" "Don't you want to help mankind any more?" Holly asked sharply. "Do not sleep." Jim moved to Holly's side. Whatever estrangement she had caused between her and Jim, by taking an aggressive stance with The Friend, was apparently behind them. He put an arm around her protectively. "You dare not sleep." The limestone was mottled with a deep red glow. "Dreams are doorways." The bloody light went out. The lantern provided the only illumination. And in the deeper darkness that followed The Friend's departure, the quiet hiss of the burning gas was the only sound. Holly stood at the head of the stairs, shining a flashlight into the gloom below. Jim supposed she was trying to make up her mind whether they really would be prevented from leaving the mill-and if so, how violently. Watching her from where he sat on his sleeping bag, he could not understand why it was all turning sour. He had come to the windmill because the bizarre and frightening events in his bedroom in Laguna Niguel, over eighteen hours ago, had made it impossible to continue ignoring the dark side to the mystery in which he had become enwrapped. Prior to that, he had been willing to drift along, doing what he was compelled to do, pulling people out of the fire at the last minute, a bemused but game superhero who had to rely on airplanes when he wanted to fly and who had to do his own laundry. But the increasing intrusion of The Enemy-whatever the hell it was-its undeniable evil and fierce hostility, no longer allowed Jim the luxury of ignorance. The Enemy was struggling to break through from some other place, another dimension perhaps, and it seemed to be getting closer on each attempt. Learning the truth about the higher power behind his activities had not been at the top of his agenda, because he had felt that enlightenment would be granted to him in time, but learning about The Enemy had come to seem urgently necessary for his survival-and Holly's. Nevertheless, he had traveled to the farm with the expectation that he.would encounter good as well as evil, experience joy as well as fear. Whatever he learned by plunging into the unknown should at least leave him with a greater understanding of his sacred life-saving mission and the supernatural forces behind it. But now he was more confused than before he'd come. Some developments had filled him with the wonder and joy for which he longed: the ringing in the stone, for one; and the beautiful, almost divine, light that was the essence of The Friend. He had been moved to rapture by the revelation that he was not merely saving lives but saving people so special that their survival would improve the fate of the entire human race. But that spiritual bliss had been snatched away from him by the growing realization that The Friend was either not telling them the whole truth or, worst case, was not telling them anything true at all. 'The childish petulance of the creature was unnerving in the extreme, and now Jim was not sure that anything he had done since saving the Newsomes last May was in the service of good rather than evil. Yet his fear was still tempered by hope. Though a splinter of despair had lodged in his heart and begun to fester, that spiritual infection was held in check by the core of optimism, however fragile, that had always been at the center of him. Holly switched off the flashlight, returned from the open door, and s down on her mattress. "I don't know, maybe it was an empty threat, but there's no way of telling till we try to leave." "You want to?" She shook her head. "What's the point in getting off the farm anyway? From everything we know, it can reach out to us anywhere we go. Right? I mean it reached you in Laguna Niguel, sent you on these missions, reached you out there in Nevada and sent you on to Boston to rescue Nicholas O'Conner." "I've felt it with me, at times, no matter where I've gone. In Houston, in Florida, in France, in England-it guided me, let me know what was coming, so I could do the job it wanted done." Holly looked exhausted. She was drawn and paler than the eerie glow af the gas lantern could account for, and her eyes were shadowed with rings of weariness. She closed her eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, a strained look on her face, as if she was trying to suppress a headache. With all his heart, Jim regretted that she had been drawn into this. But like his fear and despair, his regret was impure, tempered by the deep pleasure he took in her very presence. Though it was a selfish attitude, he was glad that she was with him, no matter where this strange night lead them. He was no longer alone. Still pinching the bridge of her nose, the lines in her forehead carved deep by her scowl, Holly said, "This creature isn't restricted to the area near the pon d, or just to psychic contact across great distances. It can manifest itself anywhere, judging by the scratches it left in my.sides and the way it entered the ceiling of your bedroom this morning." "Well, now wait," he said, "we know The Enemy can materialize over a considerable distance, yes, but we don't know that The Friend has that ability. It was The Enemy that came out of your dream and The Enemy that tried to reach us this morning." Holly opened her eyes and lowered her hand from her face. Her expression was bleak. "I think they're one and the same." "What?" "The Enemy and The Friend. I don't believe two entities are living under the pond, in that starship, if there is a starship, which I guess there is. I think there's only a single entity. The Friend and The Enemy are nothing more than different aspects of it." Holly's implication was clear, but it was too frightening for Jim to accept immediately. He said, "You can't be serious? You might as well be saying. . . it's insane." "That is what I'm saying. It's suffering the alien equivalent of a split personality. It's acting out both personalities, but isn't consciously aware of what it's doing." Jim's almost desperate need to believe in The Friend as a separate and purely benign creature must have been evident in his face, for Holly took his right hand, held it in both hers, and hurried on before he could interrupt: "The childish petulance, the grandiosity of its claim to be reshaping the entire destiny of our species, the flamboyance of its apparitions, its sudden fluctuations between an attitude of syrupy goodwill and sullen anger, the way it lies so damned transparently yet deludes itself into believing it's clever, its secretiveness about some issues when there is no apparent reason to be secretive-all of that makes sense if you figure we're dealing with an unbalanced mind." He looked for flaws in her reasoning, and found one. "But you can't believe an insane person, an insane alien individual, could pilot an unimaginably complex spacecraft across