Cold Fire

leave.”
    “Don't you want to help mankind anymore?” Holly asked sharply.
    “Do not sleep.”
    Jim moved to Holly's side. Whatever estrangement she had caused between her and Jim, by taking an aggressive stance with The Friend, was apparently behind them. He put an arm around her protectively.
    “You dare not sleep. ”
    The limestone was mottled with a deep red glow.
    “Dreams are doorways.”
    The bloody light went out.
    The lantern provided the only illumination. And in the deeper darkness that followed The Friend's departure, the quiet hiss of the burning gas was the only sound.

8
    Holly stood at the head of the stairs, shining a flashlight into the gloom below. Jim supposed she was trying to make up her mind whether they really would be prevented from leaving the mill—and if so, how violently.
    Watching her from where he sat on his sleeping bag, he could not understand why it was all turning sour.
    He had come to the windmill because the bizarre andfrightening events in his bedroom in Laguna Niguel, over eighteen hours ago, had made it impossible to continue ignoring the dark side to the mystery in which he had become enwrapped. Prior to that, he had been willing to drift along, doing what he was compelled to do, pulling people out of the fire at the last minute, a bemused but game superhero who had to rely on airplanes when he wanted to fly and who had to do his own laundry. But the increasing intrusion of The Enemy—whatever the hell it was—its undeniable evil and fierce hostility, no longer allowed Jim the luxury of ignorance. The Enemy was struggling to break through from some other place, another dimension perhaps, and it seemed to be getting closer on each attempt. Learning the truth about the higher power behind his activities had not been at the top of his agenda, because he had felt that enlightenment would be granted to him in time, but learning about The Enemy had come to seem urgently necessary for his survival—and Holly's.
    Nevertheless, he had traveled to the farm with the expectation that he would encounter good as well as evil, experience joy as well as fear. Whatever he learned by plunging into the unknown should at least leave him with a greater understanding of his sacred life-saving mission and the supernatural forces behind it. But now he was more confused than before he'd come. Some developments had filled him with the wonder and joy for which he longed: the ringing in the stone, for one; and the beautiful, almost divine, light that was the essence of The Friend. He had been moved to rapture by the revelation that he was not merely saving lives but saving people so special that their survival would improve the fate of the entire human race. But that spiritual bliss had been snatched away from him by the growing realization that The Friend was either not telling them the whole truth or, worst case, was not telling them anything true at all. The childish petulance of the creature was unnerving in the extreme, and now Jim was not sure that anything he had done since saving the Newsomes last May was in the service of good rather than evil.
    Yet his fear was still tempered by hope. Though a splinter of despair had lodged in his heart and begun to fester, that spiritual infection was held in check by the core of optimism, however fragile, that had always been at the center of him.
    Holly switched off the flashlight, returned from the open door, and sat down on her mattress. “I don't know, maybe it was an empty threat, but there's no way of telling till we try to leave.”
    “You want to?”
    She shook her head. “What's the point in getting off the farm anyway? From everything we know, it can reach out to us anywhere we go. Right? I mean it reached you in Laguna Niguel, sent you on these missions, reached you out there in Nevada and sent you on to Boston to rescue Nicholas O'Conner.”
    “I've felt it with me, at times, no matter where I've gone. In Houston, in Florida, in France, in England—it guided me, let me know what was coming, so I could do the job it wanted done.”
    Holly looked exhausted. She was drawn and paler than the eerie glow of the gas lantern could account for, and her eyes were shadowed with rings of weariness. She closed her eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, a strained look on her face, as if she was trying to suppress a headache.
    With all his heart, Jim regretted that she had been drawn into this. But like