The Manor (19 page)

Spence laughed, his girth wiggling from the sheer ecstasy of his self-love. He reached up and stroked her hair, a romance-novel cliche, silken tassels, spun gold. Her cheeks were pink with hoarded passion, lips slightly parted as she gasped at his touch. Her skin glowed like honey in the firelight.

"Our problem," he said.

She had crossed the line. This demanded a response.

His hand closed into a fist around her hair. He puled her head forward, reaching behind him to grab the manuscript. He flung the loose pages at her face, pleased at the slapping sound the paper made against her skin. The pages kited to the floor as she grunted.

"Pick them up," he said, twisting her hair, forcing her to her knees. She was petite, no match for his great bulk. She sobbed as she fumbled among the papers. He jerked her to her feet, though she had collected only a small sheaf of pages.

"Read," he said, with cold menace.

Her eyes were wide, cheeks wet with tears, lower lip quivering.

"Read," he said again. Calm now.

Her eyes flicked across the page, shoulders shaken with sobs, breasts swaying miserably against the con-fines of satin.

"Aloud." He was once again Jefferson Davis Spence, the legend, the genuine article. No more illusions of Muses and far-off literary gods, no more lofty aspira-tions, no more symbiosis with the Royal typewriter. Now he could focus on the art of cruelty.

" 'The night spread its f-filth like spies, like flies,' " she said, voice trembling. " 'The n-night walked the night, climbed its own spine like a ladder, the night rat-tled the bones of its own cage ...'" Spence relaxed his grip on her hair, and now stroked her. He closed his eyes, lost in the precious rhythm of his own prose.

"'... the night growled, hissed like a snake, sput-tered like a black firework, the night entered itself, laved itself with its own tongue, swallowed its own tail...'''

Ah, the Muse was singing again. Al she needed was the proper sheet music.

" '.. the night tastes of charcoal and ash, the night tastes of licorice, the night tastes of teeth—yes, of cold teeth ... go out frost

Her voice trailed away, but Spence stil rocked back and forth in his chair like a babe lulled by its own sonorous babble.

"Jeff?" She took a careful step backward.

"You stopped reading. I didn't tell you to stop."

"This stuff is ... this stuff is ..."

Spence smiled, his face warm with satisfaction at this small but tender tribute the peak of self-love. He braced for the paroxysm of bliss, awaiting her ejacula-tion of praise.

"This is just so awful." She dropped the section of manuscript to the floor. "You've been wasting your tal-ent on
this?
This . ..
maggot mess? "

Spence, anticipating the rush of sweet validation, didn't register her words at first. But the tone was clear. Even with their southern flavor, the words were exactly like those of Mrs. Eileen Foxx, his fifth grade teacher. Foxx in Socks, the kids called her, because they weren't clever enough to come up with something lewd or connected to bodily functions.

Mrs. Foxx had berated him in front of the whole class because he'd had the temerity to misspell the word
receive.
He stood at the chalkboard, breathing the dust of a thousand mistakes, while the other children howled with laughter, relieved because it wasn't
them
this time. And the warm wetness spread beneath his waist, his small bladder voided, and the laughter changed in pitch, rose to the level of schoolhouse legend.

And on that sunny spring afternoon at Fairfield Elementary school, a new grammar rule was formed: I before
E
except after
P.

Born as well that day was Jefferson Spence, the writer. The one who would out-obtuse Faulkner, who would out-macho Hemingway, who would out-wolf Tom Wolfe. And though he couldn't reach back through the halls of time and grab Mrs. Foxx by the frayed seams of her cardigan sweater and smash those ever-pursed lips, he could act now. He could vent against the critics and the sneerers and the pretty popinjays, all the other Eileen Foxxes of the world who deserved retribu-tion. He swept his hand hard against the cheek of the faux Muse. She moaned and collapsed back onto the bed, an arm bouncing against the brass bedstead, another arm flopping across her chest. A trickle of blood leaked from her mouth, and one nostril clotted red as well. As the flesh of her cheek warmed from the blow, her eyes stared back at him with all the severity of Eileen Foxx's. He turned from her gaze.

