The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  Shane said, “But she lost all those things, too.”

  “Once, yes. But that’s simply not enough. I’ll take those things from her again, tonight. And again and again, if I have my way. Another flood, another replay of her crime, and her just punishment. I’ll do it for the rest of eternity. I admit, it is the only thing that gives me pleasure. Besides, what else have I to do?”

  “I’m not going to die here,” Shane said, but his voice was weak, pathetic.

  Wilhelm laughed. “I love your spirit, boy. I’d expect nothing less from you. You do your ‘father’ proud.”

  Shane heard the thunder, felt the rumble beneath his feet. He could hear the rush of the river below the bluff. It sounded unusually close.

  Wilhelm brightened suddenly. “She comes,” he said, glancing toward the stairs.

  Shane heard the slam of the door below. A moment later, footsteps sounded on the stairs leading up to the studio. A figure came into view, and Shane turned to look. It was Marlena, of course. There was nothing ghostly about her. For the first time Shane saw her actual eyes, rather than mere empty black holes. They were brown, just like in his painting. She looked around the studio, and saw her husband. Her face went instantly pale, but she didn’t seem surprised, exactly. Shane saw that she had always secretly suspected this. She tore her gaze away from Wilhelm, saw Shane, and her face lit with a smile of pure relief. She moved to him, throwing her arms out.

  She embraced him. Shane stood there, feeling the warmth of her body, the perfect humanness of her touch. Slowly, helplessly, he put his arms around her. She was shorter than him, nearly the same height that Christiana had been.

  “My boy,” she whispered harshly. “My naughty boy. Why did you come here? But it doesn’t matter now. I have you. I’ve found you.”

  Shane drew a breath, trying to remember what this woman had done to Christiana. It was extremely difficult. “I’m not Hector,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I’m not your son.”

  “Shh,” Marlena shushed. Shane felt her breath on his chest, felt her tears soaking through his shirt. And he realized something awful. She already knew the truth of his words. She knew it, and was simply denying it. Shane looked over her head, meeting Wilhelm’s eyes.

  “Of course,” Wilhelm said, shrugging languidly. “Of course she knows. But what else does she have? Give her what she wants while you still can. Don’t be cruel.”

  There was another rumble as thunder rolled across the sky outside. The rumble shivered the floor, shook dust from the ceiling. The painting of Steph’s mangled Honda keeled forward and fell to the floor with a dull clunk. Wilhelm didn’t look down at it.

  “What’s happening?” Shane asked.

  “Shh,” Marlena said again, still embracing him. “Hush, son. It’s all right now. Hush little baby, don’t you cry…” She began to sing.

  “What have you done?” Shane demanded roughly, looking at Wilhelm.

  “I’ve done nothing,” the man said, still sitting on the end of the bed that bore his own corpse. “Just as I have already said, I’ve merely watched and waited, suggested and hinted. Nothing lasts forever. Credit me for simply having impeccable timing.”

  The rumble beneath Shane’s feet hadn’t stopped. It vibrated in his heels, carried up into his guts. The world seemed to be suddenly full of hidden, subtle motion. He turned his head and looked out the window over the stairs. The trees that bordered the river were inexplicably missing. Shane could see nothing but falling rain and darkness. Slowly, horribly, he began to understand.

  Marlena had already lost her son once to the river. Wilhelm meant to see it happen again.

  The window cracked suddenly. It shattered as the frame bent out of plumb. Shards of glass fell inside, breaking on the stairs. Wind and rain blew in, billowing the curtains. Shane felt the mist on his face, heard the roar of the advancing river. The rumble beneath his feet grew, became more pronounced. The floor suddenly seemed to be tilted very slightly. It leaned toward the broken window. Paintbrushes rolled off Wilhelm’s work desk and clattered to the floor.

  “Marlena,” Shane said, struggling to control his voice. “You have to let me go. The river is rising. It’s broken through the bluff. Do you understand?”

  She looked up at him then. Her eyes were beautiful, haunted but clear, adoring. “My boy,” she said. “My sweet boy.”

  “He means to make it happen again,” Shane said. “Your husband. He’s been planning this all along. It’s his revenge. He wants to make you live through your loss all over again. Starting tonight. Starting now, Marlena.”

  A pang of pain swept over her face and a tear spilled onto her cheek. “Call me mama,” she said, looking up at him, her voice broken, miserable. “Call me mama. Please. Just once.”

