CHAPTER 1

Mason Jackson stared at the large oil painting that hung on the wall above the fireplace. It stared right back, as severe as any of Mason's former art instructors. The scowling face of the portrait dominated the room, ten times life-size. The flesh tones of the oils were so re-alistic that Mason could imagine the figure bursting free of the ornate wooden frame. A brass plate beneath the painting was etched with the name ephram korban. Mason studied the black eyes. They were the only features that lacked the realism of the rest of the paint-ing. The eyes were dead, dul, completely unanimated. But Mason wasn't a painter himself, so he had no grounds for criticism. Critics be damned, and he was actually more interested in the frame than the painting. It ap-peared to be hand-carved.

Mason glanced behind him at the people miling in the foyer. Through the open door, he could see two men in overals unloading the wagon. A busty, fortyish woman wearing a long black dress seemed to be everywhere at once, giving orders, distributing drinks in long sweaty glasses, shaking hands. Mason moved closer to the fire-place. Though the day was warm for late October, a fire blazed in the hearth, all yellow and orange and other bright autumn colors. The fireplace mantel was also hand-carved. Bas-relief cherubim and seraphim, plump Raphaelite forms wing-ing among the thick curls of clouds. Mason checked his fingers to make sure they were clean, then felt among the smooth shapes. As his hands explored, he noticed someone had left a half-filed glass of red wine on the mantel. He thought of the rings the glass might leave on the white paint, like blood on virgin snow. No re-spect for the work of a craftsman.

He again looked at the eyes in the painting. Now Ephram Korban seemed to be gazing out across the room, brooding over these people who had dared to cross his threshold. The face was alternately compeling and repulsive. Mason touched the frame—

"Lovely, isn't it?" came a woman's high voice.

Mason spun, his satchel nearly knocking over the wineglass. Before him stood the buxom woman in the black dress, her dark hair tied in a tight bun. Her smile was fixed on her face as if chiseled.

"Yes," Mason said. "Whoever carved this must have spent a few weeks on it." She giggled, a thin, artificial sound. "I was talking about the painting, silly," she said. She toyed with the strand of pearls around her neck, the pearls unfashionably interrupted by a small brass locket. Her dark eyes sparkled with all the life that Korban's painted ones lacked. Mason wondered if that was something you could practice. He could picture the woman before the mirror, fastening her pearls, checking her teeth, adjusting the sparkle in her eyes.

The woman held out her hand. Mason took it, won-dering if he was supposed to bow and kiss it like some French dandy in a period film. Her skin was cool. She turned his hand over and looked at his fingers, nod-ding. "Ah, so you're the sculptor."

"Huh?"

"Calluses. We don't get many calluses here at the manor." She leaned forward, like a conspirator. "At least among the guests. The hired help stil has to work."

Mason nodded. He looked down at his tennis shoes with the scuffed toes, the hole in his blue jeans. The other people who rode up with him in the van wore leather pumps, Kenneth Coles, open-backed sandals, clothes out of catalogues that bore New Hampshire names. He didn't belong here. He was dirt-poor southern mil-town trash, no matter what sort of artistic airs he put on.

"You're our first sculptor in a while," she said, her cold hand still clinging to his. "Let's see if I have the copy memorized: 'Mason Beaufort Jackson, honors graduate from the Adderly School of the Arts, currently employed at Rayford Hosiery in Sawyer Creek, North Carolina. Winner of the 2002 Grassroots Consortium Award. Com-missioned by Westridge University to create a piece for their Alumni Hal.' Now, what was the title of that piece?" She finaly let go of his hand and pressed her hand against her forehead as if reading a page in her mind, then snapped her fingers. "Diluvium. Of course. How terribly lovely."

Mason groaned inwardly. He hadn't realized exactly how pretentious the title sounded until hearing it pass those well-bred lips. "Wel, it was the crowd I was in at the time. Avant-garde, but still meeting for lunch at McDonald's."

The woman emitted her bone-rattling laugh, then pointed to the canvas satchel slung over his shoulder.

"Are those your tools?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'm looking forward to seeing you use them," she said. "I'm Mamie Goldfeld. I insist that you call me Miss Mamie."

He glanced at Korban's portrait, then back to Miss Mamie.

"Ah, you noticed," she said.

"The eyes."

"I'm the last living relative of Ephram Korban. I run the manor, keeping it as an artists' retreat just the way he wanted. Master Korban always appreciated the cre-ative spirit."

"Was he an artist himself?"

"A frustrated one. A dilettante. He was mostly a col-lector."

Mason took in more of the architectural details of the foyer. The arch over the front entrance was ten feet high, with leaded squares of glass set in a transom overhead. The foyer had a high ceiling, the white wals and trim accentuated with an oak-paneled wainscoting as high as Mason's chest. Two Ionic columns in the center of the room held a huge ceiling beam aloft.

"This is a pretty place," Mason said, because Miss Mamie clearly expected him to say something. He'd nearly said "lovely," an adjective he'd never used be-fore. Five minutes at an expensive artists' retreat and he was already putting on airs, developing a persona. God forbid he should ever actually accomplish any-thing. He'd be insufferable.

"I'm pleased you like it," she said. "Colonial re-vivalist. Master Korban was proud of his heritage, which is why his wil stipulated that the manor be pre-served intact."

"Korban. That's Jewish, isn't it?"

"In name only. Not in spirit. He borrowed his her-itage, bought what he couldn't borrow, and stole what he couldn't afford. He ended up with everything, you see."

Mason looked at the portrait again, measured the tenacity and arrogance of the features. "Looks like your ancestor was the kind of man who didn't take no for an answer."

"Yes, but he was also highly generous. As you know."

Mason smiled, though he felt as if a lizard were crawling in his throat. He was here on the dole. He could never have afforded such a retreat on his factory pay. When you got right down to it, he was a token, in-vited so the Korban estate and the arts council could revel in their magnanimous support of the underclass. Miss Mamie looked past him to where a smal group of guests stood talking. "There's dear Mr. and Mrs. Abra-mov. The classical composers, you know."

Mason didn't know, but he kept smiling just the same. The token grin of gratitude.

"Excuse me, I must say helo. Lilith wil be along to show you to your room, and I do hope you enjoy your stay." She glanced at Korban's portrait with an expression approaching wistfulness, then was gone with a bustle of fabric. Mason gazed at the portrait again. The fire popped, sending a thick red ember up the chimney. Korban's eyes still looked dead. Mason was about to turn away to find his luggage when the fire snapped again. For the briefest of moments, the face in the por-trait was superimposed over the flames like a sunset's reflection on a lake.

Mason shrugged and rubbed his eyes. He was tired, that was al. A five-hour Greyhound ride from Sawyer Creek to Black Rock, then a half hour in a van winding up mountain roads. He got dizzy all over again think-ing about the views from the van window, how the rocky slopes dropped hundreds of feet on either side. They'd disembarked at a narrow wooden bridge that seemed to be the only connection between the civilized world and Korban Manor. The suitcases and bags were loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon and the guests had to walk the rest of the way to the manor.

His first step on the bridge was like a leap of mis-placed faith. He'd almost lost the sausage biscuit he'd had for breakfast, even though he'd kept his eyes fixed straight ahead and a sweaty palm on the bridge rail. The great gap of space surrounding him, the soft wind rising from the valey, and the lost weight of the world hundreds of feet below al pressed against his skin. His chest clenched the breath out of his lungs and he tried to tell himself that acrophobia was an irrational fear. But only one thought kept his legs moving: this was one of those paths to success, a strait gate and narrow way that al true artists had to navigate, this scared-sick stagger was leading him closer to recognition.

Before he knew it, he was on solid ground again, though he had to lean against a tree for a moment to let the blood return to his brain. Then he joined the others on the dirt road, following in the wake of the wagon, passing through a dark forest that could have harbored any number of endangered species. The other guests chattered and laughed, as smug as tourists, and Mason wondered whether they'd even noticed the isolation of their new milieu. Then the forest ended and Korban Manor stood be-fore them like something out of an antique postcard. The open fields fell away to a soft swell of orchard, a patchwork of meadows, and two barns stitched together with fencing. The manor itself was three outsized sto-ries high, tal the way they were built in the late 1800s, six Colonial columns supporting the portico ceiling at the entrance. Black shutters framed the windows against the white siding. Four chimneys puffed away, the smoke swirling through the giant red oaks and poplar that sur-rounded the house. Atop the roof was a widow's walk, a flattened area with a lonely railing. He wondered if any widows had ever walked those boards. Probably. One thing about an old house, you could be sure that somebody had died there, probably a whole lot of somebodies.

A painter or photographer would probably kill for the view the widow's walk afforded. Mason might even commit a lesser crime for the privilege, except he knew he'd grow dizzy with all that open air around him and that deadly depth stretching below. At least he'd have an opportunity to study Korban Manor's intricate scrollwork from the safety of ground level.

He fought a sudden urge to pull a hatchet from his satchel and swipe it across Ephram Korban's disquiet-ing smirk.

"You look like you could use an eye-opener," came a voice beside him. It was Roth, the photographer who had shared a seat with him on the van. The man spoke with a clipped and not entirely authentic British accent, alcohol on his breath. A martini was poised in one wrinkled hand.

"No, thanks," Mason said.

"It's afternoon, and we're all grown-ups here." Roth's eyes crinkled beneath white eyebrows. His face was sharp, thin, and full of angles. Mason saw it as a natural sculpture, the weathered topography of skin, a crag of a jawbone, the eroded plain of forehead. He had a bad habit of reducing people to essential shapes and forgeting that some sort of soul might exist within the raw clay of creation.

"I don't drink."

"Oh, you a religious nut?"

"I'm not any kind of nut, as far as I know. Except for that part about hearing God's voice in a burning bush." Roth laughed and drained some of the martini. "Don't get your knickers in a twist. You're terribly young to throw in with this lot," he said, nodding toward the people that Miss Mamie was greeting. "What's a pip like you doing on a getaway like this?"

"I'm here on a grant. North Carolina Arts Council and Korban Manor." Mason looked at the fire again. No faces swirled among the bright colors. No voices arose, either. He forced himself to relax.

"A real artist, eh? Not like these," Roth said, rolling his eyes toward Miss Mamie's well-dressed guests.

"Most of them need an artists' retreat like they need another mutual fund. A bunch of tweeds whose highest endeavor is gluing dried beans to a scrap of gunny-sack."

Another critic. Passing judgment on the unrevealed talents of others. At least they'd paid their own way, un-like Mason.

"What part of England are you from?"

"Not a pint of Brit in me," he said. "Was over there in the military for a while and picked up a little of the accent. Comes in handy with the birds." He winked one of his smoky gray eyes.

"You came here to shoot, I suppose." Mason had dated a girl at Adderly who'd had a book of Roth's work. Roth did nature, wildlife, architecture, and the occasional por-trait. He couldn't touch the grity glamour of Leibovitz or the visceral sensibility of Mapplethorpe, but his photo-graphs possessed their own brand of blunt honesty.

"I got bankrolled by a few magazines," Roth said. "I'm to do some house-and-garden stuff, scenic moun-tain shots, that sort of tripe. I do want to shoot that bridge, though. Highest wooden bridge in the southern Appalachians, they say."

"I believe it. Makes me spin just thinking about it."

"You bugged by heights?"

"Where I come from, the highest building is two stories, if you don't count silos. I can handle stairs okay, but I'm not much good on a ladder. Looking down three hundred feet—"

"Drop-off like that one on every side," Roth said, taking another drink, relishing Mason's face going pale. "Korban liked his isolation. Wanted his place to be like one of those European castles." Roth lifted a toast toward Korban's portrait. "Here's to you, old sod." Mason's satchel was geting heavy. He was anxious to get settled in, finish planning the pieces he wanted to work on. And Roth's accent was annoying.

A pretty woman in black came down the stairs, her dress just short of authentic Goth, a lace shawl over her thin shoulders. She appeared to be a receptionist of some kind. She led a couple away from Miss Mamie's group. The man was in his fifties, double-chinned, wearing a scowl, the woman blue-eyed with a clear complexion who could have walked off the cover of Seventeen. They went up the stairs together, the man clearing his throat, his enormous jowls quivering.

"Might get him later," Roth said. "Maybe at a roll-top desk with a quill pen in his hand. I'm not keen on personality work, but I could get a tidy bundle for that."

"Who?"

Roth smiled as if Mason had just falen off a turnip wagon. "Jefferson Spence."

"You mean the Jefferson Spence? The novelist?"

"The one and only. The last great southern writer. Faulkner and O'Connor and Wolfe all rolled into one, if you believe the jacket copy."

Mason watched the writer labor up the stairs. "What's he need with an artists' colony?"

"Fodder. You don't know much about him, do you?"

"Never read him. I'm more into Erskine Caldwell."

"One critic called Spence's style 'stream-of-pompousness.'"

Mason laughed. "Well, it was nice of him to bring along his daughter." Roth shook his head. "I suppose you don't read the tabloids, either. That's not his daughter. That would be his latest, I presume."

Miss Mamie's voice rose, her laughter filing the foyer. To her right stood a small, dark-haired woman, about Mason's age. Mason stared at her two seconds longer than what could pass for polite interest because her cyan eyes were startling. She met his gaze, gave him a half smile, then turned her attention back to Miss Mamie. Roth had noticed her, too. His eyes were as bright as a wolf's. "Cute bird." Mason pretended not to hear. "Excuse me. I've got to stretch my legs a little." Roth gave a faux gentleman's salute and went to re-fil his drink. Mason adjusted the satchel strap across his shoulder and went toward the open door. The wagon was gone, the squiggles of its tracks leading toward one of the barns, dark heaps of horse manure dotting the sandy road. The Korban Manor brochure had delighted in the fact that no motor vehicles would be around to "disturb creative impulses." Likewise, no distractions such as television, telephone, or electricity existed at the estate. A regular Giligan's Island, Mason thought, only without the canned laughter and unexpected plot twists.

Mason overheard one of the group say, "Let me tel you about this lovely idea I had for a novel. It's about this writer who—"

Mason gave a last look back at Korban's face, then entered the autumn sunshine. The fields were golden green sheets stretched to the surrounding forest. Great ridges of earth rose along the horizon, carved and chipped and smoothed by that master sculptor, Time. Mason now knew why these mountains were caled the Blue Ridge, though the changing leaves splashed such an array of colors that he almost wished he'd stuck with painting.

Pumpkin orange, summer squash yellow, cornsilk gold, beet purple. Van Gogh would have given his other ear to paint this place.

Except such a thought smacked of that dreaded ideal of artistic sacrifice. He wondered if the esteemed historical roster of insane artists had not been schizo-phrenic or poisoned by the lead in their paint, but had instead been driven mad by the whispering of demand-ing Muses. Mason drove the thought from his head be-cause it seemed like an option only a nut would consider. And he'd given up painting not because of a lack of desire or talent, but because of its visual nature. His mother could feel the sculpture with her fingers, but a painting was nothing to her but an endless piece of darkness.

A few horses and cows grazed in the meadow that sloped away from the front of the house. The open land must have been about twenty acres, cleared of boulders and carefully tended. Mason found it hard to believe that these soft grounds gave way to steep granite cliffs on all sides. Not even a jet trail marked the blue autumn sky, as if the manor were remote from modern civilization not only in distance but in time as well. Majestic hard-woods spread their limbs at carefully spaced intervals along a carriage trail that wound toward the west. An apple orchard covered a rise beside the pasture, the trees dotted with pink and golden fruit. Lush grass swayed softly in a hayfield beyond, ending at the edge of a dense forest.

A soft voice interrupted his reverie: "Now you know why artists trip over their egos to get up here. Especially in the fall."

It was the dark-haired woman with the cyan eyes. She crossed the porch and leaned over the railing, then closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose with an exaggerated flourish. "Ah. Fresh air. A nice change from the stench of pretension inside."

"You a painter?" Mason asked, still looking across the fields, irritated by her jab at artists.

"No."

"Me either."

"What are you, then?"

"Does everybody have to be something?"

The woman tilted her head back toward the house. "If you listen to them, you'd think so."

"Well, this is a retreat, after all. Back up and go, 'Whoa,' I reckon." He didn't want her to know he felt out of his element. He already missed Sawyer Creek's dirty little streets with their utility poles and peeling billboards. Back home, he'd be heating up the teakettle and tuning the radio to Mama's favorite conservative talk show right about now.

"What's in the bag?"

"This satchel? Nothing. Just some tools."

"I thought you were one of the staff," she said. "Too bad. Because I despise artists. I think they're full of themselves. Nothing personal."

Mason tried not to look at her too closely, though that was all he wanted to do. She was pretty, sure, but there was also the sense that she wouldn't let him hide behind his dumb bumpkin act, the one he'd used to bluff his way through art college. Those cyan eyes pierced too deeply, saw beyond the slick face of first impressions. He came up with a snappy comeback a couple of seconds too late. "Then why are you making it personal?"

"Because you're probably worse than the rest. You're so attached to what's inside your satchel you wouldn't trust it with the rest of the luggage."

He wished he could tel her. The tools were not al that expensive, but they had come at great cost. He thought of Mama alone at their cramped apartment in Sawyer Creek, siting in her worn recliner, a cat in her lap. Eyes never blinking. This woman he'd only just met was too damned in-sightful and saw his self-doubt with uncanny clarity. He was worse than the rest, even while pretending he was apart from other artists, not buying into their wank-ish and vain prattle. He wasn't sure whether his work revealed anything about the world, but he was deter-mined to shove it in the world's face and make it notice anyway.

Mason adjusted the satchel on his shoulder, feeling the woman's eyes on him. "Sculpting tools," he said.

"A hammer, hatchet, chisels, fluters, gougers, some blades."

"You do wood?"

"I've done a little of everything." He finally looked her full in the face, forcing himself not to blink against her gaze. "Except here I'll be doing wood."

She nodded as if she'd already forgotten him. "Six weeks is not very long. It would be hard to tackle something stone in that time."

Her accent was almost rural, as if she'd tried to be country but somebody had sent her off to college to have it squeezed out of her. One of the horses, a big roan, galloped across the pasture. She smiled as she watched it.

"Some place, huh?" Mason said.

"I've seen pictures, but they certainly don't do it jus-tice." Again she sounded distracted, as if Mason were as boring as Miss Mamie's well-heeled gang in the foyer.

Mason stepped between the shrubs and fingered the mortised joints of the railing. Grooved columns held up the portico, the paint thick and scaly where the lay-ers had built up over the decades. The stone foundation of the manor wore a fur coat of green moss. A sudden juvenile urge to impress the woman came over him. "Colonial revivalist architecture," he said. "This Korban guy must have had the bucks."

"Do you know anything about him?"

"Only what I read in the brochure. Industrialist, made a fortune after the Spanish-American war, bought out this mountain, and built the manor as a summer home. Two thousand acres of land connected to civilization by nothing except that wooden bridge."

