Hellfire

by John Saul

  Phillip frowned. “What are you getting at?”

  “I don’t know!” Carolyn rose from the table, and moved to the French doors. Beyond the terrace and across the lawn, she could see Beth and Tracy on the tennis. Had it been any two girls but these, the scene would have looked perfectly natural. But knowing all that had happened that summer, and remembering what Tracy had said in the restaurant the night Abigail had had her first heart attack, there was something frightening about watching Tracy show Beth how to hold the tennis racket. The scene looked so innocent, but Carolyn couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that what she was watching was more than a simple tennis lesson. Tracy, she was increasingly certain, was up to something. But what? And then, as her gaze wandered past the tennis court and fell on the massive shape of the mill, it came to her.

  Whatever Tracy was up to, it had to do with the mill. She turned back to face her husband. “What about the mill?” she asked. “Have you decided what you’re going to do with it?”

  Phillip felt dazed by her words. “What does that have to do with Beth and Tracy?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure what it has to do with Tracy,” Carolyn replied. “But it seems to me that it’s obvious what it has to do with Beth. I want you to tear it down.”

  “Tear it down?” Phillip echoed. “Carolyn, what are you talking about? There’s no way I can do that—”

  Carolyn’s heart beat faster, for even as she had spoken the words, she had known she was right.

  “But you have to! Don’t you see? It’s not just Beth! It’s everyone! Sooner or later, that mill destroys everyone in this family. Your brother—your father. Even Abigail and Alan. And I know who will be next! Phillip, if you don’t do something, the mill will destroy Beth and Tracy, too!”

  Phillip stared at her. It was like hearing his father again, rambling on about the evils and dangers that the old brick building harbored. But there was nothing to it—no more than superstition. “No! Carolyn, I won’t have you talking like that. There’s nothing in that mill—nothing at all!”

  Carolyn heard his words, and desperately wanted to believe them. And yet, deep in her heart, she knew that he was wrong. There was something evil in the mill, and it was spreading out now, reaching out toward them. If they didn’t do something, it would destroy them all.

  But what could they do, short of destroying the mill?

  Nothing.

  She had to find a way to convince him she was right. And she had to find it soon.

  “Did I really do all right?” Beth asked an hour later when Tracy finally called a halt to the tennis lesson.

  “You did great,” Tracy lied, wondering why she’d even bothered to suggest tennis lessons, when anything else would have done just as well. It had been so boring, standing there in the hot sun, throwing balls gently over the net for Beth to try to hit. And she’d hardly been able to keep from laughing as Beth kept chopping away at them, most of the time not even coming close to hitting one of them. Of course it had been kind of fun the last fifteen minutes, when she’d started throwing them all over the place, making Beth run back and forth as fast as she could.

  “When are you going to teach me how to serve?”

  “Tomorrow,” Tracy promised. She jumped easily over the net and started gathering up the balls that were scattered all over the court. When they were finished, they started toward the house, but Tracy suddenly stopped, as if something had just caught her eye. When Beth turned, Tracy was looking up the hill toward the mausoleum. When she could see Beth watching her out of the corner of her eye, she spoke. “I bet Amy’s supposed to be buried up there,” she said.

  Beth’s eyes widened. “A-Amy?” she stammered. “I thought you didn’t believe there was any such person.”

  “I changed my mind,” Tracy said. “I told you that this morning, didn’t I? That I didn’t think you were crazy anymore?”

  Beth nodded hesitantly.

  “So if I don’t think you’re crazy, and you think Amy’s real, then I have to think she is too, don’t I?”

  “I … I guess so.”

  “Besides,” Tracy went on, her voice dropping, “I snuck into my grandmother’s room last night, and found something.”

  A thrill of anticipation ran through Beth, and her eyes widened. “About Amy?”

  Tracy nodded.

  “What?” Beth asked. “What did you find?”

  “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”

  “I promise.”

  Tracy eyed the other girl narrowly. “Swear on your father’s grave?”