  She knew it all. None of it surprised her. It was unstoppable.

  There was a long, ominous creak. Something crashed downstairs, long and loud, shaking the floor. The cottage leaned. In the distance, a deep, rumbling tremor shook the air. The bluff was falling away into the river, worn away by the decades of floods, finally letting loose. It was just as Wilhelm had said: nothing lasts forever.

  “I’m not your son,” Shane said, his own eyes welling with tears. “I’m sorry. I’m not him. Your son is dead.”

  Marlena’s lips trembled, turned downwards. Her face filled slowly with anguish, but she still looked up at him, pleading at him with her eyes, begging him not to go on. Shane struggled against the urge to give in to her, to give her what she so desperately wanted.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and swallowed thickly, fighting back tears. “I wish I was your son. I wish I could give you what you want. But I can’t. I’m Shane. Your son’s name was Hector. Hector Wilhelm. Hector…”

  Shane stopped. His eyes grew unfocussed as his thoughts aligned, clicking suddenly into place. In his memory, he saw Christiana leaning toward him, as if to kiss him. He saw her cup her hand to her lips, felt her breath on the side of his neck as she whispered.

  Marlena’s maiden name was Smythe, she’d said, cupping the words as if to keep them from escaping. He’d understood the words, but hadn’t understood their significance. Now, suddenly, he thought he did.

  “Your son’s name…” he said, his voice growing firm, grimly certain. “Your son’s name was Hector Smythe Wilhelm. In honor of your dead father.”

  Marlena nodded up at him slowly, miserably.

  Across the room, Wilhelm’s voice came low and dark. He was standing slowly. “How can you know that?”

  “Your husband resisted you on that decision, didn’t he?” Shane said, meeting Marlena’s gaze. “He wanted to name the boy after himself. Hector Gustav. But you insisted. And he let you win. At least for the moment. Later, when he’d taken your son away from you, he knew he could change it. He could name the boy whatever he wanted. But for the moment, he’d let you win. Your son’s name… was Hector Smythe Wilhelm.”

  “Quiet, boy,” Wilhelm said menacingly, advancing on Shane and Marlena, his face terrible. “Children should be seen and not heard.”

  Shane almost laughed out loud. “He hid the truth from you,” he said, ignoring the advancing specter. Marlena’s brow was furrowed, worried but curious. Maybe even a little hopeful. Shane went on. “It must have taken him so much effort. I can’t even imagine. But he did it.”

  Marlena shook her head slowly, not understanding. Of course she didn’t. She didn’t know what Shane knew.

  He disengaged from her, and she let him go, reluctantly, watching. Shane reached into his pocket. The silver rattle was still there. It jingled as he pulled it out. Marlena watched it, her lips trembling.

  “This isn’t mine,” Shane said, holding it up. Lightning played on its shiny bells, flickered on the smiling cherub’s face. “But I know who it belongs to.”

  “Be still!” Wilhelm roared, raising his hands, his face crumpling into a mask of rage. Shane ignored him. He had a strong sense that, unlike Marlena, Wilhelm’s ghost really couldn’t touc
h anyone. As Wilhelm watched, Shane raised the rattle and shook it playfully, making the bells jingle and chime.

  “Smithy?” he called, but not very loudly. He didn’t have to. “Smithy, I have something that’s yours. Come on out. You can have it back now.”

  There was a tiny scuffle on the stairs. Shane looked, and so did Marlena. A figure moved in the shadows. A set of small fingers curled over the banister. A moment later, very slowly and tentatively, a face rose behind the fingers, peering over.

  “Rattle,” the face said, and then. “Mama.”

  Shane turned back to Marlena. She was staring at the staircase, her eyes wide, her mouth open in a small O of complete shock.

  “Rattle!” the little face said again, and then, with happy excitement: “Mama!”

  Marlena moved in a rush, in one single, balletic movement. She swooped to the stairs and swept the small figure into her arms, hugging him to her and calling his name, weeping his name, saying it over and over. They had both been there the whole time, throughout all the decades, and yet somehow, they hadn’t known it. Wilhelm had kept them apart, hidden them from each other. It had probably been easier when Marlena had haunted the Riverhouse, and Hector had stayed in the cottage, flushing its toilets and clicking the basement lights. Once the Riverhouse had been destroyed, however, and Marlena had been forced to flee to the cottage, it must have taken Wilhelm an enormous effort to blind them to one another, to stand between them in the darkness like a curtain, hidden himself, and yet separating them from each other. Surely, it had weakened him. Perhaps that was why Wilhelm seemed so powerless now.

