The Riverhouse (27 page)
Authors: G. Norman Lippert
The ghost had recognized that rattle. It must have been an incredible shock for her to see it in Shane’s fist that night, held up like a tarnished talisman. It must have struck her as deep magic; that familiar silver rattle, suddenly appearing in front of her. Shane wondered how much of her ghostly forbearance of him was due to the cosmic serendipity of that night in the sunroom, the night he’d happened to have that rattle in the pocket of his sweat pants. Maybe quite a lot.
Brian was the first to speak after Earl fell silent. “So how’d old Mrs. Wren know what the letter said?”
Shane expected Earl to snap at his grandson again, but he didn’t. He was still staring down at the river below the bluff, watching as it gathered into dusk.
“She didn’t. Not for sure, at least not then. We all just sort of pieced it together for ourselves. Mrs. Wren knew about the windows and the candles, Wilhelm’s damned system. She’d seen Madeleine sneaking upstairs every evening right before she left for home, seen her peeking askance out that window, looking for something.
"I expect one of those evenings, Mrs. Wren herself stole up there and peeked, too, after Madeleine had gone. She saw that candle probably, and figured it out.
"Later, Marlena told Mrs. Wren about the letter, of course. Those two women were about the same age, and Mrs. Wren was probably the closest thing the Missus had to a friend, even though she was a townie, like the rest of us. Later, after Wilhelm had been gone long enough to prove he wasn’t ever coming back, Marlena told Mrs. Wren everything. She needed to tell someone, I expect, and Mrs. Wren was safe.
"She herself never told the whole story to anyone else except me, and that wasn’t until some years later. And I never told anyone except the two of you. Never had much of a chance to, really. Nobody ever wanted to know about Marlena and Wilhelm in the beginning. Everybody seems to have pretty much forgotten about those early years, before the poor woman started slipping her gears.
"I think that’s a big part of the reason I decided to tell you that old story, Shane Bellamy. When you first showed up at my door, I thought you were just like the rest of the muckrakers, come to dig up more stories about how the old lady went crazy, all shut up in that big house. That’s all people care about nowadays.
"Once you’d left, though, I thought about it, and it dawned on me that you didn’t know anything about all that. It occurred to me you really were just curious about the people, not the craziness, about Gus Wilhelm and Marlena herself, when the house was new and none of the ugliness had happened yet. I hope I was right about that, because if I wasn’t, I’ll feel like a damned fool.”
Shane shook his head. “No, you were right, Earl. When we first came out here, my wife and I, the real estate agent told us a few stories about how the place had been rumored to be haunted, and said that there was an interesting story about the house itself, even though it had long since been sold off and converted into duplex apartments. She didn’t tell us about any… what did you call them? Insanity stairs?”
Earl grimaced and pushed himself upright in his seat. “Probably not a surprise she left all that out. That stuff’s only interesting if you don’t live right on top of it. Your agent was probably Darcy Harrold, right? I know her from way back. She probably figured she’d have a harder time selling the place to you if you knew the real story about this property and the Riverhouse. Darcy may be a chatterbox, but she knows when to shut up when a sale is on the line, oh yes. She doesn’t have those billboards with her picture on them up on the west side of town for nothing.”
Shane stirred on the low stone wall. “You don’t have to tell me any more than you want to, Earl. You’ve told me plenty already, and I’m grateful for it. But I do have two questions if you’ll indulge me.”
Earl looked up at Shane, his bushy eyebrows low on his brow. He nodded slowly, not really promising anything.
Shane drew a breath. “What ever happened to Wilhelm? Where’d he and Madeleine end up?”
Earl chuckled weakly. “Not here, that’s all anybody really knows for sure. Some people say he wound up out west, in California. They say he’d changed his name and become some kind of art teacher out there, at U.C.L.A. or Berkeley or some such.
"There’re stories about how he became a sort of pop culture icon in the sixties, the sage old hippie with his own harem of adoring teenage girls and pothead disciples. Every few years, some yarn goes around the locals that a long lost Gus Wilhelm portrait’s showed up, found at some garage sale or flea market out west, painted long after he left our neck of the woods.
"Sometimes it’s a portrait of Madeleine and Hector, all grown up and mysterious, signed by Wilhelm with his real name, like he was blowing a raspberry at history itself. One time, a decade ago—this one was my favorite—they said it was a portrait of Elvis that showed up, found in a storage garage in San Bernardino, complete with a diary and sketches by Wilhelm himself, penned in his own hand.
