The Riverhouse (17 page)

Shane thought these things as he painted, barely aware of what he was doing, lost in the fathoms of the story. The portrait of Wilson hung in the middle of the canvas, complete right down to the old, yellowed note pinned to the top right corner and the ornate gilt frame that surrounded it. And then, slowly, more shapes began to evolve around it, sketched in with quick strokes, expanding outward; a room.

As the picture took shape, the story in Shane’s head changed. It stopped being about Gustav Wilhelm. After all, while this was still a painting of the Riverhouse, the perspective had switched; it had moved inside the grand home. The exterior of the house was Gustav Wilhelm’s domain, but the interior belonged to his wife, the woman that Earl Kirchenbauer had referred to simply as “the Missus”.

For the moment, the room in the painting was empty, but Shane instinctively knew that that would not continue to be the case. Everything thus far was merely background. This was going to be a portrait, a portrait of the woman of the house. He didn’t know what she’d looked like, and yet he had seen her, in a manner of speaking. Her ghost now haunted his cottage, at least occasionally, when the sun went down. Besides, Shane hadn’t known what the Riverhouse had originally looked like either, and he had painted that accurately enough, right down to the mysterious footpath entrance. He didn’t know how he’d gotten it right, but he didn’t doubt that he had.

When it came time to paint the woman of the house, he knew that he’d get her right, too. He didn’t know how, but for the moment, he decided that the less he thought about that, the better.

Shane didn’t paint on Friday morning, however. Instead, he put on his garden gloves and cargo shorts and worked on clearing more of the footpath. He made it to the top of the granite stairs, sweating and smarting from nettle stings on his legs, but happy with his progress.

It really was going to be a very nice walk; not a long one, exactly, but pleasant and thoughtful, winding and humping over the bluff, dipping toward the site of the old house. The granite stairs were fairly solid, carpeted with grass and moss, and Shane decided to leave them as they were, almost hidden, embraced here and there by old tree roots. He liked the mysterious secrecy of the stairway, liked how it curved around the bowl of a steep hollow, descending into the shadows of the wood. He followed them carefully, enjoying the cool of the shade and the still air.

The angel statue stood at the bottom, waiting, buried in flowering vines. As he neared it, he wondered if he should simply leave the rest of the path wild, mostly concealed in the tall grass beyond the angel statue. After all, if anyone discovered this end of the path, it would lead them to his cottage. Shane wasn’t a hermit, but he did value his privacy. The last thing he wanted was to encounter a bunch of granola types hiking curiously across his front yard.

He glanced up at the vine-encrusted statue as he moved under its shadow. The upraised arm looked like a benediction. The face peered out of the vines, its blank gray eyes looking vaguely out over Shane’s head, seeking the horizon beyond the trees.

“What do you say?” Shane asked the statue, pausing and putting his hands on his hips. “Should we leave you covered as well? We wouldn’t want anyone ripping you up and carting you off in the back of a pickup, would we? All in favor, raise your right hands.”

A puff of breeze moved through the valley and whispered the vines of the statue. Shane nodded.

“Motion passed,” he said, and walked on.

The grassy plain beyond the statue was turning pale yellow as autumn fell. Shane walked briskly, listening to the pleasant sound of the grass as his feet combed through it, flattening his hands to let the tips of the stalks tickle his palms.

He could see the stream that cut across the valley, and as he approached, he could hear the happy trickle of the water. He stopped at its edge and looked for the stepping stones. He couldn’t see them, even though the water was crystal clear, revealing the pebbly bed under its cold surface. He walked along the edge of the stream, heading away from the river, looking for the large, carefully placed stepping stones. After a minute, he stopped and squinted in the hazy sunlight, putting his hands on his hips again. The rocks were nowhere in sight.

He turned around, looking along the length of the creek in the opposite direction. Obviously the stepping stones were closer to the river than he’d thought. He squinted into the distance, looking. A set of old dock pilings poked out of the river near the mouth of the stream, rotted and warped, but there was still no sign of the stepping stones.

