In his childhood, he and Frankie had made a clubhouse in the hayloft of the barn—a place to play hearts or poker, to shuffle through their baseball cards, to sneak peeks at the pictures in his brother’s raggedy Playboys that Frankie obtained along with cigarettes through the older brothers of various pals. The hayloft had been a warm and dusty place, smelling of horses and the wet stench of doused cigarette ends in Frankie’s ashtray—an old tuna-fish can half full of water. This dank, dark hole is the exact opposite of the hayloft. Hiding out here must be like being buried alive.
She jumps on the cot, trampolines on the mattress. All her chains click and whisper and chatter. They rise and fall in fluid waves in the light. Her face is alight with glee. She wants him to like this wretched, abandoned place.
“Great,” he says and she sticks out her tongue at his obviously false heartiness. He grins and she laughs.
There’s more to see. She takes him back to the first vast space and leads him to another door and around corners and up and down until they are at the bottom of a stairwell. Sam knows where they are then—in the tower at the north end of the Mill. The plaster has flaked from the walls but the steps seem sturdy enough and she is absolutely confident, bounding ahead of him, taking them two at a time, excited about something ahead of them. The stairs march at right angles around a square core. They emerge in a square dark gallery, smaller than the previous floors and with a pitched roof. Pigeon shit is thick on the floor and the windows are blocked with deteriorating shutters.
“Was this a clock tower?”
“Uh-huh,” she says. “There used to be a clockface on the village side. It’s been gone since nineteen-ought-fuck-me-if-I-give-a-shit. But I think the tower was really some kind of freight elevator. Check out the view.”
He peers past her through a broken shutter at most of downtown Greenspark. Below them, the silvery ribbon of the frozen Brook snarls through the eerily lit village. Sam has never seen Greenspark from such a vantage. All at once the history of it is palpable. It is a whole organism on the banks of the Brook, its every brick an insistent reminder that once there was no settlement here. People came here and built it, every painstaking stick and brick and stone of it, with their own callused hands. As they built this tower in which he and this girl stand.
“It’s really something,” he says.
“Yup.”
Suddenly she slips away and clatters down the stairs. He lingers briefly to take a last look and promises himself he will come back to look at it in daylight.
Approaching the bottom of the stairwell, he realizes uneasily she is not waiting there for him. Distracted as he takes the next step, he is not prepared for the crack of the tread and the stomach-dropping sensation of wood giving way. He shifts his weight instinctively forward to the foot already dropping to the next step. Thrown off balance, he descends the last few steps heavily, like a horse, a beast too large and too habituated to moving on four feet to be able to negotiate stairs—uncertain where to put his feet down, and when. For a fraction of a second, he thinks he is going to go ass over teakettle. His hand flails hard against the wall and his flashlight flies free. The beam of light bounces crazily and abruptly blinks out. Sam listens in total darkness to the rest of the flashlight’s brief tumble to the bottom of the steps.
Blind and breathing hard, he shuffles down the last few steps. As he gropes gingerly about the floor for the lost flashlight, he fights a nauseated panic. He could die in this shithole—could have fallen right through the fucking stairwell and broken his idiot neck. The whole ramshackle vastness is an evil maw, waiting to chew up some brainless asshole kid. He probably deserves to die an agonizing, grotesque death impaled on a broken timber for being so incredibly stupid as to wander around in it, after dark, with a malicious bitch who probably thought it was just a scream, leaving the big moron to find his way out on his own. She’s probably somewhere in the dark, snickering at him, waiting to jump out behind him and make him pee himself. Biting his lip to stop himself shouting her name and giving her the satisfaction of knowing she’s got him scared, he forces himself to breathe deeply and evenly.
The flashlight evades him. Surely, he despairs, he’s felt up every inch of this disgusting floor by now. Then his fingertips encounter cool smooth metal and he snatches up the flashlight. Depressing the nipple of the on-off button does zip—which means the bulb is either broken or out of contact with the batteries. Carefully, he tightens the lens to force the contact and suddenly—light. It shows Sam the door—disappointingly ordinary, shabby, filthy, knobless and unlocked, and wonderfully, it creaks open at his touch. He steps through it and into the great empty space they first entered.
From the darkness overhead there is a giggle and a flicker like a cinder.
He swings his light upward and spots her on high, balanced on a beam, a spliff in her fingers. Smoke dances in the light around her.
“Get your idiot ass down here,” he yells. “I’m leaving.”
“Suit yourself. If you weren’t such a tight-ass, you could find your way up here and have a toke with me. It’s good shit.”
She shifts, puts one foot in front of the other like a high-wire walker. Sam stops breathing as she wobbles and then steadies herself. He’s too scared to yell at her.
She waggles the doobie at him in invitation and laughs.
Sam’s light feverishly sweeps the walls and beams for her way up. Shadow pleats the plaster-scabbed brick so he can’t read what’s solid and what might be
