Cold Fire

to scrub away his weariness but as if he was trying to slough off the years and bring that lost time closer. “You spent more and more hours in the mill, Jim. Sometimes you'd be out there all day. And evenings, too. Sometimes we'd get up in the middle of the night to use the john, and we'd see a light out there in the mill, two or three or four o'clock in the morning. And you wouldn't be in your room.”
    Henry paused more often. He wasn't tired. He just didn't want to dig into this part of the long-buried past.
    “If it was the middle of the night, we'd go out there to the mill and bring you in, either me or Lena. And you'd be telling us about The Friend in the mill. You started spooking us, we didn't know what to do … so I guess … we didn't do anything. Anyway, that night … the night she died … a storm was coming up—”
    Holly recalled the dream:
    … a fresh wind blows as she hurries along the gravel path …
    “—and Lena didn't wake me. She went out there by herself and up to the high room—”
    … she climbs the limestone stairs …
    “—pretty good thunderstorm, but I used to be able to sleep through anything—”
    … the heavens flash as she passes the stairwell window, and through the glass she sees an object in the pond below …
    “—I guess, Jim, you was just doing what we always found you doing out there at night, reading that book by candlelight—”
    … inhuman sounds from above quicken her heart, and she climbs to the high room, afraid, but also curious and concerned for Jim …
    “—a crash of thunder finally woke me—”
    … she reaches the top of the stairs and sees him standing, hands fisted at his sides, a yellow candle in a blue dish on the floor, a book beside the candle …
    “—I realized Lena was gone, looked out the bedroom window, and saw that dim light in the mill—”
    … the boy turns to her and cries out, I'm scared, help me, the walls, the walls!…
    “ —and I couldn't believe my eyes because the sails of the mill were turning, and even in those days the sails hadn't turned in ten or fifteen years, been frozen up—”
    … she sees an amber light within the walls, the sour shades of pus and bile; the limestone bulges, and she realizes something is impossibly alive in the stone …
    “—but they were spinning like airplane propellers, so I pulled on my pants, and hurried downstairs—”
    … with fear but also with perverse excitement, the boy says, It's coming, and nobody can stop it!…
    “—I grabbed a flashlight and ran out into the rain—”
    … the curve of mortared blocks splits like the spongy membrane of an insect's egg; taking shape from a core of foul muck, where limestone should have been, is the embodiment of the boy's black rage at the world and its injustice, his self-hatred made flesh, his own death-wish given a vicious and brutal form so solid that it is an entity itself, quite separate from him …
    “—I reached the mill, couldn't believe how those old sails were spinning, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!—”
    Holly's dream had ended there, but her imagination too easily supplied a version of what might have happened thereafter. Horrified at the materialization of The Enemy, stunned that the boy's wild tales of aliens in the mill were true, Lena had stumbled backward and fallen down the winding stone stairs, unable to arrest her fall because there was no handrail at which to grab. Somewhere along the way she broke her neck.
    “—went inside the mill… found her at the bottom of the stairs all busted up, neck twisted … dead.”
    Henry paused for the first time in a while and swallowed hard. He had not looked at Holly once throughout his account of that stormy night, only at Jim's bowed head. With less of a slur in his voice, as if it were vitally important to him to tell the rest of it as clearly as he could, he said:
    “I went up the steps and found you in the high room, Jimmy. Do you remember that? Sitting by the candle, holding the book in your hands so tight it couldn't be taken from you till hours later. You wouldn't speak.” The old man's voice quavered now. “God forgive me, but all I could think about was Lena being dead, my dear Lena gone, and you being such a strange child all year, and still strange even at that moment, with your book, refusing to talk to me. I guess … I guess I went a little mad right then, for a while. I thought you might've pushed her, Jimmy. I thought you might've been in one of your …