lightyears through countless dangers, while completely out of its mind." "It doesn't have to be like that. Maybe the insanity set in after it got here. Or maybe it didn't have to pilot the ship, maybe the ship is essentially automatic, an entirely robotic mechanism. Or maybe there were others of its kind aboard who piloted it, and maybe they're all dead now. Jim, it's never mentioned a crew, only The Enemy. And assuming you buy its extraterrestrial origins, does it really ring true that only two individuals would set out on an intergalactic exploration? Maybe it killed the others." Everything she was theorizing could be true, but then anything she theorized could be true. They were dealing with the Unknown, capital "U," and the possibilities in an infinite universe were infinite in number. He remembered reading somewhere-even many scientists believed that anything the human imagination conceived, regardless of how fanciful, could conceivably exist somewhere in the universe, because the infinite.nature of creation meant that it was no less fluid, no less fertile than any man's or woman's dreams. Jim expressed that thought to Holly, then said, "But what bothers me is that you're doing now what you rejected earlier. You're trying hard to explain it in human terms, when it may be too alien for us to understand it at all. How can you assume that an alien species can even suffer insanity the way we can, or that it's capable of multiple personalities? These are all strictly human concepts." She nodded. "You're right, of course. But at the moment, this theory's the only one that makes sense to me. Until something happens to disprove it, I've got to operate on the assumption that we're not dealing with a rational being." With his free hand, he reached out and increased the gas flow to the wicks in the Coleman lantern, providing more light. "Jesus, I've got a bad case of the creeps," he said, shivering. "Join the club." "If it is schizo, and if it slips into the identity of The Enemy and can't get back out. . . what might it do to us?" "I don't even want to think about that," Ho
lly said. "If it's as intellectually superior to us as it seems to be, if it's from a long-lived race with experience and knowledge that makes the whole of the human experience seem like a short story compared to the Great Books of the Western World, then it sure as hell knows some tortures and cruelties that would make Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot look like Sunday-school teachers." He thought about that for a moment, even though he tried not to. The chocolate doughnuts he had eaten lay in an undigested, burning wad in his stomach. Holly said, "When it comes back-" "For God's sake," he interrupted, "no more adversarial tactics!" "I screwed up," she admitted. "But the adversarial approach was the correct one, I just carried it too far. I pushed too hard. When it comes back, I'll modify my technique." He supposed he had more fully accepted her insanity theory than he was willing to acknowledge. He was now in a cold sweat about what The Friend might do if their behavior tipped it into its other, darker identity. "Why don't we jettison confrontation altogether, play along with it, stroke its ego, keep it as happy as we-" "That's no good. You can't control madness by indulging it. That only creates more and deeper madness. I suspect any nurse in a mental institution would tell you the best way to deal with potentially violent paranoid is to be nice, respectful, but firm." He withdrew his hand from.hers because his palms were clammy. He blotted them on his shirt. The mill seemed unnaturally silent, as if it were in a vacuum where sound could not travel, sealed in an immense bell jar, on display in a museum in a land of giants. At another time Jim might have found the silence disturbing, but now he embraced it because it probably meant The Friend was sleeping or at least preoccupied with concerns other than them. "It wants to do good," he said. "It might be insane, and it might be violent and even evil in its second identity, a regular Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But like Dr. Jekyll it really wants to do good. At least we've got that going for us." She thought about it a moment. "Okay, I'll give you that one. And when it comes back, I'll try to pry some truth out of it." "What scares me most-is there really anything we can learn from it that could help us? Even if it tells us the whole truth about everything, if it's insane it's going to turn to irrational violence sooner or later." She nodded. "But we gotta try." They settled into an uneasy silence. When he looked at his watch, Jim saw that it was ten minutes past one in the morning. He was not sleepy. He didn't have to worry about drifting off and dreaming and thereby opening a doorway, but he was physically drained. Though he had not done anything but sit in a car and drive, then sit or stand in the high room waiting for revelations, his muscles ached as if he had put in ten hours of heavy manual labor. His face felt slack with weariness, and his eyes were hot and grainy. Extreme stress could be every bit as debilitating as strenuous physical activity. He found himself wishing The Friend would never return, wishing not in an idle way but with the wholehearted commitment of a young boy wishing that an upcoming visit to the dentist would not transpire. He put every fiber of his being into the wish, as if convinced, the way a kid sometimes could be, that wishes really did now and then come true. He remembered a quote from Chazal, which he had used when teaching a literature unit on the supernatural fiction of Poe and Hawthorne: Extreme terror gives us back the gestures of our childhood If he ever went back into the classroom, he would be able to teach that unit a hell of a lot better, thanks to what had happened to him in the old windmill. At 1:25 The Friend disproved the value of wishing by putting in a sudden appearance. This time no bells heralded its approach. Red light blossomed in the wall, like a burst of crimson paint in clear water. Holly scrambled to her feet..So did Jim. He could no longer sit relaxed in the presence of this mysterious being, because he was now more than halfconvinced that at any moment it might strike at them with merciless brutality. The light separated into many swarms, surged all the way around the room, then began to change from red to amber. The Friend spoke without waiting for a question: "August first Seattle Washington. Laura Lenaskian, saved from drowning. She will give birth to u child who will become a great composer and whose music will give solace to many people in times of trouble. August eighth. Peoria, Illinois Doogie Burkette. He will grow up to be a paramedic in Chicago, where he will do much good and save many lives