be re moved only with a screwdriver. Both screens were secure.
Part of that space had plank flooring, but in some places nothing but
insulation lay between the exposed floor studs, which were also the
ceiling studs of the rooms below. Duck-walking on those parallel
supports, Jim cautiously approached the rupture above the master
bathroom. He peered down at the debris-strewn floor where he and Holly
had been standing.
What in the hell had happened?
At last conceding that he would find no answers up there, he returned to
the open access and climbed down into the second-floor linen closet. He
folded up the accordion ladder into the closet ceiling, which neatly
closed off the attic entrance.
Holly was waiting for him in the hallway. “Well?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“I knew there wouldn’t be.”
“What happened here?”
“It’s like in the dream.”
“What dream?” he demanded.
“You said you’ve had the windmill dreams, too.”
“I do.”
“Then you know about the heartbeat in the walls.”
“No.”
“And the way the walls change.”
“No, none of that, for Christ’s sake! In my dream, I’m in the high room
of the windmill, there’s a candle, rain at the windows.”
She remembered how surprised he had been at the sight of the bedroom
ceiling distended and strange above them.
He said, “In the dream, I have a sense that something’s coming,
something frightening and terrible-”
“The Enemy,” she said.
“Yes! Whatever that might be. But it never comes, not in my dreams. I
ways wake up before it comes.”
He stalked down the hall and into the master bedroom, and she followed
him. Standing beside the battered furniture that he had shoved away
from the door, he stared up in consternation at the undamaged ceiling.
“I saw it,” he said, as if she had called him a liar.
“I know you did,” she said. “I saw it, too.”
He turned to her, looking more desperate than she had seen him even
aboard the doomed DC-10. “Tell me about your dreams, I want to hear all
of them, every detail.”
“Later, I’ll tell you everything. First let’s shower and get dressed. I
want out of this place.”
“Yeah, okay, me too.”
“I guess you realize where we’ve got to go.”
He hesitated.
She answered for him, “The windmill.”
He nodded.
They showered together in the guest bathroom, only to save time-and
because both of them were too edgy to be alone at the moment.
She supposed that, in a different mood, she would have found the
experience pleasantly erotic. But it was surprisingly platonic,
considering the fierce passion of the night just passed.
He touched her only when they had stepped out of the the shower and were
hurriedly toweling dry. He leaned close, kissed the corner of her
mouth, and said, “What have I gotten you into, Holly Thorne?”
Later, while Jim hurriedly packed a suitcase, Holly wandered only as far
as the upstairs study, which was next to his bedroom. The place had a
disused look. A thin layer of dust covered the top of the desk.
Like the rest of the house, his study was humble. The cheap desk had
probably been purchased at a cut-rate office-supplies warehouse.
The other furniture included just two lamps, an armchair on a
wheel-and-swivel base, two free-standing bookcases overflowing with worn
volumes, and a work table as bare as the long-unused desk.
All of the two hundred or more books were about religion: fat histories
of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduistn,
Taoism, Shintoism, and others; the collected works of St.
Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther; Scientists and Their Godsù the Bible in
several versions -Douay, King James, American Standard; the Koran; the
Torah, including the Old Testament and the Talmud; the Tripitaka of
Buddhism, the Agama of Hinduism, the Zend-Avesta of Zoroastrianism, and
the Veda of Brahmanism.
In spite of the curious completeness of that part of his personal
library, the most interesting thing in the room was the gallery of
photographs that occupied two walls. Of the thirty-some 8 X 10 prints,
a few were in color but most were black and white. The same three
people featured in all of them: a strikingly lovely brunette, a