He hated himself for blathering. He hadn't come to Korban Manor to mess around. He needed to get serious about his work, not spar with someone who seemed about as interested in him as if he were a piece of lint. Besides, artists were supposed to be aloof.

"So you only have the sanitized biography," she said. "I did a litle research on him myself. That's my line."

"You're a writer?"

"Something like that."

"Figured. They're more stuck-up and screwed-up than artists, if you ask me."

"Nobody did. As I was about to say, Korban set down in his wil that the place be kept as a period piece from the end of the nineteenth century. He stipulated that Korban Manor become an artists' retreat. While he was alive, he encouraged the servants to fil the house with handmade mountain crafts and folk art. Maybe he liked the idea of his house being filed with creative en-ergy. Sort of a way to keep himself alive."

"That portrait of him is a bit much, though," Mason said. "He must have had a hel of an ego."

"He probably was an artist, then." She looked tired and gave him a dismissive and maddening half smile. "Excuse me, I have to go to my room."

Mason fumed inside. Stupid self-obsessed girl, dis-tracted and abrupt, as snotty as any of those Yankees chatering in the foyer. He should have faked it a litle better, acted like a heartbreaker. Maybe he'd start wear-ing a beret, appear sophisticated, grow one of those wimpy little Pierre mustaches. That would get a laugh out of the boys back at Rayford Hosiery.

"See you later," he said, trying hard not to sound op-timistic. Then, without knowing where the words came from, he added, "I hope you find what you came here for."

She turned, met his eyes, serious again. "I'm look-ing for myself. Tell me if you see her." Then she was gone, swallowed by the big white house that bore Korban's name.

CHAPTER 2

Anna Galoway puled back the lace curtains of the bedroom window. A bit of dust rose from the window-pane at the stir of air. Sunlight spiled on her shoulders, the October glow warming the floor beneath her feet. The mountain air was chilier than she was used to, and even the roaring fire didn't quel her shivers. A painting of Ephram Korban hung over the room's fireplace, smaler than the one downstairs but just as brooding. The sculptor with the kicked-puppy aura was right about one thing: Korban had been thoroughly in love with himself.

She looked out over the meadows. Here she was, at long last. The place she was supposed to be, for whatever reason. This was the end of the world, the logical place for endings. She drove the fatalism from her mind and in-stead watched the roan and chestnut galoping across the pasture. The display of freedom and peace warmed her.

"It's so pretty, isn't it?" the woman behind her said. She'd told Anna that her name was "Cris without the h" as if the lack of h somehow made her harder and less flexible. And since they were going to be roomies...

"It's wonderful," Anna said. "Everything I dreamed it would be." Cris already had her makeup kit, watercolor brushes, and sketch pads scattered across the bed nearest the door. Anna had nothing but a slim stack of books piled neatly on her dresser. Her attitude toward material possessions and earthly comforts had undergone dramatic changes in the past year. You travel light when you're not sure where you're headed. The pain swept across her abdomen, sneaky this time, a needle poking in slow motion. She closed her eyes, counted backward in big fat numerals.

Ten, round and thin...

Nine, loop and droop.. .

She was down to six and the pain was floating some-where above that far cut in the Blue Ridge Mountains when Cris's voice pulled her back.

"Like, what do you do?"

Anna turned from the window. Cris sat on the bed, brushing her long blond hair. Anna was glad the chemo-therapy hadn't made her own hair fal out. Not just be-cause of vanity, but because she wanted to take all of herself with her when she went.

"I do research articles," Anna said.

"Oh, you're a writer."

"Not fiction like Jefferson Spence. More like meta-physics."

"Science and stuff?"

Anna sat on her bed. The pain was back, but not as sharp as before. "I worked at the Rhine Research Center in Durham. Investigator."

"You quit?"

"Not really. I just got finished."

"Rhine. Isn't that ESP ghosts, and weird stuff? Like on X-Files?"

"Except the truth isn't 'out there.' It's in here." She touched her temple. "The power of the mind. And we don't do aliens. I was a paranormal investigator. Except I be-came a dinosaur. Extinct almost before I even got started."

"You're too young to be a dinosaur."

"Everything's electronic these days. Electromag-netic field detectors, subsonic recorders, infrared cam-eras. If you can't plot it on a computer, they don't think it exists. But I believe what I see with my heart." Cris looked around the room, as if noticing the dark corners and flickering fire-cast shadows for the first time.

"You didn't come here because of—"

"Don't worry. I'm here for personal reasons."

"Aha. I saw you talking to that muscle guy with the canvas satchel, out on the porch."

"Not that kind of personal reason. Besides, he's not my type."

"Give it a few days. Stranger things have happened."

"And I'm sure you're here to throw yourself into your art?" Anna pointed to the sketch pads. "I won't give you my lecture on the artistic temperament, be-cause I like you."

"Oh, I think my husband is plooking his secretary and wanted me out of the house so they could use the hot tub. He sent me to Greece over the summer. New Mexico last spring to do the Georgia O'Keeffe thing. Now the North Carolina mountains."

"At least he's generous."

"I'l never be a real artist, but it gives me something to do on retreats besides chase men and drink. But my Muse allows me those little luxuries, too. Speaking of which, I noticed a bar in the study. Care for one before dinner?"

"No, thank you. I believe I'll rest a little."

"Wel, just don't walk around with a sheet over your head. I might mistake you for a ghost."

"If I die, I promise you'll be among the first to know."

Anna lay back on the pilow. A feather poked her neck. The door closed, Cris's footsteps faded down the hall, dying leaves whisked against the window. The smoke-aged walls gave off a comforting aroma, and the oil lamp's glow added to the warmth of the room. She felt at peace for the first time since—

No. She wouldn't think of that now.

The pain was back, a rude houseguest. She tried the trick of numbers, but her concentration kept getting tangled up with memory, as it so often did lately. Ever since she'd started dreaming of Korban Manor.

Ten, round and thin ...

An image of Stephen slid into her mind between the one and the zero. Stephen, with his cameras and giz-mos, his mustache and laugh. To him, Anna was the parapsychologist's version of a campfire girl. Stephen had no need for sensing ghosts. He could prove them, he said. Their graveyard dates ended up with her wandering over grass and headstones while Stephen focused on set-ting up equipment. The night she'd sensed her first ghost, shimmering beside the marble angel in the Guilford Cemetery, Stephen was too busy marking down EMF readings to look when she called. The ghost didn't wait around for a Kodak moment, it dissolved like mist at sunrise. But before those evanescent threads spooled themselves back to whatever land they'd come from, the haunted eyes had stared fully into Anna's.

The look was one of mutual understanding.

Nine, loop and droop ...

That had been her first investigation with Stephen. But the ghost-hunting circle was small. Her frustration was outweighed by her loneliness. They'd slept together on the floor of Asheville's Hanger Hall on a winter night when the wind was too brisk even for ghosts. And two weeks later, she'd overheard him at a party calling her a "flake, but a lovable flake."

So after six years of study and field research, she was little more respectable than an 800-hundred-number phone psychic. There were plenty enough skeptics out in the real world, between the hard scientists and those who were always up for a good old-fashioned witch burning. But the laughter of her own peers was enough to drive her to big, spooky, empty places where she could chase ghosts alone.

Eight, a double gate...

Then the pain came, and the first of the dreams. She had stepped from the forest, her feet soft on the damp grass, the lawn as lush as only dreams could paint it. The manor stood before her, windows dark as eyes, the trees around the house twisted and bare. A single strand of smoke rose from one of the four chimneys. The smoke curled, collected, gathered on the roof just above the white railing. And the shape formed, and the woman's whispered word, "Anna," woke her up, as it had so many nights since.

Seven, sharp and even . ..

That was what the pain was, a seven, sticking in her intestines.

Stephen came over the day she found out the colon cancer had metastasized to her liver. He held her hand and his eyes managed to look dewy and glazed behind his thick glasses. The mustache even twitched. But he was too practical, too emotionally void to realize ex-actly what the diagnosis meant. To him, death was nothing more than a cessation of pulse, a change in en-ergy readings. So much for soul mates.

Even after Anna had talked the doctors out of a colectomy, accepting the death sentence as the cancer raced to other organs, Stephen still acted as if science would intervene and save her. He probably even prayed to science, that coldest of all gods. She refused his offer of a ride home from the hospital. She'd come to accept that loneliness was a natural state for someone soon to be a ghost. Six, an arc and trick...

Miracles happen, one of her oncologists had told her. But she didn't expect them to occur in a hospital, with tubes pumping radiation into her, blades removing her flesh a sliver at a time, doctors marking off her dwindling days. And she had stopped dreaming in the hospital. It was only back home, in the wee hours of her own quiet bed, that Korban Manor once more stood before her. - Night after night, as the dream grew longer and more vivid, the shape on the roof gained substance. At last Anna could clearly see the distant face, diaphanous hair flow-ing out like a veil. The cyan eyes, the welcoming smile, the bouquet held before her from the forlorn stage of the widow's walk. At last the face was recognizable. The woman was Anna.

Five, a broken wing.. .

The pain was softer now, snow on flowers.

She'd conducted some research, knowing the manor was familiar to her through more than just dream visi-tations. She found a few items on Korban Manor in the Rhine archives. Ephram Korban had spent twenty years building his estate on the remote Appalachian crag, then had leapt to his death from the widow's walk in an ap-parent suicide. Some locals in the smal town of Black Rock passed along stories of sightings, mostly disre-garded as the gossip of hired hands. A field investiga-tion, shortly before the house was restored as an artists' retreat, had netted zero in the way of data or enthusiasm. But maybe Korban's pain, his anger, his love, his hope, his dreams, were soaked into these wals like the cedar stain on the wainscoting. Maybe this wood and stone and glass had absorbed the radiant energy of his humanity. Maybe the manor whose construction had obsessed him was now his prison. Maybe haunting wasn't a choice but an obligation.

Four, a north fork. . .

She drifted in the gray plane between sleep and thought, wondering if she would dream of the mansion now that she was actualy here. She closed her mind to her five senses, and only that other one remained, the sense that Stephen had ridiculed, the one Anna had hidden away from her few friends and many foster parents. The line be-tween being sensitive and being a freak was thin.

Three, a skeleton key...

For just a moment, she was puled from sleep. Some-thing wafted behind the maple baseboard, scurried along the cracks between dimensions. She didn't want to open her eyes. She could see better if her eyes were closed. Two, an empty hook.. .

She felt eyes on her. Someone was watching, per-haps her own ghost, the woman spun from the smoke of dreams who held that bouquet of fatal welcome.

One, a dividing line...

The line between some and none, here and gone, bed and grave, love and hate, black and white. Zero.

Nothing.

Anna had come from nothing, was bom to nothing, and walked toward nothing, both her past and future black. She opened her eyes.

No one was in the room, no ghost shifted against the wall.

Only Korban, dead as dry oil, features shadowed by the flickering firelight.

The sunlight's angles had grown steeper in the room. The pain was gone. Anna rose and went outside to wait for sundown, wondering if this was the night she would finally meet herself.

"Have you seen George?" Miss Mamie asked Ransom Streater. She hated to mingle with the hired help, with the exception of Lilith, but there were times when or-ders had to be given or stories set straight. The best way to head off gossip was to originate it.

"No, ma'am." Ransom stood by the barn, his hat in his scarred hands, sweat clinging to his thin hair. He smelled of the barnyard, hay and manure and rusty metal. Around his neck was a leather strap, and she knew it was attached to one of those quaint charm bags. These rural mountain people actually believed that roots and powders had influence over the living and the dead. If only they knew that magic was created through the force of will, not by wishful thinking.

Magic was al in the making. Like the thing she held cradled in her arms, the poppet she had shaped with great love and tenderness.

"I need someone to help the sculptor find some wood tomorrow," she said.

"Yes, ma'am." The man's Adam's apple bobbed once.

"When was the last time you heard from George?"

"This afternoon, right after the last batch of guests come in. Said he was going up Beechy Gap to check on things."

Miss Mamie hid her smile. So George had gone to Beechy Gap. Good. Nobody from town would miss him for at least a couple of weeks, and by then it wouldn't matter.

And she could count on Ransom to keep his mouth shut. Ransom knew what kind of accidents happened to people around Korban Manor, even to those who wore charms and muttered old-timey spells. And a job was a job.

Everyone had a burning mission in life.

Some missions were more special than others.

She took the little doll from its bit of folded cloth. Its apple head had shriveled into a dark and wizened face, the mouth grim with animated pain. The body was made from whittled ash and the arms and legs were strips of jackvine. Ransom drew back from the doll as if it were a rattlesnake.

"Wil you take care of George for me?" Miss Mamie asked.

"He was my friend. It's the least I can do." A shadow crossed his face. "I need to wait til morning, though. I don't go up Beechy Gap at night."

"First thing, then. I don't want to upset the guests. You know what's coming, don't you?"

"A blue moon in October," Ransom said. His eyes shifted to the barn door. A horseshoe hung above it, points up, the dull metal catching the dying daylight. As if luck mattered.

"You've been with us a long time."

"And I aim to stick around a lot longer."

"Then you won't let me down?"

"I'l bury him proper, silver on his eyes. I take pride in my work."

"Ephram always said, 'Pride wil walk you through the tunnels of the soul.' "

"Ephram Korban said lots of things. And people said lots of things about him."

"Some of it might even be true." Miss Mamie stroked the dol, suffering her own moment of pride at its skillful rendering. Folk art, they called it. The little poppet contained far more folk than anybody knew. "Excuse me, I have a dinner to host."

Ransom gave a litle bow and tugged the strap of his overalls. Miss Mamie left him to feeding the livestock and headed toward the manor. She carried the dol as if it were a precious gift to a loved one. Even though the house was as familiar to her as her own skin, to see it from a distance always brought a fresh rush of joy. The fields, the trees, the mountain wind seemed to sing his name.

This was her home.

Their home.

Forever.

CHAPTER 3

Pain comes in many colors, but fear comes in only one.

George Lawson thought he'd experienced all the colors of pain in his fifty-three years. White pain, like the time he'd raked the tip of a chain saw across his shinbone while clearing out some locust scrub a few summers back. He'd gotten acquainted with dull sky-blue pain when rheumatoid arthritis had painted a strip along his spine. And the invisible gray gut-punch had hung around for months after Selma dropped him for a rug-weaving hippie back around the end of the Reagan years.

He'd felt pain in a hundred colors, oranges and candy-apple reds and sawgrass greens, and pain had taken just as many shapes and sizes. But he was damn near positive he'd never felt pain like the kind that bear-hugged him now. This was al of those combined, a rainbow of pain, an oil slick in a mud puddle, every-thing a nerve ending could jangle at a felow, and then some.

But the fear—

The fear was nothing but black. Bigger, darker, blinding and suffocating, growing like a shadow over those other colors. Black fear lodged in his throat like a grease rag, like a clot of stale molasses, like a lump of coal. He sucked in a gasp of that autumn-sweet Appa-lachian air.

George tried to move his left arm just as an experi-ment. Mistake.

Two twenty-penny nails had pinned his biceps to the floor. He even tasted the nails, though he was pretty sure the only things in his mouth were some dust, a lit-tle blood, and a few loose teeth. And the fear. The taste was metal and rust and the kind of smithy, gunpowdery bitterness that filed the air when a fixer-upper worked a hammer. The collapsed shed settled around him with a splintering groan.

George knew he'd better open his eyes. Because in-side his head, he was looking down a long dark tunnel, and the deeper he got, the farther away he was from the light pouring in from the mouth of the tunnel. He was riding down into that tunnel as smoothly as if he were on miners' rails. And part of him wanted to slide on away, down into that cool airless place just around the bend.

But the other part of him was taking over. The part that had pulled his hind end through the jungles of Vietnam, the part that had roled him out of that hospi-tal bed when the doctors told him he was a heartbeat away from the Big One, the part that had lifted him into the sunshine after the foggy months of loneliness. It was the part that George thought of as Old Leatherneck. Sort of a secret identity that he took on when times got tough. And he realy needed Old Leatherneck now, be-cause times didn't come any tougher than this.

Another bad thing about closing his eyes was that he kept seeing her. The Woman in White. So he forced his eyelids open, thanks to his secret identity. Wood splinters sprinkled down and stuck to his tears. Something warm and wet trickled down his right temple, but he wasn't too concerned with that at the moment. First he wanted to figure out what that purplish, raggedy thing was, the thing speared on a split two-by-four a few feet over his head. It was oddly familiar, but out of place, like a sailboat in the middle of a cornfield.

The purplish thing wriggled. No, it had only slid down a little on the broken tip of the board, making a sound like Jell-0 dropping onto the floor. Even in the gloomy light and swirling dust, George could make out five litle stubs dangling like the teats on a cow's udder. That's when Old Leatherneck kicked in like a dozen cups of percolated coffee.

"So it's a goddamned hand, Georgie-Boy. What's the problem? How many people in this world was born with no hands at all? Why, you saw Joes in Nam that lost every frigging limb they had, and al they could do was lay around flopping like beached puppyfish. So get the hell over it."

George gulped, and the imaginary broken glass in his mouth worked its way down his throat. The dead fingers above were splayed out as if waiting for a high five. George hoped Old Leatherneck didn't cut him one inch of slack this time. Because he didn't believe there was an inch to spare.

"And since you're the only bozo laying around down here in this crap heap of a falen-down shed, then odds are pretty good that it's your hand, soldier."

George turned his head a little so that he couldn't see the hand. He roled his eyebals down to look at his body. He couldn't see anything past his chest because a pile of hemlock ceiling joists were spilled like jumbo tiddlywinks across his gut. He tried to wriggle his shoulders and pain erupted in flaming colorbursts.

"Okay, soldier. You gonna whine like a litle girlie-boy, or are you gonna stand up and haul your wrinkled rump hole out of here?"

George didn't see any way he could stand up. For one thing, he couldn't feel his legs.

"Excuses, excuses. Well, Georgie, it could be a whole lot worse. 'Cause in case you didn't notice, there's a slick sheet of roofing tin about four inches away from your main neck-vein, and that could have just kited on down and done some business. Then we wouldn't even be having this lovely little chat." The sharp edge of the tin caught the dying sunlight. As he watched, the piece of roofing slid closer with a metallic squeak. More cracking came from high above in the invisible carnage of the eaves. Something slith-ered in the soft shadows.

"No, it ain't no snake. Never mind that the copper-heads and rattlers get active this time of year, doing the last twist before going off to hibernate. Ain't no ssssnakes in here, Georgie." George thought of that old Johnny Cash song, about how the snakes crawl at night. But the song had it wrong. Snakes slept at night because they were cold-blooded. George knew, because he'd looked it up. George gulped again, trying to squeeze a little of that mountain air into his bruised lungs. A small drop of liquid fell between his eyes. More blood collected at the ruined wrist hanging above him. The swelling tear-drop of blood dangled from the end of a stringy bit of tendon. He wondered if the hand was his left one or his right one.

