Cold Fire Read online

  “Just said it sounded like fun.”

  “That’s two things.”

  He shook his head. Sweat flew, spattered the surrounding carpet and furniture. Holly was just out of range. He still didn’t look at her. “Number three—after he figured he had enough Tae Kwon Do, the next thing he wanted was to learn guns.”

  “Learn guns?”

  “Asked me if I knew anyone could teach him marksmanship, all about weapons. Revolver, pistols, rifles, shot-guns ...”

  “Who’d you send him to?”

  He was panting now but still able to speak clearly between each gasping breath: “Nobody. Guns aren’t my thing. But you know what I think? I think he was one of these guys reads Soldier of Fortune. Gets caught up in the fantasy. Wants to be a mercenary. He sure was preparing for a war.”

  “Didn’t it worry you to be helping someone like that?”

  “Not as long as he paid for his lessons.”

  She opened the door, hesitated, watching him. “You have a counter on that contraption?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What floor are you on?”

  “Tenth,” Eddie said, the word distorted as he spoke it on a deep exhalation. The next time he breathed out, he also issued a whoop of pleasure along with his wind. “Jesus, I have legs of stone, fuckin’ granite, I think I could get a man in a scissor hold, crack him in half with my legs. You put that in your article, okay? I could crack a guy clean in half.”

  Holly left, closing the door softly behind her.

  In the main room, the martial-arts class was even more active than when she had entered. The current exercise involved a group attempt to gang up on their Korean instructor, but he was blocking and throwing and whirling and leaping like a dervish, dealing with them as fast as they came at him.

  The brunette had removed her silvery jewelry. She had changed into Reeboks, looser shorts, a different T-shirt, and a bra. Now she was doing stretching exercises in front of the reception counter.

  “One o’clock,” she explained to Holly. “My lunch hour. I always run four or five miles instead of eating. Bye.” She jogged to the door, pushed through it into the warm August day, and sprinted out of sight along the front of the shopping center.

  Holly went outside, too, and stood for a moment in the lovely sunshine, newly aware of how many of the shoppers, coming to and going from their cars, were in good physical shape. Having moved to the northwest almost a year and a half ago, she had forgotten how health conscious many southern Californians were—and how aware of their appearance. Per capita, Orange County had a lot fewer jowls, love handles, spare tires, pot guts, and pear-shaped bottoms than Portland.

  Looking good and feeling good were imperatives of the southern-California lifestyle. It was one of the things she loved about the place. It was also one of the things she hated about it.

  She went nextdoor to the bakery for lunch. From the display cases, she selected a chocolate éclair, a crème brulée tart with kiwi on top, a piece of white-chocolate macadamia-nut cheesecake with Oreo-crumb crust, a cinnamon wheel, and a slice of orange roulade. “And a diet Coke,” she told the clerk.

  She carried her tray to a table near a window, where she could watch the passing parade of taut, tanned bodies in summer gear. The pastries were wonderful. She ate a little of this, now a little of that, savoring each bite, intending to polish off every crumb.

  After a while she realized someone was watching her. Two tables away, a heavyset woman, about thirty-five, was staring with a mixture of disbelief and envy; she only had one miserable fruit tart, a bakery junkie’s equivalent of a Nutri/System multi-grain cracker.

  Feeling both a need to explain herself and a certain sympathy, Holly said, “I wish I wasn’t doing this, but I can’t help it. If I can’t do anything else, then I always binge when I’m horny.”

  The heavyset woman nodded. “Me, too.”

  She drove to Ironheart’s place on Bougainvillea Way. She knew enough about him now to risk approaching him, and that was what she intended to do. But instead of pulling into his driveway, she cruised slowly past the house again.

  Instinct told her that the time was not right. The portrait of him that she had constructed only seemed to be com plete. There was a hole in it somewhere. She sensed that it would be dangerous to proceed before that hole had been painted in.

  She returned to the motel and spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening sitting by the window in her room, drinking Alka-Seltzer, then diet 7-Up, staring out at the jewel-blue pool in the middle of the lushly landscaped courtyard, and thinking. Thinking.

  Okay, she told herself, the story to date. Ironheart is a man with a sadness at his core, probably because of being orphaned when he was only ten. Let’s say he’s spent a lot of his life brooding about death, especially about the injustice of premature death. He dedicates his life to teaching and helping kids, maybe because no one was there for him when he was a boy and had to cope with the deaths of his mother and father. Then Larry Kakonis commits suicide. Ironheart is shattered, feels he should have been able to prevent it. The boy’s death brings to the surface all of Ironheart’s buried rage: rage at fate, destiny, the biological fragility of the human species—rage at God. In a state of severe mental distress bordering on outright imbalance, he decides to make himself over into Rambo and do something to fight back at fate, which is a weird response at best, absolutely nuts at worst. With weight lifting, aerobic endurance training, and Tae Kwon Do, he turns himself into a fighting machine. He learns to drive like a stuntman. He becomes knowledgeable in the use of all manner of guns. He’s ready. Just one more thing. He teaches himself to be a clairvoyant, so he can win the lottery and be independently wealthy, making it possible to devote himself to his crusade—and so he can know just when a premature death is about to occur.

