Dean Koontz - (1991) Read online

  ." After a silence, he said, "I'm not so sure any more that it's God talking to me." "Oh? What changed your mind?" "Well, the issues you raised last evening, for one thing. If God didn't want little Nick O'Conner to die up there in Boston, why didn't He just stop that vault from exploding? Why chase me clear across the country and throw me at the boy, as you put it? And why would He up and change His mind about the people on the airliner, let more of them live, just because I decided they should? They were all questions I'd asked myself, but you weren't willing to settle for the easy answers that satisfied me." He looked away from the street for a moment as they reached the edge of town, smiled at her, and repeated one of the questions she had asked him yesterday when she had been needling him: "Is God a waffler" "I would've expected. . ." "What?" "Well, you were so sure you could see a divine hand in this, it must be a bit of a letdown to consider less exalted possibilities. I'd expect you to be a little bummed out." He shook his head. "I'm not. You know, I always had trouble accepting that it was God working through me, it seemed like such a crazy idea, but I lived with it just because there wasn't any better explanation. There still isn 't a better explanation, I guess, but another possibility has occurred to me, and it's something so strange and wonderful in its way that I don't mind losing God from the team." "What other possibility?" "I don't want to talk about it just yet," he said as sunlight and tree shadows dappled the dusty windshield and played across his face. "I want to think it through, be sure it makes sense, before I lay it out for you, 'cause I know now you're a hard judge to convince." He seemed happy. Really happy. Holly had liked him pretty much since she had first seen him, regardless of his moodiness. She had perceived.a hopefulness beneath his glower, a tenderness beneath his gruffness, a better man beneath the exterior of a lesser one, but in his current buoyant mood, she found him easier than ever to like. She playfully pinched his cheek. "What?" he said. "You're cute." As they drove out of Svenborg, it occurred to Holly that the distribution pattern of the houses and other buildings was more like a pioneer settlement than like a modern community. In most towns, buildings were concentrated more densely in the center, with larger lots and increasing open space toward the perimeter, until finally the last structures gave way to rural precincts. But when they came to the city limits of Svenborg, the delineation between town and country was almost ruler-straight and unmistakable. Houses stopped and brushland began, with only an intervening firebreak, and Holly could not help but think of pioneers in the Old West constructing their outposts with a wary eye toward the threats that might arise out of the lawless badlands all around them. Inside its boundaries, the town seemed ominous and full of dark secrets. Seen from the outside-and Holly turned to stare back at it as the road rose toward the brow of a gentle hill-it looked not threatening but threatened, as if its residents knew, in their bones, that something frightful in the golden land around them was waiting to claim them all. Perhaps fire was all they feared. Like much of California, the land was parched where human endeavor had not brought water to it. Nestled between the Santa Ynez Mountains to the west and the San Rafael Mountains to the east, the valley was so broad and deep that it contained more geographical variety than some entire states back East Although at this time of year, untouched by rain since early spring, most of it was brown and crisp. They traveled across rounded golden hills, brown meadows. The better vantage points on their two-mile route revealed vistas of higher hills overgrown with chaparral, valleys within the valley where groves of California live oaks flourished, and small green vineyards encircled by vast seared fields. "It's beautiful," Holly said, taking in the pale hills, shining-gold meadows, and oily chaparral. Even the oaks, whose clusters indicated areas with a comparatively high water table, were not lush but a half parched silvergreen. "Beautiful, but a tinderbox. How would they cope with a fire out here?" Even as she posed that question, they came around a bend in the road and saw a stretch of blackened land to the right of the two-lane county road. Brush and grass had been reduced to veins of gray-white ash in coalblack soot. The fire had taken place within the past couple of days, for it was still recent enough to lend a burnt odor to the August air. "That one didn't get far," he said. "Looks like ten acres burned at most..They're quick around here, they jump at the first sign of smoke. There's a good volunteer group in town, plus a Department of Forestry station in the valley, lookout posts. If you live here, you don't forget the threat-you just realize after a while that it can be dealt with." Jim sounded confident enough, and he had lived there for seven or eight years, so Holly tried to suppress her pyrophobia. Nevertheless, even after they had passed the charred land and could no longer smell the scorched brush, Holly had an image in her mind of the huge valley at night, aflame from end to end, vortexes of red-orange-white fire whirling like tornadoes and consuming everything that lay between the ramparts of the two mountain ranges. "Ironheart Farm," he said, startling her. As Jim slowed the Ford, Holly looked to the left of the blacktop county route. A farmhouse stood a hundred feet back from the road, behind a withered lawn. It was of no particular architectural style, just a plain but cozy-looking two-story farmhouse with white aluminum siding, a red-shingle roof, and a commodious front porch. It might have been lifted off its foundation anywhere in the Midwest and plunked down on new footings here, for there were thousands like it in those cornbelt states. Maybe a hundred yards to the left of the house, a red barn rose to a tarnished horse-and-carriage weather vane at the pinnacle of its peaked roof It was not huge, only half again as large as the unimposing house. Behind the house and barn, visible between them, was the pond, and the structure at its far side was the most arresting sight on the farm. The windmill. Jim stopped in the driveway turnaround between house and barn, and got out of the Ford. He had to get out because the sight of the old place hit him harder than he had expected, simultaneously bringing a chill to the pit of his stomach and a flush of heat to his face. In spite of the cool draft from the dashboard vents, the air in the car seemed warm and stale, too low in oxygen content to sustain him. He stood in the fresh summer air, drawing deep breaths, and tried not to lose control of himself The blank-windowed house held little power over him. When he looked at it, he felt only a sweet melancholy that might, given time, deepen into a more disturbing sadness or even despair. But he could stare at it, draw his breath normally, and turn away from it without being seized by a powerful urge to look at it again. The barn exerted no emotional pull on him whatsoever, but the windmill was another story. When he turned his gaze on that cone of limestone beyond the wide pond, he felt as though he were being transformed into stone himself, as had been the luckless victims of the mythological serpenthaired Medusa when they had seen her snake-ringed face..He'd read about Medusa years ago. In one of Mrs. Glynn's books. That was in the days when he wished with all his heart that he, too, could see the snake-haired woman and be transformed into unfeeling rock. . . . "Jim?" Holly said from the other side of the car. "You okay?" With its high-ceilinged rooms-highest on the first floor the two-story mill was actually four stories in height. But to Jim, at that moment, it looked far taller, as imposing as a twenty-story tower. Its once-pale stones had been darkened by a century of grime. Climbing ivy, roots nurtured by the pond that abutted one flank of the mill, twined up the rough stone face, finding easy purchase in deep-mortared joints. With no one to perform needed maintenance, the plant had covered half the structure, and had grown entirely over a narrow first-floor window near the timbered door. The wooden sails looked rotten. Each of those four arms was about thirty feet in length, making a sixty-foot spread across adjoining spans, and each was five feet wide with three rows of vanes. Since he had last seen the mill, more vanes had cracked or fallen away altogether. The time-frozen sails were stopped not in a cruciform but toward the open door. "Come on, let's get this place cleaned up, move in. We want to be ready for whatever's going to happen next." She followed him to the head of the steps but stopped there and watched him descend two at a time, with the air of a kid excited
