Scott Nicholson Library, Vol. 4 (Boxed Set)

by Scott Nicholson

  Miss Mamie smiled. “Why not? I think tonight will be quite memorable, and well worth preserving.”

  Lilith came by, refilled Paul’s glass, offered wine to Adam, who held up his hand in polite refusal. “No, thanks. I’m driving.”

  Miss Mamie’s laughter carried on the wind. “Oh, you’re a funny one. No wonder Ephram is so fond of you.”

  “Speaking of whom, I’m surprised there are no portraits of him on the widow’s walk,” Paul said.

  “This was one of his favorite haunts, back when he was alive. He loved nothing better than a good party, especially under the full moon.”

  The Abramovs were seated against the railing near the impromptu bar, tuning their instruments. The drop in temperature affected the wood, and they had to constantly adjust the tension of the strings. As they ran through several series of scales, the shifting pitch gave the music a discordant, atonal quality.

  “The Abramovs have promised an original duet,” Miss Mamie said. “Written just for the occasion. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have preparations to attend to.”

  After she left, Adam leaned forward in his chair and gripped the widow’s walk, daring himself to look over the side to the small slanting roof above the portico, and to the hard arc of driveway sixty feet below. To the spot where he had died. He swallowed and closed his eyes, leaned back in the chair.

  “What’s the matter, Princess?” Paul asked. “You’ve gone pale.”

  “Shouldn’t have had that second glass of wine.”

  “How am I ever going to turn you into a party girl if you can’t hold your liquor better than that? The night is young.”

  “Yeah, but I feel a hundred years old.”

  Paul patted Adam’s knee. “You stay here and rest your ancient bones, then. I’m going to get my camera.”

  “And probably sneak a few hits off a joint?”

  Paul gave that irresistible, mischievous grin. “Makes me creative. And all the rest.”

  “Save some for me.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit, no matter what they say.” Paul looked around, leaned forward, and kissed Adam on the cheek. “Like the lady said, it’s going to be a night to remember.”

  Adam watched as Paul crossed the widow’s walk and slipped through the trapdoor. Lilith and the dough-faced cook were setting up a buffet table. The Abramovs had returned their instruments to their cases and now stood near the railing, talking to the Mediterranean woman, Zainab. Smoke drifted from the four chimneys, rising above the trees that surrounded the manor.

  Adam hunched into his chair, shivering. He wouldn’t mind a fire right now. Fall was dying and winter was coming on. Cold and gray and suffocating. Too bad this night couldn’t last forever.

  CHAPTER 57

  Sweat poured from Mason like blood from a shotgun wound, his muscles screaming as he ran the fluter under the slope that would be one of Korban’s cheeks. He rammed his gouge down across the wooden shoulders with his left hand. He had never carved with both hands at the same time before, but anything was possible now. The wood seemed to peel away as if shucking itself. They were in a hurry, both he and his statue.

  The voice came from the bust again, the voice that had been urging him onward, driving Mason into a frenzy of chiseling and chopping and planing. It had scared him at first, but now the voice was just that of another instructor, albeit the most demanding one Mason had ever worked under.

  This was the most demanding of critics.

  The tunnel was waiting if he failed.

  The dark crib and the rats and his mama with the squeaky voice and long gray tail.

  “More off the shoulder, you fool,” said the bust.

  Mason looked at the bust, at Korban, his creation, his first masterpiece. The lantern on the table threw the left side of the bust into shadow.

  The wooden lips moved again. “Hurry. They’re waiting.”

  “Who?” Mason’s syllable was a whisper. The air of the basement was charged with an eerie static. The hairs on the backs of his hands tingled. Flames roared up the central chimney on the other side of the stone wall.

  “Get on with it, sculptor.”

  “I need to rest.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to rest later.”

  Mason laid his tools on the table, wiped his brow, sagged to the concrete floor in exhaustion. Then he saw Korban’s painting of the manor, the one someone must have altered while Mason wasn’t around. Because the figures were clearly visible, dabbed in thick strokes of oil. The woman with the bouquet had moved into the foreground, beyond the railing, and her position had changed, her arms spread, eyes wide. She was falling.