  That was where it all fell apart. You could go to a place like Dojo to learn martial arts, but the Yellow Pages had no listing for schools of clairvoyance. Where the hell had he gotten his psychic power?

  She considered the question from every imaginable angle. She wasn’t trying to brainstorm an answer, only figure out an approach to researching possible explanations. But magic was magic. There was no way to research it.

  She began to feel as though she was employed by a sleazy tabloid, not as a reporter but as a concocter of pieces about space aliens living under Cleveland, half-gorilla and half-human babies born to amoral female zookeepers, and inexplicable rains of frogs and chickens in Tajikistan. But, damn it, the hard facts were that Jim Ironheart had saved fourteen people from death, in every comer of the country, always at the penultimate moment, with miraculous foresight.

  By eight o’clock, she had the urge to pound her head against the table, the wall, the concrete decking around the pool outside, against anything hard enough to crack her mental block and drive understanding into her. She decided that it was time to stop thinking, and go to dinner.

  She ate in the motel coffeeshop again—just broiled chicken and a salad to atone for lunch at the bakery. She tried to be interested in the other customers, do a little people-watching. But she could not stop thinking about Ironheart and his sorcery.

  He dominated her thoughts later, as well, when she was lying in bed, trying to sleep. Staring at the shadows on the ceiling, cast by the landscape lighting outside and the half-open Levolor blinds on the window, she was honest enough with herself to admit he fascinated her on other than professional levels. He was the most important story of her career, yes, true. And, yes, he was so mysterious that he would have intrigued anyone, reporter or not. But she was also drawn to him because she had been alone a long time, loneliness had carved an emptiness in her, and Jim Ironheart was the most appealing man she had met in ages.

  Which was insane.

  Because maybe he was insane.

  She was not one of those women who chased after men who were all wrong for her, subconsciously seeking to be used, hurt, and abandoned. She was picky when it came to men
. That was why she was alone, for God’s sake. Few men measured up to her standards.

  Sure. Picky, she thought sarcastically. That’s why you’ve got this lech for a guy who has delusions of being Superman without the tights and cape. Get real, Thorne. Jesus.

  Entertaining romantic fantasies about James Ironheart was short-sighted, irresponsible, futile, and just plain stupid.

  But those eyes.

  Holly fell asleep with an image of his face drifting in her mind, watching over her as if it were a portrait on a giant banner, rippling gently against a cerulean sky. His eyes were even bluer than that celestial backdrop.

  In time she found herself in the dream of blindness again. The circular room. Wooden floor. Scent of damp limestone. Rain drumming on the roof. Rhythmic creaking. Whoosh. Something was coming for her, a part of the darkness that had somehow come alive, a monstrous presence that she could neither hear nor see but could feel. The Enemy. Whoosh. It was closing in relentlessly, hostile and savage, radiating cold the way a furnace radiated heat. Whoosh. She was grateful that she was blind, because she knew the thing’s appearance was so alien, so terrifying, that just the sight of it would kill her. Whoosh. Something touched her. A moist, icy tendril. At the base of her neck. A pencil-thin tentacle. She cried out, and the tip of the probe bored into her neck, pierced the base of her skull—

  Whoosh.

  With a soft cry of terror, she woke. No disorientation. She knew immediately where she was: the motel, Laguna Hills.

  Whoosh.

  The sound of the dream was still with her. A great blade slicing through the air. But it was not a dream sound. It was real. And the room was as cold as the pitch-black place in the nightmare. As if weighted down by a heart swollen with terror, she tried to move, could not. She smelled damp limestone. From below her, as if there were vast rooms under the motel, came a soft rumbling sound of—she somehow knew—large stone wheels grinding against each other.

  Whoosh.

  Something unspeakable was still squirming along the back of her neck, writhing sinuously within her skull, a hideous parasite that had chosen her for a host, worming its way into her, going to lay its eggs in her brain. But she could not move.

  Whoosh.

  She could see nothing but bars of pale, pale light against part of the black ceiling, where the moonsoft glow of landscape lighting projected the image of the windowblind slats. She desperately wanted more light.

  Whoosh.

  She was making pathetic whimpers of terror, and she so thoroughly despised herself for her weakness that she was finally able to shatter her paralysis. Gasping, she sat up. Clawed at the back of her neck, trying to tear off the oily, frigid, wormlike probe. Nothing there. Nothing. Swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Fumbled for the lamp. Almost knocked it over. Found the switch. Light.

