Cold Fire Read online

  She pulled a chair near the bed and sat down. She drank diet soda and ate candy while she watched him sleep.

  The worst was over. The fantasy had been burned away, and he had plunged completely into cold reality.

  But she did not know what the aftermath would bring. She had never known him without his delusions, and she didn’t know what he would be like when he had none. She didn’t know if he would be a more optimistic man—or a darker one. She didn’t know if he would still have the same degree of superhuman powers that he’d had before. He had summoned those powers from within himself only because he had needed them to sustain his fantasy and cling to his precarious sanity; perhaps, now, he would be only as gifted as he had been before his parents had died—able to levitate a pie pan, flip a coin with his mind, nothing more. Worst of all, she didn’t know if he would still love her.

  By dinnertime he was still asleep.

  She went out and got more candy bars. Another binge. She would end up as plump as her mother if she didn’t get control of herself.

  He was still asleep at ten o’clock. Eleven. Midnight.

  She considered waking him. But she realized that he was in a chrysalis, waiting to be born from his old life into a new one. A caterpillar needed time to turn itself into a butterfly. That was her hope, anyway.

  Sometime between midnight and one o’clock in the morning, Holly fell asleep in her chair. She did not dream.

  He woke her.

  She looked up into his beautiful eyes, which were not cold in the dim light of the towel-draped lamp, but which were still mysterious.

  He was leaning over her chair, shaking her gently. “Holly, come on. We’ve got to go.”

  Instantly casting off sleep, she sat up. “Go where?”

  “Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

  “Why?”

  Grabbing up one of her uneaten candy bars, peeling off the wrapper, biting into it, he said, “Tomorrow afternoon, three-thirty, a reckless schoolbus driver is going to try to beat a train at a crossing. Twenty-six kids are going to die if we’re not there first.”

  Rising from her chair, she said, “You know all that, the whole thing, not just a part of it?”

  “Of course,” he said around a mouthful of candy bar. He grinned. “I know these things, Holly. I’m psychic, for God’s sake.”

  She grinned right back at him.

  “We’re going to be something, Holly,” he said enthusiastically. “Superman? Why the hell did he waste so much time holding down a job on a newspaper when he could’ve been doing good?”

  In a voice that cracked with relief and with love for him, Holly said, “I always wondered about that.”

  Jim gave her a chocolaty kiss. “The world hasn’t seen anything like us, kid. Of course, you’re going to have to learn martial arts, how to handle a gun, a few other things. But you’re gonna be good at it, I know you are.”

  She threw her arms around him and hugged him fiercely, with unadulterated joy.

  Purpose.

  NEW AFTERWORD

  BY

  DEAN KOONTZ

  AFTERWORD

  To those of you who have been reading this series of afterwords that Berkley Books asked me to write for (currently) eight reissues of my novels, I wonder why you don’t have something better to do with your time than reading afterwords. This is a lovely world. Go for a walk in verdant fields, in cool and mossy woods. Have an ice-cream cone. If you’re on a low-fat diet, have just the cone. If you’re on a low-carb diet, eat a squirrel. If you have a child, dandle him or her on your knee while singing a happy song. If you don’t have a child, dandle your dog on your knee; the song is optional. If your dog is adamantly opposed to dandling, find someone much larger than you are and ask to be dandled on that person’s knee.

  With all the options available to you, if you still insist on reading this afterword, I understand. I myself have always enjoyed reading introductions and afterwords written by novelists. I am an admitted fiction wonk, fascinated by how other writers work, why they write the books they write, and how they manage their careers—assuming that they have occasionally been sober enough to engage in any management.

  I have received a lot of mail about the first seven afterwords in this series, mostly from people surprised to learn that there were so many bumps in the road I followed, that not all of my publishers and agents were always supportive of my work, that I was in fact often relentlessly pressured not to write the books that I wrote, that I never received the massive TV/print/sandwich-board ad budgets that are supposedly essential to build a career as a bestseller, and that I have never been in a mental institution. Sometime within the next year, as I write this, worldwide sales of my books will pass three hundred million copies, so there is a tendency among some—especially other writers—to assume that I have romped without obstacle through the flower-filled meadows of success and now spend the larger part of my days poolside with tropical drinks and a smug expression. Those struggling to make a writing career of their own tell me they have taken comfort from my disappointments and devastations. Thanks a lot; glad to help.

  Cold Fire is one of the few books in my career about which I have no amusing stories regarding the process of its writing and publication. I worked on average sixty hours a week for seven months, wrote twenty or thirty drafts of each page, had bad days when I pounded my skull against the walls hard enough to leave eight or ten impressions of my forehead in the plaster, had good days when I left only two or three impressions, and delivered the novel reasonably close to deadline. Although it bridged several genres—suspense, romance, supernatural, science fiction—and was a novel of ideas with comic elements, neither my publisher nor my agent suggested (a) that I totally rewrite it, (b) that I put it on a shelf for seven years so as not to destroy my building career, (c) that I analyze my stubborn and self-destructive insistence on writing books in total disregard of the formulas by which bestsellers supposedly must be created—all of which were suggestions they made with increasing force regarding all my previous books except Watchers. Everybody liked Cold Fire. Either my stubborn persistence had brought them around to my way of thinking—or they had just decided that I was a hopeless bonehead. My lovely editor, Stacy Creamer, approached it seriously but with a light touch, and I addressed her notes in two days.

  Cold Fire was my third number-one hardcover bestseller. When I received the news from my publisher that it had hit the top of the charts, I was—as with Midnight and The Bad Place—again assured that it was not an achievement likely ever to reoccur for me, as mine were not the kind of books that could be expected regularly to be embraced by so many people. A fluke. Considering that this was the third such fluke in a row, I was not as crushed by this assurance as I had been the first two times.

