Hellfire

11

The morning was bright and cool, and as Beth came slowly awake, she had a strange feeling of peace. Her nightmare of a few hours earlier was almost forgotten, and she lay comfortably in bed, her eyes closed, planning the day. Maybe she and Peggy Russell—

And then, as always happened on mornings when she woke up feeling happy and relaxed, the feeling of contentment fled.

She remembered where she was.

She wasn’t back home in her bedroom on Cherry Street. She was still at Hilltop.

She was still at Hilltop, and she’d had a bad dream last night, in which she’d seen Jeff Bailey die.

Suddenly a shadow fell across her, and Beth’s eyes snapped open. A few feet away, between her and the window, stood Tracy Sturgess.

“I know what you did,” Tracy said, her voice so low that for a moment Beth wasn’t quite sure she’d spoken at all.

She sat up in bed, and instinctively pulled the covers up around her chest.

Tracy was glaring at her angrily, but there was something in the half-smile on her lips that Beth found even more frightening than the words she had spoken.

“D-did what?” she stammered. The clock on her nightstand told her that it was only seven A.M. “What are you doing here?”

“I know what you did,” Tracy repeated, louder this time. Now the smile widened into a malicious grin. “You killed Jeff, didn’t you? You sneaked into the mill yesterday, and when he came down the stairs, you killed him.”

Beth’s eyes widened. “No — I—”

“I heard you,” Tracy pressed. “Last night, when you were talking to your mother, I was out in the hall. And I heard everything you said!” There was a taunting lilt to her voice now that made Beth cower back against the headboard, clutching the covers even tighter.

“But I didn’t do anything,” she protested. “It was only a dream.”

Tracy’s eyes narrowed. “It wasn’t either a dream. You just made that up to tell your mother. And she’s dumb enough to believe you. But I’m not. And wait’ll I tell my father!”

“Tell him what?” Beth asked.

“That you’re crazy, and you killed Jeff Bailey just because he was teasing you at my party.”

“But I didn’t kill him,” Beth said, her heart suddenly beating harder. “It … it was Amy who killed him.”

Tracy’s lips twisted into a scornful sneer. “Amy? You mean the ghost in the mill you were talking about?”

Beth nodded mutely.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Tracy told her. “All you did was make up a story. But no one’s going to believe you!”

“But it’s true,” Beth suddenly flared. “Amy’s real, and she’s my friend, and all she did was just try to help me. And if you don’t watch out, maybe she’ll kill you, too!”

$$ washed away by her anger. “And you get out of my room.”

“It’s not your room,” Tracy replied. “This is my house, and if I wanted to, I could take this room away from you. You shouldn’t even be on this floor anyway — you should be upstairs where the servants used to live, because that’s all you’re good for.”

“You take that back!” Beth shouted. She was out of the bed now, standing in her pajamas, her fists clenched.

“I won’t take it back!” Tracy shouted. “I hate you, and I hate your mother, and I wish both of you were dead!” Suddenly she threw herself at Beth, her fingers reaching out to grab Beth’s hair.

Beth ducked and tried to twist away, but it was too late. Tracy’s body hurtled into her own, and she fell to the floor with Tracy on top of her. Then she felt Tracy’s hands grabbing at her hair, pulling and jerking at it. With a violent lurch, she managed to roll over, and covered her face with her arms.

“I’ll kill you!” she heard Tracy screaming.

And then, just as she was expecting Tracy to start clawing at her, she heard another voice.

“Beth? Beth, are you all — My God, what’s happening in here?” A second later she felt Tracy’s weight being lifted off her and opened her eyes to see her mother staring down at her.

And beyond her mother, she saw her stepfather, his hand clamped tightly on Tracy’s forearm. Wiping at her face with one hand, she pulled herself together, then got to her feet.

“What on earth were you doing?” she heard her mother demand. “What’s going on?”

Beth glanced at Tracy out of the corner of her eye, then shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “She … she wanted me to shut off my radio, and I wouldn’t do it.”

Carolyn turned to Tracy. “Well? Is that true?”

Tracy’s chin jutted out, and she glared at Carolyn. “I don’t have to answer you! You’re not my mother!” Then she winced as her father’s hand tightened on her arm.

“You do have to answer Carolyn,” Phillip said, his voice calm but firm. “It’s true that she’s not your mother, but she’s my wife, and you will respect that. Now, is what Beth said the truth?”

