The Manor Page 9

  "And Korban had a landscape scheme all laid out. People thought he was a little touched in the head, wanting to turn this scrubby old mountain into some kind of king's place. But the money was green enough. Korban paid a dollar a day, which was unheard of at the time. He was big in textiles."

  "I've worked in textiles myself," Mason said. "Can't say I ever got too big in it, though. I mostly just swapped out spindles for minimum wage."

  "No need to be ashamed of honest work." Ransom paused and looked in the direction of a crow's call. The smell of moist leaves and forest rot filled Mason's nostrils. He noticed himself breathing harder than the old man, who was nearly three times his age. Ransom began walking again and continued with his story.

  "When they got the road gouged out, they set to work on the bridge. In the old days, the only way to get up here was a trail that wound up the south face of those cliffs. You seen that drop-off driving up here."

  "Yeah. Down to the bottom of the world." Mason's stomach fluttered at the remembered majesty and terror of the view. He was embarrassed by his shortness of breath and tried to hide it.

  "That trail was how the early pioneers, Boone and Jeremiah and a handful of others, made it up in the first place. They say the Cherokee and Catawba used it before that, communal hunting grounds. The whites brought livestock up here, fighting and pushing the animals along the cliffs. But Korban wanted a bridge. And what Korban wanted, Korban always got."

  "Kind of what I figured." A duck-planked building stood ahead of mem, tucked under the branches of a jack pine. Its shake roof was littered with brown pine needles. Ransom led Mason toward it.

  "They was about eight families mat owned this piece of mountaintop. Korban bought mem all out and put mem to work building the house and garnering field stones for me foundation. He hired me womenfolk to set out apple seedlings and weed me gardens. Even me kids helped out, at a quarter a day plus keep."

  "Didn't anybody notice that they were doing the same work, only now they had a master?"

  The trail had widened out and wagon ruts led into the heart of the forest from the other side of the clearing. Ransom stepped onto the warped stairs leading into the shed and paused. Mason was glad that the uphill walk had finally tapped the old man's stamina.

  "You ain't from money, are you?" Ransom asked, raising a white eyebrow.

  "Well, not really. Both my parents had to work all week to get by." Mason didn't mention that his dad worked only two days a week and drank four and a half. Dad faithfully took off every Sunday morning to give thanks for the evening's pint. No other prayers ever passed his lips that didn't reek of bourbon. Except maybe from his hospital bed, when cirrhosis escorted him to the self-destruction he'd spent a lifetime toasting.

  "People around here, they fell all over themselves to get Korban's money. They was scrub poor, these people. The only cash they ever saw was once or twice a year when they loaded some handmade quilts or goods on the back of a mule and took down to Black Rock to trade. So when Korban come in with his offers, nobody blamed them for selling out."

  "I guess I would sell out, too, if I got the chance," Mason said. He was thinking of Diluvium, his first commissioned piece and the worst thing he'd ever fabricated. Also the most successful.

  Ransom fumbled in his overalls pocket and again pulled out the feathery rag ball. He waved it in the strange genuflection before lifting the cast-iron latch on the shed door.

  "Um-what's that feather for?" Mason asked.

  "Warding off," Ransom said, as if everybody carried such a charm. He pushed the door open. Before entering, he kicked the doorjamb so hard that his overalls quivered around his bony frame. "Yep, still sturdy."

  Mason wanted to ask what Ransom thought he was warding off, but didn't know what words to use. He chalked it up as one more of the manor's oddities. Compared with ghost stories, Korban's ever-watchful portraits, the jittery maid, and hearth fires burning in the heat of day, what was one old man's eccentricities? Next to Anna, Ransom was practically a model of sanity and reason.

  They went into the small shed, Ransom peering up at the rafters. Light spilled from the two single-paned windows set in the south wall. Workbenches lined the back room, piled high with broken harness and rusting plows, millwork and buckets of cut nails. Worn-handled shovels, picks, and axes leaned near the door. A long cross-saw dangled from wooden pegs, a few of its jagged teeth missing. The corner was a mess of wooden planes, hammers, and block-and-tackle tangled in yellowed hemp rope. The room smelled of iron and old leather.

