The Manor (20 page)

Why would a ghost want to kill
her?

"Snakes crawl at night, honey," it said. "Snakes crawl at night." More backward pressure.

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 ver-tebrae, 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.

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 up-right, supported by scrap lumber and wires tied to flails in the joists overhead.

"That had better be some statue, after all this trou-ble," Miss Mamie had caled from the head of the base-ment 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 realy 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 fea-ture in
Sculpture
to start with.

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 de-scended from a more heavenly plane. Jackson's
sculpture series,
The Korban Analogies,
is open-ing 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 unpre-possessing man's head.
Jackson's tour deforce is the powerful
Korban Emerging
(pictured, left), which Jackson calls "a
product of semidivine guidance." The Rodinesque muscularity and massiveness of the work has
im-pressed even the most jaded critics, but there's also a singular delicacy to Jackson's piece.
No less a discerning eye than Winston De-Bussey'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 or-ganic 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
impor-tant 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 bom for, the reason he'd come to Korban Manor. He'd never felt so alive. He thought of Anna's words, how Ephram Korban's spirit lived on in these walls. How a soul might be noth-ing 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.

The bony hand on Anna's shoulder tugged her shirt, lifted her. So the ghostman had her now. She was fi-nally 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 pur-chase 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 roled 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 swels of earth stretching out to the horizon.

"Korban about snatched you," the woman said with-out turning toward Anna. "Thought I'd get a chance to warn you first. But old Ephram's always been the impa-tient 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."

"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 til we get away from this place. 'Cause this place is
Korban's."
Anna folowed 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 ab-domen. "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.

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 arro-gance 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 Wiliam Roth, who was hiting on sev-eral 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."

Adam had finally fallen asleep sometime around what felt like midnight, though the moon was so bright that time hadn't seemed to pass at all. And again he'd had the dream, the dream of the fall from the widow's walk. But this time he recognized the man who was trying to push him off the top of the house. It was the man he'd imagined seeing in the closet when Paul was putting away his camera. The man in the portrait. Ephram Korban.

And again Korban had Adam leaning over the rail-ing. The hard wood pressed against the small of his back. Even as he was dreaming, he realized that you weren't supposed to feel pain in your dreams. But all his senses were working: he could smell the sweet beech trees, hear the aluminum tinkle of the creek, taste the rancid graveyard stench of Korban's breath, see the stars spinning crazily above as the man pushed him backward over the rail.

"You have no vanity," Korban said. "1 can't eat your dreams. They're made of air." Adam's fingers tangled in the man's beard, desper-ately gripping the coarse hairs. But as Korban pushed him away, the hairs ripped out at their roots. And just as Adam fell, losing his grip on Korban's woolen waist-coat, he stared into the man's eyes.

The eyes flickered from charcoal black to a sizzling amber. Korban's cold iron hands released their grip on Adam's upper arms and Adam screamed as he hurtled to the packed ground sixty feet below.

The air whistled like a teakettle in pain.

The great gulf of space yawned overhead, farther and farther away, its softness lost to him even as he grasped for a handle on the stars.

The house's windows gleamed in streaks, the shut-ters blurring in his peripheral vision. His blood rushed to his feet. This dream was stranger than any he'd ever had. Because you were supposed to wake up when you fell in your dreams. But Adam was aware of the impact as his head pounded into the circle of the driveway. He clearly heard the crunching of bone as his spine folded like a paper bird, he gasped as his breath whooshed from his lungs, he bit his tongue in half and the amputated tip squirted from between broken teeth, he tasted his own warm blood, then vomited as his shattered pelvis speared his stomach and kidney.

As his ruined flesh lay sprawled and leaking on the ground, he clearly saw his own eyeballs lying beside his head. The eyeballs glowered at him, their brown irises helpless in the ovate globes of white, the pupils large with shock and fear, no sockets or eyelids to hide their twin disapproval. Even dreaming, he recognized the absurdity of seeing his own eyes. He couldn't wait to tell Paul about this.

Except you also weren't supposed to feel pain in a dream, either. And what else could this be but pain, this sheet of red that dropped on him like a hundred sulfu-ric guillotines? Ribbons of electricity shot through his broken body, his nerves screaming like four alarms at a firehouse. Adam tried to laugh. Wasn't this funny, ex-periencing this hellburst of orange that flooded his brain, when he was surely dead?

But wait a second. Can you dream that you're dead?

But how would you
know
if you were dead ... this was the kind of tiling that would give you a headache if you didn't know you were dreaming. But Adam had a headache anyway. He knelt to scrape his spiled brains together, scooped them up, and put them back in their broken shell.

As his fingers stirred through the steaming wrinkles of his own cerebrum, he realized that his body was splayed out before him. This was odd, surreal, Daliesque. He expected to awaken at any moment to find himself giggling into his pilow. But he didn't wake up. He stood, looking at the pool of red that seeped from beneath his body and the sour bile around his head. A splinter of femur protruded from one thigh, angling out from a rip in the gray pajamas. The bone gleamed bright and wet in the pale light. The body's head was turned away in the direction of the wide stone steps that led into Korban Manor.