Tracy remained silent for another few seconds, her eyes flashing venomously at Beth. “No!” she said at last. “She didn’t even have her dumb radio on! She was threatening to kill me, just like she already killed Jeff Bailey!”

As Beth’s eyes widened, and her skin turned ashen, a silence fell over the room. Both Phillip and Carolyn stared at Tracy in shocked horror.

It was Phillip who finally spoke. “The only threat I heard was yours. Now, go to your room, and stay there until either Carolyn or I tell you to come out. And in the future, stay out of Beth’s room unless she invites you in.”

“It’s not her room—” Tracy protested, but her father let her go no further.

“That’s enough, Tracy!”

Tracy’s eyes glittered angrily, but she said nothing more. She stamped out of the room, slamming the door behind her. When she was gone, Carolyn sat down on the edge of the bed, and motioned Beth to join her.

“Did you threaten to kill Tracy?” she asked.

Beth hesitated, then nodded silently.

“But why?”

Beth’s chin trembled, but she managed to keep herself under control. “B-because she said I killed Jeff Bailey,” she whispered. “She came in, and said she knew what I did, and that she was going to tell Uncle Phillip.”

“But you didn’t do anything,” Phillip interjected. “What did she think she knew?”

“She was listening last night when I was talking to Mom,” Beth explained. “She heard me telling Mom about my dream, and said I was just making it all up.”

Phillip’s eyes darkened. “I see,” he said. Then: “Excuse me, Carolyn. I think it’s time my daughter and I had a private talk.”

Before Carolyn could protest, he was gone. Beth, her eyes damp, looked up at her mother. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

“So am I, darling,” Carolyn replied. “I wish you and Tracy didn’t fight and I’m sorry she’s so mean to you. I guess you’ll just have to do the same thing with Tracy that I do with Abigail. No matter what she says, and how much it hurts, you have to ignore it. After a while, if you don’t react, it won’t be any fun for Tracy anymore, and she’ll stop.”

“But why does she hate me?” Beth asked. “I never did anything to her.”

Carolyn put her arms around her daughter, and drew her close. “It’s not you, honey. That’s what you have to understand. Right now, she’d be just as mean to anybody else who was living here. She’s afraid we’re going to take her father away from her, that’s all.”

“But I don’t want to do that,” Beth replied. “I already have a father. Doesn’t she know that?”

“Of course she does.” Carolyn rose from the bed and started toward the door. “But you have to understand that what Tracy knows doesn’t really matter right now. It’s what she feels. And she’s still very angry that her father married me. So she’s taking it out on you.”

“But … but that’s not fair,” Beth said, unconsciously echoing the words Tracy had used only a few moments before.

“I know it,” Carolyn agreed. “But that’s the way life is. It isn’t always fair, and it doesn’t always make sense. But we still have to do the best we can.” She smiled fondly at the little girl. “So why don’t we forget all this and get dressed and go down to breakfast. Okay?”

Beth nodded. She said nothing, but when her mother had gone, instead of going to her closet to begin dressing, she went to the window, and gazed down over the village to the mill.

In the depths of her mind, Tracy’s words still reverberated.

I know what you did.

Was it possible? Was it possible that just as she had seen Amy in the dream last night, seen Amy pushing Jeff, making him fall on the pick …

She shuddered slightly, and turned away from the window.

But still the thought lurked in her mind. What if Tracy was right? What if there were no Amy?

But there had to be. If Amy wasn’t real, if she hadn’t heard her, if she hadn’t seen her in the dream, then that meant—

She shut the thought out of her mind, for if there were no Amy, then maybe Tracy was right.

Maybe she, Beth, really had killed Jeff.

But she wouldn’t have … she couldn’t have.…

Alan Rogers glanced at his watch, then signaled to the foreman to call the lunch hour. As the workmen moved from the heat of the day into the relative coolness of the mill itself, Alan began his normal twice-daily inspection of the job. He had found out long ago that it was impossible to hire workers with standards as high as his own, but he’d also understood that he couldn’t demand as much of his crews as he demanded of himself. They, after all, were working for an hourly wage, and didn’t share his fanaticism for getting things done right. To them, a job was a job, and what counted was the hours put in. For Alan, the work itself was more important than the money he earned. His satisfaction in getting the job done right usually outstripped his interest in squeezing out the last dollar of profit.

Today the work was going well. Already all the fence posts were in place, and by this afternoon, with any luck at all, the fence should be complete. It wouldn’t be pretty — nothing more than sheets of plywood hastily nailed to the posts and stringers, but it would be effective. Tomorrow they could get back to the real work — the reconstruction.

