The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  Shane wasn’t particularly squeamish; he recognized immediately that the face didn’t belong to anything living. It was a statue, almost entirely overcome with flowering vines and dead leaves. Even so, his heart skipped a beat and he gasped a breath when he saw that blank expression, those dead gray eyes suddenly staring down at him from the shushing mass.

  He reached up and carefully hooked his fingers into the vines, pulling them away. They came only reluctantly, having twined into the cracks of the stone, but as they ripped away, Shane began to recognize the shape buried beneath. It was an angel carved out of white marble, almost life sized, standing atop a pedestal. The wings were partially unfurled from its back, and one hand was raised, palm up, in a vaguely welcoming gesture. An abandoned bird’s nest was nestled into the vines that entwined the hand.

  Shane stood back again, taking in the entire figure. It was somehow both marvelous and a little eerie; beautifully made, but completely forgotten here in the thickness of the deep woods. He realized he was looking at something that had probably not been seen by human eyes for… how long? Decades, maybe?

  He looked back the way he had come, up the curve of the hill with its embedded stone steps. It occurred to him that he could clean up the trail, perhaps clear off the bench and the statue, make the footpath usable again. It would be a lot of work, but what else did he have to do with himself when he wasn’t putting in his shift?

  Depending on where the path ended up, walking it could be a pleasant enough alternative to going on a bike ride. He drew a deep breath, considering it, and tramped on, leaving the statue behind.

  The trees opened and Shane crossed a clearing so covered in dense weeds that he could no longer feel the flagstones beneath his feet. A narrow stream ran through the clearing like a snake, cutting a path toward the river. Large, flat rocks formed perfect stepping stones across the stream. Were they a little too regular to be random? Shane thought they were. Whoever had built this trail had placed them there. Shane might have expected a bridge instead, but on second thought he decided that a bridge probably wouldn’t have fit the original designer’s intention. He had a strange sense that the footpath hadn’t been built as an attempt to subdue and conquer nature, but rather to work with it, following its curves and moods. A bridge would have seemed a bit too bold, somehow. Too… what was the word? Condescending? Maybe.

  On the other hand, the stepping stones were like a compromise, a sort of truce between the path’s designer and the woods it passed through. It was the sort of choice that seemed to say it’s still up to you, nature; if you don’t want us passing through, just raise the water, cover the stones, and we’ll stay out. We may rule the cities, but out here, you’re still in charge. Out here, you make the rules.

  For now, the water was low, the stepping stones dry, so Shane pushed on, finding the path again on the other side of the clearing. It switched back and forth descending another hill, leading toward another bright clearing that was just visible through the thick belt of trees. This one was much larger and brighter, and Shane was not particularly surprised when he pushed through the weeds and found himself stumbling into the mundane lot of the now-defunct manor house.

  He looked around, blinking in the sun, and saw that he’d come out of the tree line at approximately the same place where the crane had been parked on the day the house had been demolished. Now, both the crane and the bulldozer were gone. The house’s cellar had been cleared out, the debris hauled away and disposed of. In its place, the cellar had been filled with dirt, leaving only a vague outline and a few broken lines of stone, rising out of the landscape like relics from some ancient civilization.

  Shane walked idly over to the site of the old house, looking over his shoulder at the woods from which he’d come.

  It made sense that this was where the footpath had led. After all, both the house and the cottage had once been part of the same property. It was only logical that there would have been some common means of getting back and forth between them. The original owner, Shane recalled, had been an artist, like him. That explained the statue and the bench with its drift of hydrangeas. It explained the stepping stones as well, as opposed to a bridge.

  Obviously, the original occupant had been a different kind of artist than Shane, but that was all right. What had his name been? The real estate agent had told him and Steph all about it when they’d signed on the cottage. Whitaker? Whitman? Something like that. Maybe Shane would look him up. He’d apparently been rather well known at the time, having made a name for himself painting portraits of politicians and world leaders. Wikipedia would probably have an article about him, at the very least, even if it wasn’t perfectly accurate.

  Shane was interested to see that the house’s portico floor had been left intact, the only recognizable remnant of the original structure. It had been swept of debris but he could still make out the round marks of the original pillars, two on each side, big as truck tires. The stone floor now overlooked nothing but the grassy lot and the scar of dirt that had once been the house’s cellar. The portico looked less like itself and more like a sort of stage, with two shallow steps rising along the front length.

  Shane climbed the steps and turned on the spot, looking out over the yard and the brick driveway where it curved off into the trees. Lengths of cut stone framed the driveway, and Shane remembered the stone steps along the path, remembered thinking the dark stone had looked familiar. He now knew that this was where he had seen it before, that same cut stone forming the perimeter of the brick driveway. The original owner had apparently liked his stonework. It couldn’t have been cheap, even then, especially since it had to have been quarried elsewhere and trucked in, or maybe even brought in on barges. After all, the ground around the river delta was almost exclusively red clay and limestone, not bedrock granite, like that used on the driveway and the footpath. There was probably some story associated with that, but Shane could only guess what it was.

