Cold Fire

going to kill me and yourself, suicide like Larry Kakonis, just stop being strong and put an end to it, let one of your own nightmares pull you in the ground?”
    Ten feet.
    Eight.
    “Jim!”
    Six.
    Four.
    Hearing a monstrous grinding of jaws in the ground under them, she raised her foot, rammed the heel of her shoe down across the front of his shin, as hard as she could, to make him feel it through his sock. Jim cried out in pain as the ground shifted under them, and Holly looked down in horror at the rupturing earth. But the burrowing stopped simultaneously with his sharp cry. The ground didn't open. Nothing erupted from it or sucked them down.
    Shaking, Holly stepped back from the ripped sod and cracked earth on which she had been standing.
    Jim looked at her, aghast. “It wasn't me. It can't have been.”
     

----
     
    Back in the car, Jim slumped in his seat.
    Holly folded her arms on the steering wheel, put her forehead on her arms.
    He looked out the side window at the park. The giant mole trail was still there. The sidewalk was cracked and tumbled. The bench lay on its side.
    He just couldn't believe that the thing beneath the park had been only a figment of his imagination, empowered only by his mind. He had been in control of himself all his life, living a Spartan existence of books and work, with no vices or indulgences. (Except a frighteningly convenient forgetfulness, he thought sourly.) Nothing about Holly's theory was harder for him to accept than that a wild and savage part of him, beyond his conscious control, was the only real danger that they faced.
    He was beyond ordinary fear now. He was no longer perspiring or shivering. He was in the grip of a primal terror that left him rigid and Dry-Ice dry.
    “It wasn't me,” he repeated.
    “Yes, it was.” Considering that she believed he'd almost killed her, Holly was surprisingly gentle with him. She did not raise her voice; it was softened by a note of great tenderness.
    He said, “You're still on this split-personality kick.”
    “Yes.”
    “So it was my dark side.”
    “Yes.”
    “Embodied in a giant worm or something,” he said, trying to hone a sharp edge on his sarcasm, failing. “But you said The Enemy only broke through when I was sleeping, and I wasn't sleeping, so even if I am The Enemy, how could I have been that thing in the park?”
    “New rules. Subconsciously, you're getting desperate. You're not able to control that personality as easily as before. The closer you're forced to the truth, the more aggressive The Enemy's going to become in order to defend itself.”
    “If it was me, why wasn't there an alien heartbeat like before?”
    “That's always just been a dramatic effect, like the bells ringing before The Friend put in an appearance.” She raised her head from her arms and looked at him. “You dropped it because there wasn't time for it. I was reading that plaque, and you wanted to stop me as fast as you could. You needed a distraction. Let me tell you, babe, it was a lulu.”
    He looked out the window again, toward the windmill and the lectern that held the information about The Black Windmill.
    Holly put a hand on his shoulder. “You were in a black despair after your parents died. You needed to escape. Evidently a writer named Arthur Willott provided you with a fantasy that fit your needs perfectly. To one extent or another, you've been living in it ever since.”
    Though he could not admit it to her, he had to admit to himself that he was groping toward understanding, that he was on the brink of seeing his past from a new perspective that would make all of the mysterious lines and angles fall into a new and comprehensible shape. If selective amnesia, carefully constructed false memories, and even multiple personalities were not indications of madness but only the hooks he had used to hold on to sanity—as Holly insisted—then what would happen to him if he let go of those hooks? If he dug up the truth about his past, faced the things he had refused to face when he had turned to fantasy as a child, would the truth drive him mad this time? What was he hiding from?
    “Listen,” she said, “the important thing is that you shut it down before it reached us, before it did any harm.”
    “My shin hurts like hell,” he said, wincing.
    “Good,” she said brightly. She started the engine.
    “Where are we going now?” he asked;
    “Where else? The library.”
     

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    Holly parked on Copenhagen Lane in