by Dean Koontz
looked down at her, he saw not only Holly but a long-dead face, the face of ...
But the moment of disorientation passed. She was only Holly now, her identity no longer entwined with that of another woman as it had been in her dream last night.
“You okay?” she asked again.
“Yeah, sure, just... memories.”
Jim was grateful when Holly directed his attention from the mill to the farmhouse. She said, “Were you happy with your grandparents?”
“Lena and Henry Ironheart. Wonderful people. They took me in. They suffered so much for me.”
“Suffered?” she said.
He realized that it was too strong a word, and he wondered why he had used it. “Sacrificed, I mean. In lots of ways, little things, but they added up.”
“Taking on the support of a ten-year-old boy isn’t something anyone does lightly,” Holly said. “But unless you demanded caviar and champagne, I wouldn’t think you’d have been much of a hardship to them.”
“After what happened to my folks, I was... withdrawn, in bad shape, uncommunicative. They put in a lot of time with me, a lot of love, trying to bring me back... from the edge.”
“Who lives here these days?”
“Nobody.”
“But didn’t you say your grandparents died five years ago?”
“The place wasn’t sold. No buyers.”
“Who owns it now?”
“I do. I inherited it.”
She surveyed the property with evident bewilderment. “But it’s lovely here. If the lawn was being watered and kept green, the weeds cut down, it would be charming. Why would it be so hard to sell?”
“Well, for one thing, it’s a damned quiet life out here, and even most of the back-to-nature types who dream of living on a farm really mean a farm close to a choice of movie theaters, bookstores, good restaurants, and dependable European-car mechanics.”
She laughed at that. “Baby, there’s an amusing little cynic lurking in you.”
“Besides, it’s hardscrabble all the way, trying to earn a living on a place like this. It’s just a little old hundred-acre farm, not big enough to make it with milk cows or a beef herd—or any one crop. My grandpa and grandma kept chickens, sold the eggs. And thanks to the mild weather, they could get two crops. Strawberries came into fruit in February and all the way into May. That was the money crop—berries. Then came corn, tomatoes—real tomatoes, not the plastic ones they sell in the markets.”
He saw that Holly was still enamored of the place. She stood with her hands on her hips, looking around as if she might buy it herself.
She said, “But aren’t there people who work at other things, not farmers, would just like to live here for the peace and quiet?”
“This isn’t a real affluent area, not like Newport Beach, Beverly Hills. Locals around here don’t have extra money just to spend on lifestyle. The best hope of selling a property like this is to find some rich movie producer or recording executive in L.A. who wants to buy it for the land, tear it down, and put up a showplace, so he can say he has a getaway in the Santa Ynez Valley, which is the trendy thing to have these days.”
As they talked, he grew increasingly uneasy. It was three o’clock. Plenty of daylight left. But suddenly he dreaded nightfall.
Holly kicked at some wiry weeds that had pushed up through one of the many cracks in the blacktop driveway. “It needs a little cleanup, but everything looks pretty good. Five years since they died? But the house and barn are in decent shape, like they were painted only a year or two ago.”
“They were.”
“Keep the place marketable, huh?”
“Sure. Why not?”
The high mountains to the west would eat the sun sooner than the ocean swallowed it down in Laguna Niguel. Twilight would come earlier here than there, although it would be prolonged. Jim found himself studying the lengthening purple shadows with the fearfulness of a man in a vampire movie hastening toward shelter before the coffin lids banged open.
What’s wrong with me? he wondered.
Holly said, “You think you’d ever want to live here yourself?”
“Never!” he said so sharply and explosively that he startled not only Holly but himself. As if overcome by a dark magnetic attraction, he looked at the windmill again. A shudder swept through him.
He was aware that she was staring at him.
“Jim,” she said softly, “what happened to you here? What in the name of God happened twenty-five years ago in that mill?”
“I don’t know,” he said shakily. He wiped one hand down his face. His hand felt warm, his face cold. “I can’t remember anything special, anything odd. It was where I played. It was... cool and quiet... a nice place. Nothing happened there. Nothing.”
“Something,” she insisted. “Something happened.”
Holly had not been close to him long enough to know if he was frequently on an emotional roller coaster as he had been since they had left Orange County, or if his recent rapid swings in mood were abnormal. In The Central, buying food for a picnic, he’d soared out of the gloom that had settled over him when they crossed the Santa Ynez Mountains, and he’d been almost jubilant. Then the sight of the farm was like a plunge into cold water for him, and the windmill was the equivalent of a drop into an ice chasm.