  “Th—that’s not fair,” Beth protested, struggling against the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat.

  “If you don’t swear, I won’t tell you,” Tracy said.

  Beth hesitated, then nodded. “I … I swear.”

  “Okay, I found a book, and it tells all about Amy.”

  “What does it say?”

  Tracy smiled mysteriously. “Want to read it?”

  “You mean you still have it?”

  “I hid it in my room. Come on.”

  They hurried into the house, and went upstairs. When they reached the landing, Tracy whispered into Beth’s ear, “Go into your room and lock the door, and don’t let anyone in until I give the secret code. And as soon as I come in, lock the door behind me. All right?”

  Beth nodded, and scurried into her room, locking the door behind her. Giggling, Tracy went into her own room, closed the door, then flopped down on the bed and turned on her television. Half an hour later, when she decided that if she waited any longer Beth would decide she’d been joking, she pulled the metal box out from under her bed, checked the upstairs hall, then ran down and knocked twice on Beth’s door, waited a second, then knocked again. Instantly the door opened, and Beth let her in.

  “What happened?” Beth whispered. “I thought you weren’t ever coming.”

  “I almost got caught,” Tracy told her. “Every time I tried to sneak out of my room, Hannah was snooping around. And if she catches us with this, she’ll tell my father, and he’ll whip us both.”

  Beth gasped. “Whip us? Really?”

  Tracy nodded solemnly. “That’s why we can’t let him know we have it.” Then she took the box to Beth’s desk, and lifted the lid. Ceremoniously, she took the book out, laid it on the desk, and carefully opened its cover. “Read it,” she said.

  When Beth had finished deciphering the strange handwriting that covered the pages of the little book, she looked up at Tracy.

  “What does it mean?” she asked. “What’ll we do?”

  “It means they buried her in the wrong place,” Tracy replied. “Don’t you see? She’s supposed to be up in the mausoleum, but she’s not. That’s what she wants.”

  Beth’s eyes widened. “You mean we have to dig her up?”

  Tracy hesitated, then shook her head. “That wouldn’t be enough,” she said. “What we have to do is get her spirit out of the mill.”

  Beth swallowed. Her heart was suddenly pounding. “How?” she whispered. “The mill’s all locked up, isn’t it? How can we get in?”

  “I know where Daddy hid the keys,” Tracy replied. “So we’ll do it tonight. All right? We’ll go down there together, and we’ll let Amy out, and bring her up to the mausoleum. Then she’ll be where she belongs, and she won’t be angry anymore, and you can visit her anytime you want to. See?”

  Beth nodded, but said nothing.

  “Keep the book in here, okay? Hannah’s always coming in to clean my room, and if she finds it, we’re dead.”

  “But what if she finds it in here?”

  “She won’t. But even if she does, it won’t be so bad, because you can say you didn’t know you shouldn’t have taken it out of Grandmother’s room. Just stick the book in your desk, and hide the box in your closet.”

  “But what—?” she began again, but this time Tracy didn’t let her finish her question.

  “Just hide it, then come down to the stable. There’s some st
uff we’ve got to get ready for tonight.” Then, before Beth could say anything else, Tracy slipped out of her room, closing the door behind her.

  After Tracy was gone, Beth stared at the book for several long seconds, then slowly read it through once more.

  Everything she read fit together with what she already knew about Amy.

  So Amy was real after all, and even Tracy finally believed her.

  Tracy, she decided as she hid the box in her closet and slipped the book into the top drawer of her desk, wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was starting to look like they were going to be almost real sisters after all.

  Tracy could hardly believe it.

  She skipped down the path toward the stable, doing her best to keep from laughing out loud.

  Beth had actually fallen for it. Just because of a name written in an old book, she’d actually been stupid enough to think it was proof that her dumb ghost was real.

  She sauntered into the stable. Peter Russell was mucking out the stalls. He looked up at her and frowned.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to come down here anymore,” he said.

