Tell My Sorrows to the Stones

by Christopher Golden

  As for Bowden’s paintings of the stones . . . well, they were paintings of stones. The images were so dull, he was surprised they hadn’t bored the paint right off the canvas.

  Fortunately, there were other Bowden paintings on display, without the serenity and charm of the street scenes or the cold boredom of the standing stones. The artist had painted various old houses in town, a series of them, and it seemed architecture fascinated him.

  “Look at this, Cori,” Jane Morgan said, beckoning them. “It’s your house.”

  And it was, complete with the turret room they had just resto-red. Sometime in the 1960s, one of the previous owners had been stupid enough to tear it down. It had been a trend at the time, perhaps, or there had been damage. But when Mike and Cori had bought the house, its absence had been obvious. The rest of the design matched Victorian homes of the same era. There would have been a turret. Sure enough, when they searched the town records, they found old photos. There it was.

  The neighbourhood association had tried to prevent them from putting up a new turret, but Cori had had the brilliant idea of enlisting the help of the Covington Historical Society, who argued in their favour because they wanted to restore the house to its original condition. The city found in their favour, and now the turret was up.

  Mike and Cori both loved that room, and the view it provided. It had fast become their favourite room in the house, a tiny thing full of windows and benches and cushions. A room for thinking, or for not thinking at all.

  “Wow,” Cori said.

  Doug and Jane Morgan had moved on to other paintings, leaving them to themselves for the moment.

  Mike stepped up beside his wife. “What’s ‘wow’?”

  “Take a look.”

  She pointed to a quintet of small paintings. They were oddly angled scenes, some of woods and others of old houses, but from above, as though looking down. Only when he looked at the fifth one, with its obvious lattice lines, did he realize that each one was the view out a window. That fifth painting, Bowden had painted in the crosshatch, so the view was through four panes of glass, complete with a bit of the warping that antique glass always created. It really was brilliant.

  Now he went back and looked more closely at the other four. In two, the outer edges of the frame were clearly visible, but they were all of the view through a single pane of window glass.

  “Don’t you see it?” Cori asked.

  “They’re windows. It’s a cool effect.”

  Cori smiled indulgently, all sins forgotten at the moment. She pointed to the paintings. “They’re our windows, doofus. Fifty years ago, anyway.”

  Mike looked again. He stepped back and sipped his wine, studying each picture. He recognized the Beauregards’ house, and then others started to fall in place. He imagined himself looking out the windows of his second floor, and saw that one of the houses in the second painting had been torn down and a pair of Colonials thrown up in the ’80s. But the others—the landscaping was different, even the road was different, and the trees were either much taller or simply gone, but it was their neighbourhood, all right.

  “Holy shit. This is very cool.”

  Cori kissed his cheek. “Eloquent as ever, honey.”

  They both studied the paintings more closely now, trying to figure out which windows would provide each of those views. As they did, Mike glanced to the right, and paused. A sixth painting seemed to go with the group. They’d nearly missed it because its shape didn’t seem to be part of the set. It was wide, but not tall, and showed a view down upon thick woods, and a white church steeple in the distance.

  “That’s the view from the turret,” Cori said, coming over beside him.

  Mike nodded. He’d been thinking exactly the same thing. It had taken a minute to see it, because the contractors had cleared some of the woods to make room for the pool, but the angle, and that church steeple in the distance—at the centre of town—must be the view Theo Bowden had had from the turret room fifty years before. The turret had been torn down ten years later, so no one could have matched the images up until now.

  After studying it a moment, Cori moved on, perhaps in pursuit of the Morgans or someone else to socialize with. That was all right. Mike had brought her here to socialize. Events like this gallery exhibit would be the saving grace of having to live so far from Boston. They could survive as long as Cori could manage not to feel too isolated. In time, Mike hoped, she might even come to think of Covington as home. They both could.

  He was about to turn away when something about that one painting drew him back. Something seemed out of place. Sure, the trees weren’t as tall, then, but it wasn’t just that. He stepped back, trying to get a new perspective, and then he saw it. A brown structure, squared off at the top, which couldn’t possibly be a tree. A blur that he’d assumed was from the warped glass now looked like smoke.

  A chimney stuck up from the trees behind Mike and Cori’s house.

  What the hell? he thought, moving closer. Under scrutiny, the painting revealed edges and lines amongst the trees that might have been a roof.

  Fifty years ago, there had been a house in the woods back there, on their property. Nobody had ever mentioned it to them—no realtor, no neighbour, nobody. The trees would have grown up to cover any trace of it now, even with the turret restored. But he had to wonder if the house itself remained.

  Mike and Cori spent Saturday morning in the room they were slowly converting into a nursery. He’d put a fresh coat of paint in there the previous week—yellow, which was nicely neutral, given they’d chosen not to find out the baby’s sex. They had gone through catalogues and picked out the crib and other furniture for the room, including one of those glider-rockers that Mike thought would always have a place in the house, even after their baby had grown up. But they hadn’t ordered any of the furniture yet. Cori insisted it was bad luck.

