Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set) Read online

“Mother,” Anna said.

  CHAPTER 65

  This wasn’t the way Miss Mamie had imagined this night, the way she had wished it during all those thousands of lonely hours, when she had only Ephram’s face in the mirror, his spirit in the hearth, his words coming from the portrait.

  This night was supposed to be perfect, a union of two souls, all else forgotten. Ephram and his beloved Margaret, together again, joined in simultaneous life and death. With dreams to fill.

  Yet there was the old hag Sylva, who had tempted poor Ephram so long ago. And now Rachel was here. Rachel, who was never supposed to be in the house. That was the reason she and Korban’s servants had chased her, made her leap to her death. Ephram said those who betrayed him could never be free, but those who served would be allowed to die a second and final time. That’s why Miss Mamie had carved the apple head dolls, the little poppets that housed the enslaved souls.

  “The sculptor didn’t finish,” Miss Mamie said to the statue.

  The bust answered. “He will.”

  Sylva knelt before the statue, unfolded the cloth, held up the collection of powders in both her wrinkled hands. “Ashes of a prayer, Ephram. I did just like you told me.”

  Miss Mamie clung to the statue, her beloved Ephram, who was wearing flesh after all those years of being reduced to smoke and shadow. “What’s she talking about, Ephram?”

  The statue swept its oaken arm, shoving Miss Mamie to the floor of the widow’s walk. She rose to her hands and knees, her dress torn, the beautiful gown she’d been saving for the blue moon. For their second honeymoon.

  “Ephram?” she said.

  “He don’t need you,” Sylva said.

  Miss Mamie crawled toward Ephram, hugged his chipped legs. “Ephram. You love me.”

  The statue kicked her away. “Spell me, Sylva.”

  “Give me her years first,” Sylva said. “Make me young again. Like you promised.”

  “Spell me.”

  “You said you always keep your promises.” Sylva held up the cloth full of folk potions.

  “What’s she talking about, Ephram?” Miss Mamie said. Suddenly she felt cold, as if a glacier had cut through her heart. She looked at her hands. Wrinkled flesh rose on her skin, deep creases carved themselves into her flesh, tiny rivers of age running dark in the moonlight. She touched her face, the skin drawing tight across her skull even as it sagged under her chin.

  Oh God, she was growing old.

  “You promised me, Ephram,” she said. “Together forever.”

  The statue and bust joined in laughter. The guests ran for the trap door, but Lilith closed it and stood on it. “Nobody ever leaves Korban Manor,” she said, grinning like a skeleton.

  CHAPTER 66

  Anna stepped toward Rachel, moving as if under dark water. “What are you doing here?”

  “I tried to warn you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  “About Sylva?”

  “She’s always loved Korban. That’s why she killed me, to please him. That’s why she learned folk magic, the spells and potions that kept his spirit alive until she could finally bring him all the way back.”

  “This is all a crazy, screwed-up dream,” Mason said.

  Anna flashed him a half smile. Couldn’t he see the obvious? Everything was so much easier when you were dead. Because the dead no longer have to dream.

  CHAPTER 67

  “I’m seeing it, but I don’t believe it,” Paul said, head tilted into the viewfinder of his video camera. “This is great stuff. Romero on acid, John Carpenter on a budget.”

  Adam yanked on his arm. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Shockumentary. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  “Damn you, Paul, this is like my dream. Don’t you see? Everybody’s dead.”

  Paul looked up from the camera, gave his boyish grin. “Not all of us, Princess. Just you.”

  “Don’t be like that,” he said.

  “You’re either working for the man on this side, or you serve him on the other side. You can be dead if you want, but me, I’d rather be the next Alfred Hitchcock, just like Korban promised me.”

  “I’m not dead, you stupid bastard.”

  Paul laughed. “Whatever.”

  Adam looked at the hand that gripped Paul’s sleeve.

  The fingers passed through the cloth, clutched on nothingness. He put a hand to his chest. When had his heart stopped beating?

  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 rivaled 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 oak 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. “Wh
en 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?