"Hell of a wonderer you are, Georgie. But I'll tell you, since you've always needed to know things. It's the old hammerer, the crap-wiper, the hand that shook the hand of Senator Hallifield at that Republican bar-becue in Raleigh. Yep, them fingers there used to grip the two-seamer curve ball that took you fourteen-and-three back in your senior year. Them are the knuckles that got one good sock to the jaw of that hippie Selma run off with. But, hey, it's dead weight now. Water under the bridge. Let's worry about the meat that's stil attached."

George wished he could feel his feet. Then he wouldn't be so afraid that he was turning into one of those puppyfish. Something inside his crushed gut spasmed and gurgled. With every shalow breath, broken rib bones reached deeper into his chest for a scoop of fresh or-gans. And who did he have to blame?

"Nobody but you and that snoopy nose of yours, soldier. Just got to poke into things that ain't none of your business. Just got to goddamned know, don't you? Always did, and always will. But if you don't get off that fat rump of yours, always ain't even going to last till sundown." Sure, George liked to know things. He wanted to know why dragonflies were caled "snakefeeders." He wanted to know why Selma had worked the springs of their old brass bed with a flea-ridden liberal longhair. He wanted to know why that picture of Ephram Korban that hung in the manor gave him seven kinds of creeps. He wanted to know why that old bat Abigail and his buddy Ransom had warned him away from this neck of the woods. Most of all, he wanted to know why the Woman in White had been dancing in the shed the mo-ment before it fell down around him.

"Ain't no earthly good dwelling on what you can't figure out," came the distant voice of Old Leatherneck. "You'd best get back to the situation at hand, if you know what I mean." Another drop of blood plopped onto his face, this time on his chin. George started to reach up and wipe it away, then was reminded that the arm that did his wip-ing was severed at the wrist. Pain lanced up his shoul-der, as bright and yelow red as Napalm.

George squinted through the jagged and crisscrossed lumber overhead. A few muted shafts of light spilled through the rubble, dust swirling slowly in the air. That meant a bit of daylight was left. Time had taken on a weird, stretched-out quality, kind of like in Nam when the grunts hunkered down for incoming even before the first mortars whistled through the air.

"Hey, Georgie, give me a litle credit here. I puled you out of that mess, didn't I? So don't give up on me yet. But I need a little help. You've got to have a little goddamned hope." Hope. Hope got you up in the morning. Hope put you to bed and tucked you in. Hope was the last thing you held on to when everything else was gone. The thought chiled George, or it may have been the cold sweat that covered his face.

"I'm holding on," George whispered. He usually didn't talk back to Old Leatherneck. He figured only crazy people talked back to the voices inside their heads. But then, there sure were a hel of a lot of crazy people around Korban Manor. Ransom Streater claimed to see people who weren't there, or those who had passed on long before. George wished one of them would have a vision now, do that Sight thing Abigail was always going on about, see him trapped under the old shed.

But Korban Manor was nearly a mile away, and not many messed around in this neck of the woods. Chances were, nobody was in shouting distance even if George could baloon his lungs up enough for a good scream. Chances were, the other hired help was busy around the house, packing in the latest batch of rich artists, Miss Mamie glaring at them if they dared to rest for even a minute. Chances were, even if he managed to crawl out from under three tons of wood and steel and glass, he'd leak away the rest of his blood before he made it back to the trail, let alone to the wagon road or manor.

But first he'd have to get free. Then he could worry about the rest of it. He looked to his right, to the side of his body that was missing a part. A section of the roof that was more or less intact sloped down from a point just above his waist to the ground fifteen feet away. The rubble above him was held up by a single bowed rafter. If that gave way ...

"Then it's 'Sayonara, Cholly,'" Old Leatherneck said, coming back from whatever shocked pocket of George's brain that the ornery bastard had been hiding out in. "Now move it." A two-by-four rested near George's cheek, the grain rough against his skin. If he could maneuver it, maybe use it as a lever, he could pry his left arm free. He moved his arm, and the bone of his elbow clubbed against the wooden floor. His right arm must have been asleep, because now it came to tingling life. He scooted the two-by-four against his side, and the payoff came. The end of his arm exploded in a bright burst of agony. This was orange pain, the color of or-ange that shot out of the Human Torch's hands in those Fantastic Four comics he'd read as a kid. Still, he pushed the two-by-four along until he could cradle it in the crook of his injured arm.

"There you go, Georgie-boy," said his one-man chain of command. "Give 'em hel. Only, what are you going to use as a fulcrum for your little make-do see-saw?"

Old Leatherneck had a point, as much as George hated to admit it. But if he gave up now, then surviving Nam and Selma and the stroke and stepping on a copper-head was all for nothing. Sliding down along those miners' rails in the dark would be that much easier. Just as an experiment, because he needed to know, he closed his eyes. And he was deeper inside the long dark tunnel. The light at the living end was fainter now, fuzzier. And he was accelerating, sliding fast and smooth as if sledding on snow. The air was thin and cool as the final bend came nearer.

George relaxed, though he was shivering and his blood was starved for oxygen and his heart was ham-mering like a roofer trying to beat a rainstorm. Because in here, in the tunnel, it was okay to give up hope. Nobody in here would hold it against him. He sensed that oth-ers were waiting to welcome him, huddled in the shad-ows, those who had ridden the rails before him. And he was rounding the bend, hell, this was easy, this was fun, and then, the soft slithering sound pickaxed him in the skull. What if there are SNAKES around the bend?

George opened his eyes and fought back to the mouth of the tunnel and saw that the sun was still hanging stubbornly in the sky somewhere above, and the AWOL hand was splayed out stiff and livid, wear-ing a bracelet of splinters and dirt. He'd almost gone under, and knew that shock was setting in. Back in An Loc once, some of the grunts had been sitting around knocking down Schlitz tall boys with George Jones on the record player. A young medic named Haley stubbed out a joint as big as a rifle barrel and told them why shock was a dying soldier's best friend.

"Some kinds of pain, even a plungerful of morphine won't touch," Haley said, a wreath of blue smoke around his head. "But shock, man, it shuts you down nice and easy. Blood pressure drops, breathing gets shallow, you get all sweaty, and you don't even know your Mama's name. Crash and bleed out, man, then drift off."

They'd told Haley to shut the hell up. And George had dodged his own run-in with fatal shock, at least so far. But lying under the crush of wreckage and running down Haley's list of symptoms, he was three-fourths of the way there. He stil remembered Mama had been named Beatrice Anne.

The torn hand was slipping off the broken tip of lumber. A drop of blood hit his cheek. George gritted his loose teeth and flipped the two-by-four onto his chest. He pushed with his stump of a forearm until one end of the board was under the joist that had his left arm pinned.

He tried not to look at his ruined wrist. Blood ran down the underside of his arm. If he didn't get a tourni-quet on it soon—

"Don't wait for that weed-brained Haley to swoop down in his Huey, Georgie-Boy. Some things, a man's gotta do for hisself. And a fixer-upper like you, some-body who's a real handyman—course, you're only half as handy as you used to be, ain't you?"

George wanted to scream at Old Leatherneck to shut up and go away. But George needed him, needed that taunting inner voice as badly as ever. Walking the lonely roads and horse trails of the Korban estate, he'd taken what companionship he could find. Sure, some of the folks down at Stony Hampton's cafe whispered about spooks and such around the manor, but after Nam, George figured the scariest spooks were the kinds that sent their sons into battle.

So when he'd seen the flicker of pale movement in-side the shed, he hadn't given the whispers much of a thought. He'd figured it was a possum or maybe a screech owl. Nothing that would have caused much damage. But George was paid to keep the place up and the critters out, or, as Miss Mamie said, "Just the way things were when Ephram was still lord and master here." So George had lifted the old metal latch and pushed open the creaking door, hoping that any snakes were scared away by the noise.

"But it wasn't no possum, nor no screech owl, was it?" whispered Old Leatherneck. George's eyes popped open. He must have drifted off. That was another one of Haley's signs. The two-by-four across his chest rose and fell with his shallow breathing. The sun had slipped low, the dark angles of shadows sharp and thick in the carnage.

Fear gave him a burst of energy, and he levered the two-by-four. His stub of a wrist screamed in fire-juice red.

"Hear that? Wasn't no possum, was it, Georgie?"

Now he wished the old bastard would shut up. He needed to focus, get the job done in a hurry, he didn't need—

"Might be sssnakes."

Or it might be—

— the long white slithery shadow—

—whatever trick his eyes had played on him as he'd stepped inside the shed. Because if a fellow couldn't trust his own eyes, his days as a to-the-sixteenth-inch handyman were numbered. But right now, all that mat-tered was—

— that slippery shadow that you could see right through—

—the next push, prying that ceiling joist off his left arm. His chest erupted in hot blue sparks of pain, hell-blazer blue, a blue so intense it was almost white. But the joist gave a little groan and inched upward, awak-ening the nailed nerves in his biceps.

"She's moving, soldier! She's a-moving! And the pain ain't nothing, is it? Hell, we been through boo-koos of this kind of hurt. This is like a pansy-assed waltz through the daisies." A waltz. The long white shadow had been doing a waltz. Like a worn linen curtain blowing in the wind, only...

"Sure wasn't no screech owl's face, Georgie-Boy."

The shadow had a human face.

George gurgled and the spit trickled down his cheek. He pried again and the joist lifted another cruel and precious inch. New colors of pain came, pus yellow, electric green, screaming violet, crazed ribbons of agony. A big section of the roof quivered-and the am-putated hand worked free of its wooden skewer, fell and bounced off his forehead and away.

But George barely noticed, because he was back in the tunnel, riding the miners' rails. And he was round-ing that slow curve into darkness, that final rum away from the bothers of breathing.

And suddenly he knew what was around the bend.

She would be waiting, the white shadow with the large round begging eyes, the thing with arms spread wide, one hand holding that dead bouquet of flowers. She looked even more afraid than George. Just before the shed collapsed, he'd seen the long see-through tail wrig-gling under the lace hem of her gown, a tail as scaly as a—

"The snakes crawl at night, Georgie."

"No, they don't," George said, voice hoarse and weak. "I know, because I looked it up." He was weeping because he realized he couldn't re-member his mama's name. But sorrow didn't matter now, neither did the pain, nor the nails in his flesh, nor the missing hand, nor the dust filing his lungs, nor the creeping night. Even Old Leatherneck was nothing, just a distant jungle ghost, a cobweb, an echo.

Al that mattered were the miners' rails and that turn in the bend, and the tunnel opening into a deeper, air-less blackness. A black beyond the colors of pain.

She was waiting. With company.

Johnny Cash was right, and the encyclopedia was wrong.

The snakes did crawl at night.

CHAPTER 4

Mason was tired from his walk along the wagon trails. He'd spent the afternoon trying to clear his head, relishing the solitude and quiet of the mountain forest that surrounded the estate. Out there, under the ancient hardwood trees, nobody had any expectations of him. He didn't have to be a hot new artist, he wasn't the repository for his mother's hopes and dreams, he had no obligation to prove his worth to the world's most un-forgiving father. On the grounds of Korban Manor, he was just another loser with a bag of tricks.

The foyer was nearly empty when Mason returned to the manor just before sunset. He nodded at an el-derly couple who wore matching jackets, their shirt-sleeves laced, drinks poised. Roth and a dark-skinned woman were talking, Roth miming as if he were snap-ping a photograph. The gaunt maid stood at the foot of the stairs, hands clasped behind her back, staring at the portrait of Korban. Mason waved to Roth and crossed the room, careful to avoid looking into the fireplace. He was afraid he'd see something that probably wasn't there. He touched the maid on the shoulder. She spun as if electrocuted, and Mason stepped back and held his hands apart.

"Sorry to startle you. Are you the one showing us our rooms?"

She forced a smile and nodded. Mason squinted to read the brass nameplate fixed to her chest. Lilith.

"Name, please?" Her voice was barely above a whis-per. Roth's laughter boomed from the other end of the room, no doubt fueled by one of his own jokes.

"Jackson," Mason said.

"Mr. Jackson, you're late." She tried a smile again, but it flitted across her pale face and settled into the shadows of her mouth. "Second floor, end of the south wing."

"I hope we've got bathrooms," he said, trying for bumpkin humor. "I know we're supposed to go back in time, but I didn't see an outhouse anywhere."

"Shared baths for adjoining rooms only," she said, already heading up the stairs. "You have a private bath. Follow me, please."

Mason took a last look back at the fireplace, then at Korban's giant face. Even with dead eyes and confined to two dimensions, the man had charisma. But then, so had David Koresh, Charles Manson, and Adolf Hitler. And Mason's father. The gallery of assholes. Mason shook his head and started up the stairs. Lilith hadn't offered to carry his satchel. Maybe she'd noticed how possessively he clung to it, or maybe the chivalry and manners of the nineteenth century stil held sway here.

Lilith glided over the oak treads with a swish of her long dress. If she was going for big-city Goth, she cer-tainly had the sickly complexion for it. She moved with a grace that belied her brittle features. Judging from her bony hands and the angles of her skul, Mason ex-pected her to clatter when she walked.

The second floor was as grand as the first, with the same high ceiling and wainscoting. A pair of chande-liers hung above the great hallway, each with cream-colored candles stuck in a silver ring and surrounded by crystal teardrops. Astral lamps burned at eye level every twenty feet, the flames throwing enough light to shrink the shadows along the wood trim. Rows of three solid maple doors lined both walls, and oil landscapes were set at intervals between the rooms. The art was of high quality, al of manor scenery. One of the paintings was of the wooden bridge that Mason and the guests had crossed, and the image brought back memories of his light-headed panic. It, like the other paintings, bore no artist's signature.

Huge portraits of Korban, with different lighting ef-fects than the one in the foyer but possessing the oblig-atory scowl of the era, hung at each end of the hall.

"Nice paintings," he said to Lilith.

"Mr. Korban lived for his art. We all did."

"Oh, are you one of us?" He meant it as humor. Either he was too worried about his imminent failure as a sculptor or she was preoccupied, but the joke fell as flat as canvas.

"I used to be," Lilith replied.

They passed an open door and Mason looked inside. Jefferson Spence's bulk was overwhelming a wooden swivel chair as the writer unpacked papers and spread them across a desk. Miss Seventeen was nowhere in sight. Mason noticed that the room only had one bed, then quickly looked away, chiding himself for being nosy. Lilith led him before a door at the end of the hall. It creaked as she pushed it open. She stood aside so Mason could enter, her eyes on the floor.

"Thanks," Mason said. His battered suitcase, a Samp-sonite with electrician's tape holding the handle together, was already inside the room. The suite was large with a king-sized wooden poster bed, cherry desks, matching chestnut bureaus, and round-topped nightstands. Tall rectangular windows were set in the south and west wals, and Mason realized the room would get sunlight throughout the day. That was a luxury at a place that had no electricity. The setting sun suffused the room with a honey-colored warmth.

"Wow. This must be one of the better rooms," he said.

The maid stil waited outside, as if afraid to breathe the room's air.

"It's the master suite," she said. "It used to be Ephram Korban's bedroom."

"Is that why his portrait's on the wal?" Mason said, nodding to the painting that hung above the bedroom's large fireplace. It was a smaler version of the painting that hung in the foyer, of a slightly younger Korban. The eyes, though, were just as black and bottomless, and the faintest hint of a smile played across those so-cruel lips.

"Miss Mamie chose this room especially for you," Lilith said without emotion. "She said you've come highly recommended."

Mason tossed his satchel on the bed. The tools clinked duly together. "I hope I can live up to her expectations."

"Nobody has yet." Lilith still waited outside the door. If she was joking, there was no sign of it in her wan face.

"Uh, I don't know much about places like this," he said, putting a hand in his pocket, falling back on his

"Aw, shucks" routine. He'd learned that people were more forgiving if they thought he was a dumb hick be-cause their expectations were lower. He achieved the same effect with his southern drawl, though that was mostly unintentional. He secretly suspected his success at Adderly had been due to the sophisticated instruc-tors'

amazement that a country rube could break the confines of his heritage and actually compete in the ranks of the cultural elite. "You might think I'm stupid, but am I supposed to tip you?"

"No, of course not. And Miss Mamie would kill me if you tried." Lilith managed a smile, relieved at being dismissed. She was even attractive, in a nervous, pallid way, like a princess whose head was due to roll. She wasn't as pretty as the stuck-up woman with the cyan eyes, but Lilith probably wasn't contemptuous of artists if she herself was one.

Lilith pointed to the door on the west wall. "The bath-room's in there."

"Fine." He sat on the bed.

"Is that all?"

"Unless you want to take off my shoes for me."

She took a hesitant step forward, staring at the floor.

"Hey, I was just kidding." He gave a laugh that sounded like a horse choking on an apple. Lilith flashed her feverish smile again, then said, "Dinner's at eight sharp, Mr. Jackson. Don't be late. Miss Mamie wouldn't like it."

Then she was gone. Mason turned his attention once more to the furnishings. A lamp stood on each night-stand, an oval glass base filled with heavy oil and en-cased in brass workings. A fire crackled away in the hearth, a stack of split locust and oak piled near the stonework. It was a miracle the old place hadn't burned down in all these years. Mason leaned back on the pil-lows and stared at the hand-swirled patterns in the gyp-sum ceiling.

Okay, Mase, this is what you wanted bad enough to go to all that trouble for. You did everything but stand naked in front of the Arts Council grant committee and shake your goodies. You swayed the critics, sold your brand of snake oil, and now you've taken maybe the biggest step of your career. Maybe even your life. Because if you don't produce any salable work here, you 're looking at another foodstamp Christmas in Sawyer Creek.

And you'll have to look Mama in the eye, even if she can't look back at you, and tell her you failed, that your dreams weren't strong enough, that you didn't be-lieve in them enough. Diabetic retinopathy. A rapid deterioration of her vi-sion, except she'd never said a word even as the tunnel closed in. She'd lied to the doctors long enough for the condition to pass the point of no return, and Mason had only found out when it was too late. She was too young for Medicare and not poor enough for Medicaid, but still could have gone ahead and run up the bills and then declared bankruptcy later. However, that would have depleted the meager savings she'd set aside for his education. Mason had wasted the money at Adderly, beating on hunks of wood and metal, trying to turn them into dreams. The worst part was that Mason didn't know whether to admire her for her sacrifice or despise her for being so noble. Now she was scraping by on disability and whatever little bit Mason could afford to give her out of his factory paycheck. But that job was gone now, lost because of his pursuit of art. And still Mama was his greatest fan.

"Don't ever let go of your dreams, honey," she said through teeth she couldn't afford to repair. "That's all we got in this world, is dreams."

Mason rolled to his feet and paced the room. It was the same way he paced when he was anxious about an idea, when he felt the itch in his fingers, when some new sculpture began to take shape in his mind. It was the same mixture of excitement and dread, excitement that the new idea was the best ever, and dread in know-ing that the finished product could never match the dream image. Except, this time, the anxiety wasn't the by-product of exhilaration.

