The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  “How you doing, buddy?” Shane said, a little too loudly. It sounded stupid and pathetic. Tom didn’t blink.

  It was crazy, what he was about to do. It had seemed perfectly sane and rational when he’d been planning it, thinking about the best way to do it. Even when he’d been buying the crayons and paper, it had seemed merely curious, like an experiment. Now, in the hard diamond light of the afternoon sun, it seemed more than simply irrational, it felt outright dangerous. It felt like he was getting ready to do the mental equivalent of sticking his finger into a light socket.

  The art was, after all, a kind of conduit. That had become obvious. It had started with the Riverhouse painting. He’d tapped into something, or something had tapped into him, and the result was that he’d been granted a chance to step through the canvas, into the story behind the pictures. Shane had suspected that he could control the conduit if he really wanted to. He was that kind of artist. He was good at going down to the well all by himself, dipping out what he needed, completely bypassing the muse. Maybe he could control that conduit, manipulate it, possibly even use it to unearth Marlena’s secrets.

  He’d first tried it with his latest painting, the last installment in the Insanity Stairs series, the one he’d already dubbed “the Sleepwalker”. He’d deliberately approached it with the intention of making it his own, of guiding the paint on the canvas, teasing it into showing him what he wanted to know. The result, however, had been mildly disastrous.

  He’d stayed up late the previous Wednesday, trying to force the picture to reveal itself, trying to dip out the answers to his questions about Marlena, but no matter how hard he tried, nothing came. It was almost as if the painting was fighting him, insisting on its own story. Eventually, Shane had grown frustrated, giving up in the small hours of the morning, exhausted and stupidly angry.

  The next day he’d gone up to the studio and found his paints strewn all over the floor and one of his brushes broken in half. Worst of all, the new painting had been tipped off its easel. It lay crookedly against his stool, one side of the wooden frame broken. Marlena had apparently been there, and had not been pleased with what she’d seen.

  Wearily, Shane had gathered up the scattered paint tubes, tossed the broken brush into the trash, and then set about replacing the broken piece of the painting’s frame. In the corner, Marlena’s portrait looked down at the letter in her hands, stricken and miserable. Shane found himself glancing back at the portrait while he worked, each time expecting Marlena’s painted eyes to be raised, glaring at him, smoldering with pained rage. Each time, however, her eyes remained just as he’d painted them, looking down, pointedly reading the letter: Dear M.

  The problem, Shane had begun to suspect, was the medium. Both Marlena and Wilhelm had been artists. They’d both had very different styles, according to the few samples Shane had seen online, but for both of them, their primary medium had been oils. That was why Shane couldn’t control the conduit when he was painting. The medium was too close to Marlena, too wedded to her. It may be that this last painting would tell him the secrets he needed to know, but it would only do so in its own time. He couldn’t control it, couldn’t make it give him just what he wanted, when he wanted it. It was like trying to water a garden with a fire hose.

  Unfortunately, Shane didn’t think he could wait for the painting to tell him its secrets, not with Christiana there more often than not, living under the potentially malevolent shadow of Marlena. But maybe he could try something else, something more simple and basic, as far from oils as possible.

  He had just finished fixing the wooden frame of “the Sleepwalker” and was replacing it on the easel when something on the floor caught his eye. It had rolled over into the corner by the stairs, knocked aside during Marlena’s tantrum of the night before. It was a white wax pencil, mostly used up. That was when Shane had gotten the idea to try crayons. As soon as he’d thought it, it had seemed like just the thing. How many adult artists used crayons as their medium? None, of course. There was more to it than that, but Shane didn’t know what it was. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had a plan, and he was fairly confident that it would work.

  He’d waited until he’d known that Christiana would be gone. She was at work, and wouldn’t be back to the cottage until that evening. He had at least two hours. He looked down at the backpack on his lap.

  “I’m just going to draw some pictures,” he said aloud, unzipping the backpack. “Nothing crazy about that, is there, Tom old boy?”

  Tom pushed himself upright, stretched, and yawned luxuriously. He began to give himself a bath.

