She felt her soul scatter on the wind, to be carried off the mountain and away, where Ephram would be always out of reach.
CHAPTER 74
No way.
No way in hell.
But Mason couldn’t deny it. Anna’s body had stirred beside him. Her eyelashes quivered. Her chest rose slightly beneath the splotch of Mason’s blood on her blouse. Anna’s breath cooled the sweat on Mason’s palm. She was back.
And even in his fright and bewilderment, a surge of pleasure rushed through his bloodstream, a joy like none he had ever known. This was all a crazy dream, had to be, but dreams were everything now.
Mason looked at the lovely red wood of the statue he’d made, at the spirits gathered around it, at the maple bust that demanded Sylva finish her spell.
Anna’s eyes opened, and her irises were no longer cyan. They were red, yellow, orange, glittering in the colors of fire.
And she rose, except her body stayed on the planks. She stood. A ghost. But still her body breathed.
She was on both sides at the same time, dead and alive.
“She—she ain’t supposed to come back,” Sylva whimpered, drawing into her old woman’s hunch despite her youth. “You killed her like you did Rachel.”
“I need her,” Korban said. “She’s part of the house. Now finish the spell. I kept my promise. Margaret is gone.”
Anna’s living lips parted in that glorious half smile, spilled words in a chorus of dead voices. “It’s the fire, Mason.”
He touched her cheek, and it was blazing with human heat. “Do you trust me?” he whispered, the kind of thing he would say in a dream. Nothing to lose.
Maybe this was the true art, the creation that gave back, the work that made itself. This was the biggest dream image of them all.
“Maybe,” Anna said. “The fire.”
“Maybe” was enough to risk everything. Mason knew what he had to do, what he should have done long ago. He eased toward the lantern, seeing Anna’s eyes in its intoxicating flame.
CHAPTER 75
Oh Lordy, something ain’t right.
Sylva tossed the charm dust onto Ephram, pressed Rachel’s burial gown to her heart.
Anna wasn’t supposed to be back at all. She was supposed to be dead and haunting the house, serving Ephram, working as his blood and juice and power. But there she lay, breathing and blinking and whispering to the sculptor.
And Anna’s eyes weren’t right. Too many people looked through them, and every one was madder than a weasel in a hatbox.
She would make him get rid of Anna, too, just like Miss Mamie. And Rachel. Get rid of them all. Only her and Ephram.
She itched to try out this new body. A century of waiting was plenty long enough. She’d spent ten thousand charms on this man and it was time for a little payback.
The beautiful bust opened its mouth. It would be awkward kissing that thing, making love to this statue that didn’t even have all its parts yet, but they always said that love would find a way. And she had forever to learn how. Forever to tame him and teach him the value of her spells and conjures and charms. Forever to be needed.
She opened her mouth to call in the fire a final time.
“Go out frost and come in—”
CHAPTER 76
Anna knew this was the moment, a time of eternal crossing. Of burnt offerings. A time for ghosts to die.
“Here comes your damn fire,” Mason shouted above the mad music and rattling leaves. He grabbed the hurricane lantern, the flesh of his hand sizzling. He sprang at Ephram, screamed at the sky, and raised the lantern over his head, then swept it down toward the statue.
Anna led the leap out of her body, her spirit a conduit for the trapped dreams and lost hope of all haunted souls.
Fuel.
The lantern smashed against the statue, the thick oil soaking into the oak, orange and red and blue ropes of fire spreading across Korban’s ungainly form. A blaze of yellow raced up one arm, igniting the dark maple of the bust. Twin screams splintered the night as the fire roared to full life, whipped by the frenzied wind.
Anna’s chest emptied as the tortured ghosts of the manor routed through her, flew across the boards of the widow’s walk, and swarmed into their hated master. Their fuel boosted the fire tenfold, twentyfold, and the statue stumbled and waltzed in blind agony. The bust dropped to the floor, the lips peeled back in endless pain. Mason kicked the flaming bust toward the statue, back into the hellish pillar of fire.