by the prospect of adventure. All of his misgivings about the mill and his fear of The Enemy seemed to have evaporated like a few beads of water on a red-hot griddle. His emotional roller coaster was cresting the highest point on the track thus far. Sensing something above her head, Holly looked up. A large web had been spun above the door, across the curve where the wall became the ceiling. A fat spider, its body as big around as her thumbnail and its spindly legs almost as long as her little finger, greasy as a dollop of wax and dark as a drop of blood, was feeding greedily on the pale quivering body of a snared moth. With a broom, dustpan, bucket of water, mop, and a few rags, they made the small upper chamber livable in short order. Jim even brought some Windex and paper towels from the store of cleaning supplies at the house, so they could scrub the grime off the windows, letting in a lot more light. Holly chased down and killed not only the spider above the door but seven others, checking darker corners with one of the flashlights until she was sure she had found them all. Of course the mill below them was surely crawling with countless other spiders. She decided not to think about that..By six o'clock, the day was waning but the room was bright enough without the Coleman lantern. They were sitting Indian fashion on their inflatable-mattress sleeping bags, with the big cooler between them. Using the closed lid as a table, they made thick sandwiches, opened the potato chips and cheese twists, and popped the tops off cans of root beer. Though she had missed lunch, Holly had not thought about food until they'd begun to prepare it. Now she was hungrier than she would have expected under the circumstances. Everything was delicious, better than gourmet fare. Olive loaf and cheese on white bread, with mustard, recalled for her the appetites of childhood, the intense flavors and forgotten innocent sensuality of youth. They did not talk much as they ate. Silences did not make either of them feel awkward, and they were taking such primal pleasure from the me that no conversation, regardless of how witty, could have improved the moment. But that was only part of the reason for their mutual reticence. Holly, at least, was also unable to think what to say under these bizarre circumstances, sitting in the high room of a crumbling old mill, waiting for an encounter with something supernatural. No small talk of any kind was adequate to the moment, and a serious discussion of just about anything would seem ludicrous. "I feel sort of foolish," she said eventually. "Me, too," he admitted. "Just a little." At seven o'clock, when she was opening the box of chocolate-covered doughnuts, she suddenly realized the mill had no lavatory. "What about a bathroom?" He picked up his ring of keys from the floor and handed them to her. "Go on over to the house. The plumbing works. There's a half bath right off the kitchen." She realized the room was filling with shadows, and when she glanced at the window, she saw that twilight had arrived. Putting the doughnuts aside, she said, "I want to zip over there and get back before dark." "Go ahead." Jim raised one hand as if pledging allegiance to the flag. "I swear on all that I hold sacred, I'll leave you at least one doughnut." "Half the box better be there when I get back," she said, "or I'll kick your butt all the way into Svenborg to buy more." "You take your doughnuts seriously." "Damn right." He smiled. "I like that in a woman." Taking a flashlight to negotiate the mill below, she rose and went to.the door. "Better start up the Coleman." "Sure thing. When you get back, it'll be a right cozy little campsite." Descending the narrow stairs, Holly began to worry about being separated from Jim, and step by step her anxiety increased. She was not afraid of being alone. What bothered her was leaving him by himself Which was ridiculous. He was a grown man and far more capable of effective self defense than was the average person. The lower floor of the mill was much darker than when she had first seen it. Curtained with cobwebs, the dirty windows admitted almost none of the weak light of dusk. As she crossed toward the arched opening to the antechamber, she was overcome by a creepy sense of being watched. She knew they were alone in the mill, and she chided herself for being such a ninny. But by the time she reached the archway, her apprehension had swelled until she could not resist the urge to turn and shine the flashlight into the chamber behind her. Shadows were draped across the old machinery as copiously as black crepe in an amusement-park haunted house; they slid aside when the flashlight beam touched them, fell softly back into place as the beam moved on. Each corner, undraped, revealed no spy. Someone could be sheltering behind one part of the millworks or another, and she considered prowling through the ruins in search of an intruder. But abruptly she felt foolish, too easily spooked. Wondering what had happened to the intrepid reporter she had once been, Holly left the mill. The sun was beyond the mountains. The sky was purple and that deep iridescent blue seen in old Maxfield Parrish paintings. A few toads were croaking from their shadowy niches along the banks of the pond. All the way around the water, past the barn, to the back door of the house, Holly continued to feel watched. However, though it was possible that someone might be lurking in the mill, it was not too likely that a virtual platoon of spies had taken up positions in the barn, the surrounding fields, and the distant hills, intent on observing her every move. "Idiot," she said self mockingly as she used one of Jim's keys to open the back door. Though she had the flashlight, she tried the wall switch unthinkingly. She was surprised to discover that the electrical service was still connected. She was more surprised, however, by what the light revealed: a fully furnished kitchen. A breakfast table and four chairs stood by the window. Copper pots and pans dangled from a ceiling fixture, and twin racks of.knives and other utensils hung on the wall near the cooktop. A toaster, toaster oven, and blender stood on the counters. A shopping list of about fifteen items was affixed to the refrigerator with a magnet in the shape of a can of Budweiser. Hadn't Jim gotten rid of his grandparents' belongings when they had died five years ago? Holly ran a finger along one of the counters, drawing a line through the thin coat of dust. But it was, at most, a three-month accumulation, not five years' worth of dirt. After she used the bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, she wandered along the hallway, through the dining room and living room, where a full complement of furniture also stood under a light shroud of dust. Some of the paintings hung aslant. Crocheted antimacassars protected the backs and arms of the chairs and sofas. Long unwound, the tall grandfather clock was not ticking. In the living room, the magazine rack beside the LaZ-Boy recliner was crammed full of publications, and inside a mahogany display case, bibelots gleamed dully beneath their own skin of dust. Her first thought was that Jim had left the house furnished in order to be able to rent it out while searching for a buyer. But on one wall of the living room were framed 8 X 10 photographs that would not have been left to the mercy of a tenant: Jim's father as a young man of about twenty-one; Jim's father and mother in their wedding finery; Jim at the age of five or six, with both parents. The fourth and final picture was a two-shot, head and shoulders, of a pleasant-looking couple in their early fifties. The man was on the burly side, with bold square features, yet recognizably an Ironheart; the woman was more handsome, in a female way, than pretty, and elements of her face could also be seen in Jim and his father. Holly had no doubt that they were Jim's paternal grandparents, Lena and Henry Ironheart. Lena Ironheart was the woman in whose body Holly had ridden like a spirit during last night's dream. Broad, clear face. Wide-set eyes. Full mouth. Curly hair. A natural beauty spot, just a little round dot of skin discoloration, marked the high curve of her right cheek. Though Holly had described this woman accurately to Jim, he had not recognized her. Maybe he didn't think of her eyes as being wide-set or her mouth as being full. Maybe her hair had been curly only during part of her life, due to the attentions of a beautician. But the beauty spot had to have clicked a switch in his memory, even five years after his grandmother's death. The sense of being watched had not entirely left Holly even after she had entered the house. Now, as she stared at Lena Ironheart's face in the photograph, the feeling of being under observation grew so acute that she abruptly wheeled around and looked back across the living room..She was alone. She stepped quickly to the archway and through it into the front
hall. Deserted. A dark mahogany staircase led up to the second floor. The dust on the newel post and bannister was undisturbed: no palm marks, no fingerprints. Looking up the first flight, she said, "Hello?" Her voice sounded queerly flat in the empty house. No one responded to her. Hesitantly, she started to climb the stairs. "Who's there?" she called. Only silence answered her. Frowning, she stopped on the third step. She glanced down into the front hall, then up toward the landing again. The silence was too deep, unnatural. Even a deserted house had some noise in it, occasional creaks and ticks and pops from old wood swelling or contracting, a rattle from a loose windowpane tapped by a finger of wind. But the Ironheart house was so hushed, Holly might have thought that she'd gone deaf, except that she could hear the sounds she made herself She climbed two more steps. Stopped again. She still felt she was under observation. It was as if the old house itself watched her with malevolent interest, alive and sentient, possessed of a thousand eyes hidden in the wood moldings and in the pattern of the wallpaper. Dust motes drifted in the rays of the landing light above. Twilight pressed its purple face to the windows. Standing just four steps below the landing, partly under the second flight that led into the unseen upstairs hallway, she became convinced that something was waiting for her on the second floor. It was not necessarily The Enemy up there, not even anything alive and hostile-but something horrible, the discovery of which would shatter her. Her heart was hammering. When she swallowed, she found a lump in her throat. She drew breath with a startling, ragged sound. The feeling of being watched and of trembling on the brink of a monstrous revelation became so overpowering that she turned and hurried down the steps. She did not flee pell-mell out of the