new footings here, for there were thousands like it in those cornbelt
states.
Maybe a hundred yards to the left of the house, a red barn rose to a
tarnished horse-and-carriage weather vane at the pinnacle of its peaked
roof It was not huge, only half again as large as the unimposing house.
Behind the house and barn, visible between them, was the pond, and the
structure at its far side was the most arresting sight on the farm.
The windmill.
Jim stopped in the driveway turnaround between house and barn, and got
out of the Ford. He had to get out because the sight of the old place
hit him harder than he had expected, simultaneously bringing a chill to
the pit of his stomach and a flush of heat to his face. In spite of the
cool draft from the dashboard vents, the air in the car seemed warm and
stale, too low in oxygen content to sustain him. He stood in the fresh
summer air, drawing deep breaths, and tried not to lose control of
himself The blank-windowed house held little power over him. When he
looked at it, he felt only a sweet melancholy that might, given time,
deepen into a more disturbing sadness or even despair. But he could
stare at it, draw his breath normally, and turn away from it without
being seized by a powerful urge to look at it again.
The barn exerted no emotional pull on him whatsoever, but the windmill
was another story. When he turned his gaze on that cone of limestone
beyond the wide pond, he felt as though he were being transformed into
stone himself, as had been the luckless victims of the mythological
serpenthaired Medusa when they had seen her snake-ringed face.
He’d read about Medusa years ago. In one of Mrs. Glynn’s books.
That was in the days when he wished with all his heart that he, too,
could see the snake-haired woman and be transformed into unfeeling rock.
. . .
“Jim?” Holly said from the other side of the car. “You okay?”
With its high-ceilinged rooms-highest on the first floor the two-story
mill was actually four stories in height. But to Jim, at that moment,
it looked far taller, as imposing as a twenty-story tower. Its
once-pale stones had been darkened by a century of grime. Climbing ivy,
roots nurtured by the pond that abutted one flank of the mill, twined up
the rough stone face, finding easy purchase in deep-mortared joints.
With no one to perform needed maintenance, the plant had covered half
the structure, and had grown entirely over a narrow first-floor window
near the timbered door.
The wooden sails looked rotten. Each of those four arms was about
thirty feet in length, making a sixty-foot spread across adjoining
spans, and each was five feet wide with three rows of vanes. Since he
had last seen the mill, more vanes had cracked or fallen away
altogether. The time-frozen sails were stopped not in a cruciform but
toward the open door.
“Come on, let’s get this place cleaned up, move in. We want to be ready
for whatever’s going to happen next.”
She followed him to the head of the steps but stopped there and watched
him descend two at a time, with the air of a kid excited by the prospect
of adventure. All of his misgivings about the mill and his fear of The
Enemy seemed to have evaporated like a few beads of water on a red-hot
griddle.
His emotional roller coaster was cresting the highest point on the track
thus far.
Sensing something above her head, Holly looked up. A large web had been
spun above the door, across the curve where the wall became the ceiling.
A fat spider, its body as big around as her thumbnail and its spindly
legs almost as long as her little finger, greasy as a dollop of wax and
dark as a drop of blood, was feeding greedily on the pale quivering body
of a snared moth.
With a broom, dustpan, bucket of water, mop, and a few rags, they made
the small upper chamber livable in short order. Jim even brought some