Hellfire

by John Saul

  Phillip walked slowly along Prospect Street, feeling the aura of tension in the village around him. There was still a crowd of people gathered in front of the mill, talking quietly among themselves, but they fell silent as he approached. There was something condemnatory in their glances, though none of them seemed willing to look directly at him. But he was all too aware of the eyes that raked over him, then quickly looked away. He wondered if he should stop and talk with them, then decided there was nothing he could say.

  As he made his way quickly through the small crowd, and came to the north side of the old brick structure, his instincts told him to walk on, leaving the mill and all thoughts of it until tomorrow. But he couldn’t do that. There were decisions that had to be made, and he couldn’t allow himself to put them off. At the corner of the building, he turned left, starting once more toward the side entrance.

  He used his key to open the construction shack, then rummaged around in Alan’s battered desk until he found a spare set of keys to the building. In the darkness of the evening, he opened the door and slipped inside the mill itself. He stood still for several seconds, rejecting once more the strange urge to turn his back on the old building and simply walk away.

  He told himself that the anxiety he was suddenly feeling meant nothing. It wasn’t the building itself he was reacting to, but rather the tragedy that had occurred there only a few hours ago. The mill was only a building, and there were practical decisions to be made.

  And yet his anxiousness began to congeal into something like fear, gathering around him, challenging him. He answered the challenge by reaching for the switch by the door that would turn on the naked bulbs of the worklights, certain that by banishing the darkness he would alleviate the irrational panic that was threatening to overwhelm him now.

  At first it worked. Harsh white light flooded the building, and the familiar forms of the new construction reassured him. There was, after all, nothing to fear.

  As his eyes scanned the progress Alan had made, Phillip realized immediately that there could be no reasonable argument for abandoning the project now. It was all but complete, needing little more than a few days’ work on the mezzanine level.

  And yet he still had an uneasy feeling that there was something here that he had yet to fully comprehend. Even with the worklights on, it was as if some dark shadow lingered in the vast spaces beneath the roof.

  He moved forward to the spot where Alan Rogers had died only a few hours before. Though the floor had already been washed clean, and there was no evidence of the tragedy that had occurred there, still he could see Alan’s broken body all too clearly in his mind’s eye, and see Beth, her face ashen, crouching brokenly over the corpse, keening her grief into the echoing spaces above.

  He paused for a moment, then, almost against his will, turned to face the front of the mill. On the steps, separated from him by the glass of the front doors, were the curious people of Westover, watching him with what he imagined to be suspicion. Suddenly he felt like an actor on a stage, caught unexpectedly in the spotlight without having rehearsed his role.

  And then, as he stood alone in the mill, he realized that he had not come here tonight simply to make a decison about the future of the mill.

  It was something else.

  There was something he was looking for.

  He turned away, and started toward the back of the mill, pausing at the enormous lighting panel that had been completed only a week ago. A moment later every light in the mill blazed into life, washing the shadows cast by the worklights away, suffusing the entire building with the even illumination of hundreds of fluorescent tubes.

  When he looked down the stairs into the basement, the darkness there was gone too, driven away by the surge of electricity.

  He started down the stairs, moving slowly, for still the light had not completely freed him from the nearpanic that had threatened him when he’d first entered the building.

  At the bottom of the stairs he gazed out into the far reaches of the basement, but there was nothing there that seemed the least bit unusual. It was as it had always been, nothing more than a vast expanse of space interrupted at regular intervals by the huge wooden columns that supported the floor above. There was nothing that Phillip could see that would induce the unease that was again growing within him.

  He looked down at his feet, at the spot where his brother had died, and Jeff Bailey had died, and his mother had nearly died.

  This, he realized, was the true reason he’d come here tonight. To stand alone at this spot, waiting to see if the fear his mother had described to him six weeks ago would come to him now, threaten him as it had threatened her.

  Was it the same fear that had killed his brother?

  He had to know.

  And yet, as the seconds stretched into minutes, there was nothing.

  He turned finally, and for the first time saw the little room tucked away behind the stairs. Its door stood slightly agape, but beyond the door there was only darkness.

  It was from that darkness that tentacles of true fear finally began to reach out to him.

  He told himself that what he was feeling was irrational, that there was nothing beyond that door but an empty room. And yet, as he approached the door he found himself stepping to one side so that the door itself separated him from whatever might lie beyond. His pulse rate suddenly rising, he reached out, grasped the door, and began sliding it to the left until it was fully open. Now the space was nearly six feet wide, and the light from the basement spilled into the room, only to be swallowed up by the blackness of the walls beyond.

  There seemed to Phillip to be nothing unusual about the room. A simple rectangle, with a single small window high up on the far wall, and barren of furniture. The only sign that anyone had been in here in years was the area on the floor where the accumulated dust of a century had been recently disturbed.

  All that set the room apart from the rest of the basement was its smell.

  Emanating from the room was a strong odor of smoke, as if there had recently been a fire here.

  As the smoky odor filled his lungs, Phillip began to feel a strange roiling of emotions that seemed to come not from within himself, but from the room.

  The fear was stronger now, but mixed with it there was a sense of pent-up rage. It was almost as if the room were coiling in upon itself, preparing to strike him.

