Cold Fire

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.

"What 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 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.

She shouted in his face anyway: "Are you going to kill me and yourself, suicide like Larry Kakonis, just stop being strong and put an end to it, let one of your own nightmares pull you in the ground?" Ten feet.

Eight.

"Jim!" Six.

Four.

Hearing a monstrous grinding of jaws in the ground under them, she raised her foot, rammed the heel of her shoe down across the front of his shin, as hard as she could, to make him feel it through his sock.

Jim cried out in pain as the ground shifted under them, and Holly looked down in horror at the rupturing earth. But the burrowing stopped simultaneously with his sharp cry. The ground didn't open. Nothing erupted from it or sucked them down.

Shaking, Holly stepped back from the ripped sod and cracked earth on which she had been standing.

Jim looked at her, aghast. "It wasn't me. It can't have been.”

Back in the car, Jim slumped in his seat.

Holly folded her arms on the steering wheel, put her forehead on her arms.

He looked out the side window at the park. The giant mole trail was still there. The sidewalk was cracked and tumbled. The bench lay on its side.

He just couldn't believe that the thing beneath the park had been only a figment of his imagination, empowered only by his mind. He had been in control of himself all his life, living a Spartan existence of books and work, with no vices or indulgences. (Except a frighteningly convenient forgetfulness, he thought sourly.) Nothing about Holly's theory was harder for him to accept than that a wild and savage part of him, beyond his conscious control, was the only real danger that they faced.

He was beyond ordinary fear now. He was no longer perspiring or shivering. He was in the grip of a primal terror that left him rigid and DryIce dry.

"It wasn't me," he repeated.

"Yes, it was." Considering that she believed he'd almost killed her Holly was surprisingly gentle with him. She did not raise her voice; it was softened by a note of great tenderness.

He said, "You're still on this split-personality kick.”

"Yes.”

"So it was my dark side.”

"Yes.”