He seemed as troubled as he was gifted, and she wished that she could do something to ease his mind. She wondered if urging him to come to the farm had been wise. Even a failed career in journalism had taught her to leap into the middle of unfolding events, seize the moment, and run with it. But perhaps this situation demanded greater caution, restraint, thought, and planning.
They got back into the Ford and drove between the house and barn, around the big pond. The graveled path, which she remembered from last night’s dream, had been made wide enough for horses and wagons in another era. It easily accommodated the Ford, allowing them to park at the base of the windmill.
When she stepped from the car again, she was beside a cornfield. Only a few parched wild stalks thrust up from that abandoned plot of earth beyond the split-rail fence. She walked around the back of the car, across the gravel, and joined Jim where he stood on the bank of the pond.
Mottled blue-green-gray, the water resembled a slab of slate two hundred feet in diameter. It was almost as still as a piece of slate, as well. Dragonflies and other insects, alighting briefly on the surface, caused occasional dimples. Languid currents, far too subtle to produce ripples, made the water shimmer almost imperceptibly near the shore, where green weeds and a few clusters of white-plumed pampas grass thrived.
“Still can’t remember quite what you saw in that dream?” Jim asked.
“No. It probably doesn’t matter anyway. Not everything in a dream is significant.”
In a low voice, almost as if speaking to himself, he said, “It was significant.”
Without turbulence to stir up sediment, the water was not muddy, but neither was it clear. Holly figured she could see only a few feet below the surface. If it actually was fifty or sixty feet deep at the center, as Jim had said, that left a lot of volume in which something could remain hidden.
“Let’s have a look in the mill,” she said.
Jim got one of the new flashlights from the car and put batteries in it. “Even in daylight, it can be kind of dark in there.”
The door was in an antechamber appended to the base of the conical main structure of the mill, much like the entrance to an Eskimo igloo. Although unlocked, the door was warped, and the hinges were rusted. For a moment it resisted Jim, then swung inward with a screech and a brittle splintering sound.
The short, arched antechamber opened onto the main room of the mill, which was approximately forty feet in diameter. Four windows, evenly spaced around the circumference, filtered sunlight through filthy panes, leeching the summer-yellow cheer from it and imparting a wintry gray tint that did little to alleviate the gloom. Jim’s big flashlight revealed dust- and cobweb-shro
uded machinery that could not have appeared more exotic to Holly if it had been the turbine room of a nuclear submarine. It was the cumbersome low technology of another century—massive wooden gears, cogs, shafts, grinding stones, pulleys, old rotting lengths of rope—so oversized and complicated that it all seemed like the work not merely of human beings from another age but of a different and less evolved species altogether.
Because he had grown up around mills, even though they had not been in use since before his birth, Jim knew the names of everything. Pointing with the flashlight beam, he tried to explain how the mill had functioned, talking about the spurwheel and the quant, the mace and the rynd, the runner stone and the bed stone. “Ordinarily you couldn’t look up through the mechanisms quite like this. But, see, the floor of the spurwheel loft is rotted out, not much of it left, and the bridge floor gave way when those huge stones broke loose and fell.”
Though he had regarded the mill with fear when they had stood outside, his mood had begun to change after they entered it. To Holly’s surprise, as Jim tried to explain the millworks to her, he began to exhibit some of that boyish enthusiasm that she had first seen when they had been grocery shopping at The Central in Svenborg. He was pleased by his knowledge, and he wanted to show it off a little, the way a bookish kid was always happy to demonstrate what he had learned at the library while others his age were out playing baseball.
He turned to the limestone stairs on their left and climbed without hesitation, running one hand lightly along the curved wall as he went. There was a half-smile on his face as he looked around, as if only the good memories were flooding in on him now.
Puzzled by his extremely mercurial mood, trying to imagine how the mill could frighten and delight him simultaneously, Holly somewhat reluctantly followed him up toward what he had called “the high room.” She had no good memories to associate with the mill, only the fearful images of her nightmares, and those returned to her as she ascended behind Jim. Thanks to her dream, the narrow twist of stairs was familiar to her, though she was climbing it for the first time—which was an uncanny feeling, far eerier than mere déjà vu.
Halfway up the stairs, she stopped at the window that overlooked the pond. The glass was frosted with dust. She used her hand to wipe one pane, and squinted at the water below. For an instant she thought she saw something strange beneath the placid surface—then realized she was seeing only the reflection of a cloud drifting across the sky.
