its answers and had tried, instead, to present her with responses to all
her written questions at once, before she was able to read them aloud.
She’d never had a chance to ask it all of the questions on her list, and
now she wondered what might be on that answer-tablet.
She eased off her bedding as quietly as possible, rose, and walked
carefully across the room. She tested the floorboards as she went to
make sure they weren’t going to squeak when she put her full weight on
them.
As she stooped to pick up the tablet, she heard a sound that froze her.
Like a heartbeat with an extra thump in it.
She looked around at the walls, up at the dome. The light from the
highburning lantern and the windows was sufficient to be certain that
the limestone was only limestone, the wood only wood.
Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB. . .
It was faint, as if someone was tapping the rhythm out on a drum far
away, outside the mill, somewhere up in the dry brown hills.
But she knew what it was. No drum. It was the tripartite beat that
always preceded the materialization of The Enemy. Just as the bells
had, until its final visit, preceded the arrival of The Friend.
As she listened, it faded away.
She strained to hear it.
Gone.
Relieved but still trembling, she picked up the tablet. The pages were
rumpled, and they made some noise falling into place.
Jim’s steady breathing continued to echo softly around the room, with no
change of rhythm or pitch.
Holly read the answers on the first page, then the second. She saw that
they were the same responses The Friend had vocalized-although without
the spur-of the-moment questions that she had not written down on the
question-tablet. She skimmed down the third and fourth pages, on which
it had listed the people Jim had saved-Carmen Diaz, Amanda Cutter,
Steven Aimes, Laura Lenaskian-explaining what great things each of them
was destined to achieve.
Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB. . .
She snapped her head up.
The sound was still distant, no louder than before.
Jim groaned in his sleep.
Holly took a step away from the window, intending to wake him, but the
dreaded sound faded away again. Evidently The Enemy was in the
neighborhood, but it had not found a doorway in Jim’s dream. He had to
get his sleep, he couldn’t function without it. She decided to let him
alone.
Easing back to the window again, Holly held the answer-tablet up to the
light. She turned to the fifth page-and felt the flesh on the nape of
her neck go as cold and nubbly as frozen turkey skin.
Peeling the pages back with great delicacy, so as not to rustle them
more than absolutely necessary, she checked the sixth page, the seventh,
the eighth. They were all the same. Messages were printed on them in
the wavery hand that The Friend had used when pulling its little
words-risingas-if-through-water trick. But they were not answers to her
questions.
They were two alternating statements, unpunctuated, each repeated three
times per page: HE LOVES YOU HOLLY HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY HE LOVES YOU
HOLLY HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY HE LOVES YOU HOLLY HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY
Staring at those obsessively repeated statements, she knew that “he”
could be no one but Jim. She focused only on the five hateful words,
trying to understand.
And suddenly she thought that she did. The Friend was warning her that
in its madness it would act against her, perhaps because it hated her
for bringing Jim to the mill, for making him seek answers, and for being
a distraction from his mission. If The Friend, which was the sane half
of the alien consciousness, could reach into Jim’s mind and compel him
to undertake life-saving missions, was it possible that The Enemy, the
dark half, could reach into his mind and compel him to kill?
Instead of the insane personality materializing in monstrous form as it
had done for an instant at the motel Friday night and as it attempted to
do in Jim’s bedroom yesterday, might it choose to use Jim against her,