The Manor

by Scott Nicholson

  It was the dark-haired woman with the cyan eyes. She crossed the porch and leaned over the railing, then closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose with an exaggerated flourish. "Ah. Fresh air. A nice change from the stench of pretension inside."

  "You a painter?" Mason asked, still looking across the fields, irritated by her jab at artists.

  "No."

  "Me either."

  "What are you, then?"

  "Does everybody have to be something?"

  The woman tilted her head back toward the house. "If you listen to them, you'd think so."

  "Well, this is a retreat, after all. Back up and go, 'Whoa,' I reckon." He didn't want her to know he felt out of his element. He already missed Sawyer Creek's dirty little streets with their utility poles and peeling billboards. Back home, he'd be heating up the teakettle and tuning the radio to Mama's favorite conservative talk show right about now.

  "What's in the bag?"

  "This satchel? Nothing. Just some tools."

  "I thought you were one of the staff," she said. "Too bad. Because I despise artists. I think they're full of themselves. Nothing personal."

  Mason tried not to look at her too closely, though that was all he wanted to do. She was pretty, sure, but there was also the sense that she wouldn't let him hide behind his dumb bumpkin act, the one he'd used to bluff his way through art college. Those cyan eyes pierced too deeply, saw beyond the slick face of first impressions. He came up with a snappy comeback a couple of seconds too late. "Then why are you making it personal?"

  "Because you're probably worse than the rest. You're so attached to what's inside your satchel you wouldn't trust it with the rest of the luggage."

  He wished he could tell her. The tools were not all that expensive, but they had come at great cost. He thought of Mama alone at their cramped apartment in Sawyer Creek, sitting in her worn recliner, a cat in her lap. Eyes never blinking.

  This woman he'd only just met was too damned insightful and saw his self-doubt with uncanny clarity. He was worse than the rest, even while pretending he was apart from other artists, not buying into their wank-ish and vain prattle. He wasn't sure whether his work revealed anything about the world, but he was determined to shove it in the world's face and make it notice anyway.

  Mason adjusted the satchel on his shoulder, feeling the woman's eyes on him. "Sculpting tools," he said. "A hammer, hatchet, chisels, fluters, gougers, some blades."

  "You do wood?"

  "I've done a little of everything." He finally looked her full in the face, forcing himself not to blink against her gaze. "Except here I'll be doing wood."

  She nodded as if she'd already forgotten him. "Six weeks is not very long. It would be hard to tackle something stone in that time."

  Her accent was almost rural, as if she'd tried to be country but somebody had sent her off to college to have it squeezed out of her. One of the horses, a big roan, galloped across the pasture. She smiled as she watched it.

  "Some place, huh?" Mason said.

  "I've seen pictures, but they certainly don't do it justice." Again she sounded distracted, as if Mason were as boring as Miss Mamie's well-heeled gang in the foyer.

  Mason stepped between the shrubs and fingered the mortised joints of the railing. Grooved columns held up the portico, the paint thick and scaly where the layers had built up over the decades. The stone foundation of the manor wore a fur coat of green moss. A sudden juvenile urge to impress the woman came over him. "Colonial revivalist architecture," he said. "This Korban guy must have had the bucks."

  "Do you know anything about him?"

  "Only what I read in the brochure. Industrialist, made a fortune after the Spanish-American war, bought out this mountain, and built the manor as a summer home. Two thousand acres of land connected to civilization by nothing except that wooden bridge."

  He hated himself for blathering. He hadn't come to Korban Manor to mess around. He needed to get serious about his work, not spar with someone who seemed about as interested in him as if he were a piece of lint. Besides, artists were supposed to be aloof.

  "So you only have the sanitized biography," she said. "I did a little research on him myself. That's my line."

  "You're a writer?"

  "Something like that."

  "Figured. They're more stuck-up and screwed-up than artists, if you ask me."

  "Nobody did. As I was about to say, Korban set down in his will that the place be kept as a period piece from the end of the nineteenth century. He stipulated that Korban Manor become an artists' retreat. While he was alive, he encouraged the servants to fill the house with handmade mountain crafts and folk art. Maybe he liked the idea of his house being filled with creative energy. Sort of a way to keep himself alive."