  And Mason didn’t care what Anna said, all that nonsense about the woman being Anna’s mother, because that was Anna’s face and those were Anna’s eyes and the woman wore that mysterious half smile that no other woman in the world could pull off.

  “Ah,” the bust said. “So it’s the woman you want, after all. Precious Anna.”

  “What about her?” Mason was far past the point of doubting his sanity. Some artists claimed their work spoke to them, so maybe hearing Korban’s voice wasn’t unusual. But the dividing line, the step from mere genius into certifiable tortured soul, occurred when you started talking back to the object in question.

  “You can have her, once you finish me. I’ve already promised you fame. And I always keep my promises.”

  Mason’s response was to take his bull point from the table. He lifted his mallet, bent his elbow to test its weight. He thought about spinning and driving the thick iron point between Korban’s eyes. A blow from the mallet would split the bust in half. But how could you kill something that was already dead?

  The statue quivered before him, the rough-hewn limbs flexing. Grain split along one forearm, and the block of head tilted, a small knothole parting in the place where Mason had planned to carve the mouth.

  “Finish me,” moaned the knothole.

  Mason dropped his hammer and stepped back, sweat and sawdust and fear stinging his eyes. The wooden arms reached for him, flecks of curled oak falling from the blunt hands. Mason stumbled against the table, knocking over the bust. He looked down and saw the eyes looking up at him. It was the same cold glare as in Korban’s portrait upstairs. Too perfectly the same.

  “What about Anna?” Mason said.

  “I promise you two will be together. We’ll all be one big happy family.”

  That made sense, as much sense as Mama watching from the tunnel, and probably a drunken and mean-eyed version of Dad as well. Just like old times, with rats in the walls and darkness all around and Dad passed out on the floor. So if he could drag Anna in there with him, the darkness might be a little more bearable. Korban always kept his promises. How could you not trust those wise and wonderful eyes?

  Mason picked up the hatchet. The critics had spoken. More off the left. Finish it. Make it perfect. Big dream image brought to life. Create.

  Wood.

  Flesh.

  Heart.

  Dream.

  CHAPTER 58

  Anna felt as if she were back in one of her dreams, those that had filled her nights in the past year. As she had so many times before, in that lost land of sleep, she approached the manor from the forest. The house’s hulking form rose between the trees that surrounded it like guardian beasts. The windows were eyes, glaring and cold even with the light of a dozen fires behind them. The chimneys spouted a breath of ephemeral transition, matter into energy, substance into heat. The front door whispered a soft welcome, the darkness inside promising peace.

  But this waking dream had features beyond all those previous ones, as if a seventh sense had been added to her other six. The grass was thick under her shoes and glittering frost clung to the skin of the earth. The sky was bright on both the eastern and western horizons, painted with lavender and maroon by some large and ragged brush. The wind had settled like a sigh, and autumn’s surrender hung in the cool air. The manor waited. Ephram Korban waited.<
br />
  Is this where I belong? Am I really coming home?

  Sylva said that Anna was fuel. That Korban would consume her, use her, leave her soul as ashes.

  What did it matter? Let her love and hate and anger and pride flow out into the house. Into Ephram Korban. No one else wanted it.

  She laughed, giddy as she crossed the porch, the raw static energy of the house flowing over her body, warming her, making her feel wonderful. Coming home. Home is where the heart is.

  Miss Mamie was waiting. She opened the door and stepped aside, sweeping her arm out in welcome. “Ephram said you’d come.”

  Anna felt drunk. Even her pain was ebbing, the fires of cancer dying down inside her. She would offer everything. Korban could have her pain, her loneliness, her feeling of never having belonged. Bon appétit.

  Yes, she had come home. This place had opened her soul, had allowed her to see ghosts. Given her what she wanted. She could die happy here.