He considered walking the length of the stream, maybe examining the ancient dock, and then decided against it. Even if he did find the stepping stones, there was no real reason to continue on to the site of the manor house. In truth, the big empty lot was a little depressing, with its vestigial driveway and cellar packed with dirt. It was probably almost two o’clock, anyway. His shift was over. He turned and began to head back.

With some amusement, he realized that he had, in fact, put in the same hours working on the path as he normally did on his art. A shift was a shift, apparently, regardless of how he spent it. Besides, clearing the footpath wasn’t that much different than his normal shift-work, was it? Whether he was working on a blank canvas or carefully grooming the path, his task was essentially the same. Either way, it was a matter of revealing that which was buried. By Monday morning, he’d be back to his normal shift work, pushing out the product, as Greenfeld called it, but for now it was nice to mix it up a little. He was proud of the path, almost as if he had designed and created it himself.

As he walked back, he took his time. For some reason, he found himself whistling something from an old movie, something he had seen a snippet of on Turner Classics while channel surfing the previous night. By the time he got back to the cottage, he realized what song it was, and sang part of it out loud.

“See the sugar bowl do the Tootsie Roll,” he called cheerfully, wondering how in the world he’d remembered such inane lyrics. “With the big bad devil’s food cake. If you eat too much, oh-oh, you’ll awake with a tummy ache.”

He was still humming the old song even after he finished his lunch and prepared for a short bike ride.

Chapter Six

She is holding a piece of paper, staring down at it in her hands, and the expression on her face is pale and dead, as if all the life has drained out of it. Shane watches her, still and breathless, ghostlike. She cannot see him. For all intents and purposes, he isn’t really there.

After all,
he tells himself,
this is just a dream
.

Still, it is an amazingly, painstakingly detailed dream. He can smell the varnish of the hardwood floor mingled with the musty scent of an old tapestry on the wall to his right. He knows that the tapestry is one of the house’s most recent additions, and that it came by ship from Scotland, rolled between two huge sheets of muslin and wrapped in brown paper, tied with twine. He even knows that the twine from that shipment is still in the house, carefully balled up and stored in a bottom drawer in the kitchen. The woman that the workers like to call “the Missus” tends to save things like that, just in case they might prove useful at some later date.

Living out here, it is a good idea to save things. One never knows when the river, their nearest neighbor, will rear up and hem them in, blocking the roads, turning the house into an island. It’s a good idea to have things on hand, just in case. It’s a good idea to be prepared.

Sounds come from the kitchen, along with the smells of cooking dinner, and Shane knows that the woman and her husband are planning on eating fish stew for dinner, prepared by the young black cook. Her first name is Clara. Shane could probably produce her last name if he really tried, but he is too distracted. All of his attention is focused on the woman in front of him.

She stands there holding the piece of paper, staring at it silently, frozen in shock and disbelief. Shane tries to read the paper, but it is turned away from him, with only the top third folded down on itself, showing the first line, the heading:
Dear M,

It is a letter, and yet Shane is certain that it does not contain good ne ws. The contents of the letter have changed this woman’s life forever, knocked it neatly aside like a child kicking over a house of blocks. There will be no fish stew tonight, despite the smells wafting from the kitchen and the amiable clank of pot lids. Not now. Those days are over.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the woman’s eyes grow thick with tears. Shane watches as one of the tears trembles on her black lashes and spills over, tracing down her cheek. In her shock, pale and vulnerable, she is beautiful. She has forgotten to breath.

Suddenly, she inhales, almost gasps, and raises her eyes. She is looking right at him, seeing him, and Shane is afraid. He is afraid because
she
is afraid—terrified, in fact. She backs up a step, retreating from him, her eyes wide, magnified with tears, and yet she doesn’t lower the letter. It rattles in her hands as she shivers. Shane looks down at it and sees that her hands, like those of Steph in his previous dream, are covered in blood. The letter is stained with wet, red fingerprints.

And then the dream changes. The room vanishes into mist, leaving Shane cold and shuddering, looking around.

