She pressed the charm that was secreted inside her blouse, held it against the warmth of her heart. She was scared, but she had faith. The moon was rising, throwing cold light over the mountain as if a new sort of day were breaking. Maybe it was. A day of endless night, when things got reborn, when dark promises were kept and broken. When spells carried the weight of prayers.
Sylva pushed open the door without knocking. Ephram knew she was here, all right. No need to sneak around. And the others, they moved about in the walls, stirred in the basement, shifted among the cracks in the hearthstones.
Ephram’s portrait nearly took the last of her breath away. She’d seen that face in a thousand dreams, half of them nightmares, the other half the kind that made you ashamed when you woke up.
“Look at me,” she whispered.
Ephram stared at her with dark, painted eyes.
“I’m old,” she said. “I spelled myself alive all these years. Sticking around, waiting for this blue moon of yours. Well, I’m here now, and I ain’t sure what you plan to do about it.”
The portrait fell from the wall, the heavy frame splintering, the canvas folding. When a picture fell, it was a sure sign that the subject was meant to die. But when a picture of a dead person fell . . .
The flames rushed out of the chimney, fingers of fire reaching toward Sylva, reminding her of that night on Korban’s bedroom floor, the night he planted the seed of Rachel deep inside her. A night of cold burning.
And this was another night of forbidden heat, a night of frost and fire. She headed for the stairs, leaving Ephram’s face lying on the wooden floor by the warmth of the house’s heart. They were waiting up there on the widow’s walk, under the rising moon. Anna and Miss Mamie and Lilith. Ephram would join them soon enough, and Sylva wouldn’t miss this for the world. For more than the world, or any world beyond this one.
She squeezed the charm until her fingers ached, her heart pumping faith as she climbed the stairs.
CHAPTER 62
Mason fell into the lamplight of the hallway as if it were healing water. He slammed the basement door shut behind him, slid the metal bolt into its seat. Why was there a lock on the outside? What had been kept in the basement that required locks?
Now that he was out of the suffocating basement, his head cleared a little. And the thoughts that came were almost as frightening as the creative trance that had been consuming him from the inside out. He leaned against the door, heart pounding.
Smooth move, Mase. In case you forgot, this guy’s been dead for eighty years and you think a DOOR’S going to stop him?
But Korban had been clumsy and stiff when shifting into the statue. That’s why the ghost or spirit or whatever moved into man-made objects. Because Korban needed that energy, that made-ness, before he could claim something as a vessel.
Then maybe he’ll slip into the DOOR, sawdust-for-brains. It’s not like he has to follow the rules or anything.
Maybe so. Mason slammed his fist against the door in frustration. The door thundered in response as wooden hands chopped from the other side. Mason looked down the hall.
“Help,” he shouted. Surely someone would hear the hammering on the door and come see what was wrong. There was movement down the hall. The pantry door swung open.
“Thank God,” Mason said, stepping away from the basement door. One of its wooden panels splintered and cracked from the pounding. “There’s a—um—”
Mason was still searching for words when he realized they would be unnecessary. The cook came out of the kitchen, a cleaver in her chubby hand. He could see the utensil’s raised wooden handle. All the way up to its gleaming tip. He was looking through the woman’s hand.
She was made of the same milky substance as Ransom and George.
Which meant—
Mason looked to his right. The hall ended in a small closet door. He’d have to go past—or through—the cook to get to either the front or rear doors of the house. And he had a feeling that he needed to get out fast, because the walls were buzzing with that same strange static he’d felt in the basement.
The basement door splintered, gave way, and the golden-red oak of Korban’s hands stabbed through. The cook, suddenly solid, blocked the hall with her ethereal girth. Her lip was curled as if she’d just taken a whiff of rancid buttermilk. The cleaver danced in the air before her, its metal blade reflecting the flames from the lamps.
