The Manor (15 page)

"And yours, of course," Spence said to the portrait of Korban, lest his creative benefactor frown. Spence picked up the manuscript and began reading. The grace of the language, the tight sentence structure, the powerful description were all superb. He'd never been shy about pating himself on the back, but now he had topped even his own lofty literary standards. He would shame them al, from Chaucer to Keats to King. He didn't question the origin of the words. That was a mystery best left to those whose livelihood was de-rived from the scholarly vivisection of the humanities. But he'd never before writen with such ease as he had last night and today. Automatic writing. That's what it felt like.

What Spence always called, during those few occa-sions when the ink flowed so freely, "ghostwriting." As if the paper and typewriter themselves were sucking words out of the air. As if his fingers knew the next word before his brain did. As if he were not even there.

Appropriate to the manuscript, to cal it ghostwriten, he thought. It had a Gothic feel, somewhat darker than the southern-flavored literature that had once made him the darling of New York. And then there was the pro-tagonist, the handsome, bearded, and odd man whose name he stil hadn't decided upon. That was strange, to be so far along in the manuscript and not even know the main character's name.

He caught himself looking, for the tenth time, at the painting of Korban that hung on the wall above the desk. Then he closed his eyes. After a moment, he re-sumed ghostwriting.

"Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"A thumping sound."

Adam strained his ears. Paul was probably just being paranoid. He had slipped outside and smoked a joint after dinner. Paul was two things when he was stoned, paranoid and horny.

"Probably that fat writer banging his chippy in the room below us," Adam said.

"If it is, they're the most uncoordinated couple in the history of the human race. Quickest, too."

"Al I care about right now is us," Adam said, resting his head on Paul's shoulder. "Thanks for the good time."

"No, thank
you."

"And I promise not to bring up the subject of adop-tion for at least a week."

"You just brought it up."

Paul.
"Forget I said anything."

Adam puled the covers up to his chin and curled his body against Paul's warmth. Adam was afraid he'd have trouble sleeping. The mountaintop estate was too quiet for a city boy, and Adam had never experienced such near-total darkness. He still missed the bright lights, traffic, and aggravation.

"Do you feel like getting out the radio?" he asked.

"Did you bring batteries?"

"Yeah. Figured we might need a litle contact with the outside world. The radio's in my bag."

"I'd have to crawl over you to get it."

"I won't bite."

"I'm too tired, anyway. 'Fagged,' as that phony-assed photographer would say."

"You just drank too much wine, that's al. And you know what pot does to you."

"Tonight was for fun. Tomorrow, I'm going to be working again."

Adam collected the radio, brought it back to bed, and switched it on. He twisted the dial, switched bands from FM to AM. Nothing but weird static. "I guess radio waves get blocked by the mountains."

"Or else cool-freaky pop gets censored up here."

They lay for a moment in the darkness. The house was stil and hushed. The embers had grown low in the fireplace, and Adam didn't feel like fumbling for a match to light the oil lamp on the bedside table.

"I've been thinking," Paul said.

"News flash. Stop the presses."

Paul elbowed Adam in the ribs. Adam tickled him in return.

"But seriously," Paul said. "I'm thinking of doing a documentary on this place."

"This place?"

"Korban Manor. It's pretty unique, and I could get a lot of scenic footage. Ephram Korban's history sounds pretty interesting, too. An industrialist with a God complex."

"A historical documentary?"

"Something like that?"

"What about all the footage you've already shot, all those weeks in the Adirondacks and the Aleghenies?"

"I'll keep it in the can. I can use it anytime."

"I don't know, Paul. The grant people might
get
upset. After al, you signed on for an Appalachian na-ture documentary."

"To hell with the grant committees. I do what I want."

Paul was pulling his Orson Welles bit. Even in the dark, Adam could visualize the famous "Paul pout." So what if Paul spent months on footage, and still had weeks of postproduction, editing, and scripting left? Those were only technical details. Paul wanted to be the artist, the posturing auteur, the brash visionary. Stubbornly refusing to sell out.

No matter the cost.

