Cold Fire

At the water's edge, the feathery white panicles of the pampas grass caught the curious radiance and glowed like plumes of iridescent gas.

Something was rising from the bottom of the pond.

As the throbbing luminescence faded with the next cessation of the bells, Holly stood in the grip of awe and fear, knowing she should run but unable to move.

Ringing.

brighter Light. Muddy-orange this time. No red tint at all more than ever.

Holly broke the chains of fear and sprinted toward the windmill.

On all sides, the palpitant light enlivened the dreary dusk.

Shadows leapt rhythmically like Apaches dancing around a war fire.

Beyond the fence, dead cornstalks bristled as repulsively as the spiny legs and plated torsos of praying mantises. The windmill appeared to be in the process of changing magically from stone to copper or even to gold.

The ringing stopped and the light went out as she reached the open door of the mill.

She raced across the threshold, then skidded to a stop in the darkness, on the brink of the lower chamber. No light at all came through the windows now. The blackness was tarry, cloying. As she fumbled for the switch on the flashlight, she found it hard to draw breath, as if the darkness itself had begun flowing into her lungs, suffocating her.

The flashlight came on just as the bells began to ring again. She slashed the beam across the room and back, to be sure nothing was there in the gloom, reaching for her. Then she found the stairs to her left and rushed toward the high room.

When she reached the window at the halfway point, she put her face to the pane of glass that she had wiped clean with her hand earlier in the day.

In the pond below, the rippling bull's-eye of light was brighter still, now amber instead of orange.

Calling for Jim, Holly ran up the remaining stairs.

As she went, lines of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry, studied an age ago in junior high school and thought forgotten, rang crazily through her mind: Keeping time, time time, In a sort ofRunic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells bells bells, bells, Bells, bells. bells She burst into the high room, where Jim stood in the soft winter-white glow of the Coleman gas lantern. He was smiling, turning in a circle and looking expectantly at the walls around him.

As the bells died away, she said, "Jim, come look, come quick, something's in the lake.”

She dashed to the nearest window, but it was just far enough around the wall from the pond to prevent her seeing the water. The other two windows were even more out of line with the desired view, so she did not even try them.

"The ringing in the stone," Jim said dreamily.

Holly returned to the head of the stairs as the bells began to ring again.

She paused and looked back just long enough to be sure that Jim was following her, for he seemed in something of a daze.

Hurrying down the stairs, she heard more lines of Poe's poem reverberating in her mind: Hear the loud alarum bells Brazen bells! What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells She had never been the kind of woman to whom sprang lines of Verdee appropriate to the moment. She couldn't recall quoting a line of poetry or even reading any other than Louise Tarvohl's treacle! — since college.

When she reached the window, she scrubbed frantically at another pane with the palm of her hand, to give them a better view of the spectacle below. She saw that the light was blood-red again and dimmer, as if whatever had been rising through the water was now sinking again.

Oh, the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells It seemed crazy to be mentally reciting poetry in the midst of these wondrous and frightening events, but she had never been under such stress before.

Maybe this was the way the mind worked-giddily dredging up long-forgotten knowledge-when you were about to meet a higher power.

Because that's just what she felt was about to happen, an encounter with a higher power, perhaps God but most likely not. She didn't really think God lived in a pond, although any minister or priest would probably tell her that God lived everywhere, in all things. God was like the eight-hundred-pound gorilla who could live anywhere he wanted.

Just as Jim reached her, the ringing stopped, and the crimson light in the pond quickly faded. He squeezed in beside her and put his face to the glass.

They waited.

Two seconds ticked by. Two more.

"No," she said. "Damn it, I wanted you to see.”

But the ringing did not resume, and the pond remained dark out there in the steadily dimming twilight. Night would be upon them within a few minutes.

"What was it?" Jim asked, leaning back from the window.

"Like something in a Spielberg film," she said excitedly, "rising up out of the water, from deep under the pond, light throbbing in time with the bells. I think that's where the ringing originates, from the thing in the pond, and somehow it's transmitted through the walls of the mill.”

"Spielberg film?" He looked puzzled.