bought at The Center.”
He let go of her hand, and she withdrew the two yellow, lined tablets
and felt-tip pen from the plastic bag at her side. He took them from
her, hesitated, looking around at the walls and at the shadows above
them, as if waiting to be told what to do next.
The bells rang.
That musical tintinnabulation sent a thrill through Jim. He knew that
he was on the verge of discovering the meaning not merely of the events
of the past year but of the last two and a half decades. And not just
that, either. More. Much more. The ringing heralded the revelation of
even greater understanding, transcendental truths, an explanation of the
fundamental meaning of his entire life, past and future, origins and
destiny, and of the meaning of existence itself Grandiose as such a
notion might be, he sensed that the secrets of creation would be
revealed to him before he left the windmill, and that he would reach the
state of enlightenment he had sought-and failed to find-in a score of
religions.
As the second spell of ringing began, Holly started to get up.
Jim figured she intended to descend to the window on the stairs and look
into the pond. He said, “No, wait. It’s going to happen here this
time.”
She hesitated, then sat down.
As the ringing stopped again, Jim felt compelled to push the ice chest
out of the way and put one of the yellow, lined tablets on the floor
between him and Holly. He was not sure what he was expected to do with
the other tablet and the pen, but after a brief moment of indecision, he
held on to them.
When the melodic ringing began a third time, it was accompanied by an
impossible pulse of light within the limestone walls. The red glow
seemed to well up from inside the stone at a point directly in front of
them, then suddenly raced around the room, encircling them with a
throbbing band of luminescence.
Even as the strange fire whipped around them, Holly issued a wordless
sound of fear, and Jim remembered what she had told him of her dream
last night. The woman-whether it had been his grandmother or not-had
climbed the stairs into the high room, had seen an amber emanation
within the walls, as if the mill was made of colored glass, and had
witnessed something unimaginably hostile being born out of those
mortared blocks.
“It’s okay.” He was eager to reassure her. “This isn’t The Enemy.
It’s something else. There’s no danger here. This is a different
light.”
He was only sharing with her the reassurances that were flooding into
him from a higher power. He hoped to God that he was correct, that no
threat was imminent, for he remembered too well the hideous biological
transformation of his own bedroom ceiling in Laguna Niguel little more
than twelve hours ago. Light had pulsed within the oily, insectile
birth sac that had blistered out of ordinary drywall, and the shadowy
form within, writhing and twitching, had been nothing he would ever want
to see more directly.
During two more bursts of melodic ringing, the color of the light
changed to amber. But otherwise it in no way resembled the menacing
radiance in his bedroom ceiling, which had been a different shade of
amber altogether the vile yellow of putrescent matter or of rich dark
pus-and which had throbbed in sympathy with an ominous tripartite
heartbeat that was not audible now.
Holly looked scared nonetheless.
He wished he could pull her close, put his arm around her. But he
needed to give his undivided attention to the higher power that was
striving to reach him.
The ringing stopped, but the light did not fade. It quivered,
shimmered, dimmed, and brightened. It moved through the otherwise dark
wall in scores of separate amoeba-like forms that constantly flowed
together and separated into new shapes; it was like a one-dimensional
representation of the kaleidoscopic display in one of those old Lava
lamps. The ever-changing patterns evolved on all sides of them, from
the base of the wall to the apex of the domed ceiling.