I know things,
a voice said in his memory. The voice belonged to someone he used to know, someone named Christiana. Who was she? A playmate? Where was she now? Tears welled in his eyes, because he knew he loved her, but knew he would never see her again. Had she moved away? Had she gotten hurt somehow? Or lost?
I know things,
she’d said to him, and then she’d told him what she knew. Shane thought of her words. They seemed a little funny, but pointless. Christiana had told him a secret. It was about the woman who was singing even now, happily moving through the Riverhouse, looking for him, calling for him.
“I’m going to tickle you…” she called, teasing. “I’m going to tickle you and hug you…”
The spell broke and an overwhelming sense of pity came over Shane, and with it came a realization. Marlena had killed Christiana, but Marlena was also a victim. She was a prisoner and a slave of the Riverhouse itself. Shane looked around. The room still seemed unnaturally tall, but it no longer loomed over him as if he were a child. He walked, crossing the room and passing in front of the portrait of Woodrow Wilson. He passed through the entryway into the kitchen. It was dense with shadows, stacked with cupboards and glass-fronted cabinets, all painted the color of green apples. There was an alcove in the back of the kitchen, between the sink and the huge ice box. He moved toward it, knowing what he’d find hidden around the corner. After all, he had painted the Riverhouse. It existed in his mind. He knew where to go.
“Where are you, you silly boy,” Marlena called again. Her voice sounded a bit more distant. “I hope you aren’t hiding anyplace you know you aren’t allowed to be…” There was a hint of worry in her voice. It pained Shane to hear it.
Go to her,
the voice of the Riverhouse soothed.
Comfort her. She is worried. She is afraid. She has waited so very long…
Shane ignored the pull of Marlena’s echoing words. It was very hard. Instead, he turned the corner into the alcove and found what he’d expected. A flight of narrow stairs climbed up into darkness. They were very steep, uncarpeted; the servant’s stairs. He began to ascend them.
“I hear you,” Marlena called. “Don’t be a naughty boy, now. Come to your mama. Come to my arms. Let me tickle you. Let me hug you. I’ve missed you so much…” Her voice was even more distant now. Shane climbed slowly into the darkness at the top of the stairs. There was a small landing, and then two more stairs to the left. They led to a long hallway, layered with shadows. Doors lined both sides. Shane knew without touching them that they were locked, nailed shut, their keys thrown into the river. He knew that the rooms beyond those locked doors were painted black, from floor to ceiling, covering even their windows. He began to walk down the hall. It was cold. His breath puffed ahead of him. He began to shiver.
Go to your mother. She is heartbroken without you. Don’t be so cruel. She loves you. And you love her.
It was the voice of the Riverhouse, and it was louder. It came out of the darkness like chimes from a broken bell. Shane was getting closer to it, nearing what passed for its brain. After all, the house was only as strong as the hands that had built it. Shane was nearing its center, approaching its secret, pulsing core.
He walked on, his eyes straining at the darkness.
At the end of the hall, barely visible in the shadows, was a painting. It was life sized, rendered with painstaking realism. Shane had seen it before, but only dimly, represented in a child’s crayon drawing on cheap newsprint paper. The painting showed a family, a mother and father, and a young child between them. Their faces were perfectly blank, like white balloons.
Shane approached the image, not knowing what to expect. The Riverhouse ended beyond that image. There was no place left to go. Marlena’s voice echoed to him still, but very distantly. He couldn’t make out her words, but he could sense her tone. She was worried, bordering on outright alarm. Her boy had gone where he wasn’t supposed to go, where
no one
was allowed to go. He had gone to the place of danger, to the cold dead heart of the Riverhouse itself. She herself didn’t even go there, but she would go there now if she had to. She would go there to save him. She was coming even now, her panic driving her faster and faster, despite her own fears. Shane sensed her approach.
He got to the end of the hallway. Even close to, the painting was utterly perfect. He couldn’t see as much as a single brush stroke in the meticulously painted figures.
They began to move. They parted, the woman moving to the left, the man to the right. The boy stayed by his mother, held her pale hand. As they moved aside, Shane saw the room beyond. It was Gustav Wilhelm’s studio. He stepped forward, entering the portal of the painting, and as he passed through it, the coldness of the hallway fell behind him. The wooden floor of the studio met his feet and he looked back. The painting stood on a tall canvas now, leaning against the wall next to the stairs. It looked exactly as it had at the end of the hall of the Riverhouse, but inverted. The figures had moved back together again, blocking the way back. Shane turned around slowly.
