The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  He was alone in the house, and yet he didn’t feel lonely. He was attended, somehow. Perhaps it was the ghost, the woman who had originally lived there, who had breathed life into it and given it her heart. If so, he didn’t see her, but the presence was in every room, sighing from the walls, billowing in the sheer curtains of the open windows, creaking with satisfaction in the tall doors as they rocked in the breeze.

  Sunlight filled the rooms, illuminating their contents: bright tapestries and oriental rugs, antique chairs and desks with carven legs as delicate as fawns. All of these Shane had replaced as well, finding each and every piece exactly as it once was. He’d known just what to look for. He’d been told. He was content as he moved through the rooms, silently and slowly, assuring himself that everything was, indeed, exactly as it should be. The Riverhouse was his, and it was perfect.

  As he passed in front of the long, gilt-framed mirror that hung in the downstairs hall, he realized he had no reflection. He was the ghost now, insubstantial as smoke and silent as a memory. That was all right, too. He had done what he needed to do.

  Slowly, however, he became aware of a sound, and as he did he realized that it had been going on for some time, nearly hidden beneath the sigh of the creaking doors and the whispering breeze. It was a soft sound, but nagging, distressing in this eternal, sunlit afternoon. It was the sound of someone crying.

  Shane tried to tune it out, but it followed him from room to room, always sounding like it was just down the hall, or up the stairs, or right outside the window. Sometimes it sounded like a woman, but then, a minute later, it sounded like a young child, whimpering and sniffing, moaning and sobbing. Shane didn’t seek it out. Instinctively, he knew he didn’t want to see who was making that sound.

  There was a baby rattle in his pocket. He could feel it there, pressing against his hip as he moved, and it annoyed him that ghosts should even have pockets, much less pointless odds and ends stuffed into them. The rattle made a muffled jingle as he moved. The sound of it became a nuisance, even worse than the sound of the mysterious weeping. Shane decided to get rid of it. He didn’t need it anymore.

  He left the house, venturing through the huge double doors in back. They were thrown wide open, providing a panoramic view of the river and the surrounding woods. The factories on the other side of the river were gone, replaced with a patchwork of fields and hills, dotted with brown cows. It looked like something from an Andrew Wyeth painting, and yet the noise of that jingling rattle soured it. It should’ve been a happy sound, but it wasn’t. It was becoming nearly maddening.

  He moved through the intricate pathways of the rose garden, stepping over the gardening shears and the weed whacker. His wheelbarrow lay on its side, abandoned on the lawn. Finally, at the edge of the yard, where it fell away to rocks and then the brown, forgetful face of the river, Shane stopped. He pulled the old rattle from his pocket, held it up, and stopped.

  The silver cherub’s face had changed. Instead, a nappy brown bear’s head protruded from his fist, smiling its black stitched smile. It wore a yellow rain hat, and Shane recognized it; this was Paddington Bear. The rattle was embedded in the yellow plastic handle in his fist; it clattered as he held it up. He’d seen this rattle before, had held it in his hand. It all came back to him and landed on him with horrible, suffocating weight.

  “No,” he said, and sobbed, lowering his arm, unable to throw the rattle away. He’d meant to heave it into the river, where it could be forgotten. The river was good at forgetting; that was nearly its job. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t forget. And an idea occurred to him. Had it been his own weeping that he’d heard as he moved through the house? Was that why he’d never been able to escape it? Why it had always followed him from room to room, nagging at him, echoing, always just out of sight?

  It was a good theory, but it was wrong. Shane turned around, back toward the house, and she was standing right behind him. Tears streaked her cheeks; her eyes were red and swollen, but bright, panicked. She was wearing the light blue tee shirt, now faded and threadbare, the black letters across her chest barely legible: ADDICTED TO ADRENALINE.

  “I lost it, Shane!” she cried, stumbling toward him and raising her hands. They were very white, wherever they weren’t splattered with bright, wet red. “I lost it! I’ve been looking, but I can’t find it anymore! It was the only thing I had to do, but I couldn’t do it! Help me Shane! Help me look!”