Ah, Ephram smiled.
Ephram, who had offered sup-port during
Seasons of Sleep.
Ephram, an ally in a uni-verse of small-minded fifth graders who would never understand.

It wasn't that he always failed with women, or that his literary output was uneven. It wasn't a flaw in the equipment. It was
them.
It
had always been them.

They stood between him and the true light, the bright shining path, the burning Word. Who needed mere physical pleasure? What one needed was the shedding of pleasure, the removal of distraction. One needed to become the Word, a communion re-duced to its simplest form.

Spence placed his fingers on the cold keys of the typewriter. The lantern hissed in approval, the fireplace rumbled with hot delight. He looked at Ephram again, and then at the blank page, his greatest ally and his most dreaded enemy.

He scarcely heard the door close behind his back. He pressed his fingers down, seeking the approval of the true god Word. His hands moved of their own ac-cord, as if encased in living gloves. Anna stumbled through the trees, tired but deter-mined, the ghostly figure always just on the edge of her vision. The moon had risen in synchronicity with sun-set, only a smal curve sliced from its white roundness. The flashlight was unnecessary in the clearings and stretches of meadow, but the moon couldn't penetrate the cold shadows beneath the forest canopy.

The ghost woman faded in and out of view, as if fighting to keep its constitution. Anna had caled out to her several times, but not even the wind responded. The forest was silent, and even the crickets seemed to be huddling in dread. The air was chily and dew hung heavy on the maple, laurel, and birch leaves that brushed her face and shoulders. The game of hide-and-seek seemed eternal, as if Anna would forever have to chase this spirit, the two of them bound in a shared purgatory of loneliness.

Anna thought the ghost was leading her to the cabin where she had seen the ghost of the young girl on her first night at the manor. But her dead tour guide turned up the ridge when they reached the meadow below the cabin, heading higher into the steep hills of Beechy Gap. Anna weaved her way among granite boulders that angled from the ground like worn fossils. The trail steep-ened and narrowed, and the vegetation changed as wel, from leafy deciduous to stunted balsam and jack pine.

Anna scooted across a long flat jut of stone. She was on the highest part of the rocky ridge. The great sea of mountains stretched out toward the horizon. A whisper of wind tried to stir itself, then gave up and settled back to earth. The trees were thinner here, and her breath plumed from her mouth like the smoke of her soul. The few stars hung in the cold sky, shivering and twinkling. Even the familiar Dog Star and the orange wink of Saturn gave her no comfort. She was alone, except for the translucent woman who hovered above the cold dirt and stone of the ridge. The ghost beckoned her forward with a wave of the haunted bouquet.

Anna's flashlight played over a mass of falen posts and splintered boards scattered in a treeless stretch of ground. The ghost woman was among the ruins of the old shack, her ethereal figure penetrated by a dozen ragged pieces of wood. The ghost opened her mouth, trying to form a lost language. Bits of broken glass glinted in the flashlight's beam.

Anna slid off the rock toward the twisted debris. One thick piece of timber jabbed forlornly at the sky. Anna stepped closer, answering the summons of the ghost. The woman stood waiting, eyes vacant, the bou-quet held out in either welcome or apology.

Then the night fell in.

One of the broken timbers lifted from the ground and cut an audible arc in the air as if swung by an invisible giant. The heavy wood slammed into her stom-ach. The flashlight fell at her feet, its beam sending a thin streak of orange into the underbrush.

Anna doubled over, spears of fire wending through her gut, rusty nails driving into her temples, her teeth biting tin roofing. But it was more than the agony of cancer. This pain was bone-deep and deadly serious. Her right wrist was squeezed in a knife-edged vise.

Anna closed her eyes and collapsed.

No slow-motion countdown would take this pain away. Through the hammering of her pulse, she could hear tremors in the building's rubble. Wood rot and corruption assaulted her nostrils as she writhed in the muddy fallen leaves.

In the jumble of ruin, she saw a tunnel, a long, dark, cold mouth opening up before her. A stale breeze blew up from the depths of the tunnel, but it had to be her imagination, because the tunnel led down into the earth. Her sweat was slivers of ice on her face, the cold swabbing her bones, and she thought of those words from the bathroom mirror. Go out frost.