  “Lotta help you are,” Shane said, and pulled the crayons and notebook out of the backpack’s pouch. He slipped open the lid of the box of crayons and dumped all eight of them out onto his lap. He picked up the black one, turned it over in his hands. It was indeed big and chunky. Still, something about it didn’t feel quite right.

  “Just going to draw me some pictures,” he muttered, looking down at the black crayon, and then the rest of the colors on his lap. Idly, he jammed his fingernail under the paper label of the black crayon, tearing it. He began to pull it away, stripping the paper from the waxy black cylinder. “Just going down to the well with my bucket. Just going to dip out some art. Nothing crazy about that. I’ve been doing the same thing for almost ten years.”

  When the paper was stripped entirely off the black crayon, Shane held it in the palm of his hand. It felt exactly right, now. Of course it did. They might have had crayons in the forties, but they probably wouldn’t have had printed labels on them. Why that should matter Shane didn’t know, but he was beyond worrying about such things now. He was sailing into uncharted waters, dipping deeper into the well of creativity than he ever had before. If the muse saw, she would be unhappy with him, but Shane had to take that risk. There were things he needed to know. Things she was hiding from him.

  He wrapped his fist around the black crayon, the way a kid might hold a spoon. With his other hand, he swept back the gaily colored cover of the sketch pad. The paper beneath was dirty gray, cheap and thin, speckled with black flecks. Shane drew a deep breath, inexplicably afraid to touch the crayon to that ugly, gray blankness. He felt like he was about to touch a copper wire to a battery, one whose voltage was uncertain and potentially deadly. His hand shook slightly.

  “Just going to draw me some pictures,” he muttered again. Nearby, unseen and forgotten, Tom the cat watched, his green eyes bright, alert, no longer bored.

  Slowly, Shane lowered the crayon. The shadow of his hand darkened on the gray paper. He felt its cool, cheap surface with the heel of his fist, pressed down, bringing the crayon closer, closer.

  The crayon touched the paper, made first a dimple, and then a mark. And with that mark, everything changed. The world retreated and Shane felt a preternatural calm descend over him. This was right. The crayons, the cheap newsprint, even the hard light of the diamond sun, casting his shadow over the paper, it was all exactly right.

  Shane pulled the crayon along the paper. The dot became a line, and then a curve.

  He began to draw.

  He started with the cottage. He drew it slowly, haltingly, using lines so dark and firm that they pressed into the paper, wrinkling it slightly. He didn’t look at the cottage as he drew it. Instead, he tapped into the well in his mind, dipping the picture out, forming it in his head.

  The cottage started as a square, and then grew a squat peak. He drew the back door, the kitchen window, the lines of the patio and the low stone wall. A rectangle formed the chimney of the barbecue, another formed the chimney on the house, crooked and leaning, as if drawn with a kid’s simplistic perspective. He didn’t draw the sunroom. It wasn’t a deliberate omission; it simply wasn’t part of the cottage in his mind, the one that came out of the well. His hand began to move faster, progressing from drawing to sketching. He shaded in the east side of the cottage, leaving a white circle for the upper window. There was no candle lit there, n
ot now. He scribbled in the magnolia tree, but it was smaller, barely higher than the shed attached to the side of the cottage.

  And then Shane’s hand began to draw something else. He watched as the scribbles of the magnolia tree turned into cross hatching, forming a grid, and then a cube, something resting on the patio floor, taking up most of the space. It cast a long, dark shadow, pressed into the paper with repeated, horizontal strokes.

  Shane stopped and stared at the drawing. He didn’t know what the shape on the patio was. It was too rough, too primitive. He wanted to add details, but he didn’t know where to start. The crayons prevented details, at any rate. The black crayon’s tip was now reduced to a dull nub. The picture on the pad was like a cave drawing, or something tacked to an elementary school bulletin board. He shook his head and pushed back the page, revealing the next blank gray space. He picked an orange crayon this time and lowered it to the paper. It began to move immediately, easier this time, almost of its own accord. It was like some bizarre artist’s version of a Ouija board. Shane watched as the new drawing took shape.

