The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  “End of November. No problem for a machine like you. What do you say?”

  Shane considered it, looking out the kitchen window at the dim afternoon light. The sky was low and dark, churning slowly. “I think I’m going to pass this time, Morrie. The machine needs a breather.”

  Greenfeld was a sharp guy. He asked, “You got another project in the works, maybe?”

  Shane smiled again. “Yeah, I guess I do. One more, just for me.”

  “For you and maybe your artsy girlfriend?” Greenfeld said.

  “You just can’t let that one go, can you?”

  “Behold, your Morrie is a jealous Morrie,” Greenfeld said, sighing loudly into the phone. “I care a lot less about you taking her away from me than I do about her taking you away from me. Twisted, isn’t it? Come to think of it, that’s probably the biggest reason I’m still in the place I am. But what can I say? As the Chairman of the Board used to say, I gotta be me. Go ahead and finish up whatever you’ve got going. Good luck with it. But don’t expect me to stop calling, eh?”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Shane said, still smiling. It was hard not to like Greenfeld, in spite of his rough edges.

  A moment later, Shane hung up the cordless and stuck it in the charger in the library. He’d been planning on going out for a short bike ride, but the darkening sky made him think otherwise. He peered out the front window. Wind switched and flicked over the yard, whipping the grass and swirling dust eddies on the gravel drive. The weather guys on KMOX had been predicting storms off and on all through the week, issuing flood warnings for most of Jefferson and St. Louis counties, but Shane took it all with a grain of salt. He’d lived in the flood valley long enough now to know that the news people tended to cry flood at the slightest warning, apparently believing it was better to err on the side of alarmism than to be caught with their pants down by a sudden deluge.

  Shane opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. Wind sucked at the door as he closed it, making it slam behind him. It was hot outside, but gray and dark, the air humid and thick with electricity. Shane guessed that today, at least, the weather guys had it right on. Even if it didn’t rain, the gusting wind would make for a challenging bike ride, carrying the trail grit and dead leaves in its arms, flinging it all into Shane’s face like a playground bully.

  He walked around to the shed anyway, peering at the trees along the edge of the yard, eyeing the entrance to the footpath. He hadn’t been along the path for a few weeks. Not, in fact, since the day he and Christiana had kissed on the portico of the Riverhouse.

  Once, before that, Shane had taken Christiana for a short walk along the path. They hadn’t gone the entire way, but Shane had told her where it ended up, about the angel statue and the stepping stones across the stream, about how it had once connected both properties. She hadn’t seemed particularly interested, and Shane had been secretly glad. They’d sat on the wrought iron bench for a while, with that careful, deliberate distance between them, watching the river where it peeked through the trees at the edge of the gully. She’d never mentioned it since.

  The path could be seen now, dark, full of shadows, like a tunnel mouth in the corner of the yard.

  Shane touched the doors of the shed but didn’t pull them open. It really wasn’t good bike-riding weather. Maybe he’d go for a walk along the path instead. It’d been awhile, after all. Maybe he should check to see if any weeds were growing up again, undoing all of his careful work. He started toward the path, dreamily, as if drawn to it by something outside himself, and then stopped.

  He turned and looked back over his shoulder. The little window above the shed was mostly obscured by the swaying leaves of the magnolia tree. Shane squinted, watching. Sure enough, he could see it. The candle flame was tiny but bright, unmoving despite the switching wind. Beyond it was seamless dark. Go on, the flame seemed to say. Walk the path. Keep it clear. Go all the way to the end and visit the Riverhouse. It’s lonely. It misses you. It loves you.

  Shane squinted up at the candle. Like the flame, its voice was tiny but bright, pervasive. Its suggestion was very hard to ignore. Hard, but not impossible. Shane turned around and walked back toward the front of the cottage. The footpath could wait, and so could the Riverhouse. He’d decided to go upstairs instead.

  He’d decided to paint.

  The painting was going to be called the Sleepwalker, but that was about the only thing Shane knew for sure about it.

