She believed him, and her instincts proved reliable. They sat at the
bar together for a couple of hours, chatting about movies and television
shows, comedians and singers, weather and food, never touching on
politics, plane crashes, or the cares of the world. To her surprise,
she drank three beers and felt nothing but a light buzz:
“Howie,” she said quite seriously when she left him, “I’ll be grateful
to you for the rest of my life.”
She returned to her room alone, undressed, slid under the sheets, and
felt sleep stealing over her even as she put her head on the pillow.
Pulling the covers around her to ward off the chill of the air
conditioner, she spoke in a voice slurred more by exhaustion than by
beer: “Snuggle down in my cocoon, be a butterfly soon.” Wondering where
that had come from and what she meant by it, she fell asleep.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. . .
Though she was in the stone-walled room again, the dream was different
in many ways from what it had been previously. For one thing, she was
not blind. A fat yellow candle stood in a blue dish, and its dancing
orange flame revealed stone walls, windows as narrow as embrasures, a
wooden floor, a turning shaft that came through the ceiling above and
disappeared through a hole into the room below, and a heavy door of
iron-bound timbers. Somehow she knew that she was in the upper chamber
of an old windmill, that the sound-whoosh, whoosh, whoosh-was produced
by the mill’s giant sails cutting the turbulent night wind, and that
beyond the door lay curved limestone steps that led down to the milling
room.
Though she was standing when the dream began, circumstances changed with
a ripple, and she was suddenly sitting, though not in an ordinary chair.
She was in an airline seat, belted in place, and when she turned her
head to the left, she saw Jim Ironheart seated beside her. “This old
mill won’t make it to Chicago,” he said solemnly. And it seemed quite
logical that they were flying in that stone structure, lifted by its
four giant woodslat sails the way an airliner was kept aloft by its jets
or propellers. “We’ll survive, though-won’t we?” she asked. Before
her eyes, Jim faded and was replaced by a ten-year-old boy. She
marveled at this magic. Then she decided that the boy’s thick brown
hair and electric-blue eyes meant he was Jim from another time.
According to the liberal rules of dreams, that made his transformation
less magical and, in fact, altogether logical. The boy said, “We’ll
survive if it doesn’t come.” And she said, “What is it?”
And he said, “The Enemy.” Around them the mill seemed to respond to his
last two words, flexing and contracting, pulsing like flesh, just as her
motel-room wall in Laguna Hills had bulged with malevolent life last
night. She thought she glimpsed a monstrous face and form taking its
substance from the very limestone. “We’ll die here,” the boy said,
“we’ll all die here,” and he seemed almost to welcome the creature that
was trying to come out of the wall. WHOOSH!
Holly came awake with a start, as she had at some point during each of
the past three nights. But this time no element of the dream followed
her into the real world, and she was not terrified as she had been
before.
Afraid, yes. But it was a low-grade fear, more akin to disquiet than to
hysteria.
More important, she rose from the dream with a buoyant sense of
liberation. Instantly awake, she sat up in bed, leaned back against the
headboard, and folded her arms across her bare breasts. She was
shivering neither with fear nor because of a chill, but with excitement.
Earlier in the night, tongue lubricated by beer, she had spoken a truth
as she had slipped off the precipice of sleep: “Snuggle down in my
cocoon, be a butterfly soon.” Now she knew what she had meant, and she
understood the changes that she had been going through ever since she
had stumbled onto Ironheart’s secret, changes that she had only begun to