Because he had grown up around mills, even though they had not been in use since before his birth, Jim knew the names of everything. Pointing with the flashlight beam, he tried to explain how the mill had functioned, talking about the spurwheel and the quant, the mace and the rynd, the runner stone and the bed stone. “Ordinarily you couldn't look up through the mechanisms quite like this. But, see, the floor of the spurwheel loft is rotted out, not much of it left, and the bridge floor gave way when those huge stones broke loose and fell.”
Though he had regarded the mill with fear when they had stood outside, his mood had begun to change after they entered it. To Holly's surprise, as Jim tried to explain the millworks to her, he began to exhibit some of that boyish enthusiasm that she had first seen when they had been grocery shopping at The Central in Svenborg. He was pleased by his knowledge, and he wanted to show it off a little, the way a bookish kid was always happy to demonstrate what he had learned at the library while others his age were out playing baseball.
He turned to the limestone stairs on their left and climbed without hesitation, running one hand lightly along the curved wall as he went. There was a half-smile on his face as he looked around, as if only the good memories were flooding in on him now.
Puzzled by his extremely mercurial mood, trying to imagine how the mill could frighten and delight him simultaneously, Holly somewhat reluctantly followed him up toward what he had called “the high room.” She had no good memories to associate with the mill, only the fearful images of her nightmares, and those returned to her as she ascended behind Jim. Thanks to her dream, the narrow twist of stairs was familiar to her, though she was climbing it for the first time — which was an uncanny feeling, far eerier than mere deja vu.
Halfway up the stairs, she stopped at the window that overlooked the pond. The glass was frosted with dust. She used her hand to wipe one pane, and squinted at the water below. For an instant she thought she saw something strange beneath the placid surface — then realized she was seeing only the reflection of a cloud drifting across the sky.
“What is it?” Jim asked with boyish eagerness. He had stopped a few steps above her.
“Nothing. A shadow.”
They continued all the way to the upper chamber, which proved to be an unremarkable room, about twelve or fourteen feet in diameter, less than fifteen feet high at its apex. The curved limestone wall wrapped around to meet itself, and curved up to form the ceiling, so it seemed as if they were standing inside the domed nose cone of a rocket. The stone was not semitransparent as it had been in her dream, and no strange amber lights played within it. An arcane mechanism was offset in the dome, through which the motion of the wind-turned sails outside was translated into horizontal movement to crank a vertical wood shaft. The thick shaft disappeared through a hole in the center of the floor.
Remembering how they had stood downstairs and looked up through the buckled and broken decks within the multi-level millworks, Holly gingerly tested the wood floor. No rot was visible. The planks and the joists under them seemed sturdy.
“Lots of dust,” Jim said, as their feet stirred up little clouds with each step.
“And spiders,” Holly noted.
Wrinkling her face in disgust, she peered up at the husks of sucked-dry insects dangling in the elaborate webs that had been spun around the long-stilled mechanism overhead. She didn't fear spiders, but she didn't like them either.
“We need to do some cleaning before we set up camp,” he said.
“Should've bought a broom and a few other things while we were in town.”
“There're cleaning materials at the house. I'll bring them here while you start unloading the car.”
“The house!” Holly was exhilarated by a lovely inspiration. “When we set out for the mill, I didn't realize this property was still yours, no one living here. We can put the sleeping bags in the house, stay there, and visit this room as often as we need to.”
“Nice thought,” Jim said, “but it's not that easy. Something's going to happen here, Holly, something that'll give us answers or put us on the road to finding them. I feel it. I know it… well, just the way I know these things. But we can't pick the time for the revelation. It doesn't work that way. We can't ask God — or whatever is behind this — to punch a time clock and deliver revelations only between regular business hours. We have to stay here and be patient.”
She sighed. “Okay, yeah, if you—”
Bells interrupted her.
It was a sweet silvery ringing, neither heavy nor clangorous, lasting only two or three seconds, pleasingly musical. It was so light and gay, in fact, that it should have seemed a frivolous sound against the backdrop of that ponderous stone structure. It was not in the least frivolous, however, because inexplicably it triggered in Holly serious associations — thoughts of sin and penitence and redemption.
The trilling faded even as she turned in search of the source. But before she could ask Jim what it had been, it came again.
This time, Holly understood why she associated the sound with issues of spirituality. It was the precise tone of the bells that an altarboy rang during Mass. The sweet ringing brought back to her the smell of spikenard and myrrh from her college days when she had toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism.
The bells faded again.
She turned to Jim and saw him grinning.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I forgot all about this,” he said wonderingly. “How could I have forgotten all about this?”
The bells tinkled again, silvery and pure.
“Forgot what?” she asked. “What're those bells?”
“Not bells,” he said as they faded. He hesitated, and as the sound returned a fourth time, he finally said, “The ringing is in the stone.”
“Ringing stone?” she said in bewilderment.
As the bells sounded twice again, she circled the room, cocking her head this way and that, until it seemed to her that the music did, indeed, originate from the limestone wall, pealing out not from any single location but equally from every block of that curved surface, no louder at one point than another.
She told herself that stone could not ring, certainly not in such a dulcet voice. A windmill was an unusual structure and could have tricky acoustics. From a high-school class trip to Washington, she remembered a tourguide showing them a spot in the Capitol's rotunda from which even a whispered conversation was picked up and, by a quirk of architecture, transmitted across the huge dome to the far side of that great space, where eavesdroppers could hear it with perfect clarity. Perhaps something similar was at work here. If bells were rung or other sounds made at a particular place in a far corner of the first floor of the mill, a peculiarity of acoustics might transmit it in equal volume along all the walls on every floor. That explanation was more logical than the concept of magical, ringing stone — until she tried to imagine who would be secretly ringing the bell, and why.
She put one hand against the wall.
The limestone was cool. She detected faint vibrations in it.
The bell fell silent.
The vibrations in the wall subsided.
They waited.
When it was clear that the ringing would not resume, Holly said, “When did you hear it before?”
“When I was ten.”
“And what happened after the ringing, what did it signify?”
“I don't know.”
“But you said you just remembered it.”
His eyes were shining with excitement. “Yeah. I remember the ringing. But not what caused it or what followed it. Though I think … it's a good sign, Holly.” A note of rapture entered his voice. “It means something very fine is going to happen, something … wonderful.”