re “Why are we here?” she asked.
“Don’t ask me. You’re the one who wanted to come.”
“Don’t be thick, babe,” she said.
She knew that pushing him was like kicking a package of unstable
dynamite, but she had no choice. He was going to blow anyway, sooner or
later.
Her only hope of survival was to force him to acknowledge that he was
the The Enemy before that personality seized control of him permanently.
She sensed that she was running out of time.
an She said, “You’re the one who put it on the itinerary yesterday. You
said they’d made a movie here once.” She was jolted by what she had
just said.
let “Wait a sec-is this where you saw Robert Vaughn? Was he in the
movie they made here?”
With a bewildered expression that slowly gave way to a frown, Jim turned
in place, surveying the small park. At last he headed toward the
windmill, and she followed him.
Two historical-marker lecterns flanked the flagstone path in front of
the mill door. They were all-weather stone stands. The reading
material on the slanted tops was protected behind sheets of plexiglass
in watertight frames.
The lectern on the left, to which they stepped first, provided
background information about the use of windmills for grain milling,
water pumping, and electricity production in the Santa Ynez Valley from
the 1800s until well into the twentieth century, followed by a history
of the preserved mill six to in front of them, which was called, rather
aptly, the New Svenborg Mill.
line That material was as dull as dirt, and Holly turned to the second
lectern over, only because she still had some of the doggedness and
appetite for facts rises that had made her a passable journalist.
Her interest was instantly piqued The title at the top of the second
plaque-THE BLACK WINDMILL: BOOK AND MOVIE.
“Jim, look at this.”
He joined her by the second marker.
There was a photograph of the jacket of a young-adult novel-The in it
Black Windmill by Arthur J. Willott, and the illustration on it was
obviously based on the New Svenborg Mill. Holly read the lectern text
with s was growing astonishment. Willott, a resident of the Santa Ynez
valley in Solvang, not Svenborg-had been a successful author of novels
for young from adults, turning out fifty-two titles before his death in
, at the age of petals eighty. His most popular and enduring book, by
far, had been a fantasynches adventure about a haunted old mill and a
boy who discovered that the ghosts were actually aliens from another
world and that under the milliosing pond was a spaceship which had been
there for ten thousand years.
, deck “No,” Jim said softly but with some anger, “no, this makes no
sense, this can’t be right.”
Holly recalled a moment from the dream in which she had been in Lena
Ironheart’s body, climbing the mill stairs.
When she had reached the top, she had found ten-year-old Jim standing
with his hands fisted at his sides, and he had turned to her and said,
“I’m scared, help me, the walls, the walls” At his feet had been a
yellow candle in a blue dish. Until now she’d forgotten that beside the
dish lay a hardcover book in a colorful dustjacket.
It was the same dustjacket reproduced on the lectern: The Black
Windmill.
“No,” Jim said again, and he turned away from the plaque. He stared
around worriedly at the breeze-ruffled trees.
Holly read on and discovered that twenty-five years ago, the very year
that ten-year-old Jim Ironheart had come to town, The Black Windmill had
been made into a motion picture. The New Svenborg Mill had served as
the primary location. The motion-picture company had created a shallow
but convincing millpond around it, then paid to restore the land after
filming and to establish the current pocket park.
Still turning slowly around, frowning at the trees and shrubs, at the
gloom beneath them that the overcast day could not dispel, Jim said,
“Something’s coming.”
Holly could see nothing coming, and she believed that he was just trying
to distract her from the plaque. He did not want to accept the