August twelfth. Portland Oregon. Billy Jenkins He will grow up to be a brilliant medical technologist whose inventions will revolutionize medical care" Jim met Holly's eyes and did not even have to wonder what she was thinking: the same thing he was thinking. The Friend was in its testy, I'll show-you mode, and it was providing details which it expected would lend credibility to its extravagant claim to be altering human destiny. But it was impossible to know if what it said was true-or merely fantasies that it had worked up to support its story. The important thing, perhaps, was that it seemed to care deeply that they believe it. Jim had no idea why his or Holly's opinion should matter at all to a being as intellectually superior to them as they were to a field mouse, but the fact that it did evidently matter seemed to be to their advantage. " August twentieth. The Mojave Desert Nevada. Lisa and Susan Jawolski . Lisa will provide her daughter with the love affection. and counseling that will make it possible for the girl eventually to overcome the severe psychological trauma of her father's murder and grow up to be the greatest woman statesman in the entire history of the world, a force for enlightenment and compassionate government policies August twenty-third. Boston, Massachusetts. Nicholas O'Conner saved from an electrical-vault explosion. He will grow up to become a priest who will dedicate his life to caring for the poor in the slums of India-" The Friend's attempt to answer Holly's criticism and present a six grandiose version of its work was childishly transparent. The Burkette bo was not going to save the world, just be a damned good paramedic, and Nicholas O'Conner was going to be a humble man leading a self effacing existence among the needy-but the rest of them were still great or brilliant or staggeringly talented in one way or another. The entity now recognized the need for credibility in its tale of grandeur, but it could not bring itself to significantly water down its professed accomplishments. And something else was bothering Jim: that voice. The longer he listened to it, the more he became convinced that he had heard it before, not in this room twenty-five years ago, not within its current context at all. The voice had to be appropriated, of course, because in its natural condition the alien almost certainly did not possess anything similar to human vocal cords; its biology would be inhuman. The voice it was imitating, as if it were an impersonator performing in a cosmic cocktail.lounge, was that of a person Jim had once known. He could not quite identify it. " August twenty-sixth. Dubuque Iowa. Christine and Casey Dubrovek Christine will give birth to another child who will grow up to be the greatest geneticist of the next century. Casey will become an exceptional school teacher who will tremendously influence the lives of her students, and who will never fail one of them to the extent that a suicide results" Jim felt as if he had been hit in the chest with a hammer. That insulting accusation, directed at him and referring to Larry Kakonis, shook his remaining faith in The Friend's basic desire to do good. Holly said, "Shit, that was low." The entity's pettiness sickened Jim, because he wanted so badly to believe in its stated purpose and goodness. The scintillant amber light swooped and swirled through the walls, as if The Friend was delighted by the effect of the blow it had struck. Despair welled so high in Jim that for a moment he even dared to consider that the entity under the pond was not good at all but purely evil. Maybe the people he had saved since May fifteenth were not destined to elevate the human condition but debase it. Maybe Nicholas O'Conner was really going to grow up to be a serial killer. Maybe Billy Jenkins was going to be a bomber pilot who went rogue and found a way to override all the safeguards in the system in order to drop a few nuclear weapons on a major metropolitan area; and maybe instead of being the greatest woman statesman in the history of the world, Susie Jawolski was going to be a radical activist who planted bombs in corporate boardrooms and machinegunned those with whom she disagreed. But as he swayed precariously on the rim of that black chasm, Jim saw in memory the fa
ce of young Susie Jawolski, which had seemed to be the essence of innocence. He could not believe that she would be anything less than a positive force in the lives of her family and neighbors. He had done good works; therefore The Friend had done good works, whether or not it was insane, and even though it had the capacity to be cruel. Holly addressed the entity within the wall: "We have more questions." "Ask them, ask them." Holly glanced at her tablet, and Jim hoped she would remember to be less aggressive. He sensed that The Friend was more unstable than at any previous point during the night. She said, "Why did you choose Jim to be your instrument?" "He was convenient. " "You mean because he lived on the farm?" "Yes. " "Have you ever worked through anyone else the way you've been working.through Jim?" "No." "Not in all these ten thousand years?" "Is this a trick question? Do you think you can trick me? Do you still not believe me when I tell you the truth?" Holly looked at Jim, and he shook his head, meaning that this was no time to be argumentative, that discretion was not only the better part of valor but their best hope of survival. Then he wondered if this entity could read his mind as well as intrude into it and implant directives. Probably not. If it could do that, it would flare into anger now, incensed that they still thought it insane and were patronizing it. "I'm sorry," Holly said. "It wasn't a trick question, not at all. We just want to know about you. We're fascinated by you. If we ask questions that you find offensive, please understand that we do so unintentionally, out of ignorance." The Friend did not reply. The light pulsed more slowly through the limestone, and though Jim knew the danger of interpreting alien actions in human terms, he felt that the changed patterns and tempo of the radiance indicated The Friend was in a contemplative mood. It was chewing over what Holly had just said, deciding whether or not she was sincere. Finally the voice came again, more mellow than it had been in a while: "Ask your questions" Consulting her tablet again, Holly said, "Will you ever release Jim from this work?" "Does he want to be released?" Holly looked at Jim inquiringly. Considering what he had been through in the past few months, Jim was a bit surprised by his answer: "Not if I'm actually doing good." "You are How can you doubt it? But regardless of whether you believe my intentions to be good or evil, I would never release you." The ominous tone of that last statement mitigated the relief Jim felt at the reassurance that he had not saved the lives of future murderers and thieves. Holly said, "Why have you-" The Friend interrupted. "There is one other reason that I chose Jim Ironheart for this work. " "What's that?" Jim asked. "You needed it" "I did?"