Free The Manor by Scott Nicholson Page B

a for-est to explore. And she felt a tingle in her gut, an in-stinct 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 pro-gression of that instinct. As if death were her true nat-ural 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 for-est 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 be-liefs matter. Wouldn't it be nice to love, to belong, to be con-nected? 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, for-ever 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 twi-light revived her. The trail had intersected with several larger ones, and she had earlier crossed another wagon road. She folowed 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 over-looked 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 bely 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 emul-sion on a photographic negative.
    The air hummed with inaudible music. The tiny hairs on the back of Anna's neck stood like magnetized nee-dles. Despite the chil of night, her armpits were sweaty. A preternatural fear coursed through her veins, threat-ening 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 wals. Anna shined the flashlight on a knothole just above the door handle. A flicker of white shadow filled the hole, then dissolved.
    Anna put her other foot on the stone porch. A form, a face, imprinted itself in the grain of the