The ghost woman faded in and out of view, as if fighting to keep her constitution. Anna had called out to her several times, but not even the wind responded. The forest was silent, and even the crickets seemed to be huddling in dread. The air was chilly and dew hung heavy on the maple, laurel, and birch leaves that brushed her face and shoulders. The game of hide-and-seek seemed eternal, as if Anna would forever have to chase this spirit, the two of them bound in a shared purgatory of loneliness.
Anna thought the ghost was leading her to the cabin where she had seen the ghost of the young girl on her first night at the manor. But her dead tour guide turned up the ridge when they reached the meadow below the cabin, heading higher into the steep hills of Beechy Gap. Anna weaved her way among granite boulders that angled from the ground like worn fossils. The trail steepened and narrowed, and the vegetation changed as well, from leafy deciduous to stunted balsam and jack pine.
Anna scooted across a long, flat jut of stone. She was on the highest part of the rocky ridge. The great sea of mountains stretched out toward the horizon. A whisper of wind tried to stir itself, then gave up and settled back to earth.
The trees were thinner here, and her breath plumed from her mouth like the smoke of her soul. The few stars hung in the cold sky, shivering and twinkling. Even the familiar Dog Star and the orange wink of Saturn gave her no comfort. She was alone, except for the translucent woman who hovered above the cold dirt and stone of the ridge. The ghost beckoned her forward with a wave of the haunted bouquet.
Anna’s flashlight played over a mass of fallen posts and splintered boards scattered in a treeless stretch of ground. The ghost woman was among the ruins of the old shack, her ethereal figure penetrated by a dozen ragged pieces of wood. The ghost opened her mouth, trying to form a lost language. Bits of broken glass glinted in the flashlight’s beam.
Anna slid off the rock toward the twisted debris. One thick piece of timber jabbed forlornly at the sky. Anna stepped closer, answering the summons of the ghost. The woman stood waiting, eyes vacant, the bouquet held out in either welcome or apology.
Then the night fell in.
One of the broken timbers lifted from the ground and cut an audible arc in the air as if swung by an invisible giant. The heavy wood slammed into her stomach. The flashlight fell at her feet, its beam sending a thin streak of orange into the underbrush.
Anna doubled over, spears of fire wending through her gut, rusty nails driving into her temples, her teeth biting tin roofing. But it was more than the agony of cancer. This pain was bone-deep and deadly serious. Her right wrist was squeezed in a knife-edged vise.
Anna closed her eyes and collapsed.
No slow-motion countdown would take this pain away. Through the hammering of her pulse, she could hear tremors in the building’s rubble. Wood rot and corruption assaulted her nostrils as she writhed in the muddy fallen leaves.
In the jumble of ruin, she saw a tunnel, a long, dark, cold mouth opening up before her. A stale breeze blew up from the depths of the tunnel, but it had to be her imagination, because the tunnel led down into the earth. Her sweat was slivers of ice on her face, the cold swabbing her bones, and she thought of those words from the bathroom mirror. Go out frost.
Then she heard the voice, a soft mournful wail that stretched over the hills.
Anna opened her eyes with effort, vision blurred by tears of pain. Two forms drifted among the ruins, the ghost woman kneeling, a second ghost swelling and hovering over the first. The other ghost was a man in blue jeans, flannel shirt, and workman’s leather boots, his clothes as translucent as his sick milk of skin. A few shreds of nebulous flesh hung from one sleeve of the shirt. His one hand held the piece of timber that had struck her. He looked down at the ghost woman, his eyes as deep as the cold black tunnel had been.
A radiance shone around the dead man, an aura of malevolent energy. His ectoplasmic face was twisted in rage, the lips peeled back to show jagged teeth. He dropped the timber and put his lone hand around the woman’s throat, and Anna could see the strength in his fingers as they tightened around surreal flesh. Anna’s throat burned in sympathetic pain. The ghost woman screamed soundlessly, struggled for a moment like a wind-driven linen caught in a briar vine, then faded from view, again a corpse, dead a second time, the bouquet falling from her fingers and dissipating into mist.