But Adam wasn't in the mood to argue. Not after the good time they'd just had.

"Why don't you sleep on it, and we can talk about it in the morning?" Adam stroked one of Paul's well-developed biceps. Lugging a twenty-pound camera and battery belt through the mountains al summer had re-ally toned him up.

"I mean, this is like an alien world or something," Paul said. "No electricity, people living like they did a hundred years ago. And the servants, all of them still live here, like serfs around the castle." Adam was drifting off despite Paul's excitement. "Uh-huh," he mumbled. He must have falen asleep, because he was standing on a tower, the wind blowing through his hair, dark trees swaying below him—

No, it wasn't a tower. He recognized the grounds of the manor. He was on top of the house, on that litle flat space marked off by the white railing—now, what had the maid called it? Oh yeah, the widow's walk—and Adam found himself climbing over the rail and looking down at the stone walkway sixty feet below, and the clouds told him to jump, he felt a hand on his back, pushing, then he was flying, falling, the wind shook him, why—

"Adam! Wake up." Paul was shaking his shoulder. Paul had sat up in bed, the blankets around his waist. A decent amount of time must have passed, because a lit-tle moonlight leaked through the window.

"What is it?" Adam was stil groggy from the dream and the after-dinner drinks. Paul pointed toward the door, his eyes wide and wet in the dimness. "I saw something. A woman, I think. All dressed in white.
She
was white."

"This is the southern Appalachians, Paul. Everybody's white." Adam shook away the fragments of the night-mare.

"No, it wasn't like that. She was
see-through."

Adam gave a drowsy snort. "That's what happens when you smoke Panamanian orange-hair. It's a won-der you didn't see the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover in drag."

"I'm not joking, Adam."

Adam put a hand on Paul's chest. His boyfriend's heart was pounding.

"Get back under the covers," Adam said. "You must have falen asleep and had a weird dream. I think I had one myself." Paul lay back down, his breathing rapid and shalow. Adam opened his eyes momentarily to see Paul staring at the ceiling.

"No drinks or smoke tomorrow, okay?"

There was a stretch of silence, one that only a noise-polluted New Yorker could truly appreciate. Finally Paul said, "I told you I'd be working."

Adam knew that tone. They'd argued enough for one vacation. Adoption, Paul's video, his drug use. And now Paul was seeing things. Adam suddenly wondered if their relationship would survive six weeks at Korban Manor. He turned his back on Paul and burrowed into the pillows.

"She had flowers," Paul said.

Mason's hands ached. Sawdust and wood shavings were scattered around his feet. Wood chips had worked their way down the tops of his tennis shoes and dug into the skin around his ankles. He tossed his chisel and mallet on the table and stood back to look at the piece.

He had worked in a fever, not thinking about which grain to folow, which parts to excise, where to cut. He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. The room had grown warmer. The candles had long since melted away, and the oil was low in the base of the lantern. He must have worked for hours, but the soreness in his limbs was the only evidence of passing time.

Except for the bust before him on the table.

He'd never attempted a bust before. He brought the lantern closer, examining the sculpture with a critical eye. He could find no flaws, no features that were out of proportion. Even the curves of the earlobes were natural and lifelike, the eyebrows etched with a deli-cate awl. The sculpture was faithful to its subject.
TOO faithful,
Mason thought.
I'm nowhere near good enough to produce this caliber of work. I've
had successes along the way. But this... Jesus Henry Christ on a crutch, I couldn't do Korban's
face this well if I'd KNOWN the old geezer.

But it was Korban's head on the table, the Korban that filled the giant oil paintings upstairs, the same face that hung above the fireplace in Mason's room. Most amazing of all was that the eyes had power, just as they did in the portraits. That was ridiculous, though. These eyes were maple, dead wood. Still...

It was almost as if the figure had life. As if the true heart of the wood had always been this shape, as if the bust had always existed but had been imprisoned in the tree. The face had been caged, and Mason had merely inserted the key and opened the door.

He shook his head in disbelief. "I don't have any idea where you came from," he said to the bust, "but you're going to make the critics love me."

