Shane blinked at her, bewildered. “What are you talking about?” he said, raising his voice over the roar of the rain. “You really are lost, aren’t you? We have to go back that way!” He pointed behind him, not taking his eyes from Christiana’s face. She looked very pale in the dim storm light.
“No. No, that’s where I just came from,” she said, but uncertainly. “It’s all wrong. We need to cross the stream, like I did on the way here, but it’s all flooded now. The stepping stones are underwater. Look!”
“Chris, the stream is over there, between us and the rest of the path. That’s the Riverhouse side. The cottage is back that wa—”
Shane turned, pointing, and the word stuck in his throat. The stream was behind him now, running high and furious in its banks. The stepping stones were nowhere in sight. He stared, his eyes wide and wild, rain running down his face.
“Shane,” Christiana said, her voice strangely calm. “How did you get over here?”
Shane swallowed past a large lump in his throat. “I don’t know,” he said.
“I don’t know either. But, somehow, I think we have to go on. At least a little way. Don’t you?”
Shane turned back to Christiana. He looked at her again, studied her face. She looked up at him openly. Finally, hopelessly, he nodded. They began to walk together, heading toward the rest of the footpath, the shorter length that led up to the site of the Riverhouse.
“Did you see her?” Shane asked as they walked.
Christiana was next to him, holding his hand. “No, of course not. I didn’t even get to the end of the path. I got… lost, I think.”
“But how, Chris? The footpath only goes one place. Did you walk off it, into the woods?” He thought of the spectral people he’d seen drifting silently through the trees. Were they the remains of Wilhelm’s gaggle of artist friends? The ones who’d come to stay for weeks at a time back during the Riverhouse’s heyday? The Wanderers, they’d called themselves. He shuddered.
“No. I mean, I don’t think so. Time seems weird out here. How long ago did you say I left?”
“At least an hour. Probably an hour and a half.”
Christiana was silent for a long moment. All around them the wood seemed suddenly very still except for the endlessly falling rain. She stopped on the path. A moment later, Shane did too.
“Something’s very wrong,” she said in a quiet, thoughtful voice.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Everything’s wrong here. That’s why we need to get out of here. We should have gotten out weeks ago. I’m sorry, Chris.”
She was shaking her head, and when she looked up at him again, her eyes sparkled with tears. “That’s not what I mean, Shane. I don’t… I don’t know what I mean.”
“Come on,” he said, pulling her hand to him, beckoning for her to follow, but she remained rooted to the spot. A sudden thrill of worry shook him and he looked at her, truly looked her up and down. All the expression went out of his face.
“Chris,” he said, his voice suddenly small and weak. “Why… why aren’t you wet?”
She looked at him, and then looked up at the dark sky. “Why?” she asked. “Is it raining or something?”
Shane stepped toward her again. Her hair was perfectly dry. Her face was clean and smooth, without a drop of rain on it. He looked closer and his knees went weak, making him sway on his feet. Christiana reached for him, her own face turning pale and dreadfully alarmed.
“Shane!” she cried, holding his hand tightly, making him look at her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
He pointed toward her cheek with one trembling finger. He touched it, feeling the smoothness of her skin. It felt cold. “The scratch,” he said hoarsely. “The M. It’s gone. It’s… just gone.”
Dreamily, Christiana reached up. She touched her cheek, felt the unmarked skin. Her eyes met Shane’s again. She nodded very slowly.
“I know things,” she said.
“Christiana, no,” Shane said quickly, moving his hand from her cheek to her lips. “No! Let’s just go back. It isn’t too late. It can’t be. When I came out to find you, I knew it was no use. But I ran anyway. Someone—” he stopped, laughed a little wildly. “Someone told me recently that hauling ass is a valuable life skill. I hauled ass, Chris, even though I thought I’d be too late. But I found you!”
She was shaking her head sadly. She took his hand away from her lips, lowered it. “No, Shane. No, I… I don’t think you did.”
“That’s crazy!” he exclaimed, his voice cracking. “You’re right here! You’re all right. You must be. Why would I have… why would you still be…” his voice trailed away as he looked at her face. Her words didn’t convince him, but her expression did.