"Maybe those stories are even true, who knows? Point is, nobody knows for sure where he and Madeleine and Hector ended up. The stories come and go. People like me, people who were here back in the day, we really just don’t care. Good riddance.”
Brian nodded somberly. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Earl glanced at his grandson and smiled crookedly. “There’s hope for you yet, boy.” He leaned over and clapped Brian on the knee. For the first time, Shane noticed that Brian was not exactly the young man he had originally thought him to be. Despite his dead end job and talk of college, Brian was probably closer to thirty than twenty. Brian grinned at Earl, and Shane noticed something else: despite the gruff words and age difference, these two loved each other.
“All right, Mr. Shane Bellamy, we’ve talked your ear off long enough,” Earl said, leaning back slowly in the deck chair. “You said you had two questions. Go ahead and ask the last one, if you want.”
Shane considered it, and then looked the old man in the eye. “I understand why you might have hated Gus Wilhelm, Earl, after your story. I even get why there might be some bad blood between the town and the estate, considering everything, considering the rumors and scandal. But there’s one thing I don’t understand.”
Earl studied Shane’s face. Unsmiling, he said, “What’s that?”
“Why did you hate the house so much? Why were you so happy when Riverhouse got torn down?”
“I’d have thought it was obvious,” Earl said. His voice had degenerated into a deep rumble, almost a growl. Shane had a feeling that the man hadn’t spoken so much in one sitting in decades. “I hated that goddamn place because of what it did to Marlena. It was all she had left after that bastard left her, like I said, and she clung to it like it was a life buoy. She clung to it even though it was poisoning her. It started sinking its fangs into her the moment she got that note, the moment she ran up to the cottage that night and found them gone, all gone.
"It never stopped killing her from that day on, and it was a slow death, believe you me. It was an outright torture. That house toyed with her and drove her mad, because it was Wilhelm’s. You see that, right? It was like he’d left a part of himself there for her, locking her down, imprisoning her, teasing her and making her madder and madder every day.
"It took almost twenty years for it to finish its work, and by then, there was hardly anything left of her. By then, that house had grown fat on her madness, gotten huge and ugly and sprawling, and it had sucked her dry, sucked her right down to nothing but a used up husk. And then she was dead, and all that was left was that monstrosity of a house.
"It killed her. I hated that place because it killed her, and I had loved her. You understand that? Maybe I caught a little bit of her craziness, but even so, I don’t deny it. Crazy is like that. It can be catching. That was part of what I was warning you about, Shane Bellamy, that day you came out to see me. I was trying to protect you, believe it or not. Because sometimes, crazy is catching. Sometimes crazy is as contagious as the goddamn plague.”
Shane could tell that Earl was getting worn out. His original cantankerousness seemed to have rallied and reasserted itself, so that the old man looked even older now than he had when Shane had first seen him on the front porch, leaning on his cane and peering out at him. Brian stood and helped Earl get to his feet.
“I appreciate everything you’ve told me,” Shane said, standing and leaning in through the back door, clicking on the yellow bug light. It chased back the twilight and lit Earl’s and Brian’s faces with its harsh glow. “I got more than I expected, to tell you the truth.”
“That’s how life is, ain’t it?” Earl said, leaning on Brian’s arm. “Ask for an inch, it’ll give you a mile.”
“I always heard that the other way around,” Brian said, frowning a little. “I thought it was something about taking an inch, when people give you a mile, or something like that?”
“Shut up, boy,” Earl said mildly, stepping through the sliding back door of the cottage.
Shane led them through the kitchen and breezeway, purposely standing between them and the front room. The dusk was gathering thickly in the cottage, and the only lights that were on were the overhead in the kitchen and the bug light out back, but Shane didn’t want to take any chances. The last thing he wanted was for old Earl Kirchenbauer to see the painting of the Riverhouse sitting on the mantel over the fireplace, especially after the old man’s comments about craziness being catching. He had a strong suspicion that that painting would be especially hard to explain.
Brian and Earl didn’t even glance in the direction of the fireplace, however. Shane followed them outside onto the porch, and watched as Brian led his grandfather to the passenger’s side of the Bonneville. The door squeaked as Brian pulled it open, and the interior light popped on, lighting the front seat brightly.
“Good luck, Bellamy,” Earl said, turning to peer back over his shoulder. “Be good to the place. It’ll probably be good to you.”
“I will,” Shane replied. “Scout’s honor.”
