Cold Fire (48 page)

He looked at the date of her death once more—September 25—and he was too frightened now to cry.

“What is it? Tell me,” Holly urged.

“That’s when I came with the flowers, the only other time I’ve ever come, the day I remember as the day she died. September twenty-fifth ... but five years ago, not twenty-four. It was the nineteenth anniversary of her death ... but at the time it seemed to me, and always has, that she’d only just then died.”

They were both silent.

Two large blackbirds wheeled across the somber sky, shrieking, and disappeared over the treetops.

Finally Holly said, “Could it be, you denied her death, refused to accept it when it really happened, twenty-four years ago? Maybe you were only able to accept it nineteen years later ... the day you came here with the flowers. That’s why you remember her dying so much more recently than she did. You date her death from the day you finally accepted it.”

He knew at once that she had hit upon the truth, but the answer did not make him feel better. “But Holly, my God, that
is
madness.”

“No,” she said calmly. “It’s self-defense, part of the same defenses you erected to hide so much of that year when you were ten.” She paused, took a deep breath, and said, “Jim, how did your grandma die?”

“She ... ” He was surprised to realize that he could not recall the cause of Lena Ironheart’s death. One more fog-filled blank. “I don’t know.”

“I think she died in the mill.”

He looked away from the tombstone, at Holly. He tensed with alarm, although he did not know why. “In the windmill? How? What happened? How can you know?”

“The dream I told you about. Climbing the mill stairs, looking through the window at the pond below, and seeing another woman’s face reflected in the glass, your grandmother’s face.”

“It was only a dream.”

Holly shook her head. “No, I think it was a memory, your memory, which you projected from your sleep into mine.”

His heart fluttered with panic for reasons he could not quite discern. “How can it have been my memory if I don’t have it now?”

“You have it.”

He frowned. “No. Nothing like that.”

“It’s locked down in your subconscious, where you can access it only when you’re dreaming, but it’s there, all right.”

If she had told him that the entire cemetery was mounted on a carousel, and that they were slowly spinning around under the bleak gun-metal sky, he would have accepted what she said more easily than he could accept the memory toward which she was leading him. He felt as if he were spinning through light and darkness, light and darkness, fear and rage....

With great effort, he said, “But in your dream ... I was in the high room when grandma got there.”

“Yes.”

“And if she died there ...”

“You witnessed her death.”

He shooked his head adamantly. “No. My God, I’d remember that, don’t you think?”

“No. I think that’s why you needed nineteen years even to admit to yourself that she died. I think you saw her die, and it was such a shock that it threw you into long-term amnesia, which you overlaid with fantasies, always more fantasies.”

A breeze stirred, and something crackled around his feet. He was sure it was the bony hands of his grandmother clawing out of the earth to seize him, but when he looked down he saw only withered leaves rattling against one another as they blew across the grass.

With each heartbeat now like a fist slamming into a punching bag, Jim turned away from the grave, eager to get back to the car.

Holly put a hand on his arm. “Wait.”

He tore loose of her, almost shoved her away. He glared at her and said, “I want to get out of here.”

Undeterred, she grabbed and halted him again. “Jim, where is your grandfather? Where is he buried?”

Jim pointed to the plot beside his grandmother’s. “He’s there, of course, with her.”

Then he saw the left half of the granite monument. He had been so intently focused on the right half, on the impossible date of his grandmother’s death, that he had not noticed what was missing from the left side. His grandfather’s name was there, as it should be, engraved at the same time that Lena’s had been: HENRY JAMES IRONHEART. And the date of his birth. But that was all. The date of his death had never been chiseled into the stone.

The iron sky was pressing lower.

The trees seemed to be leaning closer, arching over him.

Holly said, “Didn’t you say he died eight months after Lena?”

His mouth was dry. He could hardly work up enough spit to speak, and the words came out in dry whispers like susurrant bursts of sand blown against desert stone. “What the hell do you want from me? I told you ... eight months ... May twenty-fourth of the next year....”

“How did he die?”

“I ... I don’t... I don’t remember.”

“Illness?”

“I don’t know.”

“An accident?”

“I ... just ... I think... I think it was a stroke.”

Large parts of the past were mists within a mist. He realized now that he rarely thought about the past. He lived totally in the present. He had never realized there were huge holes in his memories simply because there were so many things he had never before tried to remember.

“Weren’t you your grandfather’s nearest relative?” Holly asked.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you attend to the details of his funeral?”

He hesitated, frowning. “I think... yes...”

“Then did you just forget to have the date of his death added to the headstone?”

He stared at the blank spot in the granite, frantically searching an equally blank spot in his memory, unable to answer her. He felt sick. He wanted to curl up and close his eyes and sleep and never wake up, let something else wake up in his place....

She said, “Or did you bury him somewhere else?”

Across the ashes of the burnt-out sky, the shrieking blackbirds swooped again, slashing calligraphic messages with their wings, their meaning no more decipherable than the elusive memories darting through the deeper grayness of Jim’s mind.

 
 
Holly drove them around the corner to Tivoli Gardens.

When they had left the pharmacy, Jim had wanted to drive to the cemetery, worried about what he would find there but at the same time eager to confront his misremembered past and wrench his recollections into line with the truth. The experience at the gravesite had shaken him, however, and now he was no longer in a rush to find out what additional surprises awaited him. He was content to let Holly drive, and she suspected that he would be happier if she just drove out of town, turned south, and never spoke to him of New Svenborg again.

The park was too small to have a service road. They left the car at the street and walked in.

Holly decided that Tivoli Gardens was even less inviting close up than it had been when glimpsed from a moving car yesterday. The dreary impression it made could not be blamed solely on the overcast sky. The grass was half parched from weeks of summer sun, which could be quite intense in any central California valley. Leggy runners had sprouted unchecked from the rose bushes; the few remaining blooms were faded and dropping petals in the thorny sprawl. The other flowers looked wilted, and the two benches needed painting.

