intimidated, she just kept repeating his name, then the promise that she
loved him, over and over until -they were gone.
They didn’t whirl up into the sky, as before. They vanished. One
moment the air was filled with them and their fierce cries-but the next
moment they were gone as if they had never been.
Holly held Jim against her for a moment then let him go. He still
looked through her more than at her and seemed to be in a trance.
“Jim,” Henry Ironheart said beseechingly, still reaching out toward his
grandson.
After a hesitation, Jim slid off the bench, onto his knees in front of
the old man. He took the withered hand and kissed it.
Without looking up at either Holly or Henry, Jim said, “Grandma saw The
Enemy coming out of the wall. First time it happened, first time I saw
it, too.” His voice sounded faraway, as if a part of him were still
back in the past, reliving that dreaded moment, grateful that there had
not been as much reason to dread it as he had thought.
“She saw it, and it frightened her, and she stumbled back into the
stairs, tripped, fell. . .” He pressed his grandfather’s hand to his
cheek and said, “I didn’t kill her.”
“I know you didn’t, Jim,” Henry Ironheart said. “My God, I know you
didn’t.”
The old man looked up at Holly with a thousand questions about birds and
enemies and things in walls. But she knew he would have to wait for
answers until another day, as she had waited-as Jim had waited, too.
During the drive over the mountains and down into Santa Barbara, Jim
slumped in his seat, eyes closed. He seemed to have fallen into a deep
sleep. She supposed he needed sleep as desperately as any man could
need it, for he’d enjoyed almost no real rest in twenty-five years.
She was no longer afraid to let him sleep. She was certain that The
Enemy was gone, with The Friend, and that only one personality inhabited
his body now. Dreams were no longer doorways.
For the time being, she did not want to return to the mill, even though
they had left some gear there. She’d had enough of Svenborg, too, and
all it represented in Jim’s life. She wanted to hole up in a new place,
where neither of them had been, where new beginnings might be forged
with no taint of the past.
As she drove through that parched land under the ashen sky, she put the
pieces together and studied the resulting picture:. an enormously
gifted boy, far more gifted than even he knows, lives through the
slaughter in the Dixie Duck, but comes out of the holocaust with a
shattered soul. In his desperation to feel good about himself again, he
borrow’s Arthur Willott’s fantasy, using his special power to create The
Friend, an embodiment of his most noble aspirations, and The Friend
tells him he has a mission in life.
But the boy is so full of despair and rage that The Friend alone is not
enough to heal him. He needs a third personality, something into which
he can shove all his negative feelings, all the darkness in himself that
frightens him. So he creates The Enemy, embellishing Willott’s story
structure.
Alone in the windmill, he has exhilarating conversations with The Friend
-and works out his rage through the materialization of The Enemy.
Until, one night, Lena Ironheart walks in at the wrong moment.
Frightened, she falls backward. . . .
In shock because of what The Enemy has done, merely by its presence, Jim
forces himself to forget the fantasy, both The Friend and Enemy, just as
Jim Jamison forgot his alien encounter after saving the life of the
future president of the United States. For twenty-five years, he
struggles to keep a lid firmly on those fragmented personalities,
suppressing both his very best and his very worst qualities, leading a
relatively quiet and colorless life because he dares not tap his
stronger feelings.
He finds purpose in teaching, which to some extent redeems him-until
Larry Kakonis commits suicide. Without purpose any more, feeling that