This retreat was the biggest of his big dream images. He'd already decided that if no direction or recognition came from his time at Korban Manor, he would toss his tools off the old wooden bridge that separated Korban Manor from the rest of the world. Sure, the heights would give him trouble, but he could crawl blind if necessary. He'd listen to the metal clanging and clatter-ing off the far rocks below, then he'd alow the blisters and caluses to heal while he found a real job.

He always knew that creativity came at a price. You had to pay the price even for a chance at failure. Doctors and lawyers spent ten years in colege and paid tens of thousands of dollars. Criminals paid with the risk of lost freedom. Priests gave up pleasures of the flesh. Soldiers faced an even greater cost. Artists paid with other things, the cheapest of which was pain. Not that he minded suffering for his art. He just didn't think Mama should suffer for it. He looked down and saw that his fists were clenched into angry hammers, the rage nearly making him drunk.

He stopped pacing and leaned against the window, looking through the old-fashioned rippled glass to the manor grounds. Even though he was only two stories up, he had to grip the molding to keep the dizziness at bay. The woman he'd talked to earlier stood by the fence, petting a horse. The sunset gilded the horizon and the gentle light made her ethereal and beautiful, a fairy-tale princess floating above the grass. The green roling fields, the shimmering sky, the sparkling lake at the foot of the pasture, and the seemingly weightless woman al seemed locked away in a dream.

And, according to his father, dreams were a god-damned waste of good daylight. Mason went into the bathroom. The plumbing was primitive, though the fixtures were as ornate as the rest of the house. A cast-iron tub sat in the corner. The sink was marble, with gleaming chrome spigots and a framed mirror. He faced the ceramic toilet and relieved himself, noting the small siphon tank set high on the wall. The pipes behind the wal jumped and quivered when he flushed. He washed his hands at the sink, glancing in the mirror. Though the water was cold, the mirror fogged.

He wiped at it with the sleeve of his shirt. Still the haze remained. He frowned at his bleary reflection. The face in the mirror seemed a litle slow in respond-ing, the sad and tired face of a condemned prisoner. When he returned to the room, his tools were spread across his bed. They almost seemed to taunt him, dar-ing him to take them up and fail. He didn't remember taking them out of the satchel. Was he that uptight and distracted?

The portrait of Korban glowered down at him, the imagined smile gone. Korban was just another task-master, a demanding and cold critic. An observer, out-side the creative process, but ready to judge something that no one but the creator could understand. Just an-other asshole with an opinion.

Mason went to the tools, drawn as always by then-power. He bent to them, touched the fluters, chisels, hammers, and gouges, took comfort in their edges and weight. They ached to feed, they needed Mason's fin-gers to help them shape their world. And Mason needed them in turn, a symbiotic addiction that would create as much as it destroyed. He turned his back to Korban's portrait, then wiped the tools with a chamois cloth until they gleamed in the firelight.

"We can just push the beds together," Adam said.

"Yeah, and when you rol over in your sleep, you'll be the one whose ass falls into the crack."

"Wonder what kind of bed the married couples got."

"Probably a swinging harness rigged to the bed-posts, with a mirror on the ceiling."

"Don't act so persecuted, Paul. This will be romantic, like in the old days when we used to snuggle on your sister's couch."

"Yeah, until Sis found out. That was a scene that won't make it into a Disney family special." Adam sighed. If only Paul weren't so hardheaded. They would make do. They always had. And God wasn't out to punish people like them, despite the vehement rants of the rabid right wing.

"Listen," Adam said. "We'll push both beds side-ways against the wall, and you can have the back. If anybody rolls off in the night and knocks his head on the floor, it'll be me." Paul rubbed his hair in exasperation. A few strands of it stood up, dirty-blond and wavy, young Robert Redford hair. That, combined with his half-lidded eyes and thick eyelashes, made him look sleepy. Adam liked that sleepy look. It was one of the things that had first attracted him to Paul.

"Okay," Paul said. "I'll quit griping now. This is sup-posed to be a second honeymoon." Adam smiled. Paul's tirades never lasted long. "Does this mean I get my virginity back?" Paul pulled one of the feather pillows from under the blankets and threw it.

Adam knocked it away easily. "Say, did you get a load of Miss Mamie?"

"She could pass for a drag queen if she had a little neck stubble." They laughed together. Adam said, "You don't mince words. And you don't mince anything else, ei-ther."

"I'll mince your meat if you're not careful. And that's why you love me."

"Well, that's one of the reasons."

"Let's get unpacked. I want to go out and meet some people."

"That's exactly like you," Adam said. "We go eight hundred miles to get away from it al, then you have to swing right into the middle of the social scene."

"Live to party, Princess."

"Hey, it's my inheritance we're throwing away here. And don't think I'm going to let you forget it." Paul gave his fake pout in reply.

Adam carried their luggage to the closet. Paul had three matching suitcases and a heavy-duty case for his video camera. Adam had only a gym bag and a back-pack.

"Besides," Adam said, "when the money runs out, we can always rent that tremendously gorgeous body out for Calvin Klein commercials."

"As long as I don't have to pose nude with Kate Moss. She gives me the willies."

"If she gets a look at you, she'll want to carry your baby."

"Like that wil ever happen."

"Hey, come on. You'd make a cute dad."

"Don't start that," Paul said.

Adam began puting Paul's cotton shirts on hangers, careful to keep his back turned. He didn't want his dis-appointment to show. Paul was dead set against adop-tion, against that ultimate long-term commitment. And nobody could be as dead set as Paul.

"Sorry," Adam said, his words muffled by the closet. "I just thought, out here in the wilderness, away from our old life and all the pressures—"

"I said not to start."

"You said we could talk about it when we got here."

"But I didn't mean right away. I want to relax a litle, and you're making me all tense."

"Let's not fight. It's a bad way to start a vacation."

"I need to work some, too. How can I get anything done if you're bugging me about that 'settling down' crap?" " Adam sighed into the dark hollow of the closet. He finished puting away the clothes, then pretended to be interested in what was going on outside the window. Paul would have run geting some footage here. A nice, peaceful nature documentary for an uptight Boston boy.

They had a room on the third floor, smaler than the ones he'd seen while the maid was leading them up-stairs. The window was set in a gable. The entire upper floor, including wals and angled ceilings, was covered with varnished tongue-in-groove boards. On the way up, Adam had asked the maid about a narrow ladder that led to a smal trapdoor in the roof. She told them it went to the widow's walk and that guests weren't al-lowed up there. She said it with what Adam thought was nervousness and a dismissive haste. He wondered if, during some past retreat, a guest had suffered an ac-cident there.

He turned from the window, ready to make peace. If he could get Paul talking about video, the spat would soon be forgotten. "So, do you think you brought enough tape?"

"Got enough for eight hours. Too bad the budget didn't allow for me to get a Beta SP camera. I'm stuck with crappy digital."

"Wel, you're freelancing for public television. What do you expect, the budget for Titanic minus Leo Di-Caprio's dialogue coach?"

"Hey, I'd be happy with his hairstylist's budget. Docu-mentary grants are at the bottom of the list for funding these days. Maybe I should go into 'Mysteries of the Unexplained Enigmas and Other Offbeat Occult Pheno-mena.' With al this talk about the manor being haunted, who knows?"

Adam smiled, counting a victory whenever Paul slipped into sarcastic humor. Paul wouldn't take any money from Adam to subsidize his videos, but other-wise he had no qualms about being a "kept man." Paul stretched out on one of the narrow beds and stared at the ceiling. Maybe he was visualizing the edit of some sequence.

"Tell you what," Adam said. "I'll see if I can arrange to be abducted by space aliens while you roll the cam-era."

"I hear they do all kinds of bizarre sexual experi-ments."

"Sounds better every minute."

"Hey, what can they do that I can't do better?"

Adam crossed the room. Paul had that sleepy look again. "Kiss me, you fool." Paul did. Adam felt eyes watching them. Strange.

"What?" Paul asked, his voice husky.

"Don't know," Adam said. He looked around. No one could possibly see in the window from outside, and the door was locked. Besides the furniture, the only thing in the room was an oil painting, a smaller replica of the man's portrait that hung in the foyer.

I'm not going to be paranoid. It's okay to be gay, even in the rural South. It's OKAY to get back to na-ture. This love is as real as anything in this world.

He slid into bed beside Paul, wondering if the old geezer Korban would disapprove of two boys boffing under his roof. Who cared? Korban was dead, and Paul was very much alive. October was a hunter, its prey the green beast of summer. The wind moved over the hills like a reluctant hawk; wings wide, talons low, hard eyes sweeping. Beneath its golden and frosty skin, the earth quaked in the wind of the hawk's passing. The morning held its gray breath. Each tender leaf and blade of grass trem-bled in fear.

Jefferson Spence looked down at the keys of the old manual Royal. "Horse teeth," the keys were called. George Washington had horse teeth, according to leg-end. Spence knew he was wasting time, finding any distraction to keep him from starting another sentence. He stared into the bobbing flame of the lantern on his desk.

He looked up at Ephram Korban's face on the wall. In this very room, twenty years before, Spence had written Seasons of Sleep, a masterpiece by all ac-counts, especially Spence's own. All his novels since had fallen short, but maybe the magic would return.

Words were magic. And maybe old Korban would let slip a secret or two, bestow some hidden wisdom gleaned from all those years on the wall.

"What," Spence said to the portrait, his voice filling the room, "are you trying to say?" Bridget called from the bathroom in her soft Georgia drawl. "What's that, honey?"

"To have and have not," he said.

"What is it you don't have? I thought we packed everything."

"Never mind, my sweet. A Hemingway allusion is best saved for a more appreciative audience." Spence had collected Bridget during a summer writ-ing workshop at the University of Georgia. He had led the workshop during the day and spent his evenings cooling off in the bars of Athens. Most of the sopho-more seminar students had joined him for the first few nights, but his passion for overindulgence and his brusque nature had caused the group to dwindle. By Thursday of the first week, only the faithful still or-bited like bright satellites gravitating toward the black hole of Spence's incalculable mass. Three of those were eligible in Spence's eyes: a bronze-skinned African goddess with oily curls; a hol-low-cheeked blonde who had a devilish way of licking her lips and an unhealthy appetite for the works of Richard Brautigan; and the tender Bridget. As always,

a couple of male students had also crowded his elbows and plied writing tips from him in exchange for drinks. Spence had litle patience with writers. His best advice was to spend time in front of the keyboard instead of in front of bar mirrors. But, to Spence, women's minds were simpler and therefore uncluttered with literary pretensions. He had selected Bridget precisely because she was the most innocent, and therefore would be the least corrupted of the three choices. With her fresh skin and clean hair, her simple and naive speech, her down-home manners and bele grace, she was everything that Spence wasn't. She was a lamb in a world of wolves. And Spence was pleased that he'd goten the first bite.

He'd lured her to his hotel room that weekend with the promise of showing her his latest manuscript. "Not even my agent has seen it," he'd said, swimming in a haze of vodka. "Consider yourself blessed, my sweet." She stayed the night, clumsily undressing as he watched. She shyly turned her back when she un-snapped her bra, and Spence smiled when she faced him with her arms covering her breasts. His was a smile of approval, but not for her physical qualities, as delightful as those were. He was pleased with himself for such a perfect conquest, such a decadent notch in his triggerless gun.

She hadn't complained or expressed surprise when he didn't attempt intercourse. A few women had actu-ally ridiculed him, him, Jefferson Davis Spence, the next last great southern writer, just because he was im-potent. But Bridget only lay meekly next to him while he stroked her as if she were a pet cat. Her warmth was comforting in the night. After a few weeks, she'd even stopped trembling beneath his touch.

That had been four months ago, and he figured she was probably good for at least another half a year. Then, as with all the others, the scales would fall from her eyes, the sexual frustration and the endless servi-tude would wear her down, until going back to colege and getting a degree seemed a much better career choice than watching the great Jefferson Spence barrel headlong toward his first coronary. Then Spence would find himself alone, desperately alone, with nothing but himself and his thoughts, himself and words, himself and the monster he had crafted inside his own head.

He looked down at the paper that was scrolled into the Royal. Six years. Six years, and al he had to show for it was this paragraph that he'd rewritten three hun-dred times. It was the same paragraph with which he'd lured Bridget that first time, the one he didn't even dare show his agent or editor. He'd known the time had ar-rived to get away from it al, seek a fresh perspective, summon those arcane Muses. If there was any place where he could recapture the magic, it was Korban Manor.

He placed his fingers on the keys. The shower came on in the bathroom, and Bridget began singing in her small, pretty voice. "Stand By Me," the old Ben King song. He typed "stand by me" under his opening para-graph, then clenched his teeth and ripped the page out of the carriage. He tore the sheet of paper into four pieces and let the scraps fluter to the floor.

Spence leaned back in his chair and looked out the window. The treetops were swaying in the wind that had arisen with the approaching dusk. He imagined the smells of autumn, of fallen apples bruised and sweet under the trees, of birch leaves crumpling under boot heels, of cherry bark spliting and leaking rubbery jew-eled sap, of pumpkin pies and chimney smoke. If only he could find the words to describe those things. Spence turned his attention back to the portrait of Korban on the wal. He thought about walking into the bathroom and watching Bridget soap herself up. But she might try to excite him. Each new beauty always thought she would be the one, out of dozens who had tried, to overcome what he called "the Hemingway curse." And with each fresh failure, Spence felt angry and humbled. Though he welcomed anger, he loathed humility.

He cursed under his breath and rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter. The paper was heavy, a twenty percent cotton mix. Worthy paper. The words would come. They had to come. He commanded them to come.

Spence stared into the face of Korban. "What should I write, sir?"

The portrait stared back, its eyes oil-black.

Spence's fingers hit the keys, the clattering motion vi-brated through the desk and echoed off the wooden floor, the carriage return's bell rang every thirty seconds.

The house sat amid the breasts of hills, among swells, above rivers, above all Earth, reaching where only the gods could dwell. And in the house, in the high lonely window from which he could see the world that would be his, the man smiled.

They had come, they had answered his call, those who would give him life. They would sing his songs, they would carve his name into their hearts, they would paint him into the sky. They came with their po-etries, their images, their fevered words, their dreams. They came bearing gifts, and he would give unto them likewise—

Spence was so lost in his writing, lost as he had not been in years, that he didn't notice when Bridget walked nude and steaming into the room. He worked feverishly, his tongue pressed against his teeth. The gift was returning, flowing like blood through forgotten veins. He didn't know whom to thank, Bridget, Korban, or some unseen Muse.

He'd worry about that later. For now, the words car-ried Spence beyond himself.

CHAPTER 5

Anna looked down at her plate. The prime rib oozed juices and steam, and ordinarily would have been tempt-ing enough to chalenge her vegetarian principles. The softly boiled broccoli sprouts and red potatoes had eli-cited several exploratory stabs of her fork. The apple pie's crust was so tender it flaked all over the china plate. As she watched the sugary lava of the pie filling flow between the crumbs, she wondered what it would be like to worry about dieting. She glanced across the dining room at Jefferson Spence and saw no hesitation in that man's fork. She took a few hasty mouthfuls of the vegetables, then pushed the food around a little so it would look as if she had eaten wel. The way Miss Mamie fussed over dinner proceedings, Anna almost felt guilty about not appreciating the food.

The dining room was a long hall just off the main foyer. The room contained four tables, a long one in the center occupied by the people that Anna secretly thought of as "the uberculture." The other, smaler ta-bles were relegated to the corners. Apparently Miss Mamie had tried to match people of similar interests when she made out the seating charts. That meant putting all the below-fifties at the smaller tables. Anna was sitting with Cris and the dark-skinned wo-man whom Anna had seen carrying a camera earlier. To her left was the guy she'd talked to on the porch, the sullen sculptor. Though his face was plain, something about his green-brown eyes kept drawing her attention. A secret fire buried deep. Or maybe it was only the reflection of the two candles that burned in the center of the table. Or an il-lusion created by her own desperate solitude.

Cris had mumbled a prayer before dinner. The dark-skinned woman had also bowed her head. Anna wasn't compelled to join in their ritual and instead took the opportunity to study their faces. The sculptor had kept his head down but his eyes open. Then Anna had seen what he was looking at: a fly circled the edge of his plate, dipping a tentative feeler into the brown gravy.

She'd hidden her smile as he surreptitiously tried to blow it away. When Cris said, "Amen," he quickly whisked his cloth napkin out of his lap and waved it with a flourish. The fly headed toward the oil lamps that burned in the chandeliers overhead. Anna watched its flight, and when she turned her attention back to dinner, the sculptor was looking at her.

"Darned thing was about to carry off my dinner," he said. "Evil creature."

"Maybe it was Beelzebub," she said. "Lord of the flies."

"Beelzebubba's more like it. It's a southern fly."

Anna laughed for the first time in weeks. Her table-mates looked at them with furrowed brows. The man introduced himself to them as Mason and said he was a retired textile worker from the foothills. "I'm also an aspiring sculptor," he said. "But don't confuse me with Henry Moore or anything."

"Didn't he play James Bond?" Cris asked.

"No, that was Roger Moore."

He politely waved off the wine when the maid, Lilith, brought the carafe around. Anna took a glass herself, though she had no intention of taking more than a few sips. The conservatism that came with a death sentence had surprised her. When you only have a litle time left, you try to heighten your experience, not dul it. Her eyes wandered to Mason again. He was watch-ing Lilith as if he was interested in more than just a sec-ond helping of hot rols. She was both annoyed and surprised when a flare of jealousy raced across her heart. She despised pettiness and, besides, possessiveness was the last vice a dying person should suffer. Stephen had taught her that you could never understand another per-son, much less own one, and the idea of soul mates was best limited to romance novels. She took a gulp of wine and let the mild sting of alcohol distract her, then intro-duced herself to the dark-skinned woman. The woman was named Zainab and had been born in Saudi Arabia. She was Arabian-American, but only indirectly from oil money; her father had been an engi-neer at Aramco. Zainab came to the U.S. to attend Stan-ford, back before everyone from the Middle East had to jump through flaming hoops to immigrate here, and now wanted to be a photographer "when she grew up."

"In America, you get to be grown up when you're fourteen," Anna said. "At least if you believe the fash-ion magazines. Of course, when you reach forty, you're expected to look twenty-five."

"Hey," Cris said, polishing off her third glass of wine. "I'm thirty going on twenty-nine. Guess that means I'm headed in the right direction."

Anna chopped at her pie a little more, then pushed the dessert plate away. Cris leaned toward Mason, her eyelashes doing some serious flutering.

"So, what do the guys in the foothills do for fun?" Cris asked.

"We go down to the Dumpsters behind the local café and throw rocks at the rats. The rats in Sawyer Creek eat better than the welfare families."

"I bet the rats live well around here," Cris said.

Not a smooth move, Anna thought. Talk of rodents does not a bedmate beckon.

