John Saul - Hellfire

“Why?” Phillip echoed. His eyes looked haunted now, and there was a hollowness to his voice that frightened Carolyn.

“It’s in the book,” she said softly. “It’s all in the little book I found in Beth’s room.”

Phillip shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a diary, Phillip,” Carolyn explained. She picked the small leather-bound volume up from the table next to Phillip’s chair and put it into his hands. “It must have been your greatgrandfather’s. Hannah says she’s seen it before. Your father used to read it, and Hannah thinks he kept it in a metal box in his closet.”

Phillip nodded numbly. “A brown one — I never knew what was in it.”

“That’s the one,” Carolyn replied. “Hannah found it in Beth’s closet right after you left.”

“But how did it—?”

“It doesn’t matter how it got into Beth’s room. What matters is what was in the diary. It … it tells what happened at the mill. There was a fire, Phillip.”

Phillip’s eyes widened slightly, but he said nothing.

“There was a fire in a workroom downstairs.”

“The little room under the loading dock,” Phillip muttered almost to himself. “The one behind the stairs.”

Carolyn gasped. “You knew about the fire?”

“No,” Phillip breathed. “No, I’m sure I didn’t. But one day I was down in the basement with Alan. We were looking at the foundation. And right at the bottom of the stairs, I smelled something. It was strange. It was very faint, but it smelled smoky. As if something had burned there once.”

“It did burn,” Carolyn whispered. Now she took Phillip’s hand in her own. “Phillip, children died down there.”

Phillip’s eyes fixed blankly on his wife. “Died?”

Carolyn nodded. “And one of the children who died there was your greatgrandfather’s daughter.”

Phillip looked dazed, then slowly shook his head. “That … that isn’t possible. Tracy is the first girl we’ve ever had in the family.”

Carolyn squeezed his hand once more. “Phillip, it’s in the diary. There was a little girl — your greatgrandfather’s daughter by one of the women in the village. Her name — the child’s name — was Amelia.”

“Amelia?” Phillip echoed. “That … that doesn’t make sense. I’ve never heard of such a story.”

“He never acknowledged her,” Carolyn told him. “Apparently he never told a soul, but he admitted it in his diary. And she was working in the mill the day of the fire.”

Phillip’s face was ashen now. “I … I can’t believe it.”

“But it’s there,” Carolyn insisted, her voice suddenly quiet. “Her name was Amelia, but everybody called her … Amy.”

Phillip’s face suddenly turned gray. “My God,” he whispered. “There really was an Amy.”

“And there’s something else,” Carolyn added. “According to the journal, Amy used her mother’s last name. It — Phillip, her name was Deaver. Amy Deaver.”

Phillip’s eyes met hers. The only Deavers who had ever lived in Westover were Carolyn’s family. “Did you know about this?” he asked now. “Did you know all this when you married me?”

Now it was Carolyn who shook her head. “I didn’t know, Phillip. I knew how my family felt about yours; I knew that long ago they’d lost a child in the mill. But who the child’s father was — no, I never heard that. I swear it.”

“What happened?” Phillip asked after a long silence. His voice was dull now, as if he already knew what he was about to hear. “Why didn’t the children get out?”

Carolyn hesitated, and when she finally spoke, her voice was so quiet Phillip had to strain to hear her. “He was there that day,” she said. “Samuel Pruett Sturgess. And when the fire broke out, he closed the fire door.”

“He did what?” Phillip demanded.

Carolyn nodded miserably. “Phillip, it’s all in the diary, in his own handwriting. He closed the fire door, and let all those children burn to death. Even his own daughter. He let them burn to death to save the mill!”

“My God,” Phillip groaned. He was silent for a moment, trying to absorb what Carolyn had just told him. The story was almost impossible to believe — the cruelty of it too monumental for him to accept. And yet he knew it was true — knew it was the secret that had finally driven his father mad.

Even his mother, at the end of her life, had discovered the tale, and accepted its truth.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said at last. “I never have. I never will.”

“I don’t either,” Carolyn agreed. “But I keep thinking about it. The children, caught in a fire. Tonight, our children, caught in a fire. And the other people who have died in the mill. Your brother. And Jeff Bailey. The Baileys had an interest in the mill once, didn’t they?”

Phillip nodded reluctantly. “But what about Alan?”

“The reconstruction,” Carolyn whispered. “Don’t you see? Your father was right. The project never should have started to begin with.”

Phillip’s head swung around, and his eyes met hers. “And what about Beth?” he asked. “What did she do to deserve what happened tonight?”

At last Carolyn’s tears began to flow. “I don’t know,” she said through her sobs. “She was such a sweet child. I … I just don’t know!”

Phillip put his arms around his wife, and tried to comfort her. “It was an accident, darling,” he whispered softly. “I know how it all seems now, but whatever happened tonight, it couldn’t have had anything to do with what happened a hundred years ago. It was just a terrible accident. We have to believe that.”

We have to , he repeated to himself. If we don’t, we’ll have to spend the rest of our lives waiting for it all to start again .

And then, against his will, a picture of his daughter came into his mind.

Alan Rogers had died, and she’d gazed into the mill at the broken body of Beth’s father.

Her eyes had glittered with malicious hatred, and her lips had been twisted into a satisfied smile.

He held his wife closer, and shut his eyes, but still the vision lingered.

Late the next afternoon, both Phillip and Carolyn stood with Norm Adcock as a pair of workmen pried away the metal plate that had covered one face of the loading-dock wall for the last hundred years.

Samuel Pruett Sturgess, in the last pages of his diary, wrote of the metal plate, and his hopes that it would seal the room from the outside, as the firmly bolted metal door sealed it from the inside. It was his intention, in the last days of his life, that no one ever enter the workroom behind the basement stairs again.

Grayish wisps of ash still drifted toward the sky from the smoking ruin, and its heat still caused a shimmering in the summer air.

The men, their shirts stripped off against the combined heat of the sun and the fire, worked quickly, using a cold chisel and a maul to break away the bolts that secured the metal to the concrete of the dock. At last it fell away, and the window, its glass long ago broken out of the frames, was exposed to the sunlight for the first time in a century. The workmen stepped back, and Norm Adcock, with Phillip at his side, moved forward.

Residual heat drifted from the room, but when Adcock reached out and gingerly touched the concrete itself, he realized that it was no longer too hot to go inside. He dropped to his knees, and shone a flashlight inside.

At first he thought the room was empty. Opposite the window, he could see the remains of the metal door, twisted and buckled by the intensity of the heat that had all but destroyed it, hanging grotesquely from its broken support rail.

He worked the light back and forth, examining the floor.