Brian helped settle his grandfather into the passenger’s seat, then shut the door and tossed Earl’s cane through the open window of the back seat. “Good seeing you again, Mr. Bellamy,” he said, rounding the back of the big car—Earl’s, Shane guessed, the one he still washed and waxed himself, as hard as that was to believe—and shaking out a set of keys. “See you around, all right?”
“You bet.”
Brian started the car and Earl powered down the passenger’s side window.
“She killed herself,” he said, struggling to make his voice heard over the rumble of the engine. He said it almost as if he couldn’t stop himself, as if he’d been waiting for Shane to ask. “She wasn’t in her right mind. Hadn’t been for years. She was still young, barely sixty, but she was just done. The house had used her up, like I said.
"You’ll remember that, right? She did it herself, in the end. Jumped out of that window, the round one at the front of the attic, up on the peak of the Riverhouse, the same one Wilhelm used to summon his mistress. I heard Marlena had something in her hand when she did it. It was broken on the driveway next to her when they found her. It was a painting, one of her own, but just a little one. I don’t know if it was true or not, but that’s what they say. A painting of her missing husband and son, and herself too. The paint was still wet when she jumped, like she’d just finished it.
"Remember that, will you? I’m tired of doing it myself. It’s like that damned gold watch Clearwater gave me. I don’t want to carry it anymore. It’s too heavy.”
Shane nodded slowly. “I’ll remember it, Earl.”
Brian had waited patiently. When he saw that his grandfather was finished, he shifted the big car into reverse, clicked on the headlights, and began to back up. Shane watched the Bonneville rock and squeak on its springs as Brian did a three point turn, aiming the car down the long, sloping drive. Half a minute later, the spray of its headlights had disappeared into the woods, leaving Shane leaning on the porch railing, listening to the chirr of the autumn crickets, watching the lightning bugs stitch glowing gold patterns amongst the trees.
At the perimeter of the yard, barely a gray shape slinking in the darkness, Tom the cat prowled slowly, his tail held high, his head low, stalking something in the weeds. Shane watched, thinking about Marlena, wondering if he’d see her tonight.
Wondering if she’d been listening.
A few days passed before the third artwork revealed itself.
Shane worked on the Florida series, finishing the big splashy representation of the state’s name, centering it on its own canvas, ready for Greenfeld’s Photoshop artist to cut it out and composite it into the six background images. He decided that, once the paint had dried, he’d call Greenfeld and tell him it was done, ask him how he wanted to take possession of the work to give to the next guy on the assembly line.
In the meantime, he rode his bike and worked on the footpath, clearing it as far as the little grassy plain with the stream running through it, dragging wheelbarrows of debris out of the woods and piling them in the back corner of the yard, unwilling to merely toss them to either side of the path lest they clutter up the view, make it seem haphazard and messy.
He was very proud of his progress, realizing on some level that he had become somewhat obsessed with it. This didn’t bother him. Shane was an observer of people, and he believed that most individuals spent their lives buried in various obsessions. Some were unhealthier than others, and some were more pervasive or dangerous or silly, but the saving grace of almost all of them was that humans, almost by definition, are fickle and easily bored. Obsessions pass, and are replaced by new ones.
Shane knew that he was somewhat obsessed with the footpath to the old property, but he also expected that that obsession would pass soon enough, like so many others had. For now, he enjoyed the exertion and the sense of progress, the measurable difference as he cleared the path and groomed it, even going so far as to strip the vines off the old angel statue and scrape off most of the moss, despite his earlier decision to leave it alone.
On the Thursday after Earl’s and Brian’s visit, Shane found a gallon can of old white paint in the back of the shed, still half full, albeit thick and gloppy with age. He thinned it with a cup of turpentine and slapped a gleaming white coat onto the bench that overlooked the gully. He was absurdly proud of how it looked when he was finished, despite the pasty drips that spattered from beneath, spattering the leaves of the hydrangeas in the bench’s shadow.
He had time to think that he’d been unnecessarily worried about having both the Riverhouse and the Marlena paintings in the house at the same time. The muse seemed to have forgotten him again, leaving the foreman in his head plenty of room to do his job everyday from nine until two. The Riverhouse painting still stood on the mantel downstairs, the Marlena painting on the small easel in the corner of the studio.
Maybe eventually he’d display them together. They were obviously part of a series, with their garish colors, their mix of bizarre modernism and strict realism, like a scene glimpsed through a semi-transparent kaleidoscope. Maybe both paintings had simply been cathartic exercises, just part of the process of getting over Stephanie and the loss of his previous life. Stranger things had happened. He’d display them in the years to come, and explain that they were sister pieces, the two signature works from his “Shane Bellamy Insanity Stairs” series.
