Miss Mamie glowered and touched the locket that dangled unfashionably from her choker. 'He-he doesn't want you to go.'
'Paul?'
Miss Mamie seemed to recover just a little. 'Black Rock is a half day's journey by horse. And you belong here.'
The string music increased in intensity, fragmenting into chromatic chaos.
'I'll walk, then.'
The music stopped abruptly, a diminished fifth quivering in the air, embarrassed at its isolation.
'No one leaves,' she said.
Adam followed her gaze to the portrait of Korban above the fireplace, that same face that had whispered dream words to Adam about tunnels of the soul. Adam shivered. The house itself brooded, as if the walls were weary of darkness. The air was heavy, and even the blazing fire added nothing to the room's cheer. Adam moved to the hearth and rubbed his hands, trying to drive the remnants of the nightmare from his mind.
He looked down at the broken figurine. A scrap of fabric was tucked into a splintered crease in the torso. Gray cotton, like his pajamas.
'Play on,' Miss Mamie said to the Abramovs.
Roth found Spence on the smoking porch, sitting in a hand-carved rocker whose legs seemed to bow outward from the stress.
'How goes the Shakespeare bit?' Roth asked.
The writer already had a drink, scotch, judging from its amber appearance. It was scarcely ten o'clock. Spence was certainly living up to his reputation. Roth had half suspected the writer had affected an alcoholic's indulgence that was as phony as his legendary womanizing or Roth's own accent.
'The best ever, as always,' Spence said, face pale and eyes nearly pink from lack of sleep.
'You'd like to feed it to the critics with a shovel, wouldn't you, mate? I mean, they've been bloody hard on you these last few years.'
Spence let out a wet sigh, his chins flexing like a grubworm. 'There's only one critic I want to nail. My first one.'
Roth sat in a swinging seat that was woven from thin reeds. He placed his camera case on the floor. If he worked it around right, a dissipated Spence would make a great addition to Roth's gallery of deceased celebrities. Because Spence was clearly running headlong toward some invisible cliff edge.
'Your old mum, I bet,' Roth said. 'They can be rather overbearing.'
'My mother was a saint. The critic to whom I've alluded is long dead. But I have hopes that a merciful God will bring me face-to-face with her in the afterlife.'
Roth grinned. 'Yeah, what use is heaven if you can't have a go at all your old enemies?'
Spence took a long swallow of scotch. 'You're boring me, Mr. Roth. I loathe boredom.'
'Listen here, mate, I had this idea-'
'Let me guess. You have a book you want me to write and we'll split the money after I do all the work.'
'Not quite that bald. I was thinking about a coffee table book on Korban. I'll take the photographs, dig up some old archival stuff, convert some of these portraits to digital files. All you have to do is put your name on the cover and type a few pages as a foreword.'
'My name isn't what it used be.'
'The project's a natural. Some eccentric bloke builds himself a rural empire, then dies by mysterious means. We can even play on the ghost angle. I've no qualms about inserting some transparent orbs or fairy dust on the film.'
'Speaking of fairies,' Spence said. Through the porch screen, they could see a young man carrying a video camera toward the forest.
'His friend let him go off alone like that? Seemed the jealous and clingy sort.' Roth had occasionally been driven to experiment when no birds were available for plucking. Males were a bit too rough around the edges for his taste, but they offered an element of danger that no woman could match. Still, if Spence were that prim about such matters, best to play it straight. He made no comment.
'Ephram Korban would have despised such depraved moral weakness,' Spence said.
'You talk as if you knew him.'
'No, but I understand him. I can feel him. This house was his in more than mere ownership.'
'Ah, you believe that ghost tripe?'
'I've felt the spirit move me.'
Roth wondered how many drinks the man had downed with breakfast. 'Then why not a book? We can do it as a tribute if you'd rather.'
Spence lifted himself with effort. 'I'd sooner write a trashy thriller, something with vampires and a Martian Pope and a government conspiracy. And an unlikely love interest. One must have a love interest to make the pot boil.'
'Think about it.'
'Excuse me, I have work to do. Real work.' Spence carried his empty glass toward the study, no doubt for a refill.
Roth sat in the shade of the porch. Spence, dead in the bathtub, his fat, white gut displayed in a two-page tabloid spread. Moby dicked. That would be a picture worth a thousand words. And multiple thousands of dollars.
How to make that overtaxed heart explode? A menage a trois with Bridget and Lilith? Or put Paul and Adam on him. With his homophobia, Spence likely had some serious bones in the closet.
Roth smiled. There was an easier way, one that wouldn't involve the complicity of outsiders.
If Spence were so bloody in love with his work, what would happen if the work went into the fireplace? Best of all, he could blame it all on a ghost. Who could ever prove otherwise?
The wind played through the trees that surrounded the graveyard, a lonely music for a dead resting place high on the edge of the world. Sylva leaned on her walking stick, watching from the fence, too brittle to risk climbing over. The old woman had knelt in the grass, searched the ground for a minute, then picked something and passed it through the fence to Anna. It was a four-leaf clover.
'Lucky charm?' Anna asked.
'Better than luck. Lets you see the dead.' — 'I already do.'
'Only when they want. This here gives you the power over them.' Sylva nodded toward the grave of Rachel Faye Hartley. 'That's the one you'll be wanting to summon.'
'Summon?'
'Come in fire, dead come back. Say it. Third time's a charm.'
'I can't do that.'
'It's in your blood. You just got to believe.'
Anna stared at the cold stone, the flowers chiseled by some delicate hand, a bouquet that never wilted. She believed in ghosts, and so she saw them. And since she'd arrived at Korban Manor, she'd see them more clearly than ever before. Maybe it was always a question of faith. Part of the belief might originate from the dead spirit, and a ghost had to dream itself back toward the living world.
Perhaps Anna and the ghost had to meet halfway in a union of sad and enslaved souls, and if she only had to recite an old mountain folk spell, that wasn't so much to ask. The ghost, in this case the person who had lived by the name of Rachel Faye Hartley, had to put forth the real effort. After all, it would be Rachel who wrenched herself from the dark peace of eternal slumber to rise and return to a world perhaps best forgotten. A world that held only the promise of pain and loneliness.
Anna looked down at the clover. Could she believe in magic? With cancer eating her flesh, she had to put all her faith in the permanent existence of the soul, or else she might as well leap from the top of Korban Manor herself. Without faith, what was the point?
She closed her eyes and said the words: 'Come in fire, come in fire, come in fire.'
A chill caressed her, a soft immortal coldness. When she opened her eyes, the woman in white stood before her, the bouquet in her diaphanous hands. It was as if Anna were looking into a trick mirror, because she recognized herself in that pale and transparent face.
