Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set)

by Scott Nicholson

  He lifted the hatchet, then thought of Anna’s words, how Ephram Korban’s spirit lived on in these walls. How a soul might be nothing more than the sum of a person’s mortal dreams. How dreams could lie. How dreams could turn to ash.

  No. This dream was real.

  The hatchet bit into the wood.

  CHAPTER 33

  The bony hand on Anna’s shoulder tugged her shirt, lifted her. So the ghostman had her now. She was finally going to find out what it was like to be dead. Or maybe she was already a ghost, because the worst of the pain was fading.

  Anna tried to stand, but her legs were like damp smoke. She knelt on one bloody knee, feeling for purchase among the broken boards. She opened her eyes to face the dead thing, resigning herself to crawl into the dark tunnel.

  But it wasn’t the leering spirit that held her. It was an old woman.

  “Ought to watch yourself a mite better,” the woman said.

  Her face was wrinkled, the moonlight revealing her swollen veins, her eyebrows as white as ice. But the blue eyes set among those sagging folds of skin were bright, young, intelligent. And Anna recognized the shawl that was draped around the woman’s stooped shoulders.

  “You were at the cabin—”

  “Hush yourself, child. I seen what you seen, and we both seen way too much. Let’s get away from here, then we can have us a long chat.”

  Anna got to her feet, pushing the broken boards away from her legs. The pain was gone, and the ring of fire around her ankle had faded. The moon was higher now, approaching the zenith of its arc.

  Anna studied the rubble. It could all have been a dream, except for the tearing of her clothes and skin.

  “Come on away from there. George got fetched over, but that don’t mean you got to go yet,” the woman said.

  The old woman led Anna from the fallen building. The woman had surprising strength for someone who appeared to be in her eighties. Anna watched her climb over the flat rocks with the agility of a mountain goat, even though she used a thick walking stick to steady herself. Anna looked for her flashlight, but it must have rolled into the thorny underbrush and out of sight. She hurried after the woman.

  The old woman paused on a table of rock, looking out over the great expanse of mountains. The sky was woolen gray, but Anna could make out the ripples and swells of earth stretching out to the horizon.

  “Korban about snatched you,” the woman said without turning toward Anna. “Thought I’d get a chance to warn you first. But old Ephram’s always been the impatient sort.”

  “Ephram Korban, you mean?”

  “The master of these here parts. Or, at least, he likes to think so.”

  “But you’re talking in present tense. He’s dead.”

  “Like that matters much.” She spat off the rock into the tops of the trees below.

  “Who was that woman I saw?” Anna’s head was clearing a little. “And the little girl at the cabin?”

  The old woman laughed, but it was a broken gargle, heavy with cynicism. “You got the Sight, all right. Knew it when I first laid eyes on you. Now, no more questions till we get away from this place. ‘Cause this place is Korban’s.”

  Anna followed the woman off the rock and down the narrow trail, amazed at the way the woman’s hard leather shoes dodged over protruding roots and stones, the walking stick nimbly stabbing at the dirt in search of purchase. They headed off the ridge to the back side of Beechy Gap.

  Anna paused to catch her breath, rubbing her abdomen. “One question. What does ‘go out frost’ mean?”

  “Old mountain spell. Means ‘dead stay dead.’”

  Anna would have to remember that one. She hoped that, unlike what Ransom had said about horseshoes and four-leaf clovers, this little piece of magic hadn’t been worn thin by time.

  CHAPTER 34

  Adam had spent the long hours of insomnia trying to nab the thoughts that orbited his head like space junk. And most of the thoughts were about asking Miss Mamie if there was a way he could cancel his stay at the manor. He didn’t care about a refund. Paul could remain with his camera and his pouty lips and his arrogance for the rest of the six weeks, as far as Adam was concerned. All Adam needed was a ride out of this place.

  They’d had another argument, this one in the study after carrying the log into the basement. Paul was showing off for William Roth, who was hitting on several women at once, and Adam tried to get Paul aside for a chat. Paul had sneered and said, “Why don’t you go to bed, Princess? I know how bored you get talking about anything besides yourself.”