  Whoosh.

  She sprang off the bed. Felt the back of her head again. Her neck. Between her shoulderblades. Nothing. Nothing there. Yet she felt it.

  Whoosh.

  She was over the edge of hysteria and unable to return, making queer little animal sounds of fear and desperation. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement. Swung around. The wall behind the bed. Sweating. Glistening. The entire wall bulged toward her, as if it were a membrane against which a great and terrible mass was pressing insistently. It throbbed repulsively, like an enormous internal organ in the exposed and steaming guts of a prehistoric behemoth.

  Whoosh.

  She backed away from the wet, malignantly animated wall. Turned. Ran. Had to get out. Fast. The Enemy. It was coming. Had followed her. Out of the dream. The door. Locked. Deadbolt. Disengaged it. Hands shaking. The Enemy. Coming. Brass security chain. Rattled it free. Door. Jerked it open. Something was on the threshold, filling the doorway, bigger than she was, something beyond human experience, simultaneously insectile and arachnoid and reptilian, squirming and jittering, a tangled mass of spider legs and antennae and serpentine coils and roachlike mandibles and multifaceted eyes and rattlesnake fangs and claws, a thousand nightmares rolled into one, but she was awake. It burst through the door, seized her, pain exploding from her sides where its talons tore at her, and she screamed—

  —a night breeze.

  That was the only thing coming through the open door. A soft, summery night breeze.

  Holly stood in the doorway, shuddering and gasping for breath, looking out in astonishment at the concrete promenade of the motel. Lacy queen palms, Australian tree ferns, and other greenery swayed sensuously under the caress of the tropical zephyr. The surface of the swimming pool rippled gently, creating countless ever-changing facets, refracting the pool-bottom lights, so it seemed as if there was not a body of water in the middle of the courtyard but a hole filled with a pirate’s treasure of polished sapphires.

  The creature that had attacked her was gone as if it had never existed. It had not scuttled away or scurried up some web; it had simply evaporated in an instant.

  She no longer felt the icy, squirming tendril on the back of her neck or inside her skull.

  A couple of other guests had come out of rooms farther along the promenade, evidently to investigate her scream.

  Holly stepped back from the threshold. She did not want to attract their attention now.

  She glanced over her shoulder. The wall behind the bed was only a wall again.

  The clock built into the nightstand showed 5:08 A.M.

  She eased the door shut, and suddenly she had to lean against it, because all the strength went out of her legs.

  Instead of being relieved that the strange ordeal had ended, she was shattered. She hugged herself and shivered so hard, her teeth chattered. She began to cry softly, not from fear of the experience, concern for her current safety, or concern about her sanity, but from a profound sense of having been totally violated. Briefly but for too long, she had been helpless, victimized, enslaved by terror, controlled by an entity beyond her understanding. She’d been psychologically raped. Something needful had overpowered her, forced its way into her, denying her free will; though gone now, it had left traces of itself within her, a residue that stained her mind, her soul.

  Just a dream, she told herself encouragingly.

  But it had not been a dream when she sat up in bed and snapped on the lamp. The nightmare had followed her into the waking world.

  Just a dream, don’t make so much of it, get control of yourself, she thought, struggling to regain her equanimity. You dreamed you were in that lightless place, then you dreamed that you sat up in bed and turned on the light, then in your dream you saw the wall bulging and ran for the door. But you were only sleepwalking, you were still asleep when you pulled the door open, still asleep when you saw the boogeyman and screamed, which was when you finally woke up for real, screamed yourself awake.

  She wanted to believe that explanation, but it was too pat to be credible. No nightmare she’d ever known had been that elaborate in its texture and detail. Besides, she never sleepwalked.

  Something real had been reaching for her. Maybe not the insect-reptile-spider thing in the doorway. Maybe that was only an image in which another entity clad itself to frighten her. But something had been pushing through to this world from ...

  From where?

  It didn’t matter where. From out there. From beyond. And it almost got her.

  No. That was ridiculous. Tabloid stuff. Even the National Enquirer didn’t publish trash that trashy anymore. I WAS MIND-RAPED BY A BEAST FROM BEYOND. Crap like that was three steps below CHER ADMITS BEING SPACE ALIEN, two steps below JESUS SPEAKS TO NUN FROM INSIDE A MICROWAVE, and even a full step below ELVIS HAD BRAIN TRANSPLANTED, LIVES NOW AS. ROSEANNE BARR.

  The more foolish she felt for entertaining such thoughts, the calmer she became. Dealing with the experience was easier if she could believe that it was all a product of her overactive imagination, which had been unreasonably stimulated by the admittedly fantastic Ironheart case.

