Hellfire

by John Saul

  “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.

  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.

  Epilogue

  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.

  Carolyn came to an intersecting path, and turned left, following the well-worn trail she had once used nearly every day. Since spring, though, she had found herself coming here less frequently. Indeed, she realized as she came into the little meadow where both Beth and Tracy were buried, it had been almost two weeks since she had been here last.

  Now, as she slowly approached the graves that lay flanking the slight depression where Amy’s bones had once been buried, she remembered the funeral that had taken place here last summer.

  There had been no question of separate funerals for the two girls—they had been bound too closely together by their deaths.

  Almost all of Westover had been there that day, and both Carolyn and Phillip had come to realize that their tragic loss had not been totally in vain. Though nothing had been spoken, there was a feeling that the funeral for the two young girls marked a turning point for the town, a final severing of its ties to the past, a laying to rest of the last vestiges of resentment toward the Sturgesses and the other old families who had once controlled the lives of the townspeople.

  After the service there had been a reception on the front lawn, for even the mansion itself had not been large enough to hold the crowd. And as Carolyn and Phillip had moved through the throng of people, accepting the condolences that were that day genuinely offered, they began to sense the healing that was taking place.

  It was that night that they had decided to build a park on the site of the mill, and donate it to the town. Then, during the weeks when the park was being built and the charred remnants of the mill were being obliterated, they had discussed the naming of the park.

  It was Phillip who finally suggested they dedicate it to the memory of Alan Rogers, and Carolyn had immediately concurred. It seemed fitting that the Sturgess name would no longer be associated with that part of Westover.

  Carolyn gathered a few wildflowers, and placed them as she always did between the two graves where Beth and Tracy lay. As always, she wondered fleetingly what had really transpired in the basement of the mill the night the girls had died, but she had never asked Phillip what he’d seen in the little room beneath the loading dock, nor had he ever volunteered to tell her. Though she knew in her heart that it was a fiction, she liked to believe that they had simply gone out together on what was intended to be nothing more than an adolescent adventure, an adventure that had gone disastrously wrong.

  The truth, she knew, was something too painful for her to bear.

  She turned away from the graves, and started back to the house, putting the past behind her.

  “We’re only going on a picnic,” Phillip observed wryly as he watched Carolyn pack the immense basket with more things than he could imagine her finding a use for. “It’s not as though we’re going to be gone for a week.”

  “Babies may be small, but they’re great little consumers,” Carolyn replied placidly, adding two more diapers, and a stuffed bear that was even bigger than their child to the contents of the already overfilled basket. “Besides,” she added, “didn’t I hear you telling Hannah to put two extra cases of beer in the car?”

  “I don’t want to run out, do I?”

  “Heaven forbid. Of course some people might suspect you of trying to buy votes with beer, but I suppose it’s better than just handing out money.” She finished with the basket, and tried to close its lid, which seemed to be impossible. “Here,” she said, hefting the basket and handing it to Phillip. “It’ll be good for your image if you’re seen dragging baby stuff around the park. Gives you the domestic look.”

  “That, I suppose, is as opposed to the idly arrogant look of the old aristocracy?” Phillip asked as he took the basket.

  “Whatever. Take it down and put it in the car, and I’ll bring the baby. And if you want to kiss her, do it now. I won’t have you kissing every other baby in town, then bringing the germs back to your own daughter.”

  “Candidates for alderman don’t kiss babies,” Phillip sniffed good-naturedly. “That’s strictly state and federal stuff. See you downstairs.”

  Alderman, Carolyn thought as she picked the baby up from the crib and began wrapping the blanket carefully around the little girl’s robust body. Who ever would have thought a Sturgess could run for alderman? Yet it had happened, and not through any effort on Phillip’s part. Rather, a delegation of merchants had come to him back in December, while Carolyn was still in the hospital after delivering their baby, and afte
r a great deal of awkward hemming and hawing (which Phillip had delighted in detailing for her the next day) had finally informed him that they had met among themselves and decided that what Westover needed was an alderman who had the time to make tending to the town business a full-time job. And it had to be someone with some business sense, and strong ties to the town. After giving it due consideration, they had come to the conclusion that Phillip Sturgess was the man they wanted.

  Phillip had been shocked. He’d noticed that since the funerals for his daughter and stepdaughter, the attitudes of the townspeople had changed. They spoke to him now whenever he went down to the village, stopping to pass the time of day with him as they did with each other.

  Conversations no longer eased when he came near. Instead, circles widened to include him.

  The same thing had happened to Carolyn.

  It was as if the town, recognizing that even the Sturgesses were not immune to tragedy, had closed ranks around them.

  And now they wanted Phillip to lead them.

  When they arrived at the park twenty minutes later, they found that Phillip did not, after all, have to put on the great display of domesticity that Carolyn had threatened him with. Instead, Norm Adcock grabbed the basket of baby supplies, while four of his men unloaded the beer.

  Eileen Russell appeared out of the crowd, and pulled open the front door of the Mercedes, reaching in to take the baby from Carolyn.

  “I swear to God, Carolyn,” she said as the other woman released the seat belt and got out, “if you don’t start using that baby seat I gave you, something horrible is going to happen to Amy.”

  Then her face turned scarlet as she realized what she’d said, but Carolyn—as she always did at moments like this—ignored the gaffe, knowing it had been unintentional.

  “When she gets older, she goes in the seat. For now, I just prefer to hold her.” Then she took Amy back, cradling her gently in her arms.

  Amy.