Cold Fire (38 page)

Even as the strange flare whipped around them, Holly issued a wordless sound of fear, and Jim remembered what she had told him of her dream last night. The woman—whether it had been his grandmother or not—had climbed the stairs into the high room, had seen an amber emanation within the walls, as if the mill was made of colored glass, and had witnessed something unimaginably hostile being born out of those mortared blocks.

“It’s okay.” He was eager to reassure her. “This isn’t The Enemy. It’s something else. There’s no danger here. This is a different light.”

He was only sharing with her the reassurances that were flooding into him from a higher power. He hoped to God that he was correct, that no threat was imminent, for he remembered too well the hideous biological transformation of his own bedroom ceiling in Laguna Niguel little more than twelve hours ago. Light had pulsed within the oily, insectile birth sac that had blistered out of ordinary drywall, and the shadowy form within, writhing and twitching, had been nothing he would ever want to see more directly.

During two more bursts of melodic ringing, the color of the light changed to amber. But otherwise it in no way resembled the menacing radiance in his bedroom ceiling, which had been a different shade of amber altogether—the vile yellow of putrescent matter or of rich dark pus—and which had throbbed in sympathy with an ominous tripartite heartbeat that was not audible now.

Holly looked scared nonetheless.

. He wished he could pull her close, put his arm around her. But he needed to give his undivided attention to the higher power that was striving to reach him.

The ringing stopped, but the light did not fade. It quivered, shimmered, dimmed, and brightened. It moved through the otherwise dark wall in scores of separate amoeba-like forms that constantly flowed together and separated into new shapes; it was like a one-dimensional representation of the kaleidoscopic display in one of those old Lava lamps. The ever-changing patterns evolved on all sides of them, from the base of the wall to the apex of the domed ceiling.

“I feel like we’re in a bathysphere, all glass, suspended far, far down in the ocean,” Holly said. “And great schools of luminescent fish are diving and soaring and swirling past us on all sides, through the deep black water.”

He loved her for putting the experience into better words than he could summon, words that would not let him forget the images they described, even if he lived a hundred years.

Unquestionably, the ghostly luminosity lay within the stone, not merely on the surface of it. He could see
into
that now-translucent substance, as if it had been alchemized into a dark but well-clarified quartz. The amber radiance brightened the room more than did the lantern, which he had turned low. His trembling hands looked golden, as did Holly’s face.

But pockets of darkness remained, and the constantly moving light enlivened the shadows as well.

“What now?” Holly asked softly.

Jim noticed that something had happened to the yellow tablet on the floor between them. “Look.”

Words had appeared on the top third of the first page. They looked as if they had been formed by a finger dipped in ink:

I AM WITH YOU.

Holly had been distracted—to say the least!—by the lightshow, but she did not think that Jim could have leaned to the tablet and printed the words with the felt-tip pen or any other instrument without drawing her attention. Yet she found it hard to believe that some disembodied presence had conveyed the message.

“I think we’re being encouraged to ask questions,” Jim said.

“Then ask it what it is,” she said at once.

He wrote a question on the second tablet, which he was holding, and showed it to her:

As they watched, the answer appeared on the first tablet, which lay between and slightly in front of them at such an angle that they could both read it. The words were not burnt onto the paper and were not formed by ink that dripped magically from the air. Instead, the irregular, wavery letters appeared as dim gray shapes and grew darker as they seemed to float up out of the paper, as though a page of the tablet were not one-five-hundredth of an inch thick but a pool of liquid many feet deep. She recognized immediately that this was similar to the effect she had seen earlier when the balls of light had risen to the center of the pond before bursting and casting concentric rings of illumination outward through the water; this was, as well, how the light had first welled up in the limestone walls before the blocks had become thoroughly translucent.

THE FRIEND.

Who are you? The Friend.

It seemed to be an odd self-description. Not “your friend” or “a friend” but
The
Friend.

For an alien intelligence, if indeed that’s all it was, the name had curious spiritual implications, connotations of divinity. Men had given God many names—Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Zeus, Aesir—but even more titles. God was The Almighty, The Eternal Being, The Infinite, The Father, The Savior, The Creator, The Light. The Friend seemed to fit right into that list.

Jim quickly wrote another question and showed it to Holly:
Where do you come from?

ANOTHER WORLD.

Which could mean anything from heaven to Mars.

YES.

“My God,” Holly said, awed in spite of herself.

So much for the great hereafter.

She looked up from the tablet and met Jim’s eyes. They seemed to shine brighter than ever, although the chrome-yellow light had imparted to them an exceptional green tint.

Restless with excitement, she rose onto her knees, then eased back again, sitting on her calves. The top tablet page was filled with the entity’s responses. Holly equivocated only briefly, then tore it off and set it aside, so they could see the second page. She glanced back and forth between Jim’s questions and the rapidly appearing answers.

YES.

YES.

YES.

10,000 YEARS.

As she stared at that figure, it seemed to Holly that this moment was more like a dream than some of the actual dreams she’d been having lately. After so much mystery, there were answers—but they seemed to be coming too easily. She did not know what she had expected, but she had not imagined that the murkiness in which they had been operating would clear as quickly as if a drop of a magical universal detergent had been dropped into it.

“Ask her why she’s here,” Holly said, tearing off the second sheet and putting it with the first.

Jim was surprised.
“She?”
“Why not?”

He brightened. “Why not?” he agreed.

He turned to a new page in his own tablet and wrote her question:
Why are you here?

Floating up through the paper to the surface: TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND.

“You know what this is like?” Holly said.

“What’s it like?”

