Hellfire

19

The somnolence of summer had settled into Westover, and by August the town had taken on a wilted look. People moved slowly in the damp warmth of July, and slower still as August’s heat closed oppressively down on them.

For Beth, life had taken on a strange routine, each day much like the day before.

At first it had all been terribly confusing. The memory of Patches dying while she watched was still fresh in her mind — etched indelibly there, still waking her up in the middle of the night sometimes.

But the rest of that day had taken on a dreamlike quality. The sudden arrival of her father; the explanation that it had been decided that for a while, at least, she should live with him; the hasty packing of her bags; her departure from Hilltop with her father, barely aware of what was happening while she tried to figure out why it had happened.

Her father had tried to explain it to her, tried to tell her that while no one was blaming her for what had happened to Patches, it had just seemed better to all of them for her to live with him for a while. Mrs. Sturgess would be coming home, and her mother was pregnant, and Tracy …

His voice had trailed off after he’d mentioned Tracy’s name, but Beth had known what he meant. Hilltop was Tracy’s house, not hers, and they both couldn’t live there anymore. So she had to move out.

It wasn’t fair, but it was the way things were, and even at her age, Beth already knew that life was not always fair.

But living with her father had not turned out to be quite what she’d thought it would be, either. Before she’d moved in with him, they’d always gone out to dinner on the evenings she’d spent with him, and he’d always seemed to have lots of time to spend with her.

But now, when she was there all the time, it was different. She understood why — he had to go to work every day, and he couldn’t afford to take them both to restaurants every night. So they stayed home most evenings, and he cooked dinner for them, and the food wasn’t as good as the food Hannah had fixed at Hilltop. And her room was a lot smaller, and didn’t look out over the whole village. Instead, it looked out over a parking lot, and only a little corner of the mill was visible through a gap between two buildings across Fourth Street.

But at least Tracy wasn’t there, and that was good.

What wasn’t good was what had happened when she’d gone to see Peggy Russell. Peggy had only opened the door a few inches, and she hadn’t invited Beth to come in. Instead she’d said that she couldn’t play with Beth anymore, and that Beth better stay away from her house.

Beth, her eyes blurred with tears, had gone back home, but the emptiness of her father’s little apartment had made her feel even more lonesome than Peggy’s rejection. So she’d gone down to the mill, and spent the rest of the day there.

As the days had turned into weeks she’d tried to make friends again with the kids she’d known before she moved up to the top of the hill, but it hadn’t worked. All of them had heard about what had happened to Patches, and all of them had heard Peggy’s story about the grave up on the hillside, and about the fact that Beth thought the person who was buried there still lived in the mill. At first, they’d simply ignored her when she tried to make friends with them, but when she’d persisted, they’d started calling her names, and invented a nickname for her.

Crazy Bethy.

They called it out at her when she walked down the street, and if their parents were with them, and they couldn’t yell it out loud, they’d whisper to each other, and point at her.

Her father told her not to worry about it — that in a few weeks something else would come along, and the kids would forget all about it.

But Beth wasn’t at all sure that would ever happen.

She started spending more time at the mill, and finally it got so that the workmen expected her to be there, and stopped worrying about her every minute. They were always friendly to her, and she wandered around anywhere she wanted, watching them work, bringing them tools, sometimes even helping them.

It wasn’t so bad, really, except on the days that Phillip Sturgess came to inspect the progress of the work, and brought Tracy with him.

Phillip was always friendly to Beth, interested in how she was, and what she was doing.

But Tracy never spoke to her. Instead she just stared at her, a little smile on her mouth that told Beth she was laughing at her. Beth tried to pretend she didn’t care, but of course she did.

Sometimes, during the afternoons, she’d see Tracy outside, just standing there watching the mill, and Beth knew what she wanted.

She wanted to come inside, and go down into the basement.

But she couldn’t. All day there were people there, and at night, when everyone had gone home, the building was carefully closed up, and the padlock on the one gate in the fence was always checked twice.

