Scott Nicholson - The Manor

He screamed, but no one could hear you when you were dead.

It was long past time for waking up.

He tried to run, but stood transfixed, frozen, as cold as a December tombstone.

The crowd gathered around the body that lay on the ground, the ghosts-yes, of course they're ghosts, if I'm going to have a bad dream I might as well go for broke-the ghosts merged and intertwined, showing no concern for the social constraints of personal space. And Adam, now more fascinated than frightened, also looked down at the object of their attention.

It was he, himself, the person formerly know as Adam Andrews. There was the mole on his cheek, the small white scar above his elbow where he'd fallen off his bicycle at age nine, the awkward bend in the second toe of his kicking foot that he'd severely dislocated playing high school soccer. There was his hand, the nails unevenly trimmed, a few threads of Korban's beard hair still clutched in the rigid fingers. There was the silver ring with the garnet stone that Paul had given him.

There lay his blood, his flesh, his body.

A low sound filled the lawn, stretching across the hills, a funeral dirge that reminded Adam of recordings of whales he'd heard. It was a bizarre language, sonorous and sad. The syllables of the tuneless sound phased into aural chaos, a thick clotted noise. It was emanating from the manor, as if the foyer were the building's throat.

The ghosts turned toward the door, solemn as only the dead could be. Adam gulped, looked down at his hands, and saw he was made of the same mist as the others, spun from the same insubstantial threads. He was a ghost. That meant…

He was really dead.

He smiled to himself. He closed his dreaming eyes. He'd have to forget being mad at Paul at least long enough to tell him about the dream. He wondered if he was snoring, then remembered that he'd pushed the beds apart, so he couldn't count on Paul giving him a nudge in the ribs. And right now, he'd love to be tickled, cuddled awake, to pull Paul's body close, to feel some human heat.

Because being dead was a chilly business. He must have kicked the quilts off in his sleep.

Yes, of course. Any crazy thing makes sense if you analyze it long enough. And deciding to leave Paul must have stirred up some funny things in the old Jungian jungle.

But why shouldn't your mind pull a trick or two on you while you 're asleep?

And what could be a better vacation site than this theme park of the deceased? What was that old black-and-white movie? Yeah, Carnival of Souls, dancing with the dead, wake up and say, "It was all a dream." And old Ephram Korban IS a nightmare-inducing sort.

So why not enjoy it, laugh it up, go along for the ride? You'll be awake soon enough, back in the real world with real problems. Like how to deal with Paul. For real.

He opened his eyes, and found himself still in his nightmare.

The ghosts were bending, lifting the corpse. Amused, Adam joined them. When one of the bloody arms lolled outward, Adam placed it back over the chest cavity. The ghosts hoisted the body toward the door of the house, pale pallbearers in a silent procession. Adam trailed after them as they wafted up the steps. Waiting at the door was his malefactor, Korban.

The man flashed a cold smile of triumph, his eyes like onyx marbles.

"Welcome to your tunnel of the soul, Adam," Korban said.

For a moment, Adam forgot he was dreaming. Korban held the door wide as the procession entered the darkness. Adam was unable to keep from following.

Korban's face loomed near, and the man held out a welcoming arm. As Adam drifted into the waiting murk, he realized that it wasn't the manor that was swallowing him. The foyer was a tunnel, a tube of frigid stone-glass walls, an ever-widening mouth, all darkness, beyond light and the things that light touched. Adam shivered, colder now than ghost-cold, unwilling to let his id play anymore.

Time to wake up now…

Because Korban was changing, his eyes turning from dead dark orbs into fiery hateful suns.

Because Korban was glowing with loathsome heat, Korban was reaching out to him, reaching in him, into his chest, into his heart-Please, please, please wake up!

Korban's fingers squeezed and new pain erupted, a pain beyond human understanding, so intense that even the dreaming dead Adam screamed, and Korban pulled him deeper into the tunnel, and he knew that what was waiting ahead would be the worst thing that any part of his brain could concoct.

He screamed again, screamed and screamed, closed his dream eyes so that he wouldn't see what was ahead But he knew what was ahead, the thing he'd buried so deeply in his mind that he'd forgotten. Though like all true forced forgettings, it had only gained power during the long years of hibernation. And when a buried memory finally claws through its coffin, digs its way through the dirt to the surface, it's not going to look kindly on the undertaker.

This was a memory that had teeth.

So he screamed again, and the hand in his chest was shaking, shaking him "Wake up, Adam."

He opened his eyes, but he was still seeing the glimmers of his buried memory, the image making him throw his arms out in panic. He struck Paul in the shoulder.

"Hey!"

Paul stood beside Adam's bed in his underwear. Adam stared at him, unblinking. A faint fuzz of moonlight leaked through the window and the fire threw red light onto the walls.

"You must have been having a hell of a dream," Paul said.

Adam lay still, rolling his eyes around in their sockets, his chest sore from remembered pain. The quilts were bunched in knots around him. He glanced at the corners of the room, at the closet door, expecting the freshly exhumed memory to play out its image in the nearest available scrap of shadow. He looked at the portrait above the fireplace, watching for Korban's lips to part and welcome him into the tunnel.

"I mean, you even woke me up with your thrashing around," Paul said, then added, with the slightest hint of scorn in his voice, "and I was all the way across the room."

Adam flexed his fingers, reached up, and wiped the sweat from his forehead and upper lip.

He drew in a breath, a sweet living and waking breath, and nothing had ever tasted so fine, not the chocolate cherry sauce on his favorite sundae, not the driest Chardonnay, not a new love's first kiss.

Paul put his hands on his hips, impatient now. "Did you dream about my woman in white? Or are you still not talking to me?"

Adam opened his mouth, glad to find the tip of his tongue brushing reassuringly against his teeth.

"You were right about one thing," Adam whispered, the words dry in his throat. "It was one hell of a dream."

Beautiful.

Spence held up the page so the moonlight from the window would flash fully on the words.

It had been waiting here. All these years. The Muse's blessing, the sweet inspiration, the sleeping dream of creation. The Gift.

The house had given him another masterpiece.

He leaned back in his chair and laughed. The sound echoed off the wood of the room, rattled the dresser on the mirror, mocked back at him from the wainscoting, curled around the cornice of the fireplace mantel, played off the cold rock hearth and swirled in the air like stirred dust. Korban's portrait grinned in the mischief of a secret understanding.

The room was much nicer now that it was empty. There was only Spence and the Royal. Spence and words. And the world beyond the words?

The world itself didn't matter. What mattered was the interpretation, the human reflection, the shaping of the illusion. The craft. Symbolism.

The words.

Spence's words.

So what if those latest novels had meandered off course, had failed to sustain themselves, had crept plotless into unresolved graves? The important thing was that Spence had been anointed. The critics loved him. The New York Times Book Review had him on the cover, not once, but twice. And the little people, the aspiring writers and the coffee-shop crowd and pathetic English majors, gobbled up his books like bottom-feeding fish. This was before the era of television talk-show best sellers fashioned their follow-the-leader tastes into a drab society of the mutually hip.