The Manor (24 page)

"You talk as if you knew him."

"No, but I
understand
him. I can feel him. This house was his in more than mere ownership."

"Ah, you believe that ghost tripe?"

"I've felt the spirit move me."

Roth wondered how many drinks the man had downed with breakfast. "Then why not a book? We can do it as a tribute if you'd rather."

Spence lifted himself with effort. "I'd sooner write a trashy thriller, something with vampires and a Martian Pope and a government conspiracy. And an unlikely love interest. One must have a love interest to make the pot boil."

"Think about it."

"Excuse me, I have work to do. Real work." Spence carried his empty glass toward the study, no doubt for a refill.

Roth sat in the shade of the porch. Spence, dead in the bathtub, his fat, white gut displayed in a two-page tabloid spread. Moby dicked. That would be a picture worth a thousand words. And multiple thousands of dollars.

How to make that overtaxed heart explode? A me-nage a trois with Bridget and Lilith? Or put Paul and Adam on him. With his homophobia, Spence likely had some serious bones in the closet. Roth smiled. There was an easier way, one that wouldn't involve the complicity of outsiders. If Spence were so bloody in love with his work, what would happen if the work went into the fireplace? Best of all, he could blame it all on a ghost. Who could ever prove otherwise?

The wind played through the trees that surrounded the graveyard, a lonely music for a dead resting place high on the edge of the world. Sylva leaned on her walking stick, watching from the fence, too brittle to risk climbing over. The old woman had knelt in the grass, searched the ground for a minute, then picked something and passed it through the fence to Anna. It was a four-leaf clover.

"Lucky charm?" Anna asked.

"Better than luck. Lets you see the dead." - "I already do."

"Only when
they
want. This here gives you the power over them." Sylva nodded toward the grave of Rachel Faye Hartley. "That's the one you'll be wanting to sum-mon."

"Summon?"

"Come in fire, dead come back. Say it. Third time's a charm."

"I can't do that."

"It's in your blood. You just got to
believe."

Anna stared at the cold stone, the flowers chiseled by some delicate hand, a bouquet that never wilted. She believed in ghosts, and so she saw them. And since she'd arrived at Korban Manor, she'd see them more clearly than ever before. Maybe it was always a ques-tion of faith. Part of the belief might originate from the dead spirit, and a ghost had to dream itself back toward the living world. Perhaps Anna and the ghost had to meet halfway in a union of sad and enslaved souls, and if she only had to recite an old mountain folk spell, that wasn't so much to ask. The ghost, in this case the person who had lived by the name of Rachel Faye Hartley, had to put forth the real effort. After all, it would be Rachel who wrenched herself from the dark peace of eternal slum-ber to rise and return to a world perhaps best forgotten. A world that held only the promise of pain and loneli-ness. Anna looked down at the clover. Could she believe in magic? With cancer eating her flesh, she had to put all her faith in the permanent existence of the soul, or else she might as well leap from the top of Korban Manor herself. Without faith, what was the point?

She closed her eyes and said the words: "Come in fire, come in fire, come in fire." A chil caressed her, a soft immortal coldness. When she opened her eyes, the woman in white stood before her, the bouquet in her diaphanous hands. It was as if Anna were looking into a trick mirror, because she rec-ognized herself in that pale and transparent face.

"Anna," the woman said, in that same whispered tone that had haunted Anna's dreams, had caled to her from the trail, had led her into the woods where George Law-son's spirit seized her in its severed hand.

"You," Anna said. "You're the one who summoned me here. It's wasn't Ephram Korban at all."

"You grew up beautiful, just like I always figured." The words were like splashes of ice water.

"What are you talking about?"

"I hated to send you away. I thought it was the only way to save you from
him.
But I didn't know."

"Send me away?" Anna looked at Sylva, who puled her shawl more tightly about her bony shoulders. Sylva nodded her knot of skul bone, her face tired, wrinkles deepening, as if she'd aged fifty years since arriving at the graveyard. Anna looked at the ghost of Rachel, back to Sylva, and again at the ghost. Their eyes had that same shape, the dark arch of brow, the same hint of mystery. Just like Anna's.

