As they step into a void, Sam has a fraction of a second of vertigo when he feels as if he might be falling down a rabbit hole. But the gritty floor underneath his feet is solid. The place smells like a wet-brained bum with DTs. Swinging the beam of the flashlight above him, he locates rafters a good thirty feet overhead and then realizes they are not rafters but the remains of floor joists—there is another three stories of building above the floorbeams. The floorboards of the upper stories are entirely gone. The beams are massive, beshitted things carved from whole tree trunks. There are structures he doesn’t comprehend up there, and ropes and pulleys and hoists, some of them dangling actually within reach, hanging past those enormous beams with a gallows gloom in the shadows. High up, the wind soughs distantly through broken windows as if far down a tunnel. A particularly strong gust makes something rattle and disturbs some of the lines. Their lights catch one thick rope swaying, as if something had just skittered up it. Its shadow shivers on the wall.
“In the summer,” the Mutant tells him, “this is a great place to party. Get a bunch of people wrecked, crank up a boombox, it’s a blast. Nobody ever fucking comes down here. Except the winos. We chased ‘em out a couple years ago. Sometimes some of ‘em come back but we just run them off again.”
The thick walls do cut the wind—probably keep the summer heat out too. She leads him across the floor into shadows that hide another, unlocked door. It is knobless, a hole where the original fixture protruded. Passing down corridors and up and down stairs and through partitioned spaces that might have been offices, in the gloom Sam loses any sense of where they are in the Mill. He loses his grip on time itself, not just the passing moment, but his connection with the late twentieth century. What fills his lungs is nineteenth-century air, the stale dungeon exhalation of the Industrial Revolution, grim and dim and oily.
Entering a narrower space, definitely not a corridor but exactly what he doesn’t know, it becomes markedly colder. Suddenly, weird old machinery is all around them, rising through the floor from some space underneath, running ahead of them as far as the light goes, climbing above them. At first sight, it could be the rusted iron bones of some enormous newly discovered dinosaur. In a moment it resolves itself and his stomach tightens with a nearly sexual excitement. It is a huge power train of some kind and looks substantial enough to operate yet. A terrible cold soughs up from underneath them and he realizes they are over the frozen Brook, over the millrace itself.
“Isn’t it freaky?” she asks. “It looks like you could use it to torture a giant if you only knew how.”
He laughs delightedly. But he doesn’t think it’s strange, just an amazing relic of a past era. All at once the Mill isn’t the least spooky to him. He wants to see it in daylight to explore the old gears and shafts.
She stoops to play her light over a metal plate.
Tarnished brass, bolted to iron. Beside her, Sam bends close and is stunned by the calligraphed inscription: SAM’L R. STYLES, 1849.
“D’you believe it?” she whispers, voice congested with awe. “I ‘bout shit when I saw it the first time. Must have been your great-great-granddad or something, huh?”
With shaking fingertips, Sam traces the letters. No one has ever told him his family ever had any connection to the Mill. Yet here is his own name, as it is repeated for generations in the family Bible Aunt Ilene keeps. Which Sam Styles is this one? What else could the plate mean but that this enormous device was the work of Sam’s own ancestor?
“Come on,” she urges.
He tramps after her, distracted by the discovery and ready now to get the rest of this tour out of the way and go home. He doubts there can be anything else of more consuming interest than the relic power train with his forebearer’s nameplate.
Behind another padlocked door to which the Mutant has a key is a kind of night watchman’s cubby, outfitted with a stained mattress on a cot and a kitchenette counter in which a cut-out rectangle marks the former location of a sink. The former locations of a refrigerator and stove are easy to make out because someone has helpfully cartooned substitutes for the missing appliances inside the outlines on the linoleum and the walls. Empties, food wrappers, butts and crushed cigarette packets litter the floor. The webbed, encrusted panes of glass in the single small window are like black mirrors in the night.
Surveying the room, he asks, “Party town?”
She sticks her tongue out at him.
He hardly notices, as he is distracted by what his light shows of the wall above the cot. A hallucinatory hand has graffitied the faded-to-wash-blue painted plaster with caricatures and fragments of lyrics, in greasy colored chalks. The drawings are all melted together, like somebody took a fork and swirled it through the images before their outlines could solidify. At first impression he thinks it would take hours of staring at it to sort it out but all at once he can see some of it’s pornographic. Hastily he flicks the beam away.
“One weekend in September I got fucked up on blotter,” she says. “Couldn’t stop drawing. I’d like to do all the walls in this place. Take me a lifetime and a shitload of acid, though.”
“I didn’t know you—could draw. It’s—interesting.”
“It’s not like hoops. I’m no fucking good at it.”
He can’t tell. It ain’t the Sistine Chapel, that’s for sure.
“It’s not a bad hideout when the weather’s decent. I’d live here if I had some heat,” she continues.
Christ, it’s her lair. A place to go to ground. It creeps him out completely, raising the hair on the back of his neck
