The Riverhouse (51 page)
Authors: G. Norman Lippert
“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.
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 the 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.
Shane thought he could understand that feeling.
He climbed slowly to his feet, too weak to raise his voice, to attempt to stop Earl. What good would it do anyway? It was too late. Christiana was gone. He stood swaying on his feet in the rain, Christiana’s blood staining his shirt. Slowly, he turned toward the dark house. Marlena’s garden shears lay open on the portico, slick with blood. Shane remembered painting those garden shears, placing them in the shadow of the porch next to Marlena’s hand. In the painting, she had just finished pruning the rose garden and was resting, her face turned up, one arm raised to shield her eyes from the sun. He had given her those shears, placed them into her hands.
But it was she that had killed with them.
For the first time, Shane felt a spark of anger welling deep inside him. It was small, but persistent. As he looked down at the bloody shears, the anger swelled. His face was still stained with tears, his eyes red and swollen, but the anger emboldened him. The murderer of his love was inside that house, waiting for him. Marlena might end up killing him, too, but somehow Shane didn’t think so. She loved him. For the first time, he was glad of that. After all, love is a two-edged sword. Shane knew that now as well as anyone. Maybe, just maybe, he could use that sword himself.
He walked slowly up the portico steps, stepping over the bloody garden shears. He reached for the door but before he could touch it the handle turned by itself. The door swung open silently, revealing a mass of dark shadows, deep and still, waiting for him.
Shane didn’t pause. He entered the house, feeling the silent warmth of its rooms engulf him, welcome him, draw him in. Behind him, the door closed. He didn’t look back.
The house seemed larger inside than it had appeared from the yard. The rooms felt twenty feet high, dim and silent, thick with shadows. He moved through the hall and crossed into the main parlor. The fireplace was there, but it was dark and cold, filled with gray ash. The curtains were pulled back from the high windows, letting in the glow of the stormy evening. Shadows rippled in that light, cast by the sheeting rainwater, and the shadows gave subtle motion to the entire room. The portrait of Woodrow Wilson stood on the mantel, towering over Shane. The old rejection note was still pinned to the top right corner, now yellowed and brittle with age.
“I’m here,” Shane said to the room. “You got what you wanted. Here I am.” He hadn’t raised his voice, but the silence of the rooms magnified it. He sensed his words echoing throughout the Riverhouse. “I’m here, but not because I want to be. I’m only here because you took away everything that mattered to me. I’d rather be dead. I don’t love you. I hate you. I hate everything about you.”
The Riverhouse seemed not to care. His words echoed through the rooms and came back to him, sounding small and weak, meaningless. And then, attached to his words, trailing behind them, another voice spoke.
“Five, ten, fifteen, twenty,” the voice sang. It was a smiling, female voice. It was the voice of his mother. “Twenty-five, thirty… thirty-five, forty…”
It wasn’t his mother. It was Marlena. Her voice came from all around, disjointed, echoes of echoes.
“I don’t love you,” he said again, but he didn’t sound like he meant it. He sounded like a petulant little boy who’d been denied a treat. He tried to remember the bloody gardening shears, the pitiful, diminished shape of Christiana’s body, but the memory was slippery. It was hard to concentrate on. And Marlena sounded so pleasant, so warm and comforting. The echo of her voice continued.
“Forty-five, fifty… ready or not, here I come… I hope you didn’t hide too well, sweet boy. I’m going to find you, and when I do, I’m going to tickle you! I’m going to tickle you and hug you and never let you go…” She was happy. Shane had never seen or heard Marlena happy. He realized, with some dismay, that it was a wonderful sound. An entrancing sound. He would do almost anything to keep that smile in her voice. Not because he was afraid of her, but because… because he loved her. He always had. Almost from the moment he had first seen her, pathetic and lost in the shadows of the cottage. He had pitied her, and he had wanted to make her happy. He still did, despite everything. Of course he did. She was his mother.
“But you took away what I loved,” he moaned, trying to cling to the vision of Christiana’s lifeless body. “You ruined everything. I loved her, and you killed her.”
“I know it doesn’t seem fair,” Marlena’s voice came, echoing distantly through the rooms, sourceless and directionless, full of sympathy. “I’m sorry it hurt you, my dear son. What hurts you, hurts me. But it was necessary. Someday you’ll understand. Someday when you get a little older. Sometimes, grown-ups have to do things that they don’t want to do.”
Shane nodded. He wanted to believe her. And yet, deep down, he couldn’t. Something was wrong. Something about the echoing words was like sweet poison. Marlena wasn’t his mother.
But perhaps she could be,
a voice whispered from the back of his mind. Shane recognized it. It was the voice of the entity he had first met in his studio, the one that had held the Sleepwalker painting in its invisible grip and squeezed all the air out of the room with its suffocating weight. It was the voice of the Riverhouse itself.
Perhaps she could be your mother. After all, what do you have left? Is this not pleasant? Is it not comforting? What more does a heartbroken boy want than the unconditional embrace of a mother’s arms?
Shane nodded again. It was true.
“I’m going to
fiiind
you,” Marlena sang. Her voice was delightful, like silver bells, like birdsong on a spring morning. “And then it will be my turn to hide, and you can find me. We can play together forever, you and I. Oh, I’ve been looking for you for so long, sweet boy. It’s so nice to have you home again. So nice to be back together again, here in the Riverhouse.”
It
was
nice to be home, Shane thought dreamily. He stopped and shook himself in the darkness, trying to break the hold of her words, of her smiling, comforting voice. This
wasn’t
his home. It wasn’t a home at all. It was a tomb, full of restless ghosts. It was the grave of his would-be fiancée. He heard Christiana in his memory.
Something is very wrong
, she had said. He clung to those words, repeating them in his thoughts like a wake-up call. No matter how it feels here, he reminded himself, no matter how it feels in these haunting, silent rooms, it isn’t right. It is horribly, poisonously wrong.
Go to her,
the whispering voice of the Riverhouse prodded.
Forget what you think you know. What does it matter, now? Go to her. Let her find you. You can’t be so cruel as to deny her, can you?
Shane blinked in the darkness. He looked around, at the looming furniture, the gaping, dark fireplace, the unnaturally tall windows with their streaming, watery glass. It all seemed so huge because he was so small. He was just a boy, barely a toddler. This was a grown-up’s world, a world that didn’t make a lot of sense to him. His mother would help. As long as he had her, none of it would seem strange or scary. He would go to her. He would climb into her arms, and everything would be all right. He began to move, to walk, to seek her singing, happy voice.