Cold Fire

Eloise Glynn had the bouncy manner and attitude of a girls' sports coach that Holly remembered from high school. "Willott?" she said in answer to Holly's question. "Oh, yes, we've got a truckload of Willott" She bounced up from her chair. "I can show you right where he's at.”

She came around her desk, stepping briskly, and led Holly and Jim across the hall to the other large room. "He was local, as I'm sure you know.

Died a decade ago, but two-thirds of his books are still in print." She stopped in front of the young-adult section and made a sweeping gesture with one hand to indicate two three-foot shelves of Willott titles. "He was a productive man, Artie Willott, so busy that beavers hung their heads in shame when he walked by.”

She grinned at Holly, and it was infectious. Holly grinned back at him "We're looking for The Black Windmill.”

"That's one of his most popular titles, never met a kid didn't love it, Mrs. Glynn plucked the book off the shelf almost without looking to where it was, handed it to Holly. "This for your kid?" "Actually for me. I read about it on the plaque over in Tivoli Gardens.

"I've read the book," Jim said. "But she's curious.”

With Jim, Holly returned to the main room and sat at the table f from the desk. With the book between them, they read the first two chapters.

She kept touching him-his hand, shoulder, knee-gentling him.

Somehow she had to hold him together long enough for him to learn the truth and be healed by it, and the only glue she could think of was love. She had convinced herself that each small expression of love-each touch, smile, affectionate look or word-was a bonding agent that prevented him from shattering completely.

The novel was well and engagingly written. But what it revealed about Jim Ironheart's life was so astonishing that Holly began to skim and spot read, whispering passages to him, urgently seeking the next startling revelation.

The lead character was named Jim, not Ironheart but Jamison. Jim Jamison lived on a farm that had a pond and an old windmill. The mill was supposedly haunted, but after witnessing a number of spooky incidents, Jim discovered that an alien presence, not a spirit, was quartered in a spacecraft under the pond and was manifesting itself in the mill. It revealed itself to Jim as a soft light that glowed within the mill walls.

Communication between Jim and the alien was achieved with the use of two lined, yellow tablets-one for Jim's questions, and one for the alien's answers, which appeared as if by magic. According to the extraterrestrial, it was a being of pure energy and was on earth "TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND." It referred to itself as THE FRIEND.

Marking her place with a finger, Holly flipped through the rest of the book to see if The Friend continued to use the awkward tablets for communication all the way to the end. It did. In the story on which Jim Ironheart had based his fantasy, the alien never vocalized.

"Which is why you doubted that your alien could vocalize and why you resisted my suggestion that we refuse to play along with the tablet system.”

Jim was beyond denial now. He stared at the book with wonder.

His response gave Holly hope for him. In the cemetery, he had been in such distress, his eyes so cold and bleak, that she had begun to doubt if, indeed, he could turn his phenomenal power inward to heal himself And in the park, for one terrible moment, she had thought that his fragile shell of sanity would crack and spill the yolk of madness.

But he had held together, and now his curiosity seemed to be overcoming his fear.

Mrs. Glynn had gone off to work in the stacks. No other patrons had come in to browse.

Holly returned to the story, skim-reading. At the midpoint of the tale, just after Jim Jamison and the alien had their second encounter, the ET explained that it was an entity that lived "IN ALL ASPECTS OF TIME" could perceive the future, and wanted to save the life of a man who was fated to die.

"I'll be damned," Jim said softly.

Without warning, a vision burst in Holly's mind with such force and brilliance that the library vanished for a moment and her inner world became the only reality: she saw herself naked and nailed to a wall in an obscene parody of a crucifix, blood streaming from her hands and feet (a voice whispering: die, die, die), and she opened her mouth to scream but, instead of sound, swarms of cockroaches poured out between her lips, and she realized she was already dead (die die die), her putrid innards crawling with pests and vermin The hateful phantasm flickered off the screen of her mind as suddenly as it had appeared, and she snapped back into the library with a jolt.

"Holly?" Jim was looking at her worriedly.

A part of him had sent the vision to her, no question about that.

But the Jim she was looking at now was not the Jim who had done it. The dark child within him, The Enemy, hate-filled and murderous, was striking at her with a new weapon.

She said, "It's okay. It's all right.”