Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers

by Scott Nicholson

  “Don’t know,” Adam said. He looked around. No one could possibly see in the window from outside, and the door was locked. Besides the furniture, the only thing in the room was an oil painting, a smaller replica of the man’s portrait that hung in the foyer.

  I’m not going to be paranoid. It’s okay to be gay, even in the rural South. It’s OKAY to get back to nature. This love is as real as anything in this world.

  He slid into bed beside Paul, wondering if the old geezer Korban would disapprove of two boys boffing under his roof. Who cared? Korban was dead, and Paul was very much alive.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mason was tired from his walk along the wagon trails. He’d spent the afternoon trying to clear his head, relishing the solitude and quiet of the mountain forest that surrounded the estate. Out there, under the ancient hardwood trees, nobody had any expectations of him. He didn’t have to be a hot new artist, he wasn’t the repository for his mother’s hopes and dreams, and he had no obligation to prove his worth to the world’s most unforgiving father. On the grounds of Korban Manor, he was just another loser with a bag of tricks.

  The foyer was nearly empty when Mason returned to the manor just before sunset. He nodded at an elderly couple who wore matching jackets, their shirtsleeves laced, drinks poised. Roth and a dark-skinned woman were talking, Roth miming as if he were snapping a photograph. The gaunt maid stood at the foot of the stairs, hands clasped behind her back, staring at the portrait of Korban. Mason waved to Roth and crossed the room, careful to avoid looking into the fireplace. He was afraid he’d see something that probably wasn’t there.

  He touched the maid on the shoulder. She spun as if electrocuted, and Mason stepped back and held his hands apart. “Sorry to startle you. Are you the one showing us our rooms?”

  She forced a smile and nodded. Mason squinted to read the brass nameplate fixed to her chest. Lilith.

  “Name, please?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. Roth’s laughter boomed from the other end of the room, no doubt fueled by one of his own jokes.

  “Jackson,” Mason said.

  “Mr. Jackson, you’re late.” She tried a smile again, but it flitted across her pale face and settled into the shadows of her mouth. “Second floor, end of the south wing.”

  “I hope we’ve got bathrooms,” he said, trying for bumpkin humor. “I know we’re supposed to go back in time, but I didn’t see an outhouse anywhere.”

  “Shared baths for adjoining rooms only,” she said, already heading up the stairs. “You have a private bath. Follow me, please.”

  Mason took a last look back at the fireplace, then at Korban’s giant face. Even with dead eyes and confined to two dimensions, the man had charisma. But then, so had David Koresh, Charles Manson, and Adolf Hitler. And Mason’s father. The gallery of assholes. Mason shook his head and started up the stairs. Lilith hadn’t offered to carry his satchel. Maybe she’d noticed how possessively he clung to it, or maybe the chivalry and manners of the nineteenth century still held sway here.

  Lilith glided over the oak treads with a swish of her long dress. If she was going for big-city Goth, she certainly had the sickly complexion for it. She moved with a grace that belied her brittle features. Judging from her bony hands and the angles of her skull, Mason expected her to clatter when she walked.

  The second floor was as grand as the first, with the same high ceiling and wainscoting. A pair of chandeliers hung above the great hallway, each with cream-colored candles stuck in a silver ring and surrounded by crystal teardrops. Astral lamps burned at eye level every twenty feet, the flames throwing enough light to shrink the shadows along the wood trim. Rows of three solid maple doors lined both walls, and oil landscapes were set at intervals between the rooms. The art was of high quality, all of manor scenery. One of the paintings was of the wooden bridge that Mason and the guests had crossed, and the image brought back memories of his light-headed panic. It, like the other paintings, bore no artist’s signature.

  Huge portraits of Korban, with different lighting effects than the one in the foyer but possessing the obligatory scowl of the era, hung at each end of the hall.

  “Nice paintings,” he said to Lilith.

  “Mr. Korban lived for his art. We all did.”

  “Oh, are you one of us?” He meant it as humor. Either he was too worried about his imminent failure as a sculptor or she was preoccupied, but the joke fell as flat as canvas.

