Cold Fire (53 page)

To the real birds above, Jim whispered, “‘Quoth the Raven,
Nevermore.’”

He heard a soft rhythmic creaking, as of a wheel going around and around, and footsteps. When he looked up, he saw Holly pushing his wheelchair-bound grandfather along the walkway toward the bench.

Eighteen years had passed since he had gone away to school, and he had seen Henry only once before in all this time. Initially, there had been a few telephone calls, but soon Jim stopped making those and, eventually, stopped accepting them as well. When letters came, he threw them away unopened. He remembered all of that now—and he was beginning to remember why.

He began to rise. His legs would not support him. He remained on the bench.

Holly parked the wheelchair facing Jim, then sat beside him. “How you doing?”

Nodding dumbly, he glanced up at the birds circling against the ashen clouds, rather than face his grandfather.

The old man could not look at Jim, either. He studied the beds of flowers intently, as if he had been in a great rush to get outside and have a look at those blooms and nothing else.

Holly knew this was not going to be easy. She was sympathetic toward each of the men and wanted to do her best to bring them together at last.

First, she had to burn away the tangled weeds of one last lie that Jim had told her and that, consciously if not subconsciously, he had successfully told himself. “There was no traffic accident, honey,” she said, putting a hand on his knee. “That isn’t how it happened.”

Jim lowered his eyes from the blackbirds and regarded her with nervous expectation. She could see that he longed to know the truth and dreaded hearing it.

“It happened in a restaurant—”

Jim slowly shook his head in denial.

“—down in Atlanta, Georgia—”

He was still shaking his head, but his eyes were widening.

“—you were with them—”

He stopped denying, and a terrible expression stained his face.

“—it was called the Dixie Duck,” she said.

When the memory exploded back to him with pile-driver force, he hunched forward on the bench as if he might vomit, but he did not. He curled his hands into fists on his knees, and his face tightened into a clench of pain, and he made small inarticulate sounds that were beyond grief and horror.

She put an arm around his bent shoulders.

Henry Ironheart looked at her and said, “Oh, my God,” as he began to realize the extremity of denial to which his grandson had been driven. “Oh, my God.” As Jim’s strangled gasps of pain changed into quiet sobs, Henry Ironheart looked at the flowers again, then at his aged hands, then at his feet on the tilted braces of the wheelchair, everywhere he could think to look to avoid Jim and Holly, but at last he met Holly’s eyes again. “He had therapy,” he said, trying hard to expiate his guilt. “We knew he might need therapy. We took him to a psychiatrist in Santa Barbara. Took him there several times. We did what we could. But the psychiatrist—Hemphill, his name was—he said Jim was all right, he said there was no reason to bring him any more, just after six visits, he said Jim was all right.”

Holly said, “What do they ever know? What could Hemphill have done when he didn’t really know the boy, didn’t love him?”

Henry Ironheart flinched as if she had struck him, though she had not meant her comment to be a condemnation of him.

“No,” she said quickly, hoping he would believe her, “what I meant was, there’s no mystery why I’ve gotten farther than Hemphill ever could. It’s just because I love him. It’s the only thing that ever leads to healing.” Stroking Jim’s hair, she said, “You couldn’t have saved them, baby. You didn’t have the power then, not like you have it now. You were lucky to get out alive. Believe me, honey, listen and believe me.”

For a moment they sat unspeaking, all of them in pain.

Holly noticed more blackbirds had gathered in the sky. Maybe a dozen of them now. She didn’t know how Jim was drawing them there—or why—but she knew that he was, and regarded them with growing dread.

She put a hand over one of Jim’s hands, encouraging him to relax it. Though he slowly stopped crying, he kept his fist as tight as a fist of sculpted stone.

To Henry, she said, “Now. This is your chance. Explain why you turned away from him, why you did... whatever you did to him.”

Clearing his throat, wiping nervously at his mouth with his weak right hand, Henry spoke at first without looking at either of them. “Well... you have to know... how it was. A few months after he came back from Atlanta, there was this film company in town, shooting a movie—”

“The Black Windmill,
” Holly said.

