He thought about that for a moment, even though he tried not to. The chocolate doughnuts he had eaten lay in an undigested, burning wad in his stomach.
Holly said, “When it comes back—”
“For God's sake,” he interrupted, “no more adversarial tactics!”
“I screwed up,” she admitted. “But the adversarial approach was the correct one, I just carried it too far. I pushed too hard. When it comes back, I'll modify my technique.”
He supposed he had more fully accepted her insanity theory than he was willing to acknowledge. He was now in a cold sweat about what The Friend might do if their behavior tipped it into its other, darker identity. “Why don't we jettison confrontation altogether, play along with it, stroke its ego, keep it as happy as we—”
“That's no good. You can't control madness by indulging it. That only creates more and deeper madness. I suspect any nurse in a mental institution would tell you the best way to deal with a potentially violent paranoid is to be nice, respectful, but firm.”
He withdrew his hand from hers because his palms were clammy. He blotted them on his shirt.
The mill seemed unnaturally silent, as if it were in a vacuum where sound could not travel, sealed in an immense bell jar, on display in a museum in a land of giants. At another time Jim might have found the silence disturbing, but now he embraced it because it probably meant The Friend was sleeping or at least preoccupied with concerns other than them.
“It wants to do good,” he said. “It might be insane, and it might be violent and even evil in its second identity, a regular Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But like Dr. Jekyll it really wants to do good. At least we've got that going for us.”
She thought about it a moment. “Okay, I'll give you that one. And when it comes back, I'll try to pry some truth out of it.”
“What scares me most — is there really anything we can learn from it that could help us? Even if it tells us the whole truth about everything, if it's insane it's going to turn to irrational violence sooner or later.”
She nodded. “But we gotta try.”
They settled into an uneasy silence.
When he looked at his watch, Jim saw that it was ten minutes past one in the morning. He was not sleepy. He didn't have to worry about drifting off and dreaming and thereby opening a doorway, but he was physically drained. Though he had not done anything but sit in a car and drive, then sit or stand in the high room waiting for revelations, his muscles ached as if he had put in ten hours of heavy manual labor. His face felt slack with weariness, and his eyes were hot and grainy. Extreme stress could be every bit as debilitating as strenuous physical activity.
He found himself wishing The Friend would never return, wishing not in an idle way but with the wholehearted commitment of a young boy wishing that an upcoming visit to the dentist would not transpire. He put every fiber of his being into the wish, as if convinced, the way a kid sometimes could be, that wishes really did now and then come true.
He remembered a quote from Chazal, which he had used when teaching a literature unit on the supernatural fiction of Poe and Hawthorne: Extreme terror gives us back the gestures of our childhood. If he ever went back into the classroom, he would be able to teach that unit a hell of a lot better, thanks to what had happened to him in the old windmill.
At 1:25 The Friend disproved the value of wishing by putting in a sudden appearance. This time no bells heralded its approach. Red light blossomed in the wall, like a burst of crimson paint in clear water.
Holly scrambled to her feet.
So did Jim. He could no longer sit relaxed in the presence of this mysterious being, because he was now more than half-convinced that at any moment it might strike at them with merciless brutality.
The light separated into many swarms, surged all the way around the room, then began to change from red to amber.
The Friend spoke without waiting for a question: “August first. Seattle, Washington. Laura Lenaskian, saved from drowning. She will give birth to a child who will become a great composer and whose music will give solace to many people in times of trouble. August eighth. Peoria, Illinois. Doogie Burkette. He will grow up to be a paramedic in Chicago, where he will do much good and save many lives. August twelfth. Portland, Oregon. Billy Jenkins. He will grow up to be a brilliant medical technologist whose inventions will revolutionize medical care—”
Jim met Holly's eyes and did not even have to wonder what she was thinking: the same thing he was thinking. The Friend was in its testy, I'll-show-you mode, and it was providing details which it expected would lend credibility to its extravagant claim to be altering human destiny. But it was impossible to know if what it said was true — or merely fantasies that it had worked up to support its story. The important thing, perhaps, was that it seemed to care deeply that they believe it. Jim had no idea why his or Holly's opinion should matter at all to a being as intellectually superior to them as they were to a field mouse, but the fact that it did evidently matter seemed to be to their advantage.
“—August twentieth. The Mojave Desert, Nevada. Lisa and Susan Jawolski. Lisa will provide her daughter with the love, affection, and counseling that will make it possible for the girl eventually to overcome the severe psychological trauma of her father's murder and grow up to be the greatest woman statesman in the entire history of the world, a force for enlightenment and compassionate government policies. August twenty-third. Boston, Massachusetts. Nicholas O'Conner, saved from an electrical-vault explosion. He will grow up to become a priest who will dedicate his life to caring for the poor in the slums of India—”
The Friend's attempt to answer Holly's criticism and present a less grandiose version of its work was childishly transparent. The Burkette boy was not going to save the world, just be a damned good paramedic, and Nicholas O'Conner was going to be a humble man leading a self-effacing existence among the needy — but the rest of them were still great or brilliant or staggeringly talented in one way or another. The entity now recognized the need for credibility in its tale of grandeur, but it could not bring itself to significantly water down its professed accomplishments.
And something else was bothering Jim: that voice. The longer he listened to it, the more he became convinced that he had heard it before, not in this room twenty-five years ago, not within its current context at all. The voice had to be appropriated, of course, because in its natural condition the alien almost certainly did not possess anything similar to human vocal cords; its biology would be inhuman. The voice it was imitating, as if it were an impersonator performing in a cosmic cocktail lounge, was that of a person Jim had once known. He could not quite identify it.
“—August twenty-sixth. Dubuque, Iowa. Christine and Casey Dubrovek. Christine will give birth to another child who will grow up to be the greatest geneticist of the next century. Casey will become an exceptional schoolteacher who will tremendously influence the lives of her students, and who will never fail one of them to the extent that a suicide results.”
Jim felt as if he had been hit in the chest with a hammer. That insulting accusation, directed at him and referring to Larry Kakonis, shook his remaining faith in The Friend's basic desire to do good.
Holly said, “Shit, that was low.”
The entity's pettiness sickened Jim, because he wanted so badly to believe in its stated purpose and goodness.