John Saul - Hellfire

Everywhere he looked, there was nothing but blackness.

And then, at last, he shone the light straight down.

“Jesus,” he whispered, and immediately felt Phillip Sturgess’s grip tighten on his shoulder. “I’m not sure you’re going to want to look at this, Phillip,” he said quietly.

“They’re inside?”

Adcock withdrew his head from the window, and faced Phillip. “They’re there. But I really think you should let us take care of it. Take Carolyn home, Phillip. I’ll let you know if we find anything.”

Phillip hesitated, but finally shook his head. “I can’t. I have to see it for myself.” When Adcock seemed about to protest further, he spoke again. “Carolyn and I have talked about it,” he said. “And we decided that whatever is in there, I have to see it.”

Adcock’s brows rose. “Have to?”

“I’d rather not explain it,” Phillip said. “Frankly, I doubt that it would make much sense to you. But I do have to see what happened.”

Adcock weighed the matter in his mind, then reluctantly nodded. “Okay. I’ll have the men put the ladder in, then we can go down.”

When the ladder had been lowered, Adcock disappeared through the window. Phillip followed him. He carefully avoided looking down until he was on the floor and had stepped carefully away from the ladder. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the shadowy light of the little room, he let himself look at what Adcock had already seen.

The heat of the fire had all but destroyed the remains of the two girls.

Their clothes had burned, as had their hair. There were still fragments of skin clinging to the skulls, and the skeletons themselves were wrapped in the emaciated remains of the soft tissues of their bodies.

Phillip was reminded of photographs he’d seen of the Nazi concentration camps after the war. He struggled against the nausea that rose in his gorge, then made himself kneel, and reach out to touch what was left of his daughter.

Tracy’s body lay curled tightly, as if she’d died trying to protect herself against the heat.

Around her neck there was a chain, and attached to the chain, clutched in the bony remains of Tracy’s right hand, was a jade pendant that he recognized as having been his mother’s.

If it had not been for the pendant, he was sure he wouldn’t have known which of the hideous, almost mummified bodies was Tracy’s.

His gaze shifted to Beth’s body. It was stretched prone on the floor, one hand up; its fleshless fingers seemed to be reaching toward the window.

Slowly, he became aware of the marks on the wall. At first they were only a blur, almost lost in the blackness on which they had been smeared. But as he stared at them, they gradually began to take shape, and he realized that before the girls had died, one of them — he couldn’t be sure which one — had left a message. Now the message was clear.

It consisted of only one word: AMY.

“It looks like blood,” he heard Norm Adcock say. “There’s some more on the floor.” Then his voice dropped. “Phillip?”

“I’m listening,” Phillip replied.

“I can’t be sure, but right now I’d say only Tracy died from the heat. I think Beth was already dead before the fire started. Look.”

Reluctantly, Phillip made his eyes follow Adcock’s pointing finger.

Despite the damage done by the fire, the seared skin and the shrunken flesh, the marks were clearly there.

Either before, or just after she’d died, Beth Rogers had been hacked nearly to pieces.

Phillip groaned as he realized what it must mean; then his mind rejected the knowledge, and his body finally rebelled. He could fight the nausea no longer. His stomach heaving, and his throat already filling with the sour taste of bile, he retreated to the far corner of the room.

Ten minutes later, pale and shaking, but once again in control of himself, he emerged from the little room into the daylight outside. Carolyn was still there, standing where he’d left her, waiting for him. She looked at him, her eyes asking him a silent question.

He took her in his arms, and held her close. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s all over now.”

Carolyn shuddered, and let her tears flow freely. She felt numb, empty, as if she’d lost everything that she had loved.

But that’s not true, she insisted to herself.

I still have Phillip, and we still have our baby.

And then, for the first time, she felt their unborn child stir within her.

We’ll get through it , she told herself. We’ll get through it all, and we’ll survive. Whatever’s happened, we’ll survive .

She took Phillip’s hand and pressed it to her belly. “It’s not over, darling,” she whispered. “We just have to begin again. And we can. I know we can.”

Once again, the tiny child within her moved, and this time Phillip felt it, too.

Almost a year had passed.

On the morning of July 4, Carolyn Sturgess started across the lawn toward the two stone lions that flanked the path to the mausoleum. She walked at an easy pace, enjoying the warmth of the sun. The sky was a deep blue that morning, and nowhere was there even a trace of a cloud that might foreshadow an afternoon shower. The day, she knew, would be perfect.

She wished Beth were there to share it with her.

The pain of her loss had eased with the passage of time, and as she remembered her daughter today, there was only a dull ache to remind her of the terrible days of the previous summer. And even that ache, she was finally beginning to believe, would someday fade away.

She stepped into the shade of the path, and started up the gentle grade toward the top of the hill and the marble structure that guarded the remains of her husband’s ancestors. The light was different here, filtered into a soft green by the leaves of the trees above her head. Here and there the sun shone through, its rays dancing on specks of dust that hung in the air. A squirrel paused in the path a few yards ahead of her, sat up, and examined her with bright inquisitive eyes before darting up a tree to chatter angrily at her from a perch twelve feet up. Carolyn stopped to chatter back at the squirrel, laughing softly at the indignant thrashings of its tail. When the squirrel finally gave up its tirade and disappeared into the treetops, she moved on, coming at last to the mausoleum itself.

There was a seventh chair at the table now, and the broken pillar had at last been repaired. The addition of the chair and the new pillar had changed the feel of the monument, as well as its looks. No longer did it have an air of mystery to it, as if it were filled with unanswered — and unanswerable — questions. There was a completeness to it, as if the addition of the chair for Amy Deaver Sturgess had closed the family circle around Samuel Pruett Sturgess. Now he sat with his wife at his side, and his four sons flanking them. But directly opposite him now, providing a kind of symmetry, was his only daughter’s chair. And beyond her chair, the new pillar blocked the view of the place where the mill had stood for so many decades.

No longer would Samuel Pruett Sturgess spend eternity gazing at the source of both his wealth and his guilt. Now he would sit with his completed family, his long-denied daughter acknowledged at last. For Carolyn, the mausoleum had finally lost its feeling of the grotesque, and had become a place of peace.

She paused there that morning, then moved on down the trail that would eventually lead to the river. But that trail was no longer an overgrown tangle of weeds and fallen trees. It had been cleared and widened, and neat stone steps had been carefully installed to look as if they’d been there forever. So well had the work been executed that even the week after they had been laid the steps had blended perfectly into the hillside.