“I know things, Shane” she said, almost whispering. “I know things I couldn’t know. I think you were too late. I’m… I’m sorry.”
Shane looked away, screwing his face up in denial and shaking his head vehemently. He looked back again. “This is crazy! It can’t be this way! I love you!”
She nodded once more, her eyes glistening with tears. “I loved you, too.”
“But how?” he demanded. “She’s a ghost! Ghosts can’t hurt the living!”
Christiana blinked at him. “What makes you think that?”
Shane shook his head again, refusing to acknowledge the undeniable truth. “Walk with me, Chris. Come with me. We can go around and up to the road. Everything will be fine then.” He began to move along the path again, drawing her forward with him. She came, but slowly.
“She met me at the steps,” Christiana said, as if the memory was just coming back to her.
“No,” Shane protested, not looking at her, simply walking forward, pulling her with him.
“She stood up, like she meant to greet me. The storm was coming, but it hadn’t yet started. There was still some light in the sky, and I saw her face. She looked so… so reasonable. So understanding. And I thought to myself, ‘Chris, you did the right thing. I’m really majorly creeped out here, but I think this is going to turn out all right after all’…”
Shane could see the trees opening as the woods thinned. He drew Christiana forward, his face grim, turned down in a frown of persistent denial. “Chris, please—”
“She came forward and held out her hand. Her other hand was behind her, but I didn’t think anything of it. I went to shake her hand. It’s what we’re trained to do, isn’t it? And she looked so pleasant, so… beautiful. It wasn’t just habit. I wanted to shake her hand. I wanted to be friends with her. When I got close to her, I could see that she was sad underneath her smile. Her eyes had tears in them. She reached out to me before I could ask her about it, though, and she did more than shake my hand. She drew me into a sort of half embrace. Something hit me in the back. It felt like a baseball, thrown really hard, hard enough to sting. I took a breath to ask what in the hell it was, but the breath… it hurt. Hurt like I was inhaling broken glass,”
“Chris, stop!” Shane said, nearly moaning.
“Marlena sort of grunted then, still embracing me,” she said, ignoring him. “And I felt something tug inside me. Marlena grunted again, as if she was working at some tough job, and the tug came again, only this time it didn’t just tug, it ripped. It felt like it took most of my chest out with it, right out of my back. The world keeled beneath me, came up to meet me, and I was grateful for that. I felt so tired all of a sudden. I just wanted to lay there. Marlena stood over me, and the tears were running down her face now. She looked so miserable, so sad. For some reason she had a big set of gardening shears in her left hand. They were wet with something. It glistened in the darkness. She knelt over me and lifted the shears again, opening them with both hands…”
“Stop, Chris! Stop!” Shane cried, turning to her, grabbing her and hugging her to him. “Stop this! Please don’t! Please! I can’t hear anymore!”
“I know things, Shane,” she said, not hugging him back. “I know you could have stopped this. I know you chose to stay.
I was the rabbit on your lap. You were supposed to protect me.”
“I know!” he cried desperately, hugging her tighter. “I know! I’m so sorry! I failed!”
She hugged him back then, gently but sincerely. “I know,” she whispered. “And I was partly responsible too. It’s like I told you earlier. Your mess is my mess now. I meant that. I chose it. I could have walked away. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. And you know what? I’m not sorry. In spite of everything, I’m glad I stayed. I loved you. But still. You needed to know.”
“Why?” he demanded, his face buried in her shoulder.
He felt her shrug, and then she said, “Because it’s part of the view. The part you couldn’t see until you were standing right on the edge of the cliff.”
“But how could this happen, Chris,” he asked again, begging an answer from her.
Christiana shook her head. “I don’t know, but I have a sort of inkling. A shadow of an idea. I think it takes a lot to make a ghost, a lot of unresolved business. But that’s not the only thing that’s going on here. Ghosts alone can’t explain it.”
Shane ran a hand helplessly through his hair, flinging water from it. “Then what does?”