  "Don't have to lock up tools," Ransom said. "What would a thief want with a tool? Then he'd have to work."

  Mason began picking out the equipment they might need. If he was lucky, they would find a chunk of walnut or maybe a maple stump. More likely, they would have to hack a piece out of a fallen tree. He was checking the heft of a hatchet when he noticed Ransom studying the dark ceiling again. "Sky's not about to fall, is it?"

  "Never know."

  "What are we, about four thousand feet above sea level? A lot less sky to fall on us up here."

  Ransom didn't even smile, just scratched at one weathered cheek. Maybe Mason had misjudged the old man. Those sparkling and tireless eyes suggested Ransom was no stranger to humor. But maybe the man had his own reasons for becoming solemn.

  "Found what you need?" Ransom asked, waiting near the door.

  "Sure. You mind grabbing that maul over to your left? We might need to do some heavy hitting."

  When they were back outside, they stood in the clearing and arranged the tools for easier carrying. Ransom wore an expression that Mason could only call "relieved."

  "What's the matter?" Mason asked.

  "Man's got a right to be scared, ain't he?"

  What was there to be scared of out here? Did wild predators still stalk these woods? "Scared of what?"

  "Miss Mamie said not to tell." Ransom sounded almost like a child. Mason wondered what kind of hold the woman had over Ransom. The man even said her name with a kind of frightened reverence, his hand moving up his overalls bib toward the pocket that held the rag-ball charm.

  "Look, if there's some kind of danger, you owe it to your guests to warn them. Plus, I thought we were friends."

  Ransom looked off toward the trees at the sun that was starting its downward slide to the west. "I reckon. Don't ever let on to Miss Mamie, though."

  "Of course not."

  Ransom exhaled slowly. "You know we have four gatherings of guests each year. We take a month between each batch to get things fixed up, 'cause we're too busy when the guests are here to do repairs. Somebody has to go around and check on all the little outbuildings and cabins, original homesteads that can't be torn down. Korban set it in his will that everything stay like it was.

  "Three of us was keeping up the grounds. We always switched off, one keeping up the livestock, one tending to the flowers and gardens and firewood, and the last playing handyman. Miss Lilith, the maid, and the cook see to the kitchen and the house."

  "I've met Lilith. Pretty girl."

  Ransom wobbled his knot of a head. "Not hard on the eyes. Anyways, last night, one of the men, George Lawson, was up Beechy Gap checking on the old Easley place. That was another of the original settler families. The last Easley girl worked at the house until she married off down to Charlotte with one of them artists a few years back.

  "Well, my friend George, he went into that old Easley shack. I don't know what happened, I didn't find no tools or nothing, so I can't say he was doing carpentry work. But the whole blamed shack fell on him." Ransom's jaw clenched. "Died real slow."

  "I'm sorry, Ransom. What did the investigators say?"

  "Like I said, they's rules of the world and they's rules of Korban Manor."

  Mason didn't understand. This place was remote, but an accidental death ought to require some kind of inquiry.

  "George was a good man. And he wasn't stupid. Made it through Vietnam, so he must have had some kind of sense. He just c
rossed the wrong threshold, is all." Ransom looked like he was about to add something to that last sentence, then changed his mind.

  "Which way's Beechy Gap?"

  Ransom jerked his head toward the north. "Over the ridge yonder."

  "I wouldn't mind having a look sometime."

  "Nope. Guests ain't allowed up there."

  "Rough terrain?"

  Ransom looked him full in the eyes for the first time since they'd left the tool shed. "Some things just ain't part of the deal. You'll find a lot of places are off-limits at Korban Manor."

  Ransom pulled the charm from his pocket and motioned at the shed with it. "Now, about that wood of yours. I got to be getting back soon."

  They gathered the tools and veered off the trail into the forest.

