Cold Fire

flooding into him from a higher power. He hoped to God that he was correct, that no threat was imminent, for he remembered too well the hideous biological transformation of his own bedroom ceiling in Laguna Niguel little more than twelve hours ago. Light had pulsed within the oily, insectile birth sac that had blistered out of ordinary drywall, and the shadowy form within, writhing and twitching, had been nothing he would ever want to see more directly.
    During two more bursts of melodic ringing, the color of the light changed to amber. But otherwise it in no way resembled the menacing radiance in his bedroom ceiling, which had been a different shade of amber altogether—the vile yellow of putrescent matter or of rich dark pus—and which had throbbed in sympathy with an ominous tripartite heartbeat that was not audible now.
    Holly looked scared nonetheless.
    He wished he could pull her close, put his arm around her. But he needed to give his undivided attention to the higher power that was striving to reach him.
    The ringing stopped, but the light did not fade. It quivered, shimmered, dimmed, and brightened. It moved through the otherwise dark wall in scores of separate amoeba-like forms that constantly flowed together and separated into new shapes; it was like a one-dimensional representation of the kaleidoscopic display in one of those old Lava lamps. The ever-changing patterns evolved on all sides of them, from the base of the wall to the apex of the domed ceiling.
    “I feel like we're in a bathysphere, all glass, suspended far, far down in the ocean,” Holly said. “And great schools of luminescent fish are diving and soaring and swirling past us on all sides, through the deep black water.”
    He loved her for putting the experience into better words than he could summon, words that would not let him forget the images they described, even if he lived a hundred years.
    Unquestionably, the ghostly luminosity lay within the stone, not merely on the surface of it. He could see into that now-translucent substance, as if it had been alchemized into a dark but well-clarified quartz. The amber radiance brightened the room more than did the lantern, which he had turned low. His trembling hands looked golden, as did Holly's face.
    But pockets of darkness remained, and the constantly moving light enlivened the shadows as well.
    “What now?” Holly asked softly.
    Jim noticed that something had happened to the yellow tablet on the floor between them. “Look.”
    Words had appeared on the top third of the first page. They looked as if they had been formed by a finger dipped in ink:
    I AM WITH YOU.

6
    Holly had been distracted—to say the least!—by the light-show, but she did not think that Jim could have leaned to the tablet and printed the words with the felt-tip pen or any other instrument without drawing her attention. Yet she found it hard to believe that some disembodied presence had conveyed the message.
    “I think we're being encouraged to ask questions,” Jim said.
    “Then ask it what it is,” she said at once.
    He wrote a question on the second tablet, which he was holding, and showed it to her:
    Who are you?
    As they watched, the answer appeared on the first tablet, which lay between and slightly in front of them at such an angle that they could both read it. The words were not burnt onto the paper and were not formed by ink that dripped magically from the air. Instead, the irregular, wavery letters appeared as dim gray shapes and grew darker as they seemed to float up out of the paper, as though a page of the tablet were not one-five-hundredth of an inch thick but a pool of liquid many feet deep. She recognized immediately that this was similar to the effect she had seen earlier when the balls of light had risen to the center of the pond before bursting and casting concentric rings of illumination outward through the water; this was, as well, how the light had first welled up in the limestone walls before the blocks had become thoroughly translucent.
    THE FRIEND.
    Who are you? The Friend.
    It seemed to be an odd self-description. Not “your friend” or “a friend” but The Friend.
    For an alien intelligence, if indeed that's all it was, the name had curious spiritual implications, connotations of divinity. Men had given God many names—Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Zeus, Aesir—but even more titles. God was The Almighty, The Eternal Being, The Infinite, The Father, The Savior, The Creator, The Light.