This painting was like a puzzle, or piece of complicated origami, unfolding as it went. It had begun with a face, and Shane had been dimly aware of whose it was, even as he’d drifted deep into the canvas, sinking fathom after fathom into the story. It was neither of the Wilhelms; he knew that immediately. There was no life in the face, no vibrance or story.
And then he realized why this should be so. He was not painting a face, technically; he was painting a painting of a face, duplicating one of Wilhelm’s portraits.