'Anna,' the woman said, in that same whispered tone that had haunted Anna's dreams, had called to her from the trail, had led her into the woods where George Law-son's spirit seized her in its severed hand.
'You,' Anna said. 'You're the one who summoned me here. It's wasn't Ephram Korban at all.'
'You grew up beautiful, just like I always figured.' The words were like splashes of ice water.
'What are you talking about?'
'I hated to send you away. I thought it was the only way to save you from him. But I didn't know.'
'Send me away?' Anna looked at Sylva, who pulled her shawl more tightly about her bony shoulders. Sylva nodded her knot of skull bone, her face tired, wrinkles deepening, as if she'd aged fifty years since arriving at the graveyard. Anna looked at the ghost of Rachel, back to Sylva, and again at the ghost. Their eyes had that same shape, the dark arch of brow, the same hint of mystery. Just like Anna's.
Just like Anna's.
'You're her.' The realization sliced through Anna with the slow sureness of a glacier, more implacable than cancer, an impossible truth that was all the more horrible because the impossible had become ordinary.
Anna's blood froze in her veins, as hard as the frost that still sparkled beneath the patches of tombstone shadows.
'It's all my fault,' Rachel said. 'That's my sorrow, that's what haunts me in my tunnel of the soul. The fear that Ephram uses to control me.'
'Ephram Korban. What do I care about him?' Anna's tears ran down her cheeks like the tracing of lifeless fingers.
The ghostly lips parted, Rachel's form glimmered under the sunrise. 'It was hard on me to lose you, harder even than dying. Harder even than being dead. Because being dead is just like being alive, only worse.'
'Hard on you,' Anna said. 'Every night, in every new foster home, every time some stranger tucked me in, I prayed to God that you'd have to suffer. Even though I never knew you, I hated you. Because I never got to belong.'
'I suffered, too.'
'I hated you for not being there, for never existing. And now I find you, and you still don't exist.'
'You don't understand, Anna. We need you.'
'Need, need, need. What about me? I had needs, too.' Anna flung the clover to the grave grass, the sobs shaking her. 'Go away. I don't believe in you.'
'Anna,' Sylva said. 'She may be dead, but she's blood.'
'You can keep your blood. I'm done with it all.' Anna moved between the stones, vision blurred by tears, scarcely aware of her feet, wanting only to be away, back in the world of ordinary pain, ordinary loneliness.
Rachel's voice reached across the grass, weaker, as if leaking from inside the mouth of an endless tunnel. 'He haunts us, Anna. We're dead and he still haunts us.'
Anna didn't even slow down. She had come here to find her own ghost. Now she had, and it was worse than she ever could have imagined. Her ghost didn't provide solace and the comfort of life beyond life. Her ghost brought the promise of eternal loneliness, proof that she would never belong, no matter which side of the grave claimed her.
'You don't know what it's like,' Sylva shouted after her, the words swept by the October wind. 'It's way worse to lose a daughter. I ought to know. 'Cause I lost Rachel.'
Anna stopped near the shadow of Ephram Korban's monument. She turned, and her turning seemed as slow as the spinning of the earth, trickles of angry sorrow cold on her cheeks, flesh already numb to this new impossible truth.
Ephram Korban and Sylva.
Then Rachel.
And Anna.
Korban's name hovered before her in a watery haze, as if the chiseled letters on the monument gave weight to Sylva's words. Blood. Ephram Korban's blood ran through her, as tainted as that ancestral side which cursed her with the Sight, all bound up in this ridge of ancient Appalachian soil, a sorry dirt that couldn't even hold down its corpses.
Sylva called once more, but Anna wasn't listening. She climbed over the fence, her heart on fire with a single wish.
Dead stay dead.
Dead stay dead forever.
CHAPTER 18
Mason wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had removed his shirt, but still the room was too warm. Oak chips stuck to his chest and arms. His shoulders had passed the point of aching. The pain had transformed into a dull, constant drumming somewhere in the back of his mind.
His sculpting instructor at Adderly, Dennis Graves, had told him that the key to art was stamina. Mason's first assignment had been to carve the letters of the word stamina into a block of white pine. That clumsy effort now rested across Mama's dead television set. He'd given it to her like a kindergartner who'd brought home a finger painting. That was back before her blindness, though after her eyesight failed she often held it in her lap and ran her fingers over the letters.
Someday he was going to do another word just for her: dreams.
He would fashion it in bronze or copper, something durable. Maybe even granite. Except then the word would be too heavy. Maybe it would be too heavy even in balsa wood. Or air.
Mason had finished with the hatchet and adze. The rough form was fleshed out. The sky had grown darker in the basement's small high windows. He didn't know if that meant rain or that dusk was coming. He'd long ago lost track of time.
Mason worked with his broad chisel and mallet, shaving off sections of the oak. The grain was cooperative, as if in a hurry to become its true shape. The statue was revealing itself too fast, and there was no way that he should be this far along already. It was almost as if the wood was pumping energy back through his tools into his hands.
Sure, Mase. Whatever you think. Artistic license.
And look here, the shoulders are squared, one of Korban's arms will be across his stomach, the other hand behind his back. An aristocratic pose. A man who knows what he's all about.
The dead space of the basement swallowed the sounds of metal on metal and metal into wood.
Come out, Korban. I know you 're in there, somewhere inside this godforsaken hunk of oak. SING to me, you beautiful old bastard. Rise up and walk.
Mason squinted as a spray of sawdust skipped back toward his face. He drove the chisel's blade into a space beside the statue's left arm. Stamina. Dreams.
He'd have to send Dennis Graves another word.
Spirit.
You had to have spirit, or you were lost. The material had to have spirit. You couldn't squeeze soul out of a stone. It had to already exist, to have existed forever, waiting there for the artist to release it.
The breath of spirit wind blew from the four corners. That's where dream-images came from. They weren't really new ideas or visions. They were things that already were, that just had to be revealed to human minds.
Okay. Okay. Now you're losing it, linthead.
Artistic pretension is expected, and all that gibberish might come in handy after you get 'discovered.' But right now, the reality is that you 're working yourself into a lather and you can't make yourself stop. You should have taken a break to eat and rest.
But YOU CAN'T MAKE YOURSELF STOP.
Mason frowned and rammed the chisel off the flank of hip. He didn't think it was a good sign when people started having philosophical debates with themselves. He was supposed to be in a creative trance. He wanted it, searched for it, prayed to the gods of impossible dreams.