  Finally she was able to stand on he
r own, without leaning on the door. She relocked the deadbolt, reengaged the security chain.

  As she stepped away from the door, she became aware of a hot, stinging pain in her left side. It wasn’t serious, but it made her wince, and she realized that a similar but lesser pain sizzled in her right side as well.

  She took hold of her T-shirt to lift it and look at herself—and discovered that the fabric was slashed. Three places on the left side. Two on the right. It was spotted with blood.

  With renewed dread, Holly went into the bathroom and switched on the harsh fluorescent light. She stood in front of the mirror, hesitated, then pulled the torn T-shirt over her head.

  A thin flow of blood seeped down her left flank from three shallow gashes. The first laceration was just under her breast, and the others were spaced at two-inch intervals. Two scratches blazed on her right side, though they were not as deep as those on the left and were not bleeding freely.

  The claws.

  Jim threw up in the toilet, flushed, then rinsed his mouth twice with mint-flavored Listerine.

  The face in the mirror was the most troubled he had ever seen. He had to look away from the reflection of his own eyes.

  He leaned against the sink. For at least the thousandth time in the past year, he wondered what in God’s name was happening to him.

  In his sleep he had gone to the windmill again. Never before had the same nightmare troubled him two nights in a row. Usually, weeks passed between reccurrences.

  Worse, there had been an unsettling new element—more than just the rain on the narrow windows, the lambent flame of the candle and the dancing shadows it produced, the sound of the big sails turning outside, the low rumble of the millstones below, and an inexplicable pall of fear. This time he’d been aware of a malevolent presence, out of sight but drawing nearer by the second, something so evil and alien that he could not even imagine its form or full intentions. He had expected it to burst out of the limestone wall, erupt through the plank floor, or explode in upon him from the heavy timbered door at the head of the mill stairs. He had been unable to decide which way to run. Finally he had yanked open the door—and awakened with a scream. If anything had been there, he could not remember what it had looked like.

  Regardless of the appearance it might have had, Jim knew what to call it: the enemy. Except that now he thought of it with a capital “T” and a capital “E.” The Enemy. The amorphous beast that haunted many of his other nightmares had found its way into the windmill dream, where it had never terrorized him before.

  Crazy as it seemed, he sensed that the creature was not merely a fantasy spawned by his subconscious while he slept. It was as real as he was himself. Sooner or later it would cross the barrier between the world of dreams and the waking world as easily as it had crossed the barrier between different nightmares.

  4

  Holly never considered going back to bed. She knew she would not sleep again for many hours, until she was so exhausted that she would be unable to keep her eyes open no matter how much strong black coffee she drank. Sleep had ceased to be a sanctuary. It was, instead, a source of danger, a highway to hell or somewhere worse, along which she might encounter an inhuman traveler.

  That made her angry. Everyone needed and deserved the refuge of sleep.

  As dawn came, she took a long shower, carefully but diligently scrubbing the shallow lacerations on her sides, although the soap and hot water stung the open flesh. She worried that she would develop an infection as strange as the briefly glimpsed monstrosity that had inflicted her wounds.

  That sharpened her anger.

  By nature, she was a good Girl Scout, always prepared for any eventuality. When traveling, she carried a few first-aid supplies in the same kit with her Lady Remington shaver: iodine, gauze pads, adhesive tape, Band-Aids, a small aerosol can of Bactine, and a tube of ointment that was useful for soothing minor bums. After toweling off from the shower, she sat naked on the edge of the bed, sprayed Bactine on her wounds, then daubed at them with iodine.

  She had become a reporter, in part, because as a younger woman she had believed that journalism had the power to explain the world, to make sense of events that sometimes seemed chaotic and meaningless. More than a decade of newspaper employment had shaken her conviction that the human experience could be explained all or even most of the time. But she still kept a well-ordered desk, meticulously arranged files, and neat story notes. In her closets at home, her clothes were arranged according to season, then according to the occasion (formal, semi-formal, informal), then by color. If life insisted on being chaotic, and if journalism had failed her as a tool for bringing order to the world, at least she could depend on routine and habit to create a personal pocket universe of stability, however fragile, beyond which the disorder and tumult of life were kept at bay.

  The iodine stung.

  She was angrier. Seething.

  The shower disturbed the clots that had coagulated in the deeper scratches on her left side. She was bleeding slightly again. She sat quietly on the edge of the bed for a while, holding a wad of Kleenex against the wounds, until the lacerations were no longer oozing.

  By the time Holly had dressed in tan jeans and an emerald-green blouse, it was seven-thirty.

  She already knew how she was going to start the day, and nothing could distract her from her plans. She had no appetite whatsoever for breakfast. When she stepped outside, she discovered that the morning was cloudless and unusually temperate even for Orange County, but the sublime weather had no mellowing