  "That portrait of him is a bit much, though," Mason said. "He must have had a hell of an ego."

  "He probably was an artist, then." She looked tired and gave him a dismissive and maddening half smile. "Excuse me, I have to go to my room."

  Mason fumed inside. Stupid self-obsessed girl, distracted and abrupt, as snotty as any of those Yankees chattering in the foyer. He should have faked it a little better, acted like a heartbreaker. Maybe he'd start wearing a beret, appear sophisticated, grow one of those wimpy little Pierre mustaches. That would get a laugh out of the boys back at Rayford Hosiery.

  "See you later," he said, trying hard not to sound optimistic. Then, without knowing where the words came from, he added, "I hope you find what you came here for."

  She turned, met his eyes, serious again. "I'm looking for myself. Tell me if you see her."

  Then she was gone, swallowed by the big white house that bore Korban's name.

  CHAPTER 2

  Anna Galloway pulled back the lace curtains of the bedroom window. A bit of dust rose from the windowpane at the stir of air. Sunlight spilled on her shoulders, the October glow warming the floor beneath her feet. The mountain air was chillier than she was used to, and even the roaring fire didn't quell her shivers. A painting of Ephram Korban hung over the room's fireplace, smaller than the one downstairs but just as brooding. The sculptor with the kicked-puppy aura was right about one thing: Korban had been thoroughly in love with himself.

  She looked out over the meadows. Here she was, at long last. The place she was supposed to be, for whatever reason. This was the end of the world, the logical place for endings. She drove the fatalism from her mind and instead watched the roan and chestnut galloping across the pasture. The display of freedom and peace warmed her.

  "It's so pretty, isn't it?" the woman behind her said. She'd told Anna that her name was "Cris without the h" as if the lack of h somehow made her harder and less flexible. And since they were going to be roomies…

  "It's wonderful," Anna said. "Everything I dreamed it would be."

  Cris already had her makeup kit, watercolor brushes, and sketch pads scattered across the bed nearest the door. Anna had nothing but a slim stack of books piled neatly on her dresser. Her attitude toward material possessions and earthly comforts had undergone dramatic changes in the past year. You travel light when you're not sure where you're headed.

  The pain swept across her abdomen, sneaky this time, a needle poking in slow motion. She closed her eyes, counted backward in big fat numerals.

  Ten, round and thin…

  Nine, loop and droop…

  She was down to six and the pain was floating somewhere above that far cut in the Blue Ridge Mountains when Cris's voice pulled her back.

  "Like, what do you do?"

  Anna turned from the window. Cris sat on the bed, brushing her long blond hair. Anna was glad the chemotherapy hadn't made her own hair fall out. Not just because of vanity, but because she wanted to take all of herself with her when she went.

  "I do research articles," Anna said.

  "Oh, you're a writer."

  "Not fiction like Jefferson Spence. More like metaphysics."

  "Science and stuff?"

  Anna
sat on her bed. The pain was back, but not as sharp as before. "I worked at the Rhine Research Center in Durham. Investigator."

  "You quit?"

  "Not really. I just got finished."

  "Rhine. Isn't that ESP ghosts, and weird stuff? Like on X-Files?"

  "Except the truth isn't 'out there.' It's in here." She touched her temple. "The power of the mind. And we don't do aliens. I was a paranormal investigator. Except I became a dinosaur. Extinct almost before I even got started."

  "You're too young to be a dinosaur."

  "Everything's electronic these days. Electromagnetic field detectors, subsonic recorders, infrared cameras. If you can't plot it on a computer, they don't think it exists. But I believe what I see with my heart."

  Cris looked around the room, as if noticing the dark corners and flickering fire-cast shadows for the first time. "You didn't come here because of-"

  "Don't worry. I'm here for personal reasons."

  "Aha. I saw you talking to that muscle guy with the canvas satchel, out on the porch."

