Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set) Page 20

  “He looks sort of charming, doesn’t he?”

  “As charming as a nest of snakes, maybe.”

  “Korban gets painted a lot around here. Big deal. What else is strange about the painting?”

  “One of the other faces. I mean, the oil paint is dry, and from the dust on the frame, it might be a year old, or might be twenty. Maybe more. And you told me you’d never been here before.”

  “I never lie, unless I have a good reason.” Except to myself. I’ve been lying to myself since before I learned to speak.

  “Then, since you’re a ghost hunter, you might be interested to know that your face is in the painting.”

  The fire spat an ember onto the hearth, toward Anna. Mason crushed it out with his foot.

  “Show me,” Anna said.

  CHAPTER 45

  William Roth pulled the negatives from the glass jar with practiced movements. He’d unwound hundreds of rolls of film, but this was the first time he’d done it in a wine cellar. A red light would have been handy, but this was no harder than developing in a tent in Sudan or a shack in the Amazon basin. He’d mixed the chemicals by the light of a lantern, doused the flame, done his business, and rinsed thoroughly.

  All that remained was to let the film dry. The basement air was still, which might help keep the heavy dust off the emulsion. Dust hung everywhere about this place, what with the ashes of constant fires drifting about. And that fellow Mason with all his sawdust and grit.

  Roth felt along the surface of the workbench, found the matches and the warm globe of the lantern, then stroked the match to life and touched it to the wick. He’d rigged a piece of twine across the small room, and now attached the six rolls of film to it using clothespins borrowed from the maid. After hanging the last strip, adding an extra clothespin at the bottom to take the curl out of the celluloid, he brought the lantern closer for a look at his work.

  Ah, there were those shots from the bridge, and even colorless, and with black, white, and shades of gray reversed, he could tell the photos would add to the legend that was Roth. He scanned down the squares of images, coming to those of the bridge and Lilith.

  “Bloody hell?” He brought the lantern closer, even though he risked warping the celluloid with the heat.

  There spanned the length of bridge, where it disappeared into the trees leading back to Black Rock and civilization. Those creepy ravens were perfectly plain in reverse image along the bridge rails, and the frosted spiderweb hung in the pictures like a dark piece of lace. But Lilith didn’t appear in any of them.

  Roth wiped his eyes. Maybe he’d advanced the film too far, taken the shots of her after he’d reached the end of the roll. That was the sort of thing amateurs did, gawps and ninnies, not masters. When was the last time Roth had made a mistake?

  “Bloody goddamned hell,” he whispered, his accent a blend of Manchester and lower-class Cleveland. Maybe it was time for a drink, a comfy fireside, and a bit of rest. The fringe benefits of fame and fake charisma might prove to be fleeting if he kept on like this. Especially since Spence was proving to be a stone wall. If Roth’s luck didn’t improve soon, he might start blaming the curse of Korban or some such.

  He lifted the lantern high, the dusty bottoms of the bottles surrounding him like ancient eyes. He pulled a bottle from the rack that lined one wall. The dark glass bore a plain label, corked right here at the estate. In ink, someone had handwritten 1909. Probably a decent year. Decent enough to blot out that memory of the bridge, at any rate. And maybe decent enough to warm the heart and part the legs of the fair and tender Lilith.

  Roth tucked the bottle under his arm and left the basement, his photographs consigned to the darkness.

  CHAPTER 46

  “She won’t let me leave,” Adam said.

  “Damn.” Paul took another draw off his joint. The sweet smell of marijuana drifted across the back porch. “Too bad, Princess.”

  Paul’s third joint of the day. Rational conversation would be impossible. But then, hadn’t it always been? There wasn’t much left to discuss anyway.

  Adam stood against the rail, staring out at the mountains. Paul sat in one of the mule-eared rockers, not bothering to move his chair closer to Adam’s. The noise of the piano leaked from the study, drowning out the morning song of birds. Someone laughed drunkenly inside the house, no doubt another suffering artist who had self-inflicted misery to drive away.