  Her voice was ragged, splintering into madness. She fell on Shane, pushed him backwards, and her tears fell onto his cheek, her blood streaked his clothes. He fell backwards, over the rocks, toward the river below. Stephanie clung to him, still shrieking and sobbing. The Paddington Bear rattle was still clutched in his hand, so tightly that his knuckles whitened and his fingernails dug into his palm, as if it were a lifeline. But it wasn’t a lifeline. If anything, it was just the opposite.

  Together, they fell and fell, waiting for the darkness to swallow them up, waiting for the forgetful bliss of death. It didn’t come, and Shane didn’t wake. He shifted in his sleep, moaning and sweating, trying unsuccessfully to thrash himself to consciousness.

  And in the darkness over his bed, silent and patient, something watched.

  Chapter Four

  By the time Wednesday morning came, the day before his visit from Greenfeld, Shane had made his way through most of the groceries in the cottage fridge. He put on a flannel shirt and an old pair of jeans, dressing for the seasonal mildness of the morning, and went out to his brown Chevy pickup truck. It started easily enough, despite its age, and he silently thanked the old Missouri farmer who had surely been its original owner.

  The truck bounded gamely down the rutted dirt path to the valley road, and Shane cranked the steering wheel hard left, angling toward Bastion Falls.

  He turned the truck’s old AM radio on, scanned the stations, and then turned it back off again. It was a short drive; he could stand a few minutes of amiable silence. He rolled down the window and listened instead to the thrum of the road and the rush of the cool autumn air. A few minutes later, he slowed and passed under the shadow of the huge floodwall gate, entering the town proper.

  Bastion Falls was really not much more than a collection of old factories and sprawling industrial complexes, randomly peppered with bars, auto body shops, and carry-outs. A warren of crammed residential streets clustered around the outskirts, mostly populated by the employees of the local industries, their driveways full of shiny pickup trucks, ATVs and boats on trailers.

  In the center of the town, where the factories finally gave way, was a short main street with slant parking on one side and six sets of railroad tracks on the other. At the end of the street was a small square park, sporting some of the town’s few trees and an old world war two Sherman tank on a concrete platform. The IGA grocery store was situated on the far side of the park.

  Shane steered his truck up into the small parking lot, content to find a space near the chain link fence in back.

  He shopped slowly, almost indulgently, listening to the in-store muzak and even humming along a little. He was in an unusually good mood. Last night, he had finished his latest painting. The portrait of the Riverhouse was finally complete.

  Years ago, one of Shane’s college art instructors had taught him the immortal axiom of finishing art: “the artist never finishes his work,” he’d said gravely, almost warningly, “he just abandons it. Never make the mistake of trying to finish it. The best you can hope for is to quit the work before you kill it.”

  Shane had long since learned that lesson, and yet the Riverhouse painting had been different. He’d disciplined himself to work on it in the evenings, only after he’d finished his regular shift (he was working on some Oriental Tibetan mountain scenes for a tea company contract, emailed to him by Greenfeld on a take-it-or-leave-it basis) and after he’d gotten some exercise and had his dinner. The arrangement seemed to work for the muse, albeit grudgingly. She had taken to leaving him alone until around five
-thirty or six, and then she would jump on his back like an impatient monkey, demanding and hungry.

  Sometimes Shane would still wait an hour or so, watching television or sitting on the back patio, watching the river, stroking Tom when he’d jump up on his lap, purring like a motorboat. He did this just to prove to himself that he was still in charge, that the muse was not his master. If Gustav Wilhelm had been able to train her and make her his own, maybe little old Shane Bellamy could, too. Maybe some of the old man’s indomitable spirit had even settled on Shane, since he was living in the last remnant of his once grand artist’s compound.

  When he did paint, however, he did so with a sort of speed and fury that was a little scary. And he was less and less aware of the passage of time as he was doing it. It was, he thought, eerily like abandoning his body to some outside force, allowing it to come in and puppet him, letting it create through him. He supposed all artists felt like that sometimes. Otherwise, why would they have invented the myth of the muse, the external imp of inspiration, whose fickle passions were really just the embodiment of the artist’s own quirky moods?

