Sweet Jesus, have mercy, when did my heart stop beating?
Paul pointed over the railing, to the hard patch of driveway below the porch. Adam couldn’t help looking.
There was a shape down below, prone, twisted, torn. Six feet long, dressed in gray pajamas that were dark with liquid. The shape was deathly still.
And alone.
Utterly alone.
CHAPTER 68
Spence placed a quivering finger on the Royal. The ghosts had drifted past, their nebulous flesh throwing a chill around the room. Roth was gone, Bridget away somewhere.
Spence pressed a key.
F.
The One True Word, undressing itself, shucking its golden skin, opening its warm flesh to him. An invitation to enter.
The stir of ghosts ruffled the pages of his manuscript as the white shapes filtered into the ceiling. His greatest work ever. The greatest work ever. They could drag him back to Eileen Foxx’s class, but this time he would have something to show them, to shut their slack little mouths and amaze their dull and cruel eyes. He had proof of his superiority.
His gut ached, sweat pooled under his armpits, his scalp tingled. The electric tension of the ghosts made the hairs on the back of his hands stand up. He pressed another key, and i slapped into place beside the f.
He thought the One True Word would be something rare and noble, something with seven syllables that only literary giants and dictionary-makers knew. Funny that the word was common, elemental. But Spence’s opinions held no weight here.
He was only the instrument, the sword and scepter, the pen, the flint and steel. The Word was the beginning and end of things.
Go out frost and come in fi...
He slammed home the r, weeping at the finishing of his work, already feeling the old emptiness, already bracing himself to need Bridget again. Someone to save him from himself.
He looked up at Ephram Korban, at the kind face, the encouraging eyes, the generous lips that had given him every wondrous word of this magnificent manuscript.
“Thank you, sir,” Spence said.
The ghosts were gone now. No distractions. No excuses. Just himself and Word and Korban. As he watched, the portrait faded to black, like the dying of an old tube television set.
He searched the keyboard, blind from tears, and put his clumsy, unworthy finger in the beautiful cup of the key.
CHAPTER 69
Sylva felt the energy rush through her veins, the weariness falling away, the sweet juice of youth washing over her like a brisk waterfall. She tilted her head back and laughed. Let Miss Mamie fade to dust. Ephram loved only one, the one who had made the sacrifices. The one who had faith. The one who had crumbled the bloodied burial gown of her own daughter, who had crushed owl bones and raven feathers and stoneroot and a dozen other special substances.
The one who gave Ransom bad charms. The one who built Ephram’s bridge back to this world on the ashes of a thousand prayers. The one who had said the spells, who had sent magic on the winds and summoned Anna, hooked her in the deepest meat of her heart and reeled her in, tricked her blind so that her death could complete the circle.
Oh, Sylva had the faith, all right, and she wanted all the fruits of faith.
She wanted Ephram back.
She rose, sixteen again, eager to give her restored virginity back to the man who had stolen her soul, who had lit an everlasting flame in her heart. She tossed a pinch of the special dust toward the statue, imagining those big arms loving her, those crude lips hot on her skin, those eyes burning into hers forever.
“Say it,” the statue said.
She whispered, trembling, “Go out frost, come in fire.”
CHAPTER 70
At Sylva’s words, the four threads of smoke from the chimneys insinuated themselves, thickened into a great gray fog. The smoke sent its frayed fingers toward Anna, wending between Mason, Sylva, and the statue that housed part of the soul of Ephram Korban. The bust, which contained the rest of Ephram’s invisible and eternal self, smiled at Anna with perverse affection.
Mason swatted at the smoke with both hands, but it slipped past him and the moonlit gray fingers crawled over Anna like cold earthworms. They found the soft part of her throat and became solid, squeezing in a gentle pressure that was almost erotic. She reached up to pull them away and relaxed under their insistent caresses.