  Adam didn’t even have that pathetic excuse for his nightmares. Because he’d gone to bed cold sober, and his mind was far too clear, preserving every detail of his death and subsequent resurrection.

  “You know something?” Paul’s face looked sinister as he sucked in a lungful of smoke. He held it in, then exhaled toward Adam with an exaggerated flourish. “Maybe if you’d loosen up, you could get a little more joy out of life. Do you always have to be so damned serious about everything?”

  Uptight Manhattan boy. That was Adam, all right. Worried about mutual funds when most people were worried about scoring the night’s lover, deciding which band was the flavor of the month, or choosing a brand name clothes designer. But at least Adam wasn’t selfish. That was why making the relationship work was so important to him. That was why he wanted to adopt a child.

  He wanted to share what he had to offer, to give himself away. He wanted a home in somebody’s heart. Only he now feared it wouldn’t be Paul’s.

  “Let it out,” Adam said. “Go ahead and destroy me. That’s all you’ve done since we got here, anyway. Might as well finish the job.”

  Paul giggled. “The martyr. Nails in your palms and a spear in your side. Poor boy. You’ve given me an idea for my next video. The Noble Suffering of Adam Andrews. Filmed in whine-a-vision.”

  Asshole. Asshole.

  Adam clenched a fist, the anger merging with the fear, creating a hot mix that burned his gut. But losing control would be letting Paul have the final victory. Adam always lost with grace. And he’d had lots of practice.

  He forced his voice to remain calm and quiet. “Look, since I’m stuck here for five more weeks, we may as well be civil to each other. That way, maybe we can look back at this one day and pretend it wasn’t all bad.”

  The rocker squeaked as Paul stood up, and the ember of the joint stub arced into the damp grass beside the porch. Paul walked over to Adam, leaned forward until his face was so close that Adam could smell the marijuana and liquor on his breath.

  “Now you’re talking,” Paul said. “Since we’re stuck with each other, we might as well enjoy it.”

  Adam tried to slide away from the contact, but Paul hugged him, his breath hot on Adam’s neck.

  “Paul, I don’t think—”

  “Shh. You get all hot and bothered over Ephram Korban, talking about him in your sleep, but I’m probably a little more available.”

  “I can’t, knowing you don’t care about me. Now stop it, Miss Mamie might see us.”

  Paul stepped back, looked into Adam’s eyes. Smiled. His damned hair was tousled, boyish, he was dead cute and knew it.

  Suddenly his face changed, contorted, and Ephram Korban, that twisted, cruel face from Adam’s nightmare, leered at him like a Halloween mask.

  And the dream came back in all its brilliance and realism, Korban leaning him over the railing of the widow’s walk, only kissing him this time, breath hot and foul, tongue like an insistent snake, mouth stealing the breath from his lungs. Then, drained and empty, Korban sucking him into the long tunnel toward the thing that Adam knew was waiting around the bend. The thing he feared most.

  For Adam, there would be nothing. In Adam’s part of the tunnel, after he passed through the row of ghosts, he would step into the pitch of his childhood nightmare. The one of suffocation, no sight, no sound, no touch besides the texture of the darkness pressing down around him. No taste besides the bland airless nothing.

  No feeling besides the fear that came with isolation. And the dread of knowing that the bubble was complete, intact, unchanging. Ete
rnal loneliness.

  Was that why he was so desperate to adopt? To make someone need him? To make it so the child couldn’t leave, at least for many years? Years that the awful colorless texture would be kept away.

  He blinked and it was Paul that stood before him, not Ephram Korban. The piano notes were like needles of ice driven by the wind.

  Only a flashback. How old were you when you first had that dream of suffocation? Three? Two? Even before you knew about words?

  And this house has brought it back, the dream come sniffing around your heels like a strange black dog that follows you home. That neither comes close enough to be petted nor gets left far enough behind to be forgotten.