Anna rolled onto her hands and knees and started to crawl away. The caustic fires still scorched her insides, but now a black surf of fear washed over her, momentarily dousing the raw ache. She glanced back and saw that the man’s aura had grown brighter, as if the spirit murder had fueled some infernal fire. He smiled at her, his tongue slithery as an eel and his eyes spilling forth a darkness that rivaled the black night.
The mouth parted. “That you, Selma?”
At least this ghost remembered language, though its tone was crazed.
“It’s me,” it said. “George. I knew you’d come back. Korban promised me.”
Come back? From HIS side or hers?
“I’m not Selma,” Anna said, trying to rise, but the weight of the night sky was too great.
“I got a present I been saving just for you. We got tunnels of the soul, Selma.”
The ghost held something in his hand, something that dangled like a small kill from a hunter’s belt. Anna thought at first it was the bouquet. Then it wiggled.
It was his other hand, the one that had lost its place at the end of his right arm.
As she struggled in the dirt, the spirit tossed the hand toward her. It landed on its fingers and scrabbled after her like a spider. The ghost’s laughter echoed across the dismal hills. “Hand of glory, Selma.”
Anna turned, tried again to regain her feet, but the pain had made her drunk, awkward, confused.
The severed hand closed around her ankle.
That was impossible. Ghosts had no substance, at least not a substance that could take solid form in the real world.
But this IS the real world. And sometimes, it’s not what you believe, but how MUCH you believe.
She believed in ghosts. They existed. You couldn’t turn faith off and on like water from a spigot.
Too bad.
Because now she had what she’d always wanted.
Physical contact with the dead.
Her ankle was numb, hot ice, liquid fire, ringed by dull razors.
The fingers pressed into her meat. Anna was jerked flat on her stomach. She flailed at the air, grabbing for a nearby pine branch. The hand pulled her backward before she could reach the branch. Toward the rubble. Where he waited.
“Come on, now, Selma. Don’t keep old Georgie-Boy waiting.” The ghost’s voice had changed, deepened.
She dug her fingernails into the ground, clawing at the sharp stones and pine needles. She grunted, realizing for the first time since she’d witnessed the spectral struggle that she was still breathing.
Breath.
That meant she was alive. Not a ghost yet. But if this spirit had the power to murder ghosts, what would it do to the living?
The hand tugged again, sliding her across three feet of damp dirt. Wet leaves worked their way underneath her shirt, chilling her belly.
A strange sound spilled across the ridge, like the scream of a dying mourning dove. Anna looked at the ghost man, his smile stretching and leaking red, orange, yellow, the colors melding into a malchromatic aurora that surrounded him as if he were lit by hellfire.
Anna slid another couple of feet closer to the ruins, desperately kicking at the hand. It was like kicking a rotted fish. She was pulled again and the sharp end of a piece of wood pressed into the back of her leg. The thing was dragging her into the spiked tips of broken timber and the saw teeth of the ripped tin roofing. She was about to be sacrificed at the stake.
But why?
Why would a ghost want to kill her?
“Snakes crawl at night, honey,” it said. “Snakes crawl at night.”
More backward pressure.
&n
bsp; The sharp wood against her leg dug into flesh and sent bright sparks of pain shooting up the chimney of her nervous system. A board knocked against her vertebrae, drumming her spine as if it were a xylophone. Broken glass dug into her knee, cutting through the corduroy of her slacks and stinging like acid. The flames in her abdomen expanded into her chest, into her head, sent lava through her limbs. She closed her eyes and saw streaks of light against the back of her eyelids, like popping embers or shooting stars. Behind the streaks was the black tunnel, expanding endlessly outward, and shimmering at the far end was the woman in white.
So this is what it feels like to die.
She had come to Korban Manor to find her ghost, pushed by the prophetic power of her dreams. This was what she wanted. Except she’d never expected it to be so painful. More shards, splinters, and crooked nails worked into her skin as the rubble shifted with her weight.
