happened tonight?”
At last Carolyn’s tears began to flow. “I don’t know,” she said through her sobs. “She was such a sweet child. I … I just don’t know!”
Phillip put his arms around his wife, and tried to comfort her. “It was an accident, darling,” he whispered softly. “I know how it all seems now, but whatever happened tonight, it couldn’t have had anything to do with what happened a hundred years ago. It was just a terrible accident. We have to believe that.”
We have to, he repeated to himself. If we don’t, we’ll have to spend the rest of our lives waiting for it all to start again.
And then, against his will, a picture of his daughter came into his mind.
Alan Rogers had died, and she’d gazed into the mill at the broken body of Beth’s father.
Her eyes had glittered with malicious hatred, and her lips had been twisted into a satisfied smile.
He held his wife closer, and shut his eyes, but still the vision lingered.
Late the next afternoon, both Phillip and Carolyn stood with Norm Adcock as a pair of workmen pried away the metal plate that had covered one face of the loading-dock wall for the last hundred years.
Samuel Pruett Sturgess, in the last pages of his diary, wrote of the metal plate, and his hopes that it would seal the room from the outside, as the firmly bolted metal door sealed it from the inside. It was his intention, in the last days of his life, that no one ever enter the workroom behind the basement stairs again.
Grayish wisps of ash still drifted toward the sky from the smoking ruin, and its heat still caused a shimmering in the summer air.
The men, their shirts stripped off against the combined heat of the sun and the fire, worked quickly, using a cold chisel and a maul to break away the bolts that secured the metal to the concrete of the dock. At last it fell away, and the window, its glass long ago broken out of the frames, was exposed to the sunlight for the first time in a century. The workmen stepped back, and Norm Adcock, with Phillip at his side, moved forward.
Residual heat drifted from the room, but when Adcock reached out and gingerly touched the concrete itself, he realized that it was no longer too hot to go inside. He dropped to his knees, and shone a flashlight inside.
At first he thought the room was empty. Opposite the window, he could see the remains of the metal door, twisted and buckled by the intensity of the heat that had all but destroyed it, hanging grotesquely from its broken support rail.
He worked the light back and forth, examining the floor.
Everywhere he looked, there was nothing but blackness.
And then, at last, he shone the light straight down.
“Jesus,” he whispered, and immediately felt Phillip Sturgess’s grip tighten on his shoulder. “I’m not sure you’re going to want to look at this, Phillip,” he said quietly.
“They’re inside?”
Adcock withdrew his head from the window, and faced Phillip. “They’re there. But I really think you should let us take care of it. Take Carolyn home, Phillip. I’ll let you know if we find anything.”
Phillip hesitated, but finally shook his head. “I can’t. I have to see it for myself.” When Adcock seemed about to protest further, he spoke again. “Carolyn and I have talked about it,” he said. “And we decided that whatever is in there, I have to see it.”
Adcock’s brows rose. “Have to?”
“I’d rather not explain it,” Phillip said. “Frankly, I doubt that it would make much sense to you. But I do have to see what happened.”
Adcock weighed the matter in his mind, then reluctantly nodded. “Okay. I’ll have the men put the ladder in, then we can go down.”
When the ladder had been lowered, Adcock disappeared through the window. Phillip followed him. He carefully avoided looking down until he was on the floor and had stepped carefully away from the ladder. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to the shadowy light of the little room, he let himself look at what Adcock had already seen.
The heat of the fire had all but destroyed the remains of the two girls.
Their clothes had burned, as had their hair. There were still fragments of skin clinging to the skulls, and the skeletons themselves were wrapped in the emaciated remains of the soft tissues of their bodies.
Phillip was reminded of photographs he’d seen of the Nazi concentration camps after the war.