Scott Nicholson - The Manor

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, yellow, the colors melding into a malchromatic aurora that surrounded him as if he were lit by hellfire.

Anna slid another couple of feet closer to the ruins, desperately kicking at the hand. It was like kicking a rotted fish. She was pulled 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?

Why would a ghost want to kill her?

"Snakes crawl at night, honey," it said. "Snakes crawl at night."

More backward pressure.

The sharp wood against her leg dug into flesh and sent bright sparks of pain shooting up the chimney of her nervous system. A board knocked against her vertebrae, drumming her spine as if it were a xylophone. Broken glass dug into her knee, cutting through the corduroy of her slacks and stinging like acid. The flames in her abdomen expanded into her chest, into her head, sent lava through her limbs. She closed her eyes and saw streaks of light against the back of her eyelids, like popping embers or shooting stars. Behind the streaks was the black tunnel, expanding endlessly outward, and shimmering at the far end was the woman in white.

So this is what it feels like to die.

She had come to Korban Manor to find her ghost, pushed by the prophetic power of her dreams. This was what she wanted. Except she'd never expected it to be so painful. More shards, splinters, and crooked nails worked into her skin as the rubble shifted with her weight.

Silly girl. Guess you were wrong about everything. You thought death would be cold, but it's hot, hot, and that tunnel is so deep The hand on her ankle yanked, insistent, tenacious. Then a hand gripped one shoulder.

And words came from somewhere above her, like the voice of an insane angel: "Go out frost, go out frost, go out frost."

The pain fell away, and only darkness remained.

Getting the log onto the wagon, then to the manor and down the stairs to the basement, had been a real bitch. Ransom refused to help carry the log through the house, but Miss Mamie had roused some drinkers from the study, enlisting their help. Paul, Adam, William Roth, Zainab, even Lilith. It was a miracle they hadn't dropped the log on their toes, but at last it stood upright, supported by scrap lumber and wires tied to flails in the joists overhead.

"That had better be some statue, after all this trouble," Miss Mamie had called from the head of the basement stairs before slamming the door and leaving Mason alone.

No. Not alone.

He lifted the sheet of canvas. The face of Ephram Korban stared at him. Had Mason really carved such smug perfection? But the work wasn't complete. Now that Korban had a face, he needed legs, arms, hands, an oak heart.

This would be the sculpture that earned Mason Beaufort Jackson a mention in the magazines. Forget The Artist's Magazine or Art Times. This baby was going to land him in the pages of Newsweek. Mason began writing headlines and article leads in his head, a feature in Sculpture to start with.

MILLTOWN BOY MAKES GOOD

If you heard that an artist was named "Mason Jackson," you'd automatically assume that he'd adopted a nom de plume.

(Wait a second, "nom de plume" is only for authors. Okay, call it a pseudonym then. The article writer would work that bit out.)

But there's nothing put on about this up-and-coming sculptor. Jackson has been called "the Appalachian Michelangelo." This young southern artist may have his feet planted in the land of moonshine and ski slopes, but his hands have descended from a more heavenly plane. Jackson's sculpture series, The Korban Analogies, is opening to wide acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art in Philadelphia and will soon cross the ocean to London and Paris, where critics have already rested the heavy crown of "Genius " on the unprepossessing man's head.

Jackson's tour deforce is the powerful Korban Emerging (pictured, left), which Jackson calls "a product of semidivine guidance." The Rodinesque muscularity and massiveness of the work has impressed even the most jaded critics, but there's also a singular delicacy to Jackson's piece.

No less a discerning eye than Winston De-Bussey's has found the work faultless. He calls Mason an "uncanny master" of wood, a medium in which so few top artists dare to work these days.

"It is as if there is no difference between the pulp and human tissue," raves DeBussey in a rare moment of expansiveness. "Jackson breathes organic life into every swirl of grain. One almost expects to look down and see roots, as if the statue is continually replenishing itself from the juice and salt of earth."

But Jackson takes the praise in stride, offering little insight into the mind behind the man.

"Each piece is conceptualized through a dream image," Jackson said, speaking from his farmhouse-cum-studio in Sawyer Creek, a small mill town nestled in the North Carolina foothills. "And I have absolutely nothing to do with that part of the process. My job is to take that fragile gift and somehow not misinterpret it through these clumsy human hands. Because the dream is the important thing, not the dreamer"

If Mason started talking like that, Junior would elbow him in the ribs and Mama would make him stop watching public television. Such nonsense would earn him some funny looks at the hosiery mill, where he was more at home than in any art museum. He could fool himself into thinking he was good, but fooling others was much harder. If he wanted to fool the entire world, this monstrous piece of oak before him needed to be turned into the most beautiful dream image ever conceived.

First he'd have to skin the bark.

Then find the man inside.

He lifted the hatchet, looked at the dark spaces in the corners of the basement. He didn't belong in the mill. This was what he was bom for, the reason he'd come to Korban Manor. He'd never felt so alive.

He thought of Anna's words, how Ephram Korban's spirit lived on in these walls. How a soul might be nothing more than the sum of a person's mortal dreams. How dreams could lie. How dreams could turn to ash.

No. This dream was real.

The hatchet bit into the wood.

The bony hand on Anna's shoulder tugged her shirt, lifted her. So the ghostman had her now. She was finally going to find out what it was like to be dead. Or maybe she was already a ghost, because the worst of the pain was fading.

Anna tried to stand, but her legs were like damp smoke. She knelt on one bloody knee, feeling for purchase among the broken boards. She opened her eyes to face the dead thing, resigning herself to crawl into the dark tunnel.

But it wasn't the leering spirit that held her. It was an old woman.

"Ought to watch yourself a mite better," the woman said.

Her face was wrinkled, the moonlight revealing her swollen veins, her eyebrows as white as ice. But the blue eyes set among those sagging folds of skin were bright, young, intelligent. And Anna recognized the shawl that was draped around the woman's stooped shoulders.

"You were at the cabin-"

"Hush yourself, child. I seen what you seen, and we both seen way too much. Let's get away from here, then we can have us a long chat."

Anna got to her feet, pushing the broken boards away from her legs. The pain was gone, and the ring of fire around her ankle had faded. The moon was higher now, approaching the zenith of its arc.

Anna studied the rubble. It could all have been a dream, except for the tearing of her clothes and skin.

"Come on away from there. George got fetched over, but that don't mean you got to go yet," the woman said.