Cold Fire

She tried to explain: "Wonderful and terrifying, awesome and strange, scary and damned exciting all at once.”

"You mean like in Close Encounters? Are you talking a starship or something?" "Yes. No. I'm not sure. I don't know. Maybe something weirder than that.”

"Weirder than a starship?" Her wonder, and even her fear, subsided in favor of frustration.

She was not accustomed to finding herself at a complete loss for words to describe things that she had felt or seen. But with this man and the incomparable experiences in which he became entangled, even her sophisticated vocabulary and talent for supple phrase-making failed her miserably.

"Shit, yes!" she said at last. "Weirder than a starship. At least weirder than the way they show them in the movies.”

"Come on," he said, ascending the stairs again, "let's get back up there." When she lingered at the window, he returned to her and took her hand. "It isn't over yet. I think it's just beginning. And the place for us to be is the upper room. I know it's the place. Come on, Holly.”

They sat on the inflatable-mattress sleeping bags again.

The lantern cast a pearly-silver glow, whitewashing the yellow-beige blocks of limestone. In the baglike wicks inside the glass chimney of the lamp, the gas burned with a faint hiss, so it seemed as if whispering voices were rising through the floorboards of that high room.

Jim was poised at the apex of his emotional roller coaster, full of childlike delight and anticipation, and this time Holly was right there with him.

The light in the pond had terrified her, but it had also touched her in other ways, sparking deep psychological responses on a primitive sub-subconscious level, igniting fuses of wonder and hope which were fizzing-burning unquenchably toward some much-desired explosion of faith, emotional catharsis.

She had accepted that Jim was not the only troubled person in the room.

His heart might contain more turmoil than hers, but she was as empty, in her own way, as he was in his. When they'd met in Portland, she had been a burnt-out cynic, going through the motions of a life, not even trying to identify and fill the empty spaces in her heart. She had not experienced the tragedy and grief that he had known, but now she realized that leading a life equally devoid of tragedy and joy could breed despair. Passing days and weeks and years in the pursuit of goals that had not really mattered to her, driven by a purpose she had not truly embraced, with no one to whom she was profoundly committed, she had been eaten by a dry-rot of the soul.

She and Jim were the two pieces of a yin-yang puzzle, each shaped to fill the hollowness in the other, healing each other merely by their contact.

They fit together astonishingly well, and the match seemed inevitable; but the puzzle might never have been solved if the halves of it had not been brought together in the same place at the same time.

Now she waited with nervous excitement for contact with the power that had led Jim to her. She was ready for God or for something quite different but equally benign. She could not believe that what she had seen in the pond was The Enemy. That creature was apart from this, connected somehow but different. Even if Jim had not told her that something fine and good was coming, she eventually would have sensed, on her own, that the light in the water and the ringing in the stone heralded not blood and death but rapture.

They spoke tersely at first, afraid that voluble conversation would inhibit that higher power from initiating the next stage of contact.

"How long has the pond been here?" she asked.

"A long time.”

"Before the Ironhearts?" "Yeah.”

"Before the farm itself?" "I'm sure it was.”

"Possibly forever?" "Possibly.”

"Any local legends about it?" "What do you mean?" "Ghost stories, Loch Ness, that kind of stuff" "No. Not that I've ever heard.”

They were silent. Waiting.

Finally Holly said, "What's your theory?" "Huh?" "Earlier today you said you had a theory, something strange and wonderful, but you didn't want to talk about it till you'd thought it through.”

"Oh, right. Now maybe it's more than a theory. When you said you'd seen something under the pond in your dream. well, I don't know why, but I started thinking about an encounter. ”

"Encounter?" "Yeah. Like what you said. Something. alien.”

"Not of this world," Holly said, remembering the sound of the bells and the light in the pond.

"They're out there in the universe somewhere," he said with quiet enthusiasm. "It's too big for them not to be out there. And someday they'll be coming. Someone will encounter them. So why not me, why not you?" "But it must've been there under the pond when you were ten.”

"Maybe.”

"Why would it be there all this time?" "I don't know. Maybe it's been there a lot longer. Hundreds of years.

Thousands.”

"But why a starship at the bottom of a pond?" "Maybe it's an observation station, a place where they monitor human civilization, like an outpost we might set up in Antarctica to study things there.