Two pajama bottoms and one top seemed to dissolve between them like
clothes sometimes evaporate in erotic dreams. She moved her hands over
him with increasing excitement, marveling that the sense of touch could
convey such intricacies of shape and texture, or give rise to such
exquisite longings.
She had a ridiculously romantic idea of what it would be like to make
love to him, a dreamy-eyed girl’s fantasy of unmatched passion, of sweet
tenderness and pure hot sex in perfect balance, every muscle in both of
them flexing and contracting in sublime harmony or, at times, in
breathless counterpoint, each invasive stroke a testament to mutual
surrender, two becoming one, the outer world of reason overwhelmed by
the inner world of feeling, no wrong word spoken, no sigh mistimed,
bodies moving and meshing in precisely the same mysterious rhythms by
which the great invisible tidal forces of the universe ebbed and flowed,
elevating the act above mere biology and making of it a mystical
experience. Her expectations proved, of course, to be ridiculous. In
reality, it was more tender, more fierce, and far better than her
fantasy.
They fell asleep like spoons in a drawer, her belly against his back,
her loins against his warm bottom. Hours later, in those reaches of the
night that were usually-but no longer-the loneliest of all, they woke to
the same quiet alarm of renewed desire. He turned to her, she welcomed
him, and this time they moved together with an even greater urgency, as
if the first time had not taken the edge off their need but had
sharpened it the way one dose of heroin only increases the addict’s
desire for the next.
At first, looking up into Jim’s beautiful eyes, Holly felt as if she
were gazing into the pure fire of his soul. Then he gripped her by the
sides, half lifting her off the mattress as he eased deep into her, and
she felt the scratches burning in her flanks and remembered the claws of
the thing that had stepped magically out of a dream. For an instant,
with pain flashing in her shallow wounds, her perception shifted, and
she had the queer feeling that it was a cold blue fire into which she
gazed, burning without heat. But that was only a reaction to the
stinging scratches and the pain-engendered memory of the nightmare. When
he slid his hands off her sides and under her, lifting, she rose to meet
him, and he was all warmth now, not the faintest chill about him.
Together they generated enough heat to sear away that brief image of a
soul on ice.
The frost-pale glow of the unseen moon backlit banks of coaly clouds
that churned across the night sky.
Unlike in other recent dreams, Holly was standing outside on a graveled
path that led between a pond and a cornfield toward the door in the base
of the old windmill. The limestone structure rose above her at a severe
angle, recognizably a mill but nonetheless an alien place, unearthly.
The huge sails, ragged with scores of broken or missing vanes, were
silhouetted against the foreboding sky and angled like a tilted cross.
although a blustery wind sent moon-silvered ripples across the ink-dark
pond and rattled the nearby cornstalks, the sails were still.
The mill obviously had been inoperable for many years, and the
mechanisms were most likely too rusted to allow the sails to turn.
A spectral muddy-yellow light flickered at the narrow windows of the
upper room. Beyond the glass, strange shadows moved across the interior
limestone walls of that high chamber.
She didn’t want to get any closer to the building, had never been more
frightened of a place in her life, but she was unable to halt herself
She was drawn forward as if she were the spellbound thrall of some
powerful sorcerer.
In the pond to her left, something was wrong with the moon-cast
reflection of the windmill, and she turned to look at it. The pattern
of light and shade on the water was reversed from what it should have
been. The mill shadow was not a dark geometric form imposed on the
water over the filigree of moonlight; instead, the image of the mill was