Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set)

by Scott Nicholson

  “Was he an artist himself?”

  “A frustrated one. A dilettante. He was mostly a collector.”

  All artists are frustrated. Isn’t that the point?

  Mason took in more of the architectural details of the foyer. The arch over the front entrance was ten feet high, with leaded squares of glass set in a transom overhead. The foyer had a high ceiling, the white walls and trim accentuated with an oak-paneled wainscoting as high as Mason’s chest. Two Ionic columns in the center of the room held a huge ceiling beam aloft.

  “This is a pretty place,” Mason said, because Miss Mamie clearly expected him to say something. He’d nearly said “lovely,” an adjective he’d never used before. Five minutes at an expensive artist’s retreat and he was already putting on airs, developing a persona.

  God forbid you ever actually accomplish anything. You’d be insufferable.

  “I’m pleased you like it,” she said. “Colonial revivalist. Master Korban was proud of his heritage, which is why his will stipulated that the manor be preserved intact.”

  “Korban. That’s Jewish, isn’t it?”

  “In name only. Not in spirit. He borrowed his heritage, bought what he couldn’t borrow, and stole what he couldn’t afford. He ended up with everything, you see.”

  Mason looked at the portrait again, measured the tenacity and arrogance of the features. “Looks like your ancestor was the kind of man who didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

  “Yes, but he was also highly generous. As you know.”

  Mason smiled, though he felt as if a lizard were crawling in his throat. He was here on the dole. He could never have afforded such a retreat on his factory pay. When you got right down to it, he was a token, invited so the Korban estate and the arts council could revel in their magnanimous support of the underclass.

  Miss Mamie looked past him to where a small group of guests stood talking. “There’s dear Mr. and Mrs. Abramov. The classical composers, you know.”

  Mason didn’t know, but he kept smiling just the same. The token grin of gratitude.

  “Excuse me, I must say hello. Lilith will be along to show you to your room, and I do hope you enjoy your stay.”

  She glanced at Korban’s portrait with an expression approaching wistfulness and was gone with a bustle of fabric. Mason gazed at the portrait again. The fire popped, sending a thick red ember up the chimney. Korban’s eyes still looked dead.

  Mason was about to turn away to find his luggage when the fire snapped again. For the briefest of moments, the face in the portrait was superimposed over the flames like a sunset’s reflection on a lake.

  He fought a sudden urge to pull a hatchet from his satchel and swipe it across Ephram Korban’s disquieting smirk.

  “You look like you could use an eye-opener,” came a voice beside him. It was Roth, the photographer who had shared a seat with him on the van. The man spoke with a clipped and not entirely authentic British accent, alcohol on his breath. A martini was poised in one wrinkled hand.

  “No, thanks,” Mason said.

  “It’s afternoon, and we’re all grown-ups here.” Roth’s eyes crinkled beneath white eyebrows. His face was sharp, thin, and full of angles. Mason saw it as a natural sculpture, the weathered topography of skin, a crag of a jawbone, the eroded plain of forehead. He had a bad habit of reducing people to essential shapes and forgetting that some sort of soul might exist within the raw clay of creation.

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Oh, you a religious nut?”

  “I’m not any kind of nut, as far as I know. Except for that part about hearing God’s voice in a burning bush.”

  Roth laughed and drained some of the martini. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist. You’re terribly young to throw in with this lot,” he said, nodding toward the people that Miss Mamie was greeting. “What’s a pip like you doing on a getaway like this?”

  “I’m here on a grant. North Carolina Arts Council and Korban Manor.” Mason looked at the fire again. No faces swirled among the bright colors. No voices arose, either. He forced himself to relax.

  “A real artist, eh? Not like these,” Roth said, rolling his eyes toward Miss Mamie’s well-dressed guests. “Most of them need an artists’ retreat like they need another mutual fund. A bunch of tweeds whose highest endeavor is gluing dried beans to a scrap of gunnysack.”

  Another critic. Passing judgment on the unrevealed talents of others. At least they’d paid their own way, unlike Mason. “What part of England are you from?”

  “Not a pint of Brit in me,” he said. “Was over there in the military for a while and picked up a little of the accent. Comes in handy with the birds.” He winked one of his smoky gray eyes.