“What is it?” Jim asked with boyish eagerness. He had stopped a few steps above her.
“Nothing. A shadow.”
They continued all the way to the upper chamber, which proved to be an unremarkable room, about twelve or fourteen feet in diameter, less than fifteen feet high at its apex. The curved limestone wall wrapped around to meet itself, and curved up to form the ceiling, so it seemed as if they were standing inside the domed nose cone of a rocket. The stone was not semitransparent as it had been in her dream, and no strange amber lights played within it. An arcane mechanism was offset in the dome, through which the motion of the wind-turned sails outside was translated into horizontal movement to crank a vertical wood shaft. The thick shaft disappeared through a hole in the center of the floor.
Remembering how they had stood downstairs and looked up through the buckled and broken decks within the multi-level millworks, Holly gingerly tested the wood floor. No rot was visible. The planks and the joists under them seemed sturdy.
“Lots of dust,” Jim said, as their feet stirred up little clouds with each step.
“And spiders,” Holly noted.
Wrinkling her face in disgust, she peered up at the husks of sucked-dry insects dangling in the elaborate webs that had been spun around the long-stilled mechanism overhead. She didn’t fear spiders, but she didn’t like them either.
“We need to do some cleaning before we set up camp,” he said.
“Should’ve bought a broom and a few other things while we were in town.”
“There’re cleaning materials at the house. I’ll bring them here while you start unloading the car.”
“The house!” Holly was exhilarated by a lovely inspiration. “When we set out for the mill, I didn’t realize this property was still yours, no one living here. We can put the sleeping bags in the house, stay there, and visit this room as often as we need to.”
“Nice thought,” Jim said, “but it’s not that easy. Something’s going to happen here, Holly, something that’ll give us answers or put us on the road to finding them. I feel it. I know it ... well, just the way I know these things. But we can’t pick the time for the revelation. It doesn’t work that way. We can’t ask God—or whatever is behind this—to punch a time clock and deliver revelations only between regular business hours. We have to stay here and be patient.”
She sighed. “Okay, yeah, if you—”
Bells interrupted her.
It was a sweet silvery ringing, neither heavy nor clangorous, lasting only two or three seconds, pleasingly musical. It was so light and gay, in fact, that it should have seemed a frivolous sound against the backdrop of that ponderous stone structure. It was not in the least frivolous, however, because inexplicably it triggered in Holly serious associations—thoughts of sin and penitence and redemption.
The trilling faded even as she turned in search of the source. But before she could ask Jim what it had been, it came again.
This time, Holly understood why she associated the sound with issues of spirituality. It was the precise tone of the bells that an altarboy rang during Mass. The sweet ringing brought back to her the smell of spikenard and myrrh from her college days when she had toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism.
The bells faded again.
She turned to Jim and saw him grinning.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I forgot all about this,” he said wonderingly. “How could I have forgotten all about this?”
The bells tinkled again, silvery and pure.
“Forgot what?” she asked. “What’re those bells?”
“Not bells,” he said as they faded. He hesitated, and as the sound returned a fourth time, he finally said, “The ringing is in the stone.”
“Ringing stone?” she said in bewilderment.
As the bells sounded twice again, she circled the room, cocking her head this way and that, until it seemed to her that the music did, indeed, originate from the limestone wall, pealing out not from any single location but equally from every block of that curved surface, no louder at one point than another.
She told herself that stone could not ring, certainly not in such a dulcet voice. A windmill was an unusual structure and could have tricky acoustics. From a high-school class trip to Washington, she remembered a tourguide showing them a spot in the Capitol’s rotunda from which even a whispered conversation was picked up and, by a quirk of architecture, transmitted across the huge dome to the far side of that great space, where eavesdroppers could hear it with perfect clarity. Perhaps something similar was at work here. If bells were rung or other sounds made at a particular place in a far corner of the first floor of the mill, a peculiarity of acoustics might transmit it in equal volume along all the walls on every floor. That explanation was more logical than the concept of magical, ringing stone—until she tried to imagine who would be secretly ringing the bell, and why.
She put one hand against the wall.
The limestone was cool. She detected faint vibrations in it.
The bell fell silent.
The vibrations in the wall subsided.
They waited.
When it was clear that the ringing would not resume, Holly said, “When did you hear it before?”
“When I was ten.”
“And what happened after the ringing, what did it signify?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you said you just remembered it.”
His eyes were shining with excitement. “Yeah. I remember the ringing. But not what cause
d it or what followed it. Though I think... it’s a good sign, Holly.” A note of rapture entered his voice. “It means something very fine is going to happen, something... wonderful.”
