by Dean Koontz
She thought of young Jim Ironheart in that holocaust, scrambling for his life through the shattered bodies of the other customers, the room filled with cries of pain and terror, reeking with the stench of blood and vomit, bile and urine from the slaughtered corpses. She heard the heavy sound of the automatic weapon again, chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda, and the please-please-please-please of the terrified young waitress. Even as a dream, it had been almost beyond endurance, all the random horror of existence and all the cruelty of humankind boiled down to one devastating experience, a savage ordeal from which full psychological recovery, even for an adult, would take a lifetime of struggle. For a ten-year-old boy, recovery might seem impossible, reality intolerable, denial necessary, and fantasy the only tool with which to hold on to a shred of sanity.
“Jimmy was the only survivor,” Henry said. “If the police had gotten there a few seconds later, Jimmy wouldn’t have made it either. They shot the man down.” Henry’s grip tightened slightly on Holly’s hand. “They found Jim in a corner, in Jamie’s lap, in his daddy’s lap, his daddy’s arms, all covered with... with his daddy’s blood.”
Holly remembered the end of the dream—
—the crazyman is coming straight at her, knocking tables and chairs aside, so she scrambles away and into a corner, on top of a dead body, and the crazyman is coming closer, closer, raising his gun, she can’t bear to look at him the way the waitress looked at him and then died, so she turns her face to the corpse—
—and she remembered awakening with a jolt, gagging in revulsion.
If she’d had time to look into the face of the corpse, she would have seen Jim’s father.
The avian shriek shrilled through the recreation room again. It was louder this time. A couple of the ambulatory residents went to the fireplace to see if any birds were caught behind the damper in the chimney.
“In his daddy’s blood,” Henry repeated softly. It was clear that, even after all these years, the consideration of that moment was intolerably painful to him.
The boy had not only been in his dead father’s arms but surely had known that his mother lay dead among the ruins, and that he was orphaned, alone.
Jim sat on a redwood bench in the Fair Haven courtyard. He was alone.
For a day late in August, when the seasonal drought should have been at its peak, the sky was unusually heavy with unshed moisture, yet it looked like an inverted bowl of ashes. Mixes of late-summer flowers, cascading from planting beds onto the wide concrete walkways, were missing half their color without the enhancement of sunshine. The trees shivered as if chilled by the mild August breeze.
Something was coming. Something bad was coming.
He clung to Holly’s theory, told himself that nothing would come unless he caused it to appear. He only had to control himself, and they would all survive.
But he still felt it coming.
Something.
He heard the screaky cries of birds.
The birds had fallen silent.
After a while Holly let go of Henry Ironheart’s hand, took some Kleenex from her purse, blew her nose, and blotted her eyes. When she could speak, she said, “He blames himself for what happened to his mom and dad.”
“I know. He always did. He’d never talk about it, but there were ways it showed, how he blamed himself, how he thought he should have saved them.”
“But why? He was only ten years old, a small boy. He couldn’t have done anything about a grown man with a submachine gun. For God’s sake, how could he feel responsible?”
For the moment, the brightness had gone out of Henry’s eyes. His poor lopsided face, already pulled down to the right, was pulled down farther by an inexpressible sadness.
At last he said, “I talked to him about it lots of times, took him on my lap and held him and talked about it, like Lena did, too, but he was so much locked in himself, wouldn’t open up, wouldn’t say why he blamed himself—hated himself.”
Holly looked at her watch.
She had left Jim alone too long.
But she could not interrupt Henry Ironheart in the middle of the revelations that she had come to hear.
“I’ve thought about it all these long years,” Henry continued, “and maybe I figured it out a little. But by the time I started to understand, Jim was grown up, and we’d stopped talking about Atlanta so many years ago. To be completely honest, we’d stopped talking about everything by then.”
“So what is it you figured out?”
Henry put his weak right hand in his strong left and stared down at the gnarled lumps that his knuckles made within his time-thinned skin. From the old man’s attitude, Holly sensed that he was not sure he should reveal what he needed and wanted to reveal.
“I love him, Henry.”
He looked up and met her eyes.
