Dean Koontz - Cold Fire

, In just his pajama bottoms, he got out of bed and padded into the kitchen.

The fluorescent light seared his eyes. Good. He wanted to evaporate what residue of sleep still clung to him.

The damn windmill.

He plugged in the coffeemaker and brewed a strong Colombian blend.

He sipped half the first cup while standing at the counter, then refilled it and sat down at the breakfast table. He intended to empty the pot because he could not risk going back to bed and having that dream again.

Every nightmare detracted from the quality of rest that sleep provided, but the windmill dream actually took a real physical toll.

Whenever he woke from it, his chest always ached, as though his heart had been bruised from hammering too hard against his breastbone.

Sometimes the shakes took hours to fade away completely, and he often had headaches that, like now, arced across the top of his skull and throbbed with such power that it seemed as if an alien presence was trying to burst out of him. He knew that if he looked in a mirror, his face would be unnervingly pale and haggard, with blue-black circles around the eyes, like the face of a terminal cancer patient from whom disease had sucked the juice of life.

The windmill dream was not the most frequent of those that plagued him, and in fact it haunted his sleep only one or two nights a month.

But it was by far the worst.

Curiously, nothing much happened in it. He was ten years old again, sitting on the dusty wooden floor of the smaller upper chamber, above the main room that held the ancient millstones, with only the flickering light of a fat yellow candle. Night pressed at the narrow windows, which were almost like castle embrasures in the limestone walls. Rain tapped against the glass. Suddenly, with a creak of unoiled and half rusted machinery, the four great wooden sails of the mill began to turn outside, faster and faster, cutting like giant scythes through the damp air. The upright shaft, which came out of the ceiling and vanished through a bore in the center of the floor, also began to turn, briefly creating the illusion that the round floor itself were rotating in the manner of a carousel. One level below, the ancient millstones started to roll against each other, producing a soft rumble like distant thunder.

Just that. Nothing more. Yet it scared the hell out of him.

He took a long pull of his coffee.

Stranger still: in real life, the windmill had been a good place, never the scene of pain or terror. It had stood between a pond and a cornfield on ù his grandparents' farm. To a young boy born and raised in the city, there mill had been an exotic and mysterious structure, a perfect place to play and fantasize, a refuge in a time of trouble. He could not understand why he was having nightmares about a place that held only good memories for him.

After the frightening dream passed without waking her, Holly Thor slept peacefully for the rest of the night, as still as a stone on the floor the sea.

Saturday morning, Holly ate breakfast in a booth at the motel coffeeshop.

Most of the other customers were obviously vacationers: families dressed almost as if in uniforms of shorts or white slacks and brightly colored shirts. Some of the kids wore caps and T-shirts that advertised Sea World or Disneyland or Knott's Berry Farm. Parents huddled over maps and brochures while they ate, planning routes that would take them to one of the tourist attractions that California offered in such plenitude. There were so many colorful Polo shirts or Polo-shirt knockoffs in the restaurant that a visitor from another planet might have assumed that Ralph Lauren was either the deity of a major religion or dictator of the world.

As she ate blueberry pancakes, Holly studied her list of people who had been spared from death by Jim Ironheart's timely intervention: May 15 Sam (25) and Emily (5) Newsome-Atlanta, Georgia (murder) JUNE 5 Louis Andretti (28)-Corona, California (snakebite) JUNE 21 Thaddeus Johnson (New York, New York (murder) JUNE 30 Rachael Steinberg (23j-San Francisco, California (murder) JULY S Carmen Diaz (30)-Miami, Florida (fire) JULY 14 Amanda Cutter (30)-Houston, Texas (murder) JULY 20 Steven Aimes (57)-Birmingham, Alabama (murder) AUGUST 1 Laura Lenaskian (28)-Seattle, Washington (drowning) AUGUST 8 Doogie Burkette (11}-Peoria, Illinois (drowning) AUGUST 12 Billy Jenkins (8)-Portland, Oregon (traffic fatality) AUGUST 20 Lisa (30) and Susan (10) Jawolski-Mojave desert (murder) AUGUST 23 Nicholas O'Conner (6) Boston, Massachusetts (explosion) Certain patterns were obvious. Of the fourteen people saved, six were children. Seven others were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty Only one was older-Steven Aimes, who was fifty-seven. Ironheart favored the young. And there was some evidence that his activities were increasing in frequency: one episode in May; three in June; three in July and now five already in August with a full week of the month remaining. Holly was particularly intrigued by the number of people on the list who would have been murdered without Ironheart's intervention.

Far more people died each year in accidents than at the hands of others.

traffic fatalities alone were more numerous than murders. Yet Jim Ironheart intervened in a considerably greater number of homicides than accidents; eight of the fourteen people on the list had been spared from the malevolent intentions of murderers, over sixty percent.

Perhaps his premonitions more often related to murder than to other forms of death because human violence generated stronger psychic vibrations than accidents.

Holly stopped chewing and her hand froze halfway to her mouth with another forkful of blueberry pancake, as she realized just how strange the story was. She had been operating at a breathless pace, driven by reportorial ambition and curiosity. Her excitement, then her exhaustion, had prevented her from fully considering all of the implications and ramifications of Ironheart's activities. She put down her fork and stared at her plate, if she could glean answers and explanations from the crumb patterns and smears in the same way that gypsies read tea leaves and palms.

What the hell was Jim Ironheart? A psychic? She'd never had much interest in extrasensory perception and strange mental powers. She knew there were people who claimed to be able to "see" a murderer just by touching the clothes his victim wore, who sometimes helped police find the bodies of missing persons, who were paid well by the National Enquirer to foresee world events and forthcoming developments in the lives of celebrities, who said they could channel the voices of the dead to the living. But her interest in the supernatural was so minimal that she had never really formed an opinion of the validity of such claims.

She didn't necessarily believe that all those people were frauds; the whole subject had bored her too much to bother thinking about it at all.

She supposed that her dogged rationality-and cynicism-could bend far enough to encompass the idea that now and then a psychic actually possessed real power, but she wasn't sure that "psychic" was an adequate description of Jim Ironheart. This guy wasn't just going out on a limb in some cheap tabloid to predict that Steven Spielberg would make another bit picture next year (surprise!), or that Swartzenegger would still speak English with an accent, or that Tom Cruise would dump his current girlfriend, or that Eddie Murphy would still be black for the foreseeable future. This guy knew the precise facts of each of those impending deaths. who, when, where, how-far enough in advance to derail fate. He wasn't bending spoons with the power of his mind, wasn't speaking in the gravelly voice of an ancient spirit named Rama-Lama-Dingdong, wasn't reading futures in entrails or wax drippings or Tarot cards. He was saving lives for God's sake, altering destinies, having a profound impact not only on those he saved from death but on the lives of the friends and families who would have been left shattered and bereaved. And the reach of his power extended three thousand miles from Laguna Niguel to Boston! In fact, maybe his heroics were not confined to the borders of the continental United States. She had not researched the international media for the past six months. Perhaps he had saved lives in Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, or in Pago Pago for all she knew.