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…
I am not really past my work, my dear, so be wary of me…I can still grind and I can still crush and mill. Once songs were sung about me and once children’s rhymes were chanted about how I could grind men’s bones to make bread–and women’s bones as well, my dear. I was never particular whether it was a man or a woman who fell into my hands…