Creative Spirit with Screenplay

by Scott Nicholson

  “He was my friend. It’s the least I can do.” A shadow crossed his face. “I need to wait till morning, though. I don’t go up Beechy Gap at night.”

  “First thing, then. I don’t want to upset the guests. You know what’s coming, don’t you?”

  “A blue moon in October,” Ransom said. His eyes shifted to the barn door. A horseshoe hung above it, points up, the dull metal catching the dying daylight. As if luck mattered.

  “You’ve been with us a long time.”

  “And I aim to stick around a lot longer.”

  “Then you won’t let me down?”

  “I’ll bury him proper, silver on his eyes. I take pride in my work.”

  “Ephram always said, ‘Pride will walk you through the tunnels of the soul.’”

  “Ephram Korban said lots of things. And people said lots of things about him.”

  “Some of it might even be true.” Miss Mamie stroked the doll, suffering her own moment of pride at its skillful rendering. Folk art, they called it. The little poppet contained far more folk than anybody knew. “Excuse me, I have a dinner to host.”

  Ransom gave a little bow and tugged the strap of his overalls. Miss Mamie left him to feeding the livestock and headed toward the manor. She carried the doll as if it were a precious gift to a loved one. Even though the house was as familiar to her as her own skin, to see it from a distance always brought a fresh rush of joy. The fields, the trees, the mountain wind seemed to sing his name.

  This was her home.

  Their home.

  Forever.

  CHAPTER 3

  Anna Galloway pulled back the lace curtains of the bedroom window. A bit of dust rose from the windowpane at the stir of air. Sunlight spilled on her shoulders, the October glow warming the floor beneath her feet. The mountain air was chillier than she was used to, and even the roaring fire didn’t quell her shivers. A painting of Ephram Korban hung over the room’s fireplace, smaller than the one downstairs but just as brooding. The sculptor with the fear of heights was right about one thing: Korban had been thoroughly in love with himself.

  She looked out over the meadows. Here she was, at long last. The place she was supposed to be, for whatever reason. This was the end of the world, the logical place for endings. She drove the fatalism from her mind and instead watched the roan and chestnut galloping across the pasture. The display of freedom and peace warmed her.

  “It’s so pretty, isn’t it?” the woman behind her said. She’d told Anna that her name was “Cris without the h” as if the lack of h somehow made her harder and less flexible. And since they were going to be roomies . . .

  “It’s wonderful,” Anna said. “Everything I dreamed it would be.”

  Cris already had her makeup kit, watercolor brushes, and sketch pads scattered across the bed nearest the door. Anna had nothing but a slim stack of books piled neatly on her dresser. Her attitude toward material possessions and earthly comforts had undergone dramatic changes in the past year. You travel light when you’re not sure where you’re headed.

  The pain swept across her abdomen, sneaky this time, a needle poking in slow motion. She closed her eyes, counted backward in big fat numerals.

  Ten, round and thin . . .

  Nine, loop and droop . . .

  She was down to six and the pain was floating somewhere above that far cut in the Blue Ridge Mountains when Cris’s voice pulled her back.

  “Like, what do you do?”

  Anna turned from the window. Cris sat on the bed, brushing her long blonde hair. Anna was glad the chemotherapy hadn’t made her own hair fall out. Not just because of vanity, but because she wanted to take all of herself with her when she went.

  “I do research articles,” Anna said.

  “Oh, you’re a writer.”

  “Not fiction like Jefferson Spence. More like metaphysics.”

  “Science and stuff?”

  Anna sat on her bed. The pain was back, but not as sharp as before. “I worked at the Rhine Research Center in Durham. Investigator.”

  “You quit?”

  “Not really. I just got finished.”

  “Rhine. Isn’t that ESP, ghosts, and weird stuff? Like on X-Files?”

  “Except the truth isn’t ‘out there.’ It’s in here.” She touched her temple. “The power of the mind. And we don’t do aliens. I was a paranormal investigator. Except I became a dinosaur. Extinct almost before I even got started.”

  “You’re too young to be a dinosaur.”

