Cold Fire

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 Windex and paper towels from the store of cleaning supplies at the house, so they could scrub the grime off the windows, letting in a lot more light.

Holly chased down and killed not only the spider above the door but seven others, checking darker corners with one of the flashlights until she was sure she had found them all.

Of course the mill below them was surely crawling with countless other spiders. She decided not to think about that.

By six o'clock, the day was waning but the room was bright enough without the Coleman lantern. They were sitting Indian fashion on their inflatable-mattress sleeping bags, with the big cooler between them.

Using the closed lid as a table, they made thick sandwiches, opened the potato chips and cheese twists, and popped the tops off cans of root beer. Though she had missed lunch, Holly had not thought about food until they'd begun to prepare it. Now she was hungrier than she would have expected under the circumstances. Everything was delicious, better than gourmet fare. Olive loaf and cheese on white bread, with mustard, recalled for her the appetites of childhood, the intense flavors and forgotten innocent sensuality of youth.

They did not talk much as they ate. Silences did not make either of them feel awkward, and they were taking such primal pleasure from the me that no conversation, regardless of how witty, could have improved the moment. But that was only part of the reason for their mutual reticence.

Holly, at least, was also unable to think what to say under these bizarre circumstances, sitting in the high room of a crumbling old mill, waiting for an encounter with something supernatural. No small talk of any kind was adequate to the moment, and a serious discussion of just about anything would seem ludicrous.

"I feel sort of foolish," she said eventually.

"Me, too," he admitted. "Just a little.”

At seven o'clock, when she was opening the box of chocolate-covered doughnuts, she suddenly realized the mill had no lavatory. "What about a bathroom?" He picked up his ring of keys from the floor and handed them to her.

"Go on over to the house. The plumbing works. There's a half bath right off the kitchen.”

She realized the room was filling with shadows, and when she glanced at the window, she saw that twilight had arrived. Putting the doughnuts aside, she said, "I want to zip over there and get back before dark.”

"Go ahead." Jim raised one hand as if pledging allegiance to the flag.

"I swear on all that I hold sacred, I'll leave you at least one doughnut.”

"Half the box better be there when I get back," she said, "or I'll kick your butt all the way into Svenborg to buy more.”

"You take your doughnuts seriously.”

"Damn right.”

He smiled. "I like that in a woman.”

Taking a flashlight to negotiate the mill below, she rose and went to the door. "Better start up the Coleman.”

"Sure thing. When you get back, it'll be a right cozy little campsite.”

Descending the narrow stairs, Holly began to worry about being separated from Jim, and step by step her anxiety increased. She was not afraid of being alone. What bothered her was leaving him by himself Which was ridiculous. He was a grown man and far more capable of effective self defense than was the average person.

The lower floor of the mill was much darker than when she had first seen it. Curtained with cobwebs, the dirty windows admitted almost none of the weak light of dusk.