  “I used to be,” Lilith replied.

  They passed an open door and Mason looked inside. Jefferson Spence’s bulk was overwhelming a wooden swivel chair as the writer unpacked papers and spread them across a desk. Miss Seventeen was nowhere in sight. Mason noticed that the room only had one bed, then quickly looked away, chiding himself for being nosy.

  Lilith led him before a door at the end of the hall. It creaked as she pushed it open. She stood aside so Mason could enter, her eyes on the floor.

  “Thanks,” Mason said. His battered suitcase, a Samsonite with electrician’s tape holding the handle together, was already inside the room. The suite was large with a king-sized wooden poster bed, cherry desks, matching chestnut bureaus, and round-topped nightstands. Tall rectangular windows were set in the south and west walls, and Mason realized the room would get sunlight throughout the day. That was a luxury at a place that had no electricity. The setting sun suffused the room with honey-colored warmth.

  “Wow. This must be one of the better rooms,” he said.

  The maid still waited outside, as if afraid to breathe the room’s air.

  “It’s the master suite,” she said. “It used to be Ephram Korban’s bedroom.”

  “Is that why his portrait’s on the wall?” Mason said, nodding to the painting that hung above the bedroom’s large fireplace. It was a smaller version of the painting that hung in the foyer, of a slightly younger Korban. The eyes, though, were just as black and bottomless, and the faintest hint of a smile played across those so-cruel lips.

  “Miss Mamie chose this room especially for you,” Lilith said without emotion. “She said you’ve come highly recommended.”

  Mason tossed his satchel on the bed. The tools clinked dully together. “I hope I can live up to her expectations.”

  “Nobody has yet.” Lilith still waited outside the door. If she was joking, there was no sign of it on her wan face.

  “Uh, I don’t know much about places like this,” he said, putting a hand in his pocket, falling back on his “Aw, shucks” routine. He’d learned that people were more forgiving if they thought he was a dumb hick because their expectations were lower. He achieved the same effect with his Southern drawl, though that was mostly unintentional. He secretly suspected his success at Adderly had been due to the sophisticated instructors’ amazement that a country rube could break the confines of his heritage and actually compete in the ranks of the cultural elite. “You might think I’m stupid, but am I supposed to tip you?”

  “No, of course not. And Miss Mamie would kill me if you tried.” Lilith managed a smile, relieved at being dismissed. She was even attractive, in a nervous, pallid way, like a princess whose head was due to roll. She wasn’t as pretty as the stuck-up woman with the cyan eyes, but Lilith probably wasn’t contemptuous of artists if she herself were one.

  Lilith pointed to the door on the west wall. “The bathroom’s in there.”

  “Fine.” He sat on the bed.

  “Is that all?”

  “Unless you want to take off my shoes for me.”

  She took a hesitant step forward, staring at the floor.

  “Hey, I was just kidding.” He gave a laugh that sounded like a horse choking on an apple.

  Lilith flashed her feverish smile again, then said, “Dinner’s at eight sharp, Mr. Jackson. Don’t be late. Miss Mamie wouldn’t like it.”

  Then she was gone. Mason turned his attention once more to the furnishings. A lamp stood on each nightstand, an oval glass base filled with heavy oil and encased in brass workings. A fir
e crackled away in the hearth, a stack of split locust and oak piled near the stonework. It was a miracle the old place hadn’t burned down in all these years. Mason leaned back on the pillows and stared at the hand-swirled patterns in the gypsum ceiling.

  Okay, Mase, this is what you wanted bad enough to go to all that trouble for. You did everything but stand naked in front of the Arts Council grant committee and shake your goodies. You swayed the critics, sold your brand of snake oil, and now you’ve taken maybe the biggest step of your career. Maybe even your life. Because if you don’t produce any salable work here, you’re looking at another food-stamp Christmas in Sawyer Creek.

  And you’ll have to look Mama in the eye, even if she can’t look back at you, and tell her you failed, that your dreams weren’t strong enough, that you didn’t believe in them enough.

