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 hell 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 almost like a sigh of contentment.
CHAPTER 10
Roth was irritated. He had shot three rolls of film, framing the house first in the soft, low-angle morning light and then in harsher, steeper shadows as the sun climbed the eastern sky. He had walked a good distance down the sandy road so he could do a series of approaching perspectives through a telephoto lens, working off a tripod. He achieved a rather nice depth of field, manipulating the f-stop so that the house seemed small against the surrounding forest. Then he did some closer, handheld work to get the opposite effect, to make the manor appear to tower over the trees and hills.
And that was all top-shelf, spot-on and all that, but then he wanted to try something different. He'd wanted to photograph the bridge. The narrow, weather-beaten bridge would make a jolly center spread for a coffee table picture book, what with all the dramatic cliffs and foggy vistas.
He was positive he wanted to photograph the bridge, but by the time he'd walked under the canopy of trees down the road, the idea didn't seem all that wonderful. The day was so warm that, even in the shade, his forehead beaded with sweat. A spasm of nausea and dizziness passed over him. Before he came around the final bend where the manor grounds gave way to the plummeting rocks, he'd decided that the bridge would be a bloody waste of good stock.
So he walked back toward Korban Manor. By then a little breeze sprang up, and he felt better as the sweat dried. He snapped more pictures of the house from the exact same locations as before. It was all such a bunch of poppycock.
'I'm going daft, is all,' he muttered under his breath.
'What's that you said?'
The female voice had come from somewhere to his right. He squinted into the shadow of the trees, hoping he'd maintained his British accent while he'd been muttering. One mustn't slip.
'I was saying, 'What a lot of bother,' ' he said.
He saw her now, sitting on a stump beside a sycamore. She had a sketch pad in her lap and a charcoal stick clutched between her fingers. Roth eyed her long legs, appreciating that the day was warm enough for her to wear shorts.
'You taking pictures?' she asked.
Pictures. Gawps and ninnies took pictures. Roth framed the vital, captured the essential, immortalized the utterly proper. Stupid bird, he thought. Still, in his experience, the emptier the space upstairs, the tighter the compartment below.
He was getting frustrated with his work anyway. Maybe the time was right to line up an evening's companion. 'Yes, my dear,' he said, raising the camera and pointing it at the woman.
She looked away.
'Don't be shy, love. Make my camera happy. I won't even make you say 'cheese' or anything of that sort.' He zoomed in on her cleavage without her noticing.
She looked up and smiled, he clicked the shutter, and then put the camera away. 'Say, didn't I see you at Miss Mamie's little after-dinner last night?'
'Yeah. I saw you. You're William Roth, right?'
Roth loved it when they pretended not to be impressed by his celebrity, but she couldn't hide the small sparkle in her eyes. Maybe he wasn't a famous movie star, but name recognition definitely came in handy for bedding the birds. 'I'm every inch of him,' Roth said. 'And to whom do I have the pleasure?'
'Cris Whitfield. Cris without the h.' She held out her hand in greeting, realized it was smudged by the charcoal, and put it back in her lap.
'Charmed.' He arched his neck as if to look at her drawing, but was actually peeking down her halter top. 'What are you drawing?'
'The house,' she said, nodding toward it.
'Mind if I've a look?'
She shrugged and turned the sketch pad toward him. He took the opportunity to stand over her.
'I'm not very good,' Cris said.
Looked quite good from the little peek I got.
'The house isn't an easy subject,' he said, reaching for the pad. 'I can hardly get a decent framing for it. I can't imagine how frightfully awful drawing the thing would-'
He'd expected a stick-house drawing, something that the Big Bad Wolf could blow over with a half a breath. But not this… this asylum the woman had sketched. Not coming from this little ponytailed girl who looked like a Malibu beach bunny, who probably studied EST or reiki or whatever New Age pap was all the rage now.
Because the drawing was definitely of the manor, but was of much more than that.
It was all droopy and dark and pessimistic, a cross between Dali and that Spanish artist, Goya. They'd found some of Goya's paintings after he'd died, hidden away in his house because no one could bear to look at them. Roth fought a sudden urge to touch the sketch.
The charcoal was as thick as fur on the paper. The shadows of the portico were sharp and steep, and Roth could almost imagine winged creatures fluttering in that darkness. The windows of the gables were leering eyes, the large front door a ravenous maw. He glanced from the drawing to the house, and for just a second, so short a time that he could convince himself that it was a trick of suggestion, the house looked the way she had drawn it, swaying and throbbing like a live, growling beast.
'Bloody hell, girl,' he finally managed. 'Where did that come from?'
She looked shyly down at the tips of her hiking boots. When she shrugged, he only half noticed her jiggling breasts. 'I don't know,' she said. 'It just sort of happened.'
Roth shook his head.
'I've never done anything that good,' she said. 'I mean, I'm not that good at all.'
'Looks ace to me.'
'Not this picture. I know it's good. But it's not because of me. It's because of the house.'
'The house?' Roth thought about how he couldn't manage to make himself photograph anything but the house. And how he'd felt a little queasy when he'd been walking down the road toward the bridge. At least until he got back within sight of the house.
'It's like it's got this… energy,' Cris said. 'When I was drawing, the charcoal almost seemed to be moving by itself.'
'Like hypnotic suggestion and that rot?' he snorted, then regretted it. Scorn wasn't the way into a woman's heart, or any of the other warm parts, either.
Cris's lip curled. She slapped the sketch pad closed. The haunting, warped drawing still lingered in Roth's mind.
'Everybody's a critic,' she said. 'Why don't you just go back to pushing your silly little buttons?'
She stormed past him, kicking up leaves. Roth watched her walk onto the wagon road and toward the house. He shifted the strap that was digging into his neck, then checked the camera that was perched on the tripod.
Blew a go at her, he thought. What do I care about any twopence line drawing, anyway? Artists are a pack of fools, going on about 'meaning' and 'creative spirit' and such nonsense. All it came down to was money, power, and sex, and how to secure more of each.
He peered through his viewfinder at the manor. Cris bounced up the wide steps leading to the porch. As she disappeared through the front door, Roth couldn't shake the feeling that the house had swallowed her whole.
The forest looked different in the daytime. Its edges were blunter, the branches less menacing, the shadows
