The Manor

by Scott Nicholson

  She held up the gnarled figurine, the twisted limbs of vine making the poor thing look crippled. It was hideous, the eyes crude, one larger than the other.

  "That's wonderful. I don't think Daniel Boone could have done any better."

  "Are you enjoying your stay so far?"

  "Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that. I've decided to cut my visit short. I have, um, pressing business to take care of."

  Miss Mamie's brow darkened and she pursed her lips. She dropped the little wooden figure and it clattered off the hearth, the shriveled head rolling away. "Oh, dear, what a great fall," she said, so softly that Adam barely heard her.

  Adam held up a hand. "I'm not looking for my money back. My roommate Paul will be staying on."

  Miss Mamie looked out the window. A cloud must have passed over the sun, because the room grew darker. The Abramov melody shifted into a minor key and began twisting in agitato.

  "Nobody can leave," she said.

  "I know the van doesn't come back up for another couple of weeks. I was wondering if you could possibly make other arrangements."

  "You don't understand. Nobody can leave. Especially you."

  Mrs. Abramov's face clenched as she increased the tempo of her chaotic melody. There was little of the beauty that the couple had been squeezing out of the instruments only minutes before. Now the notes were more like tortured wails than music.

  Adam looked out the window. "Can't one of the handymen take me down on horseback? I saw two of the guests out riding the other day."

  "It's not time yet," Miss Mamie said, finally looking away from the window. Her eyes glittered with what Adam took to be anger. "The party is tonight. A lovely affair, up on the widow's walk under the full moon. It's something of a hallowed tradition at Korban Manor."

  "I can pay extra for the trouble. I know what a bother this is."

  Miss Mamie glowered and touched the locket that dangled unfashionably from her choker. "He-he doesn't want you to go."

  "Paul?"

  Miss Mamie seemed to recover just a little. "Black Rock is a half day's journey by horse. And you belong here."

  The string music increased in intensity, fragmenting into chromatic chaos.

  "I'll walk, then."

  The music stopped abruptly, a diminished fifth quivering in the air, embarrassed at its isolation.

  "No one leaves," she said.

  Adam followed her gaze to the portrait of Korban above the fireplace, that same face that had whispered dream words to Adam about tunnels of the soul. Adam shivered. The house itself brooded, as if the walls were weary of darkness. The air was heavy, and even the blazing fire added nothing to the room's cheer. Adam moved to the hearth and rubbed his hands, trying to drive the remnants of the nightmare from his mind.

  He looked down at the broken figurine. A scrap of fabric was tucked into a splintered crease in the torso. Gray cotton, like his pajamas.

  "Play on," Miss Mamie said to the Abramovs.

  Roth found Spence on the smoking porch, sitting in a hand-carved rocker whose legs seemed to bow outward from the stress.

  "How goes the Shakespeare bit?" Roth asked.

  The writer already had a drink, scotch, judging from its amber appearance. It was scarcely ten o'clock. Spence was certainly living up to his reputation. Roth had half suspected the writer had affected an alcoholic's indulgence that was as phony as his legendary womanizing or Roth's own accent.

  "The best ever, as always," Spence said, face pale and eyes nearly pink from lack of sleep.

  "You'd like to feed it to the critics with a shovel, wouldn't you, mate? I mean, they've been bloody hard on you these last few years."

  Spence let out a wet sigh, his chins flexing like a grubworm. "There's only one critic I want to nail. My first one."

  Roth sat in a swinging seat that was woven from thin reeds. He placed his camera case on the floor. If he worked it around right, a dissipated Spence would make a great addition to Roth's gallery of deceased celebrities. Because Spence was clearly running headlong toward some invisible cliff edge.

  "Your old mum, I bet," Roth said. "They can be rather overbearing."

  "My mother was a saint. The critic to whom I've alluded is long dead. But I have hopes that a merciful God will bring me face-to-face with her in the afterlife."

  Roth grinned. "Yeah, what use is heaven if you can't have a go at all your old enemies?"

  Spence took a long swallow of scotch. "You're boring me, Mr. Roth. I loathe boredom."