  And yet there was a strange feeling of longing, too. A deep melancholy, tinged strongly with sadness. As he stood staring into the room, resisting a compelling urge to step inside and meet whatever was truly there, Phillip found his eyes flooding. A moment later the tears overflowed, and ran unheeded down his cheeks.

  He took a tentative step forward, his arms reaching out as if to touch whatever was in the room, but then he suddenly veered away, and instead of entering the room, grasped the edge of the door and quickly rolled it shut.

  As it slammed home, he imagined that he heard a short cry from within, a childish voice calling out to him.

  “Father!”

  He hurried up the stairs, turned off the lights, and started toward the side door.

  And then, at the far end of the mill, he saw the faces.

  They were still there—the people of Westover, their faces pressed to the glass, their features distorted into strange grimaces. Their hands seemed to be reaching out to him, and at first he had the feeling that they were beseeching him. Then, as he moved into the rotunda beneath the soaring glass dome of the building, he perceived something else.

  The faces, though vaguely familiar, were unrecognizable. The men, clad in shabby clothing, all wore caps low on their foreheads, and their faces were unshaven.

  The women, all of them gaunt with what seemed to be hunger, were also dressed shabbily, in long thin dresses that covered them from their wrists to their ankles and were buttoned high on their necks. They all wore their hair alike, twisted back into buns at the napes of their necks.

  And they were not beseeching him
.

  They were reaching out to him not because they wanted anything of him.

  They wanted him.

  Their eyes showed it clearly. The eyes, all of them fixed on him now, glittered with hatred. He could almost feel it radiating out from them, surging through the glass of the doors—rolling toward him in an angry wave down the broad corridor of the mill.

  He froze for a moment, his panic building within him, then turned and ran to the side door, reaching out to the switch and plunging the mill back into the darkness that had filled it a few moments earlier. He stepped through the door, closed it, and locked it.

  He glanced toward the front of the mill, half-expecting to see an angry crowd moving toward him. Instead, there was nothing. Only a single man, silhouetted against a streetlight, waving to him.

  “Mr. Sturgess?” he heard a voice calling. “Are you all right?”

  Phillip hesitated. “I’m okay,” he called back softly. “I just wanted to take a look around.” Then he raised his hand, and returned the man’s wave. But instead of going back to Prospect Street, he turned the other way, walking down the path until he came to the railroad tracks.

  As he hurried through the night, he tried to convince himself that what he’d seen had existed only in his imagination.

  When he got home twenty minutes later, Phillip found Tracy waiting for him. She was sitting on the stairs, halfway up, and when the door opened, she stood up and looked eagerly down at him. He glanced up at her, then dropped his keys in the drawer of the commode that sat near the front door. Neither of them said anything until he started toward the library, intent on fixing himself a drink. As he was sure she would, his daughter followed him into the big walnut-paneled room.

  “Well?” she demanded as Phillip poured a generous slug of Scotch into a Waterford tumbler, then added a couple of ice cubes and some water. Only when he finished making the drink did he turn to face her.

  “Well what?” he asked evenly.

  Tracy hesitated. There was something in her father’s eyes she’d never seen before. Though he was looking at her, she had the funny feeling that he wasn’t seeing her. “Well, did she kill him?” she asked at last.

  Phillip frowned, swirling his drink in his glass, then went over to the French doors to stare out into the night. “Why would she do that?” he asked, his back to Tracy.

  “Well, isn’t that obvious?” he heard his daughter say. “She wants to come back here. So she killed her father, because if he’s dead, there’s no place else for her to live.”

  Phillip felt his eyes flood once more, and suppressed the groan that rose in his throat. “Is this place really that wonderful?” he asked so softly that Tracy had to strain to hear him. “Is it really worth killing someone—your own father—just to live here?” Then, when he’d waited long enough for his words to sink in, he swung around and faced Tracy, who was standing in the center of the room, her eyes wide as she stared at him. “Well?” he asked. “Is it really worth all that?”

  “It is to her—” Tracy began, but Phillip didn’t let her finish.

  “How could it be?” he asked. “What would have been so wonderful for her here? Ever since you came home from school you’ve done your best to make her miserable. You didn’t even try to be friends with her. You treated her like a servant, ignored her, snubbed her—”

  “So what?” Tracy demanded. Her face had flushed with anger, and her blue eyes glinted in the light of the chandelier. “She’s nothing but trash, just like her mother. She doesn’t belong here, and she doesn’t fit in here, and if she comes back here, I won’t live here anymore!”

  “I see,” Phillip said calmly. “And just where do you propose to live?”

  Tracy’s eyes widened, and the color suddenly drained from her face. What was he saying? He couldn’t mean what she thought he meant, could he? “I … I’ll go live with Alison Babcock.”

  Phillip nodded thoughtfully, and sipped once more at his drink. “Tracy,” he said quietly, “I think you’d better sit down. It’s a good time for the two of us to have a talk, since Carolyn won’t be home.”

  “I hope Carolyn never comes back here again,” Tracy declared, dropping into one of the wing chairs and draping her left leg casually over its arm.