  “You’re looking lovely this evening, Anna,” Miss Mamie said to her. The words sounded as if they had come from far away. The fire roared and crackled at the end of the foyer. Anna looked at the portrait of Korban above the fireplace. Grandfather. With eyes so bright and loving.

  How could she have resisted getting the family back together? Let the circle be unbroken. Did it matter if some were alive and some were dead? When you came right down to it, was there any difference?

  One, a dividing line.

  Then zero. Nothing. All the same.

  Anna looked at the house with new eyes. The columns, the corners, the carving in the hearth, the reddish brown lower paneling, the polished oak floors. She didn’t blame Korban for never wanting to leave this beautiful place. She didn’t want to leave it now, either.

  “You’re just in time for the party,” Miss Mamie said. “Up on the widow’s walk.”

  Fuel.

  Painting.

  Something about the painting. Her standing here by the fire. Mason.

  “What is it, dear?” Miss Mamie put a cool hand to Anna’s cheek. “You’re not feeling ill, are you?”

  “Where’s Mason?”

  “The sculptor? He’s busy right now, but he’ll be joining us. As soon as he’s finished.”

  Anna let herself be led to the stairs. Something about the walls bothered her, something she knew she should remember. But they were ascending now, Miss Mamie leading the way. They reached the second floor landing and Anna looked down the hall toward her room. The astral lamps along the wall seemed to brighten and then dim, as if fed by a slow, even breathing.

  They reached the third floor. Anna hadn’t been to this part of the manor before, though threads of some dim ancestral memory tugged at her. The walls were covered with boxcar siding, cheap interlocking pine. No paintings hung here. There were doors that must have led to other bedrooms, and gabled windows at each end of the floor. A conductor’s lantern on a handmade table near the stair rail was the only light.

  The lantern.

  Mason had one like it in the basement.

  Where was Mason? She tried to picture his face, but it was lost in the mist inside her head, along with everything else. The walls throbbed, swelled, and contracted. The house was moving in rhythm with her breathing. She began to get dizzy, then Miss Mamie leaned her against a small ladder.

  Anna looked up, as if through the eye of the world, at the clouds that caught the blue silver of the rising moon. The widow’s walk. The top of the end of the world. Where her own ghost waited.

  She forced her arms and legs to climb. It was time to meet herself.

  CHAPTER 59

  Spence had found the Word.

  He sensed—no, knew—it would be waiting at the end of this final paragraph.

  Truth comes in unlikely packages. The One True God comes in the oddest of shapes. All gifts are weighty. Each gift demands its equal value in sacrifice.

  The shifting and bulging walls of the house had distracted him at first. Just another evil, another thing to steal his attention, to turn him from the road to glory. Bridget gasped and screamed as they took form, as the misty shapes fell from the ceiling and rose from the oak flooring, as they drifted cold and hollow through the room.

  Spence impatiently brushed them away. The True Shining Path beckoned him, and all else was superfluous poppycock and bombast, literistic excess. The True Path led to the next sentence that caused the next word to press itself into the wood pulp, as metal hammered ink into paper into existence.

  The night was ready, breath borrowed and held prisoner, lungs of ebony and earth, feet of granite, arms sweeping seasons of sleep from the eyes of the sightless. October screamed, a carpet of frost, a turn of brown wind, the end of something. Time turned backwards, cold to hot, hard water. Go out frost and come in...

  He tilted forward in his chair, not caring if the chilled air sapped his strength. He needn’t waste his flesh on Bridget. He had a better intercourse here, himself and the True Word. White shadows moved across the room in silence, the fire paused in consuming, his fingers itched.

  Come in . . . what?

  The Word hung there, teasing, waiting, drawing him body and soul onward, hovering ever out of reach.

  “I say, chap, what are you waiting for?”

  Spence thought at first the line had come from his own mind, a bit of clipped dialogue that was trying to force its way into the narrative. The fire roared, yet a frigid breeze skirled across the back of his neck. His fingers rested on the desk.

  The voice came again, no Muse, no Bridget, no Korban. “Get on with it, man. It’s not the bleeding end of the world yet.”