  “Hector!” Marlena cried, holding her son up, laughing with joy. “Oh, my sweet boy, my wonderful boy! Hector… Hector!”

  Hector laughed and squealed in her arms as she spun him around. Shane couldn’t help smiling, even as tears ran down his own cheeks. He cried for their reunion, but he also cried for his own lost daughter, the daughter whose name he would never know. He cried for Christiana, dead, sacrificed for this moment. He was sad, but strangely, what he felt most was a sort of bitter joy. Marlena had killed. She had taken away everything that he had loved. And still, in the end, he’d pitied her. And now, helplessly, he rejoiced for her.

  Marlena stopped turning Hector in her arms. She looked at him, hugged him, covered his ghostly face with her kisses. Hector grew serious, however. He reached over Marlena’s shoulder, his fingers working, opening and closing. “Rattle,” he said meaningfully.

  Shane approached them. He held the rattle up and Hector smiled. He took the rattle, looked at it in his hand, and then shook it vigorously. In his hand, the sound it made was like fairy music. It sounded like a hundred pixies banging tiny cymbals. The boy laughed happily.

  “Do you know who I am?” Shane asked him.

  Hector looked at him. He nodded slowly, shyly, still smiling.

  “You like to flush toilets, don’t you?” Shane asked him, matching the boy’s smile. “And to turn on and off the lights?”

  The boy nodded again, slowly, as if he thought he might be scolded for his playfulness. Marlena was looking at Shane now, smiling thoughtfully, happily, as she held her son.

  “You like to draw, too,” Shane whispered. “Don’t you, Hector? You like to draw, and you’re pretty good at it, just like your mother and father. But you like to use crayons. And chalks.”

  Hector nodded once again, and then leaned closer to Shane. In a loud, conspiratorial whisper, he said, “I drawed for Nanna Chris. I like Nanna Chris. I open the doors for her. I drawed for her, too. On the floor in the cellar. I didn’t like Nanna Chris to get hurt. I helped. You helped, too.”

  Shane nodded, barely trusting himself to speak. “The drawing on the cellar floor,” he whispered. “It was a warning. You knew somehow, didn’t you?”

  “I saw it,” Hector said soberly, struggling with his words. “I… dreamed it. I didn’t want it to happen. I drawed it to tell you. To help you make it go away.”

  “It worked,” Shane said, tears doubling his vision. “At least for a little while.”

  Hector stirred in his mother’s arms. “Mama and me go home, now,” he said, no longer whispering. “Home to the Riverhouse. We can take the Good Ship Lollipop. OK, Mama?” He looked at her earnestly. She smiled at him, laughed, and nodded.

  “I suppose, sweetheart,” she said. “I suppose we can, just this one time.”

  She looked at Shane then. There might have been an apology in her eyes, but Shane couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t even be sure that she saw him. She seemed thinner, somehow. There was less of her there. She turned with Hector in her arms. Slowly, she began to descend the staircase. She hummed to her son as she went, and Hector leaned on her shoulder, one arm around her neck, the other clutching the silver rattle. He shook it as they went. Shane heard them—her melodic humming and his happy jingling—for several moments after they had faded from view.

  The cottage shook. It no longer merely vibrated. Now, its motion was a ratcheting, lurching grind, as if the entire structure were rolling slowly downhill on a bed of boulders. For all Shane knew, it was. He struggled to stay on his feet, but it was suddenly a very hard task. He grabbed for the banister with both hands, supporting himself with it. He knew he had to get out, but also knew it was probably too late. Besides, he still had Wilhelm to deal with. He glanced back towards the tilting, rattling studio. Wilhelm was nowhere in sight. He scanned the room, eyes wide. Had it been that simple? Had the mere act of reuniting Marlena and Smithy defeated him? Shane didn’t believe it. And then he noticed the bed. The moldy sheets had been thrown back. They lay crumpled half on the floor, stiff with dust and cobwebs. A single leather shoe lay nearby. There was no sign of Wilhelm’s corpse.

