Cold Fire

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 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.