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"I e’d been kids together," she said

"Why?" She thought of Norby, the boy she had pulled frous under the DC-10’s overturned seats "So I could’ve known you before your parents died, what you were like then, untouched"

Another stretch of time passed in silence

When he spoke, his voice was so low that Holly could barely hear it above the thu of her own heart: "Viola has a sadness in her, too

She looks like the happiest lady in the world, but she lost her husband in Vietnaot over it Father Geary, the priest I told you about, he looks like every devout parish rector from every old sentimental Catholic movie ever made in the thirties and forties, but when IAnd you

well, you’re pretty and a, and you have an air of efficiency about you, but I’d never have guessed that you could be as relentless as you are You give the ih life, interested in life and in her work, but never ainst a current, alith it, easy Yet you’re really like a bulldog when you get your teeth in soht and shadow on the ceiling, holding his strong hand, Holly considered his statement for a while Finally she said, "What’s your point?" "People are always ure"

"Is that just an observationor a warning?" He see?" "Maybe you’re warning me that you’re not what you see pause, he said, "Maybe"

She uess I don’t care"

He turned toward her She ainst him with a shyness that she had not felt inthan three bottles or three cases of Corona

Holly realized she’d been deceiving herself She had needed the beer not to soothe her nerves, not to insure an uninterrupted night of sleep, but to give her the courage to seduce him-or to be seduced She had sensed that he was abysmally lonely, and she had told him so Now she understood that her loneliness had exceeded his, and that only the smallest part of her desolation of spirit had resulted from her disenchantment with journalis alone, for the most part, all of her adult life

Two pajama bottoms and one top seemed to dissolve between them like clothes sometimes evaporate in erotic drea excite that the sense of touch could convey such intricacies of shape and texture, or give rise to such exquisite longings

She had a ridiculously romantic idea of what it would be like to irl’s fantasy of unmatched passion, of sweet tenderness and pure hot sex in perfect balance, everyin sublime harmony or, at times, in breathless counterpoint, each invasive stroke a testa one, the outer world of reason overwhel word spoken, no sighin precisely the sareat invisible tidal forces of the universe ebbed and flowed, elevating the act aboveof it a mystical experience Her expectations proved, of course, to be ridiculous In reality, it was more tender, more fierce, and far better than her fantasy

They fell asleep like spoons in a drawer, her belly against his back, her loins against his warht that were usually-but no longer-the loneliest of all, they woke to the same quiet alarm of renewed desire He turned to her, she welcoreater urgency, as if the first tie off their need but had sharpened it the way one dose of hein only increases the addict’s desire for the next

At first, looking up into Ji into the pure fire of his soul Then he gripped her by the sides, half lifting her off the mattress as he eased deep into her, and she felt the scratches burning in her flanks and reically out of a drea in her shalloounds, her perception shifted, and she had the queer feeling that it was a cold blue fire into which she gazed, burning without heat But that was only a reaction to the stinging scratches and the pain-engendered htmare When he slid his hands off her sides and under her, lifting, she rose to meet him, and he was all warenerated enough heat to sear away that brief ilow of the unseen ht sky

Unlike in other recent drearaveled path that led between a pond and a cornfield toward the door in the base of the old windle, recognizably a e sails, ragged with scores of broken orsky and angled like a tilted cross

although a blustery wind sent moon-silvered ripples across the ink-dark pond and rattled the nearby cornstalks, the sails were still

The mill obviously had been inoperable for many years, and the mechanisms were most likely too rusted to allow the sails to turn

A spectral ht flickered at the narros of the upper rooe shadows h cha, had never been htened of a place in her life, but she was unable to halt herself She was drawn forward as if she were the spellbound thrall of so rong with the moon-cast reflection of the windht and shade on the water was reversed froeoht; instead, the ihter than the surface of the pond around it, as if the ht, when in fact its stones rose in an ebony and forbidding pile Where the high ere filled with lales floated in the impossible reflection, like the empty eyeholes in a fleshless skull

Creakcreakcreak

She looked up

Theto ears that drove the windshaft and, in turn, the grinding stones in thethat, to flee back along the gravel path over which she had coan to turn clockwise, gaining speed, producing less creaking as the gears unfroze It seeers of a ed end of every broken vane was a claw

She reached the door

She did not want to go inside She knew that within lay a hell of some kind, as bad as the pits of torture described by any fire-and-brimstone preacher who had ever thundered a sermon in old Salem If she went in there, she would never co just a couple of feet over her head, the splintered wood reaching for her: Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh

In the grip of a trance eventhan her terror, she opened the door She stepped across the threshold With the malevolent animation that objects possessed only in dreams, the door pulled out of her hand, slahtless lower rooainst each other

To her left, barely visible in the gloo cries echoed froht concert perforle, except none of these voices was quite that of a panther or monkey or bird or hyena Electronic sounds were part of the mix, and what seeh a stereo a, three-note bass refrain that reverberated in the stone walls of the stairwell and, before she had climbed halfway to the second floor, in Holly’s bones as well

She passed a narro on her left An extended series of lightning bolts crackled across the vault of the night, and at the foot of the mill, like a trick mirror in a funhouse, the dark pond turned transparent Its depths were revealed, as though the lightning cae shape resting on the bottoet a better look at the object, but the lightning sputtered out

The h the hollows of her bones

She waited, hoping for ht reainst the

Because she was halfway to the second floor of the ht flickered around her than had reached her at the foot of the stairs Theglass, backed by utter darkness now and painted with sufficient luminescence to serve as a dim mirror, presented her reflection

But the face she possessed in this dreaed to a woman twenty years older than Holly, to whom she bore no resemblance

She’d never before had a dream in which she occupied the body of another person But now she understood why she had been unable to turn back from the mill when she’d been outside, and why she was unable to stop herself froh, on one level, she knew she was drea Her lack of control was not the usual helplessness that transfor the body of a stranger