The thought made him smile, and yet, for now, he was content to leave the two paintings in their respective places. Not because he was superstitious, not anymore. Just because the time wasn’t right yet. The paintings weren’t… ripe. It was a weird thing to think, but he was an artist, even if he did wear khakis and white button-down shirts to his shift, even if he did occasionally watch sports on TV. He was an artist, and artists were prone to think weird things sometimes.
But that was before Friday evening, when Shane decided to go down to the basement to check on the furnace.
It had been thumping a bit harder than usual, and taking longer pauses between the thump and the gentle whoosh of the vents. The last thing he wanted was to go into a long Missouri winter with his furnace on the fritz. Not that he knew anything about such things. He knew there was a filter that needed to be changed sometimes, part of a humidifier addition Steph had arranged to have installed the year after they’d purchased the place. Other than that, the furnace was simply a huge black monstrosity in the rear corner of the cellar, festooned with snaking ducts and pipes, like a sort of iron-age octopus.
Still, he had some idea that, when he called the repair guys at Trane Heating and Air Conditioning in Bastion Falls, it’d behoove him to at least be able to say he’d gone downstairs and taken a quick look at the thing himself. Thinking that, Shane flicked the light switch at the top of the cellar stairs. It clicked loudly, but the basement remained dark.
“Smithy,” Shane scolded automatically, and then laughed to himself. He retraced his steps back to the kitchen and retrieved the old silver Maglight from the junk drawer next to the stove. He clicked it on, saw the satisfying cone of light it made, and turned to tromp down the steep wooden stairs into the basement.
Like always, the basement smelled of dirt and mold. Cobwebs swayed in the spaces between the upstairs floor beams, drifting at his passage like seaweed in an ocean current.
Shane shone the flashlight around in a wide arc, looking around the cellar. A pile of old cardboard boxes were stacked in the corner under the stairs, scrawled with words in black marker:
living room, den, kitchen stuff
. Steph had had a rule that if anything stayed packed for more than a year after a move, it was trash. Apparently that rule hadn’t applied to the cottage. A thick layer of dust and mouse feces covered most of the boxes. In front of them, an old exercise bike loomed like a skeleton, covered with cobwebs, an old rag dangling from one of its handlebars.
Shane sighed and approached the furnace in the opposite corner. It looked just as incomprehensible and ancient as ever, despite the relatively shiny box of the humidifier attachment. Two Honeywell filters sat neatly on the floor next to the furnace, still in their delivery boxes. Steph’s work, of course. She had ordered the replacement filters on the internet, and then placed them there on the basement floor, waiting for the day when they’d be used.
Something on top of one of the boxes caught Shane’s eye. He blinked slowly and peered closer, adjusting the angle of the flashlight. On the top of one of the boxes, four narrow streaks lay in the dust. More dust had almost filled them in, but not completely. There was no mistaking what they were; they were Steph’s fingerprints. She had been down here during their last stay together, and had checked the filters. She had moved this box, probably to get a better look at the current filter inside the humidifier attachment, and she had left those four streaked finger marks in the dust.
Shane drew a deep, shaky breath, and was amazed to feel tears suddenly blurring his vision. Dr. Taylor had had a term for this. He’d called it death lag, and he’d said it was the opposite of grief. Grief was when you walked through life fully aware of the loss of a loved one. It may be painful, but it was functional; grief helped you move on, allowed you to live your own life again, even if it felt a little like cheating. Death lag, on the other hand, was that awful moment between seeing a sign of your loved one and remembering, suddenly and horribly, that they are no more. Norm Taylor had said the instances of death lag would decrease over time, but they’d probably never go away completely, no matter how long Shane lived.
Shane raised his left hand, the one that wasn’t holding the flashlight, and held it over the top of the box. The flashlight cast the shadow of his hand onto the box, covering Steph’s fingerprints with the shadow of his own fingers. He pretended he could feel her hand. He pretended he could reach through time, back to that moment when she had been here in the basement, probably in the middle of the summer of two thousand six or seven. He pretended that he could touch her, and that she’d felt him, felt his ghostly, magical hand cover hers. Maybe it had startled her a little. Maybe she’d thought it was Smithy, reaching out to squeeze her hand for a moment. Perhaps she’d gasped and drawn her hand back suddenly, making those streaks in the dust. But then she’d probably stopped, and put her hand out again, cautious but curious. That, Shane knew, was exactly what Steph would have done.