  Proceed with caution had always been her wisdom, and more and more, Mike had adopted it as his own. Several friends from her work had given her a mobile as a kind of quitting-to-have-a-baby present, but it sat in a box in a closet.

  Somehow, though, the walls and ceiling were immune to this superstition. The paint had been acceptable, since a fresh coat of paint was welcome in almost any room. But today they were putting up the Winnie the Pooh border they had picked out while browsing at The Baby Carriage, and there could be no pretending that it served any other purpose than to make the room more pleasant for a child.

  Mike had made the mistake of asking Cori why the border was an exception to her otherwise rigid caution. Her response had been a narrowing of the eyes that always seemed to put a thousand miles between them.

  “We can’t wait until the baby’s here for this, Michael.”

  Yeah, Michael. That was never good.

  He ought to have known better than to question the wishes of a pregnant woman; it was throwing himself into a maelstrom of hormones. He had agreed, reassured her that he loved the border, and she had deigned to allow him to kiss her. Minutes later she had been laughing and tickling him, and he loved her so hard it hurt his heart.

  Mike didn’t mind the mood swings that pregnancy had brought out in his wife. Seeing her revelling in impending motherhood made up for any snappishness on her part. It would pass. And it was far preferable to the months after she had first suspected he had been having an affair. During that time there had been long periods when she would answer him in monotone or pretend he wasn’t even in the room with her.

  This house and the baby were their new beginning, and whatever rules she wanted to put in place to define that were fine by him.

  They put Cori’s iPod dock in the nursery. She dipped four-foot lengths of the border into a plastic basin of water and handed it up to Mike, who balanced on an old, wooden chair. As he carefully aligned each piece and then ran a sponge over the surface to make sure all the air bubbles were out of it, they sang along to Maia Shar
p and Sara Bareilles. They took breaks to rock out to the Dropkick Murphys and the Frames, the music blasting out the open windows. And when Madeleine Peyroux came on, they danced, and they kissed.

  Foreheads pressed together, grinning, Cori said, “I think Baby Shaughnessy’s going to love this room.”

  Mike knew she meant the tall windows and the cross-breeze that brought in the spring air, but he also understood that she meant something else, too. Something about love and family, and the happiness it gave them to be preparing this place for her. Her. Mike thought their child would be a daughter. He just had a feeling.

  As he put the last piece of the border in place, he could see out the window down into the backyard. From here he could only see the very tip of the church steeple in the centre of town. The swimming pool in the backyard was basically complete, but they were putting in a patio around it, and some fencing, and an outside grill that ran off natural gas that would be piped underground from the house. A little backyard paradise.

  But he kept looking at the trees beyond the pool.

  “I’ve got some chicken leftover from last night,” Cori said from the doorway, where she surveyed the job they’d done with an approving smile. “I thought I’d make some chicken salad.”

  “One of the many reasons I love you.” Mike dropped down from the chair. “I’m going to take a walk out back. We’ll rendezvous in the kitchen?”

  Cori arched an eyebrow and suggestively cocked a hip. “Why Michael, it’s been ages since we rendezvoused in a kitchen.”

  He grinned. Maybe it wasn’t always a bad thing when she called him Michael.

  “And that’s another of the many reasons,” he said, going to her. He kissed her and ran a hand along the arc of her ever-growing belly. “Chicken salad or rendezvous first?”

  “Depends on what you’re hungrier for,” she said, then initiated a wholly different sort of kiss.

  They made love on the hardwood floor, gently because of her condition, a warm spring breeze caressing them, and found a kind of contentment that had been gone from their relationship for a very long time.

  “I know I’ve been kind of freaked about the move, and staying home to take care of the baby, and everything,” Cori said afterward, running her fingers through the short scruff of his hair. “But I think it’s going to be good for us.”

  Mike kissed her nose. “I know it is.”

  He glanced back at the house only once. Cori would be in the kitchen, making chicken salad. His knees hurt from the wood floor in the nursery, but he wasn’t about to complain. His nostrils were still full of the musky smell of sex and it gave him a kind of high, a bit of swaggering elation. A walk in the woods seemed to fit right in with that feeling. He’d always loved to go exploring as a child, and that hadn’t changed just because he’d grown up.

  He scanned the pool area, trying to imagine what it would look like when the contractors were finished. They needed to clean up the yard still. There were some tree stumps that had to be removed and he’d have to have some serious landscaping done back here. But he would keep these woods otherwise untouched. He and Cori hoped for two or three children, and someday there might be paths through these woods, worn down by Shaughnessy feet. One of the things he’d loved about this property from the beginning was the amount of land that came with the house. The realtor had thought they wouldn’t want it because the city wouldn’t allow development on the rest of the property due to open space regulations or something. But to Mike, that had been a wonderful thing. He didn’t want other houses back there.

  And yet, once upon a time, there had been at least one.

  He set off into the woods, at first picking his way over fallen birch and lightning-split oak, but then finding the terrain easy to manage, despite thick roots and rocks that jutted from the earth. Off to his right, Mike spotted something that piqued his curiosity, and walked over to find a rough-hewn standing stone, almost identical to the one the pool contractors had removed when clearing his backyard.

