Scott Nicholson - The Manor

"Going to develop some negatives. Miss Mamie said I could use the wine cellar. Dark enough down here, don't you think?"

"And warm, too. They must be keeping the main furnace going full tilt. It's on the other side of the wall there. I hear them stoking it every three or four hours."

"This Korban bloke must not have been much of a save-the-trees sort."

Mason looked at the statue again. "Maybe in some crazy way, he is the trees."

"Get some sun, Mason. You're starting to go a bit dodgy."

"Maybe you're right."

"Loosen up, have some fun." Roth grinned, flashing his vulpine teeth. "Have a go at that quirky bird Anna. She's your style."

"No, thanks. I have enough worries. I'd better get some food in me so I can finish this thing."

From the stairs, Mason took a last look back at the statue that would be Ephram Korban. It was going to be wonderful. Dennis Graves would eat his mallet in jealousy. This creation was shaping up to be a god.

Spence wept.

The beauty, the elegance of the prose, was sweeping over him like the black tide in his novel. He could feel it approaching. With every sentence, every preposition, every punctuation mark, he was nearing the Word.

The keys sang as they slapped against the carriage, the ringing bell of the return heralded the coming glory. Spence could barely see the page through the blur of his tears, even with the sun pouring through the window, but he didn't need to see. The ghostwriter was compelling his fingers, sending them flying over the keyboard, the words no longer even remotely his own.

Spence wondered if that made any difference. The word author was derived from authority. He had always prided himself on his control and mastery of language, of juggling the alphabet, tricking verbs, nailing down nouns. But this was the uninhibited writing, the deeper language, the cracks between sound and thought. Communication that got to the heart of the truth.

He was dimly aware of Bridget on the bed. He would go to her later, when darkness came. New strength surged in his flesh, his blood was rejuvenated, his power to perform restored. The gift and blessing of the Word. The act of sacrifice always gave power back to the one making the sacrifice.

The room was cold, even with the fire leaping up the chimney as if yearning for the freedom of the sky. His fingers were like winter sticks, but still they rattled the keys, the music of ice cubes in a glass. Ephram Korban watched Spence from the portrait, the most encouraging of editors, his dark eyes suggesting plot twists.

Bridget could wait, impatient and aching in the warm bed. For now, there was only the page. The final page.

Spence sighed. The ending was always like a small death.

Those bittersweet words, The End.

Maybe End was the One True Word.

The only word that had ever mattered.

The manor welcomed Anna back, with its dark wainscoting and high ceiling and the fire roaring in the foyer hearth. And Korban, benevolent old Ephram, Grandfather Ephram, smiled kindly down from his vigilant perch above the mantel.

Maybe she did belong here. As much as anywhere. She belonged nowhere else, after all. And Korban Manor was the end of the world, the kind of place where Anna deserved to pass her final days, walking these windswept ridges in the hard heart of the Appalachian winter. If she died here, her spirit would answer its true calling, her ghost would drift above the manor just as she'd seen so many times in her dreams.

And was that so bad?

As long as Rachel Faye Hartley stayed in the graveyard or haunted the trails of Beechy Gap, never crossing this threshold of stone and wood, then Anna could be as content as any dead and restless thing. To gaze from the widow's walk, a widow without a husband to mourn, nor even a mother for that matter, and wait for whatever came after the passing of forever. Could such an afterlife possibly be worse than her actual life, which she had drifted through without any positive effect, never knowing the full and mysterious power of love?

No. Death could never be worse than this life, the one that cancer had invaded, where she had been abandoned, where she had walked a million sad miles alone.

"Anna?"

God. Not him, not now. She wiped quickly at her eyes, pretending they had been stung by the smoke that came down the chimney as the wind turned. "Hi, Mason."

"I'm glad I found you. I've been meaning to ask you something."

"As long as it's not personal."

"Hey, are you okay? You look a little shook-up."

"Like I've seen a ghost?" Anna managed a bitter laugh.

"Well, that's sort of what I wanted to ask you about. Because there's a painting of Korban Manor down in the basement-"

Anna moved closer to the inviting warmth of the foyer's fireplace, rubbing her hands together. The action was designed to put distance between her and Mason, but he hovered uncomfortably near. He checked the hallways, then spoke, his voice lower.

"The painting has a smudge on the rooftop," he said. "And the way the paint's breaking down, it looks like the artist may have hidden some figures on an earlier layer of paint, sort of like a subliminal image. Because the smudge is starting to look like people."

"Don't artists sometimes recycle their canvases? Maybe the painter covered over a mistake or a rough draft."

"Well, that's what I thought, too. But now I can see their faces."

Anna looked up at Korban's portrait, wondered how many times that face had lived in a painter's fevered mind, how many hours her long-dead relative had sat in stiff repose as an adored subject. Even Cris had talked about how the manor and Korban's face kept creeping into her mind until all her fingers wanted to do was record him in charcoal, ink, and Conte crayon. And Mason had told Anna about the bust of Korban, how the dead man's image haunted his sleep and drove him into obsessive bouts of work.

"Let me guess," Anna said. "One of the faces is Ephram Korban's. Because you see him every time you close your eyes."

"One of them is Ephram Korban." He glanced sideways at the portrait, as if not quite trusting it enough to turn his back to it. "But that's not so strange, considering that nobody seems to do anything creative around here without invoking the old bastard in some way or another."

"He looks sort of charming, doesn't he?"

"As charming as a nest of snakes, maybe."

"Korban gets painted a lot around here. Big deal. What else is strange about the painting?"

"One of the other faces. I mean, the oil paint is dry, and from the dust on the frame, it might be a year old, or might be twenty. Maybe more. And you told me you'd never been here before."

"I never lie, unless I have a good reason." Except to myself I've been lying to myself since before I learned to speak.

"Then, since you're a ghost hunter, you might be interested to know that your face is in the painting."

The fire spat an ember onto the hearth, toward Anna. Mason crushed it out with his foot.

"Show me," Anna said.

William Roth pulled the negatives from the glass jar with practiced movements. He'd unwound hundreds of rolls of film, but this was the first time he'd done it in a wine cellar. A red light would have been handy, but this was no harder than developing in a tent in Sudan or a shack in the Amazon basin. He'd mixed the chemicals by the light of a lantern, doused the flame, done his business, and rinsed thoroughly.

All that remained was to let the film dry. The basement air was still, which might help keep the heavy dust off the emulsion. Dust hung everywhere about this place, what with the ashes of constant fires drifting about. And that fellow Mason with all his sawdust and grit.

Roth felt along the surface of the workbench, found the matches and the warm globe of the lantern, then stroked the match to life and touched it to the wick. He'd rigged a piece of twine across the small room, and now attached the six rolls of film to it using clothespins borrowed from the maid. After hanging the last strip, adding an extra clothespin at the bottom to take the curl out of the celluloid, he brought the lantern closer for a look at his work.