house; she retraced her path and turned off all the lights as she went; but she did not dally, either..Outside, the sky was purple-black where it met the mountains in the east, purplish-red where it touched the mountains in the west, and saphire-blue between. The golden fields and hills had changed to pale gray, fading to charcoal, as if a fire had swept them while she was in the house. As she crossed the yard and moved past the barn, the conviction that she was under observation only grew more intense. She glanced apprehensively at the open black square of the hay loft, the windows on either side of the big red double doors. It was a gut-clenching sensation of such primitive power that it transcended mere instinct. She felt as if she were a guinea pig in a laboratory experiment, with wires hooked into her brain, while scientists sent pulses of current directly into the raw cerebral tissues that controlled the fear reflex and generated paranoid delusions. She had never experienced anything like it, knew that she was teetering on the thin edge of panic, and struggled to get a grip on herself By the time she reached the graveled drive that curved around the pond, she was running. She held the extinguished flashlight like a club, prepared to swing it hard at anything that darted toward her. The bells rang. Even above her frantic breathing, she heard the pure, silvery trilling of clappers rapidly striking the inner curves of perfectly tuned bells. For an instant she was amazed that the phenomenon was audible out side the windmill and at a distance, as the building was halfway around the pond from her. Then something flickered in her peripheral vision even before the first spell of ringing ended, and she looked away from the mill, toward the water. Pulses of blood-red light, originating at the center of the pond, spread outward toward the banks in tight concentric circles, like the measured ripples that radiated from the point at which a dropped stone struck deep water. That sight brought Holly to a stumbling halt; she almost went to her knees as gravel rolled under her feet. When the bells fell silent, the crimson light in the pond was immediately snuffed out. The water was much darker now than when she had first seen it in mid-afternoon. It no longer had all the somber hues of slate, but was as black as a polished slab of obsidian. The bells rang again, and the crimson light pulsed from the heart of the pond, radiating outward. She could see that each new bright blossom was not born on the surface of the water but in its depths, dim at first but swiftly rising, almost bursting like an overheated incandescent bulb when it neared the surface, casting waves of light toward the shore. The ringing ceased. The water darkened. The toads along the shoreline were not croaking any more. The evermurmuring world of nature had fallen as silent as the interior of the Ironheart farmhouse. No coyote howl, no insect cry, no owl hoot, no bat shriek or flap of wing, no rustling in the grass..The bells sounded again, and the light returned, but this time it was not as red as gore, more of an orange-red, though it was brighter than before. At the water's edge, the feathery white panicles of the pampas grass caught the curious radiance and glowed like plumes of iridescent gas. Something was rising from the bottom of the pond. As the throbbing luminescence faded with the next cessation of the bells, Holly stood in the grip of awe and fear, knowing she should run but unable to move. Ringing. . brighter Light. Muddy-orange this time. No red tint at all more than ever. Holly broke the chains of fear and sprinted toward the windmill. On all sides, the palpitant light enlivened the dreary dusk. Shadows leapt rhythmically like Apaches dancing around a war fire. Beyond the fence, dead cornstalks bristled as repulsively as the spiny legs and plated torsos of praying mantises. The windmill appeared to be in the process of changing magically from stone to copper or even to gold. The ringing stopped and the light went out as she reached the open door of the mill. She raced across the threshold, then skidded to a stop in the darkness, on the brink of the lower chamber. No light at all came through the windows now. The blackness was tarry, cloying. As she fumbled for the switch on the flashlight, she found it hard to draw breath, as if the darkness itself had begun flowing into her lungs, suffocating her. The flashlight came on just as the bells began to ring again. She slashed the beam across the room and back, to be sure nothing was there in the gloom, reaching for her. Then she found the stairs to her left and rushed toward the high room. When she reached the window at the halfway point, she put her face to the pane of glass that she had wiped clean with her hand earlier in the day. In the pond below, the rippling bull's-eye of light was brighter still, now amber instead of orange. Calling for Jim, Holly ran up the remaining stairs. As she went, lines of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry, studied an age ago in junior high school and thought forgotten, rang crazily through her mind: Keeping time, time time, In a sort ofRunic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells bells bells,.bells, Bells, bells. bells She burst into the high room, where Jim stood in the soft winter-white glow of the Coleman gas lantern. He was smiling, turning in a ci rcle and looking expectantly at the walls around him. As the bells died away, she said, "Jim, come look, come quick, something's in the lake." She dashed to the nearest window, but it was just far enough around the wall from the pond to prevent her seeing the water. The other two windows were even more out of line with the desired view, so she did not even try them. "The ringing in the stone," Jim said dreamily. Holly returned to the head of the stairs as the bells began to ring again. She paused and looked back just long enough to be sure that Jim was following her, for he seemed in something of a daze. Hurrying down the stairs, she heard more lines of Poe's poem reverberating in her mind: Hear the loud alarum bells Brazen bells! What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells She had never been the kind of woman to whom sprang lines of Verdee appropriate to the moment. She couldn't recall quoting a line of poetry or even reading any other than Louise Tarvohl's treacle!-since college. When she reached the window, she scrubbed frantically at another pane with the palm of her hand, to give them a better view of the spectacle below. She saw that the light was blood-red again and dimmer, as if whatever had been rising through the water was now sinking again. Oh, the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells It seemed crazy to be mentally reciting poetry in the midst of these wondrous and frightening events, but she had never been under such stress before. Maybe this was the way the mind worked-giddily dredging up long-forgotten knowledge-when you were about to meet a higher power. Because that's just what she felt was about to happen, an encounter w
ith a higher power, perhaps God but most likely not. She didn't really think God lived in a pond, although any minister or priest would probably tell her that God lived everywhere, in all things. God was like the eight-hundred-pound gorilla who could live anywhere he wanted. Just as Jim reached her, the ringing stopped, and the crimson light in the pond quickly faded. He squeezed in beside her and put his face to the glass. They waited. Two seconds ticked by. Two more. "No," she said. "Damn it, I wanted you to see." But the ringing did not resume, and the pond remained dark out there in.the steadily dimming twilight. Night would be upon them within a few minutes. "What was it?" Jim asked, leaning back from the window. "Like something in a Spielberg film," she said excitedly, "rising up out of the water, from deep under the pond, light throbbing in time with the bells. I think that's where the ringing originates, from the thing in the pond, and somehow it's transmitted through the walls of the mill." "Spielberg film?" He looked puzzled. She tried to explain: "Wonderful and terrifying, awesome and strange, scary and damned exciting all at once." "You mean like in Close Encounters? Are you talking a starship or something?" "Yes. No. I'm not sure. I don't know. Maybe something weirder than that." "Weirder than a starship?" Her wonder, and even her fear, subsided in favor of frustration. She was not accustomed to finding herself at a complete loss for words to describe things that she had felt or seen. But with this man and the incomparable experiences in which he became entangled, even her sophisticated vocabulary and talent for supple phrase-making failed her miserably. "Shit, yes!" she said at last. "Weirder than a starship. At least weirder than the way they show them in the movies." "Come on," he said, ascending the stairs again, "let's get back up there." When she lingered at the window, he returned to her and took her hand. "It isn't over yet. I think it's just beginning. And the place for us to be is the upper room. I know it's the place. Come on, Holly." They sat on the inflatable-mattress sleeping bags again. The lantern cast a pearly-silver glow, whitewashing the yellow-beige blocks of limestone. In the baglike wicks inside the glass chimney of the lamp, the gas burned with a faint hiss, so it seemed as if whispering voices were rising through the floorboards of that high room. Jim was poised at the apex of his emotional roller coaster, full of childlike delight and anticipation, and this time Holly was right there with him. The light in the pond had terrified her, but it had also touched her in other ways, sparking deep psychological responses on a primitive sub-subconscious level, igniting fuses of wonder and hope which were fizzing-burning unquenchably toward