"We call it 'living high on the hog' back home," Mason said, shuddering in mock revulsion. "I was talk-ing to one of the handymen today. He told me about set-ting out steel traps, and burying the food scraps to keep the rats down. Garbage disposal is a big chore here."

"It's amazing the things we take for granted in a civ-ilized society," Anna said.

"Who's civilized?" Cris said, giggling. "Sounds like we're heading for one of those 'walked four miles through the snow to get to school' stories."

"It was 'four kilometers over sand dunes without a camel' where I grew up," said Zainab.

"I saw one of the maids with a basket of laundry. Not her," Anna said, frowning toward Lilith, who was uncorking a wine bottle at the main table. "Imagine what it must be like to hand-wash all these table linens and curtains, not to mention the sheets."

"Seems the sheets get a good workout around here, if you believe the rumors," Cris said.

"You mean the ghost stories?" Mason said.

Anna's breath caught in her throat. If she managed to contact any ghosts here, she didn't want a bunch of would-be necromancers holding midnight seances and playing with Ouija boards. She believed those sorts of disrespectful games sent ghosts running for the safety of the grave. And if she had a mission here, a last bit of business before her soul could rest, she preferred to handle it undistracted.

"I was talking about sex, but the ghost stories are in-teresting, too," Cris said. Her sibilants were starting to get a little mushy.

Strike two, Anna said to herself. A man who's an arrogant, tee-totaling prude probably doesn't want to swap tongues with someone whose mouth smells like a barroom.

She knew she was being catty. The last entangle-ment had cured her of desire. And she definitely had no romantic interest in the sculptor. Even if he did have strong hands, thick, wavy hair, those dreaming-awake eyes. Maybe what she had taken for sullenness was ac-tually insecurity. A shyness and hesitancy that was re-freshing compared to Stephen's self-righteousness, and—

Stop it right there, girl. Find something NOT to like about him.

There.

He chews with his mouth open and he has pie crumbs sticking to his chin.

Mason said, "According to William Roth—"

"Oh, I met him." Zainab's brown eyes lit up as she interrupted. "I actually got to talk to him. I've always admired his work, but he's not at all like you'd think a famous person would be. He's so down-to-earth. And he has the most wonderful accent."

"He's quite a character, all right."

"I think William is charming," Zainab said, looking at him seated at the main table where he seemed to be engaged in three conversations at once.

"What were you saying about ghosts?" Cris said, as if she'd just realized the subject had jumped track.

"Anna does that stuff—"

Anna cut her off with a look and a subtle shake of her head. She didn't want everyone to think she was a flake, at least not right away.

"Roth says Korban Manor is haunted, and he's going to try to take some pictures," Mason said. "And the handyman I met today sure seems a little spooked."

"Has anything weird happened to you guys since we got here?" Zainab asked. Mason frowned. "I don't know about ghosts. I'll believe them when I see them, I suppose. But old geezer Korban's pictures all over the place sure give me the creeps." He nodded to the portrait on the wall above the head of the main table.

"A big old place like this," Anna said, "you always have creaky boards and sudden drafts blowing from everywhere. And al these lamps and candles throw a bunch of flickering shadows. It's no wonder stories make the rounds."

"Sure," Mason said. "If there realy were ghosts, do you think all these people would keep coming back year after year?"

"And how could they keep any employees?" Anna said.

"Wel, I wouldn't mind seeing a ghost or two," Cris said, her cheeks bright. "Might liven the place up a bit. I like things that go bump in the night." Cris smiled at Mason in lewd punctuation.

Anna watched his reaction. This is it. Right over the heart of the plate. Strike three, or the long ball. Mason shrugged, seemingly oblivious to Cris's come-on. "I don't know. I'll believe it when I see it." A small, cheap glow of victory burned in Anna's chest. Then she despised herself for the feeling. What business was it of hers if Cris hooked up with this country boy? After Stephen, men didn't exist, anyway. Ghosts were far more solid and reliable than men were.

The conversation was broken when Miss Mamie rose from her seat at the head of the main table. She tapped her wineglass with a spoon, and the clatter of dishes and small talk died to a whisper. Lilith and the other maid stood at atention near the foyer, each hold-ing a silver pitcher.

"Ladies and gentlemen, lovely guests," Miss Mamie said, her voice filling the hall. She looked at the faces lining the main table, clearly enjoying the moment. "Friends."

Anna was already bored. She hoped the speech would be short. Miss Mamie drew in a breath as if she were a soprano about to leap into an aria.

"I'd like to welcome all of you to Korban Manor," Miss Mamie said. "As most of you know, this house was built in 1902 by my grandfather, Ephram Korban. After he passed on, God rest his soul, it came into my father's hands. We turned the manor into an artists' re-treat to fulfill Ephram's final request. Now it's my duty to carry on the legacy, and I do that with great pride and joy."

"And profit," cut in a British accent, and an uncer-tain laughter rippled across the room. Miss Mamie smiled. "That, too, Mr. Roth. But it's more than just a way to fund the estate's preservation. It's a labor of love, a continuation of Ephram's vision. He himself was an admirer of the arts. And I hope each of you finds fulfillment during your stay here, and in so doing, you'll help keep Ephram's dreams alive in your own way."

Anna sneaked a glance at Mason. He was staring at Miss Mamie with blatant curiosity. Hmmm. Maybe he's not as handsome as I first thought. His nose is a little long in profile. And his fin-gers are too thick. I'll bet he's clumsy with women.

Satisfied that she had found enough flaws, she sipped her wine. Miss Mamie was in the middle of stoking the collective artistic fires.

"—so I propose a toast, my friends," the hostess said, twiddling her pearls. She raised her wineglass to-ward the vaulted ceiling, then turned and tipped it to-ward the portrait of Korban. Most of the room joined her. Anna reached for her glass again, then changed her mind. Mason saw her and smirked. Asshole. Probably one of those "holier than thou " types. An artist with a superiority complex. Now, THERE'S a rarity.

She grabbed her glass. When Miss Mamie drank, Anna took a large gulp. It was house-bottled musca-dine, a little too sweet for swilling. But she took an extra swallow for good measure.

"You're welcome to join me in the study for after-dinner drinks and conversation," Miss Mamie concluded. "There's a smoking porch off the study as wel. Again, thank you for alowing us the pleasure of your company. Good evening."

The room erupted in chatter and ratling silverware. Cris wobbled slightly as she stood, and she put a hand on Mason's shoulder to balance herself. Anna pretended not to notice. She was after ghosts, damn it. Ghosts didn't make a fool out of you the way men always did.

She slipped away up the stairs. The lamps along the hall threw a warm glow over the woodwork. She en-tered the dark bedroom and stood by the window, look-ing over the dark manor grounds. The sky was fading into a deep periwinkle, soon to be smothered by the blackness creeping from the east, the moon rising faint and blue in the east.

She took her flashlight from the nightstand. At least one modern convenience had been allowed, probably on the demands of the manor's insurance provider. She turned the light on and played it across the walls, half expecting to see a restless spirit, but revealing only a spiderweb crack in the plasterboard.

She sighed. Ghoulie-chasing. That was what Stephen called it.

"Leave me to do the serious investigating," he'd say. "You can play at ghoulie-chasing." A ghost lived in this house. She knew it as surely as she knew that she was dying. And she would chase it to hel if she had to, because she wanted to be right for once in her life. At least, she wanted Stephen to know she had been right. Even if it was only her own ghost she found.

She collected a sweater and put the flashlight in her pocket. A long walk alone with the night would do her good.

Rubbish.

Rubbish and poppycock

Rubbish, poppycock, and swill.

William Roth ran through the derogatory nouns in his mind as he studied the books that lined the study walls. The books were all hardbacks, many with leather covers and gilded titles. The dust on them was proof of their dullness.

A jolly good put-on for the intelligentsia. Because the books are all poppycock and. . . claptrap. Yes, CER-TAINLY claptrap.

Precis of the French Revolution. The Diary of Sir Wendell Swanswight. Talmud. Juris Studis. They would make rather bully paperweights. The only thing they had going for them was that they fit the shelves perfectly. Roth sipped his scotch-and-water as he worked his way toward the small crowd that had gathered around Jefferson Spence. The great man's tremulous voice held forth on some didactic opinion or other. Spence went unchallenged by his admirers.

The Arab bird stood across the room, her ever-present camera around her neck. He mentally practiced her name, because it was difficult to fake a British accent while saying it. Zay-ih-nahb. He would have to teach her a few things about photographic codes of conduct. You don't blunder about like a rhino through the veldt. You stalk, you wait, you seduce your subject with infinite pa-tience and care, you lull, you caress, and then—flick, click, thank you, prick.

But he could get Zainab anytime. She was easy meat waiting to be culled from the herd. She was a crippled gazelle, and Roth was a lion. First he had bigger game to snare.

Wait a minute, bloke. Bad metaphor. You know from your time in Afrikker that a lioness does all the hunting while the lion lies around licking his balls. But the bloody Yanks don't know that. King of the Jungle, and that bit.

He was thinking in his Manchester accent. He had descended into Liverpudlian in the mid-nineties during that brief Beatles revival, then had gone Yorkshire in the wake of "The Full Monty." Fads came and went, and so did his accent. He occasionally slipped in a "righty-right" or "bit of the old what for," but Americans didn't notice his errors. The only time he had to be careful was when he met a real Brit. And a fat bloody chance of that here, he thought, smiling to himself. He had reached the edge of Spence's circle now.

"And they say there are hermeneutic elements in Look Homeward, Angel," Spence said, his jowls quiver-ing for emphasis. "I submit to you that Gant is no more than a symbol for the human heart. A flimsy extended metaphor propped up by a billion adjectives. If you sent that to an editor today, she'd say, 'Wonderful, now can you make it read like Grisham?' "

The eyes of the onlookers brightened with awe. This man was a master, a snake charmer. His ego was as ample as his belly. None dared to dispute his ephemeral pronouncements.

Spence drained half of his martini before continu-ing. "The worst book of the twentieth century?

Perhaps not. That jester's crown must go to Hemingway's A Move-able Feast. The critics raved about the undercurrent of tension that supposedly wends through the novel. Clap-trap. It is nothing but Hemingway-in-a-bottle, quintes-sential Ernest. Too earnestly Ernest, one might say." Spence paused for the requisite laughter. It came.

Roth smiled. Spence was as great a deceiver as Roth himself. And he played the celebrity game just as successfully. Roth was constantly amazed by people's hunger for idols. Bring on your false gods. The masses needed an opiate, and that bit.

Roth worked his way to Spence's left, edging be-tween a blue-haired biddie and an old chap with a hunched back. The cute litle bird with the nice knock-ers was at Spence's side. She hadn't spoken a word all evening, even during dinner. Roth knew, because he had watched her and Spence at their private table. Roth calculated the chances of working her for a bit of the old in-out. That would be a dandy feather in the cap. Spence blathered on about the moral instructions encodified in The Great Gatsby. The crowd nodded in approval, and occasionaly dared to murmur. Roth fig-ured the time was right to make his presence known. "I say, Mr. Spence, didn't some editor supposedly say, 'Fitzgerald, get rid of that Gatsby clown and you'll have yourself a good book'?"

All eyes turned to Roth and then back to Spence. The writer looked at Roth as if measuring the reach of an adversary. Then Spence smiled. "Purely apocryphal. Though it contains the seeds of possibility. Sir Wiliam Roth, is it?"

"Yes, a pleasure to meet you, my good man," Roth said, extending his hand. A tingle of pleasure surged through him as the "little people" oohed and aahed at this meeting of the gods. Spence polished off his drink and handed the empty glass to his shapely companion. "So what do you think of my analysis of Gatsby?"

"Scintillating. And I agree that Wolfe's book is ab-solute poppycock." Out of the corner of his eye, Roth watched the girl's shimmering rear as she walked to the bar.

Spence turned away from his admirers and squared off with Roth. The photographer nudged Spence toward the corner of the room. The crowd took its cue and broke into small groups, some stepping onto the porch for smokes, others refiling their drinks.

"What brings you to Korban Manor, Mr. Roth?"

Roth roled his scotch-and-water between his hands. "Business, sir. Always business with me."

"The devil, you say. That's just what the world needs, another four hundred negatives of this place. Or are you hired for a publicity shoot?"

"I'm freelancing."

"Hmmph. I'm working, too, if you can believe it."

Roth knew that Spence hadn't finished a novel in years. He had blustered his way through some opinion pieces and essays, and had penned a scathing introduc-tion to The New Southern Voices Collection that had likely driven some of the anthology's contributors to tears. The critics had given him up. He was like a beached whale—fun to poke while blood could be drawn, but shunned after becoming a bloated, gassy corpse.

"I would think this place would be rather inspiring for a man of your genius," Roth said, barely disguising the taunt.

Spence didn't rise to the bait. He'd probably read too many of his publisher's press releases, the ones that kept promising a coming masterpiece. "This is the one, Mr. Roth. This is the work that wil earn the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's about time an American brought home that particular piece of hardware. Nothing personal, mind you." Roth turned up one palm in submission. His British accent had fooled even Spence, a man who had trained himself to observe human behavior. Spence's girlfriend brought the writer his drink, put it in his hand, and du-tifully returned to his shadow.

Roth smiled at her and then began the laborious task of drawing Spence into his trust.

CHAPTER 6

I'm a ghoulie-chasing fool.

Anna let the yellow beam of the flashlight lead her as if she had no will of her own. She found herself heading up a forest trail, onto one of the narrower worn paths crowded by laurel. The waxy leaves brushed against her face and hands. Crickets and katydids launched their choruses from the obscurity of the dark forest. You follow and you follow and you never catch up. You reach out and they dance away. You run and they run faster. You look in the dark and see nothing but darkness.

Ghosts played by their own rules. Anna had a hunch that ghosts didn't need to unravel secrets, didn't de-mand explanations. Life's great mysteries must mean very little to those no longer living. Undoubtedly all spirits received the necessary explanations as a gift to welcome them to the afterlife. But perhaps the dead needed amusement. Eternity surely got tedious after a while.

Anna wasn't worried about getting lost in the woods, even though Korban Manor's lighted windows had disappeared from view. After leaving the house, she'd stopped by the barn and found four horses in their stalls. She had massaged their necks and stroked the bristling hairs above their noses. She was comforted by their warm animal smel. The aroma of straw and manure brought back memories of one of her foster families, who had kept a farm in West Virginia. Anna had grown into a woman that summer. Her first sexual experience was with the handsome but dul boy who came every other day to colect the eggs. She'd also spent hours in the weedy local cemetery, sit-ting among the crumbling, ilegible markers, wonder-ing about the people under the ground and the part of them that might have survived the crush of dirt and decay.

And still she wondered, her curiosity sending her into anthropology at Duke University and parapsychol-ogy at the Rhine Research Center, and now out into the night woods. Roads that never ended, a seeking that never found. The moon and a sprinkle of starlight gave vague shape to the landscape. She folowed the ridge to the point where the ground sloped rapidly away. Boulders gleamed like bad teeth in the weak light. Beyond the field of stone was a yawning gap of black valley, dusted silver by an early frost.

The ribs and ripples of the Blue Ridge Mountains roled out toward the horizon, the distant twinkle of the town of Black Rock set among them like blue and or-ange jewels. A jet's winking red light cut a dotted line in the east. A little flying tin can of humanity, some passengers probably afraid of a crash, some munching stale peanuts, others longing for a cigarette. Most with thoughts of relatives, spouses, and lovers recently vis-ited or waiting at airport terminals ahead.

All with places to go, things to look forward to. People to belong to. Hopes, dreams, futures. Life. She thought of that Shirley Jackson line, "Journeys end in lovers meeting." Yeah, right. Journeys end in death, and lovers never meet.

She turned from the lights that were starting to blur in her vision and put aside her self-pity. She had a for-est to explore. And she felt a tingle in her gut, an in-stinct that she had learned to trust even if Stephen couldn't prove it was real. There were dead among these trees and hills.

She sometimes wondered if the cancer was a pro-gression of that instinct. As if death were her true nat-ural state, and life was only an interruption to be briefly endured. As if, by rights, she belonged to the dead and that her sense of them grew stronger the closer she got to becoming one of them. That was morbid thinking. Still, she couldn't ignore the Jungian symbolism of turning her back on those dim, distant lights of civilization to enter the dark for-est alone. In search of herself. This is my life's work. If I can leave just one thing behind, if I can shed a little light into the ignorant and blind caves of the human consciousness, then maybe it's worth it. Or maybe I'm more vain than any artist, politician, or religious zealot in thinking that my be-liefs matter. Wouldn't it be nice to love, to belong, to be con-nected? To know that there was more to your time of breathing than the rush toward its end? What if it WERE possible to meet another spirit, touch someone, share the science of souls, to create something that has a life beyond living and dying? Or is such wishing only a more grotesque form of vanity?

She stared at the cone of battery-powered light as it bobbed ahead of her on the trail. The older she got, and the closer to death and the deeper into her search she found herself, the more alone she became. And if there was anything that frightened her, that could frighten someone who had seen ghosts, it was the thought that any soul or consciousness or life force that continued beyond death would do so alone, forever isolated, for-ever lost. Anna figured she was about a mile from the manor now. She was beginning to tire. That was one of the things she hated most about her illness. Her strength was slowly draining away, slipping from this life into the next. She paused and played the flashlight along the ridge ahead of her. Night noises crept from beneath the canopy of hardwoods, the stirring of nocturnal animals and the restless mountain wind. A breath of pine-cleansed air and the cold dampness of the early twi-light revived her. The trail had intersected with several larger ones, and she had earlier crossed another wagon road. She folowed her instinct, the one that carried her through the night like the moon pulled a restless tide.

The trail widened under a copse of balsams, then opened onto a meadow of thick grass. A shack over-looked the clearing, frail and wobbly on its stilts of stacked rock. A crumbling chimney, gray in the dim starlight, penetrated the slanted tin roof. The glass sheets of the windows were like dark eyes watching for company.

This was what Anna had been sent to find. She waded through the meadow, her pants cuffs soaked by the frosted grains of grass. A large rounded stone was set at the foot of the porch, as pale as the bely of a fish. She stepped on the stone and peered into the dark doorway.

The house wanted her.

Maybe not the house, but whoever had lived and then died here. Something had bound a human soul to this place, an event terrible enough to leave a psychic imprint, much the way light burned through the emul-sion on a photographic negative.

The air hummed with inaudible music. The tiny hairs on the back of Anna's neck stood like magnetized nee-dles. Despite the chil of night, her armpits were sweaty. A preternatural fear coursed through her veins, threat-ening to override her curiosity.

Something hovered beyond the door, wispy and frail as if unfamiliar with its own substance. Or perhaps it was only the wind blowing through some chink in the board-and-batten wals. Anna shined the flashlight on a knothole just above the door handle. A flicker of white shadow filled the hole, then dissolved.

Anna put her other foot on the stone porch. A form, a face, imprinted itself in the grain of the door. A small voice skirled in on the wind, soft and hol-low as a distant flute: "I've been waiting." Anna fought the urge to run. Though she believed in ghosts, the sudden strangeness of encountering one al-ways hit her like a dash of ice water. And this one ... this one talked.