Her lungs burned from lack of air and an icy dizziness rushed up her spine to the base of her skull. She tried to speak, Mason had her by the shoulders and was shaking her, she was dimly aware of movement on the widow’s walk, but the gray tide was seeping in from the edges of her vision, pushed by a great black wave of nothing.
She didn’t know when the change occurred. The line had been thinner than she’d ever imagined. For the briefest of moments, she was on both sides, alive and dead at once, but the moment passed and she crossed over. She’d finally found herself, her true self. She’d become the ghost she’d always wanted to be.
The pain inside was gone. In its place was an unsettling hollowness, an empty ache. Loneliness. She was dead and she still didn’t belong.
And death was just like life, because the world was the same: Sylva whispering something to the statue, Miss Mamie kneeling and wailing, her hands cupped over her face as if trying to hold her flesh in place, Lilith drifting under the moonlight, the Abramovs slumped with vacant eyes, now playing a funereal tune, Mason crouched before her, yelling at her, raving about a talking painting and Korban in the wood and dreams come to life and all sorts of nonsense. Couldn’t he see that none of that mattered?
Death and life, all the same now.
Rachel hovered before her, holding out the bouquet. “I’m sorry, Anna. I failed you.”
Anna reached for the bouquet. Her body collapsed.
“Anna!” Mason jumped toward her, tried to catch her and slow her fall, but the body she’d abandoned slumped beyond his reach. She heard her flesh slam against the wooden planks of the widow’s walk, but her spirit kept falling. Through the house, through this place of dark emptiness that would be her home.
Death wasn’t a release. Death, at least in Ephram Korban’s version, was just another prison, this one full of the same suffering that shadowed the living. Only here, there was no escape, no hope, and still nobody to belong to.
“Anna.” Rachel’s voice, a moaning graveyard wind, a desperate fetching.
And still Anna fell.
CHAPTER 71
Mason held Anna in his arms. Her face was pale, eyes glazed and protruding. He put his cheek to her mouth. No breath.
No breath.
Anger and fear rose in him, tears stinging his eyes. He looked up at the obscene, bloated moon. She was dead. And it was his fault. He’d failed her.
He gently laid her down, wiped the blood from his face, and turned to the statue. The old woman that Korban had called Sylva had changed, was now young, her face twisted in a sick rapture. Mason rose to his feet, though the long drop beyond the railing made his head swim, the sense of being on the top of the world caused his guts to clench in dread.
“Go out frost, come in fire,” Sylva repeated, her skin vibrant and healthy in the moonlight. Hadn’t Anna said something about frost and fire?
God, why couldn’t he remember?
And did it even matter?
Because his statue, his creation, his big goddamned dream image, stood there on the widow’s walk like a monstrous wooden idol, born of vanity and faith and love. Yes, love. Because Mason loved his work.
“You’ll finish me, won’t you, sculptor?” The bust spoke calmly, cradled in the thick arms of the statue. “You love me. Everyone loves me.”
“You promised me Anna,” Mason said.
“Oh, her. She’s nothing. A necessary evil. And you’ll learn that flesh is fleeting, but the spirit is for eternity. Isn’t that right, my dear Sylva?”
“When you give somebody your heart, you owe them,” the woman said. And though she now had a beauty that ri
valed Anna’s, the shadows around her eyes were older than the Appalachians, dark and cold and full of terrible secrets.
“Then pay your debt,” Ephram said. “Finish the spell.”
“Third time’s a charm,” she said. “But, first, they’s one more promise you got to keep.”
“Promise? What promise?” The statue raised its face to the moon, and the grain of the maple sparkled like a hundred diamonds. Frost. It had settled on the wood.
Frost and fire.
Mason wasn’t sure of the connection between those two words. But he understood fire. Miss Mamie’s lantern glowed near the railing, where she’d set it down upon Korban’s arrival. Mason wondered if he could reach it before Korban decided it was time to start hurling bodies from the top of his house.
CHAPTER 72
“Anna,” Rachel called again.