But for Beth, going down to the basement, and the little room under the loading dock, was simple. No one ever missed her, and part of every day she spent sitting alone in the darkness of that room, feeling the presence of Amy, who was now her only real friend.

At first it had been a little bit scary being down there by herself. For a long time she’d always left the door open and kept her flashlight on, using its beam to search out every corner. But soon she’d decided there was nothing to fear in the darkness of the room, and began closing the door behind her, turning off the light, and imagining that Amy — a real Amy — was there with her.

After a while even the strange smoky odor of the room didn’t bother her anymore, and in late July, she’d brought an old blanket to the mill. Now she kept it in the little room, where sometimes she’d spread it out, then lie on it while she daydreamed about Amy.

She knew a lot about Amy now. She’d gone to the library, and found books about what the towns like Westover had been like a hundred years ago when Amy had been alive.

She’d read about children like Amy, who’d spent most of their lives in buildings like this, working all day long, then going home to little houses that had no heat, and no electricity, and no plumbing.

One day, she’d wandered around Westover, trying to decide which house Amy might have lived in.

Finally, in her own mind, she’d decided that Amy’s house was the one on Elm Street, right by the railroad tracks. Of course she knew that part of the reason she’d decided on that house was that her mother had showed it to her a long time ago, and told her that the house, abandoned now, its roof sagging and its windows broken, with weeds growing wild around its weathered walls, had once been her own family’s home, long ago, even before she herself had been born.

As Beth had stood on the cracked sidewalk that day, staring at it, imagining that this was where Amy had lived, she’d thought she could hear Amy’s voice whispering to her, telling her that she was right, that this was the place which had been her home.

Then she’d begun dreaming about Amy. The dreams came to her only when she was in the little room behind the stairs, and she wasn’t even sure they were really dreams, for she couldn’t remember being asleep when they came to her, nor could she remember waking up when they were over. Indeed, she decided that they weren’t dreams at all.

They were visions.

They were visits from Amy, who came to show her things, and tell her things.

She never talked to anyone about Amy’s visits. She’d learned by now not to talk about Amy to anyone. The one time she had, no one had believed her. And now everyone thought she was crazy.

Everyone, that is, except old Mrs. Sturgess, and Beth hadn’t seen her since the day after she’d gone to the hospital. Once Beth had gone back to visit her again, but the nurse had told her that there was a list of people who were allowed into the old woman’s room, and her name wasn’t on the list.

So Amy had become her secret, and it didn’t really matter to Beth anymore if old Mrs. Sturgess could prove that there had really been someone named Amy or not.

To Beth, Amy was as real as anyone else.

Amy was a part of her.

And then one day late in August, in the little room in the basement of the mill, she actually became Amy for a little while, saw what Amy saw, felt what she felt.

It was a particularly hot afternoon, but down there, in the darkness, it felt different. It felt cool, almost as if it were a perfect morning in spring. Beth spread the blanket out on the floor, then lowered herself down onto it, switched off the flashlight, and let the visit happen.…

It was the kind of spring morning Amy had long since learned to dread: the sun was shining brightly, and the air was warm even at a little before six. By ten, she knew, it would be getting hot, but there would be just enough breeze to make lying in the square and staring — daydreaming — up into the spreading maples the most alluring experience she could think of. And in the afternoon, when the heat reached its peak, and the air was getting so muggy that breathing was hard, there would be the stream, just a few yards away, its cool waters beckoning to her.

Yes, today was the kind of day she had come to dread, because for some reason, this kind of day never seemed to come on a Sunday, when she might have had at least a few minutes to enjoy it. On Sundays, even though she didn’t have to go to work, there was too much to do at home, taking care of her sisters and brothers, keeping out of her fathers way, helping her mother with all the things she never had time to do during the week.