  What it meant, he had no idea. Someone had placed these things back here, based on some pagan belief or archaic science. He promised himself that he’d do some research starting Monday. Bowden’s fascination notwithstanding, they still seemed boring things to paint, but their presence intrigued him.

  Mike started off again, cutting back toward the angle he’d started out on. Just when he started to think he’d gone too far in that direction, he came upon another of those stones, sitting by itself in a circle of old oaks. Maybe he had overshot after all.

  After a pause to get his bearings, he headed off in what he thought was a direct line between his house and where the church steeple scraped the sky at the centre of town. A slight incline brought him to what must once have been a path, though only the suggestion of it remained. Still, he had no doubt where the path would lead. He was on the right track.

  Another minute or two of walking and he came upon the house, or what remained of it. A partially collapsed chimney stood in a clearing full of tall grass and weeds. Mike walked across the clearing, grass shushing around him. Some of the bricks had tumbled into a pile beside the ruin of the chimney and they were black from fire. He stumbled over something in the grass and looked down to see that he’d nearly tripped over a charred timber.

  Walking around the chimney, he realized that more remained of the old house than he’d thought. There were bricks and rotten wood sunk partially into the ground, slowly being claimed by earth and vegetation. At some point, at least a decade past but possibly much longer than that, the house had burned down.

  He turned in a circle, studying the trees at the edge of the clearing. The fire hadn’t gotten far, otherwise none of those towering old pines would still be there, never mind the old growth birch and oak. He paused and narrowed his eyes. At the back of the clearing he spotted another of those standing stones, this one taller than the others he’d seen. And now that he looked, he saw several others, spaced about equally, creating a semi-circle behind the ruins of the house.

  Brow furrowed in thought, he gazed into the woods on either side, suddenly sure that if he looked he would find others, extending the circle out into a long oval that must have ended at the outer edge of the woods behind his own home.

  Mike smiled to himself. A genuine mystery in his own backyard. Cori would love this.

  Investigating further, he stepped over a pile of stones that had once been part of the house’s foundation, careful not to lodge his ankle amongst rotting timber. Hands on his hips, he stood looking around. Something was missing, and it took him a moment to put his finger on exactly what. Then he had it.

  “Where are the empties?”

  Local kids must know about this place. He figured that was how it had burned down in the first place. That was the first explanation that came into his head anyway, an old abandoned building, teenagers partying inside, a dropped match or a cigarette left burning. But, then, why weren’t there any beer cans or bottles? He didn’t see any. Not one.

  Weird.

  The old fireplace remained, a beautifully built hearth, its face blackened. He went over and crouched in front of it. Leaves layered the floor, now. Picking up a stick, Mike poked around in the fireplace, stirring up the rotting leaves and the damp ashes beneath, a black smear of ancient char.

  The stick hit something and he moved closer. Batting it back and forth a bit, he saw the object looked like a strange stone or—odd that he should think this—a piece of coral. But when he reached in with his hand and pulled it out, blowing and rubbing the old ash and dirt off of it, he realized what he held was a fragment of bone.

  A shudder went through him and he tossed the bone shard back into the fireplace—

  —which ignited.

  “What the hell?” he said, jerking back from the fireplace. He caught his heel and fell on his ass—

  —then twisted around, gripped by panic. The light from the fireplace flicker
ed off walls and old, dusty curtains. Beneath him the floor was rough wood and above the roof beams were heavy timber. Outside the windows, night had fallen. Snow accumulated on the sills and ice rimed each pane.

  “You’re not here. You’re not really here,” a cracking, frightened voice muttered.

  Mike leaped to his feet, backing away from the voice. He blinked, shook his head, trying to clear his vision. Just at the edge of the light thrown by the fireplace, a stooped, white-haired woman sat in a sturdy rocker, a heavy shawl drawn around her shoulders. She did not rock. Rather, she leaned forward in the chair with her hands over her ears and her eyes pressed tightly shut.

  She hadn’t been there a moment ago.

  “You’re not here,” she said again, voice rising in desperation.

  “I don’t want to be here!” Mike snapped, hating the desperate edge in his own voice.

  The old woman didn’t react at all. Mike glanced around, trying to force himself to accept what he was seeing. He could feel the cold of the winter and the warmth of the fire. Hell, he could smell the wood burning in the fireplace. His skin prickled and his heart slammed in his chest and he wanted to scream. So he did.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  Hysteria. Mike knew he was losing his shit, but he didn’t mind at all. Losing his shit seemed very much the right thing to do.

  “You can’t be here. You aren’t allowed.”

  He pressed the heels of his hands to the sides of his head, as though he needed to keep it from breaking open. And maybe he did.

  The old lady started rocking. “Not here, not here, not here.” She sounded almost like a little girl, teasing some other kid on the playground.

  The ceiling beams creaked worryingly. Loudly. The rocking stopped and she opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling with milky-white, unseeing eyes. Mike held his breath, looking from her blind eyes to the ceiling. The storm hadn’t made that noise. It sounded like an elephant shifting its weight in the attic, but this house had no attic.