She said, “Earlier you said I’d come here to learn about Atlanta because Jim wouldn’t talk about it, and in a way you were right. I came to find out a number of things, because he’s frozen me out of some areas of his life. He really loves me, Henry, I’ve no doubt of that, but he’s clenched up like a fist, he can’t let loose of certain things. If I’m going to marry him, if it’s going to come to that, then I’ve got to know all about him—or we’ll never have a chance to be happy. You can’t build a life together on mysteries.”
“Of course, you’re right.”
“Tell me why Jim blames himself. It’s killing him, Henry. If I have any hope of helping him, I’ve got to know what you know.”
He sighed and made up his mind. “What I’ve got to say will sound like superstitious nonsense, but it isn’t. I’ll make it simple and short, ‘cause it sounds even screwier if I dress it up at all. My wife, Lena, had a power. Presentiment, you’d call it, I guess. Not that she could see the future, tell you who would win a horserace or where you’d be a year from now or anything like that. But sometimes... well, you might invite her to a picnic Sunday a week, and without thinking, she’d say it was going to rain like-for-Noah come Sunday a week. And by God it would. Or some neighbor would be pregnant, and Lena would start referring to the baby as either a ‘he’ or a ‘she,’ when there was no way for her to know which it would be—and she was always right.”
Holly sensed some of the last pieces of the puzzle falling into place. When Henry gave her a maybe-you-think-I’man-old-fool look, she took his bad hand and held it reassuringly.
After studying her a moment, he said, “You’ve seen something special Jim did, haven’t you, something like magic?”
“Yes.”
“So you maybe know where this is going.”
“Maybe.”
The unseen birds began to screech again. The residents at the television set turned the sound off and looked around, trying to identify the source of the squealing.
Holly looked toward the courtyard window. No birds there. But she knew why their cries made the hair stand up on the back of her neck: they were somehow connected with Jim. She remembered the way he had looked up at them in the graveyard and how he had studied them in the sky during the drive to Solvang.
“Jamie, our son, was like his mother,” Henry said, as if he did not even hear the birds. “He just sometimes knew things. Fact is, he was a little more gifted than Lena. And after Jamie had been married to Cara for a while, when she got pregnant, Lena just one day up and said, ‘The baby’s going to be special, he’s going to be a real mage.’”
“Mage?”
“Country talk for someone with a power, with something special about him the way Lena had something special and Jamie, too. Only she meant real special. So Jim was born, and by the time he was four... well, he was doing things. Like once he touched my pocket comb, which I’d bought at the local barbershop here, and he started talking about things that were in the shop, though he’d never been in there in his life ‘cause he lived with Jamie and Cara down in Los Angeles.”
He paused and took a few deep breaths. The slur in his voice had begun to thicken. His r
ight eyelid drooped. Talking seemed to tire him as if it were a physical labor.
A male nurse with a flashlight was at the fireplace. He was squinting up into the flue, past the cracks around the damper, trying to see if any birds were trapped up in there.
The shrieking was now overlaid by the frenzied flapping of wings.
“Jimmy would touch an item and know where it’d been, bits and pieces about who owned it. Not everything about them, mind you. He just knew whatever he knew, that was it. Maybe he’d touch a personal item of yours and know the names of your parents, what you did for a living. Then he’d touch a personal item from someone else and only know where they’d gone to school, names of their children. Always different things, he couldn’t control it. But he always came up with something when he tried.”
The nurse, trailed by three patients offering advice, had moved away from the fireplace and was frowning up at the air-conditioning vents. The quarrelsome sound of birds still echoed through the room.
“Let’s go out to the courtyard,” Holly said, getting up.
“Wait,” Henry said with some distress, “let me finish this, let me tell you.”
Jim, for God’s sake, Holly thought, hold on another minute, just another minute or two.
Reluctantly she sat down.
Henry said, “Jim’s specialness was a family secret, like Lena’s and Jamie’s. We didn’t want the world to know, come snooping around, call us freaks and God knows what. But Cara, she always wanted so bad to be in show business. Jamie worked down there at Warner Brothers, which was where’d he’d met her, and he wanted what Cara wanted. They decided they could form an act with Jimmy, call him the boy-wonder mentalist, but nobody would ever suspect he really had a power. They played it as a trick, lots of winking at the audience, daring them to figure out just how it was all done—when all the time it was real. They made a good living at it, too, and it was good for them as a family, kept them together every day. They’d been so close before the act, but they were closer than ever after they went on the road. No parents ever loved their child more than they loved Jim—or ever got more love given back to them. They were so close... it was impossible to think of them ever being apart.”
