Santa Ynez Mountains, and he'd been almost jubilant. Then the sight of the farm was like a plunge into cold water for him, and the windmill was the equivalent of a drop into an ice chasm.
He seemed as troubled as he was gifted, and she wished that she could do something to ease his mind. She wondered if urging him to come to the farm had been wise. Even a failed career in journalism had taught her to leap into the middle of unfolding events, seize the moment, and run with it. But perhaps this situation demanded greater caution, restraint, thought, and planning.
They got back into the Ford and drove between the house and barn, around the big pond. The graveled path, which she remembered from last night's dream, had been made wide enough for horses and wagons in another era. It easily accommodated the Ford, allowing them to park at the base of the windmill.
When she stepped from the car again, she was beside a cornfield. Only a few parched wild stalks thrust up from that abandoned plot of earth beyond the split-rail fence. She walked around the back of the car, across the gravel, and joined Jim where he stood on the bank of the pond.
Mottled blue-green-gray, the water resembled a slab of slate two hundred feet in diameter. It was almost as still as a piece of slate, as well. Dragonflies and other insects, alighting briefly on the surface, caused occasional dimples. Languid currents, far too subtle to produce ripples, made the water shimmer almost imperceptibly near the shore, where green weeds and a few clusters of white-plumed pampas grass thrived.
“Still can't remember quite what you saw in that dream?” Jim asked.
“No. It probably doesn't matter anyway. Not everything in a dream is significant.”
In a low voice, almost as if speaking to himself, he said, “It was significant.”
Without turbulence to stir up sediment, the water was not muddy, but neither was it clear. Holly figured she could see only a few feet below the surface. If it actually was fifty or sixty feet deep at the center, as Jim had said, that left a lot of volume in which something could remain hidden.
“Let's have a look in the mill,” she said.
Jim got one of the new flashlights from the car and put batteries in it. “Even in daylight, it can be kind of dark in there.”
The door was in an antechamber appended to the base of the conical main structure of the mill, much like the entrance to an Eskimo igloo. Although unlocked, the door was warped, and the hinges were rusted. For a moment it resisted Jim, then swung inward with a screech and a brittle splintering sound.
The short, arched antechamber opened onto the main room of the mill, which was approximately forty feet in diameter. Four windows, evenly spaced around the circumference, filtered sunlight through filthy panes, leeching the summer-yellow cheer from it and imparting a wintry gray tint that did little to alleviate the gloom. Jim's big flashlight revealed dust- and cobweb-shrouded machinery that could not have appeared more exotic to Holly if it had been the turbine room of a nuclear submarine. It was the cumbersome low technology of another century — massive wooden gears, cogs, shafts, grinding stones, pulleys, old rotting lengths of rope — so oversized and complicated that it all seemed like the work not merely of human beings from another age but of a different and less evolved species altogether.
Because he had grown up around mills, even though they had not been in use since before his birth, Jim knew the names of everything. Pointing with the flashlight beam, he tried to explain how the mill had functioned, talking about the spurwheel and the quant, the mace and the rynd, the runner stone and the bed stone. “Ordinarily you couldn't look up through the mechanisms quite like this. But, see, the floor of the spurwheel loft is rotted out, not much of it left, and the bridge floor gave way when those huge stones broke loose and fell.”
Though he had regarded the mill with fear when they had stood outside, his mood had begun to change after they entered it. To Holly's surprise, as Jim tried to explain the millworks to her, he began to exhibit some of that boyish enthusiasm that she had first seen when they had been grocery shopping at The Central in Svenborg. He was pleased by his knowledge, and he wanted to show it off a little, the way a bookish kid was always happy to demonstrate what he had learned at the library while others his age were out playing baseball.
He turned to the limestone stairs on their left and climbed without hesitation, running one hand lightly along the curved wall as he went. There was a half-smile on his face as he looked around, as if only the good memories were flooding in on him now.
Puzzled by his extremely mercurial mood, trying to imagine how the mill could frighten and delight him simultaneously, Holly somewhat reluctantly followed him up toward what he had called “the high room.” She had no good memories to associate with the mill, only the fearful images of her nightmares, and those returned to her as she ascended behind Jim. Thanks to her dream, the narrow twist of stairs was familiar to her, though she was climbing it for the first time — which was an uncanny feeling, far eerier than mere
Halfway up the stairs, she stopped at the window that overlooked the pond. The glass was frosted with dust. She used her hand to wipe one pane, and squinted at the water below. For an instant she thought she saw something strange beneath the placid surface — then realized she was seeing only the reflection of a cloud drifting across the sky.
“What is it?” Jim asked with boyish eagerness. He had stopped a few steps above her.
“Nothing. A shadow.”
They continued all the way to the upper chamber, which proved to be an unremarkable room, about twelve or fourteen feet in diameter, less than fifteen feet high at its apex. The curved limestone wall wrapped around to meet itself, and curved up to form the ceiling, so it seemed as if they were standing inside the domed nose cone of a rocket. The stone was not semitransparent as it had been in her dream, and no strange amber lights played within it. An arcane mechanism was offset in the dome, through which the motion of the wind-turned sails outside was translated into horizontal movement to crank a vertical wood shaft. The thick shaft disappeared through a hole in the center of the floor.
Remembering how they had stood downstairs and looked up through the buckled and broken decks within the multi-level millworks, Holly gingerly tested the wood floor. No rot was visible. The planks and the joists under them seemed sturdy.
“Lots of dust,” Jim said, as their feet stirred up little clouds with each step.
“And spiders,” Holly noted.
Wrinkling her face in disgust, she peered up at the husks of sucked-dry insects dangling in the elaborate webs that had been spun around the long-stilled mechanism overhead. She didn't fear spiders, but she didn't like them either.
“We need to do some cleaning before we set up camp,” he said.
“Should've bought a broom and a few other things while we were in town.”
“There're cleaning materials at the house. I'll bring them here while you start unloading the car.”
“The house!” Holly was exhilarated by a lovely inspiration. “When we set out for the mill, I didn't realize this property was still yours, no one living here. We can put the sleeping bags in the house, stay there, and visit this room as often as we need to.”
“Nice thought,” Jim said, “but it's not that easy. Something's going to happen here, Holly, something that'll give us answers or put us on the road to finding them. I feel it. I know it… well, just the way I know these things. But we can't pick the time for the revelation. It doesn't work that way. We can't ask God — or whatever is behind this — to punch a time clock and deliver revelations only between regular business hours. We have to stay here and be patient.”
She sighed. “Okay, yeah, if you—”
Bells interrupted her.
It was a sweet silvery ringing, neither heavy nor clangorous, lasting only two or three seconds, pleasingly musical. It was so light and gay, in fact, that it should have seemed a frivolous sound against the backdrop of that ponderous stone structure. It was not in the least frivolous, however, because inexplicably it triggered in Holly serious associations — thoughts of sin and penitence and redemption.
The trilling faded even as she turned in search of the source. But before she could ask Jim what it had been, it came again.
This time, Holly understood why she associated the sound with issues of spirituality. It was the precise tone of the bells that an altarboy rang during Mass. The sweet ringing brought back to her the smell of spikenard and myrrh from her college days when she had toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism.
The bells faded again.