  “Everything’s electronic these days. Electromagnetic field detectors, subsonic recorders, infrared cameras. If you can’t plot it on a computer, they don’t think it exists. But I believe what I see with my heart.”

  Cris looked around the room, as if noticing the dark corners and flickering fire-cast shadows for the first time. “You didn’t come here because of—”

  “Don’t worry. I’m here for personal reasons.”

  “Aha. I saw you talking to that muscle guy with the canvas satchel, out on the porch.”

  “Not that kind of personal reason. Besides, he’s not my type.”

  “Give it a few days. Stranger things have happened.”

  “And I’m sure you’re here to throw yourself into your art?” Anna pointed to the sketch pads. “I won’t give you my lecture on the artistic temperament, because I like you.”

  “Oh, I think my husband is plooking his secretary and wanted me out of the house so they could use the hot tub. He sent me to Greece over the summer. New Mexico last spring to do the Georgia O’Keeffe thing. Now the North Carolina mountains.”

  “At least he’s generous.”

  “I’ll never be a real artist, but it gives me something to do on retreats besides chase men and drink. But my Muse allows me those little luxuries, too. Speaking of which, I noticed a bar in the study. Care for one before dinner?”

  “No, thank you. I believe I’ll rest a little.”

  “Well, just don’t walk around with a sheet over your head. I might mistake you for a ghost.”

  “If I die, I promise you’ll be among the first to know.”

  Anna lay back on the pillow. A feather poked her neck. The door closed, Cris’s footsteps faded down the hall, dying leaves whisked against the window. The smoke-aged walls gave off a comforting aroma, and the oil lamp’s glow added to the warmth of the room. She felt at peace for the first time since—

  No. She wouldn’t think of that now.

  The pain was back, a rude houseguest. She tried the trick of numbers, but her concentration kept getting tangled up with memory, as it so often did lately. Ever since she’d started dreaming of Korban Manor.

  Ten, round and thin . . .

  An image of Stephen slid into her mind between the one and the zero. Stephen, with his cameras and gizmos, his mustache and laugh. To him, Anna was the parapsychologist’s version of a campfire girl. Stephen had no need for sensing ghosts. He could prove them, he said.

  Their graveyard dates ended up with her wandering over grass and headstones while Stephen focused on setting up equipment. The night she’d sensed her first ghost, shimmering beside the marble angel in the Guilford Cemetery, Stephen was too busy marking down EMF readings to look when she called. The ghost didn’t wait around for a Kodak moment, it dissolved like mist at sunrise. But before those evanescent threads spooled themselves back to whatever land they’d come from, the haunted eyes had stared fully into Anna’s.

  The look was one of mutual understanding.

  Nine, loop and droop . . .

  That had been her first investigation with Stephen. They’d slept together on the floor of Asheville’s Hanger Hall on a winter night when the wind was too brisk even for ghosts. And two weeks later, she’d overheard him at a party calling her a “flake, but a lovable flake.”

  So after six years of study and field research, she was little more respectable than an 800-number phone psychic. There were plenty enough skeptics out in the real world, between the hard scientist
s and those who were always up for a good old-fashioned witch burning. But the laughter of her own peers was enough to drive her to big, spooky, empty places where she could chase ghosts alone.

  Eight, a double gate . . .

  Then the pain came, and the first of the dreams. She had stepped from the forest, her feet soft on the damp grass, the lawn as lush as only dreams could paint it. The manor stood before her, windows dark as eyes, the trees around the house twisted and bare. A single strand of smoke rose from one of the four chimneys. The smoke curled, collected, gathered on the roof just above the white railing.

  And the shape formed, and the woman’s whispered word, “Anna,” woke her up, as it had so many nights since.

  Seven, sharp and even . . .

  That was what the pain was, a seven, sticking in her intestines.

  Stephen came over the day she found out the colon cancer had metastasized to her liver. He held her hand and his eyes managed to look dewy and glazed behind his thick glasses. The mustache even twitched. But he was too practical, too emotionally void to realize exactly what the diagnosis meant. To him, death was nothing more than a cessation of pulse, a change in energy readings.