“An episode of
Outer Limits. ”

“The old TV show?”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t that before your time?”

“It’s on cable.”

“But what do you mean it’s like an episode of
Outer Limits
?”

She frowned at TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND and said, “Don’t you think it’s a little... trite?”

“Trite?” He was irritated. “No, I don’t. Because I haven’t any idea what alien contact
should
be like. I haven’t had a whole lot of experience with it, certainly not enough to have expectations or be jaded.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know ... it’s just... okay, let’s see where this leads.”

She had to admit that she was no less awed than she had been when the light had first appeared in the walls. Her heart continued to thud hard and fast, and she was still unable to draw a really deep breath. She still felt that they were in the presence of something superhuman, maybe even a higher power by one definition or another, and she was humbled by it. Considering what she had seen in the pond, the pulsing luminescence even now swimming through the wall, and the words that kept shimmering into view on the tablet, she would have been hopelessly stupid if she had
not
been awed.

Undeniably, however, her sense of wonder was dulled by the feeling that this entity was structuring the encounter like an old movie or TV script. With a sarcastic note in his voice, Jim had said that he had too little experience with alien contact to have developed any expectations that could be disappointed. But that was not true. Having grown up in the sixties and seventies, he had been as media-saturated as she had been. They’d been exposed to the same TV shows and movies, magazines and books; science fiction had been a major influence in popular culture all their lives. He had acquired plenty of detailed expectations about what alien contact would be like—and the entity in the wall was playing to all of them. Holly’s only conscious expectation had been that a
real
close encounter of the third kind would be like nothing the novelists and screen-writers imagined in all their wildest flights of fantasy, because when referring to life from another world, alien
meant
alien, different, beyond easy comparison or comprehension.

“Okay,” she said, “maybe familiarity is the point. I mean, maybe it’s using our modern myths as a convenient way to present itself to us, a way to make itself comprehensible to us. Because it’s probably so radically different from us that we could never understand its true nature or appearance.”

“Exactly,” Jim said. He wrote another question:
What is the light we see in the walls?

THE LIGHT IS ME.

Holly didn’t wait for Jim to write the next question. She addressed the entity directly: “How can you move through a wall?”

Because the alien seemed such a stickler about form, she was somewhat surprised when it did not insist on hewing to the written question-reply format. It answered her at once: I CAN BECOME PART OF ANYTHING, MOVE WITHIN IT, TAKE SHAPE FROM IT WHENEVER I CHOOSE.

“Sounds a little like bragging,” she said.

“I can’t believe you can be sarcastic at a time like this,” Jim said impatiently.

“I’m not being sarcastic,” she explained. “I’m just trying to understand.”

He looked doubtful.

To the alien presence, she said, “You understand the problems I’m having with this, don’t you?”

On the tablet: YES.

She ripped away that page, revealing a fresh one. Increasingly restless and nervous, but not entirely sure why, Holly got to her feet and turned in a circle, looking at the play of light in the walls as she formulated her next question. “Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

No answer appeared on the tablet.

She repeated the question.

The tablet remained blank.

Holly said, “Trade secret, I guess.”

She felt a bead of cold sweat trickle out of her right armpit and down her side, under her blouse. A childlike wonder still worked in her, but fear was on the rise again. Something was wrong. Something more than the clichéd nature of the story the entity was giving them. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what spooked her.

On his own tablet, Jim quickly wrote another question, and Holly leaned down to read it:
Did you appear to me in this room when I was ten years old?

YES. OFTEN.

YES.

“Don’t bother writing your questions,” Holly said. “Just ask them like I do.”

Jim was clearly startled by her suggestion, and she was surprised that he had persisted with his pen and tablet even after seeing that the questions she asked aloud were answered. He seemed reluctant to put aside the felt-tip and the paper, but at last he did. “Why did you make me forget?”

Even standing, Holly could easily read the bold words that appeared on the yellow tablet:

YOU WERE NOT READY TO REMEMBER.

“Unnecessarily cryptic,” she muttered. “You’re right. It must be male.”

Jim tore off the used page, put it with the others, and paused, chewing his lip, evidently not sure what to ask next. Finally he said, “Are you male or female?”

I AM MALE.

“More likely,” Holly said, “it’s neither. It’s
alien,
after all, and it’s as likely to reproduce by parthenogenesis.”

I AM MALE, it repeated.

Jim remained seated, legs folded, an undiminished look of wonder on his face, more boylike now than ever.

Holly did not understand why her anxiety level was soaring while Jim continued to bounce up and down—well, virtually—with enthusiasm and delight.

He said, “What do you look like?”

WHATEVER I CHOOSE TO LOOK LIKE.

“Could you appear to us as a man or woman?” Jim asked.

YES.

“As a dog?”

YES.

“As a cat?”

YES.

“As a beetle?”

YES.

Without the security of his pen and tablet, Jim seemed to have been reduced to inane questions. Holly half expected him to ask the entity what its favorite color was, whether it preferred Coke or Pepsi, and if it liked Barry Manilow music.

But he said, “How old are you?”

I AM A CHILD.

“A child?” Jim responded. “But you told us you’ve been on our world for ten thousand years.”

I AM STILL A CHILD.

Jim said, “Then is your species very long-lived?”

WE ARE IMMORTAL.

“Wow.” “It’s lying,” Holly told him.

Appalled by her effrontery, he said, “Jesus, Holly!”

“Well, it is.”

And
that
was the source of her renewed fear—the fact that it was not being straight with them, was playing games, deceiving. She had a sense that it regarded them with enormous contempt. In which case, she probably should have shut up, been meekly adoring before its power, and tried not to anger it.