Dean Koontz - Cold Fire

"You're right about that.”

"Like his grandmother dying," she noodged, trying to get him back on that subject. "That was-" A rattling sound interrupted her. She turned and saw bottles of shampoo, hairspray, vitamins, and cold medicines jiggling on their shelves.

"Earthquake," Handahl said, looking up worriedly at the ceiling, as if he thought it might tumble in on them.

The containers rattled more violently than ever, and Holly knew they were disturbed by something worse than an earthquake. She was being warned not to ask Handahl any more questions.

Lub-dub-DUB, lub-dub-DUB.

The cozy world of the quaint pharmacy started coming apart. The bottles exploded off the shelves, straight at her. She swung away, drew her arms over her head. The containers hammered her, flew past her and pelted Handahl. The humidor, which stood behind the counter, was vibrating. Instinctively Holly dropped to the floor. Even as she went down, the glass door of that case blew outward. Glass shrapnel cut the air where she had been standing. She scrambled toward the exit as glittering shards rained to the floor. Behind her the heavy cash register crashed off the granite counter, missing her by inches, barely sparing her a broken spine.

Before the walls could begin to blister and pulse and bring forth an alien form, she reached the door, fled through the newsstand, and went into the street, leaving Handahl in what he no doubt assumed was earthquake rubble.

The tripartite beat was throbbing up from the brick walkway beneath her feet.

She found Jim leaning against the car, shuddering and white-faced, with the expression of a man standing on a precipice, peering into a gulf longing to jump. He did not respond to her when she said his name.

He seemed on the verge of surrendering to the dark force that he'd held within — and nurtured-all these years and that now wanted its freedom.

She jerked him away from the car, put her arms around him, held him tight, tighter, repeating his name, expecting the sidewalk to erupt in geysers of brick, expecting to be seized by serrated pincers, tentacles, or cold damp hands of inhuman design. But the triple-thud heartbeat faded, and after a while Jim raised his arms and put them around her.

The Enemy had passed.

But it was only a temporary reprieve.

Svenborg Memorial Park was adjacent to Tivoli Gardens. The cemetery was separated from the park by a spearpoint wrought-iron fence and a mix of trees-mostly white cedars and spreading California Peppers.

Jim drove slowly along the service road that looped through the graveyard. "Here." He pulled to the side and stopped.

When he got out of the Ford, he felt almost as claustrophobic as he had in the pharmacy, even though he was standing in the open air.

The slatedark sky seemed to press down toward the gray granite monuments, while those rectangles and squares and spires strained up like the knobs of ancient time-stained bones half buried in the earth.

In that dreary light, the grass looked gray-green. The trees were gray-green, too, and seemed to loom precariously, as if about to topple on him.

Going around the car to Holly's side, he pointed north. "There.”

She took his hand. He was grateful to her for that.

Together they walked to his grandparents' grave site. It was on a slight rise in the generally flat cemetery: A single rectangular granite marker served both plots.

Jim's heart was beating hard, and he had difficulty swallowing.

Her name was chiseled into the right-hand side of the monument.

LENA LOUISE IRONHEART.

Reluctantly he looked at the dates of her birth and death. She had been fifty-three when she died. And she had been dead twenty-four years.

This must be what it felt like to have been brainwashed, to have had one's memory painted over, false memories air-brushed into the blanks His past seemed like a fogbound landscape revealed only by the eerie and inconstant luminescent face of a cloud-shrouded moon. He suddenly could not see back through the years with the same clarity he had enjoyed an hour ago, and he could not trust the reality of what he still did see; clear recollections might prove to be nothing more than tricks of fog and shadow when he was forced to confront them closely.

Disoriented and afraid, he held fast to Holly's hand.

"Why did you lie to me about this, why did you say five years?" she asked gently.

"I didn't lie. At least. I didn't realize I was lying." He stared at the granite as if its polished surface was a window into the past, and he struggled to remember. "I can recall waking up one morning and knowing that my grandmother was dead. Five years ago. I was living in the apartment then, down in Irvine." He listened to his own voice as if it belonged to someone else, and the haunted tone of it gave him a chill. "I dressed.

drove north. bought flowers in town. then came here.

.”

After a while, when he did not continue, Holly said, "Do you remember a funeral that day?" "No.”

"Other mourners?" "No.”

"Other flowers on the grave?" "No. All I remember is. kneeling at the headstone with the flowers I'd brought for her. crying. I cried for a long time, couldn't stop crying.”

Passing him on the way to other graves, people had looked at him with sympathy, then with embarrassment as they had realized the extent of his emotional collapse, then with uneasiness as they had seen a grief in him so wild that it made him seem unbalanced. He could even now remember how wild he had felt that day, glaring back at those who stared at him, wanting nothing more than to claw his way down into the earth and pull it over him as if it were a blanket, taking rest in the same hole as his grandmother. But he could not remember why he had felt that way or why he was beginning to feel that way again.

He looked at the date of her death once more-September 25-and he was too frightened now to cry.

"What is it? Tell me," Holly urged.

"That's when I came with the flowers, the only other time I've ever come, the day I remember as the day she died. September twenty-fifth.

but five years ago, not twenty-four. It was the nineteenth anniversary of her death. but at the time it seemed to me, and always has, that she'd only just then died.”

They were both silent.

Two large blackbirds wheeled across the somber sky, shrieking, and disappeared over the treetops.

Finally Holly said, "Could it be, you denied her death, refused to accept it when it really happened, twenty-four years ago? Maybe you were only able to accept it nineteen years later. the day you came here with the flowers. That's why you remember her dying so much more recently than she did. You date her death from the day you finally accepted it.”

He knew at once that she had hit upon the truth, but the answer did not make him feel better. "But Holly, my God, that is madness.”

"No," she said calmly. "It's self defense, part of the same defenses you erected to hide so much of that year when you were ten.”

She paused, took a deep breath, and said, "Jim, how did your grandma die?" "She. " He was surprised to realize that he could not recall the cause of Lena Ironheart's death. One more fog-filled blank. "I don't know.”

"I think she died in the mill.”

He looked away from the tombstone, at Holly. He tensed with alarm, although he did not know why. "In the windmill? How? What happened? How can you know?" "The dream I told you about. Climbing the mill stairs, looking through the window at the pond below, and seeing another woman's face reflected in the glass, your grandmother's face.”

"It was only a dream.”

Holly shook her head. "No, I think it was a memory, your memory, which you projected from your sleep into mine.”

His heart fluttered with panic for reasons he could not quite discern.