  Diabetic retinopathy. A rapid deterioration of her vision, except she’d never said a word even as the tunnel closed in. She’d lied to the doctors long enough for the condition to pass the point of no return, and Mason had only found out when it was too late. She was too young for Medicare and not poor enough for Medicaid, but still could have gone ahead and run up the bills and then declared bankruptcy later. However, that would have depleted the meager savings she’d set aside for his education. Mason had wasted the money at Adderly, beating on hunks of wood and metal, trying to turn them into dreams.

  The worst part was that Mason didn’t know whether to admire her for her sacrifice or despise her for being so noble. Now she was scraping by on disability and whatever little bit Mason could afford to give her out of his factory paycheck. But that job was gone now, lost because of his pursuit of art. And still Mama was his greatest fan.

  “Don’t ever let go of your dreams, honey,” she said through teeth she couldn’t afford to repair. “That’s all we got in this world, is dreams.”

  Mason rolled to his feet and paced the room. It was the same way he paced when he was anxious about an idea, when he felt the itch in his fingers, when some new sculpture began to take shape in his mind. It was the same mixture of excitement and dread, excitement that the new idea was the best ever, and dread in knowing that the finished product could never match the dream image.

  Except, this time, the anxiety wasn’t the by-product of exhilaration.

  This retreat was the biggest of his big dream images. He’d already decided that if no direction or recognition came from his time at the retreat, he would toss his tools off the old wooden bridge that separated Korban Manor from the rest of the world. Sure, the heights would give him trouble, but he could crawl blind if necessary. He’d listen to the metal clanging and clattering off the far rocks below, and he’d allow the blisters and calluses to heal while he found a real job.

  Creativity came at a price. You had to pay the price even for a chance at failure. Doctors and lawyers spent ten years in college and paid tens of thousands of dollars. Criminals paid with the risk of lost freedom. Priests gave up pleasures of the flesh. Soldiers faced an even greater cost. Artists paid with other things, the cheapest of which was pain.

  Not that he minded suffering for his art. He just didn’t think Mama should suffer for it. He looked down and saw that his fists were clenched into angry hammers, the rage nearly making him drunk.

  He stopped pacing and leaned against the window, looking through the old-fashioned rippled glass to the manor grounds. Even though he was only two stories up, he had to grip the molding to keep the dizziness at bay.

  Anna stood by the fence, petting a horse. The sunset gilded the horizon and the gentle light made her ethereal and beautiful, a fairy-tale princess floating above the grass. The green rolling fields, the shimmering sky, the sparkling lake at the foot of the pasture, and the seemingly weightless woman all seemed locked away in a dream.

  And, according to his father, dreams were a goddamned waste of good daylight.

  Mason went into the bathroom. The plumbing was primitive, though the fixtures were as ornate as the rest of the house. A cast-iron tub sat in the corner. The sink was marble, with gleaming chrome spigots and a framed mirror.

  He faced the ceramic toilet and relieved himself, noting the small siphon tank set high on the wall. The pipes behind the wall jumped and quivered when he flushed. He washed his hands at the sink, glancing in the mirror. Though the water was cold, the mirror fogged.

  He wiped at it with the sleeve of his shirt. Still the haze remained. He frowned at his bleary reflection. The face in the mirror seemed a little slow in responding, the sad and tired face of a condemned prisoner.

  When he returned to the room, his tools were spread across his bed. They almost seemed to taunt him, daring him to take them up and fail. He didn’t remember taking them out of the satchel. Was he that uptight and distracted?

  The portrait of Korban glowered down at him, the imagined smile gone. Korban was just another taskmaster, a demanding and cold critic. An observer, outside the creative process, but ready to judge something that no one but the creator could understand. Just another asshole with an opinion.

  Mason went to the tools, drawn as always by their power. He bent to them, touched the fluters, chisels, hammers, and gouges, took comfort in their edges and weight. They ached to feed, they needed Mason’s fingers to help them shape their world. And Mason needed them in turn, a symbiotic addiction that would create as much as it destroyed.

  He turned his back to Korban’s portrait and wiped the tools with a chamois cloth until they gleamed in the firelight.