some much-desired explosion of faith, emotional catharsis..She had accepted that Jim was not the only troubled person in the room. His heart might contain more turmoil than hers, but she was as empty, in her own way, as he was in his. When they'd met in Portland, she had been a burnt-out cynic, going through the motions of a life, not even trying to identify and fill the empty spaces in her heart. She had not experienced the tragedy and grief that he had known, but now she realized that leading a life equally devoid of tragedy and joy could breed despair. Passing days and weeks and years in the pursuit of goals that had not really mattered to her, driven by a purpose she had not truly embraced, with no one to whom she was profoundly committed, she had been eaten by a dry-rot of the soul. She and Jim were the two pieces of a yin-yang puzzle, each shaped to fill the hollowness in the other, healing each other merely by their contact. They fit together astonishingly well, and the match seemed inevitable; but the puzzle might never have been solved if the halves of it had not been brought together in the same place at the same time. Now she waited with nervous excitement for contact with the power that had led Jim to her. She was ready for God or for something quite different but equally benign. She could not believe that what she had seen in the pond was The Enemy. That creature was apart from this, connected somehow but different. Even if Jim had not told her that something fine and good was coming, she eventually would have sensed, on her own, that the light in the water and the ringing in the stone heralded not blood and death but rapture. They spoke tersely at first, afraid that voluble conversation would inhibit that higher power from initiating the next stage of contact. "How long has the pond been here?" she asked. "A long time." "Before the Ironhearts?" "Yeah." "Before the farm itself?" "I'm sure it was." "Possibly forever?" "Possibly." "Any local legends about it?" "What do you mean?" "Ghost stories, Loch Ness, that kind of stuff"."No. Not that I've ever heard." They were silent. Waiting. Finally Holly said, "What's your theory?" "Huh?" "Earlier today you said you had a theory, something strange and wonderful, but you didn't want to talk about it till you'd thought it through." "Oh, right. Now maybe it's more than a theory. When you said you'd seen something under the pond in your dream. . . well, I don't know why, but I started thinking about an encounter. . . ." "Encounter?" "Yeah. Like what you said. Something. . . alien." "Not of this world," Holly said, remembering the sound of the bells and the light in the pond. "They're out there in the universe somewhere," he said with quiet enthusiasm. "It's too big for them not to be out there. And someday they'll be coming. Someone will encounter them. So why not me, why not you?" "But it must've been there under the pond when you were ten." "Maybe." "Why would it be there all this time?" "I don't know. Maybe it's been there a lot longer. Hundreds of years. Thousands." "But why a starship at the bottom of a pond?" "Maybe it's an observation station, a place where they monitor human civilization, like an outpost we might set up in Antarctica to study things there. Holly realized they sounded like kids sitting under the stars on a summer night, drawn like all kids to the contemplation of the unknown and to fantasies of exotic adventure. On one level she found their musings absurd, even laughable, and she was unable to believe that recent events could have such a neat yet fanciful explanation. But on another level, where she was still a child and always would be, she desperately wanted the fantasy to be made real. Twenty minutes passed without a new development, and gradually Holly began to settle down from the heights of excitement and nervous agitation to which the lights in the pond had catapulted her. Still filled with wonder but no longer mentally numbed by it, she remembered what had happened to her just prior to the appearance of the radiant.presence in the millpond: the overwhelming, preternatural, almost panic-inducing awareness of being watched. She was about to mention it to Jim when she recalled the other strange things she had found at the farmhouse. "It's completely furnished," she said. "You never cleaned the house out after your grandfather died." "I left it furnished in case I was able to rent it while waitin for a buyer." Those were virtually the same words she had used, standing in the house, to explain the curious situation to herself "But you left all their personal belongings there, too." He did not look at her but at the walls, waiting for some sign of a superhuman presence. "I'd have taken that stuff away if I'd ever found a renter." "You've left it there for almost five years?" He shrugged. She said, "It's been cleaned more or less regularly since then, though not recently. "A renter might always show up." "It's sort of creepy, Jim." Finally he looked at her. "How so?" "It's like a mausoleum." His blue eyes were utterly unreadable, but Holly had the feeling she was annoying him, perhaps because this mundane talk of renters and house cleaning and real estate was pulling him away from the more pleasurable contemplation of alien encounters. He s ighed and said, "Yeah, it is creepy, a little." "Then why. . . ?" He slowly twisted the lantern control, reducing the flow of gas to the wicks. The hard white light softened to a moon-pale glow, and the shadows eased closer. "To tell you the truth, I couldn't bear to pack up my granddad's things. Together, we'd sorted through grandma's belongings only eight months earlier, when she'd died, and that had been hard enough. When he. . . passed away so soon after her, it was too much for me. For so long, they'd been all I had. Then suddenly I didn't even have them." A tortured expression darkened the blue of his eyes. As a flood of sympathy washed through Holly, she reached across the ice chest and took his hand..He said, "I procrastinated, kept procrastinating, and the longer I delayed sorting through his things, the harder it became to ever do it." He sighe
d again. "If I'd have found a renter or a buyer, that would have forced me to put things in order, no matter how unpleasant the job. But this old farm is about as marketable as a truckload of sand in the middle of the Mojave." Closing the house upon the death of his grandfather, touching nothing in it for four years and four months, except to clean it once in a while that was eccentric. Holly couldn't see it any other way. At the same time, however, it was an eccentricity that touched her, moved her. As she had sensed from the start, he was a gentle man beneath his rage, beneath his steely superhero identity, and she liked the soft-hearted part of him, too. "We'll do it together," Holly said. "When we've figured out what the hell is happening to us, wherever and however we go on from here, there'll be time for us to sort through your grandfather's things. It won't be so difficult if we do it together." He smiled at her and squeezed her hand. She remembered something else. "Jim, you recall the description I gave you of the woman in my dream last night, the woman who came up the mill stairs?" "Sort of" "You said you didn't recognize her." "So?" "But there's a photo of her in the house." "There is?" "In the living room, that photograph of a couple in their early fifties. Are they your grandparents, Lena and Henry?" "Yeah. That's right." "Lena was the woman in my dream." He frowned. "Isn't that odd. . . ?" "Well, maybe. But what's odder is, you didn't recognize her." "I guess your description wasn't that good." "But didn't you hear me say she had a beauty mark-" His eyes narrowed, and his hand tightened around hers. "Quick, the tablets." Confused, she said, "What?" "Something's about to happen, I feel it, and we need the tablets we bought at The Center.".He let go of her hand, and she withdrew the two yellow, lined tablets and felt-tip pen from the plastic bag at her side. He took them from her, hesitated, looking around at the walls and at the shadows above them, as if waiting to be told what to do next. The bells rang. That musical tintinnabulation sent a thrill through Jim. He knew that he was on the verge of discovering the meaning not merely of the events of the past year but of the last two and a half decades. And not just that, either. More. Much more. The ringing heralded the revelation of even greater understanding, transcendental truths, an explanation of the fundamental meaning of his entire life, past and future, origins and destiny, and of the meaning of existence itself Grandiose as such a notion might be, he sensed that the secrets of creation would be revealed to him before he left the windmill, and that he would reach the state of enlightenment he had sought-and failed to find-in a score of religions. As the second spell of ringing began, Holly started to get up. Jim figured she intended to descend to the window on the stairs and look into the pond. He said, "No, wait. It's going to happen here this time." She hesitated, then sat down. As the ringing stopped again, Jim felt compelled to push the ice chest out of the way and put one of the yellow, lined tablets on the floor between him and Holly. He was not sure what he was expected to do with the other tablet and the pen, but after a brief moment of indecision, he held on to them. When the melodic ringing began a third time, it was accompanied by an impossible pulse of light within the limestone walls. The red glow seemed to well up from inside the stone at a point directly in front of them, then suddenly raced around the room, encircling them with a throbbing band of luminescence. Even as the strange fire whipped around them, Holly issued a wordless sound of fear, and Jim remembered what she had told him of her dream last night. The woman-whether