."Purpose." Jim understood. His fear of The Friend was as great as ever, but he was moved by the implication that it had wanted to salvage him. By giving meaning to his broken and empty life, it had redeemed him just as surely as it had saved Billy Jenkins, Susie Jawolski, and all the others, though they had been rescued from more immediate deaths than the death of the soul that had threatened Jim. The Friend's statement seemed to reveal a capacity for pity. And Jim knew he'd deserved pity after the suicide of Larry Kakonis, when he had spiraled into an unreasonable depression. This compassion, even if it was another lie, affected Jim more strongly than he would have expected, and a shimmer of tears came to his eyes. Holly said, "Why have you waited ten thousand years to decide to use someone like Jim to shape human destinies?" "I had to study the situation first collect data, analyze it, and then decide if my intervention was wise. " "It took ten thousand years to make that decision? Why? That's longer than recorded history." No reply. She tried the question again. At last The Friend said, "I am going now" Then, as if it did not want them to interpret its recent display of compassion as a sign of weakness, it added: if you attempt to leave, you will die" "When will you be back?" Holly asked. "Do not sleep. " "We're going to have to sleep sooner or later," Holly said as the amber light turned red and the room seemed to be washed in blood. "Do not sleep. " "It's two in the morning," she said. "Dreams are doorways." Holly flared up: "We can't stay awake forever, damn it!" The light in the limestone was snuffed out. The Friend was gone. Somewhere people laughed. Somewhere music played and dancers danced, and somewhere lovers strained toward ecstasy. But in the high room of the mill, designed for storage and now stacked to the ceiling with an anticipation of violence, the mood was decidedly grim. Holly loathed being so helpless. Throughout her life she had been a.woman of action, even if the actions she took were usually destructive rather than constructive. When a job turned out to be less satisfying than she had hoped, she never hesitated to resign, move on. When a relationship soured or just proved uninteresting, she was always quick to terminate it. If she had often retreated from problems-from the responsibilities of being a conscientious journalist when she had seen that journalism was as corrupt as anything else, from the prospect of love, from putting down roots and committing to one place-well, at least retreat was a form of action. Now she was denied even that. The Friend had that one good effect on her. It was not going to let her retreat from this problem. For a while she and Jim discussed the latest visitation and went over the remaining questions on her list, to which they made changes and additions. The most recent portion of her ongoing interview with The Friend had resulted in some interesting and potentially useful information. It was only potentially useful, however, because they both still felt that nothing The Friend said could be relied upon to be true. By 3 :15 in the morning, they were too weary to stand and too to continue sitting. They pulled their sleeping bags together and stretched out side by side, on their backs, staring at the domed ceiling. To help guard against sleep, they left the gas lantern at its brightest setting. As they waited for The Friend to return, they kept talking, not about anything of importance, small talk of every kind, anything to keep their minds occupied. It was difficult to doze off in the middle of a conversation; and if one did slip away, the other would know it by the lack of a response. Th ey also held hands, her right in his left-the logic being that even during a brief pause in the conversation, if one of them started to take a nap, the other would be warned by the sudden relaxation of the sleeper's grip. Holly did not expect to have difficulty staying awake. In her university days she had pulled all-nighters before exams or when papers were due, and had stayed awake for thirty-six hours without much of a struggle. During her early years as a reporter, when she'd still believed that journalism mattered to her, she had labored away all night on a story, poring over research or listening yet again to interview tapes or sweating over the wording of a paragraph. She had missed nights of sleep in recent years, as well, if only because she was occasionally plagued by insomnia. She was a night owl by nature anyway. Piece of cake. But though she had not yet been awake twenty-four hours since bolting out of bed in Laguna Niguel yesterday morning, she felt the sandman sliding up against her, whispering his subliminal message of sleep, sleep, sleep. The past few days had been a blur of activity and personal change, both of which could be expected to take a toll of her resources. And some nights she had gotten too little rest, only in part.because of the dreams Dreams are doorways. Sleep was dangerous, she had to stay awake. Damn it, she shouldn't need sleep this badly yet, no matter how much stress she had been under lately. She struggled to keep up her end of the conversation with Jim, even though at times she realized that she was not sure what they were talking about and did not fully understand the words that came out of her own mouth. Dreams are doorways. It was almost as if she had been drugged, or as if The Friend, after warning them against sleep, was secretly exerting pressure on a narcoleptic button in her brain. Dreams are doorways. She fought against the descending oblivion, but she found that she did not possess the strength or will to sit up. . . or to open her eyes. Her eyes were closed. She had not realized that her eyes were closed. Dreams are doorways. Panic could not arouse her. She continued to drift deeper under the sandman's spell even as she heard her heart pound harder and faster. She felt her hand loosening its grip on Jim's hand, and she knew he would respond to that warning, would keep her awake, but she felt his grip loosening on her hand, and she realized they were succumbing to the sandman si