  "Not that kind of personal reason. Besides, he's not my type."

  "Give it a few days. Stranger things have happened."

  "And I'm sure you're here to throw yourself into your art?" Anna pointed to the sketch pads. "I won't give you my lecture on the artistic temperament, because I like you."

  "Oh, I think my husband is plooking his secretary and wanted me out of the house so they could use the hot tub. He sent me to Greece over the summer. New Mexico last spring to do the Georgia O'Keeffe thing. Now the North Carolina mountains."

  "At least he's generous."

  "I'll never be a real artist, but it gives me something to do on retreats besides chase men and drink. But my Muse allows me those little luxuries, too. Speaking of which, I noticed a bar in the study. Care for one before dinner?"

  "No, thank you. I believe I'll rest a little."

  "Well, just don't walk around with a sheet over your head. I might mistake you for a ghost."

  "If I die, I promise you'll be among the first to know."

  Anna lay back on the pillow. A feather poked her neck. The door closed, Cris's footsteps faded down the hall, dying leaves whisked against the window. The smoke-aged walls gave off a comforting aroma, and the oil lamp's glow added to the warmth of the room. She felt at peace for the first time since No. She wouldn't think of that now.

  The pain was back, a rude houseguest. She tried the trick of numbers, but her concentration kept getting tangled up with memory, as it so often did lately. Ever since she'd started dreaming of Korban Manor.

  Ten, round and thin…

  An image of Stephen slid into her mind between the one and the zero. Stephen, with his cameras and gizmos, his mustache and laugh. To him, Anna was the parapsychologist's version of a campfire girl. Stephen had no need for sensing ghosts. He could prove them, he said.

  Their graveyard dates ended up with her wandering over grass and headstones while Stephen focused on setting up equipment. The night she'd sensed her first ghost, shimmering beside the marble angel in the Guilford Cemetery, Stephen was too busy marking down EMF readings to look when she called. The ghost didn't wait around for a Kodak moment, it dissolved like mist at sunrise. But before those evanescent threads spooled themselves back to whatever land they'd come from, the haunted eyes had stared fully into Anna's.

  The look was one of mutual understanding.

  Nine, loop and droop…

  That had been her first investigation with Stephen. But the ghost-hunting circle was small. Her frustration was outweighed by her loneliness. They'd slept together on the floor of Asheville's Hanger Hall on a winter night when the wind was too brisk even for ghosts. And two weeks later, she'd overheard him at a party calling her a "flake, but a lovable flake."

  So after six years of study and field research, she was little more respectable than an 800-hundred-number phone psychic. There were plenty enough skeptics out in the real world, between the hard scientists and those who were always up for a good old-fashioned witch burning. But the laughter of her own peers was enough to drive her to big, spooky, empty places where she could chase ghosts alone.

  Eight, a double gate…

  Then the pain came, and the first of the dreams. She had stepped from the forest, her feet soft on the damp grass, the lawn as lush as only dreams could paint it. The manor stood before her, windows dark as eyes, the trees around the house twisted and bare. A single strand of smoke rose from one of the four chimneys. The smoke curled, collected, gathered on the roof just above the white railing.

  And the shape formed, and the woman's whispered word, "Anna," woke her up, as it had so many nights since.

  Seven, sharp and even…

  That was what the pain was, a seven, sticking in her intestines.

  Stephen came over the day she found out the colon cancer had metastasized to her liver. He held her hand and his eyes managed to look dewy and glazed behind his thick glasses. The mustache even twitched. But he was too practical, too emotionally void to realize exactly what the diagnosis meant. To him, death was nothing more than a cessation of pulse, a change in energy readings. So much for soul mates.

  Even after Anna had talked the doctors out of a colectomy, accepting the death sentence as the cancer raced to other organs, Stephen still acted as if science would intervene and save her. He probably even prayed to science, that coldest of all gods. She refused his offer of a ride home from the hospital. She'd come to accept that loneliness was a natural state for someone soon to be a ghost.

