reflected on the inside of the con lid as if it was lit and mirrored.
She raised skeletal fists and beat on the lid, heard the blows
reverberating into the yards of compacted earth above her The library
again.
“Holly, for God’s sake, what’s happening?”
“Nothing.”
“Holly?”
“Nothing,” she said, sensing that it would be a mistake to admit that
The Enemy was rattling her.
She finished skimming The Black Windmill: At the end of the novel, when
Jim Jamison had saved the future president, The Friend had subsided into
quiescence under the pond, instructing Jim to forget that their
encounter had ever taken place, and to remember only that he had saved
the politician on his own initiative. If a repressed memory of the
alien ever surfaced in Jim’s mind, he was told that he would “REMEMBER
ME ONLY AS A DREAM, AN ENTITY IN A DREAM YOU ONCE HAD.” When the alien
light faded out of the wall for the last time, the messages on the
tablet vanished, leaving no trace of the contact.
Holly closed the book.
She and Jim sat for a while, staring at the dustjacket.
Around her, thousands of times and places, people and worlds, from Mars
to Egypt to Yoknapatawpha County, were closed up in the bindings of
books like the shine trapped under the tarnished veneer of a brass lamp.
She could almost feel them waiting to dazzle with the first turn of a
page, come alive with brilliant colors and pungent odors and delicious
aromas, with laughter and sobbing and cries and whispers.
Books were packaged dreams.
“Dreams are doorways,” she told Jim, “and the story in any novel is a
kind of dream. Through Arthur Willott’s dream of alien contact and
adventure, you found a doorway out of your despair, an escape from a
crushing sense of having failed your mother and father.” He had been
unrelievedly pale since she had shown him the tablet with The Friend’s
answers. HE LOVES YOU HOLLY/HE WILL KILL YOU HOLLY. Now some color had
returned to his face. His eyes were still ghost-ridden, and worry clung
to him like shadows to the night, but he seemed to be feeling his way
toward an accommodation with all the lies that were his life.
Which was what frightened The Enemy in him. And made it desperate.
Mrs. Glynn had returned from the stacks. She was working at her desk.
Lowering her voice even further, Holly said to Jim, “But why would you
hold yourself to blame for the traffic accident that killed them?
And how could any kid that age have such a tremendously heavy sense of
responsibility?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Remembering what Corbett Handahl had told her, Holly put a hand on
Jim’s knee and said, “Think, honey. Did the accident happen when they
were on the road with this mentalist act of theirs?”
He hesitated, frowned. “Yes. . . on the road.”
“You traveled with them, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
Recalling the photograph of his mother in a glittery gown, Jim and his
father in tuxedos, Holly said, “You were part of the act.”
Some of his memories apparently were rising like the rings of light had
risen in the pond. The play of emotions in his face could not have been
faked; he was genuinely astonished to be moving out of a life of
darkness.
Holly felt her own excitement growing with his. She said, “What did you
do in the act?”
“It was. . . a form of stage magic. My mom would take objects from
people in the audience. My dad would work with me, and we would.
. .
I would hold the objects and pretend to have psychic impressions, tell
the people things about themselves that I couldn’t know.”
“Pretend?” she asked.
He blinked. “Maybe not. It’s so strange. . . how little I remember
even when I try.”
“It wasn’t a trick. You could really do it. That’s why your folks put
together the act in the first place. You were a gifted child.”
He ran his fingers down the Bro Dart-protected jacket of The Black
Windmill. “But. . .”
“But?”
“There’s so much I still don’t understand. . . .”