Anna backed away, the flashlight fixed on the door.

"Don't go," came the cold and holow voice. Anna's muscles froze. She fought with her own body as her heartbeat thundered in her ears. The voice came again, smaller, pleading: "Please." It was a child's voice. Anna's fear mixed with sym-pathy, melded into a need to comprehend. Did young ghosts stay young forever?

Anna stepped up onto the porch. The boards creaked under her feet. Something flutered under the eaves and then joined the night sky. A bat.

"What do you want?" Anna said, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice. Her flashlight beam on the door revealed only wood and rusted hardware.

"Are you her?"

"Her?"

"Help me," came the plaintive voice again, fading now, almost lost. "Help us." Anna lifted the iron catch and pushed the door open, playing the flashlight's beam into the house. She glimpsed a tiny figure, a young face outlined by long locks of hair, a few folds of soft fabric flowing be-neath the begging eyes. The threads of the vision were unraveling.

"Stay," Anna said, both a request and a desperate command.

But the shape faded, the ghostly lips parted as if to speak, and then there were only the eyes, floating, floating, becoming wisps of lesser shadow, then noth-ing. The eyes had burned into Anna's memory. She would never forget them. The eyes had looked— haunted.

"Helo?" Anna called. The word died in the holow shell of the shack. She moved the light across the room. A few shelves stood to one side, a rough beam of wood spanning the black opening of the fireplace. A long table marked off what had been the kitchen area. A row of crude, hand-carved figurines stood on the table, their gnarled limbs protruding at grotesque an-gles.

Anna touched one of the figurines. It was about a foot tall, not lacquered or painted, the wood dark and bone-dry with age. The body was made from a chopped root, the arms and legs shaped from twisted jackvine. The head was a wrinkled piece of fruit, brown like dried apple, the eyes and mouth set in a deformed grin. They appeared to be folk art, something an early Scots-Irish mountain settler had carved during long winter nights to amuse the children. But the figurines were arrayed on the table like religious relics. One was wrapped in a peeling sheet of birch bark that appeared to emulate a dress. Another wore a garland of dried and dead flowers.

Anna shined the flashlight on the nearest stooped statue. The crude opening of the mouth held a gray, pa-pery substance. Anna scratched at it with her fingernail and it fell to the table. Anna identified the object in-stantly by its mottled markings and coarse, pebbly grain.

Snakeskin.

Anna moved behind the table, facing in the same di-rection as the figurines. An old fireplace was directly across the room, its stones blackened by the smoke of ten thousand fires. The heap of ashes gave no evidence of when the fireplace was last used. The corners of the room were thick with cobwebs, which drifted like di-aphanous sails against the breeze that leaked through the log walls.

One upper half of the room was covered by a loft. Anna climbed the rickety ladder, but saw only thick dust and the scattering of leaves that marked a rodent's nest.

She was checking the primitive kitchen when she heard a noise outside. The moonlight at the window was briefly interrupted. Had the ghost returned?

Anna ran outside, holding the flashlight at chest level. A stooped human form crossed the meadow, heading for the thicket of hardwoods behind the shack. A ragged shawl trailed out behind the figure in the night wind that had arisen.

"Wait!" Anna took a step and tripped over a loose piece of planking. She tumbled off the porch and landed on her wrist in the packed dirt. An electric shock of pain raced up her arm. By the time she got to her feet and collected her flashlight, the person or thing had disap-peared into the black trees. Anna followed. When she reached the edge of the forest, she waited and strained her ears. The night made a hundred sounds: the wind moaning through the branches, limbs squeaking, leaves scraping against bark, animals disturbed from sleep, unseen birds clut-tering. Any hope of hearing footfals was futile. It must have been human. Anna sensed no ethereal thread she could folow. She wondered if the person in the shawl had also seen the ghost. Or was it someone who had arranged the primitive figurines in a strange mockery of ritual? Had she realy seen the ghost or was she victim of an elaborate trick? Was she so desperate to find proof of afterlife that her own mind was deceiv-ing her?

Anna rubbed her wrist for a moment. No one, not even Anna herself, had known her destination that night. The ghost had been real, she was certain. The figurines were probably the handiwork of one of the manor's guests and left behind as a gift or tribute. Or maybe it had been the idle tomfoolery of one of the manor's workers. She turned to follow the flashlight back toward Korban Manor, bothered by the strange sensation that she was heading home.

She realized why she had come to Korban Manor. She had been fooled into thinking it had been her choice, that she needed to make contact for her own reasons. Out of al the reputedly haunted places she could have spent her final days, she hadn't simply picked this moun-tain estate. She hadn't dreamed of this place because of some long-forgotten paranormal journal she had once read.

No, she had been summoned.

The snapping of a twig brought her out of her reverie. Something large emerged from the forest shadows. Anna raised the flashlight, ready to use it as a club if necessary. The beam flashed across the looming black shape.

"You!" she said.

Mason held up his hands as if to ward off her anger. "I saw her."

"The ghost?"

"What ghost? I saw an old woman spying on you, then she took off running through the woods. I tried to follow her but she must know these old trails pretty well."

"How dare you folow me? What are you, some kind of slimy pervert stalker?"

"No, I just... well, Miss Mamie's little party was boring me to death, and I couldn't help being curious after all that talk about ghost stories. When I saw you leave the manor—"

"You arrogant bastard." She shoved past him and headed down the trail, not caring that she was leaving him in darkness. She only wished that ghosts really were evil, so that one might bite off his stupid oversize head. With any luck, he'd wander off the trail and have to spend the night in the forest, then wake up cold, sore, and miserable. She broke into a run and told her-self it was the wind and not anger and embarrassment that filled her eyes with tears.

Miss Mamie took off her pearls and placed them on the dresser among the purple velvet ribbons and bottles of rosewater. She looked in the mirror, bringing the lamp closer so she could check her skin. Anyone seeing the faint beginnings of wrinkles around her mouth and me streaks of silver at her temples would think she was fifty years old. Not bad, considering she was going on a hundred and twenty.

Ephram had promised to keep her young. Ephram always kept his promises. He was the perfect gentle-man. That was what had first attracted her, why she'd falen in love with him. His was a complete and perfect possession.

She opened the locket attached to her necklace. Inside the locket was Ephram's young face in sepia, with its sharp cheeks, a narrow angle of nose, thick beard and sideburns burgeoning over a high stiff collar. Oh, and those dark eyes, those cold burning eyes that had swept her heart away and caged her soul, that had sparked the tinder of her desire. He'd always had power, even back when he was a mortal. But now, mow ...

"Now we are ready," he said from the mirror. "Just as I promised." Her heart accelerated and her palms grew moist. She placed a hand on the mirror's smooth surface. Ephram's face coalesced in the reflection of the fire-light. A row of peeled apples hung drying on a string by the fire, carved into heads, with protruding ears and noses. The eyes and mouths glistened like scars. The faces would take shape as they dried, taking on their own unique features.

"How do you like them?" she asked.

"You've chosen wel." Ephram's voice was low and sibilant.

"They will feed you, given time." Miss Mamie looked into those seductive eyes. She felt a flush of warmth. Her love had never faltered.

Her dead husband's eyes flared in a storm of red and gold. "Even now, their dreams give me strength. And the blue moon is coming again."

"Just like the night you died."

"Please, my love. You know I don't favor that word. It sounds so... permanent."

"What about Sylva?" Miss Mamie said, lowering her eyes, anticipating his anger.

"What of her? She's just an old witch-woman with a sack of feathers, weeds, and old bones. Her power is noth-ing but the pathetic power of suggestion. But mine " — his voice rose, thunderous, until she was afraid that the guests upstairs might hear—"mine is the power that shapes both sides."

"So many years." Miss Mamie ran her hands over the neckline of her lace nightgown. "I don't know if I can wait much longer."

"Patience, my heart's love. These are special. These are true makers. They carve me, they write me, they draw me into life. Their hands give me shape, their minds give me substance. They make me just as you make them. And soon, Margaret—"

Ephram reached up through the mist that swirled in-side the mirror and placed his palm against the glass. Miss Mamie put her fingers on the mirror, craving the cruel and arousing electricity of his touch. Her dead husband smiled.

"Soon all those we have sacrificed will find their home, their true eternal life, in me. I will have what any lord and master deserves."

"What any lord and master deserves," she repeated in a whisper. Then the mists faded. Ephram collapsed into an ethereal smoke, and the mirror was again clear.

She studied her own face. She was a lucky woman. Her own hopes and dreams were about to be reborn. Soon Ephram could escape the mirror, these wals, this house. Soon she could touch his flesh again. She went to bed, alone with her lust. Patience, she told herself. Ephram had promised her. And Ephram always kept his promises.

CHAPTER 7

"I need something stronger."

"You ain't supposed to come out here in broad day-light, Ransom. What if somebody seen you?"

"I'm scared. I ain't coming out here in the dark. It's bad enough when you can see, and it's getting worse."

"Was you folowed?"

"Not by none of the guests. Miss Mamie told them they ain't allowed up Beechy Gap. But the others"— Ransom lowered his voice and hunched his head as if afraid that the cabin's knotty walls were listening— "you know, them—they's everywheres now."

Sylva Hartley bent and spat into her fireplace. The liquid hissed and cracked, then evaporated against the flaming logs. She ran the back of her leathery hand against her shriveled mouth. She looked past Ransom, staring down the decades that were as dark as the smoky stones beneath the hearth.

"Lord knows it's getting worse," she finally said in agreement. She puled her frayed shawl up around her neck.

"The last charm worked right fair for a while. Kept them scared off. But now, they just laugh at me when I do my warding."

Sylva thought Ransom ought to have a little more faith. That was the key: faith. All the charms in the world didn't amount to a hill of beans if you didn't be-lieve. Ransom had been raised Christian, and that was al fine and dandy. But when you got right down to it, some things were older and ran deeper than religion. It was too bad about George Lawson. George was an outsider, not born on the mountain. He didn't know what he was up against. With the proper charms, he might have dodged Ephram's litle games. But maybe not. Ransom was right. They were geting stronger. Ephram was geting stronger. And now George was on their side, too. Along with al the other people Ephram had fetched over in the last hundred years.

"You mind flipping them johnny cakes?" she said.

Ransom crossed the floor of the cabin to the little blue steel cookstove. He turned the cakes in the skilet. The smel of scorched cornmeal filed the room.

"They don't stay invisible no more," he said, his back to her. "It used to be just Korban, and you only seen him in the Big House once in a while. But the others, they been walkin'."

"The blue moon in October. A time of magic. Right magic and wrong magic."

"What are you gonna do?" Ransom's voice trembled.

She didn't blame him for being scared. She was scared, too, but she didn't dare let it show. "First off, I'm going to have me a bite to eat. After that, I guess we'll just have to see what the cat drug in." Ransom handed her a plate made of hammered tin. He had laid a fried piece of side pork beside the johnny cakes. Liquid fat pooled in the bottom of the plate and dripped out a small hole in the metal. Sylva put the plate on one arm of her rocker so the grease wouldn't stain her clothes.

"It's the people, ain't it?" Ransom asked, the fire-light glittering in his eyes. "The people staying at the Big House."

Sylva said nothing, just worked the pig gristle be-tween the stumps of her teeth. There was a generous hunk of meat in the fat. Ransom always made sure she got one of the better slabs whenever they slaughtered and smoked one of the manor's hogs. She figured she ate almost as well as the fancy guests. She swallowed the pork, then drained a cup of sas-safras tea. Finaly, she spoke, gazing into the fire, at the yellow and orange and bright blue. "It's the people. And the girl. The one with the Sight." Even though her voice was soft, the words were as thick as thunder in the damp air of the cabin. The whole forest had grown quiet, as if the trees were bend-ing in to listen. She was sure a catbird had been war-bling out a happy sunrise song only minutes before.

"First he claimed the dead ones, now he's going after the live ones," Ransom said. "They's got to be some kind of ritual or other you can use against him."

"You forget. We got to play by the rules. But Ephram Korban, he ain't beholden to nothing. Not man nor God nor none of my little bags of stoneroot and bear teeth and hawk feathers."

Ransom touched the pocket of his coveralls.

"But just keep right on believin'," she said. "The ashes of a prayer are mightier than the highest flames of hel."

"I'd best be getting back. Got the livestock to tend to. And Miss Mamie's been watching me awful close."

"Get on, then."

"You sure you'll be okay?"

"Been okay all along, ain't I? But it's good to be looking out for each other." Ransom nodded. His face was in the shadows be-yond the reach of the firelight and she wasn't able to see his expression. The sun filed the room as he opened the door and went outside. She winced at the intruding light and waited for the sound of the falling wooden latch. Then she turned her gaze back to the fire and forked up another chunk of corn cake. The fire ...

If only they had listened to Sylva's mother. She had tried to warn everybody about the strange Yankee with the well-bottom eyes and the pocketful of money and the sneer that lurked between his lips, the snakish smile that you only saw when he'd let you.

But they fel under Ephram Korban's spel, the men-folk who were after the jobs he promised, the women who came caling on him while their men were out clearing trees or sawing firewood or laying stone wals. None of those women were able to resist him for long. Even the children were drawn to him. Whenever Korban got a few of the young ones together, he would throw a penny on the ground just to watch them scratch and claw each other as they fought over it. Sylva's mother had resisted Ephram. At least that's what she always told Sylva. But Sylva herself, she went to work in the manor when she was just fourteen. Daddy made her. Said you was never too young to learn the pain and glory of a hard day's work, that there was no reason to laze around the house while he had to get up before the roosters and mix sulfur-and-lime solution to spray on the apple trees.

She started out keeping the manor's fireplace ashes swept up, then was put in charge of the laundry as wel. Her spine ached with the memory of hauling those big woven baskets a quarter mile down to the creek, where a barrel of lye-water would be waiting. She'd let the clothes soak a while, then drag them dripping and heavy up to the top of the washboard. Up and down, over and over, while the alkaline ate away at her skin. And heaven help her if she got a cut. That soapy juice burned like a slice of hellfire.

Sylva looked down at her knotty fingers, at the burls of her knuckles. The scars still wove among the blue road maps of her veins. These same hands had betrayed her, al because she had to touch the fire. Ephram always had to have a fire blazing. The men were ordered to keep the firebox in the back room ful at all times. One hired helper was assigned to the fur-nace room downstairs to make sure the main chimney stayed stoked around the clock. But all the other fire-places had be lit, too, even in the summer. And, as one of the house girls, Sylva was responsible for the fire-places on the second floor.

That meant going into the master bedroom. She had always hated the room, especialy at night when, as her last and most dreaded chore, she carried an armful of heavy oak and ash and white pine to the fire. She would rest the logs on the hearth, then pile them stick by stick on the bed of embers. She tried to concentrate on her work, but she couldn't help looking around at all the fine things, the oval cut-edged mirror over the bureau, the velvet drapes that plunged from the top of the windows like lush purple waterfalls, the soft silk lace rimming the edge of the poster bed.

She had touched that lace, of course. She knew the fabrics of the master bed better than anyone. She had seen the secrets writen in the stains of sleep, and her job was to scrub them away. To erase al hint of corruption. Sometimes the mistress would already be in bed when Sylva came in. Margaret would watch her with-out speaking, a little smile of triumph on her face that she tried to hide behind the books she pretended to read. Sylva mumbled "yes'm" or "no'm" if Margaret said anything. Ephram himself was never in the bedroom during her nightly stoking. She called him "Ephram" in her secret heart of hearts, but she wouldn't dare call him that aloud. No, he was "master" or "sir" or, in a pinch, "Mr. Korban." She had wondered if he ever slept. Some of the help said he paced the widow's walk, es-pecially when the moon was near full. They said his shadow stretched two miles across the mountains in every direction. Even then, the whispers had started.

But young Sylva didn't believe the rumors, of how he laughed whenever one of the horses threw a rider, how he made the hog and cattle butchers save a pail of fresh blood in the springhouse, how he burned black candles in the dark of the basement when the only sound in the sleeping manor was the whisper of the grandfather clock's pendulum. They said that if you passed him in the dead of night, his eyes changed col-ors, gold, red, then yellow, the shades of fire. But that was what the men said. The house girls said other things, which Sylva equaly refused to believe.

Until the night his fire went out.

Sylva had been late, her mother had a fever and Sylva had to feed her little brother and sister. Daddy was gone overnight, taking a wagon load of apples down the narrow trail that was realy just a long scar in the side of the cliffs. So Sylva had whipped up some porridge, splashed it out into two bowls for the chil-dren, then changed the herb poultice on her mother's forehead. By that time, the fingers of dusk were scratch-ing at the frosty November ground.

Sylva ran the half mile to the manor, holding her skirts high, her breath silver in the twilight. The briars whipped at her knees and her long hair tangled in the laurel that lined the trail. She knew the way wel enough, but she felt as if she were slogging through molasses. The manor seemed to be slipping farther away from her, as if the snake-belly trail had gained new curves.

Sylva finaly reached the house, her heart lodged in her throat and her pulse hammering. She quietly gathered some logs from the firebox and crept up the back stairs. She remembered that Margaret was away on a trip somewhere, to a place caled Baton Rouge, fancy-sounding. If only Sylva could hurry, maybe no one would notice her tardiness. The bedroom was dark. She was afraid to light a lantern because, if any guests were visiting, one of them might look in. Sylva closed the door behind her, hoping the embers stil cast enough glow for her to see. But the hearthstones were cold and the room was filed with the pungent stench of the spent fire. Kneeling, she put the wood on the floor and groped for the newspapers and the tin box of matches that she kept beside the poker. Even sheltered from the cold night air, she felt smothered as if by the waters of a deep dream, and the smallest movement took a great effort. The matches rattled when she knocked over the container. She baled up some pages of the newspaper and stuffed them under the fire irons. As she did, a harsh, low sound came from somewhere in the room.

She struck a match and it flared briefly and died. In that split second of light, she had seen movement out of the corner of her eye. Trying to hurry, though grav-ity worked against her, she struck another match. A winter wind blew across the room and extinguished the flame before she could touch it to the paper. She wondered why the windows were open. Ephram never alowed the windows open in his room. Her fin-gers were like water skins as she fumbled for another match. The low sound came again, a ratling exhalation folowed by the unmistakable creak of the poster bed. She squeezed her eyes closed, even though the room was pitch-black, and concentrated on the match that she wanted to scratch across a stone. The dark had never frightened her until that moment.

A voice came, muffled and desperate and everything but dead.

"Fuh ... fire," it said.

Sylva's heart gave a jump like a frightened rabbit. Ephram Korban was in the room, in the bed. She dared not look in his direction, but the same power that seemed to be weighing down her limbs made her neck turn slowly toward the bed. She opened her eyes and saw nothing but blackness.

