Now she waited with nervous excitement for contact with the power that had led Jim to her. She was ready for God or for something quite different but equally benign. She could not believe that what she had seen in the pond was The Enemy. That creature was apart from this, connected somehow but different. Even if Jim had not told her that something fine and good was coming, she eventually would have sensed, on her own, that the light in the water and the ringing in the stone heralded not blood and death but rapture.
They spoke tersely at first, afraid that voluble conversation would inhibit that higher power from initiating the next stage of contact.
“How long has the pond been here?” she asked.
“A long time.”
“Before the Ironhearts?”
“Yeah.”
“Before the farm itself?”
“I'm sure it was.”
“Possibly forever?”
“Possibly.”
“Any local legends about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ghost stories, Loch Ness, that kind of stuff.”
“No. Not that I've ever heard.”
They were silent. Waiting.
Finally Holly said, “What's your theory?”
“Huh?”
“Earlier today you said you had a theory, something strange and wonderful, but you didn't want to talk about it till you'd thought it through.”
“Oh, right. Now maybe it's more than a theory. When you said you'd seen something under the pond in your dream … well, I don't know why, but I started thinking about an encounter….”
“Encounter?”
“Yeah. Like what you said. Something … alien.”
“Not of this world,” Holly said, remembering the sound of the bells and the light in the pond.
“They're out there in the universe somewhere,” he said with quiet enthusiasm. “It's too big for them not to be out there. And someday they'll be coming. Someone will encounter them. So why not me, why not you?”
“But it must've been there under the pond when you were ten.”
“Maybe.”
“Why would it be there all this tune?”
“I don't know. Maybe it's been there a lot longer. Hundreds of years. Thousands.”
“But why a starship at the bottom of a pond?”
“Maybe it's an observation station, a place where they monitor human civilization, like an outpost we might set up in Antarctica to study things there.”
Holly realized they sounded like kids sitting under the stars on a summer night, drawn like all kids to the contemplation of the unknown and to fantasies of exotic adventure. On one level she found their musings absurd, even laughable, and she was unable to believe that recent events could have such a neat yet fanciful explanation. But on another level, where she was still a child and always would be, she desperately wanted the fantasy to be made real.
Twenty minutes passed without a new development, and gradually Holly began to settle down from the heights of excitement and nervous agitation to which the lights in the pond had catapulted her. Still filled with wonder but no longer mentally numbed by it, she remembered what had happened to her just prior to the appearance of the radiant presence in the millpond: the overwhelming, preternatural, almost panic-inducing awareness of being watched. She was about to mention it to Jim when she recalled the other strange things she had found at the farmhouse.
“It's completely furnished,” she said. “You never cleaned the house out after your grandfather died.”
“I left it furnished in case I was able to rent it while waiting for a buyer.”
Those were virtually the same words she had used, standing in the house, to explain the curious situation to herself. “But you left all their personal belongings there, too.”
He did not look at her but at the walls, waiting for some sign of a superhuman presence. “I'd have taken that stuff away if I'd ever found a renter.”
“You've left it there for almost five years?”
He shrugged.
She said, “It's been cleaned more or less regularly since then, though not recently.”
“A renter might always show up.”
“It's sort of creepy, Jim.”
Finally he looked at her. “How so?”
“It's like a mausoleum.”
His blue eyes were utterly unreadable, but Holly had the feeling she was annoying him, perhaps because this mundane talk of renters and house cleaning and real estate was pulling him away from the more pleasurable contemplation of alien encounters.
He sighed and said, “Yeah, it is creepy, a little.”
“Then why …?”
He slowly twisted the lantern control, reducing the flow of gas to the wicks. The hard white light softened to a moon-pale glow, and the shadows eased closer. “To tell you the truth, I couldn't bear to pack up my granddad's things. Together, we'd sorted through grandma's belongings only eight months earlier, when she'd died, and that had been hard enough. When he … passed away so soon after her, it was too much for me. For so long, they'd been all I had. Then suddenly I didn't even have them.”
A tortured expression darkened the blue of his eyes.
As a flood of sympathy washed through Holly, she reached across the ice chest and took his hand.
He said, “I procrastinated, kept procrastinating, and the longer I delayed sorting through his things, the harder it became to ever do it.” He sighed again. “If I'd have found a renter or a buyer, that would have forced me to put things in order, no matter how unpleasant the job. But this old farm is about as marketable as a truckload of sand in the middle of the Mojave.”
Closing the house upon the death of his grandfather, touching nothing in it for four years and four months, except to clean it once in a while — that was eccentric. Holly couldn't see it any other way. At the same time, however, it was an eccentricity that touched her, moved her. As she had sensed from the start, he was a gentle man beneath his rage, beneath his steely superhero identity, and she liked the soft-hearted part of him, too.
“We'll do it together,” Holly said. “When we've figured out what the hell is happening to us, wherever and however we go on from here, there'll be time for us to sort through your grandfather's things. It won't be so difficult if we do it together.”
He smiled at her and squeezed her hand.
She remembered something else. “Jim, you recall the description I gave you of the woman in my dream last night, the woman who came up the mill stairs?”
“Sort of.”
“You said you didn't recognize her.”
“So?”
“But there's a photo of her in the house.”
“There is?”
“In the living room, that photograph of a couple in their early fifties — are they your grandparents, Lena and Henry?”
“Yeah. That's right.”
“Lena was the woman in my dream.”
He frowned. “Isn't that odd …?”
“Well, maybe. But what's odder is, you didn't recognize her.”
“I guess your description wasn't that good.”
“But didn't you hear me say she had a beauty mark—”
His eyes narrowed, and his hand tightened around hers. “Quick, the tablets.”
Confused, she said, “What?”
“Something's about to happen, I feel it, and we need the tablets we bought at The Center.”