  He didn’t know what the subject matter would be, or what style it might be in. Both the Riverhouse painting and the Marlena portrait had been done in a sort of weird fusion, mixing photo-realism with a sort of tortured abstract-cubism that looked like something out of Picasso’s nightmares. He assumed this final painting would be of the same style, and sure enough, as he held the brush over the canvas, he could feel that strange compulsion coming over him again, that weird mix of calculating angles and hot scribbles, all welding together, forming a bizarre stylistic alloy that seemed to both complement and contradict itself.

  The brush strokes nearly vibrated as they began to come, slowly this time, but confidently. This time, the painting had nothing to do with the muse. She wasn’t directing the brush strokes, or dictating the final image on the canvas. She had shown Shane the way to this particular well of creativity, and he’d remembered it. Now, just like he had with the newsprint sketch pad and the crayons, he was tapping into the well all by himself, independent of her.

  The crayons had been a shortcut, of course, giving him a greater degree of control over the portal, but the images he had created with them had been imperfect; cloudy and incomplete, rushed to the point of childishness, skipping over the story like flat stones on the river.

  The Sleepwalker, however, was not going to be rushed. It was going to go deep into the story, just as Shane had originally suspected; maybe deeper than he was truthfully comfortable with, and certainly deeper than Marlena wished. The knowledge of that—of her stern, ghostly disapproval, perhaps even her fury—gave him a sort of dizzying dread every time he settled the brush to the canvas.

  The image began to form, sketchy but certain, and yet Shane could make very little sense of it. He painted in drab browns, blacks and mossy greens—storm colors, he thought, probably influenced by the churning sky outside the studio window. Indian summer had descended with typical Missouri suddenness, turning the autumn air hot and still, making the remaining leaves hang from the trees like washcloths dried out on the kitchen faucet. Shane had opened the window over the stairs, but the thin curtains hung dead, with barely a breath of breeze to push them. Shane’s forehead was beaded with sweat as he painted.

  He could feel the story coiling in his chest, pushing through his arm, straining at the feeble medium of the brush, suddenly anxious to get out onto the canvas.

  He remembered when he’d first begun the Sleepwalker, weeks earlier. It had been a slow, frustrating process. The image had been like a deer at the edge of the woods, timid and tensed, ready to flee at the slightest false move. He’d been forcing it then, trying to make it show him what he wanted to know. Now, however, he thought he finally had his answers, or at least enough to make sense of Marlena’s malevolent moodiness.

  She was jealous. It was as simple as that. She’d thought Shane was hers, the replacement for the husband who had abandoned her and taken away everything that mattered to her. But then Christiana had come along, threatening to steal Shane away from her.

  And worse, she had succeeded. Shane was indeed in love with Christiana. He hadn’t said those words to her yet—nor had she to him—and yet they were there, waiting just offstage, listening for just the right cue. That cue would come, and the tension of waiting for it was both frightening and delicious.

  Shane felt it. He thought Christiana probably felt it, too. But most importantly, he thought Marlena felt it as well. It was probably like a knife in her dead heart, waiting to be twisted. That was her secret misery, the source of her rage and pai
n, the spearhead of her hatred for Christiana. It was Madeleine and Wilhelm all over again. Some stories, Shane thought as he painted, were cyclical; some histories just couldn’t help repeating themselves.

  Now that he knew the source of Marlena’s torment, he approached the Sleepwalker with a calm patience, ready to let it tell its own story, in its own time. And somehow, the painting responded to that, turning from a trickle into a pipeline, pushing the story through him, out onto the canvas, with sudden, almost startling urgency.

  Even still, the image that was forming, sketchy and frantic, didn’t make any sense. The first line, the up-stroke with the gentle, feminine curves, had indeed become a sort of figure, but then the story had leapt away from that shape, filling in the sides of the wide canvas.

  A large, blocky shape had constructed on the right side, complicated and busy, making Shane think of the uneven stack of bricks from his crayon drawing vision. This shape was flatter, though, and softer, somehow. A piece of upholstered furniture? Or maybe a bed? He tried to focus on the shape, to force his hand to produce the necessary details, but the story refused, impatient, brushing off his questions and moving to the opposite side of the canvas, taking his hand with it.

