The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  It was Saturday, and yet some part of him insisted that he should still try to put in his shift. He needed to paint, needed the mundane normalcy of the foreman in his head. Unfortunately, the foreman hadn’t gotten the memo about putting in a little overtime on Saturday. He was apparently off for the day, fishing somewhere, watching Sportscenter, maybe mowing his lawn. In his absence, Shane merely sat on his stool, slumped in front of the canvas. It was the fifth of the six Florida paintings, the one that celebrated the Florida Keys. A fan-boat carrying a gaggle of grinning people dominated the bottom left of the painting, only half finished.

  Shane stared at it, his right hand dangling across his knees, the brush held loosely in his fingers. It was no use. He could tell that there would be no painting today, no matter how much he might wish for it.

  He was worried. Craziness, Earl had said, was catching. Was that what was really happening here? Was he going insane?

  A few years ago, while waiting in his dentist’s office, Shane had read a magazine article about the top ten most stressful events that could occur in a person’s life. The top three had been losing a spouse, losing a job, and moving to a different city. Shane had experienced all three of those things during the previous year. It was all too plausible that, in response to those events, his mind had simply swung loose of its bearings a little.

  Maybe he’d given up seeing Dr. Taylor too soon. Maybe he should find someone else here, someone to talk to about… everything. But could he really do that? It was one thing to walk into a therapist’s office and admit that thoughts of suicide had flitted through your mind in the wake of the loss of your job and your wife. It was another thing entirely to admit that you were painting phantom visions from a dead house and entertaining a moody ghost. That was the sort of thing that summoned the men in the white coats, at least according to the stereotypes in Shane’s head. He didn’t think he was quite ready to lay down on some strangers’ couch and start talking about Marlena and the Riverhouse. Maybe he could have done it with Norm Taylor, but Dr. Taylor’s office was several states away now. Too far to go to admit maybe you had a few screws loose.

  But the funny thing was, Shane didn’t really believe it was true. He didn’t feel crazy, despite the crazy things that seemed to be happening around him. His worst fear, when he’d found the chalk drawing on the basement floor, had been that the sleep-walking had happened again, that he’d been animated by the muse, zombie-like, and marched down to the basement to make that drawing. It was possible, of course, but the more he thought about it, the more he wondered.

  For one thing, the style of the drawing was different than anything he’d ever created. It was distinct from both his normal work and his two new pieces, the signature works from his “Insanity Stairs” series. The chalk drawing was somehow minimalist and expressionistic at the same time, with details haphazardly crammed in here and there, especially around the vehicles. It wasn’t the most compelling evidence that those drawings hadn’t come from Shane’s hand, but there was something else as well: he’d never awoken with chalk on his fingers. Maybe the muse had gotten smart enough to have him wash his hands when she was through with him, but what would be the point? Why would she hide it?

  Of course, if Shane hadn’t created that drawing, either asleep or otherwise, that left one big, burning question: who had? And why? Had it been Marlena herself? Was she really capable of such a thing? And if so, had it been a warning of some kind? Or even a threat?

  Slumped on his stool in front of the canvas, Shane shook his head. There was no point in thinking about it any further. Nor was there any point in attempting to work on the Florida painting. The foreman was gone for the day, and he wasn’t answering his phone.

  Shane reached and set the paintbrush down on his little side table. He wouldn’t do any painting today, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t work on something else.

  An idea had been forming in his mind, secretly, as if backstage, waiting for the right moment to present itself. He could work on something different if he wanted, something sort of special. It was probably a little crazy, but it just might make him feel a bit better. Either way, it was harmless. Perfectly harmless.

  Shane stood up, stretched, and crossed the studio. He took the stairs two at a time, rounded the corner past the kitchen, and stopped at the top of the basement steps. The door was open, providing a wide view of the cellar floor. Watery mid-day light spilled across it, illuminating the drawing of the GMC truck and the silvery Honda with the inexplicable outline of Christiana behind the wheel. The light cast dark shadows next to the scattered nubs of sidewalk chalk. Almost all of the chalks had been worn down to stumps, but Shane thought there was just enough left to do what he had in mind. He wouldn’t need much, really.

