Hellfire

by John Saul

  “But it wasn’t the whole village,” Beth protested. “It was just the mill. And it couldn’t have been refleclions, because all the windows at the mill are boarded up.”

  Phillip nodded thoughtfully, and looked once more at the old building at the far side of the town. Already it had changed. The boards were torn away from the windows now, and scaffolding had been constructed around it. Already the sandblasting had begun, and here and there areas of bright red brick were beginning to show through the thick layers of grime that had built up over the decades. In his mind’s eye, Phillip began to picture the mill as it would be in a few more months, with shutters softening the stark rows of evenly spaced windows, a porte cochere extending from the front entrance out over the sidewalk, and wrought-iron tracery decorating the roof line.

  “How come it was closed?” he suddenly heard Beth ask. He glanced down once more, and saw her looking back at him with earnest curiosity.

  “Economics,” he replied. “The place just wasn’t making any money anymore.”

  “But what about all the stories?” Beth pressed.

  “What stories are those?” Phillip countered, though he was fairly certain he knew.

  “About the children that used to work there. I thought something happened, and they made your family close it up.”

  “Well, those stories certainly aren’t anything new, are they? I’ve heard them all my life. And I suppose there’s some truth to them, too.”

  “You mean children really did work in the mill?”

  “Absolutely. And it wasn’t just this mill, either. There were mills and factories all over the Northeast where children worked. And it wasn’t much fun, either. Most of the children your age had to work as much as twelve hours a day, six days a week.”

  “Th-that’s what Mom told me,” Beth stammered. “And she said that a lot of the children died.”

  Phillip’s eyes clouded slightly. “Yes, I suppose that’s true, too. But it’s all over now, isn’t it? All that happened a hundred years ago.”

  But Beth didn’t seem to be hearing him. Instead, she was once more looking out over the town. Even without following her gaze, Phillip knew that her eyes were fixed on the mill.

  “Uncle Phillip? Did … did the mill ever catch on fire?”

  “On fire?” Phillip echoed. “What on earth makes you think that?”

  “It just—I don’t know,” Beth floundered. “I was just thinking about what Mom and I saw the other day, that’s all.”

  “I thought we’d agreed that was just an optical illusion,” Phillip said carefully.

  “But what if it wasn’t?” Beth asked. Her eyes brightened, and the beginnings of an eager smile came over her face. “What if we were sort of looking into the past? What if it did burn, and sometimes you can still see it?”

  “Now, that,” Phillip chuckled, “is a story I haven’t heard before. How on earth did you come up with that one?”

  “But what if it’s true?” Beth pressed, ignoring her stepfather’s question. “Could something like that happen?”

  Phillip shrugged. “It depends on whom you ask, I suppose. If you ask me, I’d say no. But there are plenty of people who claim that whatever happens in a building never goes away. That’s the whole idea of ghost stories, isn’t it? That people die, but instead of going to heaven they stay around the place they died, scaring people?”

  Beth fell silent, thinking about what Phillip had said. Was that what had happened to her the other day? Was that what she had heard? A ghost?

  Beth didn’t believe in ghosts.

  Still, she’d heard something in the mill, and she had seen something from the mausoleum that same day.

  And there was the dream, too.…

  She turned away from the view of the town, and wandered back into the meadow. From the tree where she was tied, Patches whinnied softly, and pawed at the ground. Beth started across the meadow toward the horse, then stopped as something caught the corner of her eye.

  She looked around, and frowned slightly.

  A few yards away, a small depression, almost barren of the lush grass that filled the rest of the meadow, dipped slightly below the clearing’s floor. In the morning light, it almost looked as if the grass on that spot had been burned away.

  And from where she stood, the spot looked exactly like a grave.

  Suddenly she became conscious of her stepfather standing next to her.

  “Beth? What is it?”

  “Over there,” Beth said, pointing. “What’s that?”

  Phillip’s eyes scanned the meadow, but he saw nothing unusual. It looked exactly as it had always looked. “What?” he asked.

