“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 scientists 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. The 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 pressed her free hand 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.
“This is a pretty place,” Mason said, because Miss Mamie clearly expected him to say something. He’d nearly said “lovely,” an adjective he’d never used before. Five minutes at an expensive artists’ retreat and he was already putting on airs, developing a persona.
God forbid you ever actually accomplish anything. You’d be insufferable.
“I’m pleased you like it,” she said. “Colonial revivalist. Master Korban was proud of his heritage, which is why his will stipulated that the manor be preserved intact.”
“Korban. That’s Jewish, isn’t it?”
“In name only. Not in spirit. He borrowed his heritage, bought what he couldn’t borrow, and stole what he couldn’t afford. He ended up with everything, you see.”
Mason looked at the portrait again, measured the tenacity and arrogance of the features. “Looks like your ancestor was the kind of man who didn’t take no for an answer.”
“Yes, but he was also highly generous. As you know.”
Mason smiled, though he felt as if a lizard were crawling in his throat. He was here on the dole. He could never have afforded such a retreat on his factory pay. When you got right down to it, he was a token, invited so the Korban estate and the arts council could revel in their magnanimous support of the underclass.
Miss Mamie looked past him to where a small group of guests stood talking. “There’s dear Mr. and Mrs. Abramov. The classical composers, you know.”
Mason didn’t know, but he kept smiling just the same. The token grin of gratitude.
“Excuse me, I must say hello. Lilith will be along to show you to your room, and I do hope you enjoy your stay.”
She glanced at Korban’s portrait with an expression approaching wistfulness and was gone with a bustle of fabric. Mason gazed at the portrait again. The fire popped, sending a thick red ember up the
chimney. Korban’s eyes still looked dead.
Mason was about to turn away to find his luggage when the fire snapped again. For the briefest of moments, the face in the portrait was superimposed over the flames like a sunset’s reflection on a lake.
He fought a sudden urge to pull a hatchet from his satchel and swipe it across Ephram Korban’s disquieting smirk.
“You look like you could use an eye-opener,” came a voice beside him. It was Roth, the photographer who had shared a seat with him on the van. The man spoke with a clipped and not entirely authentic British accent, alcohol on his breath. A martini was poised in one wrinkled hand.
“No, thanks,” Mason said.
“It’s afternoon, and we’re all grown-ups here.” Roth’s eyes crinkled beneath white eyebrows. His face was sharp, thin, and full of angles. Mason saw it as a natural sculpture, the weathered topography of skin, a crag of a jawbone, the eroded plain of forehead. He had a bad habit of reducing people to essential shapes and forgetting that some sort of soul might exist within the raw clay of creation.
“I don’t drink.”
“Oh, you a religious nut?”
“I’m not any kind of nut, as far as I know. Except for that part about hearing God’s voice in a burning bush.”
Roth laughed and drained some of the martini. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. You’re terribly young to throw in with this lot,” he said, nodding toward the people that Miss Mamie was greeting. “What’s a pip like you doing on a getaway like this?”
“I’m here on a grant. North Carolina Arts Council and Korban Manor.” Mason looked at the fire again. No faces swirled among the bright colors. No voices arose, either. He forced himself to relax.
“A real artist, eh? Not like these,” Roth said, rolling his eyes toward Miss Mamie’s well-dressed guests. “Most of them need an artists’ retreat like they need another mutual fund. A bunch of tweeds whose highest endeavor is gluing dried beans to a scrap of gunnysack.”
Another critic. Passing judgment on the unrevealed talents of others. At least they’d paid their own way, unlike Mason. “What part of England are you from?”
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 100