Hellfire

Informationen zum Autor John Saul ’s first novel!  Suffer the Children ! was an immediate million-copy bestseller. His other bestselling suspense novels include  Perfect Nightmare ! Black Creek Crossing ! and  The Presence. He is also the author of the  New York Times  bestselling serial thriller  The Blackstone Chronicles ! initially published in six installments but now available in one complete volume. Saul divides his time between Seattle and Hawaii. Klappentext The old mill has been silent for a hundred years! its dread secrets locked from view. Still! the people of Westover! Massachusetts! remember . . . and whisper of that terrible day when horrifying flames claimed eleven innocent young lives. The day the mill's doors slammed shut--forever. But now! the last of the once-powerful Sturgess family is about to unlock those doors again . . . and unleash an elemental fury. For behind the padlocks! deep within the dark! abandoned building! a terrible vengeance waits. A vengeance conceived in HELLFIRE. Prologue   The boy turned off the path that wound down from the big house on the hill—his house—and wandered along the riverbank. A hundred yards ahead, he could see the wooden trestle that carried the railroad tracks over the rushing stream. He had always imagined that the stream was a boundary, a visible line that separated him from everyone else in the little town. If the river weren’t there, he sometimes thought, then he would be part of the town.   But of course it wasn’t just the river; there was far more to it than that.   He came to the trestle, and paused. Partly, he was listening for the sound of a train, for he knew that if he could hear the low rumblings of an engine, it wasn’t safe to cross the river.   You had to wait until the train had come and gone, or until the sound had faded away into silence.   Sometimes, though, he was tempted to try the crossing even though he could hear a train coming, just to see if he could make it in time.   But of course he’d never tried it. It was too big a risk.   Not that he didn’t like risks. He did. There was nothing he liked more than going off by himself, exploring the woods that covered the hillside, poking along the riverbank, skipping from stone to stone, though sooner or later he would miss his footing and slide into the rushing waters.   But the rushing waters wouldn’t kill him.   A train, catching him defenseless in the middle of the trestle, would.   For a moment, he visualized himself, crushed under the weight of the streamliner that roared past the town twice a day, his mutilated body dropping into the river below.…   He put the thought out of his mind, and instead—as he often did—pictured himself already dead.   He saw himself in a coffin now, with flowers all around him. His parents, their eyes wet with tears, sat in the front pew of the little Episcopalian church in the middle of the town. Behind them, he could see all the other people of the town, staring at his coffin, wishing they’d been nicer to him, wishing they’d been his friends.   Not that he cared, he assured himself. It was more fun to be by yourself anyway. Besides, he had friends most of the time anyway, and when he came home from school in the summer it was nice to be able to play by himself, without anyone else wanting to do something he might not want to do.   Abandoning the fantasy, he listened carefully. When he heard no sound of an approaching train, he started across the trestle, carefully stepping from tie to tie, then continued along the tracks as they swept around the village in a long and gentle curve.   Suddenly he felt eyes watching him, and glanced off to the left. A quarter of a block down the road two boys stood side by side, staring at him.   He smiled, but as he was about t...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: John Saul
• Verlag: Bantam Books USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 01.07.1986
• EAN: 9780553258646
• ISBN: 978-0-553-25864-6
• Seiten: 344