“Yeah. He was reading all the time....” Henry stopped, closed his eyes as if to gather strength. When he opened them, he stared at Jim’s bowed head and seemed prepared to meet his eyes if he looked up. “You was reading all the time, going through the library shelf by shelf, and because of the film you read the Willott book. For a while it became ... hell, I don’t know... I guess maybe you’d have to say it was an obsession with you, Jim. It was the only thing that brought you out of your shell, talking about that book, so we encouraged you to go watch them shoot the picture. Remember? After a while, you started telling us an alien was in our pond and windmill, just like in the book and movie. At first we thought you was just play-acting.”

He paused.

The silence lengthened.

About twenty birds in the sky above.

Circling. Silent.

To Henry, Holly said, “Then it began to worry you.”

Henry wiped one shaky hand down his deeply lined face, not so much as if he was trying to scrub away his weariness but as if he was trying to slough off the years and bring that lost time closer. “You spent more and more hours in the mill, Jim. Sometimes you’d be out there all day. And evenings, too. Sometimes we’d get up in the middle of the night to use the john, and we’d see a light out there in the mill, two or three or four o’clock in the morning. And you wouldn’t be in your room.”

Henry paused more often. He wasn’t tired. He just didn’t want to dig into this part of the long-buried past.

“If it was the middle of the night, we’d go out there to the mill and bring you in, either me or Lena. And you’d be telling us about The Friend in the mill. You started spooking us, we didn’t know what to do ... so I guess... we didn’t do anything. Anyway, that night... the night she died... a storm was coming up—”

Holly recalled the dream:

... a fresh wind blows as she hurries along the gravel path...

“—and Lena didn’t wake me. She went out there by herself and up to the high room—”

... she climbs the limestone stairs...

“—pretty good thunderstorm, but I used to be able to sleep through anything—”

... the heavens flash as she passes the stairwell window, and through the glass she sees an object in the pond below...

“—I guess, Jim, you was just doing what we always found you doing out there at night, reading that book by candlelight—”

... inhuman sounds from above quicken her heart, and she climbs to the high room, afraid, but also curious and concerned for Jim...

“—a crash of thunder finally woke me—”

... she reaches the top of the stairs and sees him standing, hands fisted at his sides, a yellow candle in a blue dish on the floor, a book beside the candle...

“—I realized Lena was gone, looked out the bedroom window, and saw that dim light in the mill—”

... the boy turns to her and cries out,
I’m scared, help me, the walls, the walls!
...

“—and I couldn’t believe my eyes because the sails of the mill were turning, and even in those days the sails hadn’t turned in ten or fifteen years, been frozen up—”

... she sees an amber light within the walls, the sour shades of pus and bile; the limestone bulges, and she realizes something is impossibly
alive
in the stone...

“—but they were spinning like airplane propellers, so I pulled on my pants, and hurried downstairs—”

... with fear but also with perverse excitement, the boy says,
It’s coming, and nobody can stop it! ...

“—I grabbed a flashlight and ran out into the rain—”

... the curve of mortared blocks splits like the spongy membrane of an insect’s egg; taking shape from a core of foul muck, where limestone should have been, is the embodiment of the boy’s black rage at the world and its injustice, his self-hatred made flesh, his own death-wish given a vicious and brutal form so solid that it is an entity itself, quite separate from him...

“—I reached the mill, couldn’t believe how those old sails were spinning, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!—”

Holly’s dream had ended there, but her imagination too easily supplied a version of what might have happened thereafter. Horrified at the materialization of The Enemy, stunned that the boy’s wild tales of aliens in the mill were true, Lena had stumbled backward and fallen down the winding stone stairs, unable to arrest her fall because there was no handrail at which to grab. Somewhere along the way she broke her neck.

“—went inside the mill ... found her at the bottom of the stairs all busted up, neck twisted... dead.”

