Scott Nicholson - The Manor

But the photographic realism wasn't the only quality that made the painting so powerful. The manor was vibrant, as if it were shaking with the force of the fantasized gale. The trees were wild with wind, and black clouds hovered around the manor's flat roof. Mason gently touched the canvas and a cool electricity surged up his arm. He wondered why such a beautiful work was relegated to the corruptive air of the basement.

He leaned it against the table and brought the lamp closer, careful not to let the heat sear the finish. He scanned every inch of the artwork, softly running his fingers along the furrows made by the brushstrokes. The angles of the gables were geometrically accurate, the shading well proportioned, the range of colors as true as the human eye. Even the bark of the trees had a sophisticated complexion.

He was looking at the top of the house, at the white railing of the widow's walk, when he spotted the painting's sole flaw. The artist had inadvertently smudged the colors together. A grayish blotch marred an area on the widow's walk. The artist could have easily fixed the mistake, but for some reason hadn't. Still, the painting was far too skilled to remain hidden away in darkness.

Mason didn't know how long he ended up staring at the painting. It had such mesmerizing power that it seemed to soak him into its maelstrom. Finally, he shook his head, realizing that if he didn't get started, he would waste the first day of his last chance. He leaned the painting out of the way against a support timber, promising himself that he would ask Miss Mamie about it later.

He had been putting off the start of his own work, the hewing of the bark from the section of maple. He was annoyed to find his mind drifting back to the painting.

"Come on, you bastard," he chided himself. "This is it. Think of Mama back in Sawyer Creek, shriveling away because she made the sacrifice. Alone in the dark."

He heard her voice in his head, telling him to hold on to his dreams. He rearranged his tools, laying out his fluter, his gouge, his hatchet, his adze, his mallet, his half-dozen chisels with their different edges and angles. Still no idea came to him. He looked around at the shadows sent leaping by the candlelight.

Someone was in the surrounding darkness, watching.

A faint rustle in the corner. Mason lifted the lamp. A small, dark thing separated itself from the lesser darkness and skittered toward the wine rack.

A mouse. Mason's toes curled inside his shoes. He'd always hated rodents. When he was young, just before his father had died, the family had lived in a rented mobile home. The trailer park was next to a trash dump, and rats multiplied fruitfully thanks to the wealth of garbage.

One night, he heard scratching sounds inside the couch that he slept upon. He turned on the light, and watched with horror as tiny newborn rats spilled from a tear in the couch's fabric. Equally repulsive was the family's old gray cat, which swallowed the rats whole, one by one, as they emerged blind into the world. The mother rat must have been sick or something, because the couch stank of her death for weeks afterward. By then, Mason had taken to sleeping in a reclining chair on the other side of the living room.

And another, older memory rose, but he pushed it back into its dark chink of slumber.

This creature in the basement had been only a mouse. Mason could handle that. Mice were timid. Rats were the ones to despise, with their long tails, deliberate manner, and those eyes that shone with a defiant intelligence.

He tried once again to focus on his work. Maybe the mouse had been his Muse. Other artists talked about the spirit moving them, moving inside them. Mason didn't understand. All he had was stubbornness and anger to drive him.

He addressed the chunk of wood that Ransom had helped him cut from a fallen tree. "Okay, what kind of secrets are you hiding inside you?"

He studied the pattern of the growth rings and caressed the grain of the wood. The dead sap pulsed. A draft of air whistled through the heating ducts.

"What do you want to become?" He picked up his hatchet. The draft turned into low laughter. He felt a hand around his own, a warm pocket of guiding air.

His voice rose. "What in the hell do you want from me?"

Mason sank the metal blade deep into the flesh of the maple. The flat single echo of the blow sounded almost like a sigh of contentment.

Roth was irritated. He had shot three rolls of film, framing the house first in the soft, low-angle morning light and then in harsher, steeper shadows as the sun climbed the eastern sky. He had walked a good distance down the sandy road so he could do a series of approaching perspectives through a telephoto lens, working off a tripod. He achieved a rather nice depth of field, manipulating the f-stop so that the house seemed small against the surrounding forest. Then he did some closer, handheld work to get the opposite effect, to make the manor appear to tower over the trees and hills.

And that was all top-shelf, spot-on and all that, but then he wanted to try something different. He'd wanted to photograph the bridge. The narrow, weather-beaten bridge would make a jolly center spread for a coffee table picture book, what with all the dramatic cliffs and foggy vistas.

He was positive he wanted to photograph the bridge, but by the time he'd walked under the canopy of trees down the road, the idea didn't seem all that wonderful. The day was so warm that, even in the shade, his forehead beaded with sweat. A spasm of nausea and dizziness passed over him. Before he came around the final bend where the manor grounds gave way to the plummeting rocks, he'd decided that the bridge would be a bloody waste of good stock.

So he walked back toward Korban Manor. By then a little breeze sprang up, and he felt better as the sweat dried. He snapped more pictures of the house from the exact same locations as before. It was all such a bunch of poppycock.

"I'm going daft, is all," he muttered under his breath.

"What's that you said?"

The female voice had come from somewhere to his right. He squinted into the shadow of the trees, hoping he'd maintained his British accent while he'd been muttering. One mustn't slip.

"I was saying, 'What a lot of bother,' " he said.

He saw her now, sitting on a stump beside a sycamore. She had a sketch pad in her lap and a charcoal stick clutched between her fingers. Roth eyed her long legs, appreciating that the day was warm enough for her to wear shorts.

"You taking pictures?" she asked.

Pictures. Gawps and ninnies took pictures. Roth framed the vital, captured the essential, immortalized the utterly proper. Stupid bird, he thought. Still, in his experience, the emptier the space upstairs, the tighter the compartment below.

He was getting frustrated with his work anyway. Maybe the time was right to line up an evening's companion. "Yes, my dear," he said, raising the camera and pointing it at the woman.

She looked away.

"Don't be shy, love. Make my camera happy. I won't even make you say 'cheese' or anything of that sort." He zoomed in on her cleavage without her noticing.

She looked up and smiled, he clicked the shutter, and then put the camera away. "Say, didn't I see you at Miss Mamie's little after-dinner last night?"

"Yeah. I saw you. You're William Roth, right?"

Roth loved it when they pretended not to be impressed by his celebrity, but she couldn't hide the small sparkle in her eyes. Maybe he wasn't a famous movie star, but name recognition definitely came in handy for bedding the birds. "I'm every inch of him," Roth said. "And to whom do I have the pleasure?"

"Cris Whitfield. Cris without the h." She held out her hand in greeting, realized it was smudged by the charcoal, and put it back in her lap.