Cold Fire

traveled north on the San Diego Freeway. The Tuesday-morning rush hour had passed, but at some places traffic still clogged all lanes and moved like a snail herd being driven toward a gourmet restaurant.
    Comfortably ensconced in the passenger seat, Holly told Jim about her four nightmares, as promised. She started with the initial dream of blindness on Friday night, concluding with last night's spookshow, which had been the most bizarre and fearful of all.
    He was clearly fascinated that she had dreamed about the mill without even knowing of its existence. And on Sunday night, after surviving the crash of Flight 246, she had dreamed of him at the mill as a ten-year-old boy, when she could not yet have known either that the mill was a familiar place to him or that he had spent a lot of time there when he was ten.
    But the majority of his questions related to her most recent nightmare. Keeping his eyes on the traffic ahead, he said, “Who was the woman in the dream if she wasn't you?”
    “I don't know,” Holly said, finishing the final bite of the last muffin. “I had no sense of her identity.”
    “Can you describe her?”
    “I only saw her reflection in that window, so I can't tell you much, I'm afraid.” She drank the last of the coffee from her big Styrofoam cup, and thought a moment. It was easier to visualize the scenes of that dream than it should have been, for dreams were usually quick to fade from memory. Images from that one returned to her quite vividly, however, as if she had not dreamed them but experienced them in real life. “She had a broad clear face, more handsome in a womanly way than pretty. Wide-set eyes, full mouth. A beauty mark high on her right cheek, I don't think it could've been a spot on the glass, just a little round dot. Curly hair. Do you recognize her?”
    “No,” he replied. “Can't say that I do. Tell me what you saw at the bottom of the pond when the lightning flashed.”
    “I'm not sure what it was.”
    “Describe it as best you can.”
    She pondered for a moment, then shook her head. “I can't. The woman's face was fairly easy to recall because when I saw it in the dream I knew what it was, a face, a human face. But whatever was lying at the bottom of the pond… that was strange, like nothing I'd ever seen before. I didn't know what I was looking at, and I had such a brief glimpse of it and … well, now it's just gone. Is there really something peculiar under that pond?”
    “Not that I know of,” he said. “Could it've been a sunken boat, a rowboat, anything like that?”
    “No,” she said. “Nothing at all like that. Much bigger. Did a boat sink in the pond once?”
    “I never heard of it, if one did. It's a deceptive-looking bit of water, though. You expect a millpond to be shallow, but this one is deep, forty or fifty feet toward the center. It never dries out, and it doesn't shrink during dry years, either, because it's formed over an artesian well, not just an aquifer.”
    “What's the difference?”
    “An aquifer is what you drill into when you're sinking a well, it's sort of a reservoir or stream of underground water. Artesian wells are rarer. You don't drill into one to find water, 'cause the water is already coming to the surface under pressure. You'd have the devil's own time trying to stop the stuff from percolating up.”
    The snarl of traffic began to loosen, but Jim did not take full advantage of opportunities to change lanes and swing around slower-moving vehicles. He was more interested in her answers than in making better time.
    He said, “And in the dream, when you got to the top of the stairs—or when this woman got to the top of the stairs—you saw a ten-year-old boy standing there, and somehow you knew he was me.”
    “Yes.”
    “I don't look much like I looked when I was ten, so how'd you recognize me?”
    “Mostly it was your eyes,” Holly said. “They haven't changed much in all these years. They're unmistakable.”
    “Lots of people have blue eyes.”
    “Are you serious? Honey, your blue eyes are to other blue eyes what Sinatra's voice is to Donald Duck's.”
    “You're prejudiced. What did you see in the wall?”
    She described it again.
    “Alive in the stone? This just gets stranger and stranger.”
    “I haven't been bored in days,” she agreed.
    Beyond the junction with Interstate 10, traffic on the San Diego Freeway became even lighter, and finally Jim began to put some of his driving skills to use. He handled