Mason backed away from her, though there was nowhere to run. Korban reached through the gash in the door, clubbing Mason with one crude stub of fist. A spark-filled darkness flooded his skull, and he fell to the floor. When he blinked himself awake, blood leaking down his scalp, he saw swirls in the grain of the wainscoting.
The wall was moving, or else his head was swimming. No, it wasn’t the wall. It was something inside the wall.
A face took shape and emerged from the wood. The face split in a grin as it stepped into the hall. The ghost of George Lawson waved its spare hand and drifted toward Mason.
Korban shattered the latch and the basement door swung open. Mason forced himself to stand and ran toward the cook, hoping she was as soft as she looked. He ducked low and dived toward her knees, the way he’d been taught in peewee football back in Sawyer Creek. His bones jarred as he plowed into her chilly flesh, and he heard something pop in his shoulder.
Ghosts weren’t supposed to be solid. But then, ghosts weren’t supposed to be at all. The cleaver whistled through the air and he looked up just in time to see the cook’s face, dead and unchanged. She could just as easily have been chopping carrots for a stew.
He tried to roll to his left, but the cleaver glanced off his upper biceps. He let out an agonized breath, and drops of blood were flung across his face as she raised the cleaver for another blow. He crawled like a crippled spider across the floor, skittering past her, Korban’s massive feet thundering down the hall.
Mason leaped for the stairs, grabbing the rail to pull himself forward. His heart throbbed, sending fresh rushes of blood from his wound as he careened up the steps. The blood reassured him in an odd way, a reminder that he was still alive. In a world where dreams made nightmares, blood was welcome, and pain meant that he could still feel.
Mason reached the second-floor landing and peered down the hall to the master bedroom. William Roth stood in the shadows beside Spence’s closed door.
“Run,” Mason yelled, fumbling to close the torn gap in his arm. “The ghosts—Korban—”
Then all speech was lost as Roth stepped into the light of the astral lamps. The photographer’s face hung in rags, a crisscross of fresh scars making a gridwork of his smile. His eye sockets were blank, like empty lenses.
The photographer held out a pale fist as Mason tried to shape his vocal cords into a scream.
“Hiyer, mate,” the Roth-ghost said, the words mumbled and muffled. The sliced lips opened again, and wet spindly things fell from the dead man’s mouth and began crawling down his ripped shirt. Spiders.
Both ends of the hall darkened. A harsh wind extinguished the lamps on the walls. It was the long dark tunnel, rushing at him from two directions, that would lead Mason back to the rats.
Ransom’s voice crept from the walls. “We got tunnels of the soul, Mason.”
The statue clambered up the stairs, awkward as a drunken mannequin. Mason peeked over the banister and saw the bust cradled in the statue’s arm like an infant carried by its mother.
The bust’s maple lips parted, and a cry echoed off the woodwork, as if the entire house joined voice with Korban: “Finish MEEEEEE.”
Mason fled up the stairs. The third floor was dark. Only a milky spill of moonlight through the windows prevented Mason from running full speed into a wall. He tried to suck breath into his lungs, but the black air was like a solid thing, a suffocating thickness. Mason heard voices and looked up, saw the square of lesser darkness.
The trapdoor to the widow’s walk.
Where Anna’s ghost had screamed from the pa
inting.
CHAPTER 63
The swollen moon rose, cutting through the tree branches. The forest glittered with frost, and Anna’s breath hung silver before her. Miss Mamie led her to the railing, and Anna looked out across the land that would be her home. She belonged to this house, to this mountain, to Ephram Korban.
“You’re beautiful,” Miss Mamie said, lifting her lantern to Anna’s face. “I can see why Ephram wants you so badly. For that, and for your gift.”
The Abramovs sat in their chairs, drew their instruments to their bodies like the meat of lovers. Paul perched his video camera on a tripod, Adam watching him. Cris and Zainab chatted near the bar, Lilith laughing and filling their glasses. Other guests stood in a cluster by the far railing, talking in low, excited voices.
“You know why you’re here, don’t you, Anna?” Miss Mamie said.