  Adam had finally fallen asleep sometime around what felt like midnight, though the moon was so bright that time hadn’t seemed to pass at all. And again he’d had the dream, the dream of the fall from the widow’s walk. But this time he recognized the man who was trying to push him off the top of the house. It was the man he’d imagined seeing in the closet when Paul was putting away his camera. The man in the portrait. Ephram Korban.

  And again Korban had Adam leaning over the railing. The hard wood pressed against the small of his back. Even as he was dreaming, he realized that you weren’t supposed to feel pain in your dreams.

  But all his senses were working: he could smell the sweet beech trees, hear the aluminum tinkle of the creek, taste the rancid graveyard stench of Korban’s breath, see the stars spinning crazily above as the man pushed him backward over the rail.

  “You have no vanity,” Korban said. “I can’t eat your dreams. They’re made of air.”

  Adam’s fingers tangled in the man’s beard, desperately gripping the coarse hairs. But as Korban pushed him away, the hairs ripped out at their roots. And just as Adam fell, losing his grip on Korban’s woolen waistcoat, he stared into the man’s eyes.

  The eyes flickered from charcoal black to a sizzling amber. Korban’s cold iron hands released their grip on Adam’s upper arms and Adam screamed as he hurtled to the packed ground sixty feet below.

  The air whistled like a teakettle in pain.

  The great gulf of space yawned overhead, farther and farther away, its softness lost to him even as he grasped for a handle on the stars.

  The house’s windows gleamed in streaks, the shutters blurring in his peripheral vision. His blood rushed to his feet. This dream was stranger than any he’d ever had. Because you were supposed to wake up when you fell in your dreams.

  But Adam was aware of the impact as his head pounded into the circle of the driveway. He clearly heard the crunching of bone as his spine folded like a paper bird, he gasped as his breath whooshed from his lungs, he bit his tongue in half and the amputated tip squirted from between broken teeth, he tasted his own warm blood, then vomited as his shattered pelvis speared his stomach and kidney.

  As his ruined flesh lay sprawled and leaking on the ground, he clearly saw his own eyeballs lying beside his head. The eyeballs glowered at him, their brown irises helpless in the ovate globes of white, the pupils large with shock and fear, no sockets or eyelids to hide their twin disapproval. Even dreaming, he recognized the absurdity of seeing his own eyes. He couldn’t wait to tell Paul about this.

  Except you also weren’t supposed to feel pain in a dream, either. And what else could this be but pain, this sheet of red that dropped on him like a hundred sulfuric guillotines? Ribbons of electricity shot through his broken body, his nerves screaming like four alarms at a firehouse. Adam tried to laugh. Wasn’t this funny, experiencing this hellburst of orange that flooded his brain, when he was surely dead?

  But wait a second. Can you dream that you’re dead?

  But how would you know if you were dead . . . this was the kind of thing that would give you a headache if you didn’t know you were dreaming. But Adam had a headache anyway. He knelt to scrape his spilled brains together, scooped them up, and put them back in their broken shell.

  As his fingers stirred through the steaming wrinkles of his own cerebrum, he realized that his body was splayed out before him. This was odd, surreal, Daliesque. He
expected to awaken at any moment to find himself giggling into his pillow. But he didn’t wake up. He stood, looking at the pool of red that seeped from beneath his body and the sour bile around his head. A splinter of femur protruded from one thigh, angling out from a rip in the gray pajamas. The bone gleamed bright and wet in the pale light. The body’s head was turned away in the direction of the wide stone steps that led into Korban Manor.

  But his real head, at least the one that housed his soul, was staring higher, at the black portal of the door.

  Shapes spilled out of the maw, white wispy forms like bits of shredded cobweb being swept along by the breeze of a broom.

  Some coalesced into more or less human figures, men, women, and small children, their faces blank, their eyes as black as the interior of the foyer. Some of them were in coarse crinolines, or trousers with button-up flies, a few men in overalls and felt hats, the women in bonnets or with their hair pinned up in buns. The young boys were in knickers, mended stockings sagging over square leather shoes, the girls in plain shifts, ribbons in their pigtails. An infant materialized at the feet of one of the women, its ragged diaper mingling with its ragged legs.