multaneously. She drifted in darkness. She felt that she was being watched. It was both a reassuring and a frightening feeling. Something was going to happen. She sensed it. For a while, however, nothing happened. Except darkness. Then she became aware that she had a mission to perform. But that couldn't be right. Jim was the one who was sent on missions not her. A mission. Her mission. She would be sent on a mission of her own. It was vitally important. Her life depended on how well she performed. Jim's life depended on it as well. The whole world's continued existence depended on it. But the darkness remained. She just drifted. It felt nice. She slept and slept. At some point during the night, she dreamed. As nightmares went, this one was a lulu, all the stops pulled out, but it was nothing like her recent dreams of the mill and The Enemy. It was worse than those because it was painted in excruciating detail and because throughout the experience she was in the grip of anguish and terror so intense that nothing in her experience prepared her for it, not even the crash of Flight 246..Lying on a tile floor, under a table. On her side. Peering out at floor level. Directly ahead is a chair, tubular metal and orange plastic, under the chair a scattering of golden french fries and a cheeseburger, the meat having slid halfway out of the bun on a skid of ketchup-greased lettuce. Then a woman, an old lady, also lying on the floor, head turned toward Holly. Looking through the tubular legs of the chair, across the fries and disarranged burger, the lady stares at her, a look of surprise, stares and stares, never blinking, and then Holly sees that the lady's eye nearest the floor isn't there any more, an empty hole, blood leaking out. Oh, lady. Oh, lady, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Holly hears a terrible sound, chuda-chudachuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, doesn't recognize it, hears people screaming, a lot of people, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, still screaming but not as much as before, glass shattering, wood breaking, a man shouting like a bear, roaring, very angry and roaring, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuduchuda-chuda-chuda-chuda. She knows now that it's gunfire, the heavy rhythmic pounding of an automatic weapon, and she wants to get out of there. So she turns in the opposite direction from which she's been facing because she doesn't want to-can't, just can't! crawl by the old lady whose eye has been shot out. But behind her is a little girl, about eight, lying on the floor in a pink dress with black patent-leather shoes and white socks, a little girl with white-blond hair, a little girl with, a little girl with, a little girl with patent-leather shoes, a little girl with, a little girl with, a little girl with white socks, a little girl with, a little girl with with with with with half her face shot of. A red smile. Broken white teeth in a red, lopsided smile. Sobbing, screaming, and still more chuda-chuda-chudachuda, it's never going to stop, it's going to go on forever, that terrible sound, chuda-chuda-chuda. Then Holly's moving, scrambling on her hands and knees, away from both the old lady and the little girl with half a face. Unavoidably her hands slap-skip-skid-slide through warm french fries, a hot fish sandwich, a puddle of mustard, as she moves, moves, staying under the tables, between the chairs, then she puts her hand down in the icy slush of a spilled Coke, and when she sees the image of Dixie Duck on the large paper cup from which the soda has spilled, she knows where she is, she's in a Dixie Duck Burger Palace, one of her favorite places in the world. Nobody's screaming now, maybe they realize that a Dixie Duck is not a place you should scream, but somebody is sobbing and groaning, and somebody else is saying please-please-please-please over and over again. Holly starts to crawl out from under another table, and she sees a man in a costume standing a few feet from her, turned half away from her, and she thinks maybe this is all just a trick, trick-or-treat, a Halloween performance. But it isn't Halloween. Yet the man is in a costume he's wearing combat boots like G.I. Joe and camouflage pants and a black T-shirt and a beret, like the Green Berets wear, only this one is black, and it must be a costume because he isn't really a soldier, can't be a soldier with that big sloppy belly overhanging his pants, and he hasn't shaved in maybe a week, soldiers have to shave, so he's only wearing soldier stuff This girl is kneeling on the floor in front of him, one of the teenagers who works at Dixie Duck, the pretty one with the red hair, she winked at Holly when she took her order, now she's kneeling in front of the guy in the soldier costume, with her head.bowed like she's praying, except what she's saying is please please-please-please. The guy is shouting at her about the CIA and mind control and secret spy networks operated out of the Dixie Duck storeroom. Then the guy stops shouting and he looks at the red-haired girl awhile, just looks down at her, and then he says look-at-me, and she says please-please-don't, and he says look-at-me again, so she raises her head and looks at him, and he says what-do-you-think-I-am-stupid? The girl is so scared, she is just so scared, and she says no-please-I-don't-know-anything-about-this, and he says like-shit-you-don't, and he lowers the big gun, he puts the big gun right there in her face, just maybe an inch or two from her face. She says oh-my-god-oh-my-god, and he says you're-one-of the-rat-people, and Holly is sure the guy will now throw the gun aside and laugh, and everyone playing dead people will get up and laugh, too, and the manager will come out and take bows for the Halloween performance, except it isn't Halloween. Then the guy pulls the trigger, chuda-chudachuda-chuda-chuda, and the red-haired girl dissolves. Holly eels around and heads back the way she came, moving so fast, trying to get away from him before he sees her, because he's crazy, that's what he is, he's a crazyman. Holly is splashing through the same spilled food and drinks that she splashed through before, past the little girl in the pink dress and right through the girl's blood, praying the crazyman can't hear her scuttling away from him. CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDA-CHUDACHUDA! But he must be shooting the other direction, because no bullets are smashing into anything around her, so she keeps going, right across a dead man with his insides coming out, hearing sirens now, sirens wailing outside, the cops'll get this crazyman. Then she hears a crash behind her, a table being overturned, and it sounds so close, she looks back, she sees him, the crazyman, he's coming straight toward her, pushing tables out of his way, kicking aside chairs, he sees her. She clambers over another dead woman and then she's in a corner, on top of a dead man who's slumped in the corner, she's in the lap of the dead man, in the arms of the dead man and no way to get out of there because the crazyman is coming. The crazyman looks so scary, so bad and scary, that she can't watch him