it had been his grandmother or not-had climbed the stairs into the high room, had seen an amber emanation within the walls, as if the mill was made of colored glass, and had witnessed something unimaginably hostile being born out of those mortared blocks. "It's okay." He was eager to reassure her. "This isn't The Enemy. It's something else. There's no danger here. This is a different light." He was only sharing with her the reassurances that were flooding into him from a higher power. He hoped to God that he was correct, that no threat was imminent, for he remembered too well the hideous biological transformation of his own bedroom ceiling in Laguna Niguel little more.than twelve hours ago. Light had pulsed within the oily, insectile birth sac that had blistered out of ordinary drywall, and the shadowy form within, writhing and twitching, had been nothing he would ever want to see more directly. During two more bursts of melodic ringing, the color of the light changed to amber. But otherwise it in no way resembled the menacing radiance in his bedroom ceiling, which had been a different shade of amber altogether the vile yellow of putrescent matter or of rich dark pus-and which had throbbed in sympathy with an ominous tripartite heartbeat that was not audible now. Holly looked scared nonetheless. He wished he could pull her close, put his arm around her. But he needed to give his undivided attention to the higher power that was striving to reach him. The ringing stopped, but the light did not fade. It quivered, shimmered, dimmed, and brightened. It moved through the otherwise dark wall in scores of separate amoeba-like forms that constantly flowed together and separated into new shapes; it was like a one-dimensional representation of the kaleidoscopic display in one of those old Lava lamps. The ever-changing patterns evolved on all sides of them, from the base of the wall to the apex of the domed ceiling. "I feel like we're in a bathysphere, all glass, suspended far, far down in the ocean," Holly said. "And great schools of luminescent fish are diving and soaring and swirling past us on all sides, through the deep black water." He loved her for putting the experience into better words than he could summon, words that would not let him forget the images they described, even if he lived a hundred years. Unquestionably, the ghostly luminosity lay within the stone, not merely on the surface of it. He could see into that now-translucent substance, as if it had been alchemized into a dark but well-clarified quartz. The amber radiance brightened the room more than did the lantern, which he had turned low. His trembling hands looked golden, as did Holly's face. But pockets of darkness remained, and the constantly moving light enlivened the shadows as well. "What now?" Holly asked softly. Jim noticed that something had happened to the yellow tablet on the floor between them. "Look." Words had appeared on the top third of the first page. They looked as if they had been formed by a finger dipped in ink: I AM WITH YOU. Holly had been distracted-to say the least!-by the lightshow, but she did not think that Jim could have leaned to the tablet and printed the words with the felt-tip pen or any other instrument without drawing her attention. Yet she found it hard to believe that some disembodied presence had conveyed the message.."I think we're being encouraged to ask questions," Jim said. "Then ask it what it is," she said at once. He wrote a question on the second tablet, which he was holding, and showed it to her: Who are you? As they watched, the answer appeared on the first tablet, which lay between and slightly in front of them at such an angle that they could both read it. The words were not burnt onto the paper and were not formed by ink that dripped magically from the air. Instead, the irregular, wavery letters appeared as dim gray shapes and grew darker as they seemed to float up out of the paper, as though a page of the tablet were not one-five hundredth of an inch thick but a pool of liquid many feet deep. She recognized immediately that this was similar to the effect she had seen earlier when the balls of light had risen to the center of the pond before bursting and casting concentric rings of illumination outward through the water this was, as well, how the light had first welled up in the limestone walls before the blocks had become thoroughly translucent. THE FRIEND. Who are you? The Friend. It seemed to be an odd self description. Not "your friend" or "a friend" but The Friend. For an alien intelligence, if indeed that's all it was, the name had curious spiritual implications, connotations of divinity. Men had given God many names-Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Zeus, Aesir-but even more titles. God was The Almighty, The Eternal Being, The Infinite, The Father, The Savior, The Creator, The Light. The Friend seemed to fit right into that list. Jim quickly wrote another question and showed it to Holly: Where do you come from? ANOTHER WORLD. Which could mean anything from heaven to Mars. Do you mean another planet? YES. "My God," Holly said, awed in spite of herself So much for the great hereafte r. She looked up from the tablet and
met Jim's eyes. They seemed to shine brighter than ever, although the chrome-yellow light had imparted to them an exceptional green tint. Restless with excitement, she rose onto her knees, then eased back again, sitting on her calves. The top tablet page was filled with the entity's responses. Holly equivocated only briefly, then tore it off.and set it aside, so they could see the second page. She glanced back and forth between Jim's questions and the rapidly appearing answers. From another solar sy.stern? YES. From another galaxy? YES. Is it your vessel we've seen in the pond? YES. How long have you been here? ,000 YEARS. As she stared at that figure, it seemed to Holly that this moment was more like a dream than some of the actual dreams she'd been having lately. After so much mystery, there were answers-but they seemed to be coming too easily. She did not know what she had expected, but she had not imagined that the murkiness in which they had been operating would clear as quickly as if a drop of a magical universal detergent had been dropped into it. "Ask her why she's here," Holly said, tearing off the second sheet and putting it with the first. Jim was surprised. "She?" "Why not?" He brightened. "Why not?" he agreed. He turned to a new page in his own tablet and wrote her question: Why are you here? Floating up through the paper to the surface: TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND. "You know what this is like?" Holly said. "What's it like?" "An episode of Outer Limits" "The old TV show?" "Yeah." "Wasn't that before your time?" "It's on cable."."But what do you mean it's like an episode of Outer Limits?" She frowned at TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND and said, "Don't you think it's a little. . . trite?" "Trite?" He was irritated. "No, I don't. Because I haven't any idea what alien contact should be like. I haven't had a whole lot of experience with it, certainly not enough to have expectations or be jaded." "I'm sorry. I don't know. . . it's just. . . okay, let's see where this leads." She had to admit that she was no less awed than she had been when the light had first appeared in the walls. Her heart continued to thud hard and fast, and she was still unable to draw a really deep breath. She still felt that they were in the presence of something superhuman, maybe even a higher power by one definition or another, and she was humbled by it. Considering what she had seen in the pond, the pulsing luminescence even now swimming through the wall, and the words that kept shimmering into view on the tablet, she would have been hopelessly stupid if she had not been awed. Undeniably, however, her sense of wonder was dulled by the feeling that this entity was structuring the encounter like an old movie or TV script. With a sarcastic note in his voice, Jim had said that he had too little experience with alien contact to have developed any expectations that could be disappointed. But that was not true. Having grown up in the sixties and seventies, he had been as media-saturated as she had been. They'd been exposed to the same TV shows and movies, magazines and books; science fiction had been a major influence in popular culture all their lives. He had acquired plenty of detailed expectations about what alien contact would be like-and the entity in the wall was playing to all of them. Holly's only conscious expectation had been that a real close encounter of the third kind would be like nothing the novelists and screenwriters imagined in all their wildest flights of fantasy, because when referring to life from another world, alien meant alien, different, beyond easy comparison or comprehension. "Okay," she said, "maybe familiarity is the point. I mean, maybe it's using our modern myths as a convenient way to present itself to us, a way to make itself comprehensible to us. Because it's probably so radically different from us that we could never understand its true nature or appearance." "Exactly," Jim said. He wrote another question: What is the light we see in the walls? THE LIGHT IS ME. Holly didn't wait for Jim to write the next question. She addressed the entity directly: "How can you move through a wall?".Because the alien seemed such a stickler about form, she was somewhat surprised when it did not insist on hewing to the written question-reply format. It answered her at once: I CAN BECOME PART OF ANYTHING, MOVE WITHIN IT, TAKE SHAPE FROM IT WHENEVER I CHOOSE. "Sounds a little like bragging," she said. "I can't believe you can be sarcastic at a time like this," Jim said impatiently. "I'm not being sarcastic," she explained. "I'm just trying to understand." He looked doubtful. To the