Spider Light(33)
The police had searched the inside of the mill, as well as combing the surrounding hillsides. They did not tell Miss Robards or her brother that they were now hesitating worriedly over the reservoir, created over two hundred years ago to power the mill’s unwieldy mechanism. They had not yet reached the stage of dragging it, and they were hoping not to do so–dragging any expanse of water was a messy, long-winded procedure never mind being unreliable, and it was more than seventy years since Twygrist’s sluice gates had been raised. The mechanism was likely to be rusted beyond use.
On the morning of the fourth day, the inspector who had been called in to head the search decided to go back inside Twygrist with more powerful lights and with the dogs. It was such a labyrinth when you actually got inside, he said, it was possible they had missed something.
Donna went with them. She could not bear it any longer, she said to the inspector. Please let her come along, if only for a couple of hours. She would feel so much better knowing she was joining in the search and in any case, they could hardly prevent her from driving out there herself, even if they would not actually let her into Twygrist. The inspector was not very keen but eventually agreed, stipulating that she was not to get in the way or try to climb into any of the inaccessible parts of the mill. It had been derelict for years and parts of it were probably dangerous. She was to regard herself as under police orders, was that clear?
‘Perfectly clear,’ said Donna politely.
Whoever had built Twygrist, had taken advantage of the natural slope of the land, and it was set into the hillside with a good part of it below the ground. Donna did not know if this was because the mill had sunk over the centuries, or if it had been built like that in the first place so as to get the full weight of the water from the reservoir directly behind the mill, a little way up the hillside. The roof was a long steep structure, its eaves so low that at the front they were only a few feet from the ground. Tiny slatted windows were set into the roof, but most of the slats had rotted away so the windows resembled empty eye sockets.
On the side was the over-elaborate clock her mother had said was to commemorate someone. There was some sort of local fund to pay for the regular winding and cleaning of it–the office of Clock-Winder was passed down in one of the local families, father to son or nephew, apparently. Maria was hoping to discover the identity of the family, and talk to them. It was very rustic, wasn’t it? She thought it perfectly charming.
Donna had not thought it perfectly charming at all, and she thought the clock itself was very ugly. It had a bulbous surface, so that from some angles it looked like a swollen face poking through the wall. It was rather unnerving to approach Twygrist and look up to see those empty windows and that swollen-faced clock.
The roof overhung the doorway so much that the policemen had to duck their heads to go through, and Donna, who was fairly tall, had to do so as well. The door itself was black with age and half hanging off its hinges, but one of the men propped it open to allow daylight in. But even with that amount of light, entering Twygrist was like stepping into a dank black cavern. It was like walking beneath an old, old lake, with the uncomfortable knowledge that directly over your head was a huge volume of dark stagnant water. Donna wondered how long it was since the old sluice gates had been raised, and the water had poured out of the reservoir, down through the tunnels and culverts, to gush into the mill and power the two massive millwheels. She had a sudden unpleasant suspicion that it would not take much to set the rusting mechanism in motion again: that if she leaned on something unwisely, or trod incautiously on a particular part of the floor, she might feel a shudder go through the old timbers, and the massive waterwheels would slowly begin to rotate once more. Sheer nerves, nothing more.
The police searched this floor first, sweeping their powerful torches over the long-disused mechanism, and brushing aside festoons of grey-white cobwebs in order to check all the corners and tucked-away little recesses. Almost all of Twygrist was decayed and rotted beyond repair, and there was a smell of sour dirt and extreme age. Donna stayed by the door, wanting to keep a low profile in case they decided to order her out, but watching where the searchers’ torches went, trying to see if there were any clues that were being missed.
But there was nothing to be seen anywhere, and after a while the search was moved to the upper level. Donna watched the police go warily up the rickety staircase. She thought the upper level was where the workers had shovelled corn into a chute so it could be fed down to the millstones for the actual grinding. Josiah Forrester had employed local women and girls for that–it was one of the things Maria Robards had discovered and talked about. They had all sat in the upper rooms, she said, picking over the corn before it was fed into the chute, and there had been a legend that some of them were witches. That was because they had worked in near-darkness on account of it being dangerous to have lit candles or rushlights inside Twygrist, and because they had usually worn black cotton gowns and hats to protect their hair from the corn dust.
There was the chute overhead, a little to her left, and directly beneath it were the two millstones that had worked together to crush the corn to flour. She walked across to them. They were both badly cracked–one was almost in two completely separate pieces–and their surfaces were deeply pitted. Donna glanced round and then reached down to the nearer stone. By leaning over she could brush it with her fingertips. It felt cold and hard and she stepped back at once, repelled. As she did so, the floor-joists around the millstones creaked protestingly, almost as if the voice of the mill was wheezing and grating its way back to life again…