Just like Anna's.

"You're her." The realization sliced through Anna with the slow sureness of a glacier, more implacable than cancer, an impossible truth that was all the more horrible because the impossible had become ordinary. Anna's blood froze in her veins, as hard as the frost that still sparkled beneath the patches of tombstone shadows.

"It's all my fault," Rachel said. "That's my sorrow, that's what haunts me in my tunnel of the soul. The fear that Ephram uses to control me."

"Ephram Korban. What do I care about him?" Anna's tears ran down her cheeks like the tracing of lifeless fingers.

The ghostly lips parted, Rachel's form glimmered under the sunrise. "It was hard on me to lose you, harder even than dying. Harder even than being dead. Because being dead is just like being alive, only worse."

"Hard on
you,"
Anna said. "Every night, in every new foster home, every time some stranger tucked me in, I prayed to God that you'd have to suffer. Even though I never knew you, I hated you. Because I never got to
belong."

"I suffered, too."

"I hated you for not being there, for never existing. And now I find you, and you stil don't exist."

"You don't understand, Anna. We need you."

"Need, need, need. What about me? I had needs, too." Anna flung the clover to the grave grass, the sobs shak-ing her. "Go away. I don't believe in you."

"Anna," Sylva said. "She may be dead, but she's blood."

"You can keep your blood. I'm done with it all." Anna moved between the stones, vision blurred by tears, scarcely aware of her feet, wanting only to be away, back in the world of ordinary pain, ordinary loneliness. Rachel's voice reached across the grass, weaker, as if leaking from inside the mouth of an endless tunnel. "He haunts us, Anna. We're dead and
he still haunts us."
Anna didn't even slow down. She had come here to find her own ghost. Now she had, and it was worse than she ever could have imagined. Her ghost didn't provide solace and the comfort of life beyond life. Her ghost brought the promise of eternal loneliness, proof that she would never belong, no matter which side of the grave claimed her.

"You don't know what it's like," Sylva shouted after her, the words swept by the October wind. "It's way worse to lose a daughter. I ought to know. 'Cause I lost Rachel."

Anna stopped near the shadow of Ephram Korban's monument. She turned, and her turning seemed as slow as the spinning of the earth, trickles of angry sorrow cold on her cheeks, flesh already numb to this new im-possible truth.

Ephram Korban and Sylva.

Then Rachel.

And Anna.

Korban's name hovered before her in a watery haze, as if the chiseled letters on the monument gave weight to Sylva's words. Blood. Ephram Korban's blood ran through her, as tainted as that ancestral side which cursed her with the Sight, all bound up in this ridge of ancient Appalachian soil, a sorry dirt that couldn't even hold down its corpses.

Sylva caled once more, but Anna wasn't listening. She climbed over the fence, her heart on fire with a sin-gle wish. Dead stay dead.

Dead stay dead forever.

Mason wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had removed his shirt, but still the room was too warm. Oak chips stuck to his chest and arms. His shoulders had passed the point of aching. The pain had transformed into a dul, constant drumming somewhere in the back of his mind. His sculpting instructor at Adderly, Dennis Graves, had told him that the key to art was stamina. Mason's first assignment had been to carve the letters of the word
stamina
into a block of white pine. That clumsy effort now rested across Mama's dead television set. He'd given it to her like a kindergartner who'd brought home a finger painting. That was back before her blindness, though after her eyesight failed she often held it in her lap and ran her fingers over the letters.

Someday he was going to do another word just for her:
dreams.

He would fashion it in bronze or copper, something durable. Maybe even granite. Except then the word would be too heavy. Maybe it would be too heavy even in balsa wood. Or air.

Mason had finished with the hatchet and adze. The rough form was fleshed out. The sky had grown darker in the basement's small high windows. He didn't know if that meant rain or that dusk was coming. He'd long ago lost track of time.