Silly girl. Guess you were wrong about everything. You thought death would be cold, but it’s hot, hot, and that tunnel is so deep—
The hand on her ankle yanked, insistent, tenacious. Then a hand gripped one shoulder.
And words came from somewhere above her, like the voice of an insane angel: “Go out frost, go out frost, go out frost.”
The pain fell away, and only darkness remained.
CHAPTER 32
Getting the log onto the wagon, then to the manor and down the stairs to the basement, had been a real bitch. Ransom refused to help carry the log through the house, but Miss Mamie had roused some drinkers from the study, enlisting their help. Paul, Adam, William Roth, Zainab, even Lilith. It was a miracle they hadn’t dropped the log on their toes, but at last it stood upright, supported by scrap lumber and wires tied to nails in the joists overhead.
“That had better be some statue, after all this trouble,” Miss Mamie had called from the head of the basement stairs before slamming the door and leaving Mason alone.
No. Not alone.
He lifted the sheet of canvas. The face of Ephram Korban stared at him. Had Mason really carved such smug perfection? But the work wasn’t complete. Now that Korban had a face, he needed legs, arms, hands, an oak heart.
This would be the sculpture that earned Mason Beaufort Jackson a mention in the magazines. Forget The Artist’s Magazine or Art Times. This baby was going to land him in the pages of Newsweek. Mason began writing headlines and article leads in his head, a feature in Sculpture to start with.
MILL TOWN BOY MAKES GOOD
If you heard that an artist was named “Mason Jackson,” you’d automatically assume that he’d adopted a nom de plume.
(Wait a second, nom de plume is only for authors. Okay, call it a pseudonym then. The article writer would work that bit out.)
But there’s nothing put on about this up-and-coming sculptor. Jackson has been called “the Appalachian Michelangelo.” This young Southern artist may have his feet planted in the land of moonshine and ski slopes, but his hands have descended from a more heavenly plane. Jackson’s sculpture series, The Korban Analogies, is opening to wide acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art in Philadelphia and will soon cross the ocean to London and Paris, where critics have already rested the heavy crown of “Genius” on the unprepossessing man’s head.
Jackson’s tour de force is the powerful Korban Emerging (pictured, left), which Jackson calls “a product of semi-divine guidance.” The Rodinesque muscularity and massiveness of the work has impressed even the most jaded critics, but there’s also a singular delicacy to Jackson’s piece.
No less a discerning eye than Winston DeBussey’s has found the work faultless. He calls Mason an “uncanny master” of wood, a medium in which so few top artists dare to work these days.
“It is as if there is no difference between the pulp and human tissue,” raves DeBussey in a rare moment of expansiveness. “Jackson breathes organic life into every swirl of grain. One almost expects to look down and see roots, as if the statue is continually replenishing itself from the juice and salt of earth.”
But Jackson takes the praise in stride, offering little insight into the mind behind the man.
“Each piece is conceptualized through a dream image,” Jackson said, speaking from his farmhouse-cum-studio in Sawyer Creek, a small mill town nestled in the North Carolina foothills. “And I have absolutely nothing to do with that part of the process. My job is to take that fragile gift and somehow not misinterpret it through these clumsy human hands. Because the dream is the important thing, not the dreamer.”
If Mason started talking like that, Junior would elbow him in the ribs and Mama would make him stop watching public television. Such nonsense would earn him some funny looks at the hosiery mill, where he was more at home than in any art museum. He could fool himself into thinking he was good, but fooling others was much harder. If he wanted to fool the entire world, this monstrous piece of oak before him needed to be turned into the most beautiful dream image ever conceived.
First, he’d have to skin the bark.
Then find the man inside.
He lifted the hatchet, looked at the dark spaces in the corners of the basement. He didn’t belong in the mill. This was what he was born for, the reason he’d come to Korban Manor. He’d never felt so alive.