  Six, an arc and trick…

  Miracles happen, one of her oncologists had told her. But she didn't expect them to occur in a hospital, with tubes pumping radiation into her, blades removing her flesh a sliver at a time, doctors marking off her dwindling days. And she had stopped dreaming in the hospital. It was only back home, in the wee hours of her own quiet bed, that Korban Manor once more stood before her. — Night after night, as the dream grew longer and more vivid, the shape on the roof gained substance. At last Anna could clearly see the distant face, diaphanous hair flowing out like a veil. The cyan eyes, the welcoming smile, the bouquet held before her from the forlorn stage of the widow's walk. At last the face was recognizable.

  The woman was Anna.

  Five, a broken wing…

  The pain was softer now, snow on flowers.

  She'd conducted some research, knowing the manor was familiar to her through more than just dream visitations. She found a few items on Korban Manor in the Rhine archives. Ephram Korban had spent twenty years building his estate on the remote Appalachian crag, then had leapt to his death from the widow's walk in an apparent suicide. Some locals in the small town of Black Rock passed along stories of sightings, mostly disregarded as the gossip of hired hands. A field investigation, shortly before the house was restored as an artists' retreat, had netted zero in the way of data or enthusiasm.

  But maybe Korban's pain, his anger, his love, his hope, his dreams, were soaked into these walls like the cedar stain on the wainscoting. Maybe this wood and stone and glass had absorbed the radiant energy of his humanity. Maybe the manor whose construction had obsessed him was now his prison. Maybe haunting wasn't a choice but an obligation.

  Four, a north fork…

  She drifted in the gray plane between sleep and thought, wondering if she would dream of the mansion now that she was actually here. She closed her mind to her five senses, and only that other one remained, the sense that Stephen had ridiculed, the one Anna had hidden away from her few friends and many foster parents. The line between being sensitive and being a freak was thin.

  Three, a skeleton key…

  For just a moment, she was pulled from sleep. Something wafted behind the maple baseboard, scurried along the cracks between dimensions. She didn't want to open her eyes. She could see better if her eyes were closed.

  Two, an empty hook…

  She felt eyes on her. Someone was watching, perhaps her own ghost, the w
oman spun from the smoke of dreams who held that bouquet of fatal welcome.

  One, a dividing line…

  The line between some and none, here and gone, bed and grave, love and hate, black and white.

  Zero.

  Nothing.

  Anna had come from nothing, was bom to nothing, and walked toward nothing, both her past and future black.

  She opened her eyes.

  No one was in the room, no ghost shifted against the wall.

  Only Korban, dead as dry oil, features shadowed by the flickering firelight.

  The sunlight's angles had grown steeper in the room. The pain was gone. Anna rose and went outside to wait for sundown, wondering if this was the night she would finally meet herself.

  "Have you seen George?" Miss Mamie asked Ransom Streater. She hated to mingle with the hired help, with the exception of Lilith, but there were times when orders had to be given or stories set straight. The best way to head off gossip was to originate it.

  "No, ma'am." Ransom stood by the barn, his hat in his scarred hands, sweat clinging to his thin hair. He smelled of the barnyard, hay and manure and rusty metal. Around his neck was a leather strap, and she knew it was attached to one of those quaint charm bags. These rural mountain people actually believed that roots and powders had influence over the living and the dead. If only they knew that magic was created through the force of will, not by wishful thinking.

  Magic was all in the making. Like the thing she held cradled in her arms, the poppet she had shaped with great love and tenderness.

  "I need someone to help the sculptor find some wood tomorrow," she said.

  "Yes, ma'am." The man's Adam's apple bobbed once.

  "When was the last time you heard from George?"

  "This afternoon, right after the last batch of guests come in. Said he was going up Beechy Gap to check on things."

  Miss Mamie hid her smile. So George had gone to Beechy Gap. Good. Nobody from town would miss him for at least a couple of weeks, and by then it wouldn't matter.

  And she could count on Ransom to keep his mouth shut. Ransom knew what kind of accidents happened to people around Korban Manor, even to those who wore charms and muttered old-timey spells. And a job was a job.