the mill walls.
Communication between Jim and the alien was achieved with the use of two
lined, yellow tablets—one for Jim’s questions, and one for the alien’s
answers, which appeared as if by magic. According to the
extraterrestrial, it was a being of pure energy and was on earth “TO
OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND.” It referred to itself as THE
FRIEND.
Marking her place with a finger, Holly flipped through the rest of the
book to see if The Friend continued to use the awkward tablets for
communication all the way to the end. It did. In the story on which
Jim Ironheart had based his fantasy, the alien never vocalized.
“Which is why you doubted that your alien could vocalize and why you
resisted my suggestion that we refuse to play along with the tablet
system.”
Jim was beyond denial now. He stared at the book with wonder.
His response gave Holly hope for him. In the cemetery, he had been in
such distress, his eyes so cold and bleak, that she had begun to doubt
if, indeed, he could turn his phenomenal power inward to heal himself
And in the park, for one terrible moment, she had thought that his
fragile shell of sanity would crack and spill the yolk of madness.
But he had held together, and now his curiosity seemed to be overcoming
his fear.
Mrs. Glynn had gone off to work in the stacks. No other patrons had
come in to browse.
Holly returned to the story, skim-reading. At the midpoint of the tale,
just after Jim Jamison and the alien had their second encounter, the ET
explained that it was an entity that lived “IN ALL ASPECTS OF TIME”
could perceive the future, and wanted to save the life of a man who was
fated to die.
“I’ll be damned,” Jim said softly.
Without warning, a vision burst in Holly’s mind with such force and
brilliance that the library vanished for a moment and her inner world
became the only reality: she saw herself naked and nailed to a wall in
an obscene parody of a crucifix, blood streaming from her hands and feet
(a voice whispering: die, die, die), and she opened her mouth to scream
but, instead of sound, swarms of cockroaches poured out between her
lips, and she realized she was already dead (die die die), her putrid
innards crawling with pests and vermin The hateful phantasm flickered
off the screen of her mind as suddenly as it had appeared, and she
snapped back into the library with a jolt.
“Holly?” Jim was looking at her worriedly.
A part of him had sent the vision to her, no question about that.
But the Jim she was looking at now was not the Jim who had done it. The
dark child within him, The Enemy, hate-filled and murderous, was
striking at her with a new weapon.
She said, “It’s okay. It’s all right.”
But she didn’t feel all right. The vision had left her nauseous and
somewhat disoriented.
She had to struggle to refocus on The Black Windmill: The man Jim
Jamison had to save, The Friend explained, was a candidate for the
United States Presidency, soon to pass through Jim’s hometown, where he
was going to be assassinated. The alien wanted him to live, instead,
because “HE IS GOING TO BE A GREAT STATESMAN AND PEACEMAKER WHO WILL
SAVE THE WORLD FROM A GREAT WAR.” Because it had to keep its presence
on earth a secret, The Friend wanted to work through Jim Jamison to
thwart the assassins: “YOU WILL THROW HIM A LIFE LINE, JIM.”
The novel did not include an evil alien. The Enemy had been entirely
Jim Ironheart’s embellishment, an embodiment of his own rage and self
hatred, which he had needed to separate from himself and control.
With a crackle of inner static, another vision burst across her
mindscreen, so intense that it blotted out the real world: she was in a
coffin, dead but somehow still in possession of all her senses; she
could feel worms churning in her (die, die, die, die), could smell the
vile stench of her own decaying body, could see her rotted face