claws.

Holly leaped to her feet, making herself a more prominent target than he was. “Jim, face it, remember it, for Christ's sake!”

She could hear the shrieks of the swift-descending birds.

“Even if The Enemy did it,” she said, pulling Jim's upturned face to her breast, shielding him, “you can get past that somehow, you can go on.”

Henry Ironheart cried out in shock, and the birds burst over Holly, flapping and squirming against her, swooping away, then more of them fluttering and scraping, trying to get past her and at Jim's face, at his eyes.

They didn't tear at her with either their beaks or talons, but she did not know how long they would spare her. They were The Enemy, after all, manifesting itself in a whole new way, and The Enemy hated her as much as it hated Jim.

The birds swirled out of the courtyard, back into the sky, gone like so many leaves in a violent updraft.

Henry Ironheart was frightened but unhurt. “Move away,” she told him.

“No,” he said. He reached helplessly for Jim, who would not reach for him.

When Holly dared look up, she knew that the birds were not finished. They had only soared to the fringe of the bearded gray clouds, where another score of them had collected. Fifty or sixty now, churning and dark, hungry and quick.

She was aware of people at the windows and sliding glass doors that opened onto the courtyard. Two nurses came through the same slider that she had used when wheeling Henry out to meet Jim.

“Stay back!” she shouted at them, not sure how much danger they might be in.

Jim's rage, while directed at himself and perhaps at God for the very fact of death's existence, might nevertheless spill over and spend itself on the innocent. Her shouted warning must have frightened the nurses, for they retreated and stood in the doorway.

She raised her eyes again. The larger flock was coming.

“Jim,” she said urgently, holding his face in both hands, peering into his beautiful blue eyes, icy now with a cold fire of self-hatred, “only one more step, only one more thing to remember.” Though their eyes were only a few inches apart, she did not believe that he saw her; he seemed to be looking through her as he had earlier in Tivoli Gardens when the burrowing creature had been racing at them.

The descending flock squealed demonically.

“Jim, damn you, what happened to Lena might not be worth suicide!”

The rustle-roar of wings filled the day. She pulled Jim's face against her body, and as before he did not struggle when she shielded him, which gave her hope. She bent her head and closed her eyes as tightly as she could.

They came: silken feathers; smooth cold beaks ticking, prying, searching; claws scrabbling gently, then not so gently, but still not drawing blood; swarming around her almost as if they were hungry rats, swirling, darting, fluttering, squirming along her back and legs, between her thighs, up along her torso, trying to get between his face and her bosom, where they could tear and gouge; batting against her head; and always the shrieking, as shrill as the cries of madwomen in a psychopathic fury, screaming in her ears, wordless demands for blood, blood, blood, and then she felt a sharp pain in her arm as one of the flock ripped open her sleeve and pinched skin with it.

“No!”

They rose and departed again. Holly did not realize they were gone, because her own beating heart and fluttering breath continued to sound like thunderous wings to her. Then she raised her head, opened her eyes, and saw they were spiraling back into the leaden sky to join a storm cloud of other birds, a mass of dark bodies and wings, perhaps two hundred of them high overhead.

She glanced at Henry Ironheart. The birds had drawn blood from one of his hands. Having huddled back into his chair during the attack, he now leaned forward again, reached out with one hand, and called Jim's name pleadingly.

Holly looked down into Jim's eyes as he sat on the bench in front of her, and still he was not there. He was in the mill, most likely, on the night of the storm, looking at his grandmother just one second before the fall, frozen at that moment in time, unable to advance the memory-film one more frame.

The birds were coming.

They were still far away, just under the cloud cover, but there were so many of them now that the thunder of their wings carried a greater distance. Their shrieks were like the voices of the damned.

“Jim, you can take the path that Larry Kakonis took, you can kill yourself. I can't stop you. But if The Enemy doesn't want me anymore, if it wants only you, don't think I'm spared. If you die, Jim, I'm dead, too, as good as dead, I'll do what Larry Kakonis did, I'll kill myself, and I'll rot in hell with you if I can't have you anywhere else!”