Almost unconsciously, she slowed her pace, as if by taking a few more minutes now, she could put off the inevitable. But she knew it was impossible. As she turned off the railroad tracks to make her way up the path toward Prospect Street, and the shadow of the shoe mill blotted out the sunlight, she began steeling herself for the hours ahead. Long ago her mother had taught her the trick of survival in the mill. All you had to do was shut everything out, until the little room you worked in was your whole world, and nothing beyond that little room could enter your head at all. Then all you thought about was the work: cutting the little pieces of leather out of the tanned hides, making sure they were all exactly the same size, stacking them carefully but quickly in neat piles so that when they went to the assembly room upstairs the assemblers would have the right pieces at the right time. And you had to work fast, because you got paid by the piece.

You had to ignore the smells, too, or you’d quickly get sick and not be able to work at all. Sometimes Amy wondered which smells were the worst — the acrid odor of the lye used for tanning the hides, or the sour smells of the dyes used to color the leather after it was tanned. Or maybe, she sometimes thought, the worst smell was the smell of the people themselves, all of them sweating in the heat, their eyes fastened on their work for fear that if they looked toward the filthy windows the light and air outside would overpower them, and they’d drop their work and run away from the mill forever.

But they couldn’t do that — Amy least of all. This was 1886, and there weren’t many jobs, and at home her mother, who had no job at all, always told her how lucky she was to have a job in the middle of the depression. And even though Amy wasn’t quite sure what a depression was, she knew that she couldn’t give in to her impulse to run away from the mill, because if she did, there wouldn’t be any money at all, and her mother and sisters and brothers would have nothing to eat.

The door of the mill loomed a few steps ahead of her now, and she paused. According to the clock on the church steeple above the square, she still had four minutes before the morning whistle blew and everyone had to be at the tables, ready to work. Her eyes darted around, as if gathering images to put away for examination later, but then fixed on a group of three children — children her own age — who were walking along the other side of the street. She knew their names, but had never spoken to them, as they had never spoken to her.

Fleetingly, she wondered if they knew her name.

Probably not, since they didn’t work at the mill.

They didn’t work at all.

They were the lucky ones, whose fathers ran the mill, and who lived in nice houses, and went to school in the winter and played outside all summer. And they had pretty clothes, clothes that never looked as though someone else had worn them before; never looked as though they needed mending two or three times a week. Involuntarily, Amy’s hands dropped down and ran over her own dress, as if by some unseen force she could make the stains on it disappear, or smooth over the rough stitches that held its tattered pieces together.

For a moment, she wondered where they were going today, then decided it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered, really, was that now she had only one minute to get to her table, and if she was late, the shift supervisor would yell at her; might even fire her. And if that happened—

She put the thought out of her mind, and hurried through the door into the dimness of the mill, doing her best to put the rest of the world out of her mind.

A few people spoke to her as she started toward the stairs at the far end of the building, and she nodded a brief response. But most of the people were already hard at work, their fingers moving quickly in unchanging routines that had long since become automatic as they assembled shoes from the piles of leather around them. The people seemed to have a sameness about them: their eyes were vacant, and their skin seemed to have the look of worn leather. Their clothes, shabby and ill-fitting, all looked alike, and marked them for what they were — millworkers. For a fleeting instant, she wondered if they, like herself, dreamed of getting out of the mill, but then she decided they didn’t. For most of them, the mill was their life, and they would be here until they died.

As the whistle sounded, its piercing scream slashing through her like a knife, Amy hurried down the stairs and into the little room under the loading dock where she worked with the other children her age, cutting the freshly dyed hides into the many pieces that went into the shoes.

It was here she had started working three years ago, when she was eight, tending to the vats in which the hides were soaked, then moving on to the dyeing itself. Finally, she had begun training as a cutter, and now she worked her twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, cutting soles from the rough leather, training herself to work as the others worked, without thinking.

Even as she put on her apron and took up her position at the cutting table, she began the process of closing down her mind.

She started with her eyes.