Anna scrambled backward, void of all spirits but her own, the conflagration too dazzling to watch even with Second or Third Sight. Acrid smoke belched from the manor’s four chimneys, and rich red sparks cut tracers in the air.
The house swayed, its siding buckling and popping, the eaves snapping like dry bones. The gables themselves moaned in the anguish of collapse. Vines of smoke spilled from the manor’s doors and windows, curling up the columns and darkening the sky.
Korban spun in the darkness, in a St. Vitus dance of overdue death, Sylva kneeling at his feet, the dead and alive scrambling to escape the fire that raged on both sides of the dividing line.
CHAPTER 77
A wall of flame stretched across the widow’s walk, cutting off escape through the trapdoor. Mason squinted against the smoke, the nerves of his scorched hand screaming in alternating ribbons of red and yellow pain, his head and arm aching from their wounds. Mason stumbled to the railing and looked down at the dizzying darkness.
A hand touched him and he turned, ready to surrender, to let Ephram Korban pull him into the manor’s endless nightmare.
It was Anna.
“The trees,” Anna said. “I think we can reach them.”
“I can’t,” he said, throat dry. “Heights.”
“We all have to face our fears sooner or later. And you just burned your masterpiece. What else do you have to lose?”
“You.”
“Okay, then. Come on, because I’m selfish as hell, too. And I don’t want to survive this thing alone.”
She climbed over the rail at the point farthest from the surging blaze. A poplar swayed in the fire’s backdraft, its branches rattling against the railing. Glass shattered below, flames shooting out the windows and spewing from the screaming mouths of the chimneys. The entire house groaned and crackled in the throes of destruction.
“Ephram Korban,” Anna said. “He’s dying with the house.”
She gripped the branches and pulled herself over, then reached back for Mason. “Hurry.”
He took her hand, closed his eyes, then swung out and wrapped a leg around a thick branch. His stomach fluttered, feeling the space beneath him, the long, yawning gap between his body and the ground—
Don’t think, Mason.
She came back from the dead, and you’re worried about a little thing like falling.
But it wasn’t the falling he was afraid of, it was the landing. The dying. Because he’d seen the hollow and vacant eyes of those who had stared down those black tunnels. He’d take blindness over any of the those deeply hidden horrors, those secrets of his soul that were stashed far away from the light.
He scrambled along the branch, her hand gripping his bloody shirt, and by the time they reached the thick trunk of the tree, he was gripping her in return.
CHAPTER 78
The walls were collapsing. It was the end. Spence stared at the paper, at the Word.
F-i-r-e
Flames crawled along the cracks in the baseboard, smoke erupted from the fireplace. The window shattered outward, and flames gushed from under the closet door like colored water.
A shrill voice pierced through the crackling of the fire: “Get out, Jeff.”
The Muse? He looked up from the typewriter, confused. The work was beautiful. Out of place in this malefic chaos, this destruction, this Dantean inferno. But the Word—the word couldn’t harm its maker, could it?
He had been wrong. The Word had lied.
Korban had lied.
; The writer was the master. The language was the slave.
The room was filled with smoke now. Bridget, shouting from the hall, ducked out of sight. Spence sat forward with a squeak of chair springs. He tried to scoop up his manuscript, but hungry flames rippled up the back of the desk.
He stood, eyes bleary, fingers numb. Smoke filled his mouth and throat. He started toward the door. He couldn’t leave his manuscript. He turned with effort, dazed from lack of oxygen. The pages had burst into a bright bonfire, the sentences now vapor, the Word lost in the heat of its own blinding glorious lie.
Spence blundered against the door frame, a tug of regret in his chest. He hadn’t pressed the period, the final key. He hadn’t finished the manuscript. He started back into the room, but the ceiling was falling, the house collapsing, the typewriter lost in a tide of yellow and red.