  He glanced down, toward the small island of earth in the middle of the circle driveway. Amazingly, his sketch was still there, despite a criss-crossing of tire tracks. It looked a little different, but that was only because he was looking at it upside down. A gust of wind blew, skirling tendrils of dust across the sketch and hissing in the tall grass. Far off, almost inaudible under the groan of the breeze in the trees, thunder grumbled.

  Shane decided to head back.

  By the time he got back to the cottage the sky was turning decidedly dark and foreboding. Clouds were pushing in swiftly over the river, turning it leaden and threatening an early evening thunderstorm. The air felt thick and metallic, dense with humidity. Wind gusted like the tail of a pensive cat.

  The cottage didn’t have central air conditioning, and Shane had turned off the big window unit in the bedroom before heading outside. Now, as he walked through the stuffy rooms, he pushed up the windows, letting the hot breeze blow in and billow the curtains. It was only five o’clock, but the lowering sky filled the cottage with drab shadows, and Shane found himself switching on lamps as he went.

  Passing the entry to the library, he saw that the answering machine light was blinking slowly. Apparently Greenfeld had indeed called while he’d been out. Shane had known he would. Still, he didn’t cross the small room and push the “Play” button on the machine. He decided he’d do it later, after he changed out of his sweaty clothes and took a quick shower.

  He didn’t go straight to the bedroom, however. Instead, he clumped upstairs to the studio. It was especially hot and dark in the small room. He flicked the light switch by the stairs, but the overhead bulb didn’t come on. He glanced up at it, frowning a little, and then decided he didn’t really need it. He crossed the room and crouched down in front of the matte painting, where it leaned in the corner under the canted attic roof.

  Carefully, he dabbed the pad of his finger on the upper corner. The paint was tacky, but not wet. If he put a fan in front of it and let it run all night, the surface would probably be dry enough f
or shipment. The humidity certainly wasn’t helping anything, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.

  He stood up and turned to head back downstairs. As he went, however, he glanced aside at the new painting.

  It sat on the big easel now, under the Escher quote, and in the dull storm light it seemed to glow faintly, full of unusually bright colors and blocky shapes.

  Shane paused. He moved a step closer to the painting, studying it. He didn’t consider himself a painter with any particular style; he could mimic almost any artistic genre, from realistic to cubist, depending on the requirement of the contract. He’d expected to paint the manor house in a more photorealistic style, since that was his default technique, but as he’d begun it, he’d found himself using much more liberal brush strokes and generalized shapes, blocking out the essential bones of the house in big colorful patches. Instead of carefully blending the shadows, he’d layered them in with purples and blues, creating a sort of conceptual mosaic that most closely resembled expressionism.

  And yet, it wasn’t abstract. It was representational and realistic, even hyper-realistic, like a crayon drawing overlaying a black and white photo. Shane had never painted anything like it before, and he had no idea where this had come from. All he knew was that it was incredible, almost hypnotic.

  He’d painted it from a slightly different angle than that represented in his original sketch, the one that was still slightly visible in the dirt in front of the old portico. That had shown the house from the front, dead on. In the painting, however, the house was turned slightly, showing the left side in perspective as it receded toward the river. A chimney climbed that side of the house, stately and towering, casting its deep purple shadow onto the white siding.

  In front of the house, sitting on the stone steps of the portico, Shane had begun the shape of a figure. It was merely a white blob at this point, but eventually it would be a woman in a pale dress, leaning back on one hand, the other raised to her brow, shading her eyes from the sun. He didn’t know who the woman was, he just knew that the painting wanted some human focal point, even if it was small and immaterial. A house by itself was just architecture. The woman on the steps would make it a home; she would give the house its story.

  Shane felt the tug of the painting. The muse trailed her finger up his back; she wanted him to paint some more, wanted him to continue telling the story of the house.

  Shane almost gave in, even reached for one of his brushes, but then he stopped. He was hungry, for one thing. And he was sticky with sweat from his work in the yard and his trek along the mysterious footpath. Surely, the muse could wait for an hour or so while he showered and ate.

  He was just about to turn and leave when something in the painting caught his eye. He frowned a little, leaning in. This time, it wasn’t something wrong, exactly; it was something unexpected.

  Last night, he had begun filling in the house’s surroundings, blocking in the tree line, the grassy hill sweeping down toward the river, and the brown curve of the river itself. He’d added a few details here and there; the edge of a rose garden protruding from the rear of the house, speckled with red buds, a wrought-iron W bolted to the bricks of the chimney, and a few decorative details at the furthest edge of the tree line, almost hidden beyond the crown of the hill. It was these details that had caught Shane’s eye.

  He leaned closer, scrutinizing them, the frown lines on his forehead deepening. He’d only noticed it as he’d begun to turn away, catching the shapes with the corner of his eye. In the gloomy light, it was hard to resolve the shapes into anything other than blobs of paint, and yet even now they teased his eye, looking strangely familiar. There was a splash of red and pink, a few strokes of light gray, all of it nearly hidden in the deep green of the distant trees and bushes.

  He was almost ready to give it up, convinced he was simply imagining things, when the shapes finally resolved and clicked into place. Once that happened, he couldn’t not see them. His eyes widened and for a long moment he forgot to breathe.