She had to keep her eyes on her work, even though it had been months since she really needed to watch every move she made. But if her eyes stayed on the leather, and the hypnotically moving knife in her right hand, they wouldn’t stray to the children around her, and she wouldn’t see things she didn’t want to see. She wouldn’t see her cousin, who worked only a few feet away, and whose face was always streaked with tears. She knew why her cousin cried while he worked, but he had sworn her to secrecy, knowing that if anyone found out he was allergic to the dyes he worked with he would lose his job. So he worked on, and even though the dyes hurt him to the point where he cried all day, he never said anything, and turned away whenever the foreman was in the area.

Amy closed her ears as well, for if she didn’t, she would hear the other children talking, and if she let herself listen, she would soon begin talking, too. And if she talked, she would think, and if she thought, she didn’t know what might happen.

The only way to get through it was to close herself down, let herself be hypnotized by the dull routine of the work, and get through the hours one at a time.

She picked up the knife, and began cutting. Within thirty seconds, she was into the rhythm of movement that would carry her through the day. Hold the hide down with her left hand, cut straight through with her right, cutting off a strip exactly three inches wide. Pick up the three-inch-wide strip in her left hand, and give a quick cut, twisting the knife slightly to turn the curve of the heel. Flip the heel over, repeat the cut. Put the heel piece in the box, and start the next one. Slowly, as happened every day, her senses began closing down, until all she was aware of was her tiny area of the workbench, the knife in her hand, and the leather in front of her. Soon time would have no meaning for her, and she would continue to work, oblivious not only of what was going on around her but also of the pain in her arms and shoulders, the pain that would creep up on her every day. She would not allow herself to feel it until the evening whistle had sounded, and she was on her way home. Then, as her senses came back to her, the pain would come too, and by the time she got home she would be unable to move her arms. But her mother would have a tub of hot water waiting for her, water she’d been heating on the wood-burning stove, and she would sink into it, waiting for the pain to turn to numbness, and then the numbness to turn into the tingling sensation that meant soon she would be able to move her arms again.

But during the day, the only thing she could do was shut the pain out, as she had learned to shut everything else out. Shutting things out was the only way to get through it.

And then, when things were shut out, and she was no longer aware of the mill, she would live in her own world for a while, a world where there was no mill. In her world, she would live outside, in the warmth of the sun, with the breezes blowing through her long hair, caressing her skin. The air would be filled with the scent of flowers, and she would lie by the stream for hours, letting the water play over her fingers. And someday, she knew, she would go to live in that world. Someday, she would find a way to leave the mill, and then she would never have to shut things out again. And when that day came, she would take her cousin with her, and all the other children who, like her, were slowly dying in the mill….

She had no idea what time it was when something encroached on her closed senses. Indeed, for the first few minutes, she wasn’t even sure what it was that was playing around the edges of her mind. All she knew was that something wasn’t quite the way it should be. Something, somewhere, was disturbing her protective trance.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, she began opening her mind to the world around her.

It was the smell.

The room, always airless, always choked with fumes and the sour odor of sweat, contained something new. Hesitating at her work, the knife poised in mid-stroke, she sniffed at the air.

There was an acrid smell, somehow familiar, but out of place.

And her eyes were stinging.

Her senses coming fully alert now, she felt tears welling in her eyes, running down her cheeks. She dropped the knife, and painfully raised her ríght hand to wipe away the tears.

The smell was stronger now, and she turned, forcing herself to look around the room.

And then she saw it.

In the corner near the door a pile of rags, stained dark with oily dyes, had burst into flames.

Amy stared at the flames for a moment, uncertain they were really there. And then she looked around.

The other children, the children she thought spent their days talking among themselves while they worked, were standing at their stations, their expressions glazed over as their hands moved in the same metronomically regular rhythm she herself experienced every day.

A few yards away, his eyes streaming, her cousin stood at one of the dye vats.

And even though he was crying, she knew immediately that he, too, had retreated into a private world where the mill could not penetrate. He, like herself — like all the children — had escaped into another world, oblivious of the world in which his body toiled.

