Circling. Silent.
To Henry, Holly said, “Then it began to worry you.”
Henry wiped one shaky hand down his deeply lined face, not so much as if
he was trying 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 at 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 )7 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.”