Spider Light(103)

‘Up there?’ said Maud, pointing.

‘Yes, clever girl. Quickly then. We can crouch down and even if he does come in, he’ll never see us. Don’t make a sound.’

So they had gone up a little flight of flimsy wooden stairs, and had hidden in the corner behind the stone grinding wheels. Maud, whose teeth were chattering with terror, thought they should not really hide from a giant behind grinding wheels: giants liked things like that, they sang a song about grinding men’s bones to make their bread. If the giant knew there were grinding stones in here, he would be sure to come inside. She glanced nervously behind her at the waterwheels towering into the shadows.

Here he came now. The door was pushed open, and the dull morning light came in. There was the sound of heavy footsteps, and of the floor creaking under them. It was an old floor and it creaked a lot.

She could not see what the man was doing, not without peering around the edges of the stones, and she was not going to do that, not even for a tiny moment. But she could hear the screech and scrape of machinery a bit further down and she frowned, because this was not what she had expected. She had expected the giant to come stomping over the floor, bellowing to know where they were.

But he did not, and after a moment Maud realized that something was happening, something huge and frightening like the first dull rumble of thunder before a great crashing storm. There was a heavy scraping–something going groaningly up and up, and then a great roaring and splashing.

She looked questioningly up at mamma. Her mother started to speak, but in that moment Twygrist began to shudder to its bones. Behind them, in the dimness, something began to move, and Maud looked round in terror.

Slowly, with the agonized groaning of a struggling monster, the great waterwheels began to turn, and Maud understood that the sound had been the sluice gates opening. Water was pouring into Twygrist, and the mill’s huge machinery was starting to move.

It ought not to have been so fearsome–Maud had often heard and seen the waterwheels turn–and probably it would not have been fearsome at all if they had not been there on their own with a giant on the floor below hunting for them.

Her mother said they must move away from the machinery, and she thought the man had gone, although it was quite difficult to hear her properly, because the water was rushing down and down and the waterwheels were swishing round much faster. Maud glanced up at them. Huge oak and iron wheels, they were, and if you went on looking at them for too long, you began to see them as gobbling teeth, chomping down and down.

As mamma stood up and began to move forward, Maud saw two things both at the same time.

One was that it was not the giant who had opened Twygrist’s sluice gates, it was papa. Her father must have come into Twygrist early as he sometimes did. Maud could see him clearly; he was bending over a wheel near the ground, frowning as if there might be something not quite right with it. Did he know they were there? No, he could not know or he would have called out to them.

The other thing she saw was the man from Latchkill–the giant-man with the reaching hands–who must have come into Twygrist while the machinery was groaning and clattering. He was coming up the stairs towards them.

Mamma gave a cry of fear, and her father looked up and saw them for the first time. As the giant-man reached the top of the steps, the waterwheels spun faster and there was a hard flinty sound as the grinding stones directly in front of them began to turn. Her mother screamed. The giant-man lunged forward, his hands outstretched to her, knocking her off her feet, knocking her onto the grinding stones.

There was a hard crunching noise that sent a terrible pain through Maud’s whole body–like having your teeth torn out, or having all your fingernails ripped off. Then her father wrapped his arms tightly around her, and carried her outside, saying over and over that she must not look, everything would be all right, so long as Maud forgot everything she had seen and heard. Would she promise that? From a long way away, Maud heard her own voice obediently promising.

Papa had nodded, and said something about never forgiving himself, but how was he to know Louisa would be here, he had come in early because there was a lot to be done today. Maud must stay out here, just for a very little while, because papa must go back inside the mill. There was a thing he had to do.

So Maud had stayed outside. It had been very cold outside the mill and she could hear the waterwheels still gobbling and clanking. But she would do what papa had told her, and keep the promise she had made to forget everything that had just happened.



She had kept her promise, and she had forgotten. Or so it had seemed.

After mamma’s funeral she had been sent to stay with some cousins of mamma’s, then she had gone to school, and she had forgotten the morning when mamma had fallen between the grinding millstones inside Twygrist.

But she could see now that she had not really forgotten. She could remember how, after a few minutes, the waterwheels had slowed down and then stopped, so she knew papa had closed the gates to stop the water pouring in. It was quite a long time before he came out–far longer than the very little time he had said–but when he did come out, Maud saw there was a frown between his eyes that had not been there before. It had frightened her, but then papa had smiled and they had gone home, and talked about Maud visiting mamma’s cousins for a while.

Throughout all these years, the memory of what had happened that morning had remained so deeply buried Maud had not known it was there. All that had remained were nightmares of the black iron doors that opened onto Reaper Wing.