She’d asked Earl to deliver the load of bricks up to the cottage over a month earlier, saying she meant to make a few changes, but then she’d never arranged for anyone to go and do the work. Earl didn’t even know what she wanted to do. Maybe she didn’t either. The cottage had been Wilhelm’s domain, but he’d left it, abandoned it along with his wife and his previous life. Now, the cottage was just an ugly reminder of his betrayal. Maybe the Missus had just wanted to put her stamp on it, somehow. Maybe she’d just wanted to change it enough to wipe his mark from it.
The funny thing was, some of the bricks were gone. An awful lot of them, in fact. Who had done the work? And what had it entailed? Was it possible that Earl could have been unaware that there was work being done on the cottage? He scoffed to himself. Nothing got done around the property that he didn’t arrange, and always direct from the mouth of the Missus.
The river stank. It was hot and humid, and the river had been high of late. When it receded, it’d left stagnant pools all along the banks, covered with mosquitoes and stinking of rot. Earl was surprised at how pervasive the reek was, even up here on the bluff. He shook himself and took his hand off the remaining pile of bricks. He may as well poke inside, see what was going on. It was possible that the Missus herself had been up to something inside. She’d been out and about a lot in the previous months, and nobody really kept tabs on her, of course. She had the know-how, most likely, to do whatever she might choose to do with the cottage, even if she didn’t necessarily have the brawn.
Earl approached the cottage, walking around the brick pile. The sliding doors weren’t there, of course. Instead, there was a simple back door with a window set into the top half. Earl produced a key and socked it into the lock. A moment later, the door creaked open and Earl entered. He moved slowly, tentatively, almost as if he thought someone might be there, hiding in the darkness. He left the door open and moved to the left, heading into the kitchen.
Shane shifted his attention to the kitchen window, trying to focus, trying to follow Earl into the cottage. Unconsciously, he moved closer, ghostlike, floating over the patio, and then the breeze lifted, soughing in the trees. It caught the open back door, began to suck it slowly shut. Shane glanced toward it, and froze.
Marlena was there. She stood inside, ghostly and pale, looking out at Shane with piercing black eyes. It was impossible. She couldn’t really be looking at him, because he wasn’t really there. And yet Shane knew he was fooling himself. This wasn’t the Marlena who was alive in the timeframe of this vision. This was
his
Marlena, his ghostly muse. She had discovered him, found him drawing his pictures, and invaded the scene he had conjured. The door swung slowly shut, closing off his view of her, but before it did, she shifted her gaze. She turned to the side, watching after Earl. Her face hardened.
Shane struggled to call out a warning to the young Earl of the vision, but he couldn’t say anything, couldn’t even draw a breath. Helplessly, he watched the kitchen window, straining. Shadows moved inside, but he couldn’t make any sense of them.
A noise startled Shane, a dull slam, and he jerked upright. He was sitting on the deck chair, his right hand gripping the crayon over the notepad on his lap. He had scribbled over the drawing of the cottage, blotting it out, and the scribble looked like a words. They were barely legible, and yet Shane could easily read them. It was as if his hand remembered making their shapes: NOT THIS TIME. They were underlined repeatedly, furiously, making deep indentations on the cheap paper. The last line had torn the page.
Another noise came from inside the cottage. Shane jumped, dropping the notepad and scattering crayons all over the leaf-strewn patio. His heart hammered. Slowly, he stood up and began to move toward the sliding glass doors. He felt weak with fear, worn out from his experience with the crayon drawings. He reached for the back door handle and his hand trembled. He could see nothing but his own reflection in the glass. His fingers touched the wooden handle and the door shuttled open swiftly, as if of its own accord, swishing noisily on its track and releasing a gust of air. Marlena was there, pale and terrible. Shane stumbled backwards onto the patio, all the strength evaporating from his legs.
