"Mind if I've a look?"
She shrugged and turned the sketch pad toward him. He took the opportunity to stand over her.
"I'm not very good," Cris said.
Looked quite good from the little peek I got.
"The house isn't an easy subject," he said, reaching for the pad. "I can hardly get a decent framing for it. I can't imagine how frightfully awful drawing the thing would-"
He'd expected a stick-house drawing, something that the Big Bad Wolf could blow over with a half a breath. But not this… this asylum the woman had sketched. Not coming from this little ponytailed girl who looked like a Malibu beach bunny, who probably studied EST or reiki or whatever New Age pap was all the rage now.
Because the drawing was definitely of the manor, but was of much more than that.
It was all droopy and dark and pessimistic, a cross between Dali and that Spanish artist, Goya. They'd found some of Goya's paintings after he'd died, hidden away in his house because no one could bear to look at them. Roth fought a sudden urge to touch the sketch.
The charcoal was as thick as fur on the paper. The shadows of the portico were sharp and steep, and Roth could almost imagine winged creatures fluttering in that darkness. The windows of the gables were leering eyes, the large front door a ravenous maw. He glanced from the drawing to the house, and for just a second, so short a time that he could convince himself that it was a trick of suggestion, the house looked the way she had drawn it, swaying and throbbing like a live, growling beast.
"Bloody hell, girl," he finally managed. "Where did that come from?"
She looked shyly down at the tips of her hiking boots. When she shrugged, he only half noticed her jiggling breasts. "I don't know," she said. "It just sort of happened."
Roth shook his head.
"I've never done anything that good," she said. "I mean, I'm not that good at all."
"Looks ace to me."
"Not this picture. I know it's good. But it's not because of me. It's because of the house."
"The house?" Roth thought about how he couldn't manage to make himself photograph anything but the house. And how he'd felt a little queasy when he'd been walking down the road toward the bridge. At least until he got back within sight of the house.
"It's like it's got this… energy," Cris said. "When I was drawing, the charcoal almost seemed to be moving by itself."
"Like hypnotic suggestion and that rot?" he snorted, then regretted it. Scorn wasn't the way into a woman's heart, or any of the other warm parts, either.
Cris's lip curled. She slapped the sketch pad closed. The haunting, warped drawing still lingered in Roth's mind.
"Everybody's a critic," she said. "Why don't you just go back to pushing your silly little buttons?"
She stormed past him, kicking up leaves. Roth watched her walk onto the wagon road and toward the house. He shifted the strap that was digging into his neck, then checked the camera that was perched on the tripod.
Blew a go at her, he thought. What do I care about any twopence line drawing, anyway? Artists are a pack of fools, going on about "meaning" and "creative spirit" and such nonsense. All it came down to was money, power, and sex, and how to secure more of each.
He peered through his viewfinder at the manor. Cris bounced up the wide steps leading to the porch. As she disappeared through the front door, Roth couldn't shake the feeling that the house had swallowed her whole.
The forest looked different in the daytime. Its edges were blunter, the branches less menacing, the shadows under the canopy less solid and suffocating. Anna took in the afternoon air, feeling alive, fresh, renewed. Korban Manor and the mountains were bringing back her appetite, making her forget the long darkness that the cancer pushed her toward.
She took a right at the fork in the trail, remembering that Robert Frost poem about the road less traveled, because the right fork was little more than an animal path. But the trail led to an opening on a knoll, a soft rounded skull of earth wearing a cap of grass. In the middle of the opening stood a square section of iron fence, and white and gray gravestones protruded from the dirt within it.
"So this is where you keep your dead," she said to the sky.
Anna made her way to the fence. She looked around, but the forest was still and silent. This wouldn't be the first cemetery she'd committed trespass against. She heaved herself over, gripping the wrought floral design and scrollwork of the fence to keep from spearing herself on the sharp-tipped ends.
Two large marble monuments, beautiful though worn with age, dominated the graveyard. The first read
EPHRAM ELIJAH KORBAN, 1859–1918. TOO SOON SUMMONED. The one beside it, slightly less ornate, said simply MARGARET. Anna knelt and pressed her palm to the soil above Ephram's final resting place.
"Anybody home, Miss Galloway?"
Anna looked up. Miss Mamie stood by the fence, somehow having crossed fifty feet of open field without Anna noticing.
"I was just out for a walk, and I got curious."
"You know what they say about curiosity and the cat. Most of our guests respect fences."
"Do you mean the guests who walk, or the ones who float?"
Miss Mamie's giggle echoed off the monuments. "Ah, those ghost stories. I couldn't resist approving your application, you know. Paranormal researcher. That's too perfect."
"It's just as much an art form as painting and writing. It's all about seeking, isn't it?"
"Clever. And just what are you seeking, Anna?"
"I suppose I'll know it when I find it."
"One can only hope. Or perhaps you won't have to search. Perhaps it will find you."
"Then you don't mind if I prowl in your graveyard?"
Miss Mamie looked at Korban's monument. "Make yourself at home."
"Thanks."
"Don't be late for dinner, though. And be careful if you're caught out after dark." Miss Mamie started to leave, then added. "You're one of those, aren't you?"
"One of what?"
"What the mountain people around here call 'gifted.' Second Sight. The power to see things other people can't."
"I'm not so special."
"Those ghost stories are so delightful. And good for business, too. What artist who fancies himself living on the edge could possibly pass up an opportunity to come here? If you see anything, you'll tell me, won't you?"
"Cross my heart and hope to die."
"Don't hope too hard. Not yet, anyway."
Anna watched the woman cross the grass and enter the forest, then she headed toward the rest of the grave markers that stippled the slope. She explored them, reading the names. Hartley, Streater, Aldridge, McFall. Then the names gave way to simple flagstone markers, in some cases chunks of rough granite propped toward the heavens as a forlorn memento of a long-forgotten life.
Would her own death be so little noted? Would her mark be as insignificant? Did it even matter?
At the edge of the scattered stones, where the rear of the fence met the woods, a pale carved tombstone stood in the shade of an old cedar. Anna went to it, read RACHEL FAYE HARTLEY etched in the marble. An ornate bouquet of flowers was engraved above the name.
"Rachel Faye, Rachel Faye," Anna said. "Someone must have loved you."
And though Rachel Faye Hartley was now dust, Anna envied her just a little.
Sylva watched from the forest until Miss Mamie left. Anna looked small and lost in the graveyard, talking to the stones, looking for ghosts among the blades of grass. The girl had the Sight, that much was plain. And something else was plain, that dark aura around her, hanging around her flesh like a rainbow of midnight.
Anna was fixing to die.
Sylva drew her shawl close together, holding it with one knotted hand. The other held her walking stick, which she leaned on to rest for the trip back to Beechy Gap. She didn't get out much these days, especially now that Korban's fetches were walking loose. Things were mighty stirred up, and part of that had to do with the coming blue moon.