  Beth hesitated, then shook her head. “Nothing,” she replied as she untied Patches and remounted the big mare. “I just thought I saw something, that’s all.” Then she grinned. “It must have been another optical illusion.”

  “Either that,” Phillip laughed, “or you’re seeing things. Come on. We don’t want to be too long, or you’ll be late for Tracy’s party.” He swung easily up onto the Arabian, and cantered out of the meadow onto the trail that led around the hillside to the paddock. But before Beth followed him, she looked once more around the little meadow.

  The strangely sunken area was still there, and the more she looked at it, the more certain she became that it was, indeed, a grave.

  And in her own mind, she decided whose grave it was.

  It was Amy’s grave.

  By the time lunch began, Beth wished the floor would open up, and she could just fall through.

  It had begun after she’d spent almost an hour trying to decide what to wear for the party, and finally settled on a green dress that she’d found in the thrift shop almost a year ago. Now, of course, she never shopped at the thrift shop, but she missed it. The thrift shop was an adventure. You never knew what you were going to find there, and she and her mother used to spend hours rummaging around, looking for things they wouldn’t have been able to afford new. The green dress had been one of their best discoveries. It had been almost new, and her mother had had it cleaned and pressed, and then they’d put it away for a special occasion. And today, Beth had decided, was the special occasion.

  But when she’d gone downstairs after all Tracy’s friends had arrived, she’d realized her mistake.

  All the other kids, Tracy included, were dressed in jeans and Lacoste shirts.

  Beth had burned with humiliation as Tracy had eyed the dress scornfully, then said, “I guess I should have told you it was informal, shouldn’t I? I mean, how could you have known?” Beth had flinched at the slight stress on the word “you,” but said nothing.

  Then Tracy began making introductions, and Beth squirmed miserably as Tracy’s friends asked her questions that weren’t really quite questions.

  “You go to school right here in Westover? How can you stand it?”

  “Where do you go during the summer? My family’s always in Maine, but it gets sooo boring up there, don’t you think?”

  “You mean you’ve never been to Maine? I thought everybody went to Maine.”

  “How come you never go to the country club? Everything else here is so tacky!”

  It was a boy named Jeff Bailey who delivered the final blow. He looked at Beth with large blue eyes, and a smile on his face. “I like your dress,” he said. Then his smile turned into a malicious grin. “I even liked it when my sister bought it three years ago.”

  That was when Beth had suddenly fled back upstairs and quickly changed her clothes, shoving the offending green dress back into a corner of the closet where she’d never have to see it again. Finally, after washing her face and recombing her hair, she’d gone back downstairs.

  Tracy and her friends were playing croquet, and when they offered to start over again so she could play, she should have known what was going to happen.

  Instead, she’d thought they were being nice to her.

  Half an hour later, she had still not made it through the first wicket
, and all the rest of them were finished.

  “In croquet, you never want to go first,” Tracy had told her after it was all over, then dropped her voice and glanced around to see if Carolyn was within earshot. “But you wouldn’t know that either, would you?”

  When they had asked her to play tennis, Beth had only shaken her head.

  Now all she had to do was get through lunch and the movie Tracy had talked her father into getting for them, and it would all be over.

  Tracy opened the curtains over the library windows, then turned and grinned maliciously at Beth. “You were scared, weren’t you?” she asked.

  “N-no,” Beth replied, not quite truthfully. Even though she had kept telling herself it was only a movie, she had been scared. Horror movies always frightened her, no matter how much she told herself they weren’t true.

  “Well, I think you were,” Tracy insisted. “If a silly old movie scares you so much, I don’t see how you can stand to live in this house.”

  Beth frowned uncertainly. “What are you talking about? There isn’t anything so scary about this house.” That wasn’t really true, but Beth wasn’t about to admit that when she’d first moved into Hilltop, she’d spent several nights lying awake listening to the strange sounds that had seemed to fill the old house.