  Slowly, he descended the basement stairs. At the bottom, he squatted and pinched a piece of yellow chalk between his right thumb and forefinger.

  The muse didn’t whisper to him this time. This time, the art was entirely his own.

  By the time Shane was finished, he’d used up almost all of the remaining chalks. His fingers were sore from pinching the nubs in order to draw with them on the rough concrete floor.

  He was mostly satisfied with what he’d done, even if it was a little crazy. It fit. He’d always been good at mimicking whatever artistic style a job required. This job, in fact, had been easier than most. The style of the chalk drawing was blissfully simplistic, almost instinctive.

  Shane stood up and dropped the fragment of blue chalk. He brushed his hands carelessly on his thighs and realized he was hungry. He considered going upstairs and making himself a sandwich, but then thought better of it. It was Saturday. If the foreman in his head had decided to take the day off, maybe Shane should as well.

  Besides, he was still out of beer.

  He didn’t even take the time to change. There were still chalk streaks all over the thighs of his khakis and ground into the knees where he’d crawled around on the basement floor but he didn’t care. He rolled down the window of the pickup truck as he steered it down the driveway and pulled out onto the Valley Road. The road made him think of the chalk drawing again, of course, with its two vehicles, each bearing down on the other with nothing but destiny between them. He put it out of his head, reluctantly but firmly.

  He stopped at a diner just past the Bastion Falls industrial district. The diner was pushed back from the road, giving it a view of the river on one side and a big gray parking lot on the other side, embraced by chain-link fence and filled with more pickup trucks. Shane’s truck was older than most of the shiny new examples in the parking lot. GMC he thought disconnectedly as he pushed through the diner’s side door, into the sound of clattering plates and lunchtime banter.

  He sat at the bar, next to a trucker wearing a plaid flannel shirt and a NASCAR ball cap, black, with a big white number three on the front. The man was talking politics when Shane entered, and he absorbed Shane into his monologue without even pausing for breath.

  He didn’t mind. In fact, the timber of the trucker’s voice, the metronome-like motion of his elbow as he shoveled eggs and hash browns into his mouth between sentences, was strangely comforting. As long as there were guys like this out there in the world, pontificating loudly while they lugged around the world’s essential loads of toilet paper, big screen televisions and Keebler cookies, things would probably be all right.

  Shane ordered a cheeseburger and fries and enjoyed the buzzing warmth of the sunlight through the diner’s plate glass windows. On the whole, it was very nice. At least for the moment, it was easy to forget all the craziness—the ghost and the paintings and Earl Kirchenbauer’s story.

  And the chalk drawing, of course.

  Shane ate ravenously, and even topped it off with a piece of apple pie from the glass dome at the end of the counter. Then he left a ten on the counter, tucked just under the lip of his plate, and left.

  The trucker was leaving at the same time. He was driving a big Freightliner, parked cro
okedly at the edge of the diner’s unusually large gravel lot. Its engine was running, throbbing in the cool fall air.

  “Gotta make Kansas City by dusk,” the trucker said, adjusting his cap and gazing up at the bright blue sky. “Radio says a storm will be blowing in this afternoon, too. Gonna have to haul ass if I want to beat that.”

  “I have a feeling hauling ass is something you’re pretty comfortable with,” Shane said, cranking open the door of his own much smaller truck and glancing back.

  The trucker grinned at him and put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses. “Haulin’ ass is an important life skill,” he said, starting across the parking lot. “You never know when it’ll come in handy. After all, everything in life is practice for everything else. My dad taught me that. Said if I remembered that I’d do just fine.”

  Shane nodded. It seemed like good advice. Maybe some of the best advice he’d ever heard.