Blackbirds streaked across the bleak sky.
Sitting on the redwood bench, Jim stared up at them.
They almost vanished into the eastern clouds, then turned sharply and came back.
For a while they kited overhead.
Those dark, jagged forms against the sere sky composed an image that might have come from some poem by Edgar Allan Poe. As a kid he’d had a passion for Poe and had memorized all of the more macabre pieces of his poetry. Morbidity had its fascination.
The bird shrieks suddenly stopped. The resulting quiet was a blessing, but Holly was, oddly, more frightened by the cessation of the cries than she had been by the eerie sound of them.
“And the power grew,” Henry Ironheart said softly, thickly. He shifted in his wheelchair, and his right side resisted settling into a new position. For the first time he showed some frustration at the limitations of his stroke-altered body. “By the time Jim was six, you could put a penny on the table, and he could move it just by wanting it to move, slide it back and forth, make it stand on end. By the time he was eight, he could pitch it in the air, float it there. By the time he was ten, he could do the same with a quarter, a phonograph record, a cake tin. It was the most amazing thing you ever saw.”
You should see what he can do at thirty-five, Holly thought.
“They never used any of that in their act,” Henry said, “they just stuck to the mentalism, taking personal items from members of the audience, so Jim could tell them things about themselves that just, you know, astonished them. Jamie and Cara figured to include some of his levitations eventually, but they just hadn’t figured out how to do it yet without giving the truth away. Then they went to the Dixie Duck down in Atlanta... and that was the end of everything.”
Not the end of everything. It was the end of one thing, the dark beginning of another.
She realized why the absence of the birds’ screams was more disturbing than the sound itself. The cries had been like the hiss of a sparking fuse as it burned down toward an explosive charge. As long as she could hear the sound, the explosion was still preventable.
“And that’s why I figure Jim thought he should’ve been able to save them,” Henry said. “Because he could do those little things with his mind, float and move things, he thought he should’ve been able maybe to jam the bullets in that crazy man’s gun, freeze the trigger, lock the safety in place, something, something...”
“Could he have done that?”
“Yeah, maybe. But he was just a scared little boy. To do those things with pennies and records and cake tins, he had to concentrate. No time to concentrate: when the bullets started flying that day.”
Holly remembered the murderous sound: chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda ...
“So when we brought him back from Atlanta, he would hardly talk, just a word or two now and then. Wouldn’t meet your eyes. Something died in him when Jamie and Cara died, and we could never bring it back again, no matter how much we loved him and how hard we tried. His power died, too. Or seemed to. He never did one of his tricks again, and after a lot of years it was sometimes hard to believe he’d ever done those strange things when he was little.”
In spite of his good spirits, Henry Ironheart had looked every one of his eighty years. Now he appeared to be far older, ancient.
He said, “Jimmy was so strange after Atlanta, so unreachable and full of rage... sometimes it was possible to love him and still be a little afraid of him. Later, God forgive me, I suspected him of...”
“I know,” Holly said.
His slack features tightened, and he looked sharply at her.
“Your wife,” she said. “Lena. The way she died.”
More thickly than usual, he said, “You know so much.”
“Too much,” she said. “Which is funny. Because all my life I’ve known too little.”
Henry looked down at his culpable hands again. “How could I believe that a boy of ten, even a disturbed boy, could’ve shoved her down the mill stairs when he loved her so much? Too many years later, I saw that I’d been so damned cruel to him, so unfeeling, so damned stupid. By then, he wouldn’t give me the chance to apologize for what I’d done... what I’d thought. After he left for college, he never came back. Not once in more than thirteen years, until I had my stroke.”
He came back once, Holly thought, nineteen years after Lena’s death, to face up to it and put flowers on her grave.
Henry said, “If there was some way I could explain to him, if he’d just give me one chance....”
“He’s here now,” Holly said, getting up again.
The weight of fear that pulled on the old man’s face made him appear even more gaunt than he had been. “Here?”