  "Listen here, mate, I had this idea-"

  "Let me guess. You have a book you want me to write and we'll split the money after I do all the work."

  "Not quite that bald. I was thinking about a coffee table book on Korban. I'll take the photographs, dig up some old archival stuff, convert some of these portraits to digital files. All you have to do is put your name on the cover and type a few pages as a foreword."

  "My name isn't what it used be."

  "The project's a natural. Some eccentric bloke builds himself a rural empire, then dies by mysterious means. We can even play on the ghost angle. I've no qualms about inserting some transparent orbs or fairy dust on the film."

  "Speaking of fairies," Spence said. Through the porch screen, they could see a young man carrying a video camera toward the forest.

  "His friend let him go off alone like that? Seemed the jealous and clingy sort." Roth had occasionally been driven to experiment when no birds were available for plucking. Males were a bit too rough around the edges for his taste, but they offered an element of danger that no woman could match. Still, if Spence were that prim about such matters, best to play it straight. He made no comment.

  "Ephram Korban would have despised such depraved moral weakness," Spence said.

  "You talk as if you knew him."

  "No, but I understand him. I can feel him. This house was his in more than mere ownership."

  "Ah, you believe that ghost tripe?"

  "I've felt the spirit move me."

  Roth wondered how many drinks the man had downed with breakfast. "Then why not a book? We can do it as a tribute if you'd rather."

  Spence lifted himself with effort. "I'd sooner write a trashy thriller, something with vampires and a Martian Pope and a government conspiracy. And an unlikely love interest. One must have a love interest to make the pot boil."

  "Think about it."

  "Excuse me, I have work to do. Real work." Spence carried his empty glass toward the study, no doubt for a refill.

  Roth sat in the shade of the porch. Spence, dead in the bathtub, his fat, white gut displayed in a two-page tabloid spread. Moby dicked. That would be a picture worth a thousand words. And multiple thousands of dollars.

  How to make that overtaxed heart explode? A menage a trois with Bridget and Lilith? Or put Paul and Adam on him. With his homophobia, Spence likely had some serious bones in the closet.

  Roth smiled. There was an easier way, one that wouldn't involve the complicity of outsiders.

  If Spence were so bloody in love with his work, what would happen if the work went into the fireplace? Best of all, he could blame it all on a ghost. Who could ever prove otherwise?

  The wind played through the trees that surrounded the graveyard, a lonely music for a dead resting place high on the edge of the world. Sylva leaned on her walking stick, watching from the fence, too brittle to risk climbing over. The old woman had knelt in the grass, searched the ground for a minute, then picked something and passed it through the fence to Anna. It was a four-leaf clover.

  "Lucky charm?" Anna asked.

  "Better than luck. Lets you see the dead." — "I already do."

  "Only when they want. This here gives you the power over them." Sylva nodded toward the grave of Rachel Faye Hartley. "That's the one you'll be wanting to summon."

  "Summon?"

  "Come in fire, dead come back. Say it. Third time's a charm."

  "I can't do that."

  "It's in your b
lood. You just got to believe."

  Anna stared at the cold stone, the flowers chiseled by some delicate hand, a bouquet that never wilted. She believed in ghosts, and so she saw them. And since she'd arrived at Korban Manor, she'd see them more clearly than ever before. Maybe it was always a question of faith. Part of the belief might originate from the dead spirit, and a ghost had to dream itself back toward the living world.

  Perhaps Anna and the ghost had to meet halfway in a union of sad and enslaved souls, and if she only had to recite an old mountain folk spell, that wasn't so much to ask. The ghost, in this case the person who had lived by the name of Rachel Faye Hartley, had to put forth the real effort. After all, it would be Rachel who wrenched herself from the dark peace of eternal slumber to rise and return to a world perhaps best forgotten. A world that held only the promise of pain and loneliness.

  Anna looked down at the clover. Could she believe in magic? With cancer eating her flesh, she had to put all her faith in the permanent existence of the soul, or else she might as well leap from the top of Korban Manor herself. Without faith, what was the point?

