Cold Fire

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.

re "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 The Enemy before that personality seized control of him permanently.

She sensed that she was running out of time.

an 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.

let "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 plexiglass 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 six to in front of them, which was called, rather aptly, the New Svenborg Mill.

line That material was as dull as dirt, and Holly turned to the second lectern over, only because she still had some of the doggedness and appetite for facts rises that had made her a passable journalist.

Her interest was instantly piqued 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 in it 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 s was growing astonishment. Willott, a resident of the Santa Ynez valley in Solvang, not Svenborg-had been a successful author of novels for young from adults, turning out fifty-two titles before his death in, at the age of petals eighty. His most popular and enduring book, by far, had been a fantasynches adventure about a haunted old mill and a boy who discovered that the ghosts were actually aliens from another world and that under the milliosing pond was a spaceship which had been there for ten thousand years.

, deck "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.