Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set)

by Scott Nicholson

  But first he’d have to get free. Then he could worry about the rest of it. He looked to his right, to the side of his body that was missing a part. A section of the roof that was more or less intact sloped down from a point just above his waist to the ground fifteen feet away. The rubble above him was held up by a single bowed rafter.

  If that gave way . . .

  “Then it’s ‘Sayonara, Cholly,’” Old Leatherneck said, coming back from whatever shocked pocket of George’s brain that the ornery bastard had been hiding out in. “Now move it.”

  A two-by-four rested near George’s cheek, the grain rough against his skin. If he could maneuver it, maybe use it as a lever, he could pry his left arm free. He moved his arm, and the bone of his elbow clubbed against the wooden floor. His right arm must have been asleep, because now it came to tingling life.

  He scooted the two-by-four against his side, and the payoff came. The end of his arm exploded in a bright burst of agony. This was orange pain, the color of orange that shot out of the Human Torch’s hands in those Fantastic Four comics he’d read as a kid. Still, he pushed the two-by-four along until he could cradle it in the crook of his injured arm.

  “There you go, Georgie-boy,” said his one-man chain of command. “Give ‘em hell. Only, what are you going to use as a fulcrum for your little make-do seesaw?”

  Old Leatherneck had a point, as much as George hated to admit it. But if he gave up now, then surviving Nam and Selma and the stroke and stepping on a copperhead was all for nothing. Sliding down along those miners’ rails in the dark would be that much easier. Just as an experiment, because he needed to know, he closed his eyes.

  And he was deeper inside the long dark tunnel. The light at the living end was fainter now, fuzzier. And he was accelerating, sliding fast and smooth as if sledding on snow. The air was thin and cool as the final bend came nearer.

  George relaxed, though he was shivering and his blood was starved for oxygen and his heart was hammering like a roofer trying to beat a rainstorm. Because in here, in the tunnel, it was okay to give up hope. Nobody in here would hold it against him. He sensed that others were waiting to welcome him, huddled in the shadows, those who had ridden the rails before him. And he was rounding the bend, hell, this was easy, this was fun, and then, the soft slithering sound pick-axed him in the skull.

  What if there are SNAKES around the bend?

  George opened his eyes and fought back to the mouth of the tunnel and saw that the sun was still hanging stubbornly in the sky somewhere above, and the AWOL hand was splayed out stiff and livid, wearing a bracelet of splinters and dirt. He’d almost went under, and knew that shock was setting in.

  Back in An Loc once, some of the grunts had been sitting around knocking down Schlitz tall boys with George Jones on the record player. A young medic named Haley stubbed out a joint as big as a rifle barrel and told them why shock was a dying soldier’s best friend.

  “Some kinds of pain, even a plunger of morphine won’t touch,” Haley said, a wreath of blue smoke around his head. “But shock, man, it shuts you down nice and easy. Blood pressure drops, breathing gets shallow, you get all sweaty, and you don’t even know your Mama’s name. Crash and bleed out, man, then drift off.”

  They’d told Haley to shut the hell up. And George had dodged his own run-in with fatal shock, at least so far. But lying under the crush of wreckage and running down Haley’s list of symptoms, he was three-fourths of the way there. He still remembered Mama had been named Beatrice Anne.

  The torn hand was slipping off the broken tip of lumber. A drop of blood hit his cheek. George gritted his loose teeth and flipped the two-by-four onto his chest. He pushed with his stump of a forearm until one end of the board was under the joist that had his left arm pinned.

  He tried not to look at his ruined wrist. Blood ran down the underside of his arm. If he didn’t get a tourniquet on it soon—

  “Don’t wait for that weed-brained Haley to swoop down in his Huey, Georgie-Boy. Some things, a man’s gotta do for hisself. And a fixer-upper like you, somebody who’s a real handyman—course, you’re only half as handy as you used to be, ain’t you?”

  George wanted to scream at Old Leatherneck to shut up and go away. But George needed him, needed that taunting inner voice as badly as ever. Walking the lonely roads and horse trails of the Korban estate, he’d taken what companionship he could find. Sure, some of the folks down at Stony Hampton’s café whispered about spooks and such around the manor, but after Nam, George figured the scariest spooks were the kinds that sent their sons into battle.

  So when he’d seen the flicker of pale movement inside the shed, he hadn’t given the whispers much of a thought. He’d figured it was a possum or maybe a screech owl. Nothing that would have caused much damage. But George was paid to keep the place up and the critters out, or, as Miss Mamie said, “Just the way things were when Ephram was still lord and master here.” So George had lifted the old metal latch and pushed open the creaking door, hoping that any snakes were scared away by the noise.

  “But it wasn’t no possum, nor no screech owl, was it?” whispered Old Leatherneck.

  George’s eyes popped open. He must have drifted off. That was another one of Haley’s signs. The two-by-four across his chest rose and fell with his shallow breathing. The sun had slipped low, the dark angles of shadows sharp and thick in the carnage.

  Fear gave him a burst of energy, and he levered the two-by-four. His stub of a wrist screamed in fire-juice red.

  “Hear that? Wasn’t no possum, was it, Georgie?”

  Now he wished the old bastard would shut up. He needed to focus, get the job done in a hurry, he didn’t need——

  “Might be sssnakes.”

  Or it might be—

  —the long white slithery shadow—

  —whatever trick his eyes had played on him as he’d stepped inside the shed. Because if a fellow couldn’t trust his own eyes, his days as a to-the-sixteenth-inch handyman were numbered. But right now, all that mattered was—

  —that slippery shadow that you could see right through—

  —the next push, prying that ceiling joist off his left arm. His chest erupted in hot blue sparks of pain, hell-blazer blue, a blue so intense it was almost white. But the joist gave a little groan and inched upward, awakening the nailed nerves in his biceps.