Anna opened her eyes to darkness.
The darkness wasn’t absolute. She blinked.
“Where am I?” she asked, her voice passing as if over a hundred tongues.
“In the basement.”
“The house?”
“We all live here,” said someone else, and a hand was in hers, small and cold.
“You,” Anna said, “the girl ghost from the cabin, the one Sylva called Becky.”
“You came to help us.” And the girl smiled.
“I can’t help you,” Anna said. And now she saw Rachel, ethereal and shimmering against the curtain of darkness.
“I had to wait for you to die, Anna,” Rachel said. “You have the gift, even stronger than mine. Korban killed me because he knew I was stronger than Sylva. But not like you. When you were alive, you had the Sight. Second Sight. But you had to die to get Third Sight.”
“Third Sight?”
“The power to look from the dead back to the living. The power to join us together. To hold our dreams, the way Ephram never could, because he wanted them for himself. He wanted our fear and hate. But he forgot about faith. Because we believe in you, Anna.”
“Believe. So says the world’s greatest liar.” She wished she could laugh, but in this bleak, gray land of nothingness, such a sound couldn’t exist.
“Believe,” Rachel said. “Become the vessel. Hold our dreams, our real dreams. Let our dreams go into you, so we can finally die.”
“You want to die?”
“More than anything,” the girl said.
“Help us,” came another voice from the gray smoke of this new dead world.
“Free us from Korban,” said another, and then another. How many souls had Korban trapped here over the years? How many of Sylva’s potions and spells had spun their sick binding magic?
“Follow your heart,” Rachel said.
“My heart. It only leads me to hell.”
“It belongs to the living.”
“No. I belong here.”
“Sylva lied, not me.”
“I don’t trust any of you. Why should I believe you?”
“Listen. I’m not your mother.”
“Not my mother?”
“Ephram’s power is that he lets you see what you want to see. He gives you what you wish for. Why do you think you can finally see the dead?”
Anna didn’t think it was possible to descend into a chill deeper than death, but the revelation made her soul spin. She had been a fool. How could you ever find your own ghost?
“Sylva used you,” Rachel said. “She used me, too. We’re just pieces of driftwood to throw on her sacrificial fire.”
“I hated you,” Anna said. “When Sylva told me you were my mother, I thought I’d finally found somebody to blame. Now it’s just me. I’m just as lost as ever.”
“I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you, but Ephram controls me, too. All I want is to have never been born.”
“That goes for me, too,” Anna said.
“You’re not alone, Anna. Something’s happened. The binding spell has broken.”
“The dolls,” Adam said.
“Adam?” Anna said. Her soul eyes couldn’t see him in the gloom. “Are you dead?”
“They say I am, so I must be.”
“What about the dolls?” Rachel said.
“Miss Mamie made them,” Adam said. “Carved, with little apple heads. I saw mine, only I didn’t know what it was. I think she carved one for everybody who died.”
“She’s dead,” Anna said. “I guess she never carved her own doll.”
“Then she can’t bind us anymore,” Rachel said. “We’re free.”
“Not free,” Anna said. “Not until Ephram’s been killed for the final time.”
“Save us,” Becky said.
“Get us out of here,” Adam said.
“You’re the one,” Rachel said. “You were fetched here for a reason.”
Other voices came from the surrounding darkness, pleading, encouraging. Anna felt their energy flow around her, a current of heat that stirred her dead heart.
“Third Sight, Anna,” Rachel said. “I’m not your mother, but I would be proud if I were. Because you’re strong. Even stronger than Ephram.”
“I don’t know,” Anna said. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Say it. What Sylva taught you. Only backward.”
“Frost and fire?”
“Yes. And believe it. Living stay alive, dead go back.”
Living. Maybe living wasn’t so bad, even with its pain, sorrow, and failure. But at least life offered hope, second chances, choices. Was that the pain that rose inside her soul now? The pain of hope, the yearning for forgotten flesh, the regret of things left undone and words left unsaid?