  Brian wasn’t working at the IGA checkouts that afternoon. Shane waited in line with his beer and meager basket of groceries. A twenty-something year-old girl was working the only open lane, attractive but unsmiling and bored. As Shane approached, he saw that her nametag read “Alex”. It was the girl that Brian had talked about, the one whose nametag he had borrowed on the day Shane had first met him. Hadn’t Brian said she normally worked in the deli? No wonder she seemed a little disgruntled. Still, cute as she was, Shane had a feeling that she probably wasn’t the nicest person in the world. Brian was probably better off spending his afternoons with his grandfather.

  Thinking that, Shane considered driving over to Denny Acres himself to see if Earl was around, and then decided against it. Something about Earl’s last visit made Shane think it’d be best to give him a week or two before dropping by again. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why, but didn’t question the general instinct. Earl had resurrected a lot of old ghosts in order to tell Shane the story of the Riverhouse. Best to give him a little time to bury them again.

  When Shane got home, he climbed the stairs up to the studio and checked the Florida title painting. The paint was finally dry to the touch, ready for delivery. He clumped back downstairs, took one of the new beers out of the fridge and found the cordless phone on the kitchen counter. Morrie probably wouldn’t be in the office, but Shane figured he could leave a message. Sure enough, the answering service clicked on after the third ring.

  “Hey Morrie, I just wanted to let you know I’ve got most of the Florida series finished,” Shane said, popping the cap off his beer. “The title piece is dry enough for you to get, if you want to send it off to your Photoshop guy. I could take some digital pics of it myself, but I figured he’d rather manage that end of things on his own, if he’s anything like the digital artists I knew back at T and C. Give me a call back and let me know how you want to manage things from here. Thanks.”

  He thumbed the power button and carried the phone into the library. Once he’d plugged it into the charger base, he meandered into the sunroom and plopped onto the couch. Outside the big sunroom windows, Shane saw Tom lying on the end of the stone wall that bordered the patio, asleep with his tail curled around him, touching his nose.

  “You’ve got the idea, Tom old boy,” Shane said, sighing. He’d planned on whiling away a few hours watching television, but suddenly it occurred to him that, like Tom, what he wanted most was a nap. Sleeping in the afternoon seemed like the sort of thing only old people did, but Shane decided he could give himself a pass this time. After all, it was Saturday. He drained a third of his beer, set the bottle on the end table, and kicked back, crossing his ankles on the arm of the couch. Five minutes later he was asleep.

  Twenty minutes after that, he was dreaming.

  It was confusing. He knew he was dreaming, because the view outside the sunroom windows was different. Featureless black pressed against the glass panes, and Shane could tell that it wasn’t the black of mere darkness; it was the black of emptiness, like the eyes of the ghost of Marlena. It was cold as well, as if the sunroom hadn’t felt actual sunlight in ages.

  He moved to stand up, and realized he already was. It was that kind of dream, bizarre and inexplicable, where things happened in jerks and whirls, with no reference to actual time. He moved toward the door that led into the library, first tentatively, and then frantically. The sunroom was breaking away from the house, silently falling into that abyss of cold blackness beyond the windows.

  As he passed through the French doors into the library he shuddered, as if he’d pressed through a sort of invisible boundary. The coldness diminished, and Shane glanced back. The sunroom was gone, but not fallen away, as he’d feared. It simply didn’t exist. It was as if it had never been there at all, or hadn’t yet been built. The doorway looked out onto nothing. In the dream, Shane himself could barely remember what the room had even looked like.

  The rest of the cottage was there, but it was different. It was as if every day of the cottage’s existence was crammed into a single moment. Nothing moved, and yet everything seemed to be strangely in flux, shimmering, night over day, winter over summer, decades and seasons all pressed together until they blended into a single seamless tone, like a ringing in the ears.