“He’s come to give you that chance,” was all that Holly could say. “Do you want me to take you to him?”
The blackbirds were flocking. Eight of them had gathered now in the sky above, circling.
Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I pondered, weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume
of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door.
To the real birds above, Jim whispered, “‘Quoth the Raven, Nevermore.’”
He heard a soft rhythmic creaking, as of a wheel going around and around, and footsteps. When he looked up, he saw Holly pushing his wheelchair-bound grandfather along the walkway toward the bench.
Eighteen years had passed since he had gone away to school, and he had seen Henry only once before in all this time. Initially, there had been a few telephone calls, but soon Jim stopped making those and, eventually, stopped accepting them as well
. When letters came, he threw them away unopened. He remembered all of that now—and he was beginning to remember why.
He began to rise. His legs would not support him. He remained on the bench.
Holly parked the wheelchair facing Jim, then sat beside him. “How you doing?”
Nodding dumbly, he glanced up at the birds circling against the ashen clouds, rather than face his grandfather.
The old man could not look at Jim, either. He studied the beds of flowers intently, as if he had been in a great rush to get outside and have a look at those blooms and nothing else.
Holly knew this was not going to be easy. She was sympathetic toward each of the men and wanted to do her best to bring them together at last.
First, she had to burn away the tangled weeds of one last lie that Jim had told her and that, consciously if not subconsciously, he had successfully told himself. “There was no traffic accident, honey,” she said, putting a hand on his knee. “That isn’t how it happened.”
Jim lowered his eyes from the blackbirds and regarded her with nervous expectation. She could see that he longed to know the truth and dreaded hearing it.
“It happened in a restaurant—”
Jim slowly shook his head in denial.
“—down in Atlanta, Georgia—”
He was still shaking his head, but his eyes were widening.
“—you were with them—”
He stopped denying, and a terrible expression stained his face.
“—it was called the Dixie Duck,” she said.
When the memory exploded back to him with pile-driver force, he hunched forward on the bench as if he might vomit, but he did not. He curled his hands into fists on his knees, and his face tightened into a clench of pain, and he made small inarticulate sounds that were beyond grief and horror.
She put an arm around his bent shoulders.
Henry Ironheart looked at her and said, “Oh, my God,” as he began to realize the extremity of denial to which his grandson had been driven. “Oh, my God.” As Jim’s strangled gasps of pain changed into quiet sobs, Henry Ironheart looked at the flowers again, then at his aged hands, then at his feet on the tilted braces of the wheelchair, everywhere he could think to look to avoid Jim and Holly, but at last he met Holly’s eyes again. “He had therapy,” he said, trying hard to expiate his guilt. “We knew he might need therapy. We took him to a psychiatrist in Santa Barbara. Took him there several times. We did what we could. But the psychiatrist—Hemphill, his name was—he said Jim was all right, he said there was no reason to bring him any more, just after six visits, he said Jim was all right.”
Holly said, “What do they ever know? What could Hemphill have done when he didn’t really know the boy, didn’t love him?”
Henry Ironheart flinched as if she had struck him, though she had not meant her comment to be a condemnation of him.
“No,” she said quickly, hoping he would believe her, “what I meant was, there’s no mystery why I’ve gotten farther than Hemphill ever could. It’s just because I love him. It’s the only thing that ever leads to healing.” Stroking Jim’s hair, she said, “You couldn’t have saved them, baby. You didn’t have the power then, not like you have it now. You were lucky to get out alive. Believe me, honey, listen and believe me.”
For a moment they sat unspeaking, all of them in pain.
Holly noticed more blackbirds had gathered in the sky. Maybe a dozen of them now. She didn’t know how Jim was drawing them there—or why—but she knew that he was, and regarded them with growing dread.
She put a hand over one of Jim’s hands, encouraging him to relax it. Though he slowly stopped crying, he kept his fist as tight as a fist of sculpted stone.
To Henry, she said, “Now. This is your chance. Explain why you turned away from him, why you did... whatever you did to him.”
Clearing his throat, wiping nervously at his mouth with his weak right hand, Henry spoke at first without looking at either of them. “Well... you have to know... how it was. A few months after he came back from Atlanta, there was this film company in town, shooting a movie—”
“The Black Windmill, ” Holly said.