She thought of Mason on the widow’s walk, facing the wooden monster he had made, a monster that would haunt this mountain the way no ghost ever could. Haunt it like a god, with anger and power and arrogance, as if all things living and dead belonged to it.
“Go out fire, come in frost,” Rachel said. “Say it.”
Anna opened her dead and dreaming mouth. Dozens of voices joined hers, Becky’s, Adam’s, Rachel’s, all blended into a chorus, a chant of hope, an ache for the final freedom. “Go out fire, come in frost. Go out fire, come in frost. Go out fire, come in frost.”
One, a dividing line.
Two, an empty hook.
Three, a skeleton key.
Third time’s a charm, opening the door.
To a room of hope. A house of faith.
A home for the soul of Anna Galloway.
She was Anna. She was alive.
She opened her eyes, saw the blanched circle of the moon, felt the October chill on her skin, tasted the smoke that skirled from the chimneys, smelled the decay of windblown leaves, heard the hollow distant roar of Ephram Korban’s heart. She put a hand to her own heart. Beating. In rhythm with his. And with the spirits she carried inside her, the combined hopes and dreams of the unhappy dead.
Fuel.
Ephram wanted fuel, she would give him fuel.
She rose, and though her body still lay prone on the widow’s walk, she didn’t need flesh for this task. All she needed was faith of the spirit. Because she’d finally found something to belong to, something that offered more than just an endless darkness, something larger than herself.
Her house was full, and Korban’s was a house divided.
Caught between frost and fire.
CHAPTER 73
Miss Mamie rose from her clatter of bones and husk of corpse.
Where was her flesh, the beauty that Ephram had given her? She wanted a mirror, because mirrors never lied. And neither did Ephram. Because Ephram loved her. He’d killed her for a reason, surely.
Maybe their love was meant for the other side, not the mortal side. That’s the only thing that made sense. She still had eyes, she could see the mortal world, and could taste all the strange wonder of death, and death was the same as life, only better.
She would go to Ephram now, on his terms, the way he had made her.
But why was Sylva still alive? And young
again, and beautiful?
Ephram could explain everything. After all, they had forever.
She went to him, though her spirit seemed stitched to the night sky, heavy and thick, and she fought to step from the fabric of darkness.
A dull aura shimmered around the rough cut of the statue’s shoulders. Ephram hoisted the polished maple bust aloft as if it were a trophy, showing himself the world, showing the world to the man who owned both sides of it.
“Make her go away,” Sylva said to him. “Then I’ll finish the spell.”
“Sylva,” Ephram said, the statue and bust speaking in unison. “I’ve given you everything.”
“I want more than everything. It ain’t enough that I get your heart. I want her out of your heart for good.”
“You’re the only one I ever loved.”
“Yeah, but that’s the same thing you said to her. Except you lied to one of us.”
Miss Mamie fought the gravity that pulled her toward darkness. Tunnels of the soul, Ephram said we all have tunnels of the soul. What’s in mine, Ephram? What do I fear more than all the world?
Sylva stared with wide loving eyes at the handsome hunk of oak. Her spells had brought out a misty horde, collecting around the statue like worshippers at the feet of a resurrected prophet:
Ransom, confused and sad, fingers fumbling for a charm that had no power.
George Lawson, offering his ragged hand in tribute.
The Abramovs, their instruments forgotten, the music playing on without them.
Lilith, fading in and out like a half-finished painting.
William Roth, dribbling spiders from his empty eyes.
The bust smiled at the night sky. “Good-bye, Margaret.”
Miss Mamie moved her hand to the locket. But it was gone. It lay among her empty gown and the dust of her desiccated body. And she realized she was already in her tunnel. Because this was her greatest fear, and she must watch as her love spun unwanted down a dark drain, her sacrifice refused, a century of promises adding up to nothing.
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