  Adam didn’t know what the dream meant, and he wasn’t interested in a shrink’s opinion, either. He only knew that he didn’t want to be alone. Even if it meant surrendering, losing, grabbing and hanging on in desperation. He wrapped his arms around Paul, clung to him as if sinking in quicksand.

  The death dream. Ephram Korban. The ghosts. All part of it. The house would take him in its jaws and then swallow him into its black stomach. Swallow him alone, unless he took someone with him into that airless silence.

  “I care about you,” Paul whispered in his ear. “Can’t you tell?”

  Paul cared about the flesh, the meat. But that was okay. That’s all they were, anyway. They had no spirit. Two souls could never mingle as one, not even in dreams.

  Adam let out a sharp breath. He hated the feelings that flooded his body, the passion that betrayed him. But love and hate were basically the same thing, and both were better than feeling nothing. Anything was better than the suffocation of solitude that waited in his tunnel of the soul. He pulled Paul closer.

  “I have an idea,” Paul said. “Let’s go up on the roof. Up the little stairs. Fool around up there where you had your dream. And I promise not to push you off.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Adam said. “And the next thing you know, you’re looking down at your own ghost.”

  “Trust me.” Paul took his hand, led him inside.

  As they entered the house, Adam realized that people never gave away their hearts, however willing or desperate or lonely they were. Hearts always had to be taken. By force or trickery. Love was murder, the infliction of death by cardiac theft, and the alternative was even worse.

  Korban’s painted eyes looked down at them, glimmering with cold empathy, wise to the futility of human dreams.

  CHAPTER 47

  Anna held the lantern higher. The air in the basement smelled of wood and decay, the shadows creeping from the corners like solid things. Mason’s statue skulked in the flicker of flame, the raw features suggesting an obscene strength. The bust of Korban was even more unsettling, because the face had grown comfortable in the polished grain. It had been fashioned with all the love God might have summoned in crafting Adam and Eve.

  “What does it mean?” Mason asked.

  “I think it means you’re obsessed.”

  “I’m talking about the painting.”

  “You did all of this since yesterday?”

  “Hey, the critics will love me, Mama will be proud, I’m the Mountain Michelangelo, the unsung hero of sculpture, blah, blah, blah. But look at this damned painting.”

  Anna looked. There, on the widow’s walk, a host of figures stood in white relief against the dark background. Foremost was the woman Anna had seen in her dreams, the woman in the long flowing gown, a bouquet in her hands. The woman’s mouth was open, caught in a scream or a whisper, the eyes imploring, pleading for deliverance from the grasping shapes behind her.

  “That’s you,” Mason said.

  “No. I thought it was, at first.”

  “You’ve seen this painting before?”

  “In my dreams. For the past year, ever since I found out—since I decided to come to Korban Manor.”

  “If it’s not you, then who is it?”

  “You won’t believe this.”

  Mason waved his arm to indicate his work. “I’ve turned into a genius practically overnight, every time I close my eyes Korban is right there telling me to get back to work, you and Ransom and half the guests are convinced that this house is haunted, and this picture has painted itself while nobody was watching. Now tell me what else I wouldn’t believe.”

  “Okay, then. Promise not to laugh.”

  “I’ve not been in a laughing mood since I got here. I’m a serious artist, didn’t you know that?”

  “Oh yes. You’ve got ‘suffering’ written all over your face. It’s your shield against the world. That’s your excuse for keeping people away. You’re as wooden as your goddamned statue.”

  Mason’s eyes flashed anger, and for a moment Anna saw Stephen, his mask of barely suppressed rage at Anna’s acceptance of approaching death, his calculation of what her loss would mean, his scorn when he’d learned she was going off to a “haunted” house that had never registered anomalous empirical data.

  Mason grabbed her arm, squeezed hard enough to hurt. “Listen to me. When I was six years old, my mother bought me a package of modeling clay. It was like magic, digging my fingers in that stuff, twisting it and shaping it however I liked. For the first time in my life, I could control something.

  “I made my mother a dinosaur, copying it from a picture in a book. I even put a row of little bony plates up its spine and spikes on its tail, two long horns and eyes that looked like they could stare down a T. Rex. Mama loved it. For the first time ever, I’d done something that really made her proud.”

