The Manor

CHAPTER 27

At Sylva's words, the four threads of smoke from the chimneys insinuated themselves, thickened into a great gray fog. The smoke sent its frayed fingers toward Anna, wending between Mason, Sylva, and the statue that housed part of the soul of Ephram Korban. The bust, which contained the rest of Ephram's invisible and eternal self, smiled at Anna with perverse affection.

Mason swatted at the smoke with both hands, but it slipped past him and the moonlit gray fingers crawled over Anna like cold earthworms. They found the soft part of her throat and became solid, squeezing in a gentle pressure that was almost erotic. She reached up to pull them away, then relaxed under their insistent caresses. Her lungs burned from lack of air and an icy dizziness rushed up her spine to the base of her skull. She tried to speak, Mason had her by the shoulders and was shaking her, she was dimly aware of movement on the widow's walk, but the gray tide was seeping in from the edges of her vision, pushed by a great black wave of nothing.

She didn't know when the change occurred. The line had been thinner than she'd ever imagined. For the briefest of moments, she was on both sides, alive and dead at once, but the moment passed and she crossed over. She'd finally found herself, her true self. She'd become the ghost she'd always wanted to be.

The pain inside was gone. In its place was an unsettling hollowness, an empty ache. Loneliness. She was dead and she still didn't belong.

And death was just like life, because the world was the same: Sylva whispering something to the statue, Miss Mamie kneeling and wailing, her hands cupped over her face as if trying to hold her flesh in place, Lilith drifting under the moonlight, the Abramovs slumped with vacant eyes, now playing a funereal tune, Mason crouched before her, yelling at her, raving about a talking painting and Korban in the wood and dreams come to life and all sorts of nonsense. Couldn't he see that none of that mattered?

Death and life, all the same now.

Rachel hovered before her, holding out the bouquet. "I'm sorry, Anna. I failed you."

Anna reached for the bouquet. Her body collapsed.

"Anna!" Mason jumped toward her, tried to catch her and slow her fall, but the body she'd abandoned slumped beyond his reach. She heard her flesh slam against the wooden planks of the widow's walk, but her spirit kept falling. Through the house, through this place of dark emptiness that would be her home.

Death wasn't a release. Death, at least in Ephram Korban's version, was just another prison, this one full of the same suffering that shadowed the living. Only here, there was no escape, no hope, and still nobody to belong to.

"Anna." Rachel's voice, a moaning graveyard wind, a desperate fetching.

And still Anna fell.

Mason held Anna in his arms. Her face was pale, eyes glazed and protruding. He put his cheek to her mouth. No breath.

No breath.

Anger and fear rose in him, tears stinging his eyes. He looked up at the obscene, bloated moon. She was dead. And it was his fault. He'd failed her.

He gently laid her down, wiped the blood from his face, and turned to the statue. The old woman that Korban had called Sylva had changed, was now young, her face twisted in a sick rapture. Mason rose to his feet, though the long drop beyond the railing made his head swim, the sense of being on the top of the world caused his guts to clench in dread.

"Go out frost, come in fire," Sylva repeated, her skin vibrant and healthy in the moonlight. Hadn't Anna said something about frost and fire?

God, why couldn't he remember?

And did it even matter?

Because his statue, his creation, his big goddamned dream image, stood there on the widow's walk like a monstrous wooden idol, born of vanity and faith and love. Yes, love. Because Mason loved his work.

"You'll finish me, won't you, sculptor?" The bust spoke calmly, cradled in the thick arms of the statue. "You love me. Everyone loves me."

"You promised me Anna," Mason said.

"Oh, her. She's nothing. A necessary evil. And you'll learn that flesh is fleeting, but the spirit is for eternity. Isn't that right, my dear Sylva?"

"When you give somebody your heart, you owe them," the woman said. And though she now had a beauty that rivaled Anna's, the shadows around her eyes were older than the Appalachians, dark and cold and full of terrible secrets.

"Then pay your debt," Ephram said. "Finish the spell."

"Third time's a charm," she said. "But, first, they's one more promise you got to keep."

"Promise? What promise?" The statue raised its face to the moon, and the grain of the oak sparkled like a hundred diamonds. Frost. It had settled on the wood.

Frost and fire.

Mason wasn't sure of the connection between those two words. But he understood fire. Miss Mamie's lantern glowed near the railing, where she'd set it down upon Korban's arrival. Mason wondered if he could reach it before Korban decided it was time to start hurling bodies from the top of his house.

"Anna," Rachel called again.

Anna opened her eyes to darkness.

The darkness wasn't absolute. She blinked.

"Where am I?" she asked, her voice passing as if over a hundred tongues.

"In the basement."

"The house?"

"We all live here," said someone else, and a hand was in hers, small and cold.

"You," Anna said, "the girl ghost from the cabin, the one Sylva called Becky."

"You came to help us." And the girl smiled.

