The Manor

CHAPTER 29

A wall of flame stretched across the widow's walk, cutting off escape through the trapdoor. Mason squinted against the smoke, the nerves of his scorched hand screaming in alternating ribbons of red and yellow pain, his head and arm aching from their wounds. Mason stumbled to the railing and looked down at the dizzying darkness.

A hand touched him and he turned, ready to surrender, to let Ephram Korban pull him into the manor's endless nightmare.

It was Anna.

"The trees," Anna said. "I think we can reach them."

"I can't," he said, throat dry. "Heights."

"We all have to face our fears sooner or later. And you just burned your masterpiece. What else do you have to lose?"

"You."

"Okay, then. Come on, because I'm selfish as hell, too. And I don't want to survive this thing alone."

She climbed over the rail at the point farthest from the surging blaze. A poplar swayed in the fire's back-draft, its branches rattling against the railing. Glass shattered below, flames shooting out the windows and spewing from the screaming mouths of the chimneys. The entire house groaned and crackled in the throes of destruction.

"Ephram Korban," Anna said. "He's dying with the house."

She gripped the branches and pulled herself over, then reached back for Mason. "Hurry."

He took her hand, closed his eyes, then swung out and wrapped a leg around a thick branch. His stomach fluttered, feeling the space beneath him, the long, yawning gap between his body and the ground Don't think, Mason.

She came back from the dead, and you're worried about a little thing like falling.

But it wasn't the falling he was afraid of, it was the landing. The dying. Because he'd seen the hollow and vacant eyes of those who had stared down those black tunnels. He'd take blindness over any of the those deeply hidden horrors, those secrets of his soul that were stashed far away from the light.

He scrambled along the branch, her hand gripping his bloody shirt, and by the time they reached the thick trunk of the tree, he was gripping her in return.

The walls were collapsing. It was the end. Spence stared at the paper, at the Word.

F-i-r-e

Flames crawled along the cracks in the baseboard, smoke erupted from the fireplace. The window shattered outward and flames gushed from under the closet door like colored water.

A shrill voice pierced through the crackling of the fire: "Get out, Jeff,"

The Muse? He looked up from the typewriter, confused. The work was beautiful. Out of place in this malefic chaos, this destruction, this Dantean inferno. But the Word-the word couldn't harm its maker, could it?

He had been wrong. The Word had lied.

Korban had lied.

The writer was the master. The language was the slave.

The room was filled with smoke now. Bridget, shouting from the hall, ducked out of sight. Spence sat forward with a squeak of chair springs. He tried to scoop up his manuscript, but hungry flames rippled up the back of the desk.

He stood, eyes bleary, fingers numb. Smoke filled his mouth and throat. He started toward the door. He couldn't leave his manuscript. He turned with effort, dazed from lack of oxygen. The pages had burst into a bright bonfire, the sentences now vapor, the Word lost in the heat of its own blinding glorious lie.

Spence blundered against the door frame, a tug of regret in his chest. He hadn't pressed the period, the final key. He hadn't finished the manuscript. He started back into the room, but the ceiling was falling, the house collapsing, the typewriter lost in a tide of yellow and red.

The fire sucked oxygen through the window, and the hot breeze sent a sheet of paper out the doorway. Spence grabbed it, held it to his chest.

Weeping, he staggered down the hall, coughing and spitting.

"— fire," Sylva whispered, finishing the spell, though it was far too late.

All the years of waiting, of sacrifice, of deception, wasted now. The years that Ephram had given her back, the ones stolen from Margaret, were fading, retreating into the past. By rights, they should have been hers. Ephram should have been hers.

Her wooden lover writhed and twitched on the charred husk of the widow's walk. Behind the wall of flames, he had somehow lost a little of his majesty. But he still had that power, that magnetism that had driven her to sacrifice everything for him. He was dying again, the third and final time, and he needed her. She felt it as keenly as she felt her hair shrinking from the heat, as she felt the moisture of her skin evaporating.

"Sylvaaaaah," he roared or it might have been the hungry tongues of the flames.

She crawled toward him, into the fire. Unlike the first time with Ephram, this time the fire burned her both body and soul.

As the blaze stole her breath, as her eyes dried in their sockets, as her brain boiled, she realized that possession worked both ways. When you gave somebody your heart, they owed you. And you owed them in return.

Both ways.

Frost and fire.

And pain, a deep freeze of burning agony. The thing called love. A suicidal, murdering thing.

Anna lowered herself, weaving through the branches. Mason was close behind, working his way down with frantic care. The heat from the house flowed over her, bits of wood and ash flying past on the wind of the firestorm. The sensation reminded her that she was alive, that the death she had welcomed was now something she was struggling to avoid. Maybe being alive meant nothing more than fighting to stay that way

Maybe.

Or maybe Rachel was right. You have to live for something bigger than yourself, belong to something that matters. Then you earn your rest.

"Hang on, Mason, we're almost there."

"Good. Because I think the house is falling."

They finally reached the ground, Mason stumbling, weak from his wounds. She supported him, leading him across the lawn away from the manor. The heat had melted the frost, and the grass was damp, steam rising. When they reached safely, she and Mason collapsed on the ground, ridding their lungs of smoke, watching Korban's funeral pyre as it stretched its fingers toward the moon.

The giant skeletal framework of the house was outlined in black, and Anna saw Korban's face in the flames, a hundred times life-sized, trapped in his own black tunnel, the one where his dreams died, where his servants abandoned him, where his heart turned to ash. Where he owned nothing and no one and his work went forever unfinished.

The great gables folded, the rails tumbled over the side. The Ionic columns snapped and the portico thundered down. The windows wept fire, the walls tucked themselves into each other, the piano works made a brassy clamor as they tumbled into the basement. Glass shattered and flames sputtered, smoke tunneled from the top of the house like the mouth of hell at the end of the world.

"Look," Anna said, pointing across the frost-coated lawn to the edge of the forest. Matchstick figures moved among the shadows.

"Some of them got out," Mason said. "They are alive, aren't they?"

"Sure." She realized her Second Sight had been blinded, somehow it had perished along with the ghost of herself she had given to Ephram Korban.

Good riddance.

Horses galloped across the meadow, whinnying in fright. Then the night was torn apart by a soul-searing shriek that echoed across the mountains. The ground shook, trees bent backward, and the barn collapsed. The fences also fell, gleaming like wet bones in the moonlight.

"He's taking it all with him," Anna said.

"Does that mean he's…?"

"Dead? Do we even know what that means anymore?"

He put his arm around her, and she relaxed against him, grateful for his warmth. "I think it's all a dream. But dreams aren't such a big deal. I like being awake better."

"So do I."

They sat in the grass, watching the fire dwindle, and waited for dawn.