John Saul - Hellfire

“I don’t care.” Tracy sulked. “They hate me, too!”

“No, I don’t think they do,” Abigail went on, her voice soothing. “At least not Carolyn. She simply doesn’t understand you, that’s all. You have to remember where she came from, Tracy. She never had any of our advantages, and we should pity her, not hate her. But of course,” she added, “pitying her doesn’t mean we should give in to her, either.”

Tracy looked up, a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “But Daddy said—”

“I know exactly what your father said. I may be eighty-three years old, but I’m neither deaf nor blind. I heard your father, and I see every day how that woman treats him.”

“I just wish she’d go away.”

“One day she will,” Abigail promised. “Mark my words, one day your father will realize the mistake he’s made, and understand that he needs a woman of his own background. But until then, all we can do is try to ignore her, and the child, too.”

“She was chasing Patches,” Tracy stormed. “She chased her out of the stall, and Patches was terrified.”

Abigail, who had watched the incident at the stable from her sitting-room window, said nothing.

“And what about my party?” Tracy went on. “Having Beth there will wreck it! My friends will think I actually like her.”

“Not if she isn’t here,” said Abigail. “Now it seems to me that all you have to do is change the day of your party. Beth always spends Saturdays with her father, so we’ll simply move your party from Sunday to Saturday. You tell Hannah,” she finished, “and I’ll tell Carolyn.” Her patrician lips curled into a smile. “I’m an old lady, and I suppose there’s a chance I might just forget to speak to her, of course.”

Tracy reached out to hug her grandmother. “Will you do that?” she asked. “Will you really do that for me?”

“Of course I will. What are grandmothers for?” Disentangling herself from Tracy’s embrace, she stood up. “Now, I want you to go down and talk to Hannah. And don’t look too pleased with yourself. While I don’t question Hannah’s loyalty, I sometimes think she has a tendency to talk too much to your father’s wife.”

Giggling, Tracy rolled off her bed and left the room. Abigail followed her slowly, then watched her as the girl hurried down the hall toward the stairs. From the back, even at her age, she looked so much like her mother that tears came to Abigail’s eyes. Lorraine Kilpatrick Sturgess had been exactly the right girl for Phillip and Abigail had never quite adjusted to the fact of her death. And yet, Tracy seemed sometimes almost to be a reincarnation of the woman who had died giving birth to her. Except for the eyes. Tracy’s eyes had come from her father, who had inherited that clear blue from Abigail herself. But the rest of Tracy was pure Lorraine.

And dear Lorraine would never have had anything to do with a woman like Carolyn, nor allowed Tracy to associate with a child like Beth. Abigail would see to it that Tracy never felt any differently.

When Tracy had disappeared down the stairs, Abigail retreated to her suite. Here, in the rooms that hadn’t changed since she’d come here as a bride, life seemed to her to be as it should have been. Here, nothing ever changed. Whatever happened in the outside world had no meaning for her here, for in these rooms were all the portraits of her family, and of Conrad, and the mementos of times past, when the Sturgesses had run Westover.

When the mill was reopened, the Sturgesses would once again resume their rightful place. Perhaps the people wouldn’t be working directly for her family, but at least they would be paying rent.

Abigail, almost against her will, glanced up at the portrait of her husband, and heard once again the words he had uttered so often in the years before he had died.

“It is an evil place, but it must never be torn down. It must stand as it is, a constant reminder to us all. It is evil, Abigail, but it is our conscience. We must never lose it, and never change it.”

Abigail had listened to him, and pitied him, but in the end had realized that her husband had simply lost his mind.

And she knew exactly when it had started.

It had started on the day that Conrad Junior had died, and his father had refused to accept it as the accident it had been.

Instead, he had blamed the mill, insisting that the mill itself had somehow claimed their son’s life.

Then, in the last few years of his life, when his mind had begun to fail as rapidly as his body, he had become fixated on a box of old records from the last days of the mill’s operations.

He had kept them in a metal box in the closet, and as he drew closer and closer to death, he had spent more and more time poring over them, and mumbling about the evil in the mill.

She took the metal box off the closet shelf now, and went to sit in her favorite chair by the window. Opening the box, she carefully removed the old journals with which it was filled. The pages were yellowed with age and threatened to crumble in her fingers. Slowly, she began reading.

Strange records of odd things happening at the mill.

Horrible things that seemed, on a bright sunny morning like today, far too terrible to believe.

And Abigail didn’t believe, despite her husband’s fanatic ravings. She turned the pages one by one, shaking her head sadly as she thought of the manner in which Conrad had wasted his life because of a few lines in an ancient journal.

Even on the day he died, he had demanded that she bring him the box, then, propped up in his bed, he had pored over the journals for the last time, his hands trembling as he fingered the pages, muttering to himself as he deciphered the words once more. Abigail had watched him, knowing that his mind was no longer in the present, that he had taken himself to another era. Finally, late in the afternoon, his breathing had suddenly changed, and the hollow rattles of death had gripped him as his worn-out heart began its last spasmodic flutterings.

Abigail had pried his fingers loose from the journals, but even as she put them back in the box and carried the box itself back to the closet, Conrad had reached out for them, as if by grasping the past one last time he could stave off death and prolong the final moment.

When she had returned to his bed, he had struggled to speak, his words barely audible as they bubbled through the fluids gathering in his lungs.

“She’s there,” he’d gasped at last. “She’s still there, and she hates us all.… Keep her there, Abigail. Keep her there for me.…”

And then, clutching at her hand, he’d died.

Abigail had pondered his last words since then, but only now, as she sat fingering the crumbling documents, did she decide that whatever he had been trying to say, the words had been nothing more than the fragmented ramblings of a dying man.

Now Abigail put the journals back in the box, closed and locked it, and returned it to its place on her husband’s closet shelf. Then she went to the window, and gazed out across Westover, as she had so many times before. At the other side of the town, silent and forbidding, lay the ancient hulk of the long-abandoned mill.

When she and Phillip had finished with it, though, it would once again be the proudest building in Westover.

Nothing and no one would stop them.

Neither Conrad’s insane superstitions, nor Carolyn’s inane prattling, would ever convince her that the mill was anything but an ordinary building.

And it was there — had always been there — to make money for the Sturgesses.

Certainly there was nothing either shameful or evil in that.

Hannah eyed Tracy suspiciously.

“Isn’t it a little late to be switching a party?”