The Spirit Wood by Robert Masello Page A

around the wing of the house, Peter thought he caught a glimpse of someone inside—the girl, no doubt—passing through one of the rooms. Nothing else was really visible—it appeared to be dim, and probably rather cool, Peter guessed.
    From the back, the statue in the center of the fountain looked like a goat, or some other wild, furry animal, rearing up on its hind legs. But from the front, to both Peter and Meg's amazement, it presented the face and torso of a bearded man holding exultantly, with both hands, a wildly disproportionate and thoroughly erect penis; the water jetted sporadically from that. Peter put the thermos and sandwich down on the cement lip of the pool and motioned for Meg to sit down beside him there.
    “I don't know,” she said, observing the statue with dismay. “I think I may have lost my appetite.”
    Peter looked back over his shoulder at it. “Think of it as art,” he said. “Ancient and disgusting art.”
    “Do you think it is ancient?”
    “Who knows—but I do remember Kennedy saying Gramps was quite the collector.” He unwrapped the one good sandwich and offered half to Meg. She took it gingerly, still studying the sculpture.
    “Your mother may be right.” Peter looked quizzical. “Maybe you shouldn't have been exposed to your grandfather.”
    With their backs to the statue that played on unashamedly behind them, they ate their belated lunch and looked down the hillside to the dock. It suddenly occurred to Peter, just as he was peeling one of the oranges they'd brought for dessert, that the dock mayhave been where his grandfather had suffered the fatal heart attack, or whatever it was, that had plunged him into the bay. This, he realized, was the scene of the crime—accident, he corrected himself—perhaps the last place on earth his grandfather had ever been alive. In his mind's eye, he pictured him there, incongruously dressed in the black winter overcoat, poised at the end of the pier. Then spinning, clutching at his chest, dropping soundlessly into the lapping water. Peter waited for some feeling to blossom in his chest, some corresponding emotion of sadness, horror, loss. But nothing came; nothing could come. His grandfather was simply that single blurred shadow for him, and even his death was only a distant, if resonant, event, like the recorded fall of some historic figure.
    Meg passed him the red cup from the top of the thermos. “It's starting to get late,” she said. “Do you think we could check out the interior of Castle Constantine now?”
    The image of his grandfather disappeared from his mind in the time it took to raise the cup to his lips. He finished the Coke, then helped Meg gather up the orange peels and Saran Wrap and stuff them into the paper sack. Rather than attempt prying open the vaultlike doors in front, they probed the back of the house until they found a pair of unlocked French doors leading into the left-hand wing. Stepping across the threshold, they found themselves at one end of a long, nearly empty room, the floor of which was composed of a highly polished, flawlessly smooth black stone. Meg knelt down and placed her palm flat against it.
    “I wonder what it is,” she said. “It's as cool as the top of an air conditioner.”
    “It looks like onyx,” he said, noting also the iron tripod lamps, equipped with short, thick candles, at each corner of the room. “But it would have to be just about all the onyx in the world.”

    “I guess it's black marble,” Meg speculated, still running her hands across the smooth, dully shining surface. “It's beautiful, whatever it is.”
    Peter couldn't tell whether it was the note of appreciation in her voice or simply the kind of delayed reaction he had always been prone to, but for the first time he experienced a sudden jolt of something like pride, or at least of proprietorial interest, in his inheritance. This spacious room, in this enormous house, on this prime tract of land, was really his—and