He had come to the last post, and was about to join the rest of the crew in the shadowy interior, when he heard Beth calling to him. He looked up to see his daughter pedaling her bicycle furiously along River Road, leaning into the turn at Prospect Street with a lot more courage than Alan himself would have had, then jumping it up the curb as she barreled onto the grounds of the mill itself. As he watched, the rear wheel of the bike lost its traction and began to skid out of control, but Beth merely put a foot down, pivoted the bicycle in a neat Brodie, and came to a stop in front of him, grinning.

“Pretty good, hunh?”

Alan nodded appreciatively. “Very neat. But if you break your neck, don’t coming whining to me. You’re nuts.”

“Didn’t you ever Brodie your bike when you were a kid?”

“Of course I did,” Alan agreed. “And I was nuts, too. So what brings you down here?”

“I came down to have lunch with you,” Beth replied, holding up a brown bag that she’d fished out of the pouch slung under the racing seat on the bike. “Hannah made me some sandwiches. Peanut butter and jelly. Want one?”

“I might swap you for a tuna fish.”

Beth made a face. “I hate tuna fish. Is that all you have?”

Alan chuckled. “Don’t get picky. It may be tuna fish, but I made it myself.”

“Big deal,” Beth replied, rolling her eyes. “You probably icked it all up with mayonnaise, didn’t you?”

Alan regarded his daughter with mock exasperation. “If you only came down here to pick on me, you can go right back home. I don’t need any grief from any eleven-year-old smart-asses, thank you very much!”

Beth stuck out her tongue, but when Alan started back toward the mill, she followed along behind him. Grabbing a hard hat from the portable site shack, Alan dropped it over her head, then stepped aside to let her precede him through the door into the vast building. Beth promptly took the hat off, adjusted the headband so it wouldn’t sink down over her eyes, then put it back on.

As soon as she stepped inside, her eyes went to the stairs at the far end of the mill.

“No,” Alan said, as if reading her mind. “You can’t go down there.”

Beth’s brow furrowed. “Why not? I just want to look.”

“Because it’s morbid,” Alan told her. He opened his lunchbox and pulled out a sandwich, offering Beth half. She shook her head.

“But all I want to do is see where it happened,” she pressed. “What’s wrong with that?”

Alan sighed, knowing there was really no way to explain it to her. If he’d been her age, he’d have been dying to see the spot where the accident had happened, too. This morning, as he’d expected, there had been a steady stream of kids coming by the mill, some of them stopping to stare, others trying to look as though the last thing in the world they had come to see was the place where someone had died the day before. “There isn’t any reason for you to see it,” he said. “There’s nothing there, anyway.”

“Not even any blood?” Beth asked with innocent curiosity.

Alan swallowed, then concentrated on the sandwich, though he was suddenly losing his appetite for it. “Why don’t we talk about something else? How’s everybody up at your house?” Beth’s eyes clouded, and Alan immediately knew that something had gone wrong that morning. “Want to talk about it?”

His daughter glanced at him, then shrugged. “It wasn’t any big deal,” she said. “I just had a fight with Tracy, that’s all.”

“Is that why you came down here? ’Cause things got too rough up there?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, there isn’t anyone home. They went over to the Baileys’.”

“All of them?”

“Mom and Uncle Phillip. Tracy’s got some friends over. And they’re all talking about what happened to Jeff.”

So much for changing the subject, Alan thought. And then, suddenly, he thought he understood. “Might be kind of neat if you could go back and tell ’em all what the spot looks like, hunh?”

Beth’s eyes widened slightly. “Could I? Could I go down there just for a minute?”

Helplessly, Alan gave in. “All right. After lunch, I’ll take you down. But just for a minute. Promise?”

Beth nodded solemnly. “I promise.”

With the darkness washed away by the blazing worklights, the basement looked nothing like it had before. It was simply a vast expanse of space, very much like the main floor, except that down here the space was broken by the many columns that supported the floor above. As she looked out into the basement, Beth could hardly remember how terrifying it had been when it was dark. Now there was nothing frightening about it at all.

Except for the spot on the floor.

It was a slightly reddish brown, and spread from a spot a few yards from the bottom of the stairs. It looked to Beth as though someone had tried to clean it up, but there was still a lot left, soaked into the wooden floor.