The Enemy of countless parts fell upon her as she pulled Jim's face against her a third time. She didn't hide her own face or close her eyes as before, but stood in that maelstrom of wings and beaks and talons. She looked back into scores of small, glistening, pure-black eyes that circled her unblinking, each as wet and deep as the night reflected on the face of the sea, each as merciless and cruel as the universe itself and as anything in the heart of humankind. She knew that, staring into those eyes, she was staring into a part of Jim, his most secret and darkest part, which she could not reach otherwise, and she said his name. She did not shout, did not scream, did not beg or plead, did not vent her anger or fear, but said his name softly, again and again, with all the tenderness that she felt for him, with all the love she had. They battered against her so hard that pinions snapped, opened their hooked beaks and shrieked in her face, plucked threateningly at her clothes and hair, tugging but not ripping, giving her one last chance to flee. They tried to intimidate her with their eyes, the cold and uncaring eyes of beasts of prey, but she was not intimidated, she just kept repeating his name, then the promise that she loved him, over and over until—

— they were gone.

They didn't whirl up into the sky, as before. They vanished. One moment the air was filled with them and their fierce cries — but the next moment they were gone as if they had never been.

Holly held Jim against her for a moment then let him go. He still looked through her more than at her and seemed to be in a trance.

“Jim,” Henry Ironheart said beseechingly, still reaching out toward his grandson.

After a hesitation, Jim slid off the bench, onto his knees in front of the old man. He took the withered hand and kissed it.

Without looking up at either Holly or Henry, Jim said, “Grandma saw The Enemy coming out of the wall. First time it happened, first time I saw it, too.” His voice sounded far away, as if a part of him were still back in the past, reliving that dreaded moment, grateful that there had not been as much reason to dread it as he had thought. “She saw it, and it frightened her, and she stumbled back into the stairs, tripped, fell …” He pressed his grandfather's hand to his cheek and said, “I didn't kill her.”

“I know you didn't, Jim,” Henry Ironheart said. “My God, I know you didn't.”

The old man looked up at Holly with a thousand questions about birds and enemies and things in walls. But she knew he would have to wait for answers until another day, as she had waited — as Jim had waited, too.

3

During the drive over the mountains and down into Santa Barbara, Jim slumped in his seat, eyes closed. He seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep. She supposed he needed sleep as desperately as any man could need it, for he'd enjoyed almost no real rest in twenty-five years.

She was no longer afraid to let him sleep. She was certain that The Enemy was gone, with The Friend, and that only one personality inhabited his body now. Dreams were no longer doorways.

For the time being, she did not want to return to the mill, even though they had left some gear there. She'd had enough of Svenborg, too, and all it represented in Jim's life. She wanted to hole up in a new place, where neither of them had been, where new beginnings might be forged with no taint of the past.

As she drove through that parched land under the ashen sky, she put the pieces together and studied the resulting picture:

… an enormously gifted boy, far more gifted than even he knows, lives through the slaughter in the Dixie Duck, but comes out of the holocaust with a shattered soul. In his desperation to feel good about himself again, he borrows Arthur Willott's fantasy, using his special power to create The Friend, an embodiment of his most noble aspirations, and The Friend tells him he has a mission in life.

But the boy is so full of despair and rage that The Friend alone is not enough to heal him. He needs a third personality, something into which he can shove all his negative feelings, all the darkness in himself that frightens him. So he creates The Enemy, embellishing Willott's story structure. Alone in the windmill, he has exhilarating conversations with The Friend — and works out his rage through the materialization of The Enemy.

Until, one night, Lena Ironheart walks in at the wrong moment. Frightened, she falls backward….

In shock because of what The Enemy has done, merely by its presence, Jim forces himself to forget the fantasy, both The Friend and Enemy, just as Jim Jamison forgot his alien encounter after saving the life of the future president of the United States. For twenty-five years, he struggles to keep a lid firmly on those fragmented personalities, suppressing both his very best and his very worst qualities, leading a relatively quiet and colorless life because he dares not tap his stronger feelings.