Gustav Wilhelm stood at the work table, leaning against it, his arms folded over his narrow chest.
“Welcome, son,” he said. The tone of his voice didn’t seem particularly welcoming, however. He seemed to be angry, in fact, but Shane sensed that this was the kind of man who was very practiced at holding his anger in, honing it, sharpening it to a point. “You’re a stubborn young man, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, should I? Like father… like son.”
“I’m not your son,” Shane said weakly. The force of the man’s black gaze was like a weight, pushing him down into the floor.
“You are very naughty not to go to your mother,” Wilhelm said, his eyes locked on Shane. “But it does not matter. She comes here to meet you. Perhaps it is best this way. Perhaps it is best that it end this time with all three of us together. It will allow me to see the look in her eyes when it happens. It will be so much more… satisfying.”
Shane recognized the man’s voice. He’d been hearing it in the back of his head ever since he’d entered the Riverhouse. “You,” he said.
“You must think me mad,” Wilhelm said, turning now and waving a hand dismissively. He walked toward a back corner of the studio. “Being murdered by your wife will do that to you. Being forced to occupy the scene of your death, to watch your body rot and molder before your eyes, caged for decades in your own crypt, it does have its effects. You couldn’t possibly comprehend it. Under the circumstances, I think I’ve held up remarkably well. In many respects, in fact, I think I’ve gotten rather better.” As he spoke, he moved some of his leaning canvases, looking for something. He nodded to himself, and lifted a particularly large painting from the stack. He turned it around and placed it in the front, showing it to Shane.
“See? Much more evocative than my previous works. Don’t you think?”
The painting was meticulously detailed. It showed a complicated mangle of metal glinting in the sunlight. Shane recognized it immediately. It was Stephanie’s Honda, lying upside-down next to a stretch of highway. A starburst of broken glass had turned the windshield milky white, but Shane could see the shape of her head behind it. Blood had stained some of the glass pink. It glimmered in the sunlight.
“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Wilhelm said, admiring his work. “There are more. Some of them feature Mr. Stambaugh. Useful man, once I’d gotten my will into him, pried his mind open a bit. Amazing how that sort of crack can be passed on through generations. I liked Mr. Stambaugh a lot more than I do his grandson, but a tool is a tool. Both of them at least know how to get a job done, wouldn’t you agree?”
Shane shook his head, unable to take his eyes away from the horrible painting. He’d thought it had been Marlena who’d marked Stephanie, orchestrated her death, but he’d been wrong. He should have known. He remembered the dream he’d had, months earlier, after he had first found Marlena’s ghost haunting the cottage. The dream had ended with Shane lost on the footpath, caught in the shadow of something huge and horrible, something that towered over the trees, watching him, studying him like a butterfly pinned to a corkboard. It had been the Riverhouse, grown massive and bloated. But even that had only been a disguise. It had been Wilhelm all along. He had been behind it all, moving beneath the surface like a disease, manipulating and coaxing, weaving his own master plan of revenge.
“I knew she would take a fancy to you,” Wilhelm said, as if reading Shane’s thoughts. “I knew she would see the similarities in you, the ways you were so like our son. And I knew you would not reject her. You both needed each other, albeit in different ways. I hardly had to do anything. I knew she would inspire you to paint. And I knew you would want to please her. All I had to do was influence and suggest, hint and whisper. It was very simple: take away your wife, give you the silver rattle. Always secretly. Never seen. It was remarkably easy to keep my secrets. Marlena built the wall, closing me off, so she would never again have to look at what she’d done. And it worked. She never saw me here, never sensed me, because she never dared to
look
.” He sighed contentedly to himself, shaking his head slowly. “But now she comes, of course. Your ‘mother’. She will know the truth, yes, but it will be too late. She always feared I’d return, you see, even when she’d been alive. She lived in terror of it. If only she’d understood the truth. I wasn’t going to return. How could I, when I’d never even left?”
“You hate her,” Shane said, merely giving voice to his own realization.
“Of course,” Wilhelm said, laughing a little. “Wouldn’t you? She took everything from me. And now I will return the favor.”
Shane stood rooted to the spot by the studio stairs, unable to move, almost unable to breath.
