had massaged their necks and stroked the bristling hairs above their noses.
She was comforted by their warm animal smell. 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 dull boy who came every other day to collect the eggs. She'd also spent hours in the weedy local cemetery, sitting among the crumbling, illegible markers, wondering 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 parapsychology 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 followed 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 rolled out toward the horizon, the distant twinkle of the town of Black Rock set among them like blue and orange 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 visited 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 forest to explore. And she felt a tingle in her gut, an instinct 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 progression of that instinct. As if death were her true natural 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 forest 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 beliefs matter.
Wouldn't it be nice to love, to belong, to be connected? 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, forever 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 twilight revived her. The trail had intersected with several larger ones, and she had earlier crossed another wagon road. She followed 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 overlooked 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 belly 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 emulsion on a photographic negative.
The air hummed with inaudible music. The tiny hairs on the back of Anna's neck stood like magnetized needles. Despite the chill of night, her armpits were sweaty. A preternatural fear coursed through her veins, threatening 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 walls.
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 hollow 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 always 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 hollow 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 sympathy, 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 fluttered 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 beneath 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 nothing. The eyes had burned into Anna's memory. She would never forget them. The eyes had looked- haunted.
'Hello?' Anna called. The word died in the hollow 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 angles.
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, papery substance. Anna scratched at it with her fingernail and it fell to the table. Anna identified the object