“Because I belong here.” The words were someone else’s.
“So do I,” Sylva said, and Miss Mamie turned, faced the old woman.
“No,” Miss Mamie said, cheeks burning with rage. “This is Ephram’s night. He told me you’d never be back, that he had used you up.”
“Ephram needs me more than he needs you.”
“I kept him alive, and he kept me young. Look at you, you pathetic sack of skin and bones. And you thought he could ever love such as you.”
“Love’s like a door that swings both ways. And so’s death. Frost and fire. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? You don’t know a thing about magic, or spells, or faith, or any of the things that kept Ephram’s spirit here all these years.”
“You’re just a crazy old witch-woman, muttering over dust and herbs. I’m the one he needs. I know how to make the poppets.”
“Well, he’ll be along shortly, and you can just ask him for yourself. Now, what do we do about dear little Anna?”
“Anna?”
Anna lifted her head at the mention of her name, the night like water, the world in slow motion.
The Abramovs began a solemn duet, bows sliding across the strings with melancholy softness, the notes vibrating on the wind. This was Anna’s house. She wasn’t Anna Galloway, had never been. That life was a dream, the lethal cancer a bell that had sounded her home, death just a slow transition that carried her back to herself.
She was Anna Korban.
And she would walk these walls forever.
The cold of the world became the coldness inside her, the frozen heart of forever, as she stepped to that dividing line.
“What about her?” Sylva said.
“Oh, Anna dies,” Miss Mamie said. “For the last time.”
CHAPTER 64
Mason scrambled through the trapdoor and up into the cold night.
The presence of the great space around him, and the depth below, made his head swim and his stomach lurch. The sea of night and the distant rolling waves of the mountains took the strength from his legs, as if they were boneless. He forced himself not to think about the ground far below on all sides. A pathetic fear of heights paled in comparison to all the new fears he’d discovered.
Mason blinked the blood from his eyes and took in the unreal scenery of the widow’s walk. Anna was by the rail, between Miss Mamie and an old woman in a filthy dress and shawl. They seemed to be arguing over Anna, who looked drugged or sleepy, swaying in the strange light cast by the moon. Mason’s sweat cooled in the autumn air, and he touched the gash in his shoulder. The pain yanked him alert, and he ran to Anna.
“The painting,” he said. “You were calling to me.”
“Who are you?” Anna said.
“Where’s the statue?” Miss Mamie asked him. “You didn’t leave it down there alone, did you?”
He looked behind him, at the trapdoor. “We’ve got to get out of here, Anna.”
Mason took her arm, and the coldness of her skin flooded through him like an electric shock. He looked into her eyes and saw a blackness inside that never ended. Tunnels. Her eyes were tunnels of the soul, leading down to death or opening from a deeper darkness inside her.
Before he could shake her, ask her what was wrong, the statue stuck its rough-hewn head through the opening. Shrieks erupted from some of the guests as the statue rose awkwardly onto the widow’s walk, its heavy limbs clattering, Mason’s chisel still in its chest, the bust tucked under its thick wooden arm. The Abramovs stopped in mid-arpeggio. A wineglass shattered. Miss Mamie gasped and rushed toward the brutish form. “Ephram!”
As the statue stood on unsteady legs, the cradled bust stared at Mason with hot anger in its eyes. Miss Mamie threw her arms around the wooden torso.
The old woman reached inside her shawl and pulled out a layer of cloth. She unfolded it and approached the statue with slow steps. “I brung you what you wanted, Ephram.”
Mason looked from the old woman to Anna. They both had those same haunted cyan eyes, and Mason realized why they seemed so familiar. Because they were the eyes that he’d lovingly carved into the bust of Ephram Korban.
He reached for Anna again, to pull her toward the trapdoor, unable to think of anything besides making a run for it. Three flights of stairs, the house alive with ghosts. Korban would never let them leave. But they had to try.