  Still, Shane had never experienced the power of creation like he had when he’d been working on the Riverhouse painting. As his arm swept over the canvas, his mind sank away into the scene, living inside of it, moving all around the house and steeping in its story.

  More importantly, there was the woman on the portico. As he’d painted her, he’d watched her, studied her, been her voyeur. She was pretty, but not beautiful, sad but not broken, strong but not domineering, quiet but not shy. Shane respected her, even loved her a little, and in his wandering thoughts, he watched her move through the house, growing old inside it as it developed around her. There were others there as well—servants, friends, art dealers, associates and fellow painters—but they moved through the scenes like blurs, silent and unimportant. The woman was all that mattered, because she was the woman in the painting, the heart of the house.

  She was the ghost, of course. In his semi-dreaming mind, he wondered if the painting had summoned her ghost, or if her ghost had somehow influenced the painting. Surely there was some kind of connection.

  He had felt her presence in the evenings sometimes, but had only seen her once more. The previous night, she had stood at the top of the stairs of the studio, almost invisible in the shadows, watching as he’d painted. He’d sensed her there, sensed her bottomless eyes on him, and hadn’t even been alarmed by it. He’d glanced aside, stopping in mid stroke, coming up out of the painting only long enough to verify what he suspected. Her black eyes were unblinking. He thought she’d been looking at him—it was hard to tell, with those featureless, colorless eyes—but she was actually looking at the painting. Shane had gone back to work, amazed that one could so quickly grow accustomed to the supernatural.

  He lived with a ghost.

  She left him alone, mostly, and he returned the favor. It had probably happened to lots of other people, but they just never talked about it. How could you? Everyone knew that ghosts didn’t exist. Everyone taught their kids that from an early age, preaching it like it was one of the infallible doctrines of life. If Shane had had a child, he’d have taught her the same thing, even now.

  Life, he thought, was full of constructive lies like that; they were the asphalt that paved the way for civilization smoothing the edges, making existence seem manageable and predictable. Most people knew it was all a sham, but that was all right. It was a useful sham. Deep down, though, the truth was undeniable. The truth was a rattling sigh that came out of the darkness, lost and confused. The truth was the coldness Shane felt on his back as he painted, as someone watched over his shoulder, someone who wasn’t really there.

  And despite what his art teacher had said, the Riverhouse painting had gotten finished. He’d been plowing along, laying on the paint, stroke after stroke, sometimes smearing it with a pallet knife or even his thumb, lost in the fathoms of the house’s story, when the muse had suddenly just vanished. He’d stopped, blinking, and lowered his arm. The painting had been complete. One more stroke would have been too much; one less, too little. It was as simple as that. He’d never been surer of anything in his entire artistic career.

  With the muse departed, Shane realized just how exhausted and beaten he felt. It wasn’t a bad feeling, however; it was the feeling of hard work that had been worth doing. He’d stood up, stretched his spine, and backed away from the painting. In the hard glare of the overhead light, it dominated the room. It almost seemed to suck the color out of its environment, drawing it into itself, transforming it into something magical. And was it all good magic? Shane knew it was not.

  Christiana had been right; there was something about the painting that messed with the viewer’s eyes. It was in the way it almost seemed to be two paintings overlaying each other, sometimes competing for attention, sometimes complementing each other. Shane liked the effect. It turned the painting into something that was very nearly alive.

  He’d looked back toward the top of the stairs, almost hoping that the ghost would still be there. He was proud of the painting, and wanted to share it with someone. The stairs were completely empty, however. Maybe the ghost had never really been there at all; maybe that had just been another invention of his daydreaming, fathoms-deep mind.

  Shane finished his shopping, filling his cart with the sorts of things that all men who live on their own are wont to stock their kitchens with: mostly lunch meat, condiments, and frozen microwave meals. He’d also gotten another six pack of St. Pauli Girl. Greenfeld was coming over tomorrow at one, but Shane had known enough people in the art world to know that midday wasn’t too early to offer one of them a beer, or even a martini.

