Cold Fire

But the boy is so full of despair and rage that The Friend alone is not enough to heal him. He needs a third personality, something into which he can shove all his negative feelings, all the darkness in himself that frightens him. So he creates The Enemy, embellishing Willott's story structure.

Alone in the windmill, he has exhilarating conversations with The Friend — and works out his rage through the materialization of The Enemy.

Until, one night, Lena Ironheart walks in at the wrong moment.

Frightened, she falls backward.

In shock because of what The Enemy has done, merely by its presence, Jim forces himself to forget the fantasy, both The Friend and Enemy, just as Jim Jamison forgot his alien encounter after saving the life of the future president of the United States. For twenty-five years, he struggles to keep a lid firmly on those fragmented personalities, suppressing both his very best and his very worst qualities, leading a relatively quiet and colorless life because he dares not tap his stronger feelings.

He finds purpose in teaching, which to some extent redeems him-until Larry Kakonis commits suicide. Without purpose any more, feeling that he has failed Kakonis as he failed his parents and, even more profoundly, his grandmother, he subconsciously longs to live out Jim Jamison's courageous and redeeming adventure, which means freeing The Friend.

But when he frees The Friend, he frees The Enemy as well. And after all these years of being bottled inside him, his rage has only intensified, become blacker and more bitter, utterly inhuman in its intensity. The Enemy is something even more evil now than it was twenty-five years ago, a creature of singularly murderous appearance and temperament.

So Jim was like any victim of multiple-personality syndrome.

Except for one thing. One little thing. He created nonhuman entities to embody aspects of himself, not other human identities-and had the power to give them flesh of their own. He hadn't been like Sally Field playing Sybil, sixteen people in one body. He had been three beings in three bodies, and one of them had been a killer.

Holly turned on the car heater. Though it must have been seventy degrees outside, she was chilled. The heat from the dashboard vents did nothing to warm her.

The clock behind the registration desk showed 1:11 P.M. when Holly checked them into a Quality motor lodge in Santa Barbara. While she filled out the form and provided her credit card to the clerk, Jim continued to sleep in the Ford.

When she returned with their key, she was able to rouse him enough to get him out of the car and into their room. He was in a stupor and went directly to the bed, where he curled up and once more fell instantly into a deep sleep.

She got diet sodas, ice, and candy bars from the vending-machine center near the pool.

In the room again, she closed the drapes. She switched on one lamp and arranged a towel over the shade to soften the light.

She pulled a chair near the bed and sat down. She drank diet soda and ate candy while she watched him sleep.

The worst was over. The fantasy had been burned away, and he had plunged completely into cold reality.

But she did not know what the aftermath would bring. She had never known him without his delusions, and she didn't know what he would be like when he had none. She didn't know if he would be a more optimistic man-or a darker one. She didn't know if he would still have the same degree of superhuman powers that he'd had before. He had summoned those powers from within himself only because he had needed them to sustain his fantasy and cling to his precarious sanity; perhaps, now, he would be only as gifted as he had been before his parents had died-able to levitate a pie pan, flip a coin with his mind, nothing more. Worst of all, she didn't know if he would still love her.

By dinnertime he was still asleep.

She went out and got more candy bars. Another hinge. She would end up as plump as her mother if she didn't get control of herself He was still asleep at ten o'clock. Eleven. Midnight.

She considered waking him. But she realized that he was in a chrysalis, waiting to be born from his old life into a new one. A caterpillar needed time to turn itself into a butterfly. That was her hope, anyway.

Sometime between midnight and one o'clock in the morning, Holly fell asleep in her chair. She did not dream.

He woke her.

She looked up into his beautiful eyes, which were not cold in the dim light of the towel-draped lamp, but which were still mysterious.

He was leaning over her chair, shaking her gently. "Holly, come on.

We've got to go.”

Instantly casting off sleep, she sat up. "Go where?" "Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

"Why?" Grabbing up one of her uneaten candy bars, peeling off the wrapper, biting into it, he said, "Tomorrow afternoon, three-thirty, a reckless schoolbus driver is going to try to beat a train at a crossing.

Twenty-six kids are going to die if we're not there first.”