She turned to Jim and saw him grinning.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I forgot all about this,” he said wonderingly. “How could I have forgotten all about this?”
The bells tinkled again, silvery and pure.
“Forgot what?” she asked. “What're those bells?”
“Not bells,” he said as they faded. He hesitated, and as the sound returned a fourth time, he finally said, “The ringing is in the stone.”
“Ringing stone?” she said in bewilderment.
As the bells sounded twice again, she circled the room, cocking her head this way and that, until it seemed to her that the music did, indeed, originate from the limestone wall, pealing out not from any single location but equally from every block of that curved surface, no louder at one point than another.
She told herself that stone could not ring, certainly not in such a dulcet voice. A windmill was an unusual structure and could have tricky acoustics. From a high-school class trip to Washington, she remembered a tourguide showing them a spot in the Capitol's rotunda from which even a whispered conversation was picked up and, by a quirk of architecture, transmitted across the huge dome to the far side of that great space, where eavesdroppers could hear it with perfect clarity. Perhaps something similar was at work here. If bells were rung or other sounds made at a particular place in a far corner of the first floor of the mill, a peculiarity of acoustics might transmit it in equal volume along all the walls on every floor. That explanation was more logical than the concept of magical, ringing stone — until she tried to imagine who would be secretly ringing the bell, and why.
She put one hand against the wall.
The limestone was cool. She detected faint vibrations in it.
The bell fell silent.
The vibrations in the wall subsided.
They waited.
When it was clear that the ringing would not resume, Holly said, “When did you hear it before?”
“When I was ten.”
“And what happened after the ringing, what did it signify?”
“I don't know.”
“But you said you just remembered it.”
His eyes were shining with excitement. “Yeah. I remember the ringing. But not what caused it or what followed it. Though I think … it's a good sign, Holly.” A note of rapture entered his voice. “It means something very fine is going to happen, something … wonderful.”
Holly was frustrated. In spite of the mystical aspect of Jim's life-saving missions — and in spite her own paranormal experiences with dreams and the creatures in them — she had come to the farm with the hope of finding logical answers to all that had transpired. She had no idea what those answers could be. But she'd had an unspoken faith in the scientific method. Rigorous investigative procedures combined with careful thought, the use of deductive and inductive reasoning as needed, would lead to solutions. But now it seemed that logic was out the window. She was perturbed by Jim's taste for mysticism, though she had to admit that he had embraced illogic from the start, with all his talk of God, and had taken no pains to conceal it.
She said, “But, Jim, how could you have forgotten anything as weird as ringing stones or any of the rest of whatever happened to you here?”
“I don't think I just forgot. I think I was
“By whom?”
“By whomever or whatever just made the stone ring again, by whatever's behind all these recent events.” He moved toward the open door. “Come on, let's get this place cleaned up, move in. We want to be ready for whatever's going to happen next.”
She followed him to the head of the steps but stopped there and watched him descend two at a time, with the air of a kid excited by the prospect of adventure. All of his misgivings about the mill and his fear of The Enemy seemed to have evaporated like a few beads of water on a red-hot griddle. His emotional roller coaster was cresting the highest point on the track thus far.
Sensing something above her head, Holly looked up. A large web had been spun above the door, across the curve where the wall became the ceiling. A fat spider, its body as big around as her thumbnail and its spindly legs almost as long as her little finger, greasy as a dollop of wax and dark as a drop of blood, was feeding greedily on the pale quivering body of a snared moth.
4
With a broom, dustpan, bucket of water, mop, and a few rags, they made the small upper chamber livable in short order. Jim even brought some Windex and paper towels from the store of cleaning supplies at the house, so they could scrub the grime off the windows, letting in a lot more light. Holly chased down and killed not only the spider above the door but seven others, checking darker corners with one of the flashlights until she was sure she had found them all.
Of course the mill below them was surely crawling with countless other spiders. She decided not to think about that.
By six o'clock, the day was waning but the room was bright enough without the Coleman lantern. They were sitting Indian fashion on their inflatable-mattress sleeping bags, with the big cooler between them. Using the closed lid as a table, they made thick sandwiches, opened the potato chips and cheese twists, and popped the tops off cans of root beer. Though she had missed lunch, Holly had not thought about food until they'd begun to prepare it. Now she was hungrier than she would have expected under the circumstances. Everything was delicious, better than gourmet fare. Olive loaf and cheese on white bread, with mustard, recalled for her the appetites of childhood, the intense flavors and forgotten innocent sensuality of youth.
They did not talk much as they ate. Silences did not make either of them feel awkward, and they were taking such primal pleasure from the meal that no conversation, regardless of how witty, could have improved the moment. But that was only part of the reason for their mutual reticence. Holly, at least, was also unable to think
“I feel sort of foolish,” she said eventually.
“Me, too,” he admitted. “Just a little.”
At seven o'clock, when she was opening the box of chocolate-covered doughnuts, she suddenly realized the mill had no lavatory. “What about a bathroom?”
He picked up his ring of keys from the floor and handed them to her. “Go on over to the house. The plumbing works. There's a half-bath right off the kitchen.”
She realized the room was filling with shadows, and when she glanced at the window, she saw that twilight had arrived. Putting the doughnuts aside, she said, “I want to zip over there and get back before dark.”
“Go ahead.” Jim raised one hand as if pledging allegiance to the flag. “I swear on all that I hold sacred, I'll leave you at least one doughnut.”
“Half the box better be there when I get back,” she said, “or I'll kick your butt all the way into Svenborg to buy more.”
“You take your doughnuts seriously.”
“Damn right.”
He smiled. “I like that in a woman.”
Taking a flashlight to negotiate the mill below, she rose and went to the door. “Better start up the Coleman.”
“Sure thing. When you get back, it'll be a right cozy little campsite.”
Descending the narrow stairs, Holly began to worry about being separated from Jim, and step by step her anxiety increased. She was not afraid of being alone. What bothered her was leaving him by himself. Which was