  So much for soul mates.

  Even after Anna had talked the doctors out of a colectomy, accepting the death sentence as the cancer raced to other organs, Stephen still acted as if science would intervene and save her. He probably even prayed to science, that coldest of all gods. She refused his offer of a ride home from the hospital. She’d come to accept that loneliness was a natural state for someone soon to be a ghost.

  Six, an arc and trick . . .

  Miracles happen, one of her oncologists had told her. But she didn’t expect them to occur in a hospital, with tubes pumping radiation into her, blades removing her flesh a sliver at a time, doctors marking off her dwindling days. And she had stopped dreaming in the hospital. It was only back home, in the wee hours of her own quiet bed, that Korban Manor once more stood before her.

  Night after night, as the dream grew longer and more vivid, the shape on the roof gained substance. At last Anna could clearly see the distant face, diaphanous hair flowing out like a veil. The cyan eyes, the welcoming smile, the bouquet held before her from the forlorn stage of the widow’s walk. At last the face was recognizable.

  The woman was Anna.

  Five, a broken wing . . .

  The pain was softer now, snow on flowers.

  She’d conducted some research, knowing the manor was familiar to her through more than just dream visitations. She found a few items on Korban Manor in the Rhine archives. Ephram Korban had spent twenty years building his estate on the remote Appalachian crag, then had leapt to his death from the widow’s walk in an apparent suicide. Some locals in the small town of Black Rock passed along stories of sightings, mostly disregarded as the gossip of hired hands. A field investigation, shortly before the house was restored as an artists’ retreat, had netted zero in the way of data or enthusiasm.

  But maybe Korban’s pain, his anger, his love, his hope, his dreams, were soaked into these walls like the cedar stain on the wainscoting. Maybe this wood and stone and glass had absorbed the radiant energy of his humanity. Maybe the manor whose construction had obsessed him was now his prison. Maybe haunting wasn’t a choice but an obligation.

  Four, a north fork . . .

  She drifted in the gray plane between sleep and thought, wondering if she would dream of the mansion now that she was actually here. She closed her mind to her five senses, and only that other one remained, the sense that Stephen had ridiculed, the one Anna had hidden away from her few friends and many foster parents. The line between being sensitive and being a freak was thin.

  Three, a skeleton key . . .

  For just a moment, she was pulled from sleep. Something wafted behind the maple baseboard, scurried along the cracks between dimensions. She didn’t want to open her eyes. She could see better if her eyes were closed.

  Two, an empty hook . . .

  She felt eyes on her. Someone was watching, perhaps her own ghost, the woman spun from the smoke of dreams who held that bouquet of fatal welcome.

  One, a dividing line . . .

  The line between some and none, here and gone, bed and grave, love and hate, black and white.

  Zero.

  Nothing.

  Anna had come from nothing, was born to nothing, and walked toward nothing, both her past and future black.

  She opened her eyes.

  No one was in the room, no ghost shifted against the wall.

  Only Korban, dead as dry oil, features shadowed by the flickering firelight.

  The sunlight’s angles had grown steeper in the room. The pain was gone. Anna rose and went outside to wait for sundown, wondering if this was the night she would finally meet herself.

  Chapter 4

  Mason stared at the large oil painting that hung on the wall above the fireplace. It stared right back, as severe as any of Mason’s former art instructors. The scowling face of the portrait dominated the room, ten times life-size. The flesh tones of the oils were so realistic that Mason could imagine the figure bursting free of the ornate wooden frame. A brass plate beneath the painting was etched with the name.

  Ephram Korban.

  Mason studied the black eyes. They were the only features that lacked the realism of the rest of the painting. The eyes were dead, dull, completely unanimated. But Mason wasn’t a painter himself, so he had no grounds for criticism. Critics be damned, and he was actually more interested in the frame than the painting. It appeared to be hand carved.

  Mason glanced behind him at the people milling in the foyer. Through the open door, he could see two men in overalls unloading the wagon. A busty, fortyish woman wearing a long black dress seemed to be everywhere at once, giving orders, distributing drinks in long sweaty glasses, shaking hands. Mason moved closer to the fireplace. Though the day was warm for late October, a fire blazed in the hearth, all yellow and orange and other bright autumn colors.