The fire was spreading now, sending tongues of flame out across the floor as billows of smoke rose from the rags and filled the room with a choking fog.

And then, from beyond the little room, she heard the sounds of people calling out: “Fire! Fire in the cutting room!” And then the voices were cut off by the scream of the whistle, this time not signaling the end of the morning shift, but blaring out in short, urgent bursts, alerting the workers to the danger. In a moment, the fire squad would appear, and begin dousing the flames.

All around her, she could feel the other children coming alive, hear them begin coughing, hear the first sounds of their terror.

Out.

She had to get them out.

She crossed to her cousin, and took his hand. The boy, a year younger than herself, stared at her for a moment, then tried to pull away.

“Come on,” Amy begged. “Willie, we have to get out of here.” But Willie, staring beyond her, only shook his head, and tried to pull away. Turning, Amy saw what her cousin had already seen: the door, barely visible now, was blocked by the rising flames.

“Through!” she yelled. “We have to go through the fire! Come on!” Grasping Willie’s hand, she began dragging him toward the door, the heat of the growing fire searing her face, singeing her hair.

But there was no other way out. She pressed on, two of the other children following her. And then, just as she was about to charge through the flames, she heard a voice on the other side.

“Close that door, dammit! Do you want the whole place to go up?”

She froze, recognizing the voice, and knowing its command would be obeyed. Then, helplessly, she watched as the heavy metal fire door slid quickly into place. Just as it slammed shut, she saw the face of the man who had issued the order. He was looking at her, but in his eyes she saw nothing. No love, no pity, no sorrow for what he had done.

Then the face disappeared and she was trapped.

Barely comprehending, she stepped backward, then let Willie pull her away from the angry flames.

Finally, she turned away, and stared into the terrified eyes of the other children. All of them seemed to be looking at her, waiting for her to do something. But there was nothing she could do.

Finally, one of the children came to life, and, screaming, ran into the flames to pound on the closed fire door, begging someone to open it, to let them out, to save them.

Amy knew that even if someone heard the screaming child, the door would not be opened.

The child’s screams began to fade, and as the girl watched, he sank slowly to his knees, his clothes on fire, his hair burned away. Then he slid lower, and the last thing the girl saw before she turned away was his hand, outstretched, still reaching toward the safety that wasn’t there.

Willie was clinging to her now, and with the other children close around her, she stumbled to the far side of the room. But even as she moved away from the fire, she knew it was useless.

Except for the window.

Above her, high up, was a small window.

If she could get to the window, break it …

Closing her mind against her rising panic, as she had learned to close it against her life in the mill, she looked around for something to stand on.

A stool. In the corner, there was a stool.

She let go of Willie’s hand, and dragged the stool over until it stood beneath the window. Climbing up, she could barely reach the sill.

The window was locked.

And then one of the other children gave her a mallet, and, ignoring the pain in her arms and shoulders, she swung it at the glass.

As the glass shattered, she realized her mistake.

Fresh air rushed into the vacuum created by the fire, and, with new oxygen to feed on, the fire exploded with new life.

Instantly, the room filled with smoke and flames, and the screams of children who knew they were about to die.

For a moment, time seemed to stand still, and the girl watched as the fire came to consume her. Then, as her dress caught fire, and she began falling toward the floor, she heard Willie calling out her name.

“Amy!” he screamed. And then once more. “Aaaammyyyy!”

It was the last word Willie spoke, the last word Amy heard. And his was the last face she ever saw.

But the last memory that flashed through her mind, the memory she died with, was the memory of another voice, and another face.

A voice ordering the fire door to be closed.

A voice ordering her death.

A voice commanding that she never leave the mill.

And the face she saw, the face that went with that terrible voice that had ordered her death, was the face of the man she knew was her father.

As Amy died, she knew that she never would leave the mill. But as it had killed her, so would she kill others.

She would have her revenge.