coming, doesn't want to see the gun in her face the way the red-haired girl saw it, so she turns her head away, turns her face to the dead man She woke from the dream as she had never awakened from another, not screaming, not even with an unvoiced cry caught in her throat, but gagging. She was cu rled into a tight ball, hugging herself, dry-heaving, choking not on anything she had eaten but on sheer throat-clogging repulsion. Jim was turned away from her, lying on his side. His knees were drawn up slightly in a modified fetal position. He was still sound asleep. When she could get her breath, she sat up. She was not merely shaking, she was rattling. She was convinced she could hear her bones clattering against one another. She was glad that she had not eaten anything after the doughnuts last evening. They had passed through her stomach hours ago. If she had eaten anything else, she'd be wearing it now. She hunched forward and put her face in her hands. She sat like that until the rattling quieted to a shudder and the shudder faded to spasms.of shivering. When she raised her face from her hands, the first thing she noticed was daylight at the narrow windows of the high room. It was opalescent graypink, a weak glow rather than a sunny-blue glare, but daylight nonetheless. Seeing it, she realized that she had not been convinced she would ever see daylight again. She looked at her wristwatch. 6:10. Dawn must have broken only a short while ago. She could have been asleep only two to two and a half hours. It had been worse than no sleep at all; she did not feel in the least rested. The dream. She suspected that The Friend had used its telepathic power to push her down into sleep against her will. And because of the unusually intense nature of the nightmare, she was convinced it had sent her that gruesome reel of mind-film. But why? Jim murmured and stirred, then grew still again, breathing de
eply but quietly. His dream must not be the same one she'd had; if it was, he would be writhing and crying out like a man on the rack. She sat for a while, considering the dream, wondering if she had been shown a prophetic vision. Was The Friend warning her that she was going to wind up in a Dixie Duck Burger Palace scrambling for her life through food and blood, stalked by a raving maniac with an automatic carbine? She had never even heard of Dixie Duck, and she couldn't imagine a more ludicrous place to die. She was living in a society where the streets were crawling with casualties of the drug wars, some of them so brain-blasted that they might well pick up a gun and go looking for the rat people who were working with the CIA, running spy networks out of burger restaurants. She had worked on newspapers all her adult life. She had seen stories no less tragic, no more strange. After about fifteen minutes, she couldn't bear to think about the nightù mare any more, not for a while. Instead of getting a handle on it through analysis, she became more confused and distressed the longer she dwelt on it. In memory, the images of slaughter did not fade, as was usually the case with a dream, but became more vivid. She didn't need to puzzle it out right now. Jim was sleeping, and she considered waking him. But he needed his rest as much as she did. There was no sign of The Enemy making use of a dream doorway, no change in the limestone walls or the oak-plank floor, so she let Jim sleep. As she had looked around the room, studying the walls, she had noticed the yellow tablet lying on the floor under the far window. She had pitched it aside last evening when The Friend had resisted vocalizing its answers and had tried, instead, to present her with responses to all.her written questions at once, before she was able to read them aloud. She'd never had a chance to ask it all of the questions on her list, and now she wondered what might be on that answer-tablet. She eased off her bedding as quietly as possible, rose, and walked carefully across the room. She tested the floorboards as she went to make sure they weren't going to squeak when she put her full weight on them. As she stooped to pick up the tablet, she heard a sound that froze her. Like a heartbeat with an extra thump in it. She looked around at the walls, up at the dome. The light from the highburning lantern and the windows was sufficient to be certain that the limestone was only limestone, the wood only wood. Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB. . . It was faint, as if someone was tapping the rhythm out on a drum far away, outside the mill, somewhere up in the dry brown hills. But she knew what it was. No drum. It was the tripartite beat that always preceded the materialization of The Enemy. Just as the bells had, until its final visit, preceded the arrival of The Friend. As she listened, it faded away. She strained to hear it. Gone. Relieved but still trembling, she picked up the tablet. The pages were rumpled, and they made some noise falling into place. Jim's steady breathing continued to echo softly around the room, with no change of rhythm or pitch. Holly read the answers on the first page, then the second. She saw that they were the same responses The Friend had vocalized-although without the spur-of the-moment questions that she had not written down on the question-tablet. She skimmed down the third and fourth pages, on which it had listed the people Jim had saved-Carmen Diaz, Amanda Cutter, Steven Aimes, Laura Lenaskian-explaining what great things each of them was destined to achieve. Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB. . . She snapped her head up. The sound was still distant, no louder than before. Jim groaned in his sleep. Holly took a step away from the window, intending to wake him, but the dreaded sound faded away again. Evidently The Enemy was in the neighborhood, but it had not found a doorway in Jim's dream. He had to.get his sleep, he couldn't function without it. She decided to let him alone. Easing back to the window again, Holly held the answer-tablet up to the light. She turned to the fifth page-and felt the flesh on the nape of her neck go as cold and nubbly as frozen turkey skin. Peeling the pages back with great delicacy, so as not to rustle them more than absolutely necessary, she checked the sixth page, the seventh, the eighth. They were all the same. Messages were printed on them in the wavery hand that The Friend had used when pulling its little words-risingas-if-through-water trick. But they were not answers to her questions. They were two alternating statements, unpunctuated, each repeated three times per page: HE LOVES YOU HOLLY HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY HE LOVES YOU HOLLY HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY HE LOVES YOU HOLLY HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY Staring at those obsessively repeated statements, she knew that "he" could be no one but Jim. She focused only on the five hateful words, trying to understand. And suddenly she thought that she did. The Friend was warning her that in its madness it would act against her, perhaps because it hated her for bringing Jim to the mill, for making him seek answers, and for being a distraction from his mission. If The Friend, which was the sane half of the alien consciousness, could reach into Jim's mind and compel him to undertake life-saving missions, was it possible that The Enemy, the dark half, could reach into his mind and compel him to kill? Instead of the insane personality materializing in monstrous form as it had done for an instant at the motel Friday night and as it attempted to do in Jim's bedroom yesterday, might it choose to use Jim against her, take command of him to a greater extent than The Friend had ever done, and turn him into a killing machine? That might perversely delight the mad-child aspect of the entity. She shook herself as if casting off a pestering wasp. No. It was impossible. All right, Jim could kill in the defense of innocent people. But he was incapable of killing someone innocent. No alien consciousness, no matter how powerful, could override his true nature. In his heart he was good and kind and caring. His love for her could not be subverted by this alien force, no matter how strong it was. But how did she know that? She was engaging in wishful thinking. For all she knew, The Enemy's powers of mental control were so awesome that it could reach into her brain right now and tell her to drown herself in the pond, and she would do as told. She remembered Norman Rink. The Atlanta convenience store. Jim had pumped eight rounds from a shotgun into the guy, blasting at him again and again, long after he was dead. Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB. . ..Still far away. Jim groaned softly. She moved away from the window again, intent on waking him, and almost called out his name, before she realized that The Enemy might be in him already. Dreams are doorways. She didn't have a clue as to what The Friend meant by that, or if it was anything more than stage dressing like the bells. But maybe what it had meant was that The Enemy could enter the dreamer's dream and thus the dreamer's mind. Maybe this time The Enemy did not intend to materialize from the wall but from Jim, in the person of Jim, in total control of Jim, just for a murderous little lark. Lub-dub-DUB, !ub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB. . . A little louder, a little closer? Holly felt that she was losing her mind. Paranoid, schizoid, flat-out crazy. No better than The Friend and his other half She was frantically trying to understand a totally alien consciousness, and the more she pondered the possibilities, the stranger and more varied the possibilities became. In an infinite universe, anything can happen, any nightmare can be made flesh. In an infinite universe, life was therefore essentially the same as a dream. Contemplation of that under the stress of a life-or-death situation, was guaranteed to drive you bugshit. Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB. . . She could not move. She could only wait. The tripartite beat faded again. Letting her breath out in a rush, she backed up against the wall beside the window, less afraid of the limestone now than she was of Jim Ironheart. She wondered if it was all right t o wake him when the threenote heartbeat was not audible. Maybe The Enemy was only in his dream -and therefore in him-when that triple thud could be heard. Afraid to act and afraid not to act, she glanced down at the tablet in her hand. Some of the pages had fallen shut, and she was no longer looking at the HE LOVES YOU HOLLY/HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY litany. Before her eyes, instead, was the list of people who had been saved by Jim, along with The Friend's grandiose explanations of their importance. She saw "Steven Aimes" and realized at once that he was the only one on the list whose fate The Friend had not vocalized during one or another of their conversations last night. She remembered him because he was the only older person on the list, fifty-seven. She read the words und
er his name, and the chill that had touched her nape earlier was nothing compared to the spike of ice that drove through it now and pierced her spine..Steven Aimes had not been saved because he would father a child who would be a great diplomat or a great artist or a great healer. He had not been saved because he would make an enduring contribution to the welfare of mankind. The reason for his salvation was expressed in just eleven words, the most horrifying eleven words that Holly had ever read or hoped to read: BECAUSE HE LOOKS LIKE MY FATHER WHOM I FAILED TO SAVE. Not "like Jim 's father" which The Friend would have said. Not "whom he failed to save," as the alien would surely have put it MY FATHER. I FAILED. MY. I. The infinite universe just kept expanding, and now an entirely new possibility presented itself to her, revealed in the telling words about Steven Aimes. No starship rested under the pond. No alien had been in hiding on the farm for ten thousand years, ten years, or ten days. The Friend and The Enemy were real enough: they were thirds, not halves, of the same personality, three in one entity, an entity with enormous and wonderful and terrifying powers, an entity both godlike and yet as human as Holly was. Jim Ironheart. Who had been shattered by tragedy when he was ten years old. Who had painstakingly put himself together again with the help of a complex fantasy about star-traveling gods. Who was as insane and dangerous as he was sane and loving. She did not understand where he had gotten the power that he so obviously possessed, or why he was not aware whatsoever that the power was within him rather than coming from some imaginary alien presence. The realization that he was everything, that the end and beginning of this mystery lay solely in him and not beneath the pond, raised more questions than it answered. She didn't understand how such a thing could be true, but she knew it was, at last, the truth. Later, if she survived, she might have the time to seek a better understanding. Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB. . . Closer but not close. Holly held her breath, waiting for the sound to get louder. Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB. . . Jim shifted in his sleep. He snorted softly and smacked his lips, just like any ordinary dreamer. But he was three personalities in one, and at least two of them possessed incredible power, and at least one of them was deadly. And it was coming. Lub-dub-DUB. . . Holly pressed back against the limestone. Her heart was pounding so hard that it seemed to have hammered her throat half shut; she had trouble swallowing. The tripartite beat faded. Silence..She moved along the curved wall. Easy little steps. Sideways. Toward the timbered, ironbound door. She eased away from the wall just far enough to reach out and snare her purse by its straps. The closer she gut to the head of the stairs, the more certain she became that the door was going to slam shut before she reached it, that Jim was going to sit up and turn to her. His blue eyes would not be beautiful but cold, as she had twice glimpsed them, filled with rage but cold. She reached the door, eased through it backward onto the first step, not wanting to take her eyes off Jim. But if she tried to back down those narrow stairs without a handrail, she would fall, break an arm or leg. So she turned away from the high room and hurried toward the bottom as quickly as she dared, as quietly as she could. Though the velvety-gray morning light outlined the windows, the lower chamber was treacherously dark. She had no flashlight, only the extra edge of an adrenaline rush. Unable to remember if any rubble was stacked along the wall that might set up a clatter when she knocked it over, she moved slowly along that limestone curve, her back to it, edging sideways again. The antechamber archway was somewhere ahead on her right. When she looked to her left, she could barely see the foot of the stairs down which she had just descended. Feeling the wall ahead of her with her right hand, she discovered the corner. She stepped through the archway and into the antechamber. Though that space had been blind-dark last night, it was dimly lit now by the pale post-dawn glow that lay beyond the open outside door. The morning was overcast. Pleasantly cool for August. The pond was still and gray. Morning insects issued a thin, almost inaudible background buzz, like faint static on a radio with the volume turned nearly off She hurried to the Ford and stealthily opened the door. Another panic hit her as she thought of the keys. Then she felt them in a pocket of her jeans, where she had slipped them last night after using the bathroom at the farmhouse. One key for the farmhouse, one key for his house in Laguna Niguel, two keys for the car, all on a simple brass-bead chain. She threw the purse and tablet into the back seat and got behind the wheel, but didn't close the door for fear the sound would wake him. She was not home free yet. He might burst out of the windmill, The Enemy in charge of him, leap across the short expanse of gravel, and drag her from the car. Her hands shook as she fumbled with the keys. She had trouble inserting.the right one in the ignition. But then she got it in, twisted it, put her foot on the accelerator, and almost sobbed with relief when the engine turned over with a roar. She yanked the door shut, threw the Ford in reverse, and backed along the gravel path that circled the pond. The wheels spun up a hail of gravel, which rattled against the back of the car as she reversed into it. When she reached the area between the barn and the house, where she could turn around and head out of the driveway front-first, she jammed on the brakes instead. She stared at the windmill, which was now on the far side of the water. She had nowhere to run. Wherever she went, he would find her. He could see the future, at least to some extent, if not as vividly or in as much detail as The Friend had claimed. He could transform drywall into a monstrous living organism, change limestone into a transparent substance filled with whirling light, project a beast of hideous design into her dreams and into the doorway of her motel, track her, find her, trap her. He had drawn her into his mad fantasy and most likely still wanted her to play out her role in it. The Friend in Jim-and Jim himself might let her go. But the third personality-the murderous part of him, The Enemy-would want her blood. Maybe she would be fortunate, and maybe the two benign thirds of him would prevent the other third from taking control and coming after her. But she doubted it. Besides, she could not spend the rest of her life waiting for a wall to bulge outward unexpectedly, form into a mouth, and bite her hand off And there was one other problem. She could not abandon him. He needed her. Part THREE From childhood s hour I have not been As others were I have not seen As others saw. Alone, F,Edgar ALLAN POE Vzbratzons in a wzre. Ice crystals in a beatzng heart. Cold fire. A mind s frzgzdzty: frozen steel, dark rage morbzdity. Cold fire Defense against a cruel life death and strzfe: Cold fire. -that. HOOK OF counted SOHROWS THE REST OF AUGUST 29 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 t
he lingering dream it was. Dreams are doorways, The Frie nd 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 dreamlike 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, aroundaroundaround. 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 return
ed. 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 funhouse, 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 frustratingly. "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 moved 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 a
t 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 have n'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 deadbrown 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." first "Why?" "Because it's the first stop we made when you were pointing out places that had meant something to you a
s 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 two glass panes glimmered like jewels along their beveled edges, and a bell had tinkled overhead. They went inside together. but Jim's heart was hammering. Not because the pharmacy seemed likely to actually be a place where anything significant had happened to him in his children hood, but because he sensed it was the first step 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, nickle candy, cigar-tobacco efiluvium filtering from the humidified case in 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 starched. 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. dead- "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 Handahl 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, enou gh 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 showhiz 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 everyday, 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 white-faced, 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-ir on 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 slatedark 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' grave site. 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. . .
Dean Koontz - (1991) Page 3