The love of the critics meant success, and that meant money. Success meant he'd never have to step foot in another textile mill as long as he lived, he wouldn't have to blow chunks of gray lint out of his nose at every break, he wouldn't have to wait for a bell to tell him when to take a leak or buy a Snickers bar or race the other lintheads to the parking lot at quitting time. Sure, he still had years of carving ahead, but success started with a single big break.

He was already planning a corporate commission, the gravy train for artists. He'd buy Mama a house, get her some advanced text-reading software and an ex-pensive computer, and then find all the other ways to pay her back for the years of handicap and hardship. Best of all, he could make her smile. Or maybe he was being suckered by the Dream Image, the high that came after completing a work. He stil had to treat the wood, do the fine sanding and pol-ishing. A hundred things could stil go wrong. Even as dry as the maple had been after years in the forest, the wood could split and crack.

Mason rubbed his shoulder. His clothes were damp from sweat. The weariness that had been building under the surface now crested and crashed like a wave. Even though he was tired, he felt too excited to sleep. He took one last look at the bust of Korban, then covered his work with an old canvas drop cloth he'd found in the corner. The first red rays of dawn stabbed through the ground-level windows. Mason's stubble itched. Back in his old life, he'd be on his third cup of coffee by now, waiting on the corner for Junior Furman's pickup to haul him to work. The start of another day that was like a thou-sand other days.

Mason traced his way back across the basement, ducking under the low beams and stepping around the stacks of stored furniture. He finaly found the stairs and went up to the main floor. The smell of bacon, eggs, and biscuits drifted from the east wing, and kitchen-ware clanged in some distant room. Mason's stomach growled. An older couple passed him in the hal, steam rising from their ceramic coffee cups. They nodded a wary greeting. Mason realized he probably looked bleary-eyed and unkempt, like an escaped lunatic who'd bro-ken into the medicine cabinet. When Mason reached his room, he looked at the painting of Korban again, marveling at how closely his sculpture resembled that stern face. But the face seemed a litle less stern this morning. And the eyes had taken on a little more light—

Don’t be bloody DAFT,
he chided himself in Wiliam Roth's accent.

Mason took a long, hot shower, then lay in bed as dawn sneaked through the cracks in the curtains. In his mind's tired eye, he saw Korban's face, then that dis-solved away and he saw Anna. Then his mother, fea-tures worn, made even sadder by the pathetic light of hope that somehow still shone in her diseased eyes. Then he pictured Miss Mamie, with her haughty lips. Ransom, clutching his warding charm. Korban, dark pupils holding wretched secrets. Anna, soft and some-how vulnerable, harboring her own secrets. Korban. His mother. The bust. Anna.

Miss Mamie. Ransom.

KorbanAnnaMissMamieAnnaKorban.

Anna.

He decided he liked Anna's face best, and thought of her until he slept and dreamed of wood.

Anna woke before the first rooster's crow broke the black silence. Across the room, Cris rolled over in her sleep. The darkness behind Anna's closed eyes wasn't as total as the room's darkness. Streaks of blue and red flared across the back of her eyelids.

She slipped into her robe and went into the bath-room. The antique plumbing used gravity to flush the toilets, and the water pressure was inconsistent, though the central heating ensured plenty of hot water. She lit a globed lantern before extinguishing her flashlight, then stepped into the shower and turned the taps. Under the dull drumming of the water, she forgot the pain in her abdomen. She hadn't dreamed last night, though the questions had swirled around and around as she spun down the drain of sleep. Where was her ghost? Who was Rachel Faye Hartley? Why was Miss Mamie so curious about Anna's 'gift"? How much time did she have left? What would happen after that time expired?

And the biggie, would anyone even care?

She peeled back the shower curtain and wrapped a towel around her. The room had grown colder, and with the water turned off, the steam hung heavy on her skin. It coated the mirror above the sink, and though she wasn't in the mood to gauge the darkness of the circles beneath her eyes, she wanted to make sure she could pass for hale and hearty.