The fire sucked oxygen through the window, and the hot breeze sent a sheet of paper out the doorway. Spence grabbed it, held it to his chest.
Weeping, he staggered down the hall, coughing and spitting.
CHAPTER 79
“—fire,” Sylva whispered, finishing the spell, though it was far too late.
All the years of waiting, of sacrifice, of deception, wasted now. The years that Ephram had given her back, the ones stolen from Margaret, were fading, retreating into the past. By rights, they should have been hers. Ephram should have been hers.
Her wooden lover writhed and twitched on the charred husk of the widow’s walk. Behind the wall of flames, he had somehow lost a little of his majesty. But he still had that power, that magnetism that had driven her to sacrifice everything for him. He was dying again, the third and final time, and he needed her. She felt it as keenly as she felt her hair shrinking from the heat, as she felt the moisture of her skin evaporating.
“Sylvaaaaah,” he roared, or it might have been the hungry tongues of the flames.
She crawled toward him, into the fire. Unlike the first time with Ephram, this time the fire burned her both body and soul.
As the blaze stole her breath, as her eyes dried in their sockets, as her brain boiled, she realized that possession worked both ways. When you gave somebody your heart, they owed you. And you owed them in return.
Both ways.
Frost and fire.
And pain, a deep freeze of burning agony. The thing called love. A suicidal, murdering thing.
CHAPTER 80
Anna lowered herself, weaving through the branches. Mason was close behind, working his way down with frantic care. The heat from the house flowed over her, bits of wood and ash flying past on the wind of the firestorm. The sensation reminded her that she was alive, that the death she had welcomed was now something she was struggling to avoid. Maybe being alive meant nothing more than fighting to stay that way.
Maybe.
Or maybe Rachel was right. You have to live for something bigger than yourself, belong to something that matters. Then you earn your rest.
“Hang on, Mason, we’re almost there.”
“Good. Because I think the house is falling.”
They finally reached the ground, Mason stumbling, weak from his wounds. She supported him, leading him across the lawn away from the manor. The heat had melted the frost, and the grass was damp, steam rising. When they reached safety, she and Mason collapsed on the ground, ridding their lungs of smoke, watching Korban’s funeral pyre as it stretched its fingers toward the moon.
The giant skeletal framework of the house was outlined in black, and Anna saw Korban’s face in the flames, a hundred times life-sized, trapped in his own black tunnel, the one where his dreams died, where his servants abandoned him, where his heart turned to ash. Where he owned nothing and no one and his work went forever unfinished.
The great gables folded, the rails tumbled over the side. The Ionic columns snapped and the portico thundered down. The windows wept fire, the walls tucked themselves into each other, the piano works made a brassy clamor as they tumbled into the basement. Glass shattered and flames sputtered, smoke funneled from the top of the house like the mouth of hell at the end of the world.
“Look,” Anna said, pointing across the frost-coated lawn to the edge of the forest. Matchstick figures moved among the shadows.
“Some of them got out,” Mason said. “They are alive, aren’t they?”
“Sure.” She realized her Second Sight had been blinded, somehow it had perished along with the ghost of herself she had given to Ephram Korban.
Good riddance.
Horses galloped across the meadow, whinnying in fright. Then the night was torn apart by a soul-searing shriek that echoed across the mountains. The ground shook, trees bent backward, and the barn collapsed. The fences also fell, gleaming like wet bones in the moonlight.
“He’s taking it all with him,” Anna said.
“Does that mean he’s . . .?”
“Dead? Do we even know what that means anymore?”
He put his arm around her, and she relaxed against him, grateful for his warmth. “I think it’s all a dream. But dreams aren’t such a big deal. I like being awake better.”
“So do I.”
They sat in the grass, watching the fire dwindle, and waited for dawn.
CHAPTER 81
“The bridge is gone,” Cris said. “There’s nothing left but some timbers braced against the edge of the cliff.”