Only the windmill was well maintained. It was a bigger, more imposing mill than the one at the farm, twenty feet higher, with an encircling deck about a third of the way up.

“Why are we here?” she asked.

“Don’t ask me. You’re the one who wanted to come.”

“Don’t be thick, babe,” she said.

She knew that pushing him was like kicking a package of unstable dynamite, but she had no choice. He was going to blow anyway, sooner or later. Her only hope of survival was to force him to acknowledge that he was The Enemy before that personality seized control of him permanently. She sensed that she was running out of time.

She said, “You’re the one who put it on the itinerary yesterday. You said they’d made a movie here once.” She was jolted by what she had just said. “Wait a sec—is this where you saw Robert Vaughn? Was he in the movie they made here?”

With a bewildered expression that slowly gave way to a frown, Jim turned in place, surveying the small park. At last he headed toward the windmill, and she followed him.

Two historical-marker lecterns flanked the flagstone path in front of the mill door. They were all-weather stone stands. The reading material on the slanted tops was protected behind sheets of Plexiglas in watertight frames. The lectern on the left, to which they stepped first, provided background information about the use of windmills for grain milling, water pumping, and electricity production in the Santa Ynez Valley from the 1800s until well into the twentieth century, followed by a history of the preserved mill in front of them, which was called, rather aptly, the New Svenborg Mill.

That material was as dull as dirt, and Holly turned to the second lectern only because she still had some of the doggedness and appetite for facts that had made her a passable journalist. Her interest was instantly piqued by the title at the top of the second plaque—THE BLACK WINDMILL : BOOK AND MOVIE.

“Jim, look at this.”

He joined her by the second marker.

There was a photograph of the jacket of a young-adult novel—
The Black Windmill
by Arthur J. Willott, and the illustration on it was obviously based on the New Svenborg Mill. Holly read the lectern text with growing astonishment. Willott, a resident of the Santa Ynez Valley—Solvang, not Svenborg—had been a successful author of novels for young adults, turning out fifty-two titles before his death in 1982, at the age of eighty. His most popular and enduring book, by far, had been a fantasy-adventure about a haunted old mill and a boy who discovered that the ghosts were actually aliens from another world and that under the millpond was a spaceship which had been there for ten thousand years.

“No,” Jim said softly but with some anger, “no, this makes no sense, this can’t be right.”

Holly recalled a moment from the dream in which she had been in Lena Ironheart’s body, climbing the mill stairs. When she had reached the top, she had found ten-year-old Jim standing with his hands fisted at his sides, and he had turned to her and said, “I’m scared, help me, the walls, the
walls!
” At his feet had been a yellow candle in a blue dish. Until now she’d forgotten that beside the dish lay a hardcover book in a colorful dustjacket. It was the same dustjacket reproduced on the lectern:
The Black Windmill.

“No,” Jim said again, and he turned away from the plaque. He stared around worriedly at the breeze-ruffled trees.

Holly read on and discovered that twenty-five years ago, the very year that ten-year-old Jim Ironheart had come to town,
The Black Windmill
had been made into a motion picture. The New Svenborg Mill had served as the primary location. The motion-picture company had created a shallow but convincing millpond around it, then paid to restore the land after filming and to establish the current pocket park.

Still turning slowly around, frowning at the trees and shrubs, at the gloom beneath them that the overcast day could not dispel, Jim said, “Something’s coming.”

Holly could see nothing coming, and she believed that he was just trying to distract her from the plaque. He did not want to accept the implications of the information on it, so he was trying to make her turn away from it with him.

The movie must have been a dog, because Holly had never heard of it. It appeared to have been the kind of production that was big news nowhere but in New Svenborg and, even there, only because it was based on a book by a valley resident. On the historical marker, the last paragraph of copy listed, among other details of the production, the names of the five most important members of the cast. No big box-office draws had appeared in the flick. Of the first four names, she recognized only M. Emmet Walsh, who was a personal favorite of hers. The fifth cast member was a young and then-unknown Robert Vaughn.

She looked up at the looming mill.

“Wha
_t
is happening here?” she said aloud. She lifted her gaze to the dismal sky, then lowered it to the photo of the dustjacket for Willott’s book. “What the
hell
is happening here?”

In a voice quaking with fear but also with an eerie note of desire, Jim said, “It’s coming!”

She looked where he was staring, and saw a disturbance in the earth at the far end of the small park, as if something was burrowing toward them, pushing up a yard-wide hump of dirt and sod to mark its tunnel, moving fast, straight at them.

She whirled on Jim, grabbed him. “Stop it!”

“It’s coming,” he said, wide-eyed.

“Jim, it’s you, it’s only you.”

“No ... not me ... The Enemy.” He sounded half in a trance.

Holly glanced back and saw the thing passing under the concrete walkway, which cracked and heaved up in its wake.

“Jim, damn it!”

He was staring at the approaching killer with horror but also with, she thought, a sort of longing.

One of the park benches was knocked over as the earth bulged then sank under it.

The Enemy was only forty feet from them, coming fast.

She grabbed Jim by the shirt, shook him, tried to make him look at her. “I saw this movie when I was a kid. What was it called, huh? Wasn’t it
Invaders from Mars,
something like that, where the aliens open doors in the sand and suck you down?”

She glanced back. It was thirty feet from them.

“Is that what’s going to kill us, Jim? Something that opens a door in the sand, sucks us down, something from a movie to give ten-year-old boys nightmares?”

Twenty feet away.

Jim was sweating, shuddering. He seemed to be beyond hearing anything Holly said.