Henry paused for the first time in a while and swallowed hard. He had not looked at Holly once throughout his account of that stormy night, only at Jim’s bowed head. With less of a slur in his voice, as if it were vitally important to him to tell the rest of it as clearly as he could, he said:

“I went up the steps and found you in the high room, Jimmy. Do you remember that? Sitting by the candle, holding the book in your hands so tight it couldn’t be taken from you till hours later. You wouldn’t speak.” The old man’s voice quavered now. “God forgive me, but all I could think about was Lena being dead, my dear Lena gone, and you being such a strange child all year, and still strange even at that moment, with your book, refusing to talk to me. I guess... I guess I went a little mad right then, for a while. I thought you might’ve pushed her, Jimmy. I thought you might’ve been in one of your... upsets ... and maybe you pushed her.”

As if it had become too much for him to address himself to his grandson any longer, Henry shifted his gaze to Holly. “That year after Atlanta, he’d been a strange boy ... almost like a boy we didn’t know. He was quiet, like I said, but there was rage in him, too, a fury like no child should ever have. It sometimes scared us. The only time he ever showed it was in his sleep... dreaming... we’d hear him screeching, and we’d go down the hall to his room ... and he’d be kicking and punching at the mattress, the pillows, clawing at the sheets, furious, taking it all out on something in his dreams, and we’d have to wake him.”

Henry paused and looked away from Holly, down at his bent right hand, which lay half useless in his lap.

Jim’s fist, under Holly’s hand, remained vise-tight.

“You never struck out at Lena or me, Jimmy, you was a good boy, never gave us that kind of trouble. But in the mill that night, I grabbed you and shook you, Jimmy, tried to make you admit how you’d pushed her down the stairs. There was no excuse for what I did, how I behaved... except I was grief-crazy over Jamie and Cara, and now over Lena, everyone dying around me, and there was only you, and you were so strange, so strange and locked up in yourself that you scared me, so I turned on you when I should have been taking you in my arms. Turned on you that night... and didn’t realize what I’d done until a lot of years later... too late.”

The birds were in a tighter circle now. Directly overhead.

“Don’t,” she said softly to Jim. “Please don’t.”

Until Jim responded, Holly could not know if these revelations were for better or worse. If he had blamed himself for his grandma’s death merely because Henry had instilled the guilt in him, then he would get past this. If he blamed himself because Lena had come into the high room, had seen The Enemy materializing from the wall, and had stumbled backward down the stairs in terror, he might still overcome the past. But if The Enemy had torn itself free of the wall and pushed her...

“I treated you like a murderer for the next six years, until you went away to school,” Henry said. “When you was gone... well, in time, I started to think about it with a clearer head, and I knew what I’d done. You’d had nowhere to turn for comfort. Your mom and dad were gone, your grandma. You went into town to get books, but you couldn’t join in with other kids because that little Zacca bastard, Ned Zacca, he was twice your size and wouldn’t ever let you alone: You had no peace except in books. I tried to call you, but you wouldn’t take the calls. I wrote but I think you never read the letters.”

Jim sat unmoving.

Henry Ironheart shifted his attention to Holly. “He came back at last when I had my stroke. He sat beside me when I was in intensive care. I couldn’t speak right, couldn’t say what I tried to say, the wrong words kept coming out, making no sense—”

“Aphasia,” Holly said. “A result of the stroke.”

Henry nodded. “Once, hooked up to all those machines, I tried to tell him what I’d known for almost thirteen years—that he wasn’t a killer and that I’d been cruel to him.” New tears flooded his eyes. “But when it came out, it wasn’t right at all, not what I meant, and he misunderstood it, thought I’d
called
him a murderer and was afraid of him. He left, and now’s the first I’ve seen him since. More than four years.”

Jim sat with his head bowed.

Hands fisted.

What had he remembered of that night in the mill, the part that no one but him could know?

Holly got up from the bench, unable to endure the wait for Jim’s reaction. She stood there, with no idea where to go. At last she sat down again. She put her hand over his fist, as before.

She looked up.

More birds. Maybe thirty of them now.

“I’m afraid,” Jim said, but that was all.