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And evenings, too Soht to use the john, and we’d see a light out there in theAnd you wouldn’t be in your room"

Henry paused more often He wasn’t tired He just didn’t want to dig into this part of the long-buried past

"If it was the o out there to theyou in, eitherus about The Friend in theus, we didn’t knohat to doso I guesswe didn’t do anything Anyway, that night

the night she dieda stor up-" Holly recalled the drearavel path

"-and Lena didn’t wake h rooood thunderstor-"the heavens flash as she passes the stair, and through the glass she sees an object in the pond below

"-I guess, Ji out there at night, reading that book by candlelight"inhuman sounds froh room, afraid, but also curious and concerned for Jim

"-a crash of thunder finally woke me-"she reaches the top of the stairs and sees hi, hands fisted )7 at his sides, a yellow candle in a blue dish on the floor, a book beside the candle

"-I realized Lena was gone, looked out the bedrooht in the mill" the boy turns to her and cries out, I’m scared help me the walls, the walls!

"-and I couldn’t believe , and even in those days the sails hadn’t turned in ten or fifteen years, been frozen up-" she sees an aht within the walls, the sour shades of pus and bile; the li is i like airplane propellers, so I pulled on my pants, and hurried downstairs-"with fear but also with perverse excite and nobody can stop it!

"-I grabbed a flashlight and ran out into the rain-"the curve of yshape from a core of foul muck, where limestone should have been, is the ee at the world and its injustice, his self hatred iven a vicious and brutal form so solid that it is an entity itself, quite separate from him

"-I reached the , whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!" Holly’s dreaination too easily supplied a version of what ht have happened thereafter Horrified at the materialization of The Enemy, stunned that the boy’s wild tales of aliens in the mill were true, Lena had stu stone stairs, unable to arrest her fall because there was no handrail at which to grab

So the way she broke her neck

"-went inside the millfound her at the bottom of the stairs all busted up, neck twisteddead"

Henry paused for the first time in a while and sed hard He had not looked at Holly once throughout his account of that storht, only at Jim’s bowed head With less of a slur in his voice, as if it were vitally important to him to tell the rest of it as clearly as he could, he said: "I went up the steps and found you in the high roo the book in your hands so tight it couldn’t be taken from you till hours later

You wouldn’t speak"

The old ivedead, e child all year, and still strange even at that uessI guess I went a little ht’ve pushed her, Jiht’ve been in one of yourupsetsand maybe you pushed her"

As if it had becorandson any longer, Henry shifted his gaze to Holly "That year after Atlanta, he’d been a strange boyalmost like a boy we didn’t know He was quiet, like I said, but there was rage in him, too, a fury like no child should ever have It sometimes scared us The only tiwe’d hear hio down the hall to his roo at theit all out on so in his dreams, and we’d have to wake him"

Henry paused and looked away froht hand, which lay half useless in his lap Jiht

"You never struck out at Lena or ave us that kind of trouble But in the rabbed you and shook you, Jimmy, tried to make you admit how you’d pushed her down the stairs There was no excuse for what I did, how I behaved

except I was grief crazy over Ja around e and locked up in yourself that you scaredyou in ht

and didn’t realize what I’d done until a lot of years later

too late"

The birds were in a tighter circle now Directly overhead

"Don’t," she said softly to Jim "Please don’t"

Until Jim responded, Holly could not know if these revelations were for better or worse If he had blaranduilt in hiet past this If he blah roo from the wall, and had stuht still overcome the past

But if The Enemy had torn itself free of the wall and pushed her

"I treated you like a murderer for the next six years, until you went away to school," Henry said "When you was gonewell, in time, I started to think about it with a clearer head, and I knehat I’d done

You’d had nowhere to turn for corandet books, but you couldn’t join in with other kids because that little Zacca bastard, Ned Zacca, he ice your size and wouldn’t ever let you alone You had no peace except in books I tried to call you, but you wouldn’t take the calls I wrote but I think you never read the letters"

Ji

Henry Ironheart shifted his attention to Holly "He came back at last when I had my stroke He sat beside ht, couldn’t say what I tried to say, the wrong words kept co no sense-" "Aphasia," Holly said