The Riverhouse

Sometimes, when Marlena painted, she could hear the Riverhouse breathing.

She hated the sound of it. It reminded her of dead leaves blowing through a winter culvert, rasping with borrowed life. Often, she drowned out the sound by leaving the television on in the parlor, blaring and echoing throughout the empty rooms with its own borrowed life. She couldn’t leave it on all the time, however. That would be crazy, and one thing Marlena Wilhelm certainly was
not
was crazy. She wasn’t even slightly senile, even though there was a history of it in her family. Despite her advancing age, and despite what all the white trash hicks in nearby Bastion Falls thought, Marlena’s mind was still as solid as cedar. This was what she told herself as she painted, sitting in the attic room near the round, leaded glass window. She was
not
crazy, despite the things that she heard and saw in the Riverhouse when no one else was around.

Which was most of the time, now.

A dull thump came from the floors below her.

“Mr. Stambaugh?” Marlena called out, her voice tremulous with age but just as commanding as it had always been, back in the years when the house had bustled with cooks and maids, workmen and groundskeepers. Now there was just Mr. Stambaugh, and he only came a few times a week. She knew he wasn’t there now, but sometimes she thought she heard him anyway, clumping distantly on the kitchen stairs or rattling doorknobs in the locked back hallway. She paused in front of the canvas, her paintbrush raised in her right hand. Mr. Stambaugh didn’t answer, and Marlena wasn’t surprised. It had just been the Riverhouse. Or maybe it had been…

She stopped herself, shook herself. Not today. She wouldn’t think about that.

“He’s gone,” she said to the canvas, not referring to Mr. Stambaugh.

The painting was finished, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to put down her paintbrush. She’d been painting all of her life, and yet this painting felt different. It showed her and her son and husband, Hector and Gus. Gus’s face was stern, immaculately shaven, as she always remembered him. Hector was smiling, pink-cheeked, balanced happily on his mother’s lap. She’d almost been able to feel him there on her lap as she’d painted him, as if the painting had reconnected her to that time when he’d still been small and sweet, bubbling with that sort of tidal love that only toddlers know for their mothers. She didn’t want the painting to be finished, not just because it had awakened the memory of that time in her heart, but because she knew, somehow, that this would be the last thing she would ever paint. Her vision blurred as she looked at it, and she sniffed wetly. Trembling, she set the paintbrush in the gutter at the bottom of the old easel and rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. There was nothing magical about the painting. It wouldn’t bring them back.

Hector would be a grown man by now. She thought she saw him sometimes, walking on the street in downtown Bastion Falls, or even hiking along the Valley Road, a man with dark blond hair and his father’s long gait. It was never really him, of course. She was suffering from the delusions of hope, that was all. She hoped for it so much that her mind couldn’t help bringing those hopes fleetingly to life sometimes.

That wasn’t
crazy
, though. It was only crazy if she forgot that the visions weren’t real.

She got up and stretched her old back. It crackled faintly, sending sparks of numbness down to her toes and the tips of her fingers. All around her, the Riverhouse sighed, and in the floors below, something clanked and thumped. Marlena listened. The sound didn’t repeat itself, but she knew she’d heard it.

“Gus?” she called, but not very loudly. There was no answer. A gust of wind shook the round window in its frame, and Marlena spun to look at it, her eyes widening. Outside, the sky was low and steely, moving with sluggish deliberation, as if it had a long way to go today, and wasn’t looking forward to the journey.

Another thump, very faint and distant, emanated from far below. Marlena’s breath caught in her throat. That sound hadn’t come from the first floor; it had come from the basement. Her knees shook beneath her, and for a moment she didn’t think she’d be able to hold herself up. Then, she remembered to breathe, and as the air filled her lungs, the strength returned to her body. She strode across the attic room, entered the dark hallway, and listened again.

The sound came once more, clearer than before: a shuffling and a tiny exclamation, a sort of whimper. That didn’t make any sense, though, did it? The river behind the house was a little high in its banks, but it was nowhere near flood stage. Why would it happen now?

Even as she thought these things, she fled toward the stairs, lurching to grab the banister and steady herself as she descended first through one level, and then the next.

“It’s a trick,” she told herself, her breath coming in quick gasps. “It’s just the Riverhouse playing a trick on me. Like every other time.” She raised her voice and gritted her teeth. “It’s a trick, damn you, and I won’t fall for it!”

And yet, she couldn’t keep herself from traversing the stairs, even as they turned and looped back up again, forming the new section that the workmen had added several years ago at her behest, the section that the locals referred to as the Insanity Stairs. This didn’t bother Marlena. What did they know? They didn’t live in the Riverhouse. They didn’t know its secrets.
She
wasn’t the one that was insane. It was the house itself that had gone crazy all around her, and all because of Gus. It was his fault. After all, it had been his choice to leave her and run off with the damned nursemaid, taking Hector with them. The Riverhouse had been his creation, and a part of him had stayed with it, driven mad and spiteful with isolation.