"Spell me," he said, a little more forcefully, almost angrily, but still muffled as if speaking through blankets. She nodded slowly, though he couldn't see her in the dark. Nor could she see him. And yet... As she looked at the bed, its form taking shape in her mind from the memory of it, she could picture Ephram lying there, his face stern and his hair and beard flowing onto the pillows. Handsome Ephram, who had never been sick. Ephram, who stayed young and strong while the workers and natives had faded away with their wrinkles and stories and tired, failing breath. Ephram, who was said to never sleep. Two small dots of light hovered in the darkness of the bed, weakly glowing, the only thing in the room she could see. She tried to turn her head away, tried to strike the match, even though she had now been puled from mere waking sleep to a helpless awareness. She knew which side of the bed was his. The dots ex-panded, hovering in the area near the headboard where the pilows were. Where Ephram's eyes should be. The eyes smoldered the deep red color of a dying ember.

"Cal in the fire," he rasped, as a sharp flicker of yel-low glinted among the red dots. The glowing eyes blurred in her tears, then she jerked the matchstick along the stone. It caught and she applied the flame to the paper. At last she could look away from that terrible bed, those impossible eyes. But she had to say those awful words, the ones Mama had taught her.

The spel.

She whispered them, hoping to weaken their power through lack of volume. "Go out frost, come in fire. Go out frost, come in fire. Go out frost, come in fire."

The fire leapt to life and she put some kindling on the grate. As the wood crackled and heat cascaded onto her face, she found that her limbs were regaining their strength.

Not daring to turn now that the room was bathed in firelight, she busied herself stacking a night's supply of logs onto the irons. Her tears had dried on her cheeks, but she felt their salty tracks. She was afraid she was in trouble, that she had commited the most unforgivable of offenses. She could only stare into the flames as they rose like yelow and red and blue water up the chimney.

A hand fel softly on her shoulder. She looked up, and Ephram was standing above her. He was smiling. His eyes were deep and dark and beautiful, alive in the fire-light. How sily she had been, thinking them to be red.

"I'm sorry," she said, her words barely audible over the snapping of the hot logs and the hammering of her heart. Ephram said nothing, only moved his hand from her shoulder to her cheek, then up under her long hair until his thumb brushed her ear. She shivered even though the fire was roaring.

"Thank you," he said. "We burn together."

She didn't understand, al she knew was that she had wished for this moment so many times while lying on her straw mattress back home. Those dreams had come to her, taken over her body, brought her skin alive. Ephram's hands on her flesh. But in her fantasies, she hadn't been this scared.

Then she realized what was wrong. He was behind her and above her, his face lit by the fire. She was kneeling on the hearth, looking up. But, somehow, his shadow was on her face. She couldn't fix on the thought, couldn't make sense of it, because other sensations were flooding her. His fervid hand traced the soft slope of her neck. And again Sylva was smothered in a dream, only under a different power this time, as she rose and let him put his arms around her, as the hellish heat of his lips pressed against hers. She was lost in his warmth, his strength, his great shadow. When he took her hand in his and brought it to the flames, she didn't whimper or beg. He was the master, after all.

Their hands went into the flames, merged, com-busted, and skin and bone were replaced by smoke and ash. There was no pain. How could there not be pain?

The next thing she knew, she was removing her coarse house-girl skirt and homespun blouse and they merged once more, this time on the floor in front of the fire, the spel lost from her lips, and only Ephram in her senses. Sylva looked down at her withered hands.

If only she had felt pain. The wounds without pain were the slowest in healing. The tin plate sat empty in her lap. The fire had gone out. She shivered and spat into the ashes, She wasn't sure which pain was greater, Ephram's loving or his leaving her.

She had known Ephram would come back. But then, he had never really left. He didn't die when she had pushed him off the widow's walk. He just went into the house. Because she'd killed him under the October blue moon.

As he had promised, wood and stone became his flesh, the smoke his breath and the mirrors his eyes, the shadows his restless spirit's blood. And his heart burned in the fires of forever. She shivered in the heat of the day and reached for the matches.

CHAPTER 8

The house threw a sunrise shadow across the back-yard. Mason was tired, his face scratched from his midnight wanderings. He'd slept poorly, his brain in-vaded by feverish images of Anna, his mother, Ephram Korban, Lilith, a dozen others whose faces were lost in smoke. He shivered as he walked behind the manor, folowing the worn path that wound between two out-buildings. He climbed a row of creosote railroad ties that were terraced into the earth as steps leading into the forest.

The door on the smaller building was open. An old man in overalls emerged from the darkness within. Mason waved a greeting. The man rubbed his hands to-gether, his breath coming out in a mist.

"Brrr," he said, creasing his wrinkled jaws. "Cold as a woman's heart in there."

"What is it?" Mason asked. He'd assumed it was a tool storage shed or something similar. The shed, like its larger counterpart, was constructed of rough-cut logs and chinked with yellowish red cement. A smell of damp age and cedar spiled from the doorway.

" 'Frigeration," the man said. When his mouth opened on the "gee" sound, Mason saw that the old man had about enough teeth left to play a quick game of jacks. His overals threatened to swalow him, his back hunched from years of work. The man cocked his head back to-ward the door and went into the shed. "Take a look-see." Mason folowed. Cold air wafted over his face. A mound covered the center of the dirt floor. The old man stooped down and swept at the grainy mound with his hands, revealing streaks of shiny silver.

"Ice," said the man. "We bury it under sawdust so it wil keep through summer. You wouldn't think it would last that long, would you?"

"I wondered how you kept the food cold without power," Mason said. "What about the food safety po-lice, the health inspectors?"

"They's rules of the world and then they's rules of Korban Manor. Two different things." The old man pointed through the door to a western rise covered by tulip poplars. Wagon tracks crossed the meadow, curving up the slope like twin red snakes. "They's a little pond up yonder," he said. "A spring pops out 'twixt two rocks. The pond's fenced off from the animals so it stays clean. Come the third or fourth long freeze in January, when the water's good and hard, we go up and cut out big blocks of it."

"Sounds like a lot of work. I understand that heavy machinery isn't allowed on the grounds."

"Oh, we got machines. A wagon is a machine. So's a horse, in its way. And, of course, they got us, too." Mason went out into the sun and the man closed the door behind him. His gnarled hand fumbled in the front pocket of his overals as if he were looking for a cigarette. He pulled out something that looked like a knotted rag with a tip of feather protruding from one end. He waved the rag in the sign of the cross over the front of the icehouse door. The motion was practiced and fluid, appearing natural despite its oddness. Mason expected the man to comment on the ritual, but the knotted rag was quickly squirreled away. "What's in the other shed?" Mason asked after a mo-ment.

"That's the larder. Keep stuff in there that doesn't need to be so cold, such as squash and cucumbers and corn. A little spring runs through there, gets piped out into the gully yonder." Mason looked where the man had pointed and saw a trickle of water meandering through a bed of rich, black mud. Blackberry briars tangled along the creek banks, the scarlet vines bent in autumn's death. "Do you pick the berries, too?"

"Yep, and the apples. They's hels of apples around here. You gonna have something apple every meal. Pie, turnovers, stewed, fried apples with cinnamon and just a dash of brandy. We keep up a vegetable garden, too, and—"

"Ransom!"

They both turned at the sound of the shrill voice. Miss Mamie stood on the back porch, leaning over the railing.

"Yes, Miss Mamie," the man responded. The last bit of starch seemed to have gone out of him, and Mason was sure the old man was going to disappear inside his overalls.

"Now, Ransom, you know you're not to trouble the guests," Miss Mamie said in a high, artificially cheer-ful tone.

"I was just—" Ransom swelled momentarily, then seemed to think better of it. He studied the tips of his worn work boots. The sun lit the silver wires of hair that were combed back over his balding head. "Yes, Miss Mamie."

The hostess stood triumphantly at the porch rail and turned her attention to Mason. "Did you sleep well, Mr. Jackson?"

"Yes, ma'am," he lied. He sneaked a glance at Ran-som. The man looked as if he'd been beaten with a hickory rod. "Um... thanks for setting me up in the master bedroom. It's very comfortable."

"Lovely." She clasped her hands together. Her pearls shifted over her bosom. "Ephram Korban would be so pleased. You know our moto: 'The splendid isolation of Korban Manor wil fire the imagination and kindle the creative spirit.'"

"I read the brochure," Mason said. "And I've al-ready got a few ideas. I might need a litle help geting started, though. Is it okay if Ransom helps me collect some good sculpting wood?" Miss Mamie frowned and her thin eyebrows flat-tened. Her face wore the same expression that glared from the portraits of Korban. Mason realized he had challenged her authority, if only mildly. He was sud-denly sorry he had dragged Ransom into the spotlight of her stare. She folded her arms like a schoolmarm debating the punishment of unruly students.

After a moment, she said, "Of course it's okay. As long as his chores are finished. Are your chores fin-ished, Ransom?"

Ransom kept his eyes down. "Yes, ma'am. I'm done til dinner. Then I got to curry the horses and see to the produce." Miss Mamie smiled and adopted her cheerful voice again. "Lovely. And that sculpture better be perfect, Mr. Jackson. We're counting on you."

"I'm kindled and fired up," Mason said. "By the way, is there a space where I can work without bother-ing anybody? Sometimes I work late, and there's no way to beat up wood without making enough noise to wake the dead."

"There's a studio space in the basement. I'll have Lilith show you after lunch."

"No need to bother her. I'm sure she'l be busy with the other guests. Why not let Ransom show me?" A shadow passed across Miss Mamie's face and her voice grew cold. "Ransom doesn't go down there." Mason peeked at Ransom and saw the corner of the man's mouth twitch. My God. He's scared to death of her. Miss Mamie turned back toward the manor, her heels clatering across the wooden porch. Door chimes jingled as she went inside. Ransom exhaled as if he had been holding his breath for the last few minutes.

"What a wonderful boss," Mason said when Ransom finally looked him in the eye.

"Careful," he said out of the side of his mouth. "She's probably watching from one of the windows."

"You're kidding."

"Just follow me," he whispered, then said, more loudly, "Toolshed's right through them trees." After they had gone down a side trail far enough that the house was out of sight, Mason asked, "Is she always like that?"

Ransom's confidence grew as they moved farther from the house. "Oh, she don't mean nothing. That's just her way, is all. Everything's got to be just so. And she got worries of her own."

"How long have you worked here, Ransom? You don't mind if I call you 'Ransom,' do you?"

"Respect for elders. I like that, Mr. Jackson."

"Call me Mason, because I hope we're going to be friends."

Ransom looked back down the trail. "Only outside the house, son. Only outside."

"Got you."

"Anyways, you was asking how long I've been working here, and the answer to that is 'Always.' I was born here, in a litle cabin just over the orchards. Place called Beechy Gap. Same cabin my grandpaw was born in, and my daddy, too. Cabin's stil standing."

"They all worked here?"

"Yep. Grandpaw held deed to the north part, way back when Korban started buying up property around here. Grandpaw sold out and got a job thrown in as part of the deal. I guess us Streaters always been tied to the land, one way or another. Family history has it that my great-back-to-however-many-greats-grandpaw Jeremiah Streater was one of the first settlers in this part of the country. Came up with Daniel Boone, they say."

"Did Boone live here, too?"

"Wel, he tried to. Kept a hunting cabin down around the foot of the mountain. But they took his land. They always take your land, see?"

Ransom didn't sound bitter. He said it as if it were a universal truth, something you could count on no mat-ter what. The sun comes up, the rooster crows, the dew dries, they take your land.

"Toolshed's over yonder," Ransom said, heading for a clearing in a stand of poplars. He continued with his storytelling, the rhythm of his words matching the stride of his thin legs.

"Grandpaw went to work right away for Korban, clearing orchard land and cutting the roads. Him and two of my uncles. They leveled with shovels and stumped with iron bars and a team of mules. Korban was crazy about firewood right from the start. Had them saw up the trees with big old cross-saws and pile the logs up beside the road.

"And Korban had a landscape scheme all laid out. People thought he was a little touched in the head, wanting to turn this scrubby old mountain into some kind of king's place. But the money was green enough. Korban paid a dolar a day, which was unheard of at the time. He was big in textiles."

"I've worked in textiles myself," Mason said. "Can't say I ever got too big in it, though. I mostly just swapped out spindles for minimum wage."

"No need to be ashamed of honest work." Ransom paused and looked in the direction of a crow's cal. The smel of moist leaves and forest rot filed Mason's nos-trils. He noticed himself breathing harder than the old man, who was nearly three times his age. Ransom began walking again and continued with his story.

"When they got the road gouged out, they set to work on the bridge. In the old days, the only way to get up here was a trail that wound up the south face of those cliffs. You seen that drop-off driving up here."

"Yeah. Down to the bottom of the world." Mason's stomach flutered at the remembered majesty and ter-ror of the view. He was embarrassed by his shortness of breath and tried to hide it.

"That trail was how the early pioneers, Boone and Jeremiah and a handful of others, made it up in the first place. They say the Cherokee and Catawba used it be-fore that, communal hunting grounds. The whites brought livestock up here, fighting and pushing the an-imals along the cliffs. But Korban wanted a bridge. And what Korban wanted, Korban always got."

"Kind of what I figured." A duck-planked building stood ahead of mem, tucked under the branches of a jack pine. Its shake roof was litered with brown pine needles. Ransom led Mason toward it.

"They was about eight families mat owned this piece of mountaintop. Korban bought mem al out and put mem to work building the house and garnering field stones for me foundation. He hired me women-folk to set out apple seedlings and weed me gardens. Even me kids helped out, at a quarter a day plus keep."

"Didn't anybody notice that they were doing the same work, only now they had a master?" The trail had widened out and wagon ruts led into the heart of the forest from the other side of the clear-ing. Ransom stepped onto the warped stairs leading into the shed and paused. Mason was glad that the up-hil walk had finaly tapped the old man's stamina.

"You ain't from money, are you?" Ransom asked, raising a white eyebrow.

"Well, not really. Both my parents had to work all week to get by." Mason didn't mention that his dad worked only two days a week and drank four and a half. Dad faithfuly took off every Sunday morning to give thanks for the evening's pint. No other prayers ever passed his lips that didn't reek of bourbon. Except maybe from his hospital bed, when cirrhosis escorted him to the self-destruction he'd spent a lifetime toast-ing.

"People around here, they fel al over themselves to get Korban's money. They was scrub poor, these peo-ple. The only cash they ever saw was once or twice a year when they loaded some handmade quilts or goods on the back of a mule and took down to Black Rock to trade. So when Korban come in with his offers, nobody blamed them for selling out."

"I guess I would sell out, too, if I got the chance," Mason said. He was thinking of Diluvium, his first commissioned piece and the worst thing he'd ever fab-ricated. Also the most successful. Ransom fumbled in his overals pocket and again pulled out the feathery rag ball. He waved it in the strange genuflection before lifting the cast-iron latch on the shed door.

"Um—what's that feather for?" Mason asked.

"Warding off," Ransom said, as if everybody carried such a charm. He pushed the door open. Before enter-ing, he kicked the doorjamb so hard that his overalls quivered around his bony frame. "Yep, stil sturdy." Mason wanted to ask what Ransom thought he was warding off, but didn't know what words to use. He chalked it up as one more of the manor's oddities. Compared with ghost stories, Korban's ever-watchful portraits, the jittery maid, and hearth fires burning in the heat of day, what was one old man's eccentricities? Next to Anna, Ransom was practicaly a model of san-ity and reason.

They went into the smal shed, Ransom peering up at the rafters. Light spilled from the two single-paned windows set in the south wal. Workbenches lined the back room, piled high with broken harness and rusting plows, milwork and buckets of cut nails. Worn-han-dled shovels, picks, and axes leaned near the door. A long cross-saw dangled from wooden pegs, a few of its jagged teeth missing. The corner was a mess of wooden planes, hammers, and block-and-tackle tangled in yel-lowed hemp rope. The room smelled of iron and old leather.

"Don't have to lock up tools," Ransom said. "What would a thief want with a tool? Then he'd have to work." Mason began picking out the equipment they might need. If he was lucky, they would find a chunk of wal-nut or maybe a maple stump. More likely, they would have to hack a piece out of a falen tree. He was check-ing the heft of a hatchet when he noticed Ransom study-ing the dark ceiling again. "Sky's not about to fal, is it?"

"Never know."

"What are we, about four thousand feet above sea level? A lot less sky to fal on us up here." Ransom didn't even smile, just scratched at one weathered cheek. Maybe Mason had misjudged the old man. Those sparkling and tireless eyes suggested Ransom was no stranger to humor. But maybe the man had his own reasons for becoming solemn.

"Found what you need?" Ransom asked, waiting near the door.

"Sure. You mind grabbing that maul over to your left? We might need to do some heavy hiting." When they were back outside, they stood in the clearing and arranged the tools for easier carrying. Ransom wore an expression that Mason could only cal "relieved."

"What's the matter?" Mason asked.

"Man's got a right to be scared, ain't he?"

What was there to be scared of out here? Did wild predators still stalk these woods? "Scared of what?"

"Miss Mamie said not to tell." Ransom sounded al-most like a child. Mason wondered what kind of hold the woman had over Ransom. The man even said her name with a kind of frightened reverence, his hand moving up his overals bib toward the pocket that held the rag-ball charm.

"Look, if there's some kind of danger, you owe it to your guests to warn them. Plus, I thought we were friends." Ransom looked off toward the trees at the sun that was starting its downward slide to the west. "I reckon. Don't ever let on to Miss Mamie, though."

"Of course not."

Ransom exhaled slowly. "You know we have four gatherings of guests each year. We take a month be-tween each batch to get things fixed up, 'cause we're too busy when the guests are here to do repairs. Somebody has to go around and check on all the little outbuildings and cabins, original homesteads that can't be torn down. Korban set it in his will that everything stay like it was.

"Three of us was keeping up the grounds. We al-ways switched off, one keeping up the livestock, one tending to the flowers and gardens and firewood, and the last playing handyman. Miss Lilith, the maid, and the cook see to the kitchen and the house."

"I've met Lilith. Pretty girl."

Ransom wobbled his knot of a head. "Not hard on the eyes. Anyways, last night, one of the men, George Lawson, was up Beechy Gap checking on the old Easley place. That was another of the original settler families. The last Easley girl worked at the house until she married off down to Charlotte with one of them artists a few years back.

"Wel, my friend George, he went into that old Easley shack. I don't know what happened, I didn't find no tools or nothing, so I can't say he was doing carpentry work. But the whole blamed shack fel on him." Ransom's jaw clenched. "Died real slow."

"I'm sorry, Ransom. What did the investigators say?"

"Like I said, they's rules of the world and they's rules of Korban Manor." Mason didn't understand. This place was remote, but an accidental death ought to require some kind of inquiry.

"George was a good man. And he wasn't stupid. Made it through Vietnam, so he must have had some kind of sense. He just crossed the wrong threshold, is all." Ransom looked like he was about to add some-thing to that last sentence, then changed his mind.

"Which way's Beechy Gap?"