  “Isn’t there?” Tracy asked. “What about the ghost?”

  Beth’s frown smoothed out as she realized that Tracy just wanted her to look stupid again. “What ghost?” she asked, trying to make her voice as scornful as Tracy’s.

  “We’re not sure.” Tracy’s voice took on a tone of smug self-importance, and she glanced at Alison Babcock. “But we think she’s friendly. She’s an old lady, dressed in black, and she prowls around the house late at night, looking for something.”

  “That’s your grandmother,” Beth ventured, but nobody laughed, and Tracy only shook her head.

  “No, it’s not,” she replied. She turned to Jeff Bailey. “It isn’t Grandmother, is it?”

  “It didn’t look like her to me,” Jeff said, picking up the game. “She’s real old, and her eyes are all sunken in, like she’s blind or something. And she carries a candle,” he added, in his most sepulchral tone.

  “When did you see her?” Beth demanded.

  “Last year,” Jeff replied. “There were a bunch of us here for the weekend, and we all saw her. Isn’t that right?”

  Brett Kilpatrick nodded. “I saw her the same time Jeff did. She was in the upstairs hall, right by the top of the stairs. And when we spoke to her, she disappeared.”

  Beth looked around at the rest of Tracy’s guests. All of them were nodding agreement and looking a little bit frightened. Maybe, after all, it was true. Then, slowly, an idea began to form in her mind. “Maybe … maybe she was looking for Amy,” she said.

  Tracy Sturgess’s eyes clouded uncertainly. “Amy?” she repeated. “Who’s Amy?”

  “The ghost who lives in the mill,” Beth replied, her confidence beginning to grow. “Don’t you know about her?”

  Tracy shook her head slowly, glancing at her friends out of the corner of her eyes. “Tell us about her.”

  Beth shrugged. “She’s a little girl,” she improvised. “And she’s lived in the mill practically forever.”

  “Oh, sure,” Jeff scoffed. “But have you ever seen her?”

  Beth felt herself flush. “No,” she admitted. “But … but I’ve heard her.”

  “Really?” Tracy asked. She was smirking now. “What did she say?”

  “She said—” But before Beth could think of anything a ghost might have said, Jeff and Brett looked at each other and broke into loud laughter.

  “She believes it!” Brett crowed. “She really believes there’s a ghost in the mill.”

  As the boys’ raucous whoops filled the room, Beth felt her face flush with humiliation once again. “Well, if there’s a ghost here, why couldn’t there be one in the mill?” she demanded, her face scarlet and her voice desperate as the laughter grew among Tracy’s friends.

  “Because there isn’t any ghost here,” Tracy said triumphantly. “I just made all that up! And you believed it, just like I thought you would. You really are stupid, aren’t you?”

  Beth stood up, her chin quivering. “Not as stupid as you and your dumb friends, Tracy! There is a ghost in the mill, and I know who it is! And I’m leaving!”

  “So leave,” Tracy taunted, dropping the last vestige of politeness from her voice. “Who wants you here anyway?”

  Beth fled from the room, intent on finding her mother.

  And then she remembered.

  Her mother had made an emergency appointment to go see Dr. Blanchard. Neither she nor even Uncle Phillip was home.

  Her father.

  She would go and see her father.

  Tears welling from her eyes, she hurried out the front door, and started toward the driveway.

  And then, as she came to the lawn, she remembered the trail leading down the hill.

  It was a shortcut, and would get her to the village much faster. She ran across the lawn, and plunged through the brush until she came to the trail from the paddock, then hurried along to the path that led down the hill.

  It was when she was halfway down the hill that the idea came to her.

  She wouldn’t go see her father after all. Instead, she would go to the mill, and find a way to get inside.

  And once she was in the mill, she would find out if Amy was truly there or not.

  But even as she started on her way again, she knew what she would find in the mill.

  Amy would be there—because Beth wanted her to be there.