  “You came here to shoot, I suppose.” Mason had dated a girl at Adderly who’d had a book of Roth’s work. Roth did nature, wildlife, architecture, and the occasional portrait. He couldn’t touch the gritty glamour of Leibovitz or the visceral sensibility of Mapplethorpe, but his photographs possessed their own brand of blunt honesty.

  “I got bankrolled by a few magazines,” Roth said. “I’m to do some house-and-garden stuff, scenic mountain shots, that sort of tripe. I do want to shoot that bridge, though. Highest wooden bridge in the southern Appalachians, they say.”

  “I believe it. Makes me spin just thinking about it.”

  “You bugged by heights?”

  “Where I come from, the highest building is two stories, if you don’t count silos. I can handle stairs okay, but I’m not much good on a ladder. Looking down three hundred feet—”

  “Drop-off like that one on every side,” Roth said, taking another drink, relishing Mason’s face going pale. “Korban liked his isolation. Wanted his place to be like one of those European castles.”

  Roth lifted a toast toward Korban’s portrait. “Here’s to you, old sod.”

  Mason’s satchel was getting heavy. He was anxious to get settled in, finish planning the pieces he wanted to work on. And Roth’s accent was annoying.

  A pretty woman in black came down the stairs, her dress just short of authentic Goth, a lace shawl over her thin shoulders. She appeared to be a receptionist of some kind. She led a couple away from Miss Mamie’s group. The man was in his fifties, double-chinned, wearing a scowl, the woman blue-eyed with a clear complexion who could have walked off the cover of Seventeen. They went up the stairs together, the man clearing his throat, his enormous jowls quivering.

  “Might get him later,” Roth said. “Maybe at a rolltop desk with a quill pen in his hand. I’m not keen on personality work, but I could get a tidy bundle for that.”

  “Who?”

  Roth smiled as if Mason had just fallen off a turnip wagon. “Jefferson Spence.”

  “You mean the Jefferson Spence? The novelist?”

  “The one and only. The last great southern writer. Faulkner and O’Connor and Wolfe all rolled into one, if you believe the jacket copy.”

  Mason watched the writer labor up the stairs. “What’s he need with an artists’ colony?”

  “Fodder. You don’t know much about him, do you?”

  “Never read him. I’m more into Erskine Caldwell.”

  “One critic called Spence’s style ‘stream-of-pompousness.’”

  Mason laughed. “Well, it was nice of him to bring along his daughter.”

  Roth shook his head. “I suppose you don’t read the tabloids, either. That’s not his daughter. That would be his latest, I presume.”

  Miss Mamie’s voice rose, her laughter filling the foyer. To her right stood Anna. She met his gaze, gave him a half smile, and turned her attention back to Miss Mamie.

  Roth had noticed her, too. His eyes were as bright as a wolf’s. “Cute bird.”

  Mason pretended not to hear. “Excuse me. I’ve got to stretch my legs a little.”

  Roth gave a faux gentleman’s salute and went to refill his drink. Mason adjusted the satchel strap across his shoulder and went toward the open door. The wagon was g
one, the squiggles of its tracks leading toward one of the barns, dark heaps of horse manure dotting the sandy road. The Korban Manor brochure had delighted in the fact that no motor vehicles would be around to “disturb creative impulses.” Likewise, no distractions such as television, telephone, or electricity existed at the estate.

  A regular Gilligan’s Island, only without the canned laughter and predictable plot twists. What the hell am I doing here?

  Someone in the group bellowed, “Let me tell you about this lovely idea I had for a novel. It’s about this writer who—”

  Mason gave a last look at Korban’s face and entered the autumn sunshine.

  CHAPTER 5

  Pain comes in many colors, but fear comes in only one.

  George Lawson thought he’d experienced all the colors of pain in his fifty-three years. White pain, like the time he’d raked the tip of a chain saw across his shinbone while clearing out some locust scrub a few summers back. He’d gotten acquainted with dull sky-blue pain when rheumatoid arthritis had painted a strip along his spine. And the invisible gray gut-punch had hung around for months after Selma dropped him for a rug-weaving hippie back around the end of the Reagan years.

