John Saul: Hellfire

The car turned again, and Carolyn glanced out the window to see the bleak form of the old shoe factory — the building everyone in Westover referred to as “the mill”—looming above Prospect Street, its soot-covered red bricks giving it an even more forbidding appearance than its bleak nineteenth-century architecture had intended.

Carolyn, as always, felt a slight shudder pass through her body at the sight of the mill, and quickly looked away. Then it was gone, and the village was left behind as the cortege moved out River Road to begin winding its way up the long narrow lane that led to Hilltop.

“Mom?” Beth suddenly asked, interrupting the silence that had fallen over the big car. “What’s going to happen, now that—” She hesitated for a moment, then used the term her mother had asked her to use. Until today she had refused to utter it. “—now that Uncle Conrad’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” Carolyn replied. “I suppose everything will go on just as it always has.”

But of course she knew it wasn’t true. She knew that without Conrad Sturgess silently controlling his family’s interests from the privacy of his den, everything in Westover was going to change.

And she knew that she, at least, wasn’t going to like the changes. As the limousine pulled through the gates of Hilltop, she remembered the old adage about sleeping dogs.

Her husband, she knew, had no intention of letting them lie.

The six pallbearers carried the casket containing Conrad Sturgess’s body slowly up a narrow path through the forest. Behind the casket, Abigail Sturgess walked alone, head held high, unmindful of the rain that still fell in a dense drizzle. Though she leaned heavily on a cane, her back was as stiffly erect as ever. Behind her walked her son, Phillip, with Carolyn on his arm. Following the couple were their two children, Beth Rogers and Tracy Sturgess. Then, bringing up the rear of the short procession, came the mourners: the Kilpatricks and the Baileys, the Babcocks and the Adamses — the old families whose ties to the Sturgesses went back through the generations.

The cortege rounded a bend in the trail, and came to a sudden stop as Abigail Sturgess paused for a moment to gaze at the wrought-iron grillwork that arched over the path.

Two words were worked into the pattern:

ETERNAL VIGILANCE

She seemed to consider the words for a few moments, then walked on. A few minutes later, Conrad Sturgess, followed by his family and friends, arrived at the spot he had always known would be his final resting place.

Worked carefully into the earth, and covered with moss, there was a short flight of stone steps. At the top of the steps, looming out of the forest like some sort of strange temple, stood the Sturgess-family mausoleum.

The structure was circular, and made entirely of pale pink marble. There were seven columns, each of them nearly twenty feet high, topped by a marble ring that was almost fifty feet across. All around, the forest seemed to be crowding in on the strange edifice, and only a few rays of sunlight ever glinted on the polished marble. Today the lowering skies seemed to hover only a few feet above the strange monument, and the stone, slick with rain, seemed to have had its color washed away.

Six of the columns were in perfect condition.

The seventh pillar was broken; all that remained of it was its base, and the top two feet, hanging oddly from the surmounting marble drum.

In the center of the circle of columns, on a marble floor, stood a large round marble table, with space around it for seven marble chairs.

Six of the chairs were there.

The seventh place at the table, the place with the broken pillar behind it, was empty.

Beth, her eyes glued to her mother’s back, climbed the steps uncertainly. She’d been here before, but always before the mausoleum had seemed to her to be nothing more than some strange ruin from the past. But today it was different, and she felt a chill pass through her as she stepped between two of the columns and found herself inside the stone ring.

She glanced nervously around, but everyone else seemed to know exactly what to do. The mourners, all of them clad in black, the women’s faces veiled, had spread themselves in a semicircle around the chairs. The pallbearers placed the coffin carefully on a bier that stood at the empty seventh place. Abigail Sturgess, her face impassive, stood behind the coffin, gazing at the massive stone chair that stood opposite.

Beth’s eyes shifted to the back of the marble chair upon which the old woman’s eyes were fixed.

On the back of the chair, chiseled deep into the marble, was an inscription:

SAMUEL PRUETT STURGESS

MAY 3, 1822–AUGUST 12, 1890

Beth’s hand reached out and took her mother’s. She tugged gently, and when Carolyn leaned down, the little girl whispered in her ear.

“What’s she doing?” she asked.

“She’s presenting Conrad to his grandfather,” Carolyn whispered back.

“Why?”

“It’s a tradition, sweetheart,” Carolyn replied, glancing nervously around. But it was all right — no one seemed to notice them at all.

Beth frowned slightly. Why were they “presenting” Uncle Conrad to old Mr. Sturgess? It didn’t make any sense to her. She tugged at her mother’s hand once more, but this time her mother only looked down at her, holding a finger to her lips and shaking her head.

Silently, wishing she were somewhere else — anywhere else — Beth watched the rest of the service. The minister’s voice droned on, repeating everything he’d said about Conrad Sturgess in the church only half an hour ago, and Beth wondered if this time he was telling Samuel Pruett Sturgess about Uncle Conrad. Then she began looking around at all the unfamiliar faces of the people around her.

None of them were the people she’d known all her life, the people she’d known when her mother and father were married. They were all strangers, and she knew that they were somehow different from her.

It wasn’t that they were rich, even though she knew they were. They all lived in big houses, like Hilltop, though none was quite so grand as Hilltop itself.

It was the way they acted.

Like this morning, before the funeral, when she’d been sitting by herself in the breakfast room, and one of them — she thought it was Mrs. Kilpatrick — had come in, and smiled at her. It had been a nice smile, and for a minute Beth had hoped she and the woman might be friends.

“And a good morning to you, young lady,” the woman had said. “I don’t believe we’ve met, have we?”

Beth had shaken her head shyly, and offered the woman her hand. “I’m Beth Rogers.”

“Rogers?” the woman had repeated. “I don’t believe I know any Rogerses. Where are you from? Do I know your mother?”

Beth had nodded. “I live here. My mother’s—”

And then she’d seen the woman’s smile disappear, and her eyes, the eyes that had been so warm and sparkling a minute before, had suddenly turned cold. “Oh,” she’d said. “You’re Carolyn’s little girl, aren’t you? How nice.” Before Beth could say anything else, the woman had turned and silently left the room.

Now, Beth realized she must have been staring at the woman, for the woman — she was almost sure it was Mrs. Kilpatrick — was glaring at her. She felt her mother tugging at her arm, and realized that the service was over.

The pallbearers were carrying the casket down another flight of steps, and as Beth, walking beside her mother, followed Tracy and Phillip Sturgess — at old Abigail’s side now — she saw that there was a tiny cemetery in the forest behind the mausoleum. An open grave awaited, and Conrad Sturgess’s coffin was slowly lowered into it. Abigail Sturgess stepped forward, reached stiffly down to pick up a clod of sodden earth, and dropped it into the grave. Then she turned away, and began making her way back through the mausoleum, and down the path that led to the house.