Cold Fire

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.
    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.”

5
    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