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clear away the kudzu, the windows will have to remain bricked up for a while. I’ve ordered some stained-glass windows brought from an old church that was damaged by Hurricane Katrina, but it will be several months before they can be delivered.”
    Next, he pointed out the walls. They were the color of old ivory, stained brown in places by seeping moisture, with a seafoam-blue paint flaking from the woodwork. As the beam of his flashlight played over the surface, I could just make out the ghosts of old landscapes and people, houses and Greek temples, horses and dogs, blue like ancient tattoos on pale, mummified skin. “This is Zuber wallpaper, from France. As you can see, the images are nearly lost. I’m hoping you can pull these out with your photos, so they can be re-created by an artist I know.”
    If anybody could work that kind of photographic magic, it was my pal Deiter Marks. He owned a small camera shop that was so exclusive, it was hardly ever open. He was usually too busy building photography equipment for NASA and the Pentagon to serve ordinary customers. I snapped a few pictures to give him something to start with.
    â€œIt’s gonna be a lot of work, turning this place around,” I said. “You’d do better to tear it down and start over.”
    He shrugged. “That’s not an option, so we’re rebuilding it. Before I was called to the service of the Lord, I restored homes in Louisiana. I learned construction from my father. He rebuilt hundreds of homes after Camille wiped out the Gulf Coast.”
    â€œDeacon is a man of many talents,” Holly mooned. “He was a soldier in Iraq—the first time, not this last time.” Deacon frowned and walked away from her, but she followed him, wagging her tail. Her desperation was a thing to behold.
    â€œMost of the wood in here is chestnut, which can’t be replaced. I want to preserve as much of it as possible,” Deacon said as he pointed out the cornices above the doors. “The American chestnut tree was wiped out by blight in the 1930s and 40s. It has never recovered, and so much that was built with it has already been lost.”
    He dropped his brick with a hollow thump on the floor. The sound was echoed by a loud bang upstairs. “Jesus!” Holly shrieked under her breath. “God, I hate this place. It gives me the creeps!”
    When I first set eyes on the dilapidated ruin, I was certain I would find a congress of ghosts inside. But since crossing the threshold, I hadn’t seen the first wisp, not even a shadow of movement in the corner of my eye. This was perhaps the strangest thing about the place—its deep and abiding emptiness. Now it seemed we weren’t so alone after all.
    A creaking noise, like footsteps, moved slowly overhead. Holly’s fingers tightened around a loose fold of Deacon’s jacket, pulling it taut as a drum.
    We followed the noise into the next interior room. Deacon’s flashlight beam crawled along the crumbling plaster of the coffered ceiling, revealing the laths beneath, and in some places tiny glowing eyes staring back. “Once the cats are gone, it doesn’t take long for the rats to move in,” he said.
    The footsteps passed over us. Deacon pointed his beam at a narrow door in the opposite corner of the room. “That door leads to the servants’ stair,” he said. Soon the stair steps behind the door began to creak, one at a time, with deliberate slowness. Holly shrank behind the preacher, doubled her death grip on his jacket, and buried her face in his back.
    â€œThere’s nothing to fear here,” Deacon said, though I noticed the beam of his light wavering ever so slightly as it dropped to the gilded doorknob, which was, at that moment, turning.
    The door burst open and a dark figure leaped into the room. Holly screamed and I snapped its picture. At the flash from my camera, he recoiled, swearing