He lifted the hatchet, then thought of Anna’s words, how Ephram Korban’s spirit lived on in these walls. How a soul might be nothing more than the sum of a person’s mortal dreams. How dreams could lie. How dreams could turn to ash.
No. This dream was real.
The hatchet bit into the wood.
CHAPTER 33
The bony hand on Anna’s shoulder tugged her shirt, lifted her. So the ghost man had her now. She was finally going to find out what it was like to be dead. Or maybe she was already a ghost, because the worst of the pain was fading.
Anna tried to stand, but her legs were like damp smoke. She knelt on one bloody knee, feeling for purchase among the broken boards. She opened her eyes to face the dead thing, resigning herself to crawl into the dark tunnel.
But it wasn’t the leering spirit that held her. It was an old woman.
“Ought to watch yourself a mite better,” the woman said.
Her face was wrinkled, the moonlight revealing her swollen veins, her eyebrows as white as ice. But the blue eyes set among those sagging folds of skin were bright, young, intelligent. And Anna recognized the shawl that was draped around the woman’s stooped shoulders.
“You were at the cabin—”
“Hush yourself, child. I seen what you seen, and we both seen way too much. Let’s get away from here, then we can have us a long chat.”
Anna got to her feet, pushing the broken boards away from her legs. The pain was gone, and the ring of fire around her ankle had faded. The moon was higher now, approaching the zenith of its arc.
Anna studied the rubble. It could all have been a dream, except for the tearing of her clothes and skin.
“Come on away from there. George got fetched over, but that don’t mean you got to go yet,” the woman said.
The old woman led Anna from the fallen building. The woman had surprising strength for someone who appeared to be in her eighties. Anna watched her climb over the flat rocks with the agility of a mountain goat, even though she used a thick walking stick to steady herself. Anna looked for her flashlight, but it must have rolled into the thorny underbrush and out of sight. She hurried after the woman.
The old woman paused on a table of rock, looking out over the great expanse of mountains. The sky was woolen gray, but Anna could make out the ripples and swells of earth stretching out to the horizon.
“Korban about snatched you,” the woman said without turning toward Anna. “Thought I’d get a chance to warn you first. But old Ephram’s always been the impatient sort.”
“Ephram Korban, you mean?”
“The master of these here parts. Or, at least, he likes to think so.”
“But you’re talking in present tense. He’s dead.”
&nbs
p; “Like that matters much.” She spat off the rock into the tops of the trees below.
“Who was that woman I saw?” Anna’s head was clearing a little. “And the little girl at the cabin?”
The old woman laughed, but it was a broken gargle, heavy with cynicism. “You got the Sight, all right. Knew it when I first laid eyes on you. Now, no more questions till we get away from this place. ‘Cause this place is Korban’s.”
Anna followed the woman off the rock and down the narrow trail, amazed at the way the woman’s hard leather shoes dodged over protruding roots and stones, the walking stick nimbly stabbing at the dirt in search of purchase. They headed off the ridge to the back side of Beechy Gap.
Anna paused to catch her breath, rubbing her abdomen. “One question. What does ‘go out frost’ mean?”
“Old mountain spell. Means ‘dead stay dead.’”
Anna would have to remember that one. She hoped that, unlike what Ransom had said about horseshoes and four-leaf clovers, this little piece of magic hadn’t been worn thin by time.
CHAPTER 34
Adam had spent the long hours of insomnia trying to nab the thoughts that orbited his head like space junk. And most of the thoughts were about asking Miss Mamie if there was a way he could cancel his stay at the manor. He didn’t care about a refund. Paul could remain with his camera and his pouty lips and his arrogance for the rest of the six weeks, as far as Adam was concerned. All Adam needed was a ride out of this place.
They’d had another argument, this one in the study after carrying the log into the basement. Paul was showing off for William Roth, who was hitting on several women at once, and Adam tried to get Paul aside for a chat. Paul had sneered and said, “Why don’t you go to bed, Princess? I know how bored you get talking about anything besides yourself.”
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 113