  The rest of the people in the small store seemed to be women in their forties, mostly unhappy-looking, drifting through the aisles as if in slow motion. The checkout area had three lanes, but only one of them was open, manned by a young, skinny guy in a black tee shirt and a stained green apron. Across the top of his tee shirt, printed in faded, silvery letters, were the words Avenged Sevenfold, hovering over what appeared to be a skull with bat wings. Shane could only guess it was the name of a band. For better or worse, he had stopped paying attention to the world of music around the time Kurt Cobain had decided success was a burden too heavy to bear.

  He sighed and looked around. The front wall of the IGA was comprised of glass windows plastered with hand-lettered sale signs. The glare of the morning sun on the white signs turned the checkout area into a sort of human terrarium. It was not unpleasant, despite the drab, eighties-era cash registers and conveyer belts and the shocked, frozen faces of the people on the covers of the tabloids. The guy working the scanner was humming to himself, and despite his shirt, Shane thought the song he was humming was Bad Moon Rising by Creedance Clearwater Revival. He even whistled part of the chorus as the woman in front of him studiously wrote out her check.

  “Morning, paper or plastic?” the guy said, glancing up at Shane as the woman ahead of him pushed her cart disconsolately toward the front doors.

  “Surprise me,” Shane replied, unloading his cart.

  “You got it,” the guy answered, swiping the six pack of beer over the scanner. “And hey, just so you know, we had to send back a whole pallet of that Macarena salsa. It was all rancid. Had a bunch of people bringing it back. I’m not supposed to say anything about it, but the boss is down at Nick’s getting coffee, so screw him, right?”

  Shane blinked and looked down at the salsa in his hand. “Thanks. Maybe I’ll skip this one, then.” He set it aside, on the metal plate at the end of the conveyor.

  The guy in the green apron scanned the groceries with practiced speed. “It’s just that you look like a man who knows his salsa, and I’d hate for you to have to drive all the way back into town to return a bad jar.”

  “I appreciate it,” Shane said, glancing at the nametag on the guy’s apron. “Er, Alex.”

  “S’not really my name,” the guy said, grinni
ng up at Shane. “I lost my name tag. Probably under the front seat of my Honda. I borrowed this one from a locker in the back room. Alex is actually a girl. She’s hot, too. Works in the deli. I’m Brian.”

  Shane smiled, bemused. “Nice to meet you, Brian. By the way, how’d you know I was from outside of town?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Brian said, now stuffing the groceries into plastic bags. “I see the same faces in here all week long. Most of them I’ve known all my life. That lady behind you used to babysit me even, back when I was a snot-nosed brat. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Baker?”

  Shane glanced behind him, to a large black woman in her fifties. She stirred and said, “What, you mean you aren’t still a snot-nosed brat?”

  “Good times, Mrs. Baker,” Brian answered unperturbed, and then glanced up at Shane again. “Besides, you live out in the river cottage, right?”

  Shane raised his eyebrows. “Er, yeah. I do. Just moved in about a week ago.”

  Brian nodded. “Don’t worry, it’s not like we’ve all been spying on you or anything. My Grandpa used to be caretaker out there, and he still keeps tabs on it. He took me there sometimes when I was a kid. I’ve been in your place a few times, back before it was your place. Grandpa worked at the house, too, way back in the day, when he was my age. Started when the Wilhelms still owned the place. Shame they finally tore it down, after all these years. I guess time marches on, eh?”

  “It sure does,” Shane said, frowning a little. “You say your grandfather worked there when the Wilhelms were still there? He must be getting up there himself. They built the place in, what, the thirties?”

  “He’ll be ninety-five this Christmas,” Brian replied, as if he was personally responsible for his grandfather’s longevity. “Still drives his own car. Washes it, too, once a month, rain or shine. I try to get him to wash mine too, but he’s a stubborn old coot. That’ll be seventy-nine, twenty-nine.”