Still, if her father hadn’t told her what it was, she wasn’t sure she would have known. Somehow, she had sort of expected it to be bright red, and glistening.

She stared at the spot for several long seconds, searching her mind for a memory.

But all that was there was the memory of the dream.

Surely, if she had killed Jeff herself, seeing the place where she had done it would have brought it all back.

And then, as she was about to turn away, her eyes scanned the rear wall, under the stairs. She frowned, then tugged at her father’s arm. “What’s that?” she asked.

Alan’s eyes followed his daughter’s pointing finger. For a moment he saw nothing — just a blank wall. Then, as he looked again, he realized that under the stairs the wall wasn’t made out of concrete.

It looked to him like it was made out of metal.

He stepped into the shadows below the stairs, and took a closer look.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said softly.

“What is it, Daddy?” Beth asked. Suddenly her heart skipped a beat and she felt a slight thrill of anticipation.

“It looks like some kind of fire door,” Alan replied. He reached up and felt in the darkness, and his fingers found a rail bolted to the concrete behind the metal. Moving his hands along the rail, he came to a metal roller.

He pounded on the metal, and heard a low echoing sound.

“Is it hollow?” Beth asked.

Alan nodded. “It sure seems like it’s some kind of fire door. Give me a hand, and we’ll see if we can open it.”

Gingerly, Alan felt for the end of the door nearest the staircase, and curled his fingers around its edge. Then he leaned his weight into it, and tugged.

The door didn’t budge.

Frowning, he stepped back, surveyed the door, then moved to the other end.

Near the ceiling, he found what he was looking for. A metal pin, protruding from the concrete. When he tried to remove it, it too held fast.

“What is it, Daddy?” Beth asked.

“Don’t know,” Alan muttered. “And it’s going to take a couple of wrenches to find out.”

“Is there another room back there?”

“That’s what’s weird,” her father replied. “According to the plans I have, all that’s back there is the loading dock, and it’s supposed to be solid concrete.”

“Then why would they need a fire door?”

“Good question. Unless it’s not a fire door. It might be something else entirely. I’ll be back in a minute.”

As her father trotted up the stairs, Beth stared at the strange, barely visible door in fascination.

There was a room behind the door — she was sure of it.

And she knew what the room was.

It was Amy’s room.

It was the room where Amy lived, and that’s why, when she’d heard the strange voice the other day, it had sounded so faint.

It had been muffled by the door.

She moved closer to the door, letting her imagination run free.

There could be anything behind the door. She imagined an old forgotten room, still filled with the kind of furniture they sold in antique stores. It was probably an office of some kind, so there would be desks, and maybe a big black leather chair. There might even be one of those old-fashioned braided rugs still on the floor.

It would all be covered with dust, but there would still be papers on the desks, and stuff in the wastebasket, for in Beth’s mind she was sure the room had simply been closed up one day, and forgotten. And then, when the mill had been closed, no one had even remembered that this room was there.

Suddenly she heard footsteps on the stairs, and her father reappeared, carrying a large monkey wrench.

“This should do it,” he said, giving her a conspiratorial wink. “All set?”

Beth nodded, and stood back while Alan adjusted the wrench to the pin, then applied pressure to it.

The pin held for a moment, then squealed, and slowly began to turn. With some further effort, it fell away, and once more Alan gripped the end of the metal door and leaned his weight into it.

This time the door groaned and moved slightly. After two more pulls its rusty rollers screeched in protest, and it slid reluctantly to one side.

Instantly, a rush of ice-cold air flowed out of the gap.

Beth froze, the chill seeming to cut through her, and she could feel goose bumps rippling her skin as the hair on her neck stood on end. It was as if something physical had emerged from whatever lay behind the door. Beth’s first instinct was to turn and run.

And then the blast of icy air stopped, almost as if it had never happened. She looked up at her father.

“What was that?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly.

“What?” Alan replied.

“The cold,” Beth explained. “Didn’t you feel the cold coming through the crack?”

Alan frowned slightly, then shook his head. “I didn’t feel anything at all.” He pulled on the door again, opening it far enough for them both to peer inside.

Alan shone his flashlight into the darkness beyond the metal door.

It was a room, perhaps twenty feet long and fifteen feet deep.

Its walls were blackened, and the floor was covered with a thick layer of dust.

It was completely empty.

Then, as Beth gazed around the long-forgotten room, she noticed a familiar odor in the stale air.

The little room smelled strongly of smoke.