  9

  Jeff Bailey and Brett Kilpatrick presented an odd contrast as they walked along River Road. Though they were distant cousins, Jeff was blond and gangling, while Brett’s thatch of dark curly hair gave the same clear evidence of Celtic descent as did his compact body. They were approaching the point at which River Road crossed the railroad tracks, where they would turn right, cross the trestle over the river, and head north toward their homes near the country club. It was the long way around from Hilltop, but neither of them had felt like taking the shortcut directly down the hillside to the river.

  “How come she was even there?” Jeff asked, casually kicking a battered beer can that lay by the road. It arced into the air, then dropped back into the drainage ditch. “Tracy hates her.”

  “She lives there,” Brett replied. “Tracy tried to switch the party, but her stepmother found out. She’s sure a creep, isn’t she?”

  “She’s a local—they’re all like that.” Jeff watched idly while Brett took careful aim on the beer can, then snickered when it rolled only a few feet ahead. “And you think you’re going to make the soccer team next year?” At St. Francis Academy, where both of them spent nine months of each year, the soccer team was the team to be on.

  Brett ignored the gibe. “Can you believe the dress she was wearing?” he asked, bringing the subject back to Beth Rogers. “It looked even uglier on her than it did on your sister. And when Tracy started telling that story about the ghost, and she believed her, I thought I was gonna piss my pants.”

  Jeff skidded down the shoulder into the ditch, and kicked the can neatly back up onto the road. Then, as they came to the railroad tracks, he glanced across the street, his eyes falling on the scaffold-covered walls of the mill.

  “What about the ghost she claimed lives in there?” he asked.

  “Give me a break,” Brett groaned. “She was just trying to look smart. Or she’s so dumb she really believes there’s something in there.”

  Jeff eyed his friend, a mischievous grin playing around the corners of his mouth. “Want to go in and take a look?” he challenged.

  Brett hesitated. All his life he’d heard stories about the mill, and he knew as well as everyone else in Westover that Mr. Sturgess’s older brother had gotten killed in the building years earlier.

  And according to Brett’s father, no one had ever f
ound out exactly what had happened to Con Sturgess. It was supposed to have been an accident, but everyone knew that old man Sturgess had always claimed it wasn’t.

  Then he saw Jeff watching him, a smirk on his face. Ignoring the knot of fear in his gut, he nodded. “Why not?” he asked, aiming one last kick at the battered can and missing completely. He followed Jeff down the tracks toward the back of the mill. “How do we get in?”

  Jeff surveyed the building, then shrugged. “It’s got to be a cinch. I bet they aren’t even keeping it locked up.”

  Brett’s eyes followed Jeff’s, but he didn’t feel nearly as confident as Jeff sounded. “What if someone catches us?”

  “So what? All we’re going to do is look around. What’s the big deal? Besides, they’re working on it, right?”

  Brett nodded.

  “So everybody pokes around buildings that are being restored. If anybody catches us, we’ll just tell them we wanted to see what was going on. Come on.”

  They followed a spur from the main line that led to the long-abandoned loading dock at the rear of the mill, skirted around a pile of trash that had accumulated against the dock itself, then scrambled up to try the freight door. It was securely locked, as was the door to what had once been the dispatcher’s office. After trying two more doors, they jumped off the dock, rounded the corner of the building, and started walking along a newly cleared path that paralleled the side of the building. Halfway to Prospect Street they came to the metal door that had always before been carefully locked.

  Today the lock was open, hanging loosely from the hasp.

  “See?” Jeff asked. “What’d I tell you? It’s not even locked up. We can just walk in.” He reached out and grasped the knob, then twisted it.

  It turned easily.

  “H-how come it’s not locked?” Brett asked, his voice dropping to a whisper. “S’pose someone’s inside?”

  Jeff’s eyes raked him scornfully. “It’s not locked because the workmen were too stupid to lock it,” he said. He pushed the door open, and stepped through, but Brett still hung back. “You coming, or not?”