was. Then it all 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 forest? 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 well 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 remembered my dreams.'
'Really?' 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, billowing out behind me. You know, all 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 submitted 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 little 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 pillow and saw Cris, hair tangled, eyes bleary, but a blush apparent on her cheeks.
'— the warmth down there,' Cris finished, as if startled by the force of the memory. 'And I just kept running. 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 remembered dream. 'It was pretty intense,' she whispered.
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 remembered 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 suppose 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 behavioral sciences program had taught her.
Basically, dreams were nonsense. Both the sleeping and the waking kind. Especially 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 all, you have all 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 inside 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 gathering 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 famous people.'
Anna shrugged. 'We had to study his Seasons of Sleep in American lit. About put me to sleep, let me tell 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 coffee. 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 little modesty, having gone downstairs 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 comfortable.'
'And you, Miss Galloway? You were out late last night?' Miss Mamie's eyes reflected the warm flickering 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 stubborn 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 challenge 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 will come to you, Miss Galloway. Keep your spirits up.' Miss Mamie pursed her lips in a reptilian 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 repositioned 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 fully shifting his weight.