  It was the Riverhouse, but changed somehow. It was taller, narrow and top-heavy, like a caricature. The round window beneath the peak was exaggerated, and a shape began to form there. Shane recognized it; it was Marlena. She was leaning, looking. Her eyes were primitive, barely two orange smudges, but they managed to speak volumes. She was looking, even though she knew there was nothing to see. This was much later, years after Wilhelm and Madeleine had gone, taking young Hector with them. Marlena still looked. She couldn’t stop herself. She looked to see if the candle was lit again, glowing in the cottage window at the top of the bluff. The problem was that sometimes it was lit. Sometimes that candle flickered in the distance, teasing her. She never followed its beckoning call—after all, she knew it was just an illusion, that there was nothing there for her to find—but she couldn’t help looking, hoping it wouldn’t be there. And most of the time, it wasn’t. But only most of the time.

  Shane’s hand stopped moving. The picture wasn’t complete, but it was finished. Somehow, his hand knew it, even if his mind wanted more. He ripped the paper away and dropped it onto the leaves at his feet. The wind rustled it but didn’t carry it away. Shane picked another color, green, and bore down on the paper once again.

  Lines appeared, parallel and diminishing. They formed steps. There was a railing, descending toward a landing. Shane was drawing the interior of the Riverhouse now. He was drawing the Insanity Stairs. No single drawing could show their entirety, and yet the entire scene formed in Shane’s mind. The stairs started on the main level, and then went up. They reached the next floor, but didn’t open up onto it. They’d been sealed off, and new stairs added. The new stairs turned and went back down again, past the main floor, into the basement. And there, they stopped dead, meeting another wall, one made of brick. There was a window built into the wall, looking into the cellar. Shane could see the window in his drawing, a square pane with curtains hanging on both sides. On the right side of the curtains was a pull cord. Shane switched to the yellow crayon, scribbling the cord in gold. The cord operated the curtains, allowing them to be opened and closed over the strange window. Marlena stood at the window, her hand held out to the cord, not touching it, but poised, ready. She was watching, waiting. For what, Shane didn’t know.

  Another drawing pushed forward in Shane’s head. He ripped the Insanity Stairs drawing from the pad and dropped it. The new picture formed in blue, quickly, roughly. Shane’s hand could barely keep up with it. It seemed to be a hole, or some kind of well. It had a heavy metal grate on the top of it, forming a sort of sluice. Blue lines scribbled in all around it, implying darkness, perpetual night. This, Shane realized, was the view seen through the Insanity Stairs window. Brian had referred to it: the Bottomless Pit. It wasn’t bottomless, of course, but it was very deep. Marlena had paid to have it excavated, boring right through the limestone bedrock of the valley floor. It looked like a well, but Shane knew that wasn’t what it was, even if it did have water in the bottom of it. In a sense, it was just the opposite. This wasn’t supposed to provide water; it was meant to take it away. Was it insurance against a future flood? A sort of primitive drainage mechanism? Somehow, that didn’t seem exactly right. He looked at the grate embedded into the hole’s top. It looked almost like a net, or a trap of some kind. But for what?

  That picture ended as well. Shane stripped it away, letting it fall to join the others at his feet.

  The next drawing showed a room. It was painted entirely black, including the floors and ceilings. There were windows in the room, but they were scribbled in, completely obscured. They’d been painted over as well, blinded. They were nailed shut.

  Another drawing; a hallway. The doors were blank, closed and locked, their keys thrown into the river. The rooms beyond were all empty, their windows painted over, their walls and floors and ceilings covered with black paint. There was no rational reason for it. It just was. At the end of the hall was one open doorway. The door had been taken completely off its hinges, carted away, burned. Through that open doorway was nothing but a wall, but the wall had been painted to resemble a scene, a remarkably realistic vision, so true that it could fool the eye if you stood very still at the end of the hallway, looking past all those dead, locked doors. The painted scene showed more hallway, progressing past the end of the house. Lit windows on one side of the painted hall let in cheery sunlight. On the other side, open doors showed teasing glimpses of the happy rooms beyond. Standing before that false hallway, however, partly obscuring the skillfully painted windows and doors, was a family: a man and woman, with a young boy standing between them, posed as if for a portrait. It was like looking into a mirror at the end of the hall, a mirror showing an alternate universe. It would have been a pleasant scene if not for one detail: the faces were all entirely blank, mere flesh-colored ovals, as if the features had been seamlessly erased. Or were still waiting to be filled in.