“I’m not surprised,” Anna said. “Korban took everything that belonged to him. A control freak to the end.”
The morning sun had lifted over the ridges, melting the remainder of the frost, and the mist rose off the ground like lost spirits, joining the last threads of smoke from the smoldering house. Anna and Mason sat on bales of hay, along with Zainab and Paul. Anna had tethered the two Morgans to a nearby locust. The other horses and the cattle had wandered into the orchard, no longer fenced off from the sweet autumn grass. Pigs played at the edge of the little pond at the foot of the slope, and wrens sang like the world was new.
Anna checked on Mason again. He held his hand in the watering barrel, where a pipe supplied cold spring water from the hills. He had a second-degree burn. There would probably be scars, but the wounds would heal eventually.
EVERYTHING heals eventually, Anna thought. Even if you don’t have the power of charms and spells and herbs. Or the power over life and death.
Paul tore a strip off the waist of his shirt, dipped it in the water, and wrapped Mason’s cut arm. “Used to be a Boy Scout,” he said.
“Eagle?” Mason grunted.
“No. One of the lesser birds. Buzzard, maybe.”
“Sorry about your friend.”
“Yeah. I’ll deal with it after I quit lying to myself. After I figure out what happened.”
“We all have our guilt to deal with,” Mason said. “And we learn from our mistakes.”
“I sure as hell wish I had salvaged my videotapes, though. I could have been rich and famous. Who will ever believe it now?”
“You don’t want any evidence,” Mason said. “And if you look at what you have to pay for success, it’s not such a hot deal.”
“Is he in shock?” Anna asked Paul.
Paul looked into Mason’s eyes, then felt his pulse. “No. Maybe on the edge, but—”
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” Mason said.
“Shock’s not a bad way to go,” Anna said. “A dying soldier’s best friend.”
“Where in the world did that come from?”
“I don’t know. Just popped into my head.”
Paul stood up and rubbed at his eyes. “I guess we’re all suffering from disorientation. Or maybe mass hysteria. Because my camera didn’t lie.”
“All of it had to go,” Anna said. “Because it all belonged to Ephram Korban.”
“Then how will we ever prove it was real?”
“I don’t think we want to prove it,” Mason said.
“I wonder if they saw the smoke from down in the valley,” Cris said.
It was strange to be reminded that another world existed off this mountaintop, a world of sanity and order, where the dead stayed in the ground for the most part and people drifted through ordinary lives. Anna stood, heading for the wreckage of the barn. “Good thing the fire department didn’t get here in time to put it out, huh? I don’t think any part of Ephram should remain.”
“What are we going to tell them?” Mason said. “I mean, what really happened here?”
“I’ve got a theory. But a theory’s worth about as much as a match in hell. There’s supposed to be some old trails that go down the side of the mountain. I’m going to find one and ride down to the river and follow it until it meets a road.”
“Need some company?” Mason asked.
“Not the kind that gets woozy from heights. Plus you need time to heal.”
“I’ll go with you,” Zainab said.
Anna shook her head. “No. They need you here. And I’ve had a lot of experience with horses. It’ll be faster if I go alone.”
Paul nodded. “The writer’s having trouble breathing. Ate a little too much smoke. Good luck, Anna.”
Paul, Cris, and Zainab headed up the road, where Spence and Bridget gathered near the house’s foundation like ghosts who felt an obligation to haunt. But there were no more ghosts at Korban Manor. They had all moved on, to wherever their destination had been before Miss Mamie copied them as crude little dolls and Korban hijacked their midnight flight to eternity.
Korban Manor was nothing but ash and charcoal and a sprinkle of embers. And Korban was nothing, just a burned memory, a flash in the cosmic pan. A dream that was already half-forgotten, one that faded by the minute, and Anna was sure his magnificent marble grave marker was only a handful of dust, those words Too Soon Summoned crumbled like the lie they were.
Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers Page 125