  “You’ve made a rather large mistake, boy,” Wilhelm said. His voice seemed to come from everywhere, from every brick and floorboard, every creaking bone of the shuddering cottage. “I was merely going to kill you. You were meant either to drown in the Riverhouse, or be crushed in the grave of this cottage. Was that so bad? Now, though, I’m going to kill you, and keep you. It’s only fair, isn’t it? You’ve managed to send away my family. Now, you’ll just have to take their place.”

  Shane looked around wildly, trying to pinpoint the sound of the voice. It was no use. And then, for the second time that night, he thought of the words of the trucker, the one he had met at the diner in Bastion Falls. Haulin’ ass is a valuable life skill, he’d said, you never know when it’ll come in handy.

  Shane bent his knees and tried to steady his balance on the creaking, tilting floor. Holding onto the banister, he worked his way around to the stairs. Glass gritted and cracked under his feet. The cottage creaked ominously and Shane couldn’t resist looking out the shattered remains of the window. All he could see was rain falling into darkness. The sound of the river was loud and hungry, busy, going about its destructive work.

  “Stay here, why don’t you?” Wilhelm said, his voice calm, almost playful. “Stay with me. What’s the point of trying to escape?”

  “I don’t think you can even hurt me,” Shane called out as he worked his way down the steps, leaning hard on the exterior wall. “If you could, you would have done it when I called out for Smithy, your son. You’d have stopped me. I think you wasted all your strength keeping Marlena and Hector apart all those years. She was the stronger one. That’s why she was able to touch us, and to kill Chris.”

  “Her strength was my strength,” Wilhelm replied casually. “She did what I allowed her to do. What the Riverhouse allowed her to do. But you were right about one thing. I couldn’t stop you. Not then. I was too divided. It’s hard work, revenge. But things are different now, as you can see.”

  Shane reached the bottom of the steps. His bedroom was already mostly gone. Rain and wind tore at the remains of the bedroom floor, which jutted, naked and shattered, out over darkness. Vertigo tried to grip him, to freeze him in his tracks, but he resisted it, turning away, toward the hall. He began to work his way a
long it, fighting the disorienting lean and rumble of the walls all around him.

  “I don’t believe you,” Shane called out, gritting his teeth, steadying himself on the frame of the basement door. He could tell by the sounds from below that the basement was already gone, ground away into the guts of the collapsing bluff. “I think the thing you’re best at is lying.”

  “I have watched my body all these years,” Wilhelm mused, ignoring Shane. “I watched it molder away to bones and dust. I knew that if I ever entered it again, I would be doomed to inhabit it again forever. As a spirit, one simply understands these things. The use of my corpse would be futile to me in the long term, but what does it matter now? My time here is nearly done. It was worth it to rejoin my bones in order to stop you, to imprison you here with me, to keep you with me forever. You will be my son now, since you succeeded in taking mine from me. Perhaps it is even better this way. He never wanted me, once he learned the truth. But you will accept me. You will love me. In time.”

  “You’re crazy,” Shane called, moving now across the floor of the living room, toward the front door. It hung open on one hinge, swinging like a broken bat’s wing. Beyond it, the night boomed and flashed, beckoning.

  Wilhelm laughed then, long and loud. “I am indeed crazy. We discussed that, already, if you recall. Death does it to you. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Shane said, gripping the frame of the door, pulling himself toward it.

  “But you can’t,” Wilhelm’s voice whispered in his right ear.

  A skeletal hand wrapped around Shane’s neck. It was surprisingly strong. Wilhelm’s other hand clutched Shane’s head, covering the top half of his face like a bony spider. Wilhelm laughed again, pulling, dragging Shane backward into the collapsing cottage. Shane smelled the rancid puff of the corpse’s breath. He was still holding the frame of the door with one hand, but his fingers were slipping, one by one.

  He beat at the skeletal arms with his free hand, but it was no use. The skeleton drug him backwards, breaking Shane’s grip on the doorframe. The darkness of the cottage surrounded him, and Shane panicked. He coiled his strength and lunged with his legs, heaving forward. The skeleton was strong, but it was light. Shane carried it forward with him now, and it clung to him, squeezed him in its unforgiving grip. Shane felt the jaws snap at him, clacking together next to his ear. He reached for the doorframe again, caught it, and began to pull himself forward once more.