Cold Fire (50 page)

Holly closed the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

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

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

“You traveled with them, didn’t you?”

He nodded.

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

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

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

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

“Pretend?” she asked.

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

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

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

“But?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Glynn looked speculatively at Jim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim had been there, too.

And only Jim had come out of it alive.

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

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

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

Yeah, Holly thought, did it ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There was a reason....”

“What?”

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

“Clearly remember it?”

“Yes.”

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

He frowned. “No.”

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

“No.”

“Remember making arrangements for his burial?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

“No.”

“Did you inherit his property?”

“How could I inherit if he’s alive?”

“A conservatorship then?”

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

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

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

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

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

The sky was contusive.

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

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

“The worst is yet to come,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”