  Adam walked along the fence, his head full of the wilderness smells. He felt sure that Manhattan's pollutants had permanently clogged his sinuses, but maybe the fresh mountain air would add a year back to the six the city had stolen from his life. The near-perfect silence was eerie, and he had almost gone through a physical withdrawal in the night as his sleeping self yearned for those constant sirens, car horns, and burglar alarms. And all this wide-open space was unnatural. No wonder hillbillies were stereotyped as crazed and grizzled outcasts. There was nothing to impose the insanity of civilization upon them, so they had to make up their own rules of order.

  Paul was off somewhere shooting video, no doubt wrapped up in the latest project, the world reduced to the narrow scope of his viewfinder. That was for the best. Though solitude was kind of creepy in itself, especially in the sprawling expanse of the manor, he needed a break from Paul's company. He'd talked briefly with the weird photographer Roth on the porch, and had recognized the same artistic self-absorption that plagued Paul.

  Adam saw a man by the barn dressed in worn work clothes. It wasn't one of the handymen who'd helped unload the van. Probably someone in charge of the stables, or else the tender of the long garden that stretched in stubbled rows in the low valley. The man waved Adam over. Adam stole a glance back at the manor a hundred yards away, then approached the barn.

  "Morning, there," the man said. His hands were tucked deep into the pockets of his loose-fitting jeans. A shovel leaned against the wall beside him.

  "Hi," Adam said.

  "You're one of the guests, I reckon."

  "We just got in yesterday."

  "What do you think of the place so far?"

  "It's… different from what I'm used to. But that's part of the adventure."

  "Yep, the unknown is always scary at first. But once you get used to it, you start to like it."

  Adam looked down at a set of wire-enclosed pens beyond the garden. A grunting sound rolled across the hills.

  "Hogs," the man said. "About time of year to get out the boiling kettle and have us a slaughter."

  Adam's face must have shown his revulsion.

  The man laughed. "Don't worry, son. You won't get no blood on your hands. But meat don't get on the table by itself."

  "I prefer my meat boneless," Adam said.

  "Miss Mamie serves it up however you like. Careful, though, she's been known to take a shine to the guests. Especially them that's young and male. I reckon even an old crow like that needs a play-pretty once in a while."

  "Thanks for the warning, but she's not my type," he said.

  The man leaned forward like a conspirator, his face emerging from the shadows of the barn's overhang. "Say, can you do me a favor?"

  "What's that?" Adam looked back at the manor again. Smoke rose from its four chimneys, but other than that, it appeared devoid of life. Even the breeze seemed to have died.

  "Dig me a hole. I'll pay you."

  "I don't want to get you in any trouble. Miss Mamie seems to have this thing about the guests being kept apart from the staff."

  The man licked his lips. "Let me worry about Miss Mamie. But I got a sore arm and I'm a little down in the back. Pain's hellfire blue this morning."

  "Okay, then," Adam said. He took the shovel and tested its balance.

  The man took his right hand out of his pocket and pointed to the base of a dying gray apple tree that stood alone in a slight clearing. "Right there between the roots," he said. "About big enough to hold a hatbox."

  The man followed Adam to the spot, and Adam slid the bright blade into the earth, turned the dark soil. In a couple of minutes he'd shaped the hole to the man's satisfaction.

  "That's fine and dandy," the man said. "I can handle the rest. Appreciate it."

  "What are you burying?"

  "Covering up for old Ransom. He's no-account, but he's been around so long he gets away with murder. I got to finish a job for him."

  "Well, have a good morning. I need to get back to my room."

  "Here," he said, his right hand dipping into his pocket again. "A little something for your trouble."

  "No, really," Adam said, holding up his hands in protest. The shovel handle had heated up the flesh surrounding his palms, a hint of possible blisters to come.

  "You don't want to hurt my feelings, do you?" the man said. "Us mountaineers can get mighty prideful about such things."

  "Sure, then."

  The man held his fist out, then opened it over Adam's palm. A small green thing dropped into it.

  "Four-leaf clover," the man said.

  Adam smiled. "I'm going to need all the luck I can get."

