She might have laughed at the image of an alien, vastly superior to
human beings, stooping to engage in a bickering match. But the
impatience and poutiness she’d thought she detected as an undercurrent
in some of its previous answers was now unmistakable, and the concept of
a hypersensitive, resentful creature with godlike power was too
unnerving to be funny at the moment.
“How’s that for a higher power?” she asked Jim. “Any second now, he’s
going to call me a bitch.”
The Friend said nothing.
Consulting her notebook again, she said, “July twentieth. Steven Aimes.
Birmingham, Alabama.”
Schools of light swam through the walls. The patterns were less
graceful and less sensuous than before; if the lightshow had been the
visual equivalent of one of Brahms’s most pacific symphonies, it was now
more like the discordant wailing of bad progressive jazz.
“What about Steven Aimes?” she demanded, scared but remembering how an
exertion of will had been met with respect before.
“I am going now”
“That was a short tide,” she said.
The amber light began to darken.
“The tides in the vessel are not regular or of equal duration. But I
will return. ”
“What about Steven Aimes? He was fifty-seven, still capable of siring a
great something-or-other, though maybe a little long in the tooth. Why
did you save Steve?”
The voice grew somewhat deeper, slipping from baritone toward bass, and
it hardened. “It would not be wise for you to attempt to leave” She had
been waiting for that. As soon as she heard the words, she knew she had
been tensed in expectation of them.
Jim, however, was stunned. He turned, looking around at the dark amber
forms swirling and melding and splitting apart again, as if trying to
figure out the biological geography of the thing, so he could look it in
the eyes. “What do you mean by that? We’ll leave any time we want.”
“You must wait for my return. You will die if you attempt to leave.
”
“Don’t you want to help mankind any more?” Holly asked sharply.
“Do not sleep.” Jim moved to Holly’s side.
Whatever estrangement she had caused between her and Jim, by taking an
aggressive stance with The Friend, was apparently behind them. He put
an arm around her protectively.
“You dare not sleep.” The limestone was mottled with a deep red glow.
“Dreams are doorways.” The bloody light went out.
The lantern provided the only illumination. And in the deeper darkness
that followed The Friend’s departure, the quiet hiss of the burning gas
was the only sound.
Holly stood at the head of the stairs, shining a flashlight into the
gloom below. Jim supposed she was trying to make up her mind whether
they really would be prevented from leaving the mill-and if so, how
violently.
Watching her from where he sat on his sleeping bag, he could not
understand why it was all turning sour.
He had come to the windmill because the bizarre and frightening events
in his bedroom in Laguna Niguel, over eighteen hours ago, had made it
impossible to continue ignoring the dark side to the mystery in which he
had become enwrapped. Prior to that, he had been willing to drift
along, doing what he was compelled to do, pulling people out of the fire
at the last minute, a bemused but game superhero who had to rely on
airplanes when he wanted to fly and who had to do his own laundry. But
the increasing intrusion of The Enemy-whatever the hell it was-its
undeniable evil and fierce hostility, no longer allowed Jim the luxury
of ignorance. The Enemy was struggling to break through from some other
place, another dimension perhaps, and it seemed to be getting closer on
each attempt. Learning the truth about the higher power behind his
activities had not been at the top of his agenda, because he had felt
that enlightenment would be granted to him in time, but learning about
The Enemy had come to seem urgently necessary for his survival-and
Holly’s.
Nevertheless, he had traveled to the farm with the expectation that he
would encounter good as well as evil, experience joy as well as fear.