running out of arguments, if not resistance.
The words quickly faded, then vanished.
Maybe that was a good sign, an indication of his subconscious
accommodation to her theory. Or maybe The Enemy had decided that she
could not be intimidated with threats-and was struggling to burst
through and savage her.
She said, “When it’s killed me, you’ll realize it is part of you.
And if you love me, like you told me you did through The Friend last
night, then what’s that going to do to you? Isn’t that going to destroy
the Jim I love?
Isn’t that going to leave you with just one personality-the dark one,
The Enemy? I think it’s a damned good bet. So we’re talking your
survival here as well as mine. If you want to have a future, then let’s
dig to the bottom of this.”
“Maybe we dig and dig-but there is no bottom. Then what?”
“Then we dig a little deeper.”
As they were entering town, making the abrupt transition from deadbrown
land to tightly grouped pioneer settlement, Holly suddenly said aloud:
“Robert Vaughn.”
Jim twitched with surprise, not because she had said something
mystifying but because that name made an immediate connection for him.
“My God,” he said, “that was the voice.”
“The voice of The Friend,” she said, glancing at him. “So you realized
it was familiar, too.”
Robert Vaughn, the wonderful actor, had been the hero of television’s
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and exquisitely oily villain of countless
films.
He possessed one of those voices with such a rich timbre and range that
it could be as threatening, or as fatherly and reassuring, as he chose
to make it.
“Robert Vaughn,” Holly said. “But why? Why not Orson Welles or Paul
Newman or Sean Connery or Fred Flintstone? It’s too quirky a choice not
to be meaningful.”
“I don’t know,” Jim said thoughtfully, but he had the unnerving feeling
he should know. The explanation was within his grasp.
Holly said, “Do you still think it’s an alien? Wouldn’t an alien just
manufacture a nondescript voice? Why would it imitate any one
particular actor?”
“I saw Robert Vaughn once,” Jim said, surprised by a dim memory stirring
within him. “I mean, not on TV or in the movies, but for real, up
close. A long time ago.”
“Where, when?”
“I can’t. . . it won’t. . . won’t come to me.”
Jim felt as if he were standing on a narrow spine of land between two
precipices, with safety to neither side. On the one hand was the life
he had been living, filled with torment and despair that he had tried to
deny but that had overwhelmed him at times, as when he had taken his
spiritual journey on the Harley into the Mojave Desert, looking for a
way out even if the way was death. On the other hand lay an uncertain
future that Holly was trying to paint in for him, a future that she
insisted was one of hope but which looked to him like chaos and madness.
And the narrow spine on which he stood was crumbling by the minute.
He remembered an exchange they’d had as they lay side by side in his bed
two nights ago, before they had made love for the first time.
He’d said, People are always more. . . complex than you figure.
Is that just an observation. . . or a warning?
Warning?
Maybe you ‘re warning me that you ‘re not what you seem to be.
After a long pause, he had said, Maybe.
And after her own long pause, she had said, I guess I don ‘t care.
He was sure, now, that he had been warning her. A small voice within
told him that she was right in her analysis, that the entities at the
mill had only been different aspects of him. But if he was a victim of
multiple personality syndrome, he did not believe that his condition
could be casually described as a mere mental disturbance or a troubled
state of mind, as she had tried to portray it. Madness was the only
word that did it justice.
They entered Main Street. The town looked strangely dark and