Tears spilled from both of Shane’s eyes and ran down his cheeks. He dropped his hand and lowered his head. It was all just his imagination, of course. Steph was gone. As gone as the Riverhouse.
Feeling very weak and tired, Shane pushed himself upright. The flashlight dangled from his hand, harshly illuminating a spot on the gray basement floor. Long ago, the floor had probably been dirt, but at some point during the intervening decades, someone had decided to pour it with concrete. Now, the concrete was cracked and chipped, spread with dust and water stains from the leaky basement windows. Shane stared down at the cone of light on the bare floor, feeling hopeless and exhausted and terribly sad.
Something lay on the floor next to his foot. It was cylindrical and pale yellow, worn down to almost a nub; a piece of sidewalk chalk. Shane frowned at it. Vaguely, he recognized the chalk. It was part of a box of colors that he and Steph had bought no less than five years ago, thinking it’d amuse Steph’s nieces when they came to visit. The plan had been to let them use it on the patio out back. The nieces had been entirely disinterested in the chalk, however, being old enough for iPods and Hannah Montana and High School Musical by that time. Thus, the chalk had ended up down here in the basement, probably stuffed into one of the boxes under the stairs. How, Shane wondered, had this one gotten out onto the floor?
He raised the flashlight a little. There was another one; green, also worn down to nearly nothing. And there was something else—a shape, drawn in chalk, curling out of the shadow of the dark basement.
Shane’s frown deepened on his brow. He walked slowly away from the furnace, raising the flashlight so as to broaden its cone of light. More shapes and more worn out chalks. It was a drawing, huge and complicated, but completely indecipherable from so close up.
Shane began to feel that familiar chill falling over him, starting in his stomach and spreading out and down, making him shudder. He saw his own footprints in the chalk dust, smearing the image where he’d walked over to the furnace, oblivious of what lay under his feet. His eyes widened as he began to recognize one of the shapes of the drawing.
A surge of hopeless frustration welled up in him as he backed away, toward the stairs, and then began to climb them, backwards, holding the flashlight higher and higher, illuminating the entirety of the basement floor with that cold, bony light.
The scene was enormous, filling almost all of the cracked basement floor, scribbled in haphazardly but with a cruel eye for detail. Shane easily recognized it now. It was the Valley Road, the one that the cottage driveway emptied onto, the road that led into Bastion Falls. Gaily bright fall leaves adorned the trees on both sides of the road, and a childishly blue sky made a gigantic V between the trees, pointing down toward the ribbon of asphalt. The perspective was all off, however, so that both ends of the road could be seen.
One side, nearest the furnace, diminished toward the floodwalls of Bastion Falls, just visible in the chalky distance. The other, under the front cellar window, led up the hill of the valley toward that awful blue sky. Shane could see his own mailbox drawn into the space next to the stairs, crammed in, destroying all sense of perspective.
But the worst part was the vehicles. On the Bastion Falls side, drawn with scurrying, frantic strokes, implying speed and recklessness, was a big red pickup truck. Acres of silver grill dominated its front, and in the center of that grill were scrawled three letters: GMC.
On the other side, drawn with nearly loving care and detail, was Steph’s silver Honda Prelude. There was a shape behind the glass of the windshield, and Shane recognized it. He sunk to a seat on the stairs and dropped the flashlight. It clattered to the floor and rolled crookedly, spraying harsh light over the scene, illuminating the silvery Honda and that eerily familiar silhouette. Shane shuddered and covered his face with his hands, but his eyes peered out, bulging between his fingers, still wet with tears, still looking at that shape on the floor. He couldn’t help himself
The silhouette behind the wheel of the Honda wasn’t Steph. That would have been bad enough.
It was Christiana.
He couldn’t paint at all on the morning after finding the chalk drawing on the floor of the basement.
It was Saturday, and yet some part of him insisted that he should still try to put in his shift. He needed to paint, needed the mundane normalcy of the foreman in his head. Unfortunately, the foreman hadn’t gotten the memo about putting in a little overtime on Saturday. He was apparently off for the day, fishing somewhere, watching Sportscenter, maybe mowing his lawn. In his absence, Shane merely sat on his stool, slumped in front of the canvas. It was the fifth of the six Florida paintings, the one that celebrated the Florida Keys. A fan-boat carrying a gaggle of grinning people dominated the bottom left of the painting, only half finished.