  “She’s moving, soldier! She’s a-moving! And the pain ain’t nothing, is it? Hell, we been through boo-koos of this kind of hurt. This is like a pansy-assed waltz through the daisies.”

  A waltz. The long white shadow had been doing a waltz. Like a worn linen curtain blowing in the wind, only . . .

  “Sure wasn’t no screech owl’s face, Georgie-Boy.”

  The shadow had a human face.

  George gurgled and the spit trickled down his cheek. He pried again and the joist lifted another cruel and precious inch. New colors of pain came, pus yellow, electric green, screaming violet, crazed ribbons of agony. A big section of the roof quivered and the amputated hand worked free of its wooden skewer, fell and bounced off his forehead and away.

  But George barely noticed, because he was back in the tunnel, riding the miners’ rails. And he was rounding that slow curve into darkness, that final turn away from the bothers of breathing.

  And suddenly he knew what was around the bend.

  She would be waiting, the white shadow with the large round begging eyes, the thing with arms spread wide, one hand holding that dead bouquet of flowers. She looked even more afraid than George. Just before the shed collapsed, he’d seen the long see-through tail wriggling under the lace hem of her gown, a tail as scaly as a—

  “The snakes crawl at night, Georgie.”

  “No, they don’t,” George said, voice hoarse and weak. “I know, because I looked it up.”

  He was weeping because he realized he couldn’t remember his Mama’s name. But sorrow didn’t matter now, neither did the pain, nor the nails in his flesh, nor the missing hand, nor the
dust filling his lungs, nor the creeping night. Even Old Leatherneck was nothing, just a distant jungle ghost, a cobweb, an echo.

  All that mattered were the miners’ rails and that turn in the bend, and the tunnel opening into a deeper, airless blackness. A black beyond the colors of pain.

  She was waiting. With company.

  Johnny Cash was right, and the encyclopedia was wrong.

  The snakes did crawl at night.

  CHAPTER 6

  The fields were golden green sheets stretched to the surrounding forest. Great ridges of earth rose along the horizon, carved and chipped and smoothed by that master sculptor, Time. Mason now knew why these mountains were called the Blue Ridge, though the changing leaves splashed such an array of colors that he almost wished he’d stuck with painting.

  Pumpkin orange, summer squash yellow, cornsilk gold, beet purple. Van Gogh would have given his other ear to paint this place.

  Except such a thought smacked of that dreaded ideal of artistic sacrifice. Mason wondered if the esteemed historical roster of insane artists had not been schizophrenic or poisoned by the lead in their paint, but had instead been driven mad by the whispering of demanding Muses.

  He drove the thought from his head because it seemed like an option only a nut would consider. And he’d given up painting not because of a lack of desire or talent, but because of its visual nature. His mother could feel the sculpture with her fingers, but a painting was nothing to her but an endless piece of darkness.

  A few horses and cows grazed in the meadow that sloped away from the front of the house. The open land must have been about twenty acres, cleared of boulders and carefully tended. Mason found it hard to believe that these soft grounds gave way to steep granite cliffs on all sides.

  Not even a jet trail marked the blue autumn sky, as if the manor were remote from modern civilization not only in distance but in time as well. Majestic hardwoods spread their limbs at carefully spaced intervals along a carriage trail that wound toward the west. An apple orchard covered a rise beside the pasture, the trees dotted with pink and golden fruit. Lush grass swayed softly in a hayfield beyond, ending at the edge of a dense forest.

  A soft voice interrupted his reverie: “Now you know why artists trip over their egos to get up here. Especially in the fall.”

  Anna Galloway 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.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “You’d be far more interesting if it was a parachute.”

  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. “Think it’s weird I carry my tools everywhere?”

  “I think it’s weird you carried them over the bridge. Like you expect art to happen at any moment.”

  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 wankish 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. Playing a Goth, white enough without the make-up. Probably used that same little one-liner of “Death” for most of her snappy comebacks.

  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 7

  “We can just push the beds together,” Adam said.

  “Yeah, and when you roll over in your sleep, you’ll be the one whose ass falls into the crack.”

  “Wonder what kind of bed the married couples got.”

  “Probably a swinging harness rigged to the bedposts, with a mirror on the ceiling.”

  “Don’t act so persecuted, Paul. This will be romantic, like in the old days when we used to snuggle on your sister’s couch.”

  “Yeah, until Sis found out. That was a scene that won’t make it into a Disney family special.”

  Adam sighed. If only Paul weren’t so hardheaded. They would make do. They always had. And God wasn’t out to punish people like them, despite the vehement rants of the rabid right wing.

  “Listen,” Adam said. “We’ll push both beds sideways against the wall, and you can have the back. If anybody rolls off in the night and knocks his head on the floor, it’ll be me.”

  Paul rubbed his hair in exasperation. A few strands of it stood up, dirty-blond and wavy, young Robert Redford hair. That, combined with his half-lidded eyes and thick eyelashes, made him look sleepy. Adam liked that sleepy look. It was one of the things that had first attracted him to Paul.

  “Okay,” Paul said. “I’ll quit griping now. This is supposed to be a second honeymoon.”

  Adam smiled. Paul’s tirades never lasted long. “Does this mean I get my virginity back?”

  Paul pulled one of the feather pillows from under the blankets and threw it.

  Adam knocked it away easily. “Say, did you get a load of Miss Mamie?”