“God damn you, Gus!” she cried out, her heart pounding as she reached the base of the steps, stopping in front of the curtain that closed off the rest of the cellar. Her voice was thin, cracking with exertion. “Damn you! I hate you!”

She pulled the golden cord next to the curtains and they swept open, revealing the cellar beyond the thick glass window. Darkness filled the space, but not so much that she couldn’t see the pit in the cellar floor, covered with its iron grate. Marlena threw herself forward, cupping her hands to the side of her head to cut off the glare.

There was movement in the darkness of the pit. Shadows shifted, and then something white moved between the rungs of the grate, reaching and clutching slowly. Marlena gasped so hard that her chest hurt. She swayed slightly on her feet. It was finally happening, just as she’d always known it would.

“Don’t go!” she screamed through the glass. “I’m coming! Don’t go!”

She scrambled at the gold chain that hung around her neck, seeking the key that hung there, but even as her fingers closed on it, she heard another sound, one that came from all around. It was a low laugh, delighted and amused. Marlena startled at the sound, and then pressed her face to the glass again.

The grate was empty. There was nothing moving in the shadows of the pit beneath it.

“I’m not crazy,” she whispered to herself, pleading with herself. She slumped against the glass as the strength leaked from her arms and legs. “I’m not… I saw this time… with my own eyes…”

The laughter was quieter now, satisfied. Every other time, Marlena had cried out in rage at the meanness of the Riverhouse. Now, she was simply too weak and emotionally exhausted. She had been prepared to do what would be necessary, even though it would be extremely difficult. Marlena had never been afraid of hard work. Hard work was, in fact, what she thrived on.

It was the waiting that was killing her.

She slumped to the floor and sat there, weeping helplessly, her legs tangled and her arms hanging listlessly at her sides. “I can’t do it anymore!” she said suddenly, almost accusingly. “I can’t live everyday with the weight of this hope hanging over me! Every day I pick it up, even though it’s so very
heavy
! And every day
you
dash it from my hands again! And
laugh
!”

The Riverhouse was silent now, listening, drinking her anguish like wine.

“I hate you,” Marlena said, quieter now. “I helped make you. I gave you life. But now I hate you.”

The Riverhouse was still.

After some time, Marlena climbed to her feet again, clutching the banister for support. Slowly, she began to climb the stairs. It took her several minutes to reach the attic room again, not because she was old, but because she was used up. The Riverhouse had sapped her, taken everything from her except her life. The bitterness of her loss filled her like lead, forming a very nearly physical ache in her chest.

“I always thought you’d come back,” she said, no longer speaking to the walls around her. “I was prepared. I loved you, Gus. Despite what you did and what you took from me. Why couldn’t you come back, and bring everything back with you? How could you be so cruel?”

The sky had grown darker beyond the round window. A storm was coming in over the trees, carried on a stiff wind. The storm would bring rain, and the rain would probably swell the river, drive it to flood stage. Marlena didn’t care anymore. The hope had been dashed from her hands, and this time she wasn’t going to pick it up again.

“The definition of insanity,” she whispered to herself, “is doing the same thing over and over… and expecting different results.”

She’d been doing the same thing for decades now. Now, it was time to do something different.

She approached the painting on its easel. It was heartbreakingly beautiful, much like the one she had painted on the wall in the back hallway, the one with all the locked doors, except that this time she’d added the faces. It was complete. She smiled at it wistfully, and then picked it up in her hands. It was a small painting, but it seemed to have a sort of otherworldly weight as she held it.

Marlena carried the painting to the round window, leaned it against the wall, and then unlatched the window lock. The hinge squeaked as the window blew open in front of her, letting in the constant shush of the trees and the driving wind. It felt cool on Marlena’s face and she breathed it in deeply. After a moment, she picked up the painting again and climbed through the window, out onto the ledge that overlooked the circle drive far below.

“I always thought you’d come back,” she said to the painting, raising her voice against the stormy wind. “I was prepared. Maybe you knew that. Maybe that’s why you stayed away.”

She clutched the canvas to her chest then, heedless of the still-wet paint that smeared onto her blouse, distorting the image. It didn’t matter now.

Before she stepped off the ledge, however, she looked out over the river valley.

A long time ago, back before Hector had been born, when Gustav Wilhelm had first brought her here with the idea of creating an idyllic home for them, Marlena had fallen in love with the valley. It was a boundary land, a line drawn between earth and water, making a sort of natural magic. That magic had captured Marlena and enthralled her. She’d thought to herself,
I could never leave this place. I could raise my children here, live here every day of my life, and die happy.

But then, things had changed. Life had turned ugly all around her, and the Riverhouse had absorbed it, turned what she’d loved into a dagger, stabbing her with it every day.

Standing there now, on the ledge high over the brick driveway, Marlena looked again at the river valley, and loved it. It was a balm to her broken, pierced heart, and she realized something extraordinary, something that made her pause, frozen halfway between the window behind her and the yawning emptiness in front of her:
somewhere out there,
she mused tentatively,
there is still life to be had
.