  Life was good.

  Then, as is often the case when life is good, someone said, “Hey, let’s make a movie!” and life got strange, dark, and scary.

  By this I do not mean to imply—although I can’t stop you from inferring—that a lot of movie-industry executives are as brainless, voracious, and destructive as the flesh-eating bacteria that was in the news not long ago. I’ve met smart, fair, creative executives over the years... although I’ve noticed their kind either eventually get fired, are driven insane, or decide that gutting halibut aboard an Alaskan fishing trawler is a more appealing and even a more glamorous occupation than anything Hollywood has to offer.

  In this instance, we were going to develop Cold Fire as a film without input from studios, and make a deal only when we had a script we loved. My partner in this was a director with whom I’d worked on a previous project and whose talent I admired. He was smart, had shown integrity on that shoot under difficult conditions, and was fun to spend time with. I wrote several drafts of the screenplay, always taking notes from him, and eventually we arrived at a version that we were ready to market.

  A series of pitch meetings were arranged with independent producers and studio executives, and we began mak
ing the rounds. Any of the potential buyers we met with could have tortured us with sharp instruments and killed us during the meeting, right there in their office or studio-lot bungalow (and I suspected that many of them were engaged in similar psychopathic behavior in their private lives), but none of them was sufficiently forthright or kind enough to put a quick end to us.

  Soon it became clear that we had a problem involving an important plot point in Cold Fire, so if you haven’t yet read the novel and intend to, consider this a SPOILER WARNING.

  In the novel, Jim Ironheart, the lead character, has a psychic gift of a peculiar nature that becomes the sole focus of his life. Eventually he comes to suspect that the source of this power dates back to something that happened to him when he was a boy, in a hulking windmill on his grandfather’s farm. Later we are led to believe that he might have had contact with extraterrestrials in a spaceship that has rested in the silt under the windmill pond for perhaps thousands of years. This is not what has happened to him; the source of his power is something far stranger, more interesting, and arguably scarier than aliens ever could be.

  Several of those with whom we had pitch meetings expressed an interest in the script—but only if we’d make one “little” change. They thought it could be a terrific picture if there really were aliens in a starship under the pond. In fact, this was not a little change but a huge one; it would have turned a fresh idea into stale mule puke, and there is nothing stinkier.

  Each executive and/or producer presented that idea in the same way: leaning forward, smiling and as bright-eyed as an ax murderer on methamphetamine, voice characterized not just by excitement but also by awe, as if what he was about to suggest was of such genius that we might want to hold fast to the arms of our chairs and brace our feet to avoid being literally blown away. And always they were the same exact words, “What if there really are aliens in a starship under the pond?”

  If I had been inclined to doubt the shape of the original story, I might have succumbed to one of these people. Any temptation to give them what they wanted, however, was squelched by the dismal fact that so many of them had the exact same stroke of genius, which was proof positive that it wasn’t genius at all, but classic dumbass plotting. Worse, when each of them suggested possible scenes and set pieces that would flow brilliantly from this change, everything they wanted was cribbed from other movies including the original Invaders from Mars, Aliens, and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Okay, they didn’t steal from Plan 9, but there wasn’t another movie about aliens that they didn’t want to steal from.

  Fortunately, the director was as strongly opposed to this change as I was. Consequently, each time the issue was raised, we politely declined to go in that direction.

  One of the interested parties would not take our negative but polite response seriously. The evening of the day when we rejected him, I came home from dinner out with my lovely wife, Gerda, and found a message from this producer on my answering machine: “I know how to make the aliens in the pond work for you. I’m very excited. We’ve got to talk.”

  Because he was a player in the business and because I am a courteous guy, I called him back the following day.

  “Don’t make a snap judgment about what I’m going to pitch,” he said. “Hear me out, go away and think about it, get yourself around the texture of the idea. Part of it is, the aliens in the pond don’t look like any damn aliens you’ve ever seen in a movie before.”

  From my point of view, this didn’t constitute a complete idea, merely an effervescent bubble of thought, a little gas of the mind. I said, “What’s the other part of it?”

  “It’s not just one starship under the pond, it’s an entire alien city like fifty miles in diameter. Is that cool or is it cool?”

  “An underground alien city,” I said.

  “A SECRET underground alien city!” he exclaimed exuberantly.

  “What are they doing down in this underground city?”

  “Everything!” he declared with almost childlike glee.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as any crazy-assed scary thing imaginable!”

  “And what does this alien city have to do with Jim Ironheart’s story?”

  “Anything we want it to!” he said, his sense of wonder and his enthusiasm seeming to increase in direct proportion to the vagueness of his suggestions.

  I pressed: “But what might one of those anythings be?”

  “You’re the writer,” he said. “You tell me. Run wild with it.”

  At his insistence, I went away to get myself “around the texture of the idea.” This gave me the mental equivalent of irritable bowel syndrome.

  Unwilling to add the aliens, an alien city, an alien strip club, an alien rodeo, or an alien Coca-Cola bottling plant, my director friend and I never made a film sale for Cold Fire.

  Several years later, a famous producer with many successes read the script, liked it, and wanted to make a deal. I said that I’d sell it as long as I had approval of whatever substantive changes might be proposed. “In that case,” the producer said, “we need to discuss those changes up front rather than after a deal is in place.” He had only one little change he wanted, but it meant all the world to him because it was “and I think you’ll agree, totally brilliant. What if there really were aliens in a starship under the pond?”

  I still regularly receive mail, almost fourteen years after the original release of Cold Fire, from readers who love the characters, love the story, love the themes—the power of love, and the power of books to change a life—and who say it’s one of their favorite novels ever. Not one of them has ever suggested I should have put aliens in the pond. Clearly, none of these lovely people has a future in the film industry.