Christiana sighed deeply and furrowed her brow, looking around at the dark, dripping trees, and suddenly Shane thought he knew what she was going to say. After all, somehow, he’d already dreamed it. “There’s a reason why Gus Wilhelm chose this spot to build the Riverhouse, a reason why people all over the world settle in places like this,” she said in a low voice. “It’s a boundary land. It’s where water meets earth. We’re drawn to the boundary lands of life, the shores and valleys, the foothills and cliffs. Instinctively, we know such places have power. But this one is unusual. There are other places like it, but not many. Here, the boundary line is a lot deeper.
“The river forms a boundary between land and water, but also between the present and the past, even between life and death. This is one of the thin spots, where reality is worn almost all the way through to the other side. You can sense it, can’t you? I’d bet that everyone who ever came here could. It’s like an echo in a room you can’t quite see. Here, the line between the dead and the living blurs. Tonight especially. Probably because of the flood, because of the way it brings two points in history together, folded together like pages in a book. Tonight, here at the boundary line, I think the difference between the living and the dead is completely erased.”
Shane took both of her hands, drawing her to him. “Then maybe it can be undone,” he said urgently. “Maybe what happens here isn’t really real!”
She smiled sadly at him. “I don’t think it works that way, Shane. I wish it did. Just because nothing that happens here is exactly real, that doesn’t mean it’s a dream. It just means we can’t quite understand it. It just means the normal rules don’t apply. Not even the normal ghostly rules.”
“But you’re real,” Shane insisted desperately, touching her face. “I can feel you.”
She didn’t say anything; merely looked at him, letting the truth sink in. He hugged her to him. “I’m so sorry, Chris,” he said, his voice tight, strained. She nodded. After a moment, she pushed him gently away.
“It’s not over,” she said. “I know that now. After Marlena was through with me, I was confused for awhile. I was down in the clearing again, just moving around, looking. I saw a dock down by the river, on the other side of the stream. There was a little boat tied to it. The Good Ship Lollipop. I didn’t go near it. It scared me. I wandered around, following the stream. I think I was looking for you, waiting for you, although I didn’t remember why. I do now. I know things. I need to tell you what I know.”
Shane drew a deep breath. It hitched in his chest, but he held it. Slowly, he nodded.
“The first thing,” Christiana said, moving toward Shane again, touching his arm. “Is that Stephanie says hello. She misses you. She says you were right about that day at the Spring Garden. Right about everything. She says she is sorry. And she says your child was a girl.”
Shane sobbed suddenly, helplessly, and turned away. He reached up and swiped at his tears with the heels of his hands. “A girl,” he said, his voice shaking. He laughed a little. “Steph wanted a girl. I think I did, too. A little girl. I wonder what her name was going to be.”
“I don’t know,” Christiana whispered apologetically. “But I saw her. She has her mother’s eyes. They’re two different colors. Blue and green. But I didn’t get her name.”
Shane laughed again, and cried again. He turned on the spot, looking blindly around the dark woods. Lightning flashed. He drew another breath and let it out shakily, steeling himself. “All right,” he said. “What else? What else do you have to tell me?”
Christiana came close to him. She leaned towards him, as if she meant to kiss him one last time. Shane knew it was too much to hope for, and he was right. She cupped a hand to her lips and leaned close to his ear. He could feel her breath on the side of his neck. Like her cheek, her breath was cold. In a tiny, whisper, almost like a child’s secret, she told him.
Chapter Twenty Three
Shane walked on, approaching the end of the footpath. Christiana followed behind him, but she spoke no more. She would be gone soon. He knew it somehow, instinctively. He didn’t want to see it happen. The woods opened up before him finally, and he saw the second statue, the one that had appeared in his painting, the one guarding the Riverhouse entrance of the footpath. It was the twin of the one on the other side of the stream, except that this one was male. Its lips were turned up in a gentle smile. Its eyes were blank white orbs in the darkness.
Shane stopped in the shadow of the statue and stared up at the sight that loomed over him, his face draining of color. The clouds were low, moving slowly, massively, like an inverted ocean. Lightning played through them, illuminating them from within. Beneath that sky, towering like a dark sentinel, stood the Riverhouse. It was no longer a half-transparent ghost, or merely a teasing flicker in the lightning. It was as solid as the ground it stood on, but dark, with no lights shining from its tall windows. The chimney was a black monolith, stretching up into the cauldron of the clouds. Rain fell from the awnings and gutters in steady curtains. The rose garden stretched neatly down the slope of the yard, reaching for the river beyond. Shane drew a deep breath and began to walk towards the house, simultaneously repulsed and enthralled. He wanted to run away. He wanted to go inside and never come out again. He warred with himself at every step.