Before Mason could order his legs to move, the ghost appeared near the railing, the spitting image of Anna. She held a bouquet before her. Just like the woman in the painting.
“Mother,” Anna said.
CHAPTER 65
This wasn’t the way Miss Mamie had imagined this night, the way she had wished it during all those thousands of lonely hours, when she had only Ephram’s face in the mirror, his spirit in the hearth, his words coming from the portrait.
This night was supposed to be perfect, a union of two souls, all else forgotten. Ephram and his beloved Margaret, together again, joined in simultaneous life and death. With dreams to fill.
Yet there was the old hag Sylva, who had tempted poor Ephram so long ago. And now Rachel was here. Rachel, who was never supposed to be in the house. That was the reason she and Korban’s servants had chased her, made her leap to her death. Ephram said those who betrayed him could never be free, but those who served would be allowed to die a second and final time. That’s why Miss Mamie had carved the apple-head dolls, the little poppets that housed the enslaved souls.
“The sculptor didn’t finish,” Miss Mamie said to the statue.
The bust answered. “He will.”
Sylva knelt before the statue, unfolded the cloth, held up the collection of powders in both her wrinkled hands. “Ashes of a prayer, Ephram. I did just like you told me.”
Miss Mamie clung to the statue, her beloved Ephram, who was wearing flesh after all those years of being reduced to smoke and shadow. “What’s she talking about, Ephram?”
The statue swept its oaken arm, shoving Miss Mamie to the floor of the widow’s walk. She rose to her hands and knees, her dress torn, the beautiful gown she’d been saving for the blue moon. For their second honeymoon.
“Ephram?” she said.
“He don’t need you,” Sylva said.
Miss Mamie crawled toward Ephram, hugged his chipped legs. “Ephram. You love me.”
The statue kicked her away. “Spell me, Sylva.”
“Give me her years first,” Sylva said. “Make me young again. Like you promised.”
“Spell me.”
“You said you always keep your promises.” Sylva held up the cloth full of folk potions.
“What’s she talking about, Ephram?” Miss Mamie said. Suddenly she felt cold, as if a glacier had cut through her heart. She looked at her hands. Wrinkled flesh rose on her skin, deep creases carved themselves into her flesh, tiny rivers of age running dark in the moonlight. She touched her face, the skin drawing tight across her skull even as it sagged under her chin.
Oh God, she was growing old.
“You promised me, Ephram,” she said. “Together forever.”
The statue and bust joined in laughter. The gues
ts ran for the trapdoor, but Lilith closed it and stood on it. “Nobody ever leaves Korban Manor,” she said, grinning like a skeleton.
CHAPTER 66
Anna stepped toward Rachel, moving as if under dark water. “What are you doing here?”
“I tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“About Sylva?”
“She’s always loved Korban. That’s why she killed me, to please him. That’s why she learned folk magic, the spells and potions that kept his spirit alive until she could finally bring him all the way back.”
“This is all a crazy, screwed-up dream,” Mason said.
Anna flashed him a half smile. Couldn’t he see the obvious? Everything was so much easier when you were dead. Because the dead no longer have to dream.
CHAPTER 67
“I’m seeing it, but I don’t believe it,” Paul said, head tilted into the viewfinder of his video camera. “This is great stuff. Romero on acid, John Carpenter on a budget.”
Adam yanked on his arm. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Shockumentary. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
“Damn you, Paul, this is like my dream. Don’t you see? Everybody’s dead.”
Paul looked up from the camera, gave his boyish grin. “Not all of us, Princess. Just you.”
“Don’t be like that,” he said.
“You’re either working for the man on this side, or you serve him on the other side. You can be dead if you want, but me, I’d rather be the next Alfred Hitchcock, just like Korban promised me.”
“I’m not dead, you stupid bastard.”
Paul laughed. “Whatever.”
Adam looked at the hand that gripped Paul’s sleeve.
The fingers passed through the cloth, clutched on nothingness. He put a hand to his chest. When had his heart stopped beating?
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 123