Scott Nicholson - The Manor

The Abramovs, their instruments forgotten, the music playing on without them.

Lilith, fading in and out like a half-finished painting.

William Roth, dribbling spiders from his empty eyes.

The bust smiled at the night sky. "Good-bye, Margaret."

Miss Mamie moved her hand to the locket. But it was gone. It lay among her empty gown and the dust of her desiccated body. And she realized she was already in her tunnel. Because this was her greatest fear, and she must watch as her love spun unwanted down a dark drain, her sacrifice refused, a century of promises adding up to nothing.

She felt her soul scatter on the wind, to be carried off the mountain and away, where Ephram would be always out of reach.

No way.

No way in hell.

But Mason couldn't deny it. Anna's body had stirred beside him. Her eyelashes quivered. Her chest rose slightly beneath the splotch of Mason's blood on her blouse. Anna's breath cooled the sweat on Mason's palm. She was back.

And even in his fright and bewilderment, a surge of pleasure rushed through his bloodstream, a joy like none he had ever known. This was all a crazy dream, had to be, but dreams were everything now.

Mason looked at the lovely red wood of the statue he made, at the spirits gathered around it, at the maple bust that demanded Sylva finish her spell.

Anna's eyes opened, and her irises were no longer cyan. They were red, yellow, orange, glittering in the colors of fire.

And she rose, except her body stayed on the planks. She stood. A ghost. But still her body breathed.

She was on both sides at the same time, dead and alive.

"She-she ain't supposed to come back," Sylva whimpered, drawing into her old woman's hunch despite her youth. "You killed her like you did Rachel."

"I need her," Korban said. "She's part of the house. Now finish the spell. I kept my promise. Margaret is gone."

Anna's living lips parted in that glorious half smile, spilled words in a chorus of dead voices. "It's the fire, Mason."

He touched her cheek, and it was blazing with human heat. "Do you trust me?" he whispered, the kind of thing he would say in a dream. Nothing to lose.

Maybe this was the true art, the creation that gave back, the work that made itself. This was the biggest dream image of them all.

"Maybe," Anna said. "The fire." — "Maybe" was enough to risk everything. Mason knew what he had to do, what he should have done long ago. He eased toward the lantern, seeing Anna's eyes in its intoxicating flame.

Oh Lordy, something ain't right.

Sylva tossed the charm dust onto Ephram, pressed Rachel's burial gown to her heart.

Anna wasn't supposed to be back at all. She was supposed to be dead and haunting the house, serving Ephram, working as his blood and juice and power. But there she lay, breathing and blinking and whispering to the sculptor.

And Anna's eyes weren't right. Too many people looked through them, and every one was madder than a weasel in a hatbox.

She would make him get rid of Anna, too, just like Miss Mamie. And Rachel. Get rid of them all. Only her and Ephram.

She itched to try out this new body. A century of waiting was plenty long enough. She'd spent ten thousand charms on this man and it was time for a little payback.

The beautiful bust opened its mouth. It would be awkward kissing that thing, making love to this statue that didn't even have all its parts yet, but they always said that love would find a way. And she had forever to learn how. Forever to tame him and teach him the value of her spells and conjures and charms. Forever to be needed.

She opened her mouth to call in the fire a final time. "Go out frost and come in-"

Anna knew this was the moment, a time of eternal crossing. Of burnt offerings. A time for ghosts to die.

"Here comes your damn fire," Mason shouted above the mad music and rattling leaves. He grabbed the hurricane lantern, the flesh of his hand sizzling. He sprang at Ephram, screamed at the sky, and raised the lantern over his head, then swept it down toward the statue.

Anna led the leap out of her body, her spirit a conduit for the trapped dreams and lost hope of all haunted souls.

Fuel.

The lantern smashed against the statue, the thick oil soaking into the oak, orange and red and blue ropes of fire spreading across Korban's ungainly form. A blaze of yellow raced up one arm, igniting the dark maple of the bust. Twin screams splintered the night as the fire roared to full life, whipped by the frenzied wind.

Anna's chest emptied as the tortured ghosts of the manor routed through her, flew across the boards of the widow's walk, and swarmed into their hated master. Their fuel boosted the fire tenfold, twentyfold, and the statue stumbled and waltzed in blind agony. The bust dropped to the floor, the lips peeled back in endless pain. Mason kicked the flaming bust toward the statue, back into the hellish pillar of fire.

Anna scrambled backward, void of all spirits but her own, the conflagration too dazzling to watch even with Second or Third Sight. Acrid smoke belched from the manor's four chimneys, and rich red sparks cut tracers in the air.

The house swayed, its siding buckling and popping, the eaves snapping like dry bones. The gables themselves moaned in the anguish of collapse. Vines of smoke spilled from the manor's doors and windows, curling up the columns and darkening the sky.

Korban spun in the darkness, in a St. Vitus dance of overdue death, Sylva kneeling at his feet, the dead and alive scrambling to escape the fire that raged on both sides of the dividing line.

A wall of flame stretched across the widow's walk, cutting off escape through the trapdoor. Mason squinted against the smoke, the nerves of his scorched hand screaming in alternating ribbons of red and yellow pain, his head and arm aching from their wounds. Mason stumbled to the railing and looked down at the dizzying darkness.

A hand touched him and he turned, ready to surrender, to let Ephram Korban pull him into the manor's endless nightmare.

It was Anna.

"The trees," Anna said. "I think we can reach them."

"I can't," he said, throat dry. "Heights."

"We all have to face our fears sooner or later. And you just burned your masterpiece. What else do you have to lose?"

"You."

"Okay, then. Come on, because I'm selfish as hell, too. And I don't want to survive this thing alone."

She climbed over the rail at the point farthest from the surging blaze. A poplar swayed in the fire's back-draft, its branches rattling against the railing. Glass shattered below, flames shooting out the windows and spewing from the screaming mouths of the chimneys. The entire house groaned and crackled in the throes of destruction.

"Ephram Korban," Anna said. "He's dying with the house."

She gripped the branches and pulled herself over, then reached back for Mason. "Hurry."

He took her hand, closed his eyes, then swung out and wrapped a leg around a thick branch. His stomach fluttered, feeling the space beneath him, the long, yawning gap between his body and the ground Don't think, Mason.

She came back from the dead, and you're worried about a little thing like falling.

But it wasn't the falling he was afraid of, it was the landing. The dying. Because he'd seen the hollow and vacant eyes of those who had stared down those black tunnels. He'd take blindness over any of the those deeply hidden horrors, those secrets of his soul that were stashed far away from the light.

He scrambled along the branch, her hand gripping his bloody shirt, and by the time they reached the thick trunk of the tree, he was gripping her in return.

The walls were collapsing. It was the end. Spence stared at the paper, at the Word.

F-i-r-e