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.
For Alan Rogers, that late-August afternoon had been the day on which, for the first time, he’d finally begun to see the results of the summer’s labors. The outside of the mill was finished. Its surfaces, stripped clean of their layers of grime, were now the warm dark red of old brick, set off with white trim around the windows. The windows themselves, formerly no more than symmetrically placed holes in the otherwise blank facade of the building, had been widened with shutters, and now gave the building a vaguely colonial look.
The fence, no longer serving any useful purpose, had been torn down a week ago.
The main entrance on Prospect Street was done, a broad flight of steps leading to a rank of glass doors that opened directly onto the main concourse of the first floor. Halfway down, the concourse widened into a huge skylit atrium, above which a rainbow-hued dome of stained glass had been installed. Beyond the atrium, the concourse continued to the end of the building, where a waterfall would eventually cascade down to a small pool. The old offices had long since been torn out, but the staircase to the basement still remained — one of the last vestiges of the original structure still to be replaced.
Above him, the construction of the open mezzanine was two weeks ahead of schedule, and already the dividing walls of the second-level shops were in place. Their facades, like those on the main level, would not be completed until the tenants had signed their leases and submitted designs for completion of their storefronts. All of them would be different, but there were strict guidelines within which the tenants could exercise their imaginations. In the end, Alan was now certain, the mill would look exactly as Phillip had hoped it would — an ornate nineteenth- century arcade of the sort one would be likely to run across in London, but that one could scarcely hope to discover in a fading industrial town fifty miles outside of Boston.
Until today, Alan had not been certain that the September 1 deadline would be met. Even now he wasn’t positive that every detail would have been completed. But it would be close enough for the Labor Day dedication ceremony to take place, and for the Old Mill to be opened to the public. Some of the stores would be occupied, and the rest of them would have intriguingly painted wooden fronts, announcing the names of their future tenants, and hinting at what the contents of the shops might eventually be.
The construction crew was gone, and silence hung over the building. But in his mind, Alan could almost hear the murmur of a crowd of shoppers, and the faint gurgling of the waterfall. He walked slowly around the main floor, inspecting the work that had been done that day, and reinspecting what had been accomplished over the previous weeks.