  “There’s some stuff I have to get,” Tracy replied, her eyes narrowing angrily.

  “What kind of stuff?” Peter challenged. “Your dad told me the stable was off limits.”

  “None of your business,” Tracy replied, but when she tried to brush past Peter, he stepped out into the aisle and blocked her way.

  “It is too my business. And until your father says different, you stay out of here.”

  Tracy hesitated, wondering if she should try to talk him out of it. And then she had an even better idea.

  She’d just wait for Beth, and tell her what to get out of the tackroom. And Beth would do it, too. Now that she’d shown Beth that old book, she was sure Beth would do anything she asked her to do.

  Anything at all.

  25

  A kind of somnolence hung over the house all that day, and more than once Carolyn had to resist an urge to go to her room, close the curtains, then lie down in the cool half-light and let sleep overtake her. But she hadn’t done it, for all day long she found herself obsessed with the idea that hidden somewhere in the house was the key to whatever evil lay within the mill.

  For a while, after breakfast, she tried to fight the growing obsession, telling herself that Phillip was right, and that there could not possibly be anything inherently evil about the old building. She reminded herself that Phillip’s father, in his last years, had been senile, and that Abigail, in those last weeks of her life when she had changed her mind about the mill, had already been weakened by a heart attack.

  And yet every argument she presented herself with fell to pieces in the face of her growing certainty that there was something in the mill that neither Conrad nor Abigail had quite understood, but had nevertheless finally been forced to accept.

  Finally, after lunch, she started searching the house.

  She began in Abigail’s rooms, opening every drawer, searching through the stacks of correspondence the old woman had kept filed away, looking for anything that might refer, even indirectly, to the mill.

  There was nothing.

  She went to the basement, then, and spent two hours searching through the jumble of furniture that had been stored there. When she finally emerged, covered with the dust and grime that had collected through the years, it was only to climb the long flights of stairs to the attic, where she began the search once more.

  Again she found nothing.

  But it was strange, for she did find that the Sturgesses, apparently for generations long past, had been inveterate collectors. Aside from enough discarded furniture to fill the house half-again, she had found box after box of old albums, piles of scrapbooks, cartons of personal correspondence, and even yellowed school reports done by Sturgess children who had long since grown up, grown old, and passed away.

  And yet, among the collected detritus of the family’s life, there had been not one scrap of information about the mill upon which their fortune had been built.

  In the end she decided there was a reason for it. The records, she was certain, would have too clearly reflected the realities of the mill—the theft of her own family’s share in it, and the appalling conditions under which it had been run. The Sturgesses, she was sure, would not have wanted those records around as a constant reminder of the sins of the past.

  Eventually giving up the search, she wandered into the dining room to sit among the portraits of the departed Sturgesses.

  She dwelt for a long time on the picture of Samuel Pruett Sturgess, who today seemed to be mocking her, as if he knew it was a descendant of Charles Cobb Deaver who was gazing at him, and was laughing at her efforts to discover the secrets he had long since destroyed.

  At last, as the afternoon faded into the kind of hot and sticky evening that promised no relief from the humidity of the day, Phillip came home. He found his wife still in the dining room.

  “Enjoying the pleasure of their company?” he asked. When Carolyn turned to face him, he regretted his bantering tone. Her hair, usually flowing in soft waves, hung limply around her shoulders, and her white blouse was smudged with dirt. Her face looked haggard, and her eyes almost frightened. Phillip’s smile faded away. “Carolyn, what is it?”

  “Nothing,” Carolyn sighed. Then she managed a weak smile. “I guess I’m behaving like an hysteric. I’ve been turning the house upside down all day, trying to find the old records from the mill.”

  “They’re probably in the attic,” Phillip observed. “That’s where practically everything is.”

  “They’re not,” Carolyn replied. She pulled herself to her feet, and started out of the room. “And if you ask me, old Samuel Pruett destroyed them all himself.”

