powder. The cloth was tied with a piece of frayed blue ribbon. White dust trickled from the opening.
Suddenly Ransom stood and threw the bag at George. 'Ashes of a prayer, George!'
Mason was frozen by his own fear and a strange fascination as the bag came untied and the contents spread out in a cloud of green and gray dust. The material wafted over the ghost, mingled in its vapor, caught a stir of wind from the crack beneath the door, and swirled around the shape.
George shimmered, faded briefly, fizzled like a candle about to burn the last of its wax Jiminy H. Christ, it's working, Mason thought. IT'S WORK The cloud of herbs settled to the floor, and George wiped at its eyes.
'Now you boys have gone and made me mad' the ghost said, its voice flat and cold, seeping from the corners of the room like a fog. 'I tried to do it nice, Ransom. Just you and me, taking us a nice long walk into the tunnel like old friends. But you tried to spell me.'
George shook its see-through head. The motion made a breeze that chilled Mason to the bone. Ransom ducked behind the wagon wheel and tensed beside him. The ghost fluttered forward, steadily, now only twenty feet away, twelve, ten. A rusty metallic rattle filled the barn.
George held up the amputated hand. 'They took my hammering hand, Ransom. He took it'
The ghost sounded almost wistful, as if debating whether to follow the orders of an absent overseer. But then the deep caves of the eyes grew bright, flickered in bronze and gold and blazing orange, and the face twisted into something that was barely recognizable as having once been human. It was shrunken, wizened, a shriveled rind with pockmarks for eyes. The voice came again, but it wasn't just George's voice, it was the combined voice of dozens, a congregation, a chorus of lost souls. 'Come inside, Ransom. We're waiting for you.'
The horses kicked their stall doors. A calf bawled from the meadow outside. The surrey and the wagons rocked back and forth. The lantern quivered on the floor and shadows climbed the walls like giant insects.
The calf bawled again, then once more, the sound somehow standing out in the cacophony.
'Calf bawled three times,' Ransom whispered. 'Sure sign of death.'
Mason crouched beside him, wanting to ask Ransom what in the hell was happening. But his tongue felt like a piece of harness against the roof of his mouth. He didn't think he could work it to form words. Ransom looked at George, then at the closed door. The door was much farther.
Mason reached out to touch Ransom's sleeve, but came up with nothing. Ransom made a run for it. The ghost didn't move as Ransom's boots drummed across the plank floor. Mason wondered if he should make a run for it, too. Ransom moved fast, arms waving wildly.
He's going to make it!
Ransom was about six feet from the door when the hay rake pounced-POUNCED, Mason thought, like a cat- with a groan of stressed steel and wood, the rusty tines of the windrower sweeping down and forward. Ransom turned and faced the old farm machine as if to beg for mercy.
His eyes met Mason's, and Mason knew he would never forget that look, even if he got lucky and escaped George and managed to live to be a hundred and one. Ransom's face blanched, blood rushed from his skin as if trying to hide deep in his organs where the hay rake couldn't reach. Ransom's eyes were wet marbles of fear. The leathery skin of his jaws stretched tight as he opened his mouth to scream or pray or mutter an ancient mountain spell.
Then the windrower swept forward, skewering Ransom and pushing him backward. His body slammed against the door, two dozen giant nails hammered into wood. Ransom gurgled and a red mist spewed from his mouth. And the eyes were gazing down whatever tunnel death had cast him into.
The wagon and surrey stopped shaking, the walls settled back into place, and a sudden silence jarred the air. The old man's body sagged on the tines like a raw chuck steak at the end of a fork. Mason forced himself to look away from the viscera and carnage. The lantern threw off a burst of light, as if the flames were fed by Ransom's soul-wind leaving his body.
George floated toward Mason, who took a step backward.
'You're not here,' Mason said. He put up his hands, palms open. 'I don't believe in you, so you don't exist.'
The ghost stopped and looked down at its own silken flesh. After a stretch of skipped heartbeats, it looked at Mason and grinned.
'I lied. It ain't what we believe that matters,' it said softly, sifting forward another three feet. 'It's what Korban believes.'
The hand reached out, the hand in the hand, in a manly welcome. Marble cold and grave-dirt dead.
Mason turned, ran, waiting for the pounce of the hay rake or the grip of the ghost hand. He tripped over a gap in the floorboards and fell. He looked back at his feet. The root cellar.
He wriggled backward and flipped the trapdoor open, then scrambled through headfirst. He grabbed the first rung of the ladder and pulled himself into the damp darkness of the cellar. If potions and prayers didn't work, then a trapdoor wouldn't stop a ghost. But his muscles took over where his rational mind had shut down.
He was halfway inside when the trapdoor slammed down on his back. Stripes of silver pain streaked up his spinal column. Then he felt something on the cloth of his pants. A light tapping, walking.
Fingers.
He kicked and flailed his legs, grabbed the second rung, and heaved himself into the darkness. He was weightless for a moment, his stomach lurching from vertigo. Then he was falling, a drop into forever that was too fast for screaming. The door slammed into place overhead as he landed in the root cellar. The air was knocked from his lungs, but that didn't matter because he wasn't sure he'd breathed since he'd entered the barn.
The cellar was completely dark except for a few splinters of light that leaked through gaps in the flooring above. He experimentally moved his arms and something tumbled to the ground. He reached out and squeezed the thing under his hand, then felt it. He had landed in a sweet potato bin.
Mason rolled to his feet, then ducked behind the bin. He tried to remember what Ransom had said about another door at one end of the cellar, and a tunnel leading back to the house. George might already be down here. How well could ghosts see in the dark?
Boots, marching feet, fell loud and heavy above him, then he realized it was his pulse pounding in his ears. He opened his mouth so he could listen better. The upstairs was quiet. Mason smelled the earth and the sweet apples. He tried to get a sense of the cellar's layout, to figure out where the exit was, but he'd lost his sense of direction in the dark.
He could find the ladder again, but a trapdoor worked both ways. What would be waiting for him if he went back up? The hay rake, its tines dripping red? George, ready to give him a hand up? How about Ransom, full of holes, now one of them, whatever they were supposed to be?
He thought of Anna, her quiet self-confidence, her hidden inner strength disguised as aloofness. She claimed to understand ghosts, and hadn't ridiculed Ransom's folk beliefs. She wouldn't freak if she saw a ghost. She would know what to do, if only he could reach her. But what can anybody who's alive really know about ghosts?
His racing thoughts were broken by a soft noise. At first he thought it was the creaking of the hay rake flexing its metal claw up in the barn. But the noise wasn't grating and metallic.
It was a rustle of fingers on cloth.
The hand.
He kicked and flailed, and more sweet potatoes tumbled to the cool dirt.
The noises came again, from all sides, from too many sources to be five ghostly digits.
Then he recognized the sound, one he'd grown familiar with while living by the Sawyer Creek landfill.
It wasn't a creaking, it was a squeaking.
Rats.
CHAPTER 22
'Go away,' Anna said to the ghost that had stepped from the wall, that now stood before her in evanescent splendor.
Rachel drifted closer, the forlorn bouquet held out in apology or sorrow. 'I never wanted to hurt you, Anna.'