alien presence, she said, "You understand the problems I'm having with this, don't you?" On the tablet: YES. She ripped away that page, revealing a fresh one. Increasingly restless and nervous, but not entirely sure why, Holly got to her feet and turned in a circle, looking at the play of light in the walls as she formulated her next question. "Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?" No answer appeared on the tablet. She repeated the question. The tablet remained blank. Holly said, "Trade secret, I guess." She felt a bead of cold sweat trickle out of her right armpit and down her side, under her blouse. A childlike wonder still worked in her, but fear was on the rise again. Something was wrong. Something more than the disjointed nature of the story the entity was giving them. She couldn't quite put her finger on what spooked her. On his own tablet, Jim quickly wrote another question, and Holly leaned down to read it: Did you appear to me in this room when I was ten years old? YES. OFTEN. Did you make me forget it? YES. "Don't bother writing your questions," Holly said. "Just ask them like I do." Jim was clearly startled by her suggestion, and she was surprised that he had persisted with his pen and tablet even after seeing that the questions she asked aloud were answered. He seemed reluctant to put.aside the felttip and the paper, but at last he did. "Why did you make me forget?" Even standing, Holly could easily read the bold words that appeared on the yellow tablet: YOU WERE NOT READY TO REMEMBER. "Unnecessarily cryptic," she muttered. "You're right. It must be male." Jim tore off the used page, put it with the others, and paused, chewing his lip, evidently not sure what to ask next. Finally he said, "Are you male or female?" I AM MALE. "More likely," Holly said, "it's neither. It's alien, after all, and it's as likely to reproduce by parthenogenesis." I AM MALE, it repeated. Jim remained seated, legs folded, an undiminished look of wonder on his face, more boylike now than ever. Holly did not understand why her anxiety level was soaring while Jim continued to bounce up and down-well, virtually-with enthusiasm and delight. He said, "What do you look like?" WHATEVER I CHOOSE TO LOOK LIKE. "Could you appear to us as a man or woman?" Jim asked. YES. "As a dog?" YES. "As a cat?" YES. "As a beetle?" YES. Without the security of his pen and tablet, Jim seemed to have been reduced to inane questions. Holly half expected him to ask the entity what its favorite color was, whether it preferred Coke or Pepsi, and if it liked Barry Manilow music. But he said, "How old are you?" I AM A CHILD. "A child?" Jim responded. "But you told us you've been on our world.for ten thousand years." I AM STILL A CHILD. Jim said, "Then is your species very long-lived?" WE ARE IMMORTAL. "Wow." "It's lying," Holly told him. Appalled by her effrontery, he said, "Jesus, Holly!" "Well, it is." And that was the source of her renewed fear-the fact that it was not being straight with them, was playing games, deceiving. She had a sense that it regarded them with enormous contempt. In which case, she probably should have shut up, been meekly adoring before its power, and tried not to anger it. Instead she said, "If it were really immortal, it wouldn't think of itself as a child. It couldn 't think that way about itself Infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood-those are age categories a species concerns itself with if it has a finite lifespan. If you're immortal, you might be born innocent, ignorant, uneducated, but you aren't born young because you're never really going to get old." "Aren't you splitting hairs?" Jim asked almost petulantly. "I don't think so. It's lying to us." "Maybe its use of the word child' was just another way it was trying to make its alien nature more understandable." YES. "Bullshit," Holly said. "Damn it, Holly!" As Jim removed another page from the tablet, detaching it neatly along its edge, Holly moved to the wall and studied the patterns of light churning through it. Seen close up, they were quite beautiful and strange, not like a smooth-flowing phosphorescent fluid or fiery streams of lava, but like scintillant swarms of fireflies, millions of spangled points not unlike her analogy of luminous, schooling fish. Holly half expected the wall i
n front of her to bulge suddenly. Split open. Give birth to a monstrous form. She wanted to step back. Instead she moved closer. Her nose was only an inch from the transmuted stone. Viewed this intimately, the surge and flux and whirl of the millions of bright cells was dizzying..There was no beat from it, but she imagined she could feel the flicker of light and shadow across her face. "Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?" she asked. After a few seconds, Jim spoke from behind her: "No answer." The question seemed innocent enough, and one that they should logically be expected to ask. The entity's unwillingness to answer alerted her that the ringing must be somehow vitally important. Understanding the bells might be the first step toward learnin g something real and true about this creature. "Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?" Jim reported: "No answer. I don't think you should ask that question again, Holly. It obviously doesn't want to answer, and there's nothing to be gained by aggravating it. This isn't The Enemy, this is-" "Yeah, I know. It's The Friend." She remained at the wall and felt herself to be face-to-face with an alien presence, though it had nothing that corresponded to a face. It was focused on her now. It was right there. Again she said, "Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?" Instinctively she knew that her innocent question and her not-so-innocent repetition of it had put her in great danger. Her heart was thudding so loud that she wondered if Jim could hear it. She figured The Friend, with all its powers, could not only hear her hammering heart but see it jumping like a panicked rabbit within the cage of her chest. It knew she was afraid, all right. Hell, it might even be able to read her mind. She had to show it that she would not allow fear to deter her. She put one hand on the light-filled stone. If those luminous clouds wert not merely a projection of the creature's consciousness, not just an illusion or representation for their benefit, if the thing was, as it claimed, actually alive in the wall, then the stone was now its flesh. Her hand was upon its body. Faint vibrations passed across the wall in distinctive, whirling vortexes That was all she felt. No heat. The fire within the stone was evidently cold. "Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?" "Holly, don't," Jim said. Worry tainted his voice for the first time. Perhaps he, too, had begun to sense that The Friend was not entirely a friend. But she was driven by a suspicion that willpower mattered in this confrontation, and that a demonstration of unflinching will would set a.ne tone in their relationship with The Friend. She could not have explained why she felt so strongly about it. Just instinct-not a woman's but an exreporter's. "Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?" She thought she detected a slight change in the vibrations that tingled across her palm, but she might have imagined it, for they were barely perceptible in the first place. Through her mind flickered an image of the stone cracking open in a jagged mouth and biting off her hand, blood spurting, white bone bristling from the ragged stump of her wrist. Though she was shaking uncontrollably, she did not step back or lift her hand off the wall. She wondered if The Friend had sent her that horrifying image. "Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?" "Holly, for Christ's sake-" Jim broke off, then said, "Wait, an answer's coming." Willpower did matter. But for God's sake, why? Why should an all-powerful alien force from another galaxy be intimidated by her unwavering resolution? Jim reported the response: "It says. . . For drama?'" "For drama?" she repeated. "Yeah. F-O-R, then D-R-A-M-A, then a question mark." To the thing in the wall, she said, "Are you telling me the bells are just a bit of theater to dramatize your apparitions?" After a few seconds, Jim said, "No answer." "And why the question mark?" she asked The Friend. "Don't you know what the bells mean yourself, where the sound comes from, what makes it, why? Are you only guessing when you say for drama'? How can you not know what it is if it always accompanies you?" "Nothing," Jim told her. She stared into the wall. The churning, schooling cells of light were increasingly disorienting her, but she did not close her eyes. "A new message," Jim said." I am going.'" "Chicken," Holly said softly into the amorphous face of the thing in the wall. But she was sheathed in cold sweat now. The amber light began to darken, turn orange. Stepping away from the wall at last, Holly swayed and almost fell. She moved back to her bedroll and dropped to her knees..New words appeared on the tablet: I WILL BE BACK. "When?" Jim asked. WHEN THE TIDE IS MINE. "What tide?" THERE IS A TIDE IN THE VESSEL, AN EBB AND FLOW, DARKNESS AND LIGHT. I RISE WITH THE LIGHT TIDE, BUT HE RISES WITH THE DARK. "He?" Holly asked. THE ENEMY. The light in the walls was red-orange now, dimmer, but still ceaselessly changing patterns around them. Jim said, "Two of you share the starship?" YES. TWO FORCES. TWO ENTITIES. It's lying, Holly thought. This, like all the rest of its story, is just like the bells: good theater. WAIT FOR MY RETURN. "We'll wait," Jim said. DO NOT SLEEP. "Why can't we sleep?" Holly asked, playing along. YOU MIGHT DREAM. The page was full. Jim ripped it off and stacked it with the others. The light in the walls was blood-red now, steadily fading. DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS. "What are you telling us?" The same