  Boundary lands, he thought for no reason. It was like a memory, one he couldn’t quite place, spoken in a woman’s voice. We’re drawn to the boundary lands of life… rivers and valleys, shores and cliffs… but this one is unusual. Here, the boundary line is a lot deeper… deeper… The voice was familiar, but Shane couldn’t place it. All he knew for sure was that it wasn’t Marlena, even though—

  He looked up. Marlena was there. She stood in the doorway that led down into the basement, her back to him. Shane tried to speak to her, but no sound came. It was as if there was no air, no medium to conduct the sound waves of his voice.

  He pushed forward, toward her slight, straight frame. He meant to touch her, for here, unlike in his waking hours, he thought he truly could. He wanted to comfort her, soothe her, draw her into his arms. The cottage swam past him with infuriating sluggishness. It was that kind of dream as well, the kind where space is plastic, elongating in front of you so that you never quite seem to reach your destination, as if some capricious force was constantly pushing you backwards.

  And yet he did reach her, suddenly, as if time had once again slipped its gears, launching him forward so that he nearly barreled into her where she stood on the top of the stairs, her back to him, her posture rigid and tense. He reached for her, but before he could touch her, she seemed to sense him. She turned, very slowly, and once again, time became sluggish, focusing in on that single action, as if Marlena herself were standing still and the entire world, Shane included, was swiveling around her, forcing him to look into her face.

  Her eyes were as blank and black as ever, but they were no longer cold. They were blindingly hot, pulsing like a blast furnace.

  Shane tried to stop himself from touching her, but the inertia was too great. He pressed against her, and she was as rigid as a statue, suddenly towering over him, looking down at him as if from a great height. She was monstrous, her face calm, but her eyes flaming darkly, as if they could turn him into ash right where he stood.

  In that moment, he was terrified of her. Not because she meant to hurt him, but because he had disappointed her. He didn’t know how, or why he should even care, but he did. The weight of it crushed him, pressed him down, and she seemed to tower even further over him. The cottage itself drifted away around them, shredding like paper, incinerating into dust. And then, for the first time, Marlena spoke.

  “See the sugar bowl do the Tootsie Roll,” she said, her voice huge and clanging, ringing like lead weights in a watery grave. “If you eat too much, uh-oh, you’ll awake with a tummy ache.”

  It should have been funny, but it wasn’t. The words were terrible, heartbreaking, lonely, lost. Shane tried to cover his ears to drown out the sound of them, but it was no use. He wasn’t hearing them with his ears.

  Darkness fell, and all
that was left was the echo of those awful, senseless words and the heat of her eyes, baking out of the darkness, consuming everything. And yet, Shane did not wake. He tossed and turned, sweating, shivering, his pupils switching under the hot film of his eyelids, mumbling to himself.

  Outside, Tom the cat had woken up. He sat on the stone wall watching the sunlight wane and die, watching purple storm clouds crowd in over the trees. His ears pricked as Shane thrashed and muttered, but he didn’t turn his head to look. Only his tail moved, twitching and writhing, as if it had a mind of its own.

  Chapter Twelve

  Shane awoke to the nagging warble of the cordless phone in the next room. He rolled over, not realizing where he was, and nearly fell off the couch. He threw out an arm and caught the top of the ottoman, saving himself from crashing face first onto the sunroom floor. Feeling stiff and stupid, he groaned and pushed himself upright.

  The phone rang again. Shane stumbled into the library.

  “Shane?”

  “Yeah,” he answered, rubbing his eyes. “Hey Morrie.” The light outside the library windows seemed wrong somehow. Too bright.

  “You sick or something, pal? You sound awful, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “Why would I mind that, you insensitive prick? I’m fine.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Morrie replied cheerfully. “Even gladder to hear about how things are going with the Florida series. You really have the title piece done and ready to roll?”

  “I do. It’s upstairs now, calling your name. How do you want it?”

  “Any way I can get it. I was thinking about sending somebody out there this morning, but no couriers are running today. I’d do it myself, but I got priors. My nephew’s available this afternoon around two. I thought it’d be best for me to check in with you first, anyway. You going to be around?”

  “Today,” Shane repeated, confused. “You mean tonight? Isn’t it a little late?”