He is in the woods, on the path, and something is in the woods with him. It is not following him on the path. It is in the wood all around, watching and waiting, like the woman on the front steps in his painting. The thing is not human. It is not even truly alive, and yet it is hungry. It breathes in the whisper of the leaves, moves in the massive creak of the ancient trees, sighs in the gurgle of the brown river, unseen beyond the mist. All of these sounds together seem to say a word, over and over, repeating on itself like an echo, sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, like waves lapping at a rocky shore. Shane can almost hear the word. It is the same word the ghost said to him, on the single occasion that she has spoken.
Riverhouse… Riverhouse… Riverhouse…

And then, rising over the treetops, much larger than it could possibly be, Shane sees it, and it sees him. For the first time since childhood, Shane feels his bladder loosen of its own accord. He wants to run, but there is no point. His knees unhinge and he falls down, tumbling backwards onto the hard stones of the path, his eyes still nailed to that horrible, massive shape as it looms over him, pushing the trees aside like grass, groaning and creaking in a deafening chorus.

And Shane takes the only escape he knows of.

He awoke.

He was sitting up in bed, panting, his forehead beaded with sweat. His lungs physically hurt, as if he had just run a marathon. But it had just been a dream—a nightmare, really. Even now, it was breaking apart around him, tattering like a vampire in the sunlight. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were covered in blood. A strangled bark of horror erupted from his throat and he scrambled backwards, pushing up against the headboard of the bed, as if to escape the sight of his own red-stained fingers.

Caught red-handed,
a voice in his head sang gleefully. Was it Stevie Burkett, the kid who’d lived down the street from his parents’ apartment in New Jersey, the kid he’d shot hoops with on lazy summer afternoons? Stevie always did have a very strange, mean sense of humor.
Caught red-handed, Shane-brain! What’d you do now? Boy, are
you
gonna get it!

Shane squeezed his eyes shut, still panting from the nightmare, his heart pounding in his chest. A moment later, he reopened his eyes and focused on the bedroom window. Dim, pink light lay beyond; a cloudy pre-dawn, cool and pearly. Shane raised his hands again and looked at them.

They were still stained with red, but it wasn’t blood. Blood turned brown as it dried, but this was still bright and vivid, like clown make-up. He pressed the fingers of both hands together and pulled them apart again, feeling the tacky stickiness. It wasn’t blood, it was paint. Somehow, that realization didn’t make him feel much better.

He got out of bed and went out to the hall without turning on the light. The dawn glow permeated the cottage, making everything strangely flat and shadowless. He turned and climbed the stairs to the studio.

On the left of the stairway, just above the banister, three streaks of drying paint were smeared, as if left by a careless, dripping hand. They were red. Shane stopped at the top of the stairs. He didn’t need to go any further to verify his suspicion. He could see the painting from here, lit in the first rays of the morning light as it angled through the window over the stairs.

It was much further along than he had left it the night before. The woman in the painting was almost entirely finished. She stood exactly as he had seen her in his dream, dominating the foreground, partly obscuring the carefully painted portrait of Woodrow Wilson over the fireplace. Her face was pale and expressionless, staring down at the piece of paper that she held in both of her small hands. The top third of the letter was folded back, revealing the first line, the salutation:
Dear M
,

For a moment, Shane was sure that he had painted her hands splattered with blood, as he had seen her in the dream just before it had evaporated, but that was just a trick of the dawn light. Her hands were white, spotless. The red had come from the fireplace in the background. He had painted it as embers, a pile of glowing coals in the grate, spilling their bloody light across the floor behind the woman. The colors, like that of the portrait of the Riverhouse, were shockingly bright, almost garish, laid on so thick that each stroke created its own miniature topography of dried paint. The red paint tube was still open, sitting on the side table, nearly empty.

