Cold Fire

the blows reverberating into the yards of compacted earth above her—
    The library again.
    “Holly, for God's sake, what's happening?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Holly?”
    “Nothing,” she said, sensing that it would be a mistake to admit that The Enemy was rattling her.
    She finished skimming The Black Windmill:
    At the end of the novel, when Jim Jamison had saved the future president, The Friend had subsided into quiescence under the pond, instructing Jim to forget that their encounter had ever taken place, and to remember only that he had saved the politician on his own initiative. If a repressed memory of the alien ever surfaced in Jim's mind, he was told that he would “REMEMBER ME ONLY AS A DREAM, AN ENTITY IN A DREAM YOU ONCE HAD.” When the alien light faded out of the wall for the last time, the messages on the tablet vanished, leaving no trace of the contact.
    Holly closed the book.
    She and Jim sat for a while, staring at the dustjacket.
    Around her, thousands of times and places, people and worlds, from Mars to Egypt to Yoknapatawpha County, were closed up in the bindings of books like the shine trapped under the tarnished veneer of a brass lamp. She could almost feel them waiting to dazzle with the first turn of a page, come alive with brilliant colors and pungent odors and delicious aromas, with laughter and sobbing and cries and whispers. Books were packaged dreams.
    “Dreams are doorways,” she told Jim, “and the story in any novel is a kind of dream. Through Arthur Willott's dream of alien contact and adventure, you found a doorway out of your despair, an escape from a crushing sense of having failed your mother and father.”
    He had been unrelievedly pale since she had shown him the tablet with The Friend's answers. HE LOVES YOU HOLLY/HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY. Now some color had returned to his face. His eyes were still ghost-ridden, and worry clung to him like shadows to the night, but he seemed to be feeling his way toward an accommodation with all the lies that were his life.
    Which was what frightened The Enemy in him. And made it desperate.
    Mrs. Glynn had returned from the stacks. She was working at her desk.
    Lowering her voice even further, Holly said to Jim, “But why would you hold yourself to blame for the traffic accident that killed them? And how could any kid that age have such a tremendously heavy sense of responsibility?”
    He shook his head. “I don't know.”
    Remembering what Corbett Handahl had told her, Holly put a hand on Jim's knee and said, “Think, honey. Did the accident happen when they were on the road with this mentalist act of theirs?”
    He hesitated, frowned. “Yes … on the road.”
    “You traveled with them, didn't you?”
    He nodded.
    Recalling the photograph of his mother in a glittery gown, Jim and his father in tuxedos, Holly said, “You were part of the act.”
    Some of his memories apparently were rising like the rings of light had risen in the pond. The play of emotions in his face could not have been faked; he was genuinely astonished to be moving out of a life of darkness.
    Holly felt her own excitement growing with his. She said, “What did you do in the act?”
    “It was … a form of stage magic. My mom would take objects from people in the audience. My dad would work with me, and we would … I would hold the objects and pretend to have psychic impressions, tell the people things about themselves that I couldn't know.”
    “Pretend?” she asked.
    He blinked. “Maybe not. It's so strange … how little I remember even when I try.”
    “It wasn't a trick. You could really do it. That's why your folks put together the act in the first place. You were a gifted child.”
    He ran his fingers down the Bro Dart-protected jacket of The Black Windmill. “But …”
    “But?”
    “There's so much I still don't understand….”
    “Oh, me too, kiddo. But we're getting closer, and I have to believe that's a good thing.”
    A shadow, cast from within, stole across his face again.
    Not wanting to see him slip back into a darker mood, Holly said, “Come on.” She picked up the book and took it to the librarian's desk. Jim followed her.
    The energetic Mrs. Glynn was drawing on posterboard with a rainbow of colored pencils and magic markers. The colorful images were of well-rendered boys and girls dressed as spacemen, spelunkers, sailors, acrobats, and jungle explorers. She had penciled in but not yet colored the message: THIS IS A LIBRARY. KIDS