  There, he painted a jumble of blocky shapes, apparently thick with shadows. He thought he could recognize these—trunks and crates, mostly empty, merely stage dressing. A large cloth seemed to be draped over them, turning them into an abstract backdrop, but Shane knew that these were unimportant details. The focus of this side of the canvas was an upholstered chair, high-backed, with dainty wooden legs, each represented by one quick slash of curve.

  There was something sitting on the chair. Not a figure, but another shape, smaller and indistinct, and yet familiar. Shane squinted at it, wondering, but then the focus of the story darted away again, moving back to the central figure. A shape formed around it, a sort of halo, perfectly round, framing the head and shoulders. The halo quickly became the centerpiece of the scene, partly because it was, in fact, in the exact center, but also because it was the only light-colored object in the scene, formed of a pale, dusty blue. Baby blue, Shane thought idly as his arm arced around, tracing the curves, making them perfect.

  Wind suddenly switched outside the window, lifting the curtains out over the stairs and singing a high note in the screen. Downstairs, startling Shane badly, a dull slam suddenly reverberated. It shook the cottage, and Shane nearly dropped his brush. He sat back, his heart thudding, and drew a deep breath. He knew what had caused that slam—the changing air pressure had merely pulled a door shut downstairs, slamming it—but it had still unsettled him, broken his mental link with the story on the canvas.

  After a moment, he glanced down at his watch and saw that he’d been at it for nearly two hours. His shoulder was tired, but not quite sore. He could paint more, if he wanted to. The story was still there, hovering in the air, crackling like electricity, waiting to find life on the canvas.

  First, however, he should go downstairs and close some of the windows, just in case it did storm and the wind blew the rain in. As he passed the window over the stairs he felt the sudden cool of the air outside. It chilled the sweat on his brow and made him shiver slightly.

  Shadows filled the downstairs as he moved through the rooms, pushing the windows down, rattling the handles of the front door and the door over the basement, making sure that they were securely latched and wouldn’t swing wide again with any more gusts of air.

  Satisfied, he retreated down the short hall and pounded back up the stairs to the studio. The air from the window was much colder all of a sudden. Shane stopped at the top of the stairs, his hair prickling and his breath puffing out in a white fog.

  The Sleepwalker was no longer on its easel. It was hovering in the air in the middle of the studio, facing him directly, its image looking stark and naked in the light of the window. Shane stared at it, his eyes wide, his hand gripping the top knob of the banister hard enough to turn his knuckles white.

  Was it Marlena? Smithy? Somehow, he didn’t think so. This was both of them somehow, or neither of them. This was something larger, more pervasive, less human—almost like the ghost of the Riverhouse itself. It filled the studio with its cold presence, packing the space, making the air feel crowded and dense, almost too thick to inhale. Shane forced his lungs to fill and when he tried to speak, to ask who was there, nothing came out but a thin rasp.

  The Sleepwalker began to drift slowly toward him, and as it did, it grew brighter, gathering the stormlight, focusing it, making the rough brush strokes leap off the canvas. The image loomed over Shane, but he could barely focus on it. Dimly, he realized he wasn’t breathing. His vision began to darken at the edges, spiked with angry pulses as his heart pounded. Still, the Sleepwalker pushed toward him, demanding that he look, that he make sense of the images.

  And suddenly, vaguely, he thought he did. The shape on the right was indeed a bed. Someone was lying in it, covered roughly with a mass of blankets, their head buried in the pillows. The red slashes weren’t the light of a sunset, as Shane had originally thought. They were spatters of blood on the pillows, hiding the ruin of the figure’s head.

  Shane felt dismay sink its claws into him, making him sway on his feet. And yet it was the object on the left side, the object sitting on the cushion of the high-backed chair, that followed him down into unconsciousness. He should have recognized it right away—and part of him had. After all, he’d already painted it once.

  It was a purse. It sat open, its inside full of black shadow, its secrets already revealed. None of it made any sense. It was pathetic and frustrating and terrifying, all at the same time.

