Scott Nicholson - The Manor

The old woman led Anna from the fallen building. The woman had surprising strength for someone who appeared to be in her eighties. Anna watched her climb over the flat rocks with the agility of a mountain goat, even though she used a thick walking stick to steady herself. Anna looked for her flashlight, but it must have rolled into the thorny underbrush and out of sight. She hurried after the woman.

The old woman paused on a table of rock, looking out over the great expanse of mountains. The sky was woolen gray, but Anna could make out the ripples and swells of earth stretching out to the horizon.

"Korban about snatched you," the woman said without turning toward Anna. "Thought I'd get a chance to warn you first. But old Ephram's always been the impatient sort."

"Ephram Korban, you mean?"

"The master of these here parts. Or, at least, he likes to think so."

"But you're talking in present tense. He's dead."

"Like that matters much." She spat off the rock into the tops of the trees below.

"Who was that woman I saw?" Anna's head was clearing a little. "And the little girl at the cabin?"

The old woman laughed, but it was a broken gargle, heavy with cynicism. "You got the Sight, all right. Knew it when I first laid eyes on you. Now, no more questions till we get away from this place. 'Cause this place is Korban's."

Anna followed the woman off the rock and down the narrow trail, amazed at the way the woman's hard leather shoes dodged over protruding roots and stones, the walking stick nimbly stabbing at the dirt in search of purchase. They headed off the ridge to the back side of Beechy Gap.

Anna paused to catch her breath, rubbing her abdomen. "One question. What does 'go out frost' mean?"

"Old mountain spell. Means 'dead stay dead.' " Anna would have to remember that one. She hoped that, unlike what Ransom had said about horseshoes and four-leaf clovers, this little piece of magic hadn't been worn thin by time.

Adam had spent the long hours of insomnia trying to nab the thoughts that orbited his head like space junk. And most of the thoughts were about asking Miss Mamie if there was a way he could cancel his stay at the manor. He didn't care about a refund. Paul could remain with his camera and his pouty lips and his arrogance for the rest of the six weeks, as far as Adam was concerned. All Adam needed was a ride out of this place.

They'd had another argument, this one in the study after carrying the log into the basement. Paul was showing off for William Roth, who was hitting on several women at once, and Adam tried to get Paul aside for a chat. Paul had sneered and said, "Why don't you go to bed, Princess? I know how bored you get talking about anything besides yourself."

Adam had finally fallen asleep sometime around what felt like midnight, though the moon was so bright that time hadn't seemed to pass at all. And again he'd had the dream, the dream of the fall from the widow's walk. But this time he recognized the man who was trying to push him off the top of the house. It was the man he'd imagined seeing in the closet when Paul was putting away his camera. The man in the portrait. Ephram Korban.

And again Korban had Adam leaning over the railing. The hard wood pressed against the small of his back. Even as he was dreaming, he realized that you weren't supposed to feel pain in your dreams.

But all his senses were working: he could smell the sweet beech trees, hear the aluminum tinkle of the creek, taste the rancid graveyard stench of Korban's breath, see the stars spinning crazily above as the man pushed him backward over the rail.

"You have no vanity," Korban said. "1 can't eat your dreams. They're made of air."

Adam's fingers tangled in the man's beard, desperately gripping the coarse hairs. But as Korban pushed him away, the hairs ripped out at their roots. And just as Adam fell, losing his grip on Korban's woolen waistcoat, he stared into the man's eyes.

The eyes flickered from charcoal black to a sizzling amber. Korban's cold iron hands released their grip on Adam's upper arms and Adam screamed as he hurtled to the packed ground sixty feet below.

The air whistled like a teakettle in pain.

The great gulf of space yawned overhead, farther and farther away, its softness lost to him even as he grasped for a handle on the stars.

The house's windows gleamed in streaks, the shutters blurring in his peripheral vision. His blood rushed to his feet. This dream was stranger than any he'd ever had. Because you were supposed to wake up when you fell in your dreams.

But Adam was aware of the impact as his head pounded into the circle of the driveway. He clearly heard the crunching of bone as his spine folded like a paper bird, he gasped as his breath whooshed from his lungs, he bit his tongue in half and the amputated tip squirted from between broken teeth, he tasted his own warm blood, then vomited as his shattered pelvis speared his stomach and kidney.

As his ruined flesh lay sprawled and leaking on the ground, he clearly saw his own eyeballs lying beside his head. The eyeballs glowered at him, their brown irises helpless in the ovate globes of white, the pupils large with shock and fear, no sockets or eyelids to hide their twin disapproval. Even dreaming, he recognized the absurdity of seeing his own eyes. He couldn't wait to tell Paul about this.

Except you also weren't supposed to feel pain in a dream, either. And what else could this be but pain, this sheet of red that dropped on him like a hundred sulfuric guillotines? Ribbons of electricity shot through his broken body, his nerves screaming like four alarms at a firehouse. Adam tried to laugh. Wasn't this funny, experiencing this hellburst of orange that flooded his brain, when he was surely dead?

But wait a second. Can you dream that you're dead?

But how would you know if you were dead… this was the kind of tiling that would give you a headache if you didn't know you were dreaming. But Adam had a headache anyway. He knelt to scrape his spilled brains together, scooped them up, and put them back in their broken shell.

As his fingers stirred through the steaming wrinkles of his own cerebrum, he realized that his body was splayed out before him. This was odd, surreal, Daliesque. He expected to awaken at any moment to find himself giggling into his pillow. But he didn't wake up. He stood, looking at the pool of red that seeped from beneath his body and the sour bile around his head. A splinter of femur protruded from one thigh, angling out from a rip in the gray pajamas. The bone gleamed bright and wet in the pale light. The body's head was turned away in the direction of the wide stone steps that led into Korban Manor.

But his real head, at least the one that housed his soul, was staring higher, at the black portal of the door.

Shapes spilled out of the maw, white wispy forms like bits of shredded cobweb being swept along by the breeze of a broom.

Some coalesced into more or less human figures, men, women, and small children, their faces blank, their eyes as black as the interior of the foyer. Some of them were in coarse crinolines, or trousers with button-up flies, a few men in overalls and felt hats, the women in bonnets or with their hair pinned up in buns. The young boys were in knickers, mended stockings sagging over square leather shoes, the girls in plain shifts, ribbons in their pigtails. An infant materialized at the feet of one of the women, its ragged diaper mingling with its ragged legs.

Adam stepped backward as they walked toward him. Except they weren't walking, they were flitting, floating, flying, arms wide, mouths slack with grim purpose. There were about two dozen figures, and he saw Lilith among them, the maid with the flowing dress, but she was as misty as the others. The plump cook, whom he'd seen earlier pouring dishwater off the back porch, was wiping her hands on her apron.