Hellfire

8

Tracy Sturgess woke up early on Sunday morning, her eyes going immediately to the open window.

Outside, the day was bright and sunny, without a cloud in the sky. That meant they’d be able to play tennis and croquet that afternoon, two games Tracy was an expert at and that Beth Rogers could barely play at all.

Tracy smiled to herself as she thought about it. She could picture Beth now, clumsily running around the tennis court — barely able to return a serve — while the rest of them watched, clucking sympathetically while they tried to keep from giggling out loud. Maybe they’d even play doubles, and Tracy would get Alison Babcock to be Beth’s partner. Alison was almost as good at tennis as Tracy herself, and the two of them had already planned it out. Alison would act as if she was going for the ball, then step aside at the last minute, telling Beth that she was only giving her more room. And Beth, not knowing what was going on, would keep on trying harder, and it would get funnier and funnier. And the best part of it was that even if Carolyn was watching, she wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, because it would look like they were all doing their best to help Beth have a good time.

Tracy stretched, then lazily got out of bed and wandered over to the window to look out onto the grounds. On the lawn, Ben was setting up the croquet court, laboriously studying a book, then measuring the distances with a tape measure. Tracy had insisted on an English court, with a single stake in the center and six wickets arranged around it. She and Alison had planned this, too, then practiced the unfamiliar layout with Jeff Bailey and Kip Braithwaite. Tracy could hardly wait until she saw the look on Beth’s face, particularly when Beth had to ask how the game was played.

“Oh,” she’d say, pretending to be surprised. “I thought you said you knew—” And then she’d pretend she’d suddenly remembered, and offer Beth her best sympathetic expression. “You meant the American game, didn’t you? None of us plays that.” Then, while Beth squirmed in embarrassment, and her friends looked politely bored, she’d carefully explain to Beth the sequence of the wickets, graciously allowing her to go first.

And then, of course, all the rest of them would use Beth’s ball to get around the court fast.

As Ben placed the last wicket into the lawn, Tracy’s eyes wandered down toward the stable, and suddenly her happy mood vanished. Her father and Beth were in the paddock, saddling Patches. Next to Patches, already saddled, was her father’s favorite horse, an enormous black Arabian gelding named Sheik.

Tracy’s chin trembled with fury. She turned from the window and began struggling into a pair of jeans and one of her father’s old shirts. Ignoring the tangled mess of her hair, she slammed out of her room, and started toward the stairs.

“Tracy?” she heard her grandmother call from the far end of the corridor. “Tracy, darling, what on earth is wrong? Where are you going?”

Tracy spun around, her eyes glittering with anger. “He’s doing it again! He’s down in the paddock with her, and he’s going to let her ride my horse again!”

Abigail, framed in the door of her room, frowned in puzzlement. “Peter?” she asked. “But I thought you’d told him not to let Beth anywhere near the stable.”

“I did. But it’s not Peter — it’s Father! He’s down there with her, and he’s going to take her riding. Just like day before yesterday!”

Abigail’s brows arched, and she started toward Tracy, but Tracy had already turned away. And then, when Abigail was halfway to the landing, she heard a muffled thump and a scream. Hurrying forward, she reached the landing, and peered down over the railing.

Near the bottom of the stairs, Carolyn sat nearly doubled over, clutching herself in pain, while Tracy glared at her furiously.

“What were you doing there?” she heard Tracy demand. “You could see me coming down! Why didn’t you get out of my way?”

“And you could see me, too, couldn’t you?” Carolyn replied. “If you hadn’t been running, it wouldn’t have happened at all.”

“I can run if I want to,” Tracy said, fixing a malevolent stare on Carolyn now. “And you can’t stop me! You’d better just watch where you’re going.”

Carolyn pulled herself painfully to her feet, then reached out and grasped Tracy’s wrist just as the girl began to turn away. When she spoke again, her voice was level, but carried an edge that made Tracy turn back and face her.

“That will be quite enough, young lady. You may be thirteen years old today, but you’re not so old that I can’t turn you over my knee and give you a good spanking. I’ve put up with just about as much from you as I intend to tolerate, and I suggest you think long and hard before you speak to me again that way. Me, or anyone else. And as for running up and down the stairs, I don’t really care if you do it or not, so long as you don’t run into people. You could have hurt me very badly, you know. You might even have made me lose my baby.”

Tracy’s mouth quivered, and she suddenly twisted loose from Carolyn’s grip. “I wish I had hurt you,” she hissed. “I wish I’d killed you and your baby, too!” Then she spun around. She charged through the French doors at the rear of the foyer, and dashed across the lawn to push her way through the hedge to the paddock. But when she got there, it was too late.

The paddock was empty.

Carolyn, shocked at the hatred in Tracy’s voice, sank back down onto the stairs, burying her face in her hands.

Abigail remained where she was, watching her daughter-in-law silently. After nearly a minute had passed, she spoke.

“Carolyn? Carolyn, are you all right?”

Carolyn stiffened, then looked up to see Abigail gazing down at her from the landing above. She managed a weak smile, and got once more to her feet. “I’m all right, Abigail. I just had a bad moment, that’s all.”

The old woman’s lips curved into a tight line of disapproval. “I thought I heard a scream. You didn’t fall, did you?”

Carolyn hesitated, then shook her head. “No. No, I’m really perfectly all right.”

“Perhaps you’re trying to do too much,” Abigail suggested, her voice taking on the slight purring quality that Carolyn had long since learned to recognize as a danger signal. “Why don’t you spend the rest of the day in your room? After all, you’d never forgive yourself if something happened to the baby, would you? And I hate to think how Phillip would feel.”

She heard! Carolyn suddenly knew. She heard every word we said! And she doesn’t care. She knows what happened, and what could have happened, and she won’t say a word to Tracy, or a word to Phillip. She feels the same way as Tracy. She hopes I lose my baby.

Her heart was thumping now, and when she spoke she had to make an effort to keep her voice from trembling. “But nothing’s going to happen to my baby, Abigail. It’s going to be perfectly all right.”

The two women gazed at each other for a moment; then, at last, Abigail turned away, and started slowly back down the corridor toward her rooms.

Only when she was gone did Carolyn gingerly touch her abdomen once more, hoping to feel a movement that would tell her the baby was all right.

But it was too early to expect any movement from the life within her, and finally she moved painfully across the wide entry hall to the telephone and called the hospital. Despite the fact of Tracy’s party that afternoon, she made an appointment to see Dr. Blanchard at two o’clock.

Phillip and Beth dismounted, and Beth carefully tied Patches’s reins to a low branch before flopping down onto the soft grass of the little meadow. Then she sat up, and looked around, remembering the last time she’d been here.

“This is where Mom fainted, Uncle Phillip. Right over there by that big rock.”

Phillip’s eyes followed Beth’s pointing arm, then he stood up and wandered over to the rock on which Carolyn had been sitting that morning a few days earlier. A moment later Beth was beside him. “Remember what Mom said that morning? About it looking like the mill was on fire?”

Phillip glanced down at Beth, nodding. “And she asked you if you’d seen the same thing.”

“And I did,” Beth said, her voice suddenly shy. “At least, I think I did.” Slowly, trying to reconstruct the memory, she told Phillip what she’d seen that day from up at the mausoleum. “I thought it was an optical illusion at first,” she said when she was finished. “But Mom saw the same thing.”

“Maybe you both saw an illusion,” Phillip replied. “From up here, the sun can play funny tricks on you. It reflects off the roof of one building and lights up another. And sometimes when it catches the windows just right, it looks as though the whole village is on fire.”

“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.