Cold Fire

was approaching, an entity so strange that even light—and the full sight of the thing—would not provide understanding. Although she was aware that she was dreaming, she knew she had to get out of that dark and stony place quickly—or die. A nightmare couldn't be escaped just by running from it, so she had to wake up, but she could not, she was too tired, unable to break the bonds of sleep. Then the lightless room seemed to be spinning, she had a sense of some great structure turning around and around (creak, whoosh), thrusting up into the rainy night (creak, whoosh) and turning (creak, whoosh), cutting the air (creak, whoosh), she was trying to scream (creak, whoosh), but she couldn't force a sound from herself (whoosh, whoosh, whoosh), couldn't awaken and couldn't scream for help. WHOOSH!
     

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    “No!”
    Jim sat up in bed as he shouted the one-word denial. He was clammy and trembling violently.
    He had fallen fast asleep with the lamp on, which he frequently did, usually not by accident but by design. For more than a year, his sleep had been troubled by nightmares with a variety of plots and a panoply of boogeymen, only some of which he could recall when he woke. The nameless, formless creature that he called “the enemy,” and of which he had dreamed while recuperating at Our Lady of the Desert rectory, was the most frightening figure in his dreamscapes, though not the only monster.
    This time, however, the focus of the terror had not been a person or creature. It was a place. The windmill.
    He looked at the bedside clock. Three-forty-five in the morning.
    In just his pajama bottoms, he got out of bed and padded into the kitchen.
    The fluorescent light seared his eyes. Good. He wanted to evaporate what residue of sleep still clung to him.
    The damn windmill.
    He plugged in the coffeemaker and brewed a strong Colombian blend. He sipped half the first cup while standing at the counter, then refilled it and sat down at the breakfast table. He intended to empty the pot because he could not risk going back to bed and having that dream again.
    Every nightmare detracted from the quality of rest that sleep provided, but the windmill dream actually took a real physical toll. Whenever he woke from it, his chest always ached, as though his heart had been bruised from hammering too hard against his breastbone. Sometimes the shakes took hours to fade away completely, and he often had headaches that, like now, arced across the top of his skull and throbbed with such power that it seemed as if an alien presence was trying to burst out of him. He knew that if he looked in a mirror, his face would be unnervingly pale and haggard, with blue-black circles around the eyes, like the face of a terminal cancer patient from whom disease had sucked the juice of life.
    The windmill dream was not the most frequent of those that plagued him, and in fact it haunted his sleep only one or two nights a month. But it was by far the worst.
    Curiously, nothing much happened in it. He was ten years old again, sitting on the dusty wooden floor of the smaller upper chamber, above the main room that held the ancient millstones, with only the flickering light of a fat yellow candle. Night pressed at the narrow windows, which were almost like castle embrasures in the limestone walls. Rain tapped against the glass. Suddenly, with a creak of unoiled and half-rusted machinery, the four great wooden sails of the mill began to turn outside, faster and faster, cutting like giant scythes through the damp air. The upright shaft, which came out of the ceiling and vanished through a bore in the center of the floor, also began to turn, briefly creating the illusion that the round floor itself were rotating in the manner of a carousel. One level below, the ancient millstones started to roll against each other, producing a soft rumble like distant thunder.
    Just that. Nothing more. Yet it scared the hell out of him.
    He took a long pull of his coffee.
    Stranger still: in real life, the windmill had been a good place, never the scene of pain or terror. It had stood between a pond and a cornfield on his grandparents' farm. To a young boy born and raised in the city, the big mill had been an exotic and mysterious structure, a perfect place to play and fantasize, a refuge in a time of trouble. He could not understand why he was having nightmares about a place that held only good memories for him.
     

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    After the frightening dream passed without