  He’d felt pain in a hundred colors, oranges and candy-apple reds and sawgrass greens, and pain had taken just as many shapes and sizes. But he was damn near positive he’d never felt pain like the kind that bear-hugged him now. This was all of those combined, a rainbow of pain, an oil slick in a mud puddle, everything a nerve ending could jangle at a fellow, and then some.

  But the fear—

  The fear was nothing but black. Bigger, darker, blinding and suffocating, growing like a shadow over those other colors. Black fear lodged in his throat like a grease rag, like a clot of stale molasses, like a lump of coal. He sucked in a gasp of that autumn-sweet Appalachian air.

  George tried to move his left arm just as an experiment. Mistake.

  Two twenty-penny nails had pinned his biceps to the floor. He even tasted the nails, though he was pretty sure the only things in his mouth were some dust, a little blood, and a few loose teeth. And the fear.

  The taste was metal and rust and the kind of smithy, gunpowdery bitterness that filled the air when a fixer-upper worked a hammer. The collapsed shed settled around him with a splintering groan.

  George knew he’d better open his eyes. Because inside his head, he was looking down a long dark tunnel, and the deeper he got, the farther away he was from the light pouring in from the mouth of the tunnel. He was riding down into that tunnel as smoothly as if he were on miners’ rails. And part of him wanted to slide on away, down into that cool airless place just around the bend.

  But the other part of him was taking over. The part that had pulled his hind end through the jungles of Vietnam, the part that had rolled him out of that hospital bed when the doctors told him he was a heartbeat away from the Big One, the part that had lifted him into the sunshine after the foggy months of loneliness. It was the part that George thought of as Old Leatherneck. Sort of a secret identity that he took on when times got tough. And he really needed Old Leatherneck now, because times didn’t come any tougher than this.

  Another bad thing about closing his eyes was that he kept seeing her. The Woman in White.

  So he forced his eyelids open, thanks to his secret identity. Wood splinters sprinkled down and stuck to his tears. Something warm and wet trickled down his right temple, but he wasn’t too concerned with that at the moment. First he wanted to figure out what that purplish, raggedy thing was, the thing speared on a split two-by-four a few feet over his head. It was oddly familiar, but out of place, like a sailboat in the middle of a cornfield.

  The purplish thing wriggled. No, it had only slid down a little on the broken tip of the board, making a sound like Jell-O dropping onto the floor. Even in the gloomy light and swirling dust, George could make out five little stubs dangling like the teats on a cow’s udder. That’s when Old Leatherneck kicked in like a dozen cups of percolated coffee.

  “So it’s a goddamned hand, Georgie-Boy. What’s the problem? How many people in this world was born with no hands at all? Why, you saw Joes in Nam that lost every frigging limb they had, and all they could do was lay around flopping like beached puppyfish. So get the hell over it.”

  George gulped, and the imaginary broken glass in his mouth worked its way down his throat. The dead fingers above were splayed out as if waiting for a high five. George hoped Old Leatherneck didn’t cut him one inch of slack this time. Because he didn’t believe there was an inch to spare.

  “And since you’re the only bozo laying around down here in this crap heap of a fallen-down shed, then odds are pretty good that it’s your hand, soldier.”

  George turned his head a little so that he couldn’t see the hand. He rolled his eyeballs down to look at his body. He couldn’t see anything past his chest because a pile of hemlock ceiling joists was spilled like jumbo tiddlywinks across his gut. He tried to wriggle his shoulders and pain erupted in flaming colorbursts.

  “Okay, soldier. You gonna whine like a little girlie-boy, or are you gonna stand up and haul your wrinkled rump hole out of here?”

  George didn’t see any way he could stand up. For one thing, he couldn’t feel his legs.

  “Excuses, excuses. Well, Georgie, it could be a whole lot worse. ‘Cause in case you didn’t notice, there’s a slick sheet of roofing tin about four inches away from your main neck-vein, and that could have just kited on down and done some business. Then we wouldn’t even be having this lovely little chat.”

  The sharp edge of the tin caught the dying sunlight. As he watched, the piece of roofing slid closer with a metallic squeak. More cracking came from high above in the invisible carnage of the eaves. Something slithered in the soft shadows.