  CHAPTER 9

  October was a hunter, its prey the green beast of summer. The wind moved over the hills like a reluctant hawk—wings wide, talons low, hard eyes sweeping. Beneath its golden and frosty skin, the earth quaked in the wind of the hawk’s passing. The morning held its gray breath. Each tender leaf and blade of grass trembled in fear.

  Jefferson Spence looked down at the keys of the old manual Royal. “Horse teeth,” the keys were called. George Washington had horse teeth, according to legend. Spence knew he was wasting time, finding any distraction to keep him from starting another sentence. He stared into the bobbing flame of the lantern on his desk.

  He looked up at Ephram Korban’s face on the wall. In this very room, twenty years before, Spence had written Seasons of Sleep, a masterpiece by all accounts, especially Spence’s own. All his novels since had fallen short, but maybe the magic would return.

  Words were magic. And maybe old Korban would let slip a secret or two, bestow some hidden wisdom gleaned from all those years on the wall.

  “What,” Spence said to the portrait, his voice filling the room, “are you trying to say?”

  Bridget called from the bathroom in her soft Georgia drawl. “What’s that, honey?”

  “To have and have not,” he said.

  “What is it you don’t have? I thought we packed everything.”

  “Never mind, my sweet. A Hemingway allusion is best saved for a more appreciative audience.”

  Spence had collected Bridget during a summer writing workshop at the University of Georgia. He had led the workshop during the day and spent his evenings cooling off in the bars of Athens. Most of the sophomore seminar students had joined him for the first few nights, but his passion for overindulgence and his brusque nature had caused the group to dwindle. By Thursday of the first week, only the faithful still orbited like bright satellites gravitating toward the black hole of Spence’s incalculable mass.

  Three of those were eligible in Spence’s eyes: a bronze-skinned African goddess with oily curls; a hollow-cheeked blonde who had a devilish way of licking her lips and an unhealthy appetite for the works of Richard Brautigan; and the tender Bridget. As always, a couple of male students had also crowded his elbows and plied writing tips from him in exchange for drinks. Spence had little patience with writers. His best advice was to spend time in front of the keyboard instead of bar mirrors. But women’s minds were simpler and therefore uncluttered with literary pretensions.

  He had
selected Bridget precisely because she was the most innocent, and therefore would be the most corrupted of the three choices.

  “Getting the juices flowing?” Bridget asked.

  He could sense her nakedness. Maybe it was the raw heat of her fresh skin, or the animal energy she radiated. He dared not look. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m working.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Since when have you ever thought? Leave that particular activity to those with brains.”

  He heard the door close, with a solid, satisfying click instead of the slam of a more confident woman. He had chosen wisely.

  Spence looked down at the paper that was scrolled into the Royal. Six years. Six years, and all he had to show for it was this paragraph that he’d rewritten three hundred times. It was the same paragraph with which he’d lured Bridget that first time, the one he didn’t even dare show his agent or editor.

  He’d known the time had arrived to get away from it all, seek a fresh perspective, summon those arcane Muses. If there was any place where he could recapture the magic, it was Korban Manor.

  He placed his fingers on the keys. The shower came on in the bathroom, and Bridget began singing in her small, pretty voice. “Stand By Me,” the old Ben King song. He typed “stand by me” under his opening paragraph, then clenched his teeth and ripped the page out of the carriage. He tore the sheet of paper into four pieces and let the scraps flutter to the floor.

  Spence leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. The treetops were swaying in the wind that had arisen with the approaching dusk. He imagined the smells of autumn, of fallen apples bruised and sweet under the trees, of birch leaves crumpling under boot heels, of cherry bark splitting and leaking rubbery jeweled sap, of pumpkin pies and chimney smoke. If only he could find the words to describe those things.

  Spence turned his attention back to the portrait of Korban on the wall. He thought about walking into the bathroom and watching Bridget soap herself up. But she might try to excite him. Each new beauty always thought she would be the one, out of dozens who had tried, to overcome what he called “the Hemingway curse.”