Cold Fire (37 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They waited.

Two seconds ticked by. Two more.

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

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

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

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

“Spielberg film?” He looked puzzled.

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

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

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

“Weirder than a starship?”

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

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

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

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 waiting for a buyer.”

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

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

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

He shrugged.

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

“A renter might always show up.”

“It’s sort of creepy, Jim.”

Finally he looked at her. “How so?”

“It’s like a mausoleum.”

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

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

“Then why... ?”

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

A tortured expression darkened the blue of his eyes.

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

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

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

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

He smiled at her and squeezed her hand.

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

“Sort of.”

“You said you didn’t recognize her.”

“So?”

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

“There is?”

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

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“Lena was the woman in my dream.”

He frowned. “Isn’t that odd... ?”

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

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

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

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

Confused, she said, “What?”

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

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

The bells rang.

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

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