  The fireplace mantel was also hand carved. Bas-relief cherubim and seraphim, plump Raphaelite forms winging among the thick curls of clouds. Mason checked his fingers to make sure they were clean, then felt among the smooth shapes. As his hands explored, he noticed someone had left a half-filled glass of red wine on the mantel. The rings the glass might leave on the white paint, like blood on virgin snow. No respect for the work of a craftsman.

  He again looked at the eyes in the painting. Now Ephram Korban seemed to be gazing out across the room, brooding over these people who had dared to cross his threshold. The face was alternately compelling and repulsive. Mason touched the frame—

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” came a woman’s high voice.

  Mason spun, his satchel nearly knocking over the wineglass. Before him stood the buxom woman in the black dress, her dark hair tied in a tight bun. Her smile was fixed on her face as if chiseled.

  “Yes,” Mason said. “Whoever carved this must have spent a few weeks on it.”

  She giggled, a thin, artificial sound. “I was talking about the painting, silly.”

  She toyed with the strand of pearls around her neck, the gems unfashionably interrupted by a small brass locket. Her dark eyes sparkled with all the life that Korban’s painted ones lacked. Mason wondered if that was something you could practice. He could picture the woman before the mirror, fastening her pearls, checking her teeth, adjusting the sparkle in her eyes.

  The woman held out her hand. Mason took it, wondering if he was supposed to bow and kiss it like some French dandy in a period film. Her skin was cool. She turned his hand over and looked at his fingers, nodding. “Ah, so you’re the sculptor.”

  “Huh?”

  “Calluses. We don’t get many calluses here at the manor.” She leaned forward, like a conspirator. “At least among the guests. The hired help still has to work.”

  Mason nodded. He looked down at his tennis shoes with the scuffed toes, the hole in his blue jeans. Th
e other people who rode up with him in the van wore leather pumps, Kenneth Coles, open-backed sandals, clothes out of catalogues that bore New Hampshire names. He didn’t belong here. He was dirt-poor Southern mill town trash, no matter what sort of artistic airs he put on.

  But here he was, ready to carve his own success.

  “You’re our first sculptor in a while,” she said, her cold hand still clinging to his. “Let’s see if I have the copy memorized: ‘Mason Beaufort Jackson, honors graduate from the Adderly School of the Arts, currently employed at Rayford Hosiery in Sawyer Creek , North Carolina. Winner of the 2002 Grassroots Consortium Award. Commissioned by Westridge University to create a piece for their Alumni Hall.’ Now, what was the title of that piece?”

  She finally let go of his hand and pressed it against her forehead as if reading a page in her mind, then snapped her fingers. “Diluvium. Of course. How terribly lovely.”

  Mason groan inwardly. He hadn’t realized exactly how pretentious the title sounded until hearing it pass those well-bred lips. “Well, it was the crowd I was in at the time. Avant-garde, but still meeting for lunch at McDonald’s.”

  The woman emitted her bone-rattling laugh and pointed to the canvas satchel slung over his shoulder. “Are those your tools?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing you use them.” Her cold hand still clung to his. “I’m Mamie Goldfeld. I insist that you call me Miss Mamie.”

  He glanced at Korban’s portrait, then back to Miss Mamie.

  “Ah, you noticed,” she said.

  “The eyes.”

  “I’m the last living relative of Ephram Korban. I run the manor, keeping it as an artists’ retreat just the way he wanted. Master Korban always appreciated the creative spirit.”

  “Was he an artist himself?”

  “A frustrated one. A dilettante. He was mostly a collector.”

  All artists are frustrated. Isn’t that the point?

  Mason took in more of the architectural details of the foyer. The arch over the front entrance was ten feet high, with leaded squares of glass set in a transom overhead. The foyer had a high ceiling, the white walls and trim accentuated with an oak-paneled wainscoting as high as Mason’s chest. Two Ionic columns in the center of the room held a huge ceiling beam aloft.