  Mason squeezed harder, and Anna feared that he’d lost his mind, was going to snap her arm as if it were one of his whittling sticks. He talked faster, face red, eyes dark and faraway. “And my dad came in, saw the dinosaur, knocked it on the floor, and stomped it flat. Called me a goddamned useless daydreamer, a lazybones sack of crap. I can still see that imprint on the floor, the tread of his boot in the clay. Made me feel real special, all right.

  “And you’re special because you see things that don’t exist. Well, let me tell you something, Little Miss Strange. This isn’t one of your campfire tales. This is happening, this is real.” He pulled her closer to the painting. “You can see it.”

  She twisted away, retreated with the lantern. The motion of the light made the shadows shift, gave the illusion that the statue had altered its position among the boards and wires that supported it. She gazed into the small flame of the lantern, where the orange gave way to blue and then to yellow. Maybe if she burned out her retinas, she’d never have to see another ghost in the short time she had left to live. Blinded to Second Sight or any sight.

  “That’s not me,” she said, commanding her tears to evaporate. “It’s my mother.”

  “Your mother?”

  “She’s here. She’s dead. She’s one of them now. And they can have her, for all I care.”

  “One of who? Wait a minute. You’re losing me.”

  “Join the club. I’ve lost everybody else along the way.”

  She slammed the lantern onto Mason’s worktable hard enough to rattle the glass. The shadows jumped as the flame bobbed, then the darkness began its slow crawl toward Anna. “Here. You’re going to need this, because it gets awfully dark when your head’s up your ass.”

  She headed for the stairs, welcoming the cool air that drifted over her skin like fingers of fog. The pain came again, in gentle prods, reminders of the sand that poured through the narrow hourglass gap between present and past. Soon the sand would run out and darkness would claim her. Soon but not nearly soon enough.

  On each wooden step, she stomped out her ritual countdown.

  Ten, round and thin.

  Nine, loop and droop.

  Eight, a double gate.

  “Anna. Wait.”

  Seven, sharp and even.

  Six, an arc and trick.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She was sorry, too.

  Five, a broken wing.

  Four, a north fork. />
  “I’m scared.”

  Join the club.

  Three, a skeleton key.

  Two, an empty hook.

  One, a dividing line.

  “Help me.”

  Zero.

  Nothing.

  She opened the door and went down the hall, into the arteries of the house, aware of its patient and held breath, its warm and welcoming heart. Acceptance brought peace. This was the first and last place she had ever belonged. Sylva Hartley was right. She had come home.

  CHAPTER 48

  She had come home. Sylva ground the dried bloodroot, pulse working her veins like a snowmelt busting through rocks at the tail end of winter. Only a handful of hours until sundown, and then the rising of the blue moon. Sylva had prayed for this night for nigh on a hundred years, and the ashes of a prayer were stronger than the hottest fires of hell.

  The spirits shifted in the dirt, turned in their tunnels, restless, disturbed by Ephram Korban’s rising power. She knew Ephram better than anybody, better than even Margaret did, or “Miss Mamie,” as she’d taken to being called. Many was the night Ephram’s voice haunted the wind of Beechy Gap, whispering to Sylva, sending her scuttling for the charms. And he was fetching up a storm now, had already called over George Lawson and one of them new guests, with more soon to follow. By the next sunrise, Korban would have them all. Even Anna. Especially Anna.

  Sylva clutched the clay jar of catbone, sprinkled some on the hearth. Her hand ached from gripping the stone, but the powders had to be fine as grave dust. She crushed the mixture again, worked the dry herbs, trembling. The fire spat, which she took as a good omen.

  Would her faith be enough? She had the spells down, all her life had been dress rehearsal for this one magic night. Mighty long had she walked these hills, collecting roots and legends, crossing over to commune with the dead, even when the dead just wanted to be left alone. The spell hung on her cracked lips like a fevered drool.