“It’s so… tall,” he breathed. “I didn’t get that part right in the painting. I don’t think I could have. There wouldn’t have been enough room.”
There was no answer. Christiana was gone now. Maybe she had never even been there. A deep sense of loneliness filled him as he approached the house, moving along its side. The chimney rose next to him, complete with its wrought iron W bolted halfway up its height. The metal shimmered in the lightning as water coursed down it. He supposed he could have gone in through the back door, by way of the rose garden, but that didn’t seem right. The portico was where he had first met the Riverhouse, at least the version of it that Gus Wilhelm had built, rather than the rambling monstrosity that it had later become. He had only come to know the real house, to taste its silent magic, once that later version had been destroyed. Now, thanks to him, the original Riverhouse had been reborn, returned to its original shadowy splendor. If Shane was going to enter it at all, he would go in through the front door, the one that he had painted, the one below that high round window that looked so much like the one on the east side of his cottage.
He turned the corner and saw the driveway stretching off into the far woods. It was purple in the darkness, each brick straight and crisp, looking sharp enough to cut his finger on. He continued to turn, to move around the front of the house, and saw the portico steps, and the tall pillars on either end, framing the face of the Riverhouse. And he saw Christiana. She lay on her back, her legs tangled on the steps, her shoulders on th
e bricks of the curved driveway.
Shane stumbled towards her body, his vision doubling with tears. She’d been stabbed in the chest as well as the back. The wounds formed two ragged holes in the fabric of her blouse, dark with blood. Her face looked calmly up at the storm, her eyes open but dull, unblinking as the rain spattered into them. Blood ran in rivulets along the seams of the bricks, spreading away from her corpse in a dim fan. Shane fell on his knees next to the pathetic, diminished figure. He touched her hand, her wet cheek, and then fell on her, laying his head on her cold breast, wrapping his arms around her. She felt horribly light, sodden with rain. He cried against her, delirious with grief.
“This isn’t you,” he sobbed, repeating the phrase over and over. “This isn’t you. You’re gone now. I saw you in the woods. You weren’t like this. You were better. You were whole. You didn’t even have the scratch on your cheek. You weren’t even wet. This… isn’t… you…”
He tried to convince himself, and yet the vision of Christiana he’d seen in the woods already seemed ghostly, faint, like a mirage. The body that lay on the bricks, broken and bloody, seemed all too real now. All too final. It was his fault. It had been his job to protect her, and he had failed.
Christiana had had her role to play. She was Madeleine. Marlena had always known that Madeleine would come back, had even known that it would happen during a flood. She had watched and waited for that moment, aware that when the time came, she’d have a job to do. A difficult, grisly job, but Marlena was a strong woman. This time around, Marlena knew that Madeleine might not die so easily.
This time around, she hadn’t taken any chances.
A rhythmic noise attracted Shane’s attention, a dull scuffling sound, and he realized that it had been going on since his arrival on the portico steps. He looked up, following the sound, and saw a figure some distance away, on the other side of the driveway. The figure was dressed in a black raincoat, but wore no hat. It was Earl. He was digging a hole in the shadow of the woods. Shane thought he understood now. The Riverhouse was like a beacon. It was built on the portal, on the boundary line between life and death, between then and now. It drew those who had dwelled in it, brought them back across the gulf, blessed them or cursed them with the task of reliving their roles over and over. Earl had gotten caught in that tide, and now here he was again, still performing his chosen part, even beyond death. After all, he had known, or at least suspected, what had happened between Marlena and her husband. He might even have helped her to cover it up. Now, he was doomed to continue that work, covering up one more murder, burying the evidence. Maybe he knew the truth, and tried to fight it. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe for him it was all just a bad dream, like the most vivid nightmare ever.
The Riverhouse Page 45
