Roth knew that Spence hadn't finished a novel in years. He had blustered his way through some opinion pieces and essays, and had penned a scathing introduction to The New Southern Voices Collection that had likely driven some of the anthology's contributors to tears. The critics had given him up. He was like a beached whale-fun to poke while blood could be drawn, but shunned after becoming a bloated, gassy corpse.
"I would think this place would be rather inspiring for a man of your genius," Roth said, barely disguising the taunt.
Spence didn't rise to the bait. He'd probably read too many of his publisher's press releases, the ones that kept promising a coming masterpiece. "This is the one, Mr. Roth. This is the work that will earn the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's about time an American brought home that particular piece of hardware. Nothing personal, mind you."
Roth turned up one palm in submission. His British accent had fooled even Spence, a man who had trained himself to observe human behavior. Spence's girlfriend brought the writer his drink, put it in his hand, and dutifully returned to his shadow.
Roth smiled at her and then began the laborious task of drawing Spence into his trust.
CHAPTER 6
I'm a ghoulie-chasing fool.
Anna let the yellow beam of the flashlight lead her as if she had no will of her own. She found herself heading up a forest trail, onto one of the narrower worn paths crowded by laurel. The waxy leaves brushed against her face and hands. Crickets and katydids launched their choruses from the obscurity of the dark forest.
You follow and you follow and you never catch up. You reach out and they dance away. You run and they run faster. You look in the dark and see nothing but darkness.
Ghosts played by their own rules. Anna had a hunch that ghosts didn't need to unravel secrets, didn't demand explanations. Life's great mysteries must mean very little to those no longer living. Undoubtedly all spirits received the necessary explanations as a gift to welcome them to the afterlife. But perhaps the dead needed amusement. Eternity surely got tedious after a while.
Anna wasn't worried about getting lost in the woods, even though Korban Manor's lighted windows had disappeared from view. After leaving the house, she'd stopped by the barn and found four horses in their stalls. She had massaged their necks and stroked the bristling hairs above their noses.
She was comforted by their warm animal smell. The aroma of straw and manure brought back memories of one of her foster families, who had kept a farm in West Virginia. Anna had grown into a woman that summer. Her first sexual experience was with the handsome but dull boy who came every other day to collect the eggs. She'd also spent hours in the weedy local cemetery, sitting among the crumbling, illegible markers, wondering about the people under the ground and the part of them that might have survived the crush of dirt and decay.
And still she wondered, her curiosity sending her into anthropology at Duke University and parapsychology at the Rhine Research Center, and now out into the night woods. Roads that never ended, a seeking that never found. The moon and a sprinkle of starlight gave vague shape to the landscape. She followed the ridge to the point where the ground sloped rapidly away. Boulders gleamed like bad teeth in the weak light. Beyond the field of stone was a yawning gap of black valley, dusted silver by an early frost.
The ribs and ripples of the Blue Ridge Mountains rolled out toward the horizon, the distant twinkle of the town of Black Rock set among them like blue and orange jewels. A jet's winking red light cut a dotted line in the east. A little flying tin can of humanity, some passengers probably afraid of a crash, some munching stale peanuts, others longing for a cigarette. Most with thoughts of relatives, spouses, and lovers recently visited or waiting at airport terminals ahead.
All with places to go, things to look forward to. People to belong to. Hopes, dreams, futures. Life. She thought of that Shirley Jackson line, "Journeys end in lovers meeting."
Yeah, right. Journeys end in death, and lovers never meet.
She turned from the lights that were starting to blur in her vision and put aside her self-pity. She had a forest to explore. And she felt a tingle in her gut, an instinct that she had learned to trust even if Stephen couldn't prove it was real. There were dead among these trees and hills.
She sometimes wondered if the cancer was a progression of that instinct. As if death were her true natural state, and life was only an interruption to be briefly endured. As if, by rights, she belonged to the dead and that her sense of them grew stronger the closer she got to becoming one of them.
That was morbid thinking. Still, she couldn't ignore the Jungian symbolism of turning her back on those dim, distant lights of civilization to enter the dark forest alone. In search of herself.
This is my life's work. If I can leave just one thing behind, if I can shed a little light into the ignorant and blind caves of the human consciousness, then maybe it's worth it. Or maybe I'm more vain than any artist, politician, or religious zealot in thinking that my beliefs matter.
Wouldn't it be nice to love, to belong, to be connected? To know that there was more to your time of breathing than the rush toward its end? What if it WERE possible to meet another spirit, touch someone, share the science of souls, to create something that has a life beyond living and dying? Or is such wishing only a more grotesque form of vanity?
She stared at the cone of battery-powered light as it bobbed ahead of her on the trail. The older she got, and the closer to death and the deeper into her search she found herself, the more alone she became. And if there was anything that frightened her, that could frighten someone who had seen ghosts, it was the thought that any soul or consciousness or life force that continued beyond death would do so alone, forever isolated, forever lost.
Anna figured she was about a mile from the manor now. She was beginning to tire. That was one of the things she hated most about her illness. Her strength was slowly draining away, slipping from this life into the next.
She paused and played the flashlight along the ridge ahead of her. Night noises crept from beneath the canopy of hardwoods, the stirring of nocturnal animals and the restless mountain wind. A breath of pine-cleansed air and the cold dampness of the early twilight revived her. The trail had intersected with several larger ones, and she had earlier crossed another wagon road. She followed her instinct, the one that carried her through the night like the moon pulled a restless tide.
The trail widened under a copse of balsams, then opened onto a meadow of thick grass. A shack overlooked the clearing, frail and wobbly on its stilts of stacked rock. A crumbling chimney, gray in the dim starlight, penetrated the slanted tin roof. The glass sheets of the windows were like dark eyes watching for company.
This was what Anna had been sent to find. She waded through the meadow, her pants cuffs soaked by the frosted grains of grass. A large rounded stone was set at the foot of the porch, as pale as the belly of a fish. She stepped on the stone and peered into the dark doorway.
The house wanted her.
Maybe not the house, but whoever had lived and then died here. Something had bound a human soul to this place, an event terrible enough to leave a psychic imprint, much the way light burned through the emulsion on a photographic negative.
The air hummed with inaudible music. The tiny hairs on the back of Anna's neck stood like magnetized needles. Despite the chill of night, her armpits were sweaty. A preternatural fear coursed through her veins, threatening to override her curiosity.
Something hovered beyond the door, wispy and frail as if unfamiliar with its own substance.
Or perhaps it was only the wind blowing through some chink in the board-and-batten walls.