Cold Fire

procrastinating, and the longer I delayed sorting through his things, the harder it became to ever do it.” He sighed again. “If I'd have found a renter or a buyer, that would have forced me to put things in order, no matter how unpleasant the job. But this old farm is about as marketable as a truckload of sand in the middle of the Mojave.”
    Closing the house upon the death of his grandfather, touching nothing in it for four years and four months, except to clean it once in a while—that was eccentric. Holly couldn't see it any other way. At the same time, however, it was an eccentricity that touched her, moved her. As she had sensed from the start, he was a gentle man beneath his rage, beneath his steely superhero identity, and she liked the soft-hearted part of him, too.
    “We'll do it together,” Holly said. “When we've figured out what the hell is happening to us, wherever and however we go on from here, there'll be time for us to sort through your grandfather's things. It won't be so difficult if we do it together.”
    He smiled at her and squeezed her hand.
    She remembered something else. “Jim, you recall the description I gave you of the woman in my dream last night, the woman who came up the mill stairs?”
    “Sort of.”
    “You said you didn't recognize her.”
    “So?”
    “But there's a photo of her in the house.”
    “There is?”
    “In the living room, that photograph of a couple in their early fifties—are they your grandparents, Lena and Henry?”
    “Yeah. That's right.”
    “Lena was the woman in my dream.”
    He frowned. “Isn't that odd … ?”
    “Well, maybe. But what's odder is, you didn't recognize her.”
    “I guess your description wasn't that good.”
    “But didn't you hear me say she had a beauty mark—”
    His eyes narrowed, and his hand tightened around hers. “Quick, the tablets.”
    Confused, she said, “What?”
    “Something's about to happen, I feel it, and we need the tablets we bought at The Center.”
    He let go of her hand, and she withdrew the two yellow, lined tablets and felt-tip pen from the plastic bag at her side. He took them from her, hesitated, looking around at the walls and at the shadows above them, as if waiting to be told what to do next.
    The bells rang.
     

----
     
    That musical tintinnabulation sent a thrill through Jim. He knew that he was on the verge of discovering the meaning not merely of the events of the past year but of the last two and a half decades. And not just that, either. More. Much more. The ringing heralded the revelation of even greater understanding, transcendental truths, an explanation of the fundamental meaning of his entire life, past and future, origins and destiny, and of the meaning of existence itself. Grandiose as such a notion might be, he sensed that the secrets of creation would be revealed to him before he left the windmill, and that he would reach the state of enlightenment he had sought—and failed to find—in a score of religions.
    As the second spell of ringing began, Holly started to get up.
    Jim figured she intended to descend to the window on the stairs and look into the pond. He said, “No, wait. It's going to happen here this time.”
    She hesitated, then sat down.
    As the ringing stopped again, Jim felt compelled to push the ice chest out of the way and put one of the yellow, lined tablets on the floor between him and Holly. He was not sure what he was expected to do with the other tablet and the pen, but after a brief moment of indecision, he held on to them.
    When the melodic ringing began a third time, it was accompanied by an impossible pulse of light within the limestone walls. The red glow seemed to well up from inside the stone at a point directly in front of them, then suddenly raced around the room, encircling them with a throbbing band of luminescence.
    Even as the strange flare whipped around them, Holly issued a wordless sound of fear, and Jim remembered what she had told him of her dream last night. The woman—whether it had been his grandmother or not—had climbed the stairs into the high room, had seen an amber emanation within the walls, as if the mill was made of colored glass, and had witnessed something unimaginably hostile being born out of those mortared blocks.
    “It's okay.” He was eager to reassure her. “This isn't The Enemy. It's something else. There's no danger here. This is a different light.”
    He was only sharing with her the reassurances that were