Hellfire

The fear was stronger now, but mixed with it there was a sense of pent-up rage. It was almost as if the room were coiling in upon itself, preparing to strike him.

And yet there was a strange feeling of longing, too. A deep melancholy, tinged strongly with sadness. As he stood staring into the room, resisting a compelling urge to step inside and meet whatever was truly there, Phillip found his eyes flooding. A moment later the tears overflowed, and ran unheeded down his cheeks.

He took a tentative step forward, his arms reaching out as if to touch whatever was in the room, but then he suddenly veered away, and instead of entering the room, grasped the edge of the door and quickly rolled it shut.

As it slammed home, he imagined that he heard a short cry from within, a childish voice calling out to him.

“Father!”

He hurried up the stairs, turned off the lights, and started toward the side door.

And then, at the far end of the mill, he saw the faces.

They were still there — the people of Westover, their faces pressed to the glass, their features distorted into strange grimaces. Their hands seemed to be reaching out to him, and at first he had the feeling that they were beseeching him. Then, as he moved into the rotunda beneath the soaring glass dome of the building, he perceived something else.

The faces, though vaguely familiar, were unrecognizable. The men, clad in shabby clothing, all wore caps low on their foreheads, and their faces were unshaven.

The women, all of them gaunt with what seemed to be hunger, were also dressed shabbily, in long thin dresses that covered them from their wrists to their ankles and were buttoned high on their necks. They all wore their hair alike, twisted back into buns at the napes of their necks.

And they were not beseeching him.

They were reaching out to him not because they wanted anything of him.

They wanted him.

Their eyes showed it clearly. The eyes, all of them fixed on him now, glittered with hatred. He could almost feel it radiating out from them, surging through the glass of the doors — rolling toward him in an angry wave down the broad corridor of the mill.

He froze for a moment, his panic building within him, then turned and ran to the side door, reaching out to the switch and plunging the mill back into the darkness that had filled it a few moments earlier. He stepped through the door, closed it, and locked it.

He glanced toward the front of the mill, half-expecting to see an angry crowd moving toward him. Instead, there was nothing. Only a single man, silhouetted against a streetlight, waving to him.

“Mr. Sturgess?” he heard a voice calling. “Are you all right?”

Phillip hesitated. “I’m okay,” he called back softly. “I just wanted to take a look around.” Then he raised his hand, and returned the man’s wave. But instead of going back to Prospect Street, he turned the other way, walking down the path until he came to the railroad tracks.

As he hurried through the night, he tried to convince himself that what he’d seen had existed only in his imagination.

When he got home twenty minutes later, Phillip found Tracy waiting for him. She was sitting on the stairs, halfway up, and when the door opened, she stood up and looked eagerly down at him. He glanced up at her, then dropped his keys in the drawer of the commode that sat near the front door. Neither of them said anything until he started toward the library, intent on fixing himself a drink. As he was sure she would, his daughter followed him into the big walnut-paneled room.

“Well?” she demanded as Phillip poured a generous slug of Scotch into a Waterford tumbler, then added a couple of ice cubes and some water. Only when he finished making the drink did he turn to face her.

“Well what?” he asked evenly.

Tracy hesitated. There was something in her father’s eyes she’d never seen before. Though he was looking at her, she had the funny feeling that he wasn’t seeing her. “Well, did she kill him?” she asked at last.

Phillip frowned, swirling his drink in his glass, then went over to the French doors to stare out into the night. “Why would she do that?” he asked, his back to Tracy.

“Well, isn’t that obvious?” he heard his daughter say. “She wants to come back here. So she killed her father, because if he’s dead, there’s no place else for her to live.”

Phillip felt his eyes flood once more, and suppressed the groan that rose in his throat. “Is this place really that wonderful?” he asked so softly that Tracy had to strain to hear him. “Is it really worth killing someone — your own father — just to live here?” Then, when he’d waited long enough for his words to sink in, he swung around and faced Tracy, who was standing in the center of the room, her eyes wide as she stared at him. “Well?” he asked. “Is it really worth all that?”

“It is to her—” Tracy began, but Phillip didn’t let her finish.

“How could it be?” he asked. “What would have been so wonderful for her here? Ever since you came home from school you’ve done your best to make her miserable. You didn’t even try to be friends with her. You treated her like a servant, ignored her, snubbed her—”

“So what?” Tracy demanded. Her face had flushed with anger, and her blue eyes glinted in the light of the chandelier. “She’s nothing but trash, just like her mother. She doesn’t belong here, and she doesn’t fit in here, and if she comes back here, I won’t live here anymore!”

“I see,” Phillip said calmly. “And just where do you propose to live?”

Tracy’s eyes widened, and the color suddenly drained from her face. What was he saying? He couldn’t mean what she thought he meant, could he? “I … I’ll go live with Alison Babcock.”

Phillip nodded thoughtfully, and sipped once more at his drink. “Tracy,” he said quietly, “I think you’d better sit down. It’s a good time for the two of us to have a talk, since Carolyn won’t be home.”

“I hope Carolyn never comes back here again,” Tracy declared, dropping into one of the wing chairs and draping her left leg casually over its arm.

“I’m sure that’s what you hope,” Phillip replied, sitting down opposite her. “But I’m telling you right now that it’s a hope I want never to hear expressed in this house again. You may think anything you like, but you will keep your thoughts to yourself from this moment on.”

His words hit Tracy like a physical blow. For a moment she was too stunned to say anything at all. Then she swallowed, and widened her eyes. “Daddy—”

“Put your feet on the floor, and sit up like the lady you think you are,” Phillip said.

Tracy’s leg came off the arm of the chair, and dropped to the floor. She stared at her father, trying to figure out what had happened. “You’re going to let her come back here, aren’t you?” she finally asked, her voice heavy with accusation. “Even after what she did to my horse.”

“Ah,” Phillip said, draining his glass and rising to his feet to fix himself another drink. “The horse.” As he passed Tracy he glanced down, and could see by her eyes that his suspicion was correct. “The Babcocks have some pretty good stock in their stable,” he commented. He said nothing more until he was once more facing her. “I wonder how safe they’d feel with you living in their house.”

Tracy’s heart was pounding now, and she had to grip the arms of the chair to keep her hands from shaking. “I didn’t do it—” she began, but when her father shook his head, she fell silent.

“I don’t believe you, Tracy,” she heard him say. “I don’t believe you, and I don’t know what to do.” His eyes flooded with tears once more, and this time he made no effort to hide them. “I guess I haven’t been much of a father, have I? I’ve always tried to give you everything you wanted, but it wasn’t enough.”

“But I love you, Daddy,” Tracy ventured.

“Do you?” Phillip asked. “I suppose you do, in your own way. But it’s the wrong way, Tracy. I can’t live my life for you. I can’t decide whom to fall in love with simply on the basis of what you want. And I can’t let you dictate who will live in my house and who won’t.”

In her own mind, Tracy mistcok the sadness in Phillip’s words for weakness. “But they don’t belong here, Daddy,” she protested once more. “I don’t see why you can’t see that. Carolyn and Beth don’t even like it here. All they want is our money!”

The tenseness in her father’s jaw told Tracy she had made a mistake, and she instinctively shrank back in her