John Saul: Hellfire

The vast expanse seemed empty.

And then, once again, the hair on the back of his neck stood up, and his spine began to tingle.

He whirled once more. Once more there was nothing.

Yet something seemed to fill the emptiness, seemed to surround him, taunt him.

He should never have come inside. He knew that now, knew it with a certainty that made his blood run cold.

But now it was too late. Now there was no turning back.

Far away, and seeming to recede into the distance, he could barely make out the small rectangle of brightness that marked the door he had come through only a few minutes before.

The door was too far away.

It seemed as if he had been in the mysterious gloom forever, and already, dimly, he began to understand that he was never going to leave.

There was something here — something that wanted him.

Charged with the inexorable force of his own imagination, he moved once more toward the vortex that was the stairwell.

He paused at the top of the stairs, peering fearfully into the blackness below. He wanted to turn now, and run away, run back toward that distant speck of light, and the daylight beyond.

But it was too late. The gloom of the building held him in its rapture, and though there was nothing but darkness below, he knew he had no choice but to continue down the stairs.

He started down the steps, straining to see into a blackness that seemed to go on forever.

There was a mustiness in the air below, and something else — some faint odor he couldn’t quite identify, but that seemed oddly familiar.

He came to the bottom of the stairs, and stopped, terrified.

Again, he wanted to turn around, turn away from the evil he felt in the darkness, but he knew he wouldn’t.

Knew he couldn’t.

Then he heard a sound — barely distinguishable.

He listened, straining his ears.

Was it real, or had he only imagined it?

He heard it again.

Some kind of animal. It had to be. A rat, perhaps, or maybe only a mouse.

Or was it something else, something unreal?

A voice, whispering to him so quietly he couldn’t make out the words, calling to him, luring him on into the darkness and the unknown.…

The strange odor grew stronger, its acridity burning in his nostrils.

He stepped off the last stair, and began groping his way through the darkness.

He thought he could feel unseen hands guiding him, feel a strange force drawing him on.

And then, though he could still see nothing, he sensed a presence.

It was close to him — too close.

“Who—” he began, but his question was cut off as something struck him from behind. Staggering, he pitched forward, his balance gone, then tried to break his fall by throwing his arms in front of him.

But it was too late, and even as he fell, he knew it.

He opened his mouth to scream, but his throat felt choked, as though strangling hands held him in a deadly grip. No sound emerged from his throat.

In an instant that seemed to go on forever, he felt a coldness slide through his clothing, piercing his skin, an icy pain that slipped between his ribs deep into his chest.

The object — the thing; the unidentifiable evil — plunged into his heart, and he felt himself begin to die.

And as he died, he slowly recognized the familiar odor that had filled his nostrils.

Smoke.

For some reason, in that long-abandoned basement, he smelled smoke.…

Then, as the last vestiges of life drained from his body, he saw flames flickering out from beneath the stairway, and in the faint remnants of his consciousaess, he heard laughter.

Laughter, mixed with screams of terror.

The laughter and the screams closed in on him, growing louder and louder, mingling with the ice-cold pain until there was nothing but blackness. And for the boy, the terror was over.…

Rain at a funeral is a cliché, Carolyn Sturgess reflected as she gazed abstractedly out the window of the limousine that moved slowly through the streets of Westover. Though it was June, the day was chilly, with a dampness that seemed to seep into the bones. Ahead, through the divider window and the streaked windshield beyond, she could see the car carrying her husband, her mother-in-law, and her stepdaughter, and ahead of that — barely visible — the hearse bearing the body of her father-in-law. Carolyn shuddered, feeling chilled.

Barely visible.

The words, she realized, described Conrad Sturgess perfectly, at least in his last years. For more than a decade, he had seldom left the mansion on the hill above the town, seldom been seen in the streets of the village that his family had dominated for more than a century. But despite his reclusiveness, the old man had still been a presence in Westover, and Carolyn found herself wondering how the village would change, now that Conrad Sturgess was dead.

As the long black car turned left on Church Street, Carolyn glanced back at the small crowd that still lingered in front of the white-clapboard Episcopal church that stood facing the square, its sober New England facade seeming to glare with faint disapproval at the small business district that squatted defensively on the other side of the worn patch of lawn beyond the bronze statue of a long-forgotten Revolutionary hero that gazed out from the middle of the square.

“Will any of them come up to Hilltop for the other service?”

Her daughter’s voice interrupted her reverie, and Carolyn reached over to give Beth’s hand an affectionate squeeze. “The interment,” she automatically corrected.

“The interment,” Beth Rogers repeated, her brows furrowing as she concentrated on getting the word exactly right. She pictured the look of scorn she would get from Tracy Sturgess, her stepsister, if she mispronounced it later. Not, she told herself, that she cared what Tracy Sturgess thought, but she still hated it when Tracy and her friends laughed at her. Just because Tracy was almost thirteen, and went to private school, didn’t make her any better than Beth. After all, she was almost twelve herself. “How come they call it that? An … interment?”

“Because that’s what it is,” Carolyn explained. “Anyway, that’s what Abigail calls it, so that’s what we must call it, too. After all, we’re Sturgesses now, aren’t we?”

“I’m not,” Beth said, her brown eyes darkening in exactly the same way her father’s did when he got angry. “I’m still Beth Rogers, and I always will be. I don’t want to be a Sturgess!”

Oh, Lord, Carolyn thought. Here we go again. When would she learn to stop trying to convince her daughter to accept Phillip Sturgess as her father? And why, really, should Beth transfer her affection to her stepfather, when her real father still lived right here in Westover, and she saw him every day? She wished, though she’d never say it, that Alan Rogers would simply disappear from the face of the earth. Or at least from Westover, Massachusetts. “Of course you are,” she said aloud. “Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what you call it, because an interment and a burial are the same thing. Okay?”

“Well, are the other people from the church coming?”

Carolyn shook her head. “The service at Hilltop is only for family and our closest friends.”

“But we know everybody who was there,” Beth replied, her voice reflecting her puzzlement. “Why can’t they all come?”

“Because—” Carolyn floundered for a moment, knowing that whatever she said, Beth would immediately see through her words and grasp the truth of the matter. “Because they aren’t all friends of the Sturgesses,” she ventured.

“You mean they aren’t all rich,” Beth replied.

Bingo! Carolyn thought. And there was no point in trying to deny it, at least not to Beth.