The strength drained out of Shane’s body and he leaned back against the wall next to the window. He remembered riding home on his bike the previous evening, just as dusk was setting, remembered walking the bike around to the shed on the east side of the cottage and then looking up, looking for the round window hidden in the branches of the magnolia tree. That glimmer of light had been there again, reflecting sunlight from the dying day. But that hadn’t made sense, because it was cloudy. The sky was a huge blot of gray from horizon to horizon, masking the sun. The glimmer of light in the window was a candle, lit just inside, sitting on the windowsill. Impossible, of course. Shane had decided to go in and check it out that very evening. He would let himself into the attic via the door in the back of the studio, look for the strange, hidden space, and figure out what was making that weird light.

But he hadn’t. Why hadn’t he? Once he’d gotten inside, he had just… forgotten. Was that all? Shane leaned against the wall, staring at the painting of the woman with the letter, and knew that wasn’t it. He hadn’t forgotten. He had been distracted. The muse had landed on him the moment he’d gotten inside. She wanted him to paint, and to paint at that very moment. The canvas was waiting on the easel; the background was finished. Now it was time to put in the main character, the woman. Shane hadn’t known what she was going to look like, or what she’d be doing, but the muse would take care of that, if he’d let her.

But he’d resisted. He was stubborn about it. She didn’t control him, damn it. He wanted to shower and eat. He was tired. The painting could wait. Maybe he’d paint Saturday morning instead of work on the footpath.

All that evening, the painting called to him, but he refused it. He was not the slave of the muse. He controlled the art, not the other way around. As he’d fallen asleep, he’d felt the muse loosen her grip on him, and he’d thought,
I’ve won. I’ve shown her. I’m still the boss
. But she
hadn’t
been letting him go. She’d just decided to take a different approach. She’d waited until he’d gone to sleep, and then she’d jumped on him all over again, animating him in his sleep, walking him like a zombie. She’d taken him to the well of creativity and used him to draw up bucket after bucket, bringing her vision to life. It was horrible to realize that the muse could be that powerful and persuasive. Is this how it always was for the starving artists? If so, Shane could begin to understand the hollow-eyed pathos that was so often apparent on their faces.

He shivered and looked down at his hands again, at the red paint packed under his fingernails and layered darkly in the folds of his skin. He had painted the fireplace with his fingers. He knew it instinctively, just like he knew that the Wilhelm’s cook had been named Clara. He had completely foregone the brush and smeared the paint on with his bare hands. He had done it in his sleep, while he’d dreamed, and then he had stumbled back to his bed, leaving a smear of paint over the banister as he’d gone, and probably staining the sheets with bloody red handprints.

Outside, the wind blew, moaning in the drainpipes and thrashing the trees along the bluff. The sound of it was horrible, almost like a voice, repeating the same word over and over, not quite clear enough to understand, but just clear enough to tease. The sound filled Shane with dread. He turned his back on the painting, tramping back downstairs and heading for the shower.

Late that morning, Shane found the cordless phone on the counter in the kitchen. He used it to call Greenfeld’s office. The line rang half a dozen times, and then clicked over to Greenfeld’s voice mail. Shane wasn’t surprised. The recording offered to let Shane leave a message, and Shane was prepared to do so, but then the voice also offered Greenfeld’s cell phone number, “for urgent matters”. Shane considered it, and then hooked a pad of paper toward him on the counter. He jotted the number down and broke the connection. Immediately, he dialed Greenfeld’s cell number. Most likely, Greenfeld and Christiana were already at the museum getting things ready for that night’s show. He didn’t want to risk the message being missed until Monday. By then, it would be too late. Greenfeld answered on the third ring, sounding impatient.

“Yeah?”

“Hey Morrie, Shane Bellamy.”

“I had a weird feeling I’d be hearing from you today. Tell me you aren’t calling to cancel on me, old buddy.”

“Nope. In fact, I think you’ll call this good news. I’ve decided to go ahead and offer the house painting for sale, if anyone wants it.”

“Well,” Greenfeld said, sounding genuinely surprised. “That
is
good news. He wants to sell his painting after all,” this, Shane could tell, was for someone else’s benefit. Christiana was probably with him. Shane imagined her looking at Greenfeld, her eyebrows raised. Greenfeld went on, “If you don’t mind me asking, what changed your formidable mind?”