  For a moment, Phillip thought she must be joking, but there was nothing good-humored in her tone. He followed her into the library, where he fixed himself a drink, then poured her a Coke. “What about the girls?” he asked. “Any problems?”

  Carolyn sank into a chair, shaking her head. “None at all. They’ve been together all day, and I kept waiting for the explosion. But it hasn’t come.”

  Phillip’s brows arched hopefully. “Maybe,” he suggested, “you were wrong this morning.”

  “I wish I could think so,” Carolyn replied. “But I don’t. I just have a feeling something’s going to happen. And I wasn’t wrong about the mill this morning, either,” she added. “I really do want you to close it up again.” She met his eyes. “I know it sounds crazy, and I can’t explain it, but I’ve just gotten to the point where I believe your parents were right. There’s something evil about the place, and I think your whole family knew it. I think that’s why I can’t find any records. And I mean, none at all!”

  Phillip hesitated, then, to Carolyn’s surprise, nodded. “You might be right,” he said at last. “Anyway, I can’t really say I think you’re wrong anymore.” His gaze shifted away from her for a moment, then came back. “I went down there again today, and something $$

  As clearly as he could, he told Carolyn about the strange experiences he’d had—the odor of smoke he’d noticed in the mill when he’d been there with Alan back when the restoration was just beginning, and the sense of panic he’d had the day Alan had died.

  He even told her about the hallucination he’d had, as if he’d slipped back a century in time, and felt as if an angry mob had been reaching out to him, trying to lay their hands on him.

  “I felt as though they were going to lynch me,” he finished. “And I went back this morning.”

  “And?” Carolyn prompted him.

  Phillip shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t like being in the place alone, but I kept telling myself it was nothing—that the place has so many bad associations for me that I couldn’t feel any other way. But the longer I stayed, the worse it got. And I couldn’t go into the basement at all. I tried, but I just couldn’t do it. Every time I looked down those stairs, I had the feeling
that if I went down them, I’d die.” He fell silent, then drained his glass and set it aside.

  “What did you do?” Carolyn finally pressed when it seemed as if Phillip wasn’t going to go on.

  “Went to see my accountant.” He chuckled hollowly. “When I told him I was thinking about giving the project up, he told me what I told you—we can’t. Only he had the numbers to back himself up with.”

  Carolyn frowned now. “The numbers? What numbers?”

  “All the figures on the amount of money we’ve committed to the project. The loans, the contracts, the cash layouts—the whole ball of wax. And the bottom line is that we literally cannot afford to abandon it. There’s just too much money invested.” He smiled bitterly. “The best thing that could happen,” he added, “would be if the place burned to the ground.”

  For the rest of the evening, Phillip’s last words echoed in Carolyn’s mind, and when she at last went to bed, she found it difficult to sleep.

  The mill, for her, had become a trap, and she felt its jaws inexorably closing on all of them.

  Tracy Sturgess awoke at midnight, just before the alarm on her night table went off. It wasn’t a slow wakening, the slight stirring that grows into a stretch and is then followed by reluctantly opening eyes. It was the other kind, when sleep is suddenly snatched away, and the mind is fully alert. At the first sound of the alarm, she reached out and silenced it.

  Tracy lay still in the bed, listening to the faint sounds of the night. She had not intended to fall asleep at all—indeed, she had not even bothered to undress that night, and when her father had come in to say good night to her, she had merely clutched the covers tight around her neck. But when he was gone, she’d set her alarm, just in case.

  She slid out of her bed and went to the window. The moon, nearly full, hung high in the night sky, bathing the village below in its silvery light. Even from here, each of the houses of Westover was clearly visible, and when Tracy looked at the mill, the moonlight seemed to shimmer on its windows, making it look as if it were lit from within.

  Tracy turned away from the window, put on her sneakers, then crossed to the door. Opening it a crack, she listened for several long seconds. From below, the slow regular ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer seemed amplified by the silence of the house, and Tracy instinctively knew that everyone else was asleep.