  Adam started back toward the barn, then turned and said, "I'm Adam, by the way."

  "Lawson," the man said, now hunched over the hole as if his bad back had undergone a miracle cure. "George Lawson."

  CHAPTER 9

  Anna awoke with light slanting through the window, and for a few moments couldn't remember where she was. Then it all came back, Korban Manor, Mason, the cabin in the woods with its mysterious figurines, the pained spirit of the girl she'd encountered.

  Why had the ghost asked for Anna's help? And who was the person in the shawl who had fled into the forest? Anna shook away the spiderwebs of memory. She hadn't dreamed last night, unless that whole walk in the woods had taken place solely in her imagination.

  "Did you have a good night's sleep?" Cris asked from her bed across the room.

  "I slept like the dead. Haven't slept that well in years. I guess even a city girl benefits from the peace and quiet."

  Cris, her voice raspy from sleep and hangover, said, "I know what you mean. In Modesto, a siren wakes you up every fifteen minutes. It's kind of weird, though."

  "What's weird?" Anna looked at Korban's portrait, then at the fire that must have been stoked and banked by one of the servants in the night.

  "For the first time since I was a little girl, I remembered my dreams."

  "Really?" Anna thought of her own recurrent dream, of her ghostly self on the widow's walk, holding that forlorn and haunted bouquet.

  "Yeah. I was running across the orchard out there, I had these long bedclothes on, billowing out behind me. You know, all that lacy Victorian stuff you see on the covers of Gothic novels? I was running in slow motion, like the wind was pushing me back or something."

  "The old 'running but never getting there' dream," Anna said. "I had them during final exams or sometimes when I submitted a research paper."

  Or like the last time I dreamed about Stephen. What was that, nearly a year ago?

  "I wasn't running away." Cris's voice faded a little as she recalled the details of the dream. "I was running to something. Waiting in the shadows, right at the edge of the frees. It was so real. I could feel the dew on my bare feet, the cold air against my face, the warmth-"

  Anna raised herself up on her pillow and saw Cris, hair tangled, eyes bleary, but a blush apparent on her cheeks.

  "— the warmth down there," Cris finished, as if startled by the force of the memory. "And I just kept running. I could feel the house behind me, almost like it was watching, like it wanted me to… then I was all the way across the meadow. The shadow thing, it moved
out from under the trees, it touched me, but I couldn't see its face. Where it touched my shoulder, the warmth sort of expanded, filling me up…"

  Cris's widened eyes stared past the room into the remembered dream. "It was pretty intense," she whispered.

  Anna wasn't used to people sharing intimate details with her. Being an orphan had taught her to maintain a safe emotional distance. She'd kept secrets even from the few romantic interests in her life, keeping a deep part of herself hidden. Now this woman she'd only met yesterday was sharing a sensual dream. But maybe it was something else. "You found some company. Mason, I'll bet."

  Cris grinned. "No, I definitely would have remembered if something had happened with him. I wasn't that drunk."

  Anna forced herself to show interest in Cris's dream as penance for thinking of Mason. "What do you suppose it means?"

  "That I'm a basket case?"

  As if dreams had meaning. Dreams were nothing but a mistake of the synapses, a firing off of excess electrical energy much the way sparks jump off a cracked distributor wire in a car. Dreams were random brain waves, no matter what the professors in the Duke behavioral sciences program had taught her.

  Basically, dreams were nonsense. Both the sleeping and the waking kind. Especially when they compelled you to visit a big manor tucked high in the Appalachian Mountains, where you searched for your own ghost. Especially then.

  "Maybe it's just your subconscious reveling in your newfound sense of freedom," Anna said, scrambling up a solipsism from one of her old psychology classes. "After all, you have all kinds of time, no deadlines, no husband to please. Nothing but yourself and what you want to do. Maybe it's only natural that this relief should express itself in romantic imagery."

  "Wow. That's good. I can't wait to get back home and tell my analyst."

  Anna was going to add something about sexual frustration due to the dream's Victorian overtones. But that was too cynical and obtuse even for Anna.