nature. 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 ù his grandparents’ farm. To a young boy born and raised
in the city, there 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.
After the frightening dream passed without waking her, Holly Thor slept
peacefully for the rest of the night, as still as a stone on the floor
the sea.
Saturday morning, Holly ate breakfast in a booth at the motel
coffeeshop.
Most of the other customers were obviously vacationers: families dressed
almost as if in uniforms of shorts or white slacks and brightly colored
shirts. Some of the kids wore caps and T-shirts that advertised Sea
World or Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm. Parents huddled over maps
and brochures while they ate, planning routes that would take them to
one of the tourist attractions that California offered in such
plenitude. There were so many colorful Polo shirts or Polo-shirt
knockoffs in the restaurant that a visitor from another planet might
have assumed that Ralph Lauren was either the deity of a major religion
or dictator of the world.
As she ate blueberry pancakes, Holly studied her list of people who had
been spared from death by Jim Ironheart’s timely intervention:
May 15 Sam (25) and Emily (5) Newsome-Atlanta, Georgia (murder)