three words again: DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS. "It's a warning," Jim said. DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS. No, Holly thought, it's a threat. The windmill was just a windmill again. Stones and timbers. Mortar and nails. Dust sifting, wood rotting, iron rusting, spiders spinning in secret lairs. Holly sat directly in front of Jim, in powwow position, their knees.touching. She held both his hands, partly because she drew strength from his touch, and partly because she wanted to reassure him and take the sting out of what she was about to say. "Listen, babe, you're the most interesting man I've ever known, the sexiest, for sure, and I think, at heart, the kindest. But you do a lousy interview. For the most part, your questions aren't well thought-out, you don't get at the meat of an issue, you follow up on irrelevancies but generally fail to follow up on the really important answers. And you're a naive enough reporter to think that the subject is always being straight with you, when they're almost never straight with an interviewer, so you don't probe the way you should." He did not seem offended. He smiled and said, "I didn't think of myself s a reporter doing an interview." "Well, kiddo, that's exactly what the situation was. The Friend, as he calls himself, has information, and we need information to know where we stand, to do our job." "I thought of it more as. . . I don't know. . . as an epiphany. When God came to Moses with the Ten Commandments, I figure He just told Moses what they were, and if Moses had other questions he didn't feel he had to grill the Big Guy." "This wasn't God in the walls." "I know that. I'm past that idea now. But it was an alien intelligence so superior to us that it almost might as well be God." "We don't know that," she said patiently. "Sure we do. When you consider the high degree of intelligence and the millennia needed to build a civilization capable of traveling across galaxies -good heavens, we're only monkeys by comparison!" "There, you see, that's what I'm talking about. How do you know it's from another galaxy? Because you believe what it told you. How do you know there's a spaceship under the pond? Because you believe what it told you." Jim was getting impatient now. "Why would it lie to us, what would it have to gain from lies?" "I don't know. But we can't be sure that it isn't manipulating us. And when it comes back, like it promised, I want to be ready for it. I want to spend the next hour or two or three-however long we've got-making a list of questions, so we can put it through a carefully planned inquisition. We've got to have a strategy for squeezing real information from it, facts not fantasies, and our questions have to support that strategy." When he frowned, she hastened on before he could interrupt. "Okay, all right, maybe it's incapable of lying, maybe it's noble and.pure, maybe everything it's told us is the gospel truth. But listen, Jim, this is not an epiphany. The Friend set the rules by influencing you to buy the tablets and pen. It established the question-and-answer format. If it didn't want us to make the best of that format, it would've just told you to shut up and would've blabbered at you from a burning bush!" He stared at her. He chewed his lip thoughtfully. He shifted his gaze to the walls where the creature of light had swum in the stone. Pressing her point, Holly said, "You never even asked it why it wants you to save people's lives,
or why some people and not others." He looked at her again, obviously surprised to realize that he had not pursued the answer to the most important question of all. In the lactescent glow of the softly hissing gas lantern, his eyes were blue again, not green as the amber light had temporarily made them. And troubled. "Okay," he said. "You're right. I guess I was just swept away by it all. I mean, Holly, whatever the hell it is-it's astounding." "It's astounding," she acknowledged. "We'll do what you want, make up a list of carefully thought-out questions. And when it comes back, you should be the one to ask all of them, 'cause you'll be better at ad-libbing other questions if it says anything that needs follow-up." "I agree," she said, relieved that he had suggested it without being pressured. She was better schooled at interviewing than he was, but she was also more trustworthy in this particular situation than Jim could ever be. The Friend had a long past relationship with him and had, admittedly, already messed with his memory by making him forget about the encounters they'd had twenty-five years ago. Holly had to assume that Jim was coopted, to one degree or another corrupted, though he could not realize it. The Friend had been in his mind perhaps on scores or hundreds of occasions, when he had been at a formative age, and when he had been particularly vulnerable due to the loss of his parents, therefore even more susceptible to manipulation and control than most ten-year-old boys. On a subconscious level, Jim Ironheart might be programmed to protect The Friend's secrets rather than help to reveal them. Holly knew she was walking a thread-thin line between judicious precaution and paranoia, might even be treading more on the side of the latter than the former. Under the circumstances, a little paranoia was a prescription for survival. When he said he was going outside to relieve himself, however, she much preferred to be with him than alone in the high room. She followed him downstairs and stood by the Ford with her back to him while he peed.against the split-rail fence beside the cornfield. She stared out at the deep black pond. She listened to the toads, which were singing again. So were the cicadas. The events of the day had rattled her. Now even the sounds of nature seemed malevolent. She wondered if they had come up against something too strange and too powerful to be dealt with by just a failed reporter and an ex-schoolteacher. She wondered if they ought to leave the farm right away. She wondered if they would be allowed to leave. Since the departure of The Friend, Holly's fear had not abated. If anything, it had increased. She felt as if they were living under a thousand-ton weight that was magically suspended by a single human hair, but the magic was weakening and the hair was stretched as taut and brittle as a filament of glass. By midnight, they had eaten six chocolate doughnuts and composed seven pages of questions for The Friend. Sugar was an energizer and a consolation in times of trouble, but it was no help to already-frayed nerves. Holly's anxiety had a sharp refined-sugar edge to it now, like a wellstropped razor. Pacing with the tablet in her hand, Holly said, "And we're not going to let it get away with written answers this time. That just slows down the give and take between interviewer and interviewee. We're going to insist that it talk to us." Jim was lying on his back, his hands folded behind his head. "It can't talk." "How do you know that?" "Well, I'm assuming it can't, or otherwise it would've talked right from the start." "Don't assume anything," she said. "If it can mix its molecules with the wall, swim through stone-through anything, if it's to be believed-and if it can assume any form it wishes, then it can sure as hell form a mouth and vocal cords and talk like any self respecting higher power." "I guess you're right," he said uneasily. "It already said that it could appear to us as a man or woman if it wanted, didn't it?" "Well, yeah." "I'm not even asking for a flashy materialization. Just a voice, a disembodied voice, a little sound with the old lightshow.".Listening to herself as she talked, Holly realized that she was using her edginess to pump herself, to establish an aggressive tone that would serve her well when The Friend returned. It was an old trick she had learned when she had interviewed people whom she found imposing or intimidating. Jim sat up. "Okay, it could talk if it wanted to, but maybe it doesn't want to." "We already decided we can't let it set all the rules, Jim." "But I don't understand why we have to antagonize it." "I'm not antagonizing it." "I think we should be at least a little respectful." "Oh, I respect the hell out of it." "You don't seem to." "I'm convinced it could squash us like bugs if it wanted to, and that gives me tremendous respect for it." "That's not the kind of respect I mean." "That's the only kind of respect it's earned from me so far," she said, pacing around him now instead of back and forth. "When it stops trying to manipulate me, stops trying to scare the crap out of me, starts giving me answers that ring true, then maybe I'll respect it for other reasons." "You're getting a little spooky," he said. "Me?" "You're so hostile." "I am not." He was frowning at her. "Looks like blind hostility to me." "It's adversarial journalism. It's the modern reporter's tone and theme. You don't question your subject and later explain him to readers, you attack him. You have an agenda, a version of the truth you want to report regardless of the full truth, and you fulfill it. I never approved of it, never indulged in it, which is why I was always losing out on stories and promotions to other reporters. Now, here, tonight, I'm all for the attack part. The big difference is, I do care about getting to the truth, not shaping it, and I just want to twist and yank some real facts out of this alien of ours."