Dean Koontz - Cold Fire

So Jim was like any victim of multiple-personality syndrome.

Except for one thing. One little thing. He created nonhuman entities to embody aspects of himself, not other human identities-and had the power to give them flesh of their own. He hadn't been like Sally Field playing Sybil, sixteen people in one body. He had been three beings in three bodies, and one of them had been a killer.

Holly turned on the car heater. Though it must have been seventy degrees outside, she was chilled. The heat from the dashboard vents did nothing to warm her.

The clock behind the registration desk showed 1:11 P.M. when Holly checked them into a Quality motor lodge in Santa Barbara. While she filled out the form and provided her credit card to the clerk, Jim continued to sleep in the Ford.

When she returned with their key, she was able to rouse him enough to get him out of the car and into their room. He was in a stupor and went directly to the bed, where he curled up and once more fell instantly into a deep sleep.

She got diet sodas, ice, and candy bars from the vending-machine center near the pool.

In the room again, she closed the drapes. She switched on one lamp and arranged a towel over the shade to soften the light.

She pulled a chair near the bed and sat down. She drank diet soda and ate candy while she watched him sleep.

The worst was over. The fantasy had been burned away, and he had plunged completely into cold reality.

But she did not know what the aftermath would bring. She had never known him without his delusions, and she didn't know what he would be like when he had none. She didn't know if he would be a more optimistic man-or a darker one. She didn't know if he would still have the same degree of superhuman powers that he'd had before. He had summoned those powers from within himself only because he had needed them to sustain his fantasy and cling to his precarious sanity; perhaps, now, he would be only as gifted as he had been before his parents had died-able to levitate a pie pan, flip a coin with his mind, nothing more. Worst of all, she didn't know if he would still love her.

By dinnertime he was still asleep.

She went out and got more candy bars. Another hinge. She would end up as plump as her mother if she didn't get control of herself He was still asleep at ten o'clock. Eleven. Midnight.

She considered waking him. But she realized that he was in a chrysalis, waiting to be born from his old life into a new one. A caterpillar needed time to turn itself into a butterfly. That was her hope, anyway.

Sometime between midnight and one o'clock in the morning, Holly fell asleep in her chair. She did not dream.

He woke her.

She looked up into his beautiful eyes, which were not cold in the dim light of the towel-draped lamp, but which were still mysterious.

He was leaning over her chair, shaking her gently. "Holly, come on.

We've got to go.”

Instantly casting off sleep, she sat up. "Go where?" "Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

"Why?" Grabbing up one of her uneaten candy bars, peeling off the wrapper, biting into it, he said, "Tomorrow afternoon, three-thirty, a reckless schoolbus driver is going to try to beat a train at a crossing.

Twenty-six kids are going to die if we're not there first.”

Rising from her chair, she said, "You know all that, the whole thing, not just a part of it?" "Of course," he said around a mouthful of candy bar. He grinned.

"I know these things, Holly. I'm psychic, for God's sake.”

She grinned right back at him.

"We're going to be something, Holly," he said enthusiastically.

"Super man? Why the hell did he waste so much time holding down a job newspaper when he could've been doing good?" In a voice that cracked with relief and with love for him, Holly said "I always wondered about that.”

Jim gave her a chocolaty kiss. "The world hasn't seen anything yet kid.

Of course, you're going to have to learn martial arts, how to handle a gun, a few other things. But you're gonna be good at it, I know you." She threw her arms around him and hugged him fiercely, with unadulterated joy.