The Manor

CHAPTER 24

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.

Is this where I belong? Anna thought. 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. Coining 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 appetit.

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.

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 backward, 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 mid-western. "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.

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 girl.

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.

The statue quivered, its limbs moved with a groan of splinters, then it tore itself free from the nails that held it to the support boards. The wooden hands reached up and fumbled with the wires. The legs had been divided at the bottom, but the feet were not refined, mere dark clumps of oak covered in bark. The heavy feet scraped across the floor.

Moving toward him.

Mason kicked the table, tumbling the lantern over. The flame extinguished as the globe shattered. They were in darkness.

Both he and Korban.

Except Korban was used to darkness, Korban fed on darkness, Korban was darkness.

Mason groped in front of his face and headed toward where he thought the stairs were. He tripped over something metallic, then he fell into the arms of the animated statue, his bones knocking on wood No, it was only an old four-poster bed frame. But he was confused now, all directions the same, and he heard the twitching and squeaking behind him. Rodent noises.

No, no, no, not the crib.

And on the tail of that thought came another, equally frightful one. He had longed to create a lasting work of art. And he had done it. This was his undying success.

The statue's limbs snapped as it searched for its maker, the sound like dry bones breaking. Korban was stretching, trying on his new body in the darkness. His wonderful but clumsy body, crafted by Mason's loving touch.

"I'm blind," came Korban's muffled voice, as if he were chewing on sawdust. "You haven't finished my eyes."

Mason's fingers brushed one of the support beams. He ducked behind it and knelt in the dark. He tried to slow his breathing, but he couldn't. His pounding heart was going to give him away. The heavy wooden feet shuffled in his direction.

If he's blind, he's deaf, too. Unless part of him is still in the bust. Then maybe he can SMELL you.

Mason shuddered at the image of a rat leaning back on its haunches, whiskers quivering and nose wrinkling as it sniffed the air in search of sustenance. Korban was a rat, a rodent king, coming to get him. The thick tail slid across the cold concrete floor. Mason pressed against his eyelids until the pain drove the image away in a burst of bright green.

"Come here, sculptor," Korban said, and the voice was clearer now, more strident. Had Korban moved from the statue back into the bust?

The clumsy wooden feet shuffled closer, then moved away.

Where are the stairs?

"Don't betray me," Korban said. The voice filled the room, but the echoes were swallowed by the dead air.

The statue must have found the bust and lifted it off the floor. Which one did Korban inhabit? Or was he in both at the same time? If he could fill an entire house, then surely bouncing around between a couple of pieces of dead wood was no trick at all.

Two heavy steps forward. The rasping was either Korban's labored, unnatural breathing or warm air drifting through the ductwork overhead.

"We need each other," Korban whispered.

Fame, fortune, and the girl. And all Mason had to do was what he already lived and longed to do, what was in his blood, what he was born for and would risk death for.

To create.

To dream into life.

He was made to make.

He could make Korban, and Korban could make him. What was it Anna had said? It was not what you believed, it was how much. He believed in his art.

Mason was tempted to reach out and touch it, caress the sleek muscle and wooden skin.

This would be his lasting work. It would be simple, really. Just transpose the features he had carved on the bust onto the statue. Bring Korban to full and final life.

He heard a clicking, a soft sound that might have been a chuckle. Or a rat's sigh.,

"Finish me," Korban whispered.

Surrender would be so easy. Surrender to the dream. Why bothering running from the deepest desires of his heart, the calling of the fire in his soul?

Anna's voice came from the darkness, from the corner where the painting stood. "He'll eat your dreams, Mason."

Mason scrambled for the stairs, stumbled upward, the basement alive with the angry creak of wood and the slither of things unseen, the cold tunnel of darkness licking at his heels and threatening to swallow him forever.