Scott Nicholson - The Manor

How could she have resisted getting the family back together? Let the circle be unbroken. Did it matter if some were alive and some were dead? When you came right down to it, was there any difference?

One, a dividing line.

Then zero. Nothing. All the same.

Anna looked at the house with new eyes. The columns, the corners, the carving in the hearth, the reddish brown lower paneling, the polished oak floors. She didn't blame Korban for never wanting to leave this beautiful place. She didn't want to leave it now, either.

"You're just in time for the party," Miss Mamie said. "Up on the widow's walk."

Fuel.

Painting.

Something about the painting. Her standing here by the fire. Mason.

"What is it, dear?" Miss Mamie put a cool hand to Anna's cheek. "You're not feeling ill, are you?"

"Where's Mason?"

"The sculptor? He's busy right now, but he'll be joining us. As soon as he's finished."

Anna let herself be led to the stairs. Something about the walls bothered her, something she knew she should remember. But they were ascending now, Miss Mamie leading the way. They reached the second-floor landing and Anna looked down the hall toward her room. The astral lamps along the wall seemed to brighten and then dim, as if fed by a slow, even breathing.

They reached the third floor. Anna hadn't been to this part of the manor before, though threads of some dim ancestral memory tugged at her. The walls were covered with boxcar siding, cheap interlocking pine. No paintings hung here. There were doors that must have led to other bedrooms, and gabled windows at each end of the floor. A conductor's lantern on a handmade table near the stair rail was the only light.

The lantern.

Mason had one like it in the basement.

Where was Mason? She tried to picture his face, but it was lost in the mist inside her head, along with everything else. The walls throbbed, swelled, and contracted. The house was moving in rhythm with her breathing. She began to get dizzy, then Miss Mamie leaned her against a small ladder.

Anna looked up, as if through the eye of the world, at the clouds that caught the blue silver of the rising moon. The widow's walk. The top of the end of the world. Where her own ghost waited.

She forced her arms and legs to climb. It was time to meet herself.

Spence had found the Word.

He sensed-no, knew-it would be waiting at the end of this final paragraph.

Truth comes in unlikely packages. The One True God comes in the oddest of shapes. All gifts are weighty. Each gift demands its equal value in sacrifice.

The shifting and bulging walls of the house had distracted him at first. Just another evil, another thing to steal his attention, to turn him from the road to glory. Bridget gasped and screamed as they took form, as the misty shapes fell from the ceiling and rose from the oak flooring, as they drifted cold and hollow through the room.

Spence impatiently brushed them away. The True Shining Path beckoned him, and all else was superfluous poppycock and bombast, literistic excess. The True Path led to the next sentence that caused the next word to press itself into the wood pulp, as metal hammered ink into paper into existence.

The night was ready, breath borrowed and held prisoner, lungs of ebony and earth, feet of granite, arms sweeping seasons of sleep from the eyes of the sightless. October screamed, a carpet of frost, a turn of brown wind, the end of something. Time turned backward, cold to hot, hard water. Go out frost and come in…

He tilted forward in his chair, not caring if the chilled air sapped his strength. He needn't waste his flesh on Bridget. He had a better intercourse here, himself and the True Word. White shadows moved across the room in silence, the fire paused in consuming, his fingers itched.

Come in… what?

The Word hung there, teasing, waiting, drawing him body and soul onward hovering ever out of reach.

"I say, chap, what are you waiting for?"

Spence thought at first the line had come from his own mind a bit of clipped dialogue that was trying to force its way into the narrative. The fire roared, yet a frigid breeze skirled across the back of his neck. His fingers rested on the desk.

The voice came again, no Muse, no Bridget, no Korban. "Get on with it, man. It's not the bleeding end of the world yet."

Spence turned glared at the photographer who stood in the corner of the room, face obscured by shadows. "Damn you, why didn't you knock? I can't abide interruptions when I'm working."

Roth's accent flattened became nasally and mid-western. "We got tunnels of the soul, Jeff. And guess what's inside yours?"

"You're mad" Spence said. "Come out where I can see you."

The photographer waved a quick hand toward the portrait of Korban. "He said you can have a typewriter, but all the keys will be stuck."

Spence tried to rise, anger throbbing through him and sending a bright flash of pain across his left temple.

Roth laughed his voice changed pitch, accelerated into that shrill and strident voice from Spence's past. The voice of Miss Eileen Foxx. "I before E except after PEEEE," she said Roth's body shaking with her gleeful laughter.

"F-f-foxx in socks?" Spence said confused his chest split with pain. A warmth spread around his groin, an unfamiliar wetness that was almost pleasant.

Roth moved back into the shadows and was gone. Eileen Foxx's last admonishment hung in the air like a threat: "You'd better make the grade, Jefferson, or I'll be waiting. Yessirree, you'll be staying after school with me."

Spence stared into the fire until the dampness between his legs grew cold, then he faced the typewriter again, the words on the page almost like symbols etched by people from some lost civilization. They no longer had meaning, but he knew he wasn't finished. He needed that word.

The class would laugh at him if he didn't find the word.

Mason lifted the bull point again, the mallet in his slick right hand. The pile of wood shavings was ankle-deep around him, the statue hewn into a recognizable shape. The head needed a lot of work, but the arms and legs were there, the torso as strong and ugly as a stump. This was a hideous masterpiece, a raw stroke of genius, a creative vision that no eyes should ever see.

Eyes.

The thing needed eyes, so that it might see. And once it could see, then what?

"You're not working, sculptor," the bust said.

"I'm thinking," Mason said.

"You'll think when I tell you. Now finish."

Finish. And he could have it all, fame, fortune, Mama's approval. And the girl. Oh, don't forget the girl.

He looked at the painting again. The painted Anna had changed position, was definitely falling, and her arms were now spread wide, the bouquet slipping from her fingers, the half smile shifted to a dark, round tunnel of a scream.

Anna. Something about Anna that he should remember, if only he could think about anything besides the statue.

The whispers spilled from the corner of the basement, and he was afraid the tunnel had opened again, that Mama would come out and sniff at him with her pointy rodent nose, show her sharp teeth, wriggle her whiskers, and tell him about the power of dreams.

But the whisper stirred again, and the voice was Anna's: "Mason."

The voice was coming from the painting.

"Don't listen to her, sculptor," the bust said. "I need you. Give me my eyes. And my mouth. I'm hungry."

Anna spoke again from the painting. "He's burning you up, Mason. He's burning us all."

"Work," the bust commanded.

"Burning our dreams," Anna said. "The closer I get to being dead, the more I understand."

Being dead? Anna?

He had to find her. Something was wrong. Something was wrong with him. He looked at his blistered hands, the tools, the things that had shaped these monstrosities before him. Where had these graven idols come from? Not from his own imagination, that was certain.