  There, in the far corner of the painted yard, he had dabbed in the shape of a statue. It was comprised of no more than four or five quick brush strokes, but they were very economical strokes, like visual poetry. The statue seemed to have one arm raised, palm up, as if welcoming the viewer, as if beckoning them into some secret. Of course, Shane knew what that secret was, for he had seen that statue’s sister, covered in vines, leaning and nearly hidden in the woods.

  Below the painted statue, a drift of red and pink flowers bloomed; hydrangeas, of course. Somehow, Shane had painted the entry to the footpath that connected the manor house to the cottage. He had painted it last night, without even knowing it, believing those lines were just squiggles of color, meaningless details.

  He shuddered, and out over the river the thunder grumbled again. A moment later, Shane startled violently and let out a little bark of surprise; the ceiling light over his head had popped on with a tiny electrical snap. Its light suddenly filled the room, bone white and brilliant after the stormy twilight.

  And downstairs, for the first time since Shane had returned to the cottage, the toilet flushed all by itself.

  Chapter Three

  The next day was Saturday, and the phone was ringing when Shane woke up, bleary-eyed and disoriented. He squinted at the sunshine that speared through the curtains, reached for the clock on the bedside table, and groaned when he looked at it. A few seconds later, he rolled out from under the covers and clumped out of the bedroom, following the incessant ring of the phone.

  “Hullo,”

  “Morning, Shane. Don’t tell me I woke you up?” It was Greenfeld again. Damn but he was persistent. Shane wasn’t very surprised.

  “As a matter of fact, you did. Not your fault, though. I was up late last night.”

  “Burning the midnight oil? Or living fast and dying young?”

  “Maybe a little of both. What about you? Don’t tell me you’re in the office on a Saturday morning?”

  “Maybe I am, maybe I am,” Greenfeld replied easily. “I have this artist who likes to finish things on the Friday before a Monday deadline. Means I have to show up bright and early Saturday to arrange shipping and manage the fine print.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about that, Morrie. Really. It’s not like me at all.”

  “Yeah, you know, in your case I actually believe that. I get a sense of people, and you, you’re not a bullshitter, at least about your work. But don’t sweat it. This is what I get paid my exorbitant commissions for.”

  “So you saw the photos I sent?”

  “Yes I did. Got ‘em late last night, when I got home, otherwise I’d have called right away. Looks good to me, but the ball’s always in the air until the client takes shipment and gives us their final okey dokey. You know how it is. I sent the pics off to my contact at the studio, and I haven’t heard anything since. Considering how anxious they were about getting this matte just right, I’d say that’s a good sign.”

  Shane felt a knot of tension loosen from his shoulders. He knew the average client well enough to know that Greenfeld was right; these weren’t the kind of people who sent handwritten thank-you notes full of high praise. The only time the artist ever heard from the client was when there was something wrong with the product. “That’s good news,” Shane answered. “So are you arranging the shippers?”

  “Already set. That’s why I called. I’m sending over an intern to get the painting and pack it up, just to be safe.”

  Shane nodded. Greenfeld was very thorough. “When will they get here?”

  “I scheduled the pickup for here at the office at one. Chris is already en route to your place. Should be there by ten. You going to be there?”

  “I don’t have my interview with Access Hollywood until noon, so I think I’ll still be around.”

  “Sounds good. We still on for Thursday?”

  “Sure. You need directions?”

  “Nah. I know the general area. I’ll call you if I can’
t find the house number on your cave.”

  Shane told Greenfeld he looked forward to it and hung up, relieved.

  While Shane waited for the intern from Greenfeld’s office, he sat at the little computer desk by the living room window, sipping coffee and staring hard at the screen of his laptop.

  Outside, the previous evening’s storms had left the sky bright and hazy. The air was cooler than yesterday, and Shane had left the windows open rather than cranking up the window air conditioner. The curtains next to the desk hung limp, still damp from last night’s rain.

  He had sat down at the computer to check the weather, then to browse the headlines. Eventually, however, he had remembered his trip out to the site of the manor house yesterday, and his plan to look up the original owner. The footpath had piqued his interest, but it was the painting upstairs that was really driving his curiosity. Ever since he’d begun it, he’d developed a rather detailed picture of the original owner—how he’d looked, his personality and history.

  This was not especially unusual. Shane remembered watching a documentary about a well known comic book artist a few years earlier, remembered the artist saying that when he drew monsters and beasts, he’d sit at his art table roaring and growling, baring his teeth. If he was drawing battle sequences, he’d mimic the sounds of sword clashes, or gunfire, or fists on chins. Shane had grinned as he’d watched, because he completely understood that tendency. It was part of going fathoms deep into the art, becoming one with it, examining it from all the angles so as to best understand it.

  It was a simple, elementary idea, one that any little kid with a box of crayons understood instinctively: being an artist meant creating in your head before you ever created on the canvas, and the more you gave life to the version between your ears, the more vibrant the final work on the canvas would be.

  Thus, as Shane had painted the manor house, constructing it in his head and looking at it from every angle, he had begun to also create its occupants.