Mason worked with his broad chisel and mallet, shaving off sections of the oak. The grain was cooper-ative, as if in a hurry to become its true shape. The statue was revealing itself too fast, and there was no way that he should be this far along already. It was al-most as if the wood was pumping energy back through his tools into his hands.

Sure, Mase. Whatever you think. Artistic license.

And look here, the shoulders are squared, one of Korban's arms will be across his stomach, the
other hand behind his back. An aristocratic pose. A man who knows what he's all about.
The dead space of the basement swallowed the sounds of metal on metal and metal into wood.
Come out, Korban. I know you 're in there, some-where inside this godforsaken hunk of oak.
SING to me, you beautiful old bastard. Rise up and walk.

Mason squinted as a spray of sawdust skipped back toward his face. He drove the chisel's blade into a space beside the statue's left arm. Stamina. Dreams.

He'd have to send Dennis Graves another word.

Spirit.

You had to have spirit, or you were lost. The mater-ial had to have spirit. You couldn't squeeze soul out of a stone. It had to already exist, to have existed forever, waiting there for the artist to release it. The breath of spirit wind blew from the four cor-ners. That's where dream-images came from. They weren't really new ideas or visions. They were things that already
were,
that just had to be revealed to human minds.

Okay. Okay. Now you're losing it, linthead.

Artistic pretension is expected, and all that gibberish might come in handy after you get

"discovered." But right now, the reality is that you 're working your-self into a lather and you
can't make yourself stop. You should have taken a break to eat and rest.

But YOU CAN'T MAKE YOURSELF STOP.

Mason frowned and rammed the chisel off the flank of hip. He didn't think it was a good sign when people started having philosophical debates with themselves. He was
supposed
to be in a creative trance. He
wanted
it, searched for it, prayed to the gods of impossible dreams. He looked at the bust of Korban, and it seemed to smile at him from the table. The wooden lips parted:

"So why can't you stop?"

I
can stop any time I want to.

"Certainly. I believe you, Mr. Jackson."

Look, you can't just turn creativity off and on at will. You've got to roll with it while you've got
the wheels. You've got to take the Muse's hand when she wants to dance.

"Fine. No arguments. But let's just see you stop."

Okay. But I want you to know that my shoulders and arms and finger muscles are going to
scream in pain because they 're wound tighter than a spool of factory thread. Besides, I'm doing
this for Mama, not me.

The bust said, "Excuses, excuses."

I'll show you. Here we go. . . .

Mason flailed at the chisel. Two inches of dark red wood peeled away from the section that would be Korban's left kneecap. He repositioned the blade and drew back the mallet for another blow. The bust laughed, a sound like the shuffle of ro-dents. "You're not stopping."
Okay, already. Get off my case. I just had to get USED to the idea.

Mason curled another strip of oak away, then looked down at his tools scattered around the floor among the shavings.

See? I can take my eyes off it if I want to. Just as an experiment, I'm going to think about
something be-sides Ephram Korban's statue. Take, for instance, the lovely Anna Galloway. ...
Mason paused, a drop of sweat hanging at the tip of his nose.

"Ah, so it's fair Anna that makes your heart sing," the bust said. "You can have her, you know. Once you finish. I promise. And I always keep my promises."

Mason clenched his teeth and gave the hammer an extra-hard swing. He could stop any time he wanted. He just didn't want to think about her right now. Didn't want to think, didn't want to think, didn't want to think—

"I say, who were you talking to?"

Mason spun, hammer in hand, raising it as if to ward off an attacker. William Roth stepped back, his gray eyes startled wide. He almost dropped the canisters of liquid in his arms.

"Easy, mate."

Mason lowered the hammer. The spell was broken. "Sorry. I was just getting carried away there for a minute."

"Looks longer than a ruddy minute to
me.
Have you been working on that thing nonstop?" Mason nodded. The pain in the back of his shoulder blades sent its first red twinges to his brain. He rubbed his right biceps.