  More drawings came. Shane stripped each one from the pad as another followed. They collected around his feet like dead leaves, joining the autumn carpet that rustled and stirred in the breeze. His hand ached, but he barely noticed. The crayons grew shorter, shorter, dull as fingers.

  Individually, each drawing was a mere snapshot, but taken as a whole they formed an expanding story, like images on a roll of movie film. This was the tale of Marlena’s madness, seen from the inside. It was confused and fragmented, and yet cruelly stubborn. Some of it he thought he understood, such as the phantom hallway, showing the life that Marlena had lost. More of it, however, seemed utterly inexplicable, deranged and obsessive. The Insanity Stairs, for instance, overlooking the grated pit in the cellar. It was more than a safeguard against another flood, of that Shane was certain. It was almost as if she had been waiting for the flood to bring something to her, something she’d wanted to capture, something she’d wanted some forewarning of. It was utterly insane.

  If such delusions had appeared in anyone else, that person would have surely been hospitalized, treated for whatever psychological disorder they were suffering from. Unfortunately for Marlena, though, she’d been too rich to be committed. She’d hired the workers to make her strange additions and modifications to the house, probably even stepping in and doing a lot of the work herself, and of course no one had deigned to stop her. After all, she had probably paid them very well. No one wanted to kill the Golden Goose, least of all Stambaugh, the Riverhouse’s caretaker during those years of increasing madness.

  Stambaugh didn’t appear in any of Shane’s crayon drawings, but Shane sensed him in the background, playing along, doing the Missus’ bidding, no matter how bizarre it might be. Maybe he’d even manipulated her deranged fetishes a little, sponging off more and more of her dwindling wealth, socking it away, maybe even convincing himself he was doing her a favor, saving the estate from her delusions. How easy it would be. And how would she know? She was too distracted, too obsessed with her nameless, irrational fe
ars to pay attention to such banalities as the numbers on her bank statements.

  Shane stopped drawing. He realized he’d been going forward on the timeline of Marlena’s madness, following along as the years went by and she sank into incoherence, gradually transforming the Riverhouse into a twisted mirror of her dementia. He was learning things, and yet he didn’t seem to be finding what he really needed, the key to Marlena’s dark obsession with Christiana. He dropped the nub of the blue crayon and shook out his fingers, looking down at the drawings scattered all around his feet. Finally, he looked at the pad on his lap again. The blank gray sheet stared up at him. He tapped the well in his mind again, tried to pull one more image out of it, but nothing came. The well was dry.

  Frustrated, he flipped back to the first page of the notebook, the one showing the black drawing of the cottage. He looked at it. This was where it had all started, he thought. Not just his drawings, but the entire story. This was where all of Marlena’s troubles traced back to. The cottage, where Wilhelm had first hidden his affairs with Madeleine, where he had summoned her, and where he had finally arranged to run off with her, taking Hector with them. This was the root of all of Marlena’s madness.

  Shane looked at the crayons on his lap. He found the black one again. It was worn dull, barely half the size that it had been when he’d first begun. He held it over the pad once more. Maybe this drawing was the key to what he needed to know after all. Maybe that was why he’d started there. Could the secret be in that odd shape on the patio? That strange gridded cube that he couldn’t make any sense of?

  Shane touched the shape with the crayon again. The crayon began to move. It made another shape, taller and more complicated: a man. Shane recognized the figure immediately, even though the head was barely a rough oval, topped with a rumpled cap. It was Earl Kirchenbauer.