“Shane!” a voice cried out. Hands scrambled to catch him. He fought against them, and then looked up. It wasn’t Marlena at all. It was Christiana, her eyes wide and frightened. “Shane, what’s wrong? Are you hurt or something?”
She caught his arm and he grasped her, struggling to his feet. He was panting, sheened with sweat despite the cool breeze. When he spoke, his voice sounded unnaturally high and shaky. “What… what are you doing here already?”
“What do you mean,” she replied, helping him up. “Why shouldn’t I be here?”
Shane opened his mouth, and then stopped himself. Instead, he glanced down at his watch. It was five forty-seven. He’d been sitting on the back patio, drawing pictures and pursuing his strange vision of Earl and Marlena, for nearly three hours. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it. He looked around and saw the twilight lowering over the river, felt the cold evening air pushing through the trees.
“Shane,” Christiana said, her voice firm, worried. “What’s going on? What’s the matter?”
He glanced back at her, focused on her. He took a deep breath. “I think we need to go see Earl.”
He pulled her back into the cottage, grabbing his keys from the hook in the kitchen as he went. Christiana trotted to keep up. As the two of them pushed through the front screen door, heading toward Shane’s truck, she caught her breath enough to ask, “Who in the hell is Earl?”
He explained to Christiana on the way, but only a little. He told her how he’d met Earl, about how Earl and Brian, his grandson, had come to visit Shane in the cottage. He told her how Earl knew the place, and how he had told the story of its history. He didn’t tell her any of that history, though. Nor did he tell her about Marlena, or the mysterious clairvoyant drawings he’d created on the patio. He didn’t want to freak her out.
He was plenty freaked out for the both of them.
“I just have to see him,” he told her as they drove. “I just have to see if he’s all right. Do you ever get those kind of feelings?”
Christiana shrugged, her face noncommittal and grim, watching the road.
Ever since Shane had seen Marlena—
his
Marlena—appear in the vision of the cottage, he’d felt an increasingly urgent sense of foreboding. He kept telling himself that what he’d seen in the crayon drawing was only a vision, a memory, replayed through the small magic of recreating it on paper. He’d tapped into the story of the Riverhouse, deliberately, as he’d suspected he could if he really tried. Just because he’d seen Marlena in that vision didn’t mean that she could act within it. She’d merely discovered what he was up to and invaded the moment. It had been frightening, but what could she do? Earl wasn’t in any danger, no matter how the ghostly Marlena had looked at him. She could barely affect things in the present day (as far as Shane knew). Certainly, she couldn’t pose a danger to some long gone version of Earl Kirchenbauer, buried in a forgotten summer day some seventy years past. Could she?
Shane pressed the accelerator of his old pickup to the floor, feeling the truck rattle and shimmy around him as it sped down the Valley Road. Christiana was pale on the bench seat next to him. She didn’t speak, but she tightened her seat belt and held onto the dashboard with one hand.
It was mostly dark by the time Shane pulled into the parking lot next to Denny Acres, and his mind had concocted a variety of bizarre, utterly irrational suspicions. He imagined he’d go to the big round counter inside the front door of the retirement home and the orderly on duty would tell him that there was no one named Earl Kirchenbauer in residence there. They’d be so kind as to look him up in some kind of town database, only to discover that someone by that name had, in fact, lived in Bastion Falls at one time, but that they had died long ago, probably sometime around July of nineteen forty-five. Or worse, maybe Earl would still be there, but he’d be altered somehow, crazy and deranged, cursed with whatever madness had gripped Marlena herself. After all, crazy was contagious. Earl himself had said so.
It was all paranoia, of course. Twilight Zone stuff. Nothing like that ever happened in real life.
Shane and Christiana made their way through the breezeway, and Shane forced himself to walk normally, not to rush, not to seem at all alarmed or anxious, partly for Christiana’s sake, and partly for his own. It was important not to let the old imagination get out of control. Earl would be fine, of course. After all, Earl had something to tell Shane; something he’d seen in the cottage all those decades ago, on one hot summer day in the year after Wilhelm had left. Maybe it hadn’t seemed important at the time. Maybe it had slipped his mind during his retelling. Or maybe he had left it out on purpose, for reasons of his own. Whatever it was, though, it was the key to Shane’s problems with the ghostly Marlena. That was why he’d drawn it.
