Uptight city boy. That was Adam, all right. Worried about mutual funds when most people were worried about scoring the night's lover, deciding which band was the flavor of the month, or choosing a brand name clothes designer. But at least Adam wasn't selfish. That was why making the relationship work was so important to him. That was why he wanted to adopt a child.
He wanted to share what he had to offer, to give himself away. He wanted a home in somebody's heart. Only he now feared it wouldn't be Paul's.
'Let it out,' Adam said. 'Go ahead and destroy me. That's all you've done since we got here, anyway. Might as well finish the job.'
Paul giggled. 'The martyr. Nails in your palms and a spear in your side. Poor boy. You've given me an idea for my next video. The Noble Suffering of Adam Andrews. Filmed in whine-a-vision.'
Asshole. Asshole.
Adam clenched a fist, the anger merging with the fear, creating a hot mix that burned his gut. But losing control would be letting Paul have the final victory. Adam always lost with grace. And he'd had lots of practice.
He forced his voice to remain calm and quiet. 'Look, since I'm stuck here for five more weeks, we may as well be civil to each other. That way, maybe we can look back at this one day and pretend it wasn't all bad.'
The rocker squeaked as Paul stood up, and the ember of the joint stub arced into the damp grass beside the porch. Paul walked over to Adam, leaned forward until his face was so close that Adam could smell the marijuana and liquor on his breath.
'Now you're talking,' Paul said. 'Since we're stuck with each other, we might as well enjoy it.'
Adam tried to slide away from the contact, but Paul hugged him, his breath hot on Adam's neck.
'Paul, I don't think-'
'Shh. You get all hot and bothered over Ephram Korban, talking about him in your sleep, but I'm probably a little more available.'
'I can't, knowing you don't care about me. Now stop it, Miss Mamie might see us.'
Paul stepped back, looked into Adam's eyes. Smiled. His damned hair was tousled, boyish, he was dead cute and knew it.
Suddenly his face changed, contorted, and Ephram Korban, that twisted, cruel face from Adam's nightmare, leered at him like a Halloween mask.
And the dream came back in all its brilliance and realism, Korban leaning him over the railing of the widow's walk, only kissing him this time, breath hot and foul, tongue like an insistent snake, mouth stealing the breath from his lungs. Then, drained and empty, Korban sucking him into the long tunnel toward the thing that Adam knew was waiting around the bend. The thing he feared most.
For Adam, there would be nothing. In Adam's part of the tunnel, after he passed through the row of ghosts, he would step into the pitch of his childhood nightmare. The one of suffocation, no sight, no sound, no touch besides the texture of the darkness pressing down around him. No taste besides the bland airless nothing.
No feeling besides the fear that came with isolation. And the dread of knowing that the bubble was complete, intact, unchanging. Eternal loneliness.
Was that why he was so desperate to adopt? To make someone need him? To make it so the child couldn't leave, at least for many years? Years that the awful colorless texture would be kept away.
He blinked and it was Paul who stood before him, not Ephram Korban. The piano notes were like needles of ice driven by the wind.
Only a flashback, he thought. How old were you when you first had that dream of suffocation? Three? Two? Even before you knew about words?
And this house has brought it back, the dream comes sniffing around your heels like a strange black dog that follows you home. That neither comes close enough to be petted nor gets left far enough behind to be forgotten.
Adam didn't know what the dream meant, and he wasn't interested in a shrink's opinion, either. He only knew that he didn't want to be alone. Even if it meant surrendering, losing, grabbing and hanging on in desperation. He wrapped his arms around Paul, clung to him as if sinking in quicksand.
The death dream. Ephram Korban. The ghosts. All part of it. The house would take him in its jaws and then swallow him into its black stomach. Swallow him alone, unless he took someone with him into that airless silence.
'I care about you,' Paul whispered in his ear. 'Can't you tell?'
Paul cared about the flesh, the meat. But that was okay. That's all they were, anyway. They had no spirit. Two souls could never mingle as one, not even in dreams.
Adam let out a sharp breath. He hated the feelings that flooded his body, the passion that betrayed him. But love and hate were basically the same thing, and both were better than feeling nothing. Anything was better than the suffocation of solitude that waited in his tunnel of the soul. He pulled Paul closer.
'I have an idea,' Paul said. 'Let's go up on the roof. Up the little stairs. Fool around up there where you had your dream. And I promise not to push you off.'
'That's what they all say,' Adam said. 'And the next thing you know, you're looking down at your own ghost.'
'Trust me.' Paul took his hand, led him inside.
As they entered the house, Adam realized that people never gave away their hearts, however willing or desperate or lonely they were. Hearts always had to be taken. By force or trickery. Love was murder, the infliction of death by cardiac theft, and the alternative was even worse.
Korban's painted eyes looked down at them, glimmering with cold empathy, wise to the futility of human dreams.
Anna held the lantern higher. The air in the basement smelled of wood and decay, the shadows creeping from the corners like solid things. Mason's statue skulked in the flicker of flame, the raw features suggesting an obscene strength. The bust of Korban was even more unsettling, because the face had grown comfortable in the polished grain. It had been fashioned with all the love God might have summoned in crafting Adam and Eve.
'What does it mean?' Mason asked.
'I think it means you're obsessed.'
'I'm talking about the painting.'
'You did all of this since yesterday? '
'Hey, the critics will love me, Mama will be proud, I'm the Mountain Michelangelo, the unsung hero of sculpture, blah, blah, blah. But look at this damned painting.'
Anna looked. There, on the widow's walk, a host of figures stood in white relief against the dark background. Foremost was the woman Anna had seen in her dreams, the woman in the long flowing gown, the bouquet in her hands. The woman's mouth was open, caught in a scream or a whisper, the eyes imploring, pleading for deliverance from the grasping shapes behind her.
'That's you,' Mason said.
'No. I thought it was, at first.'
'You've seen this painting before?'
'In my dreams. For the past year, ever since I found out-since I decided to come to Korban Manor.'
'If it's not you, then who is it?'
'You won't believe this.'
Mason waved his arm to indicate his work. 'I've turned into a genius practically overnight, every time I close my eyes Korban is right there telling me to get back to work, you and Ransom and half the guests are convinced that this house is haunted, and this picture has painted itself while nobody was watching. Now tell me what else I wouldn't believe.'
'Okay, then. Promise not to laugh.'
'I've not been in a laughing mood since I got here. I'm a serious artist, didn't you know that?'
'Oh yes. You've got 'suffering' written all over your face. It's your shield against the world. That's your excuse for keeping people away. You're as wooden as your goddamned statue.'
Mason's eyes flashed anger, and for a moment Anna saw Stephen, his mask of barely suppressed rage at Anna's acceptance of approaching death, his calculation of what her loss would mean, his scorn when he'd learned