  She closed her eyes and said the words: "Come in fire, come in fire, come in fire."

  A chill caressed her, a soft immortal coldness. When she opened her eyes, the woman in white stood before her, the bouquet in her diaphanous hands. It was as if Anna were looking into a trick mirror, because she recognized herself in that pale and transparent face.

  "Anna," the woman said, in that same whispered tone that had haunted Anna's dreams, had called to her from the trail, had led her into the woods where George Law-son's spirit seized her in its severed hand.

  "You," Anna said. "You're the one who summoned me here. It's wasn't Ephram Korban at all."

  "You grew up beautiful, just like I always figured." The words were like splashes of ice water.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I hated to send you away. I thought it was the only way to save you from him. But I didn't know."

  "Send me away?" Anna looked at Sylva, who pulled her shawl more tightly about her bony shoulders. Sylva nodded her knot of skull bone, her face tired, wrinkles deepening, as if she'd aged fifty years since arriving at the graveyard. Anna looked at the ghost of Rachel, back to Sylva, and again at the ghost. Their eyes had that same shape, the dark arch of brow, the same hint of mystery. Just like Anna's.

  Just like Anna's.

  "You're her." The realization sliced through Anna with the slow sureness of a glacier, more implacable than cancer, an impossible truth that was all the more horrible because the impossible had become ordinary.

  Anna's blood froze in her veins, as hard as the frost that still sparkled beneath the patches of tombstone shadows.

  "It's all my fault," Rachel said. "That's my sorrow, that's what haunts me in my tunnel of the soul. The fear that Ephram uses to control me."

  "Ephram Korban. What do I care about him?" Anna's tears ran down her cheeks like the tracing of lifeless fingers.

  The ghostly lips parted, Rachel's form glimmered under the sunrise. "It was hard on me to lose you, harder even than dying. Harder even than being dead. Because being dead is just like being alive, only worse."

  "Hard on you," Anna said. "Every night, in every new foster home, every time some stranger tucked me in, I prayed to God that you'd have to suffer. Even though I never knew you, I hated you. Because I never got to belong."

  "I suffered, too."

  "I hated you for not being there, for never existing. And now I find you, and you still don't exist."

  "You don't understand, Anna. We need you."

  "Need, need, need. What about me? I had needs, too." Anna flung the clover to the grave grass, the sobs shaking her. "Go away. I don't believe in you."

  "Anna," Sylva said. "She may be dead, but she's blood."

  "You can keep your blood. I'm done with it all." Anna moved between the stones, vision blurred by tears, scarcely aware of her feet, wanting only to be away, back in the world of ordinary pain, ordinary loneliness.

  Rachel's voice reached across the grass, weaker, as if leaking from inside the mouth of an endless tunnel. "He haunts us, Anna. We're dead and he still haunts us."

  Anna didn't even slow down. She had come here to find her own ghost. Now she had, and it was worse than she ever could have imagined. Her ghost didn't provide solace and the comfort of life beyond life. Her ghost brought the promise of eternal loneliness, proof that she would never belong, no matter which side of the grave claimed her.

  "You don't know what it's like," Sylva shouted after her, the words swept by the October wind. "It's way worse to lose a daughter. I ought to know. 'Cause I lost Rachel."

  Anna stopped near the shadow of Ephram Korban's monument. She turned, and her turning seemed as slow as the spinning of the earth, trickles of angry sorrow cold on her cheeks, flesh already numb to this new impossible truth.

  Ephram Korban and Sylva.

  Then Rachel.

  And Anna.

  Korban's name hovered before her in a watery haze, as if the chiseled letters on the monument gave weight to Sylva's words. Blood. Ephram Korban's blood ran through her, as tainted as that ancestral side which cursed her with the Sight, all bound up in this ridge of ancient Appalachian soil, a sorry dirt that couldn't even hold down its corpses.

  Sylva called once more, but Anna wasn't listening. She climbed over the fence, her heart on fire with a single wish.

  Dead stay dead.

  Dead stay dead forever.