Then she heard the voice, a soft mournful wail that stretched over the hills. Anna opened her eyes with effort, vision blurred by tears of pain. Two forms drifted among the ruins, the ghost woman kneeling, a second ghost sweling and hovering over the first. The other ghost was a man in blue jeans, flannel shirt, and workman's leather boots, his clothes as translucent as his sick milk of skin. A few shreds of nebulous flesh hung from one sleeve of the shirt. His one hand held the piece of timber that had struck her. He looked down at the ghost woman, his eyes as deep as the cold black tunnel had been.

A radiance shone around the dead man, an aura of malevolent energy. His ectoplasmic face was twisted in rage, the lips peeled back to show jagged teeth. He dropped the timber and put his lone hand around the woman's throat, and Anna could see the strength in his fingers as they tightened around surreal flesh. Anna's throat burned in sympathetic pain. The ghost woman screamed soundlessly, struggled for a moment like a wind-driven linen caught in a briar vine, then faded from view, again a corpse, dead a second time, the bou-quet falling from her fingers and dissipating into mist.

Anna rolled onto her hands and knees and started to crawl away. The caustic fires still scorched her insides, but now a black surf of fear washed over her, momen-tarily dousing the raw ache. She glanced back and saw that the man's aura had grown brighter, as if the spirit murder had fueled some infernal fire. He smiled at her, his tongue slithery as an eel and his eyes spilling forth a darkness that rivaled the black night.

The mouth parted. "That you, Selma?"

At least this ghost remembered language, though its tone was crazed.

"It's me," it said. "George. I knew you'd come back. Korban promised me."
Come back? From HIS side or hers?

"I'm not Selma," Anna said, trying to rise, but the weight of the night sky was too great.

"I got a present I been saving just for you. We got tunnels of the soul, Selma." The ghost held something in his hand, something that dangled like a small kill from a hunter's belt. Anna thought at first it was the bouquet. Then it wiggled.

It was his other hand, the one that had lost its place at the end of his right arm. As she struggled in the dirt, the spirit tossed the hand toward her. It landed on its fingers and scrabbled after her like a spider. The ghost's laughter echoed across the dismal hills. "Hand of glory, Selma." Anna turned, tried again to regain her feet, but the pain had made her drunk, awkward, confused. The severed hand closed around her ankle.

That was impossible. Ghosts had no substance, at least a substance that could take solid form in the real world.

But this IS the real world. And sometimes, it's not what you believe, but how MUCH you believe.
She believed in ghosts. They existed. You couldn't turn faith off and on like water from a spigot. Too bad.

Because now she had what she'd always wanted.

Physical contact with the dead.

Her ankle was numb, hot ice, liquid fire, ringed by dull razors.

The fingers pressed into her meat. Anna was jerked flat on her stomach. She flailed at the air, grabbing for a nearby pine branch. The hand puled her backward before she could reach the branch. Toward the rubble. Where
he
waited.

"Come on, now, Selma. Don't keep old Georgie-Boy waiting." The ghost's voice had changed, deepened. She dug her fingernails into the ground, clawing at the sharp stones and pine needles. She grunted, realiz-ing for the first time since she'd witnessed the spectral struggle that she was still breathing. Breath.

That meant she was alive. Not a ghost yet. But if this spirit had the power to murder ghosts, what would it do to the living?

The hand tugged again, sliding her across three feet of damp dirt. Wet leaves worked their way underneath her shirt, chilling her belly.

A strange sound spilled across the ridge, like the scream of a dying mourning dove. Anna looked at the ghostman, his smile stretching and leaking red, orange, yelow, the colors melding into a malchromatic aurora that surrounded him as if he were lit by helfire.

Anna slid another couple of feet closer to the ruins, desperately kicking at the hand. It was like kicking a rotted fish. She was puled again and the sharp end of a piece of wood pressed into the back of her leg. The thing was dragging her into the spiked tips of broken timber and the sawteeth of the ripped tin roofing. She was about to be sacrificed at the stake.

But why?