  Adam stepped backward as they walked toward him. Except they weren’t walking, they were flitting, floating, flying, arms wide, mouths slack with grim purpose. There were about two dozen figures, and he saw Lilith among them, the maid with the flowing dress, but she was as misty as the others. The plump cook, whom he’d seen earlier pouring dishwater off the back porch, was wiping her hands on her apron.

  He screamed, but no one could hear you when you were

  dead.

  It was long past time for waking up.

  He tried to run, but stood transfixed, frozen, as cold as a December tombstone.

  The crowd gathered around the body that lay on the ground, the ghosts—yes, of course they’re ghosts, if I’m going to have a bad dream I might as well go for broke—the ghosts merged and intertwined, showing no concern for the social constraints of personal space. And Adam, now more fascinated than frightened, also looked down at the object of their attention.

  It was he, himself, the person formerly know as Adam Andrews. There was the mole on his cheek, the small white scar above his elbow where he’d fallen off his bicycle at age nine, the awkward bend in the second toe of his kicking foot that he’d severely dislocated playing high school soccer. There was his hand, the nails unevenly trimmed, a few threads of Korban’s beard hair still clutched in the rigid fingers. There was the silver ring with the garnet stone that Paul had given him.

  There lay his blood, his flesh, his body.

  A low sound filled the lawn, stretching across the hills, a funeral dirge that reminded Adam of recordings of whales he’d heard. It was a bizarre language, sonorous and sad. The syllables of the tuneless sound phased into aural chaos, a thick clotted noise. It was emanating from the manor, as if the foyer were the building’s throat.

  The ghosts turned toward the door, solemn as only the dead could be. Adam gulped, looked down at his hands, and saw he was made of the same mist as the others, spun from the same insubstantial threads. He was a ghost. That meant . . .

  He was really dead.

  He smiled to himself. He closed his dreaming eyes. He’d have to forget being mad at Paul at least long enough to tell him about the dream. He wondered if he was snoring, then remembered that he’d pushed the beds apart, so he couldn’t count on Paul giving him a nudge in the ribs.

  And right now, he’d love to be tickled, cuddled awake,

  to pull Paul’s body close, to feel some human heat.

  Because being dead was a chilly business. He must have kicked the quilts off in his sleep.

  Yes, of course. Any crazy thing makes sense if you analyze it long enough. And deciding to leave Paul must have stirred up some funny things in the old Jungian jungle.

  But why shouldn’t your mind pull a trick or two on you while you’re asleep?

  And what could be a better vacation site than this theme park of the deceased? What was that old black-and-white movie? Yeah, Carnival of Souls, dancing with the dead, wake up and say “It was all a dream.” And old Ephram Korban IS a nightmare-inducing sort.

  So why not enjoy it, laugh it up, go along for the ride? You’ll be awake soon enough, back in the real world with real problems. Like how to deal with Paul. For real.

  He opened his eyes, and found himself still in his nightmare.

  The ghosts were bending, lifting the corpse. Amused, Adam joined them. When one of the bloody arms lolled outward, Adam placed it back over the chest cavity. The ghosts hoisted the body toward the door of the house, pale pallbearers in a silent procession. Adam trailed after them as they wafted up the steps. Waiting at the door was his malefactor, Korban.

  The man flashed a cold smile of triumph, his eyes like onyx marbles.

  “Welcome to your tunnel of the soul, Adam,” Korban said.

  For a moment, Adam forgot he was dreaming. Korban held the door wide as the procession entered the darkness. Adam was unable to keep from following.

  Korban’s face loomed near, and the man held out a welcoming arm. As Adam drifted into the waiting murk, he realized that it wasn’t the manor that was swallowing him.

  The foyer was a tunnel, a tube of frigid stone-glass walls, an ever-widening mouth, all darkness, beyond light and the things that light touched. Adam shivered, colder now than ghost-cold, unwilling to let his id play anymore.

  Time to wake up now . . .