  CHAPTER 18

  Mason wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had removed his shirt, but still the room was too warm. Oak chips stuck to his chest and arms. His shoulders had passed the point of aching. The pain had transformed into a dull, constant drumming somewhere in the back of his mind.

  His sculpting instructor at Adderly, Dennis Graves, had told him that the key to art was stamina. Mason's first assignment had been to carve the letters of the word stamina into a block of white pine. That clumsy effort now rested across Mama's dead television set. He'd given it to her like a kindergartner who'd brought home a finger painting. That was back before her blindness, though after her eyesight failed she often held it in her lap and ran her fingers over the letters.

  Someday he was going to do another word just for her: dreams.

  He would fashion it in bronze or copper, something durable. Maybe even granite. Except then the word would be too heavy. Maybe it would be too heavy even in balsa wood. Or air.

  Mason had finished with the hatchet and adze. The rough form was fleshed out. The sky had grown darker in the basement's small high windows. He didn't know if that meant rain or that dusk was coming. He'd long ago lost track of time.

  Mason worked with his broad chisel and mallet, shaving off sections of the oak. The grain was cooperative, as if in a hurry to become its true shape. The statue was revealing itself too fast, and there was no way that he should be this far along already. It was almost as if the wood was pumping energy back through his tools into his hands.

  Sure, Mase. Whatever you think. Artistic license.

  And look here, the shoulders are squared, one of Korban's arms will be across his stomach, the other hand behind his back. An aristocratic pose. A man who knows what he's all about.

  The dead space of the basement swallowed the sounds of metal on metal and metal into wood.

  Come out, Korban. I know you 're in there, somewhere inside this godforsaken hunk of oak. SING to me, you beautiful old bastard. Rise up and walk.

  Mason squinted as a spray of sawdust skipped back toward his face. He drove the chisel's blade into a space beside the statue's left arm. Stamina. Dreams.

  He'd have to send Dennis Graves another word.

  Spirit.

  You had to have spirit, or you were lost. The material had to have spirit. You couldn't squeeze soul out of a stone. It had to already exist, to have existed forever, waiting there for the artist to release it.

  The breath of spiri
t wind blew from the four corners. That's where dream-images came from. They weren't really new ideas or visions. They were things that already were, that just had to be revealed to human minds.

  Okay. Okay. Now you're losing it, linthead.

  Artistic pretension is expected, and all that gibberish might come in handy after you get "discovered." But right now, the reality is that you 're working yourself into a lather and you can't make yourself stop. You should have taken a break to eat and rest.

  But YOU CAN'T MAKE YOURSELF STOP.

  Mason frowned and rammed the chisel off the flank of hip. He didn't think it was a good sign when people started having philosophical debates with themselves. He was supposed to be in a creative trance. He wanted it, searched for it, prayed to the gods of impossible dreams.

  He looked at the bust of Korban, and it seemed to smile at him from the table. The wooden lips parted: "So why can't you stop?"

  I can stop any time I want to.

  "Certainly. I believe you, Mr. Jackson."

  Look, you can't just turn creativity off and on at will. You've got to roll with it while you've got the wheels. You've got to take the Muse's hand when she wants to dance.

  "Fine. No arguments. But let's just see you stop."

  Okay. But I want you to know that my shoulders and arms and finger muscles are going to scream in pain because they 're wound tighter than a spool of factory thread. Besides, I'm doing this for Mama, not me.

  The bust said, "Excuses, excuses."

  I'll show you. Here we go…

  Mason flailed at the chisel. Two inches of dark red wood peeled away from the section that would be Korban's left kneecap. He repositioned the blade and drew back the mallet for another blow.

  The bust laughed, a sound like the shuffle of rodents. "You're not stopping."

  Okay, already. Get off my case. I just had to get USED to the idea.

  Mason curled another strip of oak away, then looked down at his tools scattered around the floor among the shavings.

  See? I can take my eyes off it if I want to. Just as an experiment, I'm going to think about something besides Ephram Korban's statue. Take, for instance, the lovely Anna Galloway…