He finds purpose in teaching, which to some extent redeems him — until Larry Kakonis commits suicide. Without purpose anymore, feeling that he has failed Kakonis as he failed his parents and, even more profoundly, his grandmother, he subconsciously longs to live out Jim Jamison's courageous and redeeming adventure, which means freeing The Friend.

But when he frees The Friend, he frees The Enemy as well. And after all these years of being bottled inside him, his rage has only intensified, become blacker and more bitter, utterly inhuman in its intensity. The Enemy is something even more evil now than it was twenty-five years ago, a creature of singularly murderous appearance and temperament….

So Jim was like any victim of multiple-personality syndrome. Except for one thing. One little thing. He created nonhuman entities to embody aspects of himself, not other human identities — and had the power to give them flesh of their own. He hadn't been like Sally Field playing Sybil, sixteen people in one body. He had been three beings in three bodies, and one of them had been a killer.

Holly turned on the car heater. Though it must have been seventy degrees outside, she was chilled. The heat from the dashboard vents did nothing to warm her.

The clock behind the registration desk showed 1:11 P.M. when Holly checked them into a Quality motor lodge in Santa Barbara. While she filled out the form and provided her credit card to the clerk, Jim continued to sleep in the Ford.

When she returned with their key, she was able to rouse him enough to get him out of the car and into their room. He was in a stupor and went directly to the bed, where he curled up and once more fell instantly into a deep sleep.

She got diet sodas, ice, and candy bars from the vending-machine center near the pool.

In the room again, she closed the drapes. She switched on one lamp and arranged a towel over the shade to soften the light.

She pulled a chair near the bed and sat down. She drank diet soda and ate candy while she watched him sleep.

The worst was over. The fantasy had been burned away, and he had plunged completely into cold reality.

But she did not know what the aftermath would bring. She had never known him without his delusions, and she didn't know what he would be like when he had none. She didn't know if he would be a more optimistic man — or a darker one. She didn't know if he would still have the same degree of superhuman powers that he'd had before. He had summoned those powers from within himself only because he had needed them to sustain his fantasy and cling to his precarious sanity; perhaps, now, he would be only as gifted as he had been before his parents had died — able to levitate a pie pan, flip a coin with his mind, nothing more. Worst of all, she didn't know if he would still love her.

By dinnertime he was still asleep.

She went out and got more candy bars. Another binge. She would end up as plump as her mother if she didn't get control of herself.

He was still asleep at ten o'clock. Eleven. Midnight.

She considered waking him. But she realized that he was in a chrysalis, waiting to be born from his old life into a new one. A caterpillar needed time to turn itself into a butterfly. That was her hope, anyway.

Sometime between midnight and one o'clock in the morning, Holly fell asleep in her chair. She did not dream.

He woke her.

She looked up into his beautiful eyes, which were not cold in the dim light of the towel-draped lamp, but which were still mysterious.

He was leaning over her chair, shaking her gently. “Holly, come on. We've got to go.”

Instantly casting off sleep, she sat up. “Go where?”

“Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

“Why?”

Grabbing up one of her uneaten candy bars, peeling off the wrapper, biting into it, he said, “Tomorrow afternoon, three-thirty, a reckless schoolbus driver is going to try to beat a train at a crossing. Twenty-six kids are going to die if we're not there first.”

Rising from her chair, she said, “You know all that, the whole thing, not just a part of it?”

“Of course,” he said around a mouthful of candy bar. He grinned. “I know these things, Holly. I'm psychic, for God's sake.”

She grinned right back at him.

“We're going to be something, Holly,” he said enthusiastically. “Superman? Why the hell did he waste so much time holding down a job on a newspaper when he could've been doing good?”

In a voice that cracked with relief and with love for him, Holly said, “I always wondered about that.”

Jim gave her a chocolaty kiss. “The world hasn't seen anything like us, kid. Of course, you're going to have to learn martial arts, how to handle a gun, a few other things. But you're gonna be good at it, I know you are.”

She threw her arms around him and hugged him fiercely, with unadulterated joy.

Purpose.