  “I’m sure that’s what you hope,” Phillip replied, sitting down opposite her. “But I’m telling you right now that it’s a hope I want never to hear expressed in this house again. You may think anything you like, but you will keep your thoughts to yourself from this moment on.”

  His words hit Tracy like a physical blow. For a moment she was too stunned to say anything at all. Then she swallowed, and widened her eyes. “Daddy—”

  “Put your feet on the floor, and sit up like the lady you think you are,” Phillip said.

  Tracy’s leg came off the arm of the chair, and dropped to the floor. She stared at her father, trying to figure out what had happened. “You’re going to let her come back here, aren’t you?” she finally asked, her voice heavy with accusation. “Even after what she did to my horse.”

  “Ah,” Phillip said, draining his glass and rising to his feet to fix himself another drink. “The horse.” As he passed Tracy he glanced down, and could see by her eyes that his suspicion was correct. “The Babcocks have some pretty good stock in their stable,” he commented. He said nothing more until he was once more facing her. “I wonder how safe they’d feel with you living in their house.”

  Tracy’s heart was pounding now, and she had to grip the arms of the chair to keep her hands from shaking. “I didn’t do it—” she began, but when her father shook his head, she fell silent.

  “I don’t believe you, Tracy,” she heard him say. “I don’t believe you, and I don’t know what to do.” His eyes flooded with tears once more, and this time he made no effort to hide them. “I guess I haven’t been much of a father, have I? I’ve always tried to give you everything you wanted, but it wasn’t enough.”

  “But I love you, Daddy,” Tracy ventured.

  “Do you?” Phillip asked. “I suppose you do, in your own way. But it’s the wrong way, Tracy. I can’t live my life for you. I can’t decide whom to fall in love with simply on the basis of what you want. And I can’t let you dictate who will live in my house and who won’t.”

  In her own mind, Tracy mistcok the sadness in Phillip’s words for weakness. “But they don’t belong here, Daddy,” she protested once more. “I don’t see why you can’t see that. Carolyn and Beth don’t even like it here. All they want is our money!”

  The tenseness in her father’s jaw told Tracy she had made a mistake, and she instinctively shrank back in her chair. Her father’s eyes were coldly furious now.

  “I’m not going to hit you,” he told her. “Perhaps I should, but I won’t. I don’t believe in that sort of thing. But I will tell you this now, Tracy, and you had better listen and you had better understand, because I won’t tell you again. From this moment on, you will treat Carolyn with all the respect you would give your own mother, or any other adult woman. I don’t care anymore how you feel about her. The only thing I care about is how you treat her. From now on, you will be friendly and helpful and polite, whether I am in the house or not. As for Beth, yes, she will be coming back here to live. And it won’t be because she has no other place to go. It will be because both her mother and I love her very much. And you will treat her the same way you will treat Carolyn. You will go even further. You will make friends with Beth, unless she’s not interested in being friends with you. In that case, you will simply be polite to her, and stay out of her way. When she comes home tomorrow, you will tell her you are sorry about what happened to her father, and you will apologize for having poisoned her horse—”

  “It was my horse,” Tracy exploded. Suddenly she was on her feet, glaring at her father with naked fury. “It was my horse, and I had the right to do anything I wanted to it! And it’s my house, and I can act any way I want to here, and you can’t stop me. I hate you!”


  Phillip rose to his feet. “Very well,” he said softly. “If that’s the way you feel, there’s only one thing I can do. In the morning, I’ll make some calls and find a school for you.”

  “Good!” Tracy shot back, her feet planted wide apart on the carpet, her face a mask of angry belligerence. “And I hope it’s as far away from here as you can get!”

  “Oh, it will be,” Phillip replied. “But of course since you’ll be there year-round from now on, we’ll have to find one that has no vacations. Also, of course, one that has no horses.” He looked down, his eyes fixing on his daughter. “No privileges of any sort, I should think,” he said softly. “It appears that you’ve already had far too many of those.”

  Tracy searched her father’s face, trying to see if he really meant what he was saying. “I … I’ll run away!”

  Phillip shrugged. “If you do, then you do. But if I were you, I’d think about it pretty hard. I understand life can be pretty rough out there for a girl of your age.” Then he turned and left the library, closing the door quietly behind him. Tracy, frozen with rage and disbelief, stood perfectly still for a moment, then went to the bar and began throwing the glasses at the door, one by one.

  Phillip and Hannah met at the bottom of the stairs as the first crash of breaking crystal emanated from the library. The old woman’s eyes widened, and she almost dropped the small overnight case she carried in her right hand. She said nothing, but her eyes questioned Phillip.

  “It’s Tracy,” he said mildly. “She’s a little upset right now, but I imagine she’ll calm down when she runs out of glasses. If she asks you to clean up the mess for her, please do me the favor of playing deaf.” He thought he heard her gasp as her head bobbed dutifully. “Oh … and, Hannah,” he added as he started up the stairs. “From now on, there will be no need for you to do anything about Tracy’s room. Shell be cleaning it up herself, starting tomorrow.”

  Hannah’s brows arched, and she eyed Phillip shrewdly. “Is that what this is all about?” she asked, tilting her head toward the library.