Holly was frustrated. In spite of the mystical aspect of Jim’s life-saving missions—and in spite her own paranormal experiences with dreams and the creatures in them—she had come to the farm with the hope of finding logical answers to all that had transpired. She had no idea what those answers could be. But she’d had an unspoken faith in the scientific method. Rigorous investigative procedures combined with careful thought, the use of deductive and inductive reasoning as needed, would lead to solutions. But now it seemed that logic was out the window. She was perturbed by Jim’s taste for mysticism, though she had to admit that he had embraced illogic from the start, with all his talk of God, and had taken no pains to conceal it.
She said, “But, Jim, how could you have forgotten anything as weird as ringing stones or any of the rest of whatever happened to you here?”
“I don’t think I just forgot. I think I was made to forget.”
“By whom?”
“By whomever or whatever just made the stone ring again, by whatever’s behind all these recent events.” He moved toward the open door. “Come on, let’s get this place cleaned up, move in. We want to be ready for whatever’s going to happen next.”
She followed him to the head of the steps but stopped there and watched him descend two at a time, with the air of a kid excited by the prospect of adventure. All of his misgivings about the mill and his fear of The Enemy seemed to have evaporated like a few beads of water on a red-hot griddle. His emotional roller coaster was cresting the highest point on the track thus far.
Sensing something above her head, Holly looked up. A large web had been spun above the door, across the curve where the wall became the ceiling. A fat spider, its body as big around as her thumbnail and its spindly legs almost as long as her little finger, greasy as a dollop of wax and dark as a drop of blood, was feeding greedily on the pale quivering body of a snared moth.
4
With a broom, dustpan, bucket of water, mop, and a few rags, they made the small upper chamber livable in short order. Jim even brought some Windex and paper towels from the store of cleaning supplies at the house, so they could scrub the grime off the windows, letting in a lot more light. Holly chased down and killed not only the spider above the door but seven others, checking darker corners with one of the flashlights until she was sure she had found them all.
Of course the mill below them was surely crawling with countless other spiders. She decided not to think about that.
By six o’clock, the day was waning but the room was bright enough without the Coleman lantern. They were sitting Indian fashion on their inflatable-mattress sleeping bags, with the big cooler between them. Using the closed lid as a table, they made thick sandwiches, opened the potato chips and cheese twists, and popped the tops off cans of root beer. Though she had missed lunch, Holly had not thought about food until they’d begun to prepare it. Now she was hungrier than she would have expected under the circumstances. Everything was delicious, better than gourmet fare. Olive loaf and cheese on white bread, with mustard, recalled for her the appetites of childhood, the intense flavors and forgotten innocent sensuality of youth.
They did not talk much as they ate. Silences did not make either of them feel awkward, and they were taking such primal pleasure from the meal that no conversation, regardless of how witty, could have improved the moment. But that was only part of the reason for their mutual reticence. Holly, at least, was also unable to think what to say under these bizarre circumstances, sitting in the high room of a crumbling old mill, waiting for an encounter with something supernatural. No small talk of any kind felt adequate to the moment, and a serious discussion of just about anything would seem ludicrous.
“I feel sort of foolish,” she said eventually.
“Me, too,” he admitted. “Just a little.”
At seven o’clock, when she was opening the box of chocolate-covered doughnuts, she suddenly realized the mill had no lavatory. “What about a bathroom?”
He picked up his ring of keys from the floor and handed them to her. “Go on over to the house. The plumbing works. There’s a half-bath right off the kitchen.”
She realized the room was filling with shadows, and when she glanced at the window, she saw that twilight had arrived. Putting the doughnuts aside, she said, “I want to zip over there and get back before dark.”
“Go ahead.” Jim raised one hand as if pledging allegiance to the flag. “I swear on all that I hold sacred, I’ll leave you at least one doughnut.”
“Half the box better be there when I get back,” she said, “or I’ll kick your butt all the way into Svenborg to buy more.”
“You take your doughnuts seriously.”
“Damn right.”
He smiled. “I like that in a woman.”
Taking a flashlight to negotiate the mill below, she rose and went to the door. “Better start up the Coleman.”
“Sure thing. When you get back, it’ll be a right cozy little campsite.”
Descending the narrow stairs, Holly began to worry about being separated from Jim, and step by step her anxiety increased. She was not afraid of being alone. What bothered her was leaving him by himself. Which was ridiculous. He was a grown man and far more capable of effective self-defense than was the average