She referred to her notebook again. “June seventh. Corona, California. Louis Andretti.”
Better than dying of multiple rattlesnake bites, she thought.
She said, “June twenty-first. New York City. Thaddeus—”
“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—”
That voice was bugging her. She knew she had heard it before. But where?
“July fifth—”
Holly fanned herself with the notebook and said, “Why not president of the world?”
“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.”
“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
“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.”
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.
“That was a short tide,” she said.
The amber light began to darken.
“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.
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.”
“Don't you want to help mankind anymore?” Holly asked sharply.
Jim moved to Holly's side. Whatever estrangement she had caused between her and Jim, by taking an aggressive stance with The Friend, was apparently behind them. He put an arm around her protectively.
The limestone was mottled with a deep red glow.
The bloody light went out.
The lantern provided the only illumination. And in the deeper darkness that followed The Friend's departure, the quiet hiss of the burning gas was the only sound.
8
Holly stood at the head of the stairs, shining a flashlight into the gloom below. Jim supposed she was trying to make up her mind whether they really would be prevented from leaving the mill — and if so, how violently.
Watching her from where he sat on his sleeping bag, he could not understand why it was all turning sour.
He had come to the windmill because the bizarre andfrightening events in his bedroom in Laguna Niguel, over eighteen hours ago, had made it impossible to continue ignoring the dark side to the mystery in which he had become enwrapped. Prior to that, he had been willing to drift along, doing what he was compelled to do, pulling people out of the fire at the last minute, a bemused but game superhero who had to rely on airplanes when he wanted to fly and who had to do his own laundry. But the increasing intrusion of The Enemy — whatever the hell it was — its undeniable evil and fierce hostility, no longer allowed Jim the luxury of ignorance. The Enemy was struggling to break through from some other place, another dimension perhaps, and it seemed to be getting closer on each attempt. Learning the truth about the higher power behind his activities had not been at the top of his agenda, because he had felt that enlightenment would be granted to him in time, but learning about The Enemy had come to seem urgently necessary for his survival — and Holly's.
Nevertheless, he had traveled to the farm with the expectation that he would encounter good as well as evil, experience joy as well as fear. Whatever he learned by plunging into the unknown should at least leave him with a greater understanding of his sacred life-saving mission and the supernatural forces behind it. But now he was
