Read Online The Ghost Orchid by Carol Goodman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Carol Goodman
Tags: Fiction
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for the little green bottle on the night table. It’s only her imagination, she thinks, taking a sip straight from the bottle, her overactive imagination, which is both the novelist’s curse and blessing. Even though a blind person could have told they’d met before (she’s never bought that story about the impoverished schoolmistress-mother from Gloversville), that doesn’t mean there’s anything between them. She takes another sip and now when she closes her eyes, she sees only swirls of color: turquoise and jade and violet, the colors of the sea below the cliffs of the Villa Syrene, where her heroine has been imprisoned by the mysterious Prince Pavone. As she falls asleep, she imagines herself drifting above the cliffs, high over the water, free of pain at last.
Even after Corinth has gone down into the garden and stood in front of the statue whose gaze had so startled her before in her room, she still doesn’t feel easy. She is not the nervous sort. She has sat through séances while ropes of ectoplasm disgorged from the mouth of a twelve-year-old girl and hideous apparitions floated overhead. She’s had chairs and other articles of furniture pitched at her by putative ghosts and not-so-putative landladies. Once, at a revival on the outskirts of Buffalo, a snake handler tripped over her leg and spilled from his burlap sack into Corinth’s lap a six-foot-long boa constrictor. She had stayed perfectly still, staring straight into the snake’s yellow eyes, while the handler coaxed his charge back into its sack, and she hadn’t felt anything like the dread she’d felt ten minutes ago meeting the gaze of this inanimate piece of marble.
There’s certainly nothing threatening about the statue, which stands just below the main terrace to the west of the fountain allée. A young girl, draped in Grecian robes, one arm folded in front of her breasts, her empty marble eyes cast upward as if listening to the fluttering wings of a descending god. She’s probably one of those silly girls who are seduced by a god in disguise. Corinth has seen dozens like them in the gardens of Italy and France. In fact, the statue’s antiquity suggests that the Lathams looted it from some impoverished European noble—making it the foolish girl’s second abduction. No doubt it was the girl’s upward-tilting eyes and a chance moonbeam that gave Corinth the impression that she was staring at her window. She follows the statue’s gaze back to the house and is startled to notice a girl in a short white chemise standing at one of the windows.
Corinth draws her dark cloak around her and steps behind the statue into the shadows of the ilex trees. When the girl’s gaze doesn’t follow her, Corinth assumes she hasn’t been seen. Still, she chides herself for not being more careful. Instead of taking the central path by the fountain allée she slips into the densely planted grove and, keeping her cloak tightly wrapped around her, makes her way down the hill.
She finds the secret entrance to the grotto just where he wrote it would be, behind the left knee of the reclining river god—the one representing the Sacandaga. She follows the narrow passage, trying to keep her cloak from brushing the damp rock walls, and emerges onto a shallow ledge behind the waterfall. She expected it to be dark, but instead she is dazzled by the light that at first she thinks is coming from the water. A hundred phosphorescent fish seem to be swimming in the underground cave, but then she realizes that the light comes from candles set in niches recessed into the grotto walls, their light reflected in the water and cast back up onto the domed ceiling, which is glazed in ceramic tile and encrusted with jeweled sea creatures: spiny lobsters and hook-tailed sea horses, urchins and long-tentacled octopi. Reclining on a shallow bench that is carved into the rock wall is a robed figure, who might be another river god, only Corinth is in no danger of mistaking Milo
Even after Corinth has gone down into the garden and stood in front of the statue whose gaze had so startled her before in her room, she still doesn’t feel easy. She is not the nervous sort. She has sat through séances while ropes of ectoplasm disgorged from the mouth of a twelve-year-old girl and hideous apparitions floated overhead. She’s had chairs and other articles of furniture pitched at her by putative ghosts and not-so-putative landladies. Once, at a revival on the outskirts of Buffalo, a snake handler tripped over her leg and spilled from his burlap sack into Corinth’s lap a six-foot-long boa constrictor. She had stayed perfectly still, staring straight into the snake’s yellow eyes, while the handler coaxed his charge back into its sack, and she hadn’t felt anything like the dread she’d felt ten minutes ago meeting the gaze of this inanimate piece of marble.
There’s certainly nothing threatening about the statue, which stands just below the main terrace to the west of the fountain allée. A young girl, draped in Grecian robes, one arm folded in front of her breasts, her empty marble eyes cast upward as if listening to the fluttering wings of a descending god. She’s probably one of those silly girls who are seduced by a god in disguise. Corinth has seen dozens like them in the gardens of Italy and France. In fact, the statue’s antiquity suggests that the Lathams looted it from some impoverished European noble—making it the foolish girl’s second abduction. No doubt it was the girl’s upward-tilting eyes and a chance moonbeam that gave Corinth the impression that she was staring at her window. She follows the statue’s gaze back to the house and is startled to notice a girl in a short white chemise standing at one of the windows.
Corinth draws her dark cloak around her and steps behind the statue into the shadows of the ilex trees. When the girl’s gaze doesn’t follow her, Corinth assumes she hasn’t been seen. Still, she chides herself for not being more careful. Instead of taking the central path by the fountain allée she slips into the densely planted grove and, keeping her cloak tightly wrapped around her, makes her way down the hill.
She finds the secret entrance to the grotto just where he wrote it would be, behind the left knee of the reclining river god—the one representing the Sacandaga. She follows the narrow passage, trying to keep her cloak from brushing the damp rock walls, and emerges onto a shallow ledge behind the waterfall. She expected it to be dark, but instead she is dazzled by the light that at first she thinks is coming from the water. A hundred phosphorescent fish seem to be swimming in the underground cave, but then she realizes that the light comes from candles set in niches recessed into the grotto walls, their light reflected in the water and cast back up onto the domed ceiling, which is glazed in ceramic tile and encrusted with jeweled sea creatures: spiny lobsters and hook-tailed sea horses, urchins and long-tentacled octopi. Reclining on a shallow bench that is carved into the rock wall is a robed figure, who might be another river god, only Corinth is in no danger of mistaking Milo
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