  Because Korban was changing, his eyes turning from dead dark orbs into fiery hateful suns.

  Because Korban was glowing with loathsome heat, Korban was reaching out to him, reaching in him, into his chest, into his heart—

  PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE WAKE UP!

  Korban’s fingers squeezed and new pain erupted, a pain beyond human understanding, so intense that even the dreaming dead Adam screamed, and Korban pulled him deeper into the tunnel, and he knew that what was waiting ahead would be the worst thing that any part of his brain could concoct.

  He screamed again, screamed and screamed, closed his dream eyes so that he wouldn’t see what was ahead—

  But he knew what was ahead, the thing he’d buried so deeply in his mind that he’d forgotten. Though like all true forced forgettings, it had only gained power during the long years of hibernation. And when a buried memory finally claws through its coffin, digs its way through the dirt to the surface, it’s not going to look kindly on the undertaker.

  This was a memory that had teeth.

  So he screamed again, and the hand in his chest was shaking, shaking him—

  “Wake up, Adam.”

  He opened his eyes, but he was still seeing the glimmers of his buried memory, the image making him throw his arms out in panic. He struck Paul in the shoulder.

  “Hey!”

  Paul stood beside Adam’s bed in his underwear. Adam stared at him, unblinking. A faint fuzz of moonlight leaked through the window and the fire threw red light onto the walls.

  “You must have been having a hell of a dream,” Paul said.

  Adam lay still, rolling his eyes around in their sockets, his chest sore from remembered pain. The quilts were bunched in knots around him. He glanced at the corners of the room, at the closet door, expecting the freshly exhumed memory to play out its image in the nearest available scrap of shadow. He looked at the portrait above the fireplace, watching for Korban’s lips to part and welcome him into the tunnel.

  “I mean, you even woke me up with your thrashing around,” Paul said, then added, with the slightest hint of scorn in his voice, “and I was all the way across the room.”

  Adam flexed his fingers, reached up, and wiped the sweat from his forehead and upper lip.

  He drew in a breath, a sweet living and waking breath, and nothing had ever tasted so fine, not the chocolate cherry sauce on his favorite sundae, not the driest Chardonnay, not a new love’s first kiss.

  Paul put his hands on his hi
ps, impatient now. “Did you dream about my woman in white? Or are you still not talking to me?”

  Adam opened his mouth, glad to find the tip of his tongue brushing reassuringly against his teeth.

  “You were right about one thing,” Adam whispered, the words dry in his throat. “It was one hell of a dream.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Beautiful.

  Spence held up the page so the moonlight from the window would flash fully on the words.

  It had been waiting here. All these years. The Muse’s blessing, the sweet inspiration, the sleeping dream of creation. The Gift.

  The house had given him another masterpiece.

  He leaned back in his chair and laughed. The sound echoed off the wood of the room, rattled the dresser on the mirror, mocked back at him from the wainscoting, curled around the cornice of the fireplace mantel, played off the cold rock hearth and swirled in the air like stirred dust. Korban’s portrait grinned in the mischief of a secret understanding.

  The room was much nicer now that it was empty. There was only Spence and the Royal. Spence and words. And the world beyond the words?

  The world itself didn’t matter. What mattered was the interpretation, the human reflection, the shaping of the illusion. The craft. Symbolism.

  The words.

  Spence’s words.

  So what if those latest novels had meandered off course, had failed to sustain themselves, had crept plotless into unresolved graves? The important thing was that Spence had been anointed. The critics loved him. The New York Times Book Review had him on the cover, not once, but twice. And the little people, the aspiring writers and the coffee-shop crowd and pathetic English majors, gobbled up his books like bottom-feeding fish. This was before the era of television talk-show best sellers fashioned their follow-the-leader tastes into a drab society of the mutually hip.

  Not that the little people mattered, aside from providing the stimulus of mass adoration. Spence didn’t write for them. He didn’t write for the critics, either. They were as blind as Homer had been, puffing themselves up as if they had a hand in the creative process, hogs who couldn’t recognize they were feeding at the same trough they spat in. Even editors were nothing more than intruders, more in love with the product than the act.