Cold Fire

and the illustration on it was obviously based on the New Svenborg Mill. Holly read the lectern text with growing astonishment. Willott, a resident of the Santa Ynez Valley—Solvang, not Svenborg—had been a successful author of novels for young adults, turning out fifty-two titles before his death in 1982, at the age of eighty. His most popular and enduring book, by far, had been a fantasy-adventure about a haunted old mill and a boy who discovered that the ghosts were actually aliens from another world and that under the millpond was a spaceship which had been there for ten thousand years.
    “No,” Jim said softly but with some anger, “no, this makes no sense, this can't be right.”
    Holly recalled a moment from the dream in which she had been in Lena Ironheart's body, climbing the mill stairs. When she had reached the top, she had found ten-year-old Jim standing with his hands fisted at his sides, and he had turned to her and said, “I'm scared, help me, the walls, the walls!” At his feet had been a yellow candle in a blue dish. Until now she'd forgotten that beside the dish lay a hardcover book in a colorful dustjacket. It was the same dust-jacket reproduced on the lectern: The Black Windmill.
    “No,” Jim said again, and he turned away from the plaque. He stared around worriedly at the breeze-ruffled trees.
    Holly read on and discovered that twenty-five years ago, the very year that ten-year-old Jim Ironheart had come to town, The Black Windmill had been made into a motion picture. The New Svenborg Mill had served as the primary location. The motion-picture company had created a shallow but convincing millpond around it, then paid to restore the land after filming and to establish the current pocket park.
    Still turning slowly around, frowning at the trees and shrubs, at the gloom beneath them that the overcast day could not dispel, Jim said, “Something's coming.”
    Holly could see nothing coming, and she believed that he was just trying to distract her from the plaque. He did not want to accept the implications of the information on it, so he was trying to make her turn away from it with him.
    The movie must have been a dog, because Holly had never heard of it. It appeared to have been the kind of production that was big news nowhere but in New Svenborg and, even there, only because it was based on a book by a valley resident. On the historical marker, the last paragraph of copy listed, among other details of the production, the names of the five most important members of the cast. No big box-office draws had appeared in the flick. Of the first four names, she recognized only M. Emmet Walsh, who was a personal favorite of hers. The fifth cast member was a young and then-unknown Robert Vaughn.
    She looked up at the looming mill.
    “What is happening here?” she said aloud. She lifted her gaze to the dismal sky, then lowered it to the photo of the dustjacket for Willott's book. “What the hell is happening here?”
    In a voice quaking with fear but also with an eerie note of desire, Jim said, “It's coming!”
    She looked where he was staring, and saw a disturbance in the earth at the far end of the small park, as if something was burrowing toward them, pushing up a yard-wide hump of dirt and sod to mark its tunnel, moving fast, straight at them.
    She whirled on Jim, grabbed him. “Stop it!”
    “It's coming,” he said, wide-eyed.
    “Jim, it's you, it's only you.”
    “No … not me … The Enemy.” He sounded half in a trance.
    Holly glanced back and saw the thing passing under the concrete walkway, which cracked and heaved up in its wake.
    “Jim, damn it!”
    He was staring at the approaching killer with horror but also with, she thought, a sort of longing.
    One of the park benches was knocked over as the earth bulged then sank under it.
    The Enemy was only forty feet from them, coming fast.
    She grabbed Jim by the shirt, shook him, tried to make him look at her. “I saw this movie when I was a kid. What was it called, huh? Wasn't it Invaders from Mars, something like that, where the aliens open doors in the sand and suck you down?”
    She glanced back. It was thirty feet from them.
    “Is that what's going to kill us, Jim? Something that opens a door in the sand, sucks us down, something from a movie to give ten-year-old boys nightmares?”
    Twenty feet away.
    Jim was sweating, shuddering. He seemed to be beyond hearing anything Holly said.
    She shouted in his face anyway: “Are you