brighter than the surface of the pond around it, as if the mill were
luminous, the brightest object in the night, when in fact its stones
rose in an ebony and forbidding pile. Where the high windows were
filled with lambent light in the real mill, black rectangles floated in
the impossible reflection, like the empty eyeholes in a fleshless skull.
Creak. . . creak. . . creak. . .
She looked up.
The massive sails were trembling in the wind and beginning to move.
They forced the corroded gears that drove the windshaft and, in turn,
the grinding stones in the millroom at its base.
Wanting only to wake up or, failing that, to flee back along the gravel
path over which she had come, Holly drifted inexorably forward.
The giant sails began to turn clockwise, gaining speed, producing less
creaking as the gears unfroze. It seemed to her that they were like the
fingers of a monstrous hand, and the jagged end of every broken vane was
a claw.
She reached the door.
She did not want to go inside. She knew that within lay a hell of some
kind, as bad as the pits of torture described by any fire-and-brimstone
preacher who had ever thundered a sermon in old Salem. If she went in
there, she would never come out alive.
The sails swooped down at her, passing just a couple of feet over her
head, the splintered wood reaching for her: Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh,
whoosh.
In the grip of a trance even more commanding than her terror, she opened
the door. She stepped across the threshold. With the malevolent
animation that objects possessed only in dreams, the door pulled out of
her hand, slammed shut behind her.
Ahead lay the lightless lower room of the mill, in which the worn stone
wheels ground against each other.
To her left, barely visible in the gloom, stairs led up. Ululant
squeals and haunting cries echoed from above, like the night concert
performed by the wildlife in a jungle, except none of these voices was
quite that of a panther or monkey or bird or hyena. Electronic sounds
were part of the mix, and what seemed to be the brittle shrieks of
insects passed through a stereo amplifier. Underlying the cacophony was
a monotonous, throbbing, three-note bass refrain that reverberated in
the stone walls of the stairwell and, before she had climbed halfway to
the second floor, in Holly’s bones as well.
She passed a narrow window on her left. An extended series of lightning
bolts crackled across the vault of the night, and at the foot of the
mill, like a trick mirror in a funhouse, the dark pond turned
transparent. Its depths were revealed, as though the lightning came
from under the water, and Holly saw an infinitely strange shape resting
on the bottom. She squinted, trying to get a better look at the object,
but the lightning sputtered out.
The merest glimpse of the thing, however, sent a cold wind through the
hollows of her bones.
She waited, hoping for more lightning, but the night remained as opaque
as tar, and black rain suddenly spattered against the window.
Because she was halfway to the second floor of the mill, more
muddy-orange and yellow light flickered around her than had reached her
at the foot of the stairs. The window glass, backed by utter darkness
now and painted with sufficient luminescence to serve as a dim mirror,
presented her reflection.
But the face she possessed in this dream was not her own. It belonged
to a woman twenty years older than Holly, to whom she bore no
resemblance.
She’d never before had a dream in which she occupied the body of another
person. But now she understood why she had been unable to turn back
from the mill when she’d been outside, and why she was unable to stop
herself from climbing to the high room even though, on one level, she
knew she was dreaming. Her lack of control was not the usual
helplessness that transformed dreams into nightmares, but the result of
sharing the body of a stranger.
The woman turned from the window and continued upward toward the