  “No, it ain’t no snake. Never mind that the copperheads and rattlers get active this time of year, doing the last twist before going off to hibernate. Ain’t no ssssnakes in here, Georgie.”

  George thought of that old Johnny Cash song, about how the snakes crawl at night. But the song had it wrong. Snakes slept at night because they were cold-blooded. George knew, because he’d looked it up.

  George gulped again, trying to squeeze a little of that mountain air into his bruised lungs. A small drop of liquid fell between his eyes. More blood collected at the ruined wrist hanging above him. The swelling teardrop of blood dangled from the end of a stringy bit of tendon. He wondered if the hand was his left one or his right one.

  “Hell of a wonderer you are, Georgie. But I’ll tell you, since you’ve always needed to know things. It’s the old hammerer, the crap-wiper, the hand that shook the hand of Senator Hallifield at that Republican barbecue in Raleigh. Yep, them fingers there used to grip the two-seamer curve ball that took you fourteen-and-three back in your senior year. Them are the knuckles that got one good sock to the jaw of that hippie Selma run off with. But, hey, it’s dead weight now. Water under the bridge. Let’s worry about the meat that’s still attached.”

  George wished he could feel his feet. Then he wouldn’t be so afraid that he was turning into one of those puppyfish. Something inside his crushed gut spasmed and gurgled. With every shallow breath, broken rib bones reached deeper into his chest for a scoop of fresh organs. And who did he have to blame?

  “Nobody but you and that snoopy nose of yours, soldier. Just got to poke into things that ain’t none of your business. Just got to goddamned know, don’t you? Always did, and always will. But if you don’t get off that fat rump of yours, always ain’t even going to last till sundown.”

  Sure, George liked to know things. He wanted to know why dragonflies were called “snakefeeders.” He wanted to know why Selma had worked the springs of their old brass bed with a flea-ridden liberal longhair. He wanted to know why that picture of Ephram Korban that hung in the manor gave him seven kinds of creeps. He wanted to know why that old bat Sylva and his buddy Ransom had warned him away from this neck of the woods. Most of all,
he wanted to know why the Woman in White had been dancing in the shed the moment before it fell down around him.

  “Ain’t no earthly good dwelling on what you can’t figure out,” came the distant voice of Old Leatherneck. “You’d best get back to the situation at hand, if you know what I mean.”

  Another drop of blood plopped onto his face, this time on his chin. George started to reach up and wipe it away, then was reminded that the arm that did his wiping was severed at the wrist. Pain lanced up his shoulder, as bright and yellow red as Napalm.

  George squinted through the jagged and crisscrossed lumber overhead. A few muted shafts of light spilled through the rubble, dust swirling slowly in the air. That meant a bit of daylight was left. Time had taken on a weird, stretched-out quality, kind of like in Nam when the grunts hunkered down for incoming even before the first mortars whistled through the air.

  “Hey, Georgie, give me a little credit here. I pulled you out of that mess, didn’t I? So don’t give up on me yet. But I need a little help. You’ve got to have a little goddamned hope.”

  Hope. Hope got you up in the morning. Hope put you to bed and tucked you in. Hope was the last thing you held on to when everything else was gone. The thought chilled George, or it may have been the cold sweat that covered his face.

  “I’m holding on,” George whispered. He usually didn’t talk back to Old Leatherneck. He figured only crazy people talked back to the voices inside their heads. But then, there sure were a hell of a lot of crazy people around Korban Manor. Ransom Streater claimed to see people who weren’t there, or those who had passed on long before. George wished one of them would have a vision now, do that Sight thing Abigail was always going on about, see him trapped under the old shed.

  But Korban Manor was nearly a mile away, and not many messed around in this neck of the woods. Chances were, nobody was in shouting distance even if George could balloon his lungs up enough for a good scream. Chances were, the other hired help was busy around the house, packing in the latest batch of rich artists, Miss Mamie glaring at them if they dared to rest for even a minute. Chances were, even if he managed to crawl out from under three tons of wood and steel and glass, he’d leak away the rest of his blood before he made it back to the trail, let alone to the wagon road or manor.