  Spence turned, glared at the photographer who stood in the corner of the room, face obscured by shadows. “Damn you, why didn’t you knock? I can’t abide interruptions when I’m working.”

  Roth’s accent flattened, became nasally and Midwestern. “We got tunnels of the soul, Jeff. And guess what’s inside yours?”

  “You’re mad,” Spence said. “Come out where I can see you.”

  The photographer waved a quick hand toward the portrait of Korban. “He said you can have a typewriter, but all the keys will be stuck.”

  Spence tried to rise, anger throbbing through him and sending a bright flash of pain across his left temple.

  Roth laughed, his voice changed pitch, accelerated into that shrill and strident voice from Spence’s past. The voice of Miss Eileen Foxx. “I before E except after PEEEE,” she said, Roth’s body shaking with her gleeful laughter.

  “F-f-foxx in socks?” Spence said, confused, his chest split with pain. A warmth spread around his groin, an unfamiliar wetness that was almost pleasant.

  Roth moved back into the shadows and was gone. Eileen Foxx’s last admonishment hung in the air like a threat: “You’d better make the grade, Jefferson, or I’ll be waiting. Yessirree, you’ll be staying after school with me.”

  Spence stared into the fire until the dampness between his legs grew cold, then he faced the typewriter again, the words on the page almost like symbols etched by people from some lost civilization. They no longer had meaning, but he knew he wasn’t finished. He needed that word.

  The class would laugh at him if he didn’t find the word.

  CHAPTER 60

  Mason lifted the bull point again, the mallet in his slick right hand. The pile of wood shavings was ankle-deep around him, the statue hewn into a recognizable shape. The head needed a lot of work, but the arms and legs were there, the torso as strong and ugly as a stump. This was a hideous masterpiece, a raw stroke of genius, a creative vision that no eyes should ever see.

  Eyes.

  The thing needed eyes, so that it might see. And once it could see, then what?

  “You’re not working, sculptor,” the bust said.

  “I’m thinking,” Mason said.

  “You’ll think when I tell you. Now finish.”

  Finish. And he could have it all, fame, fortune, Mama’s approval. And the girl. Oh, don’t forget the g
irl.

  He looked at the painting again. The painted Anna had changed position, was definitely falling, and her arms were now spread wide, the bouquet slipping from her fingers, the half smile shifted to a dark, round tunnel of a scream.

  Anna. Something about Anna that he should remember, if only he could think about anything besides the statue.

  The whispers spilled from the corner of the basement, and he was afraid the tunnel had opened again, that Mama would come out and sniff at him with her pointy rodent nose, show her sharp teeth, wriggle her whiskers, and tell him about the power of dreams.

  But the whisper stirred again, and the voice was Anna’s: “Mason.”

  The voice was coming from the painting.

  “Don’t listen to her, sculptor,” the bust said. “I need you. Give me my eyes. And my mouth. I’m hungry.”

  Anna spoke again from the painting. “He’s burning you up, Mason. He’s burning us all.”

  “Work,” the bust commanded.

  “Burning our dreams,” Anna said. “The closer I get to being dead, the more I understand.”

  Being dead? Anna?

  He had to find her. Something was wrong. Something was wrong with him. He looked at his blistered hands, the tools, the things that had shaped these monstrosities before him. Where had these graven idols come from? Not from his own imagination, that was certain.

  “Dream me to life,” the bust commanded. “Don’t stop now.”

  Dream Korban.

  No.

  He wanted his own dreams. Good or bad, whether or not they ever brought him fame. Whether or not they made Mama proud.

  He wanted his own dreams. Not Korban’s.

  Mason raised the bull point, pressed it into the hulking chest of the statue, swept his arm back, and smashed the mallet into the steel. The bust screamed. Mason flung the hammer at the bust, knocking it to the floor.

  “Sculptorrrrr,” Korban roared, voice like a thousand wildfires eating the air in the room, shaking the timbers of the house.