Dean Koontz - Cold Fire

"We'll just take a bathroom break.”

"At our age," George said, "if we didn't coordinate our bathroom breaks, there'd never be more than two of us at the card table at any one time!" The others wheeled away, and Holly pulled up a chair to sit near Henry Ironheart.

He was not the vital-looking, square-faced man she had seen in the photograph on the living-room wall of the farmhouse last evening, and without help Holly might not have recognized him. His stroke had left his right side weak, though not paralyzed, and a lot of the time he held that arm curled against his chest, the way an injured animal might favor a paw.

He had lost a lot of weight and was no longer a burly man. His face was not gaunt but nearly so, though his skin had good color; the facial muscles on the right side were unnaturally relaxed, allowing his features to droop a little.

His appearance, combined with the slur that thickened every word b spoke, might have sent Holly into a depression over the inevitable direction of every human life-if not for his eyes, which revealed an unbowed soul. And his conversation, though slowed somewhat by his impediment, was that of a bright and humorous man who would not give the fates the satisfaction of his despair; his treacherous body was to be cursed, if at all, in private.

"I'm a friend of Jim's," she told him.

He made a lopsided "O" of his mouth, which she decided was an expression of surprise. At first he did not seem to know what to say, but then he asked, "How is Jim?" Deciding to opt for the truth, she said, "Not so good, Henry. He's a very troubled man.”

He looked away from her, at the pile of poker chips on the table.

"Yes," he said softly.

Holly had half expected him to be a child-abusing monster who had been at least in part responsible for Jim's withdrawal from reality. He seemed anything but that.

"Henry, I wanted to meet you, talk to you, because Jim and I are more than friends. I love him, and he's said that he loves me, and it's my hope that we're going to be together a long, long time.”

To her surprise, tears brimmed up and slipped from Henry's eyes, forming bright beads in the soft folds of his aged face.

She said, "I'm sorry, have I upset you?" "No, no, good lord, no," he said, wiping at his eyes with his left hand.

"Excuse me for being an old fool.”

"I can tell you're anything but that.”

"It's just, I never thought. Well, I figured Jim was going to spend his life alone.”

"Why did you think that?" "Well. ”

He seemed distressed at having to say anything negative about his grandson, completely dispelling her lingering expectations that he would be a tyrant of some kind.

Holly helped him. "He does have a way of keeping people at arm's length. Is that what you mean?" Nodding, he said, "Even me. I've loved him with all my heart, all these years, and I know he loves me in his way, though he's always had real trouble showing it, and he could never say it." As Holly was about to ask him a question, he suddenly shook his head violently and wrenched his distorted face into an expression of anguish so severe that for an instant she thought he was having another stroke. "It's not all him.

God knows it's not." The slur in his voice thickened when he grew more emotional.

"I've got to face it-part of the distance between us is me, my fault, the blame I put on him that I never should've.”

"Blame?" "For Lena.”

A shadow of fear passed across her heart and induced a quiver of angina-like pain.

She glanced at the window that looked out on a corner of the courtyard.

It was not the corner to which Jim had gone. She wondered where he was, how he was. who he was.

"For Lena? I don't understand," she said, though she was afraid that she did.

"It seems unforgivable to me now, what I did, what I allowed myself to think." He paused, looking not at her but through her now, toward a distant time and place. "But he was just so strange in those days, not the child he had been. Before you can even hope to understand what I did, you have to know that, after Atlanta, he was so very strange, all locked up inside.”

Immediately Holly thought of Sam and Emily Newsome, whose lives Jim had saved in an Atlanta convenience store-and Norman Rink, into whom he had pumped eight rounds from a shotgun in a blind rage. But Henry obviously was not talking about a recent event in Atlanta; he was referring to some previous incident, much further in the past.

"You don't know about Atlanta?" he asked, reacting to her evident mystification.

A queer sound chittered through the room, alarming Holly. For an instant she could not identify the noise, then realized it was several birds shrieking the way they did when protecting their nests. No birds were in the room, and she supposed their cries were echoing down the fireplace chimney from the roof Just birds. Their chatter faded.

She turned to Henry Ironheart again. "Atlanta? No, I guess I don't know about that.”

"I didn't think you did. I'd be surprised if he talked about it; even to you, even if he loves you. He just doesn't talk about it.”

"What happened in Atlanta?" "It was a place called the Dixie Duck-" "Oh, my God," she whispered. She had been there in the dream.

"Then you do know some of it," he said. His eyes were pools of sorrow.

She felt her face crumple in grief, not for Jim's parents, whom she had never known, and not even for Henry, who presumably had loved them, but for Jim. "Oh, my God." And then she couldn't say any more because her words backed up behind her own tears.

Henry reached out to her with one liver-spotted hand, and she took it, held it, waiting until she could speak again.

At the other end of the room, bells were ringing, horns blaring, on the TV game show.

No traffic accident had killed Jim's parents.

That story was his way of avoiding a recounting of the terrible truth.

She had known. She had known, and refused to know.

Her latest dream had not been a warning prophecy but another memory that Jim had projected into her mind as they had both slept. She had not been herself in the dream. She had been Jim. Just as she had been Lena in a dream two nights ago. If a mirror had given her a look at her face, she would have seen Jim's countenance instead of her own, as she had seen Lena's in the windmill window. The horror of the blood-drenched restaurant returned to her now in vivid images that she could not block from memory, and she shuddered violently.

She looked toward the window, the courtyard, frightened for him.

"They were performing for a week at a club in Atlanta," Henry said.

"They went out for lunch to Jimmy's favorite place, which he remembered from the last time they'd played Atlanta.”

Voice trembling, Holly said, "Who was the gunman?" "Just a nut. That's what made it so hard. No meaning to it. Just a crazy man.”

"How many people died?" "A lot.”

"How many, Henry?" "Twenty-four.”

She thought of young Jim Ironheart in that holocaust, scrambling for his life through the shattered bodies of the other customers, the room filled with cries of pain and terror, reeking with the stench of blood and vomit, bile and urine from the slaughtered corpses. She heard the heavy sound of the automatic weapon again, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, and the please-please-please-please of the terrified young waitress. Even as a dream, it had been almost beyond endurance, all the random horror of existence and all the cruelty of humankind boiled down to one devastating experience, a savage ordeal from which full psychological recovery, even for an adult, would take a lifetime of struggle. For a ten-year-old boy, recovery might seem impossible, reality intolerable, denial necessary, and fantasy the only tool with which to hold on to a shred of sanity.