I will return the favor.
Marlena wouldn’t kill the man she believed to be her son, but Wilhelm would. It had been his plan from the beginning.
“You understand now, don’t you?” Wilhelm said. He stepped toward the round window and sat on the end of the bed. It squeaked slightly, and Shane was chilled by the sight of the skeletal figure cocooned in the sheets. Wilhelm’s ghost rested its hand on the shoe of its corpse’s skeletal foot. “She denied me everything. My lover, my son, and my life. You can relate, I think. At least in part.” He smiled crookedly at Shane.
Shane said, “But she lost all those things, too.”
“Once, yes. But that’s simply not enough. I’ll take those things from her again, tonight. And again and again, if I have my way. Another flood, another replay of her crime, and her just punishment. I’ll do it for the rest of eternity. I admit, it is the only thing that gives me pleasure. Besides, what else have I to do?”
“I’m not going to die here,” Shane said, but his voice was weak, pathetic.
Wilhelm laughed. “I love your spirit, boy. I’d expect nothing less from you. You do your ‘father’ proud.”
Shane heard the thunder, felt the rumble beneath his feet. He could hear the rush of the river below the bluff. It sounded unusually close.
Wilhelm brightened suddenly. “She comes,” he said, glancing toward the stairs.
Shane heard the slam of the door below. A moment later, footsteps sounded on the stairs leading up to the studio. A figure came into view, and Shane turned to look. It was Marlena, of course. There was nothing ghostly about her. For the first time Shane saw her actual eyes, rather than mere empty black holes. They were brown, just like in his painting. She looked around the studio, and saw her husband. Her face went instantly pale, but she didn’t seem surprised, exactly. Shane saw that she had always secretly suspected this. She tore her gaze away from Wilhelm, saw Shane, and her face lit with a smile of pure relief. She moved to him, throwing her arms out.
She embraced him. Shane stood there, feeling the warmth of her body, the perfect humanness of her touch. Slowly, helplessly, he put his arms around her. She was shorter than him, nearly the same height that Christiana had been.
“My boy,” she whispered harshly. “My naughty boy. Why did you come here? But it doesn’t matter now. I have you. I’ve found you.”
Shane drew a breath, trying to remember what this woman had done to Christiana. It was extremely difficult. “I’m not Hector,” he said, gritting his teeth. “I’m not your son.”
“Shh,” Marlena shushed. Shane felt her breath on his chest, felt her tears soaking through his shirt. And he realized something awful. She already knew the truth of his words. She knew it, and was simply denying it. Shane looked over her head, meeting Wilhelm’s eyes.
“Of course,” Wilhelm said, shrugging languidly. “Of course she knows. But what else does she have? Give her what she wants while you still can. Don’t be cruel.”
There was another rumble as thunder rolled across the sky outside. The rumble shivered the floor, shook dust from the ceiling. The painting of Steph’s mangled Honda keeled forward and fell to the floor with a dull clunk. Wilhelm didn’t look down at it.
“What’s happening?” Shane asked.
“Shh,” Marlena said again, still embracing him. “Hush, son. It’s all right now. Hush little baby, don’t you cry…” She began to sing.
“What have you done?” Shane demanded roughly, looking at Wilhelm.
“I’ve done nothing,” the man said, still sitting on the end of the bed that bore his own corpse. “Just as I have already said, I’ve merely watched and waited, suggested and hinted. Nothing lasts forever. Credit me for simply having impeccable timing.”
The rumble beneath Shane’s feet hadn’t stopped. It vibrated in his heels, carried up into his guts. The world seemed to be suddenly full of hidden, subtle motion. He turned his head and looked out the window over the stairs. The trees that bordered the river were inexplicably missing. Shane could see nothing but falling rain and darkness. Slowly, horribly, he began to understand.
Marlena had already lost her son once to the river. Wilhelm meant to see it happen again.
The window cracked suddenly. It shattered as the frame bent out of plumb. Shards of glass fell inside, breaking on the stairs. Wind and rain blew in, billowing the curtains. Shane felt the mist on his face, heard the roar of the advancing river. The rumble beneath his feet grew, became more pronounced. The floor suddenly seemed to be tilted very slightly. It leaned toward the broken window. Paintbrushes rolled off Wilhelm’s work desk and clattered to the floor.