"I can't help you," Anna said. And now she saw Rachel, ethereal and shimmering against the curtain of darkness.

"I had to wait for you to die, Anna," Rachel said. "You have the gift, even stronger than mine. Korban killed me because he knew I was stronger than Sylva. But not like you. When you were alive, you had the Sight. Second Sight. But you had to die to get Third Sight."

"Third Sight?"

"The power to look from the dead back to the living. The power to join us together. To hold our dreams, the way Ephram never could, because he wanted them for himself. He wanted our fear and hate. But he forgot about faith. Because we believe in you, Anna."

"Believe. So says the world's greatest liar." She wished she could laugh, but in this bleak, gray land of nothingness, such a sound couldn't exist.

"Believe," Rachel said. "Become the vessel. Hold our dreams, our real dreams. Let our dreams go into you, so we can finally die."

"You want to die?"

"More than anything," the girl said.

"Help us," came another voice from the gray smoke of this new dead world.

"Free us from Korban," said another, and then another. How many souls had Korban trapped here over the years? How many of Sylva's potions and spells had spun their sick binding magic?

"Follow your heart," Rachel said.

"My heart. It only leads me to hell."

"It belongs to the living."

"No. I belong here."

"Sylva lied, not me."

"I don't trust any of you. Why should I believe you?"

"Listen. I'm not your mother."

"Not my mother?"

"Ephram's power is that he lets you see what you want to see. He gives you what you wish for. Why do you think you can finally see the dead?"

Anna didn't think it was possible to descend into a chill deeper than death, but the revelation made her soul spin. She had been a fool. How could you ever find your own ghost?

"Sylva used you," Rachel said. "She used me, too. We're just pieces of driftwood to throw on her sacrificial fire."

"I hated you," Anna said. "When Sylva told me you were my mother, I thought I'd finally found somebody to blame. Now it's just me. I'm just as lost as ever."

"I'm sorry. I wanted to tell you, but Ephram controls me, too. All I want is to have never been born."

"That goes for me, too," Anna said.

"You're not alone, Anna. Something's happened. The binding spell has broken."

"The dolls," Adam said.

"Adam?" Anna said. Her soul eyes couldn't see him in the gloom. "Are you dead?"

"They say I am, so I must be."

"What about the dolls?" Rachel said.

"Miss Mamie made them," Adam said. "Carved, with little apple heads. I saw mine, only I didn't know what it was. I think she carved one for everybody who died."

"She's dead," Anna said. "I guess she never carved her own doll."

"Then she can't bind us anymore," Rachel said. "We're free."

"Not free," Anna said. "Not until Ephram's been killed for the final time."

"Save us," Becky said.

"Get us out of here," Adam said.

"You're the one," Rachel said. "You were fetched here for a reason."

Other voices came from the surrounding darkness, pleading, encouraging. Anna felt their energy flow around her, a current of heat that stirred her dead heart.

"Third Sight, Anna," Rachel said. "I'm not your mother, but I would be proud if I were. Because you're strong. Even stronger than Ephram."

"I don't know," Anna said. "What am I supposed to do?"

"Say it. What Sylva taught you. Only backward."

"Frost and fire?"

"Yes. And believe it. Living stay alive, dead go back." Living. Maybe living wasn't so bad, even with its pain, sorrow, and failure. But at least life offered hope, second chances, choices. Was that the pain that rose inside her soul now? The pain of hope, the yearning for forgotten flesh, the regret of things left undone and words left unsaid?

She thought of Mason on the widow's walk, facing the wooden monster he had made, a monster that would haunt this mountain the way no ghost ever could. Haunt it like a god, with anger and power and arrogance, as if all things living and dead belonged to it.

"Go out fire, come in frost," Rachel said. "Say it."

Anna opened her dead and dreaming mouth. Dozens of voices joined hers, Becky's, Adam's, Rachel's, all blended into a chorus, a chant of hope, an ache for the final freedom. "Go out fire, come in frost. Go out fire, come in frost. Go out fire, come in frost."

One, a dividing line.

Two, an empty hook.

Three, a skeleton key.

Third time's a charm, opening the door.

To a room of hope. A house of faith.

A home for the soul of Anna Galloway.

She was Anna. She was alive.

She opened her eyes, saw the blanched circle of the moon, felt the October chill on her skin, tasted the smoke that skirled from the chimneys, smelled the decay of windblown leaves, heard the hollow distant roar of Ephram Korban's heart. She put a hand to her own heart. Beating. In rhythm with his. And with the spirits she carried inside her, the combined hopes and dreams of the unhappy dead.

Fuel.

Ephram wanted fuel, she would give him fuel.

She rose, and though her body still lay prone on the widow's walk, she didn't need flesh for this task. All she needed was faith of the spirit. Because she'd finally found something to belong to, something that offered more than just an endless darkness, something larger than herself.

Her house was full, and Korban's was a house divided.

Caught between frost and fire.