Ransom jerked his head toward the north. "Over the ridge yonder."

"I wouldn't mind having a look sometime."

"Nope. Guests ain't allowed up there."

"Rough terrain?"

Ransom looked him ful in the eyes for the first time since they'd left the tool shed. "Some things just ain't part of the deal. You'l find a lot of places are off-limits at Korban Manor."

Ransom puled the charm from his pocket and mo-tioned at the shed with it. "Now, about that wood of yours. I got to be getting back soon."

They gathered the tools and veered off the trail into the forest.

* * *

Adam walked along the fence, his head full of the wilderness smels. He felt sure that Manhattan's pollu-tants had permanently clogged his sinuses, but maybe the fresh mountain air would add a year back to the six the city had stolen from his life. The near-perfect si-lence was eerie, and he had almost gone through a physical withdrawal in the night as his sleeping self yearned for those constant sirens, car horns, and bur-glar alarms. And all this wide-open space was unnat-ural. No wonder hilbilies were stereotyped as crazed and grizzled outcasts. There was nothing to impose the insanity of civilization upon them, so they had to make up their own rules of order. Paul was off somewhere shooting video, no doubt wrapped up in the latest project, the world reduced to the narrow scope of his viewfinder. That was for the best. Though solitude was kind of creepy in itself, especially in the sprawling expanse of the manor, he needed a break from Paul's company. He'd talked briefly with the weird photographer Roth on the porch, and had recognized the same artistic self-absorption that plagued Paul.

Adam saw a man by the barn dressed in worn work clothes. It wasn't one of the handymen who'd helped unload the van. Probably someone in charge of the sta-bles, or else the tender of the long garden that stretched in stubbled rows in the low valley. The man waved Adam over. Adam stole a glance back at the manor a hundred yards away, then approached the barn.

"Morning, there," the man said. His hands were tucked deep into the pockets of his loose-fitting jeans. A shovel leaned against the wal beside him.

"Hi," Adam said.

"You're one of the guests, I reckon."

"We just got in yesterday."

"What do you think of the place so far?"

"It's ... different from what I'm used to. But that's part of the adventure."

"Yep, the unknown is always scary at first. But once you get used to it, you start to like it." Adam looked down at a set of wire-enclosed pens beyond the garden. A grunting sound roled across the hills.

"Hogs," the man said. "About time of year to get out the boiling kettle and have us a slaughter." Adam's face must have shown his revulsion.

The man laughed. "Don't worry, son. You won't get no blood on your hands. But meat don't get on the table by itself."

"I prefer my meat boneless," Adam said.

"Miss Mamie serves it up however you like. Careful, though, she's been known to take a shine to the guests. Especially them that's young and male. I reckon even an old crow like that needs a play-pretty once in a while."

"Thanks for the warning, but she's not my type," he said.

The man leaned forward like a conspirator, his face emerging from the shadows of the barn's overhang. "Say, can you do me a favor?"

"What's that?" Adam looked back at the manor again. Smoke rose from its four chimneys, but other than that, it appeared devoid of life. Even the breeze seemed to have died.

"Dig me a hole. I'll pay you."

"I don't want to get you in any trouble. Miss Mamie seems to have this thing about the guests being kept apart from the staff."

The man licked his lips. "Let me worry about Miss Mamie. But I got a sore arm and I'm a little down in the back. Pain's hellfire blue this morning."

"Okay, then," Adam said. He took the shovel and tested its balance. The man took his right hand out of his pocket and pointed to the base of a dying gray apple tree that stood alone in a slight clearing. "Right there between the roots," he said. "About big enough to hold a hatbox." The man folowed Adam to the spot, and Adam slid the bright blade into the earth, turned the dark soil. In a couple of minutes he'd shaped the hole to the man's satisfaction.

"That's fine and dandy," the man said. "I can handle the rest. Appreciate it."

"What are you burying?"

"Covering up for old Ransom. He's no-account, but he's been around so long he gets away with murder. I got to finish a job for him."

"Well, have a good morning. I need to get back to my room."

"Here," he said, his right hand dipping into his pocket again. "A litle something for your trouble."

"No, really," Adam said, holding up his hands in protest. The shovel handle had heated up the flesh sur-rounding his palms, a hint of possible blisters to come.

"You don't want to hurt my feelings, do you?" the man said. "Us mountaineers can get mighty prideful about such things."

"Sure, then."

The man held his fist out, then opened it over Adam's palm. A smal green thing dropped into it.

"Four-leaf clover," the man said.

Adam smiled. "I'm going to need all the luck I can get."

Adam started back toward the barn, then turned and said, "I'm Adam, by the way."

"Lawson," the man said, now hunched over the hole as if his bad back had undergone a miracle cure. "George Lawson."

CHAPTER 9

Anna awoke with light slanting through the window, and for a few moments couldn't remember where she was. Then it al came back, Korban Manor, Mason, the cabin in the woods with its mysterious figurines, the pained spirit of the girl she'd encountered.

Why had the ghost asked for Anna's help? And who was the person in the shawl who had fled into the for-est? Anna shook away the spiderwebs of memory. She hadn't dreamed last night, unless that whole walk in the woods had taken place solely in her imagination.

"Did you have a good night's sleep?" Cris asked from her bed across the room.

"I slept like the dead. Haven't slept that wel in years. I guess even a city girl benefits from the peace and quiet." Cris, her voice raspy from sleep and hangover, said, "I know what you mean. In Modesto, a siren wakes you up every fifteen minutes. It's kind of weird, though."

"What's weird?" Anna looked at Korban's portrait, then at the fire that must have been stoked and banked by one of the servants in the night.

"For the first time since I was a little girl, I remem-bered my dreams."

"Realy?" Anna thought of her own recurrent dream, of her ghostly self on the widow's walk, holding that forlorn and haunted bouquet.

"Yeah. I was running across the orchard out there, I had these long bedclothes on, bilowing out behind me. You know, al that lacy Victorian stuff you see on the covers of Gothic novels? I was running in slow motion, like the wind was pushing me back or something."

"The old 'running but never getting there' dream," Anna said. "I had them during final exams or sometimes when I submited a research paper." Or like the last time I dreamed about Stephen. What was that, nearly a year ago?

"I wasn't running away." Cris's voice faded a litle as she recalled the details of the dream. "I was running to something. Waiting in the shadows, right at the edge of the frees. It was so real. I could feel the dew on my bare feet, the cold air against my face, the warmth—"

Anna raised herself up on her pilow and saw Cris, hair tangled, eyes bleary, but a blush apparent on her cheeks.

"—the warmth down there," Cris finished, as if star-tled by the force of the memory. "And I just kept run-ning. I could feel the house behind me, almost like it was watching, like it wanted me to ... then I was all the way across the meadow. The shadow thing, it moved out from under the trees, it touched me, but I couldn't see its face. Where it touched my shoulder, the warmth sort of expanded, filling me up ..." Cris's widened eyes stared past the room into the re-membered dream. "It was pretty intense," she whis-pered. Anna wasn't used to people sharing intimate details with her. Being an orphan had taught her to maintain a safe emotional distance. She'd kept secrets even from the few romantic interests in her life, keeping a deep part of herself hidden. Now this woman she'd only met yesterday was sharing a sensual dream. But maybe it was something else. "You found some company. Mason, I'll bet."

Cris grinned. "No, I definitely would have remem-bered if something had happened with him. I wasn't that drunk."

Anna forced herself to show interest in Cris's dream as penance for thinking of Mason. "What do you sup-pose it means?"

"That I'm a basket case?"

As if dreams had meaning. Dreams were nothing but a mistake of the synapses, a firing off of excess electrical energy much the way sparks jump off a cracked distributor wire in a car. Dreams were random brain waves, no matter what the professors in the Duke be-havioral sciences program had taught her. Basicaly, dreams were nonsense. Both the sleeping and the waking kind. Especialy when they compelled you to visit a big manor tucked high in the Appalachian Mountains, where you searched for your own ghost. Especially then.

"Maybe it's just your subconscious reveling in your newfound sense of freedom," Anna said, scrambling up a solipsism from one of her old psychology classes. "After al, you have al kinds of time, no deadlines, no husband to please. Nothing but yourself and what you want to do. Maybe it's only natural that this relief should express itself in romantic imagery."

"Wow. That's good. I can't wait to get back home and tell my analyst." Anna was going to add something about sexual frustration due to the dream's Victorian overtones. But that was too cynical and obtuse even for Anna.

"Or maybe it was just a dream," she said, dreading the coming bout of bloody diarrhea that welcomed her to each new day.

"Probably," Cris said.

Anna pushed off her quilts and sat up, shivering in-side her cotton nightgown. "Dibs on the bathroom."

"Go ahead. I need to lie here a minute and get my wits together. I'm going to sneak downstairs and score a caffeine fix. Want anything?"

"No, thanks."

When Anna returned to the room, Cris was gather-ing her sketch pads, a cup of coffee steaming on the nightstand. "I ran into Jefferson Spence. You know, the fat writer. It's kind of cool to be here with actual fa-mous people."

Anna shrugged. "We had to study his Seasons of Sleep in American lit. About put me to sleep, let me tel you."

"He wrote that one here, at the manor. They say he writes about real people, only he changes the names so he won't get sued. I wonder if we'll be in his next book."

Anna went to her dresser to pick out some clothes. "I'll be the ghost-hunting flake with the big nose, and you can be—"

"—the bimbo housewife who has wet dreams."

"Except it wouldn't be that simple in the book," Anna said, then sniffed daintily. "You'd be a 'trembling Venus, clutching and grasping at the sheets, back arched toward the dark ceiling of heaven, the endless roof of forever, the prison of night,' et cetera and so on.

Cris laughed so hard that she snorted into her cof-fee. A knock came at the door. Anna crossed her arms, not sure if the nightgown was revealing or not. She avoided mirrors these days.

Cris apparently had litle modesty, having gone down-stairs in the yellow slip she still wore. "Enter," she shouted.

"We're all decent here."

Miss Mamie came into the room, her hands clasped, a smile on her face that could have been carved in wood.

"You ladies sleep well?"

"More or less," Cris said. "The beds are very com-fortable."

"And you, Miss Galoway? You were out late last night?" Miss Mamie's eyes reflected the warm flicker-ing light of the fire.

Was Miss Mamie chiding her, or merely making conversation? The hostess knew that Anna was a para-psychologist. Anna hadn't seen any reason to lie on her retreat application. In fact, she'd learned to take a stub-born pride in her peculiarities.

So she saw no reason to lie now. "I took a walk," she said. "On that ridge to the east."

"Did you find what you were looking for?" There was no mistaking the chalenge in the hostess's voice.

"No." Not a lie. She wasn't sure yet what she was looking for, besides her own ghost.

"Maybe it wil come to you, Miss Galoway. Keep your spirits up." Miss Mamie pursed her lips in a reptil-ian smile and looked at the portrait of Ephram Korban.

"You've got a very strange house," Cris said.

"The house is his," Miss Mamie said, with a slight bow toward the portrait. She touched the locket that hung from the strand of pearls that circled her throat. "I just keep the home fires burning." She left them to dress and to speculate about the meaning of their hostess's cryptic manner.

"This way, Mr. Jackson."

Lilith headed down the narrow stairs. Mason reposi-tioned the twenty-pound chunk of red maple in his arms and followed her. The musty, moist air clung to the skin of Mason's face. He stared down into the dark basement, making sure each step was solid before fuly shifting his weight.

Lilith waited at the bottom of the stairs, holding the lantern at shoulder level. When Mason finaly reached the basement floor, he peered into the gloomy and shifting shadows, trying to get a feel for the basement's layout. Tiny wedges of windows were set high in the wals just above the ground, but only a graying of starlight leaked through. The aroma of dry rot gave way to a deeper, older decay.

He stumbled and his tool satchel banged against his hip. The handle was starting to dig into his skin where the satchel dangled from his shoulder. Lilith led him past a couple of thick wooden beams, a cluster of old furniture, and a small doorway. The lantern's firelight glinted off rows of dusty wine bottles tucked in the narrow alcove.

"Why is it so hot?" Mason asked. His voice was swallowed by the dead space.

"Central heating," Lilith said. "Mr. Korban insisted on having his fires." Mason wondered if he would be able to work down here for long stretches. Sculpting usually sent the sweat gushing from his pores. The work was as much muscle as it was inspiration. Only the final touches, the thin detailing and polishing, were not so physicaly de-manding that they wore him out.

"Where's the stove?" he asked.

Lilith pointed into the darkness toward the left end of the basement. "There's a separate room over there so the workers can keep the fire stoked from the outside. The ductwork runs al through the house." She lifted the lantern higher and Mason saw the dul metal sheeting of the ducts.

"Air-circulated heat," he said. "That was pretty so-phisticated for its time, wasn't it?"

"I'm not a historian, Mr. Jackson. Miss Mamie would be the one to answer such questions." Lilith led him into an area that wasn't exactly a

room. It was more like a bit of floor space divided by

timber posts and shelving. A rough-finished cabinet

flanked the near side of what he guessed was going to

be his studio.

*

"I hope this will do," she said. "We've only had a few sculptors at the manor, but many painters. And one old gentleman who did acid etchings and woodblock prints. We've al managed to work just fine down here."

"Oh, do you paint?"

"I used to."

He didn't want to comment on her career change. His own might be coming soon enough. "Maybe a litle of that creative spirit soaked into the wals."

"Maybe so, Mr. Jackson. Maybe more than we know."

She was an odd one, Mason decided. If she weren't so frosty, he would risk geting to know her. But he was better off focusing on his work. Besides, he was posi-tive that Miss Mamie wouldn't approve of the hired help cavorting with the guests, no matter how much the guests cavorted with each other.

A thick table stood in the center of the studio space. Mason set down the bulky maple with a solid thump. He shook the satchel from his arm onto the table as wel. It would stay dark down here even during the day. He didn't mind, though. He worked mostly by touch and instinct, anyway.

"Will that be all?" Again Lilith seemed to be in a hurry to get away from him. Or perhaps it wasn't him. Maybe she wanted to be away from this dim, claustro-phobic place where Mason was going to spend his time.

"So will I have to curse the darkness?" he answered.

"Excuse me?"

He pointed to the lantern. "I assume you're taking that with you."

"Oh, I see." She stepped toward the shelves, and in the lantern light Mason saw a clutter of half-melted candles. "There are matches in that cupboard."

She waited until Mason lit two of the thick candles. He found an oil lamp on the bottom shelf and roled up the wick. He had just touched the tip of a candle to the wick when she called, "Good luck," then she was gone. As her echoing footsteps receded up the stairs, he mutered to himself, "Jeez, no wonder people make up stories about this place."

Mason lit an extra candle and spread his tools across the table. He studied the sharpened edges of the blades before turning his attention to the red maple. Then he paced, his mind drifting into that mysterious well-spring from which ideas bubbled forth.

His foot caught on something, causing a muffled crash. He brought the lamp down low to see what he had tripped over. It was a stretched canvas, the back graying with age. He turned it over. On the canvas was a perfect reproduction of Korban Manor on a stormy night, done in the same thick oils as the other paintings that lined the walls of the house. The manor was drawn to precise scale, seeming such a natural part of the landscape that it looked as if the house had grown out of the soil like a living thing. In the painting was the knothole that Mason had noticed earlier that morning in the siding beneath a second-floor window. But the photographic realism wasn't the only quality that made the painting so powerful. The manor was vi-brant, as if it were shaking with the force of the fanta-sized gale. The trees were wild with wind, and black clouds hovered around the manor's flat roof. Mason gently touched the canvas and a cool electricity surged up his arm. He wondered why such a beautiful work was relegated to the corruptive air of the basement.

He leaned it against the table and brought the lamp closer, careful not to let the heat sear the finish. He scanned every inch of the artwork, softly running his fingers along the furrows made by the brushstrokes. The angles of the gables were geometricaly accurate, the shading well proportioned, the range of colors as true as the human eye. Even the bark of the trees had a sophisticated complexion.

He was looking at the top of the house, at the white railing of the widow's walk, when he spotted the paint-ing's sole flaw. The artist had inadvertently smudged the colors together. A grayish blotch marred an area on the widow's walk. The artist could have easily fixed the mistake, but for some reason hadn't. Still, the painting was far too skiled to remain hidden away in darkness.

Mason didn't know how long he ended up staring at the painting. It had such mesmerizing power that it seemed to soak him into its maelstrom. Finally, he shook his head, realizing that if he didn't get started, he would waste the first day of his last chance. He leaned the painting out of the way against a support timber, promising himself that he would ask Miss Mamie about it later.

He had been putting off the start of his own work, the hewing of the bark from the section of maple. He was annoyed to find his mind drifting back to the paint-ing.

"Come on, you bastard," he chided himself. "This is it. Think of Mama back in Sawyer Creek, shriveling away because she made the sacrifice. Alone in the dark."

He heard her voice in his head, telling him to hold on to his dreams. He rearranged his tools, laying out his fluter, his gouge, his hatchet, his adze, his mallet, his half-dozen chisels with their different edges and angles. Stil no idea came to him. He looked around at the shadows sent leaping by the candlelight. Someone was in the surrounding darkness, watching.

A faint rustle in the corner. Mason lifted the lamp. A small, dark thing separated itself from the lesser dark-ness and skittered toward the wine rack.

A mouse. Mason's toes curled inside his shoes. He'd always hated rodents. When he was young, just before his father had died, the family had lived in a rented mo-bile home. The trailer park was next to a trash dump, and rats multiplied fruitfully thanks to the wealth of garbage.

One night, he heard scratching sounds inside the couch that he slept upon. He turned on the light, and watched with horror as tiny newborn rats spilled from a tear in the couch's fabric. Equally repulsive was the family's old gray cat, which swallowed the rats whole, one by one, as they emerged blind into the world. The mother rat must have been sick or something, because the couch stank of her death for weeks afterward. By then, Mason had taken to sleeping in a reclining chair on the other side of the living room.

And another, older memory rose, but he pushed it back into its dark chink of slumber. This creature in the basement had been only a mouse. Mason could handle that. Mice were timid. Rats were the ones to despise, with their long tails, de-liberate manner, and those eyes that shone with a defi-ant intelligence. He tried once again to focus on his work. Maybe the mouse had been his Muse. Other artists talked about the spirit moving them, moving inside them. Mason didn't understand. All he had was stubbornness and anger to drive him.

He addressed the chunk of wood that Ransom had helped him cut from a falen tree. "Okay, what kind of secrets are you hiding inside you?"

He studied the pattern of the growth rings and ca-ressed the grain of the wood. The dead sap pulsed. A draft of air whistled through the heating ducts.

"What do you want to become?" He picked up his hatchet. The draft turned into low laughter. He felt a hand around his own, a warm pocket of guiding air.

His voice rose. "What in the hel do you want from me?"

Mason sank the metal blade deep into the flesh of the maple. The flat single echo of the blow sounded al-most like a sigh of contentment.