."Maybe he won't show up." "He said he would." Jim shook his head. "But why should he if you're going to be like this?" "You're saying he might be afraid of me? What kind of higher power is that?" The bells rang, and she jumped in alarm. Jim got to his feet. "Just take it easy." The bells fell silent, rang again, fell silent. When they rang a third time, a sullen red light appeared at one point in the wall. It grew more intense, assumed a brighter shade, then suddenly burst across the domed room like a blazing fireworks display, after which the bells stopped ringing and the multitude of sparks coalesced into the pulsing, constantly moving amoebalike forms that they had seen before. "Very dramatic," Holly said. As the light swiftly progressed from red through orange to amber, she seized the initiative. "We would like you to dispense with the cumbersome way you answered our questions previously and simply speak to us directly." The Friend did not reply. "Will you speak to us directly?" No response. Consulting the tablet that she held in one hand, she read the first question. "Are you the higher power that has been sending Jim on life-saving missions?" She waited. Silence. She tried again. Silence. Stubbornly, she repeated the question. The Friend did not speak, but Jim said, "Holly, look at this." She turned and saw him examining the other tablet. He held it toward her, flipping through the first ten or twelve pages. The eerie and inconstant light from the stone was bright enough to show her that the pages were filled with The Friend's familiar printing. Taking the tablet from him, she looked at the first line on the top page: YES. I AM THAT POWER. Jim said, "He's already answered every one of the questions we've pre.pared." Holly threw the tablet across the room. It hit the far window without breaking the glass, and clattered to the floor. "Holly, you can't" She cut him off with a sharp look. The light moved through the transmuted limestone with greater agitation than before. To The Friend, Holly said, "God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone, yeah, but He also had the courtesy to talk to him. If God can humble Himself to speak directly with human beings, then so can you." She did not look to see how Jim was reacting to her adversarial tactics. All she cared about was that he not interrupt her. When The Friend remained silent, she repeated the first question on her list. "Are you the higher power that has been sending Jim on life-saving missions?" "Yes. I am that power" The voice was a soft, mellifluous baritone. Like the ringing of the bells, it seemed to come from all sides of them. The Friend did not materialize out of the wall in human form, did not sculpt a face from the limestone, but merely produced its voice out of thin air. She asked the second question on her list. "How can you know these people are about to die?" "I am an entity that lives in all aspects of time. " "What do you mean by that?" "Past present, and future." "You can foresee the
future?" "I live in the future as well as in the past and present" The light was coruscating through the walls with less agitation now, as if the alien presence had accepted her conditions and was mellow again. Jim moved to her side. He put a hand on her arm and squeezed gently, as if to say "good work." She decided not to ask for any more clarification on the issue of its ability to see the future, for fear they would be off on a tangent and never get back on track before the creature next announced that it was depart. She returned to the prepared questions. "Why do you want these particular people saved?" "To help mankind" it said sonorously. There might have been a note of pomposity in it, too, but that was hard to tell because the voice was so evenly modulated, almost machinelike.."But when so many people are dying every day-and most of them an innocents-why have you singled out these particular people to be rescued?" "They are special people. " "In what way are they special?" "If allowed to live each of them will make a major contribution to the betterment of mankind." Jim said, "I'll be damned." Holly had not been expecting that answer. It had the virtue of being fresh. But she was not sure she believed it. For one thing, she was bothered that The Friend's voice was increasingly familiar to her. She was sure she had heard it before, and in a context that undermined its credibility now, in spite of its deep and authoritative tone. "Are you saying you not only see the future as it will be but as it might have been?" "Yes" "Aren't we back to your being God now?" "No. I do not see as clearly as God. But I see" In his boyish best humor again, Jim smiled at the kaleidoscopic patterns of light, obviously excited and pleased by all that he was hearing. Holly turned away from the wall, crossed the room, squatted beside her suitcase, and opened it. Jim loomed over her. "What're you doing?" "Looking for this," she said, producing the notebook in which she had chronicled the discoveries she'd made while researching him. She got up, opened the notebook, and paged to the list of people whose lives he had saved prior to Flight 246. Addressing the entity throbbing through the limestone, she said, "May fifteenth. Atlanta, Georgia. Sam Newsome and his five-year-old daughter Emily. What are they going to contribute to humanity that makes them more important than all the other peo ple who died that day?" No answer was forthcoming. "Well?" she demanded. "Emily will become a great scientist and discover a cure for a major disease" Definitely a note of pomposity this time. "What disease?" "Why do you not believe me Miss Thorne?" The Friend spoke as formally as an English butler on duty, yet in that response, Holly felt she heard the subtle pouting tone of a child under the dignified, reserved sur She said, "Tell me what disease, and maybe I'll believe you."."Cancer" "Which cancer? There are all types of cancer." "All cancers" She referred to her notebook again. "June seventh. Corona, California Louis Andretti." "He will father a child who will grow up to become a great diplomat. " Better than dying of multiple rattlesnake bites, she thought. She said, "June twenty-first. New York City. Thaddeus" "He will become a great artist whose work will give millions of people hope." "He seemed like a nice kid," Jim said happily, buying into the whole thing. "I liked him." Ignoring him, Holly said, "June thirtieth. San Francisco-" "Rachael Steinberg will give birth to a child who will become a great h spiritual leader" That voice was bugging her. She knew she had heard it before. But where? "July fifth-" "Miami; Florida. Carmen Diaz She will give birth to a child who will become president of the United States" Holly fanned herself with the notebook and said, "Why not president of the world?" "July fourteenth. Houston, Texas. Amanda Cutter She will give birth to a child who will &be a great peacemaker" "Why not the Second Coming?" Holly asked. Jim had moved away from her. He was leaning against the wall between two windows, the display of light quietly exploding around him. "What's the matter with you?" he asked. "It's all too much," she said. "What is?" "Okay, it says it wants you to save special people." "To help mankind" "Sure, sure," Holly said to the wall. To Jim she said, "But these people are all just too special, don't you think? Maybe it's me, but it all seems overblown, it's gotten trite again. Nobody's growing up to be just a damned good doctor, or a businessman who creates a new industry and maybe ten thousand jobs, or an honest and courageous cop, or a terrific nurse. No, they're great diplomats, great scientists, great politicians, great peacemakers..Great, great, great!" "Is this adversarial journalism?" "Damn right." He pushed away from the wall, used both hands to smooth his thick hair back from his forehead, and cocked his head at her. "I see your point, why it's starting to sound like another episode of Outer Limits to you, but let's think about this. It's a crazy, extravagant situation. A being from another world, with powers that seem godlike to us, decides to use me to better the chances of the human race. Isn't it logical that he'd send me out to save special, really special people instead of your theoretical business tycoon?" "Oh, it's logical," she said. "It just doesn't ring true to me, and I've got a fairly well-developed nose for deception." "Is that why you were a great success as a reporter?" She might have laughed at the image of an alien, vastly superior to human beings, stooping to engage in a bickering match. But the impatience and poutiness she'd thought she detected as an undercurrent in some of its previous answers was now unmistakable, and the concept of a hypersensitive, resentful creature with godlike power was too unnerving to be funny at the moment. "How's that for a higher power?" she asked Jim. "Any second now, he's going to call me a bitch." The Friend said nothing. Consulting her notebook again, she said, "July twentieth. Steven Aimes. Birmingham, Alabama." Schools of light swam through the walls. The patterns were less graceful and less sensuous than before; if the lightshow had been the visual equivalent of one of Brahms's most pacific symphonies, it was now more like the discordant wailing of bad progressive jazz. "What about Steven Aimes?" she demanded, scared but remembering how an exertion of will had been met with respect before. "I am going now" "That was a short tide," she said. The amber light began to darken. "The tides in the vessel are not regular or of equal duration. But I will return. " "What about Steven Aimes? He was fifty-seven, still capable of siring a great something-or-other, though maybe a little long in the tooth. Why did you save Steve?".The voice grew somewhat deeper, slipping from baritone toward bass, and it hardened. "It would not be wise for you to attempt to leave" She had been waiting for that. As soon as she heard the words, she knew she had been tensed in expectation of them. Jim, however, was stunned. He turned, looking around at the dark amber forms swirling and melding and splitting apart again, as if trying to figure out the biological geography of the thing, so he could look it in the eyes. "What do you mean by that? We'll leave any time we want." "You must wait for my return. You will die if you attempt to leave.