  As the Sleepwalker drifted toward him, suspended in the grip of that awful, nameless force, Shane began to black out. He fell forward, collapsing as if in slow motion, all the strength evaporating from his arms and legs, and as he did, a gust of cold wind pushed through the open window, belling the curtains over him, sighing in the window screen. The sigh of the wind sounded almost like a word, and that word followed Shane down into oblivion, echoing, tolling like a bell. Riverhouse, it said, over and over, backwards and forwards, beckoning and warning, teasing and threatening. Riverhouse… Riverhouse…

  Shane awoke some time later, startling to the sound of a door slamming again somewhere in the cottage. His ribs hurt and he rolled over, pressing his hand to them, remembering everything in a rush—the Sleepwalker floating in the air, looming over him, the air going dense and poisonous, the revelation of the images on the canvas, and finally himself falling forward, collapsing onto the top few steps, bruising his ribs.

  He jerked upright, suddenly sure the painting was still hovering over him, descending on him like a set of gaping jaws. The painting wasn’t there, however. Neither were the stairs, or the rest of the studio. He blinked in the darkness, looking around. He was in his bedroom, on his own bed. It was rumpled, the pillows damp with sweat, as if he’d just awoken from a very restless nap. He drew a shaking breath and felt another pang of pain in his ribs. It hadn’t been a dream, of course. Had it?

  He frowned, squinting into the muddy twilight of his bedroom, staring toward his dresser. The antique silver baby rattle sat on top, next to his wallet and a wooden bowl filled with loose change. The rattle caught the waning light, condensing it into watery glimmers.

  He remembered the sound that had awoken him, the sound of a door slamming somewhere in the cottage. He listened: footsteps, light but purposeful, and then a dull thunk. Shane knew what that sound was, and smiled to himself, in spite of everything. Christiana was home. She’d just put her bag on the kitchen counter. Another thump; the refrigerator closing. She liked a Diet Coke when she got back from work. It was nice to know someone’s habits like that.

  “I’m in here,” he called, his voice thick and raspy. “Just took a little nap. Apparently.”

  Nothing. Shane listened for another moment, and then climbed off the bed. His legs felt weak beneath him, nearly geriatric. He leaned
on the bedroom door for a moment.

  “Chris?” he called again, but no answer came.

  The cottage was suddenly perfectly silent. The hallway into the kitchen was packed with shadows. He walked slowly along it, his hair prickling. Christiana’s bag sat on the kitchen counter. An open can of Diet Coke sat next to it, already beading in the humid evening stillness.

  “Chris?” he said, his voice faltering. Where could she be? A surge of frustrated hopelessness welled up in him. It was his job to protect her, wasn’t it? It had only been a few minutes. Surely Marlena couldn’t have gotten to Christiana in such short a period of time. Could she have? Worse, what if it wasn’t Marlena at all? What if it was that nameless, pervasive force—the inhuman spirit of the Riverhouse itself—he’d felt (or dreamed he’d felt) in the studio?

  Panic tried to shimmy up Shane’s spine like a monkey, but he fought it back. She had been here only a moment earlier; she couldn’t have gone far. He moved through the kitchen, into the library, and then stopped.

  The sunroom was the brightest room in the cottage, filled with diffuse twilight from the low sky outside. Something was standing in the center of the room, blocky, silhouetted against the dim blue light.

  Shane sucked in a breath, his heart pounding, but the figure didn’t move. It wasn’t a figure at all. It was a painting on an easel. He recognized it. It was the portrait of Marlena, the one he thought of as “Dear M”. It stood on the smaller of his two easels, looking incongruous in front of the cushioned ottoman.

  A flicker of heat lightning lit the painting, illuminating it brilliantly—Marlena’s shocked eyes, her white fingers gripping the letter, the blood red fireplace behind her. And the purse in the shadow of the sofa, of course; Steph’s purse, its mouth open and dark.

  Shane continued forward, drawn to the painting, his eyes widening. It was almost magnetic. The paintings were portals, after all.

  “Chris?” Shane said one more time, his voice barely a hoarse whisper.