Marlena had interrupted Shane’s conjured vision before he could follow Earl inside the cottage, before he could see what Earl had seen, but she couldn’t stop Earl from recalling that day now. She couldn’t stop Earl from telling Shane about it, not if he wanted to.
“Visiting hours are over at seven,” the woman at the desk announced, shoving a clipboard at Shane and Christiana to sign. “Unless you have permission from the resident to stay later. Just have him call down to the desk, ‘kay?”
Shane nodded, scribbling his name. Part of him was relieved that the woman hadn’t blinked when he’d announced who he was there to see. Christiana matched his stride as he walked down the right hand hallway, past the gaily decorated bulletin boards. There were fewer wheelchairs and walkers in the hallways tonight, but there were more propped-open doors, more televisions warbling in dimly lit living rooms.
Shane knew he should be feeling better now. Obviously everything was fine. And yet, his sense of growing apprehension continued to cinch higher and higher. It was like a piano wire wrapped around his gut, tightening, constricting his breath, pushing him toward raw panic. He sped up, unable to stop himself, and Christiana matched his stride, almost jogging next to him. She had questions, Shane knew, but for now she wasn’t asking them.
They rounded the corner, passed the cafeteria where a few stragglers still sat leaning over tables, staring at their plates. Dishes clanked and rattled in the kitchen beyond. Another corner, and Shane scanned the doorways on the left side. Earl’s was the fifth one down. It was propped open with a rolled-up magazine, just as it had been the last time Shane had been there. The blue flicker of the television could be seen through the darkness of the cracked door. They reached the door and Shane peered in through the crack.
“Earl?” he called softly. “You home? It’s me, Shane Bellamy.”
No answer. Beyond the crack of the door, the television flickered and flashed.
“You might want to stay out here for a minute,” Shane said, putting his hand on the doorknob. “He might not be, you know, decent.”
“Nuts to that,” Christiana said in a low voice. “You said he was almost a hundred years old, right? Guys like that aren’t shy around the ladies. If something’s wrong…”
Shane nodded and pressed his lips together. He pushed the door open slowly and stepped inside.
It was warmer in Earl’s apartment. The only light in the main living space was the flash of the television and a dim table lamp next to his orange recliner. There was a stain in the middle of the carpet. Shane remembered it, remembered the broken coffee cup on the day he had come to visit the old man. There was a smell in the apartment, both medicinal and darkly organic. The mingled scents turned Shane’s stomach.
“Where is he?” Christiana asked, her voice unconsciously hushed.
“Earl?” Shane called again.
There was a response this time. A shuffle and mutter. Shane whipped his head toward the sound and saw the mostly-closed bedroom door. Maybe Earl had simply gone to bed and forgotten to turn off the TV. Shane knew that that wasn’t the case, but he told himself he
couldn’t
know any such thing, reprimanding himself for being so paranoid. He inched toward the bedroom door, reaching out for the knob. It was very dark inside.
“Earl? I hate to wake you. I just want to make sure you’re all right, okay? It’s me, Shane. I brought a… a friend.”
Another noise came from within the bedroom, a sort of rhythmic, chuffing hiss. Was Earl laughing? Shane felt his hair standing up on his head. Christiana was right behind him. He touched the doorknob, began to push the door open. Flickering light from the television leaked into the room, showing a narrow bed, a bedside table, an old Westclox wind-up alarm clock. It ticked loudly. Shane felt around for a light switch but couldn’t find one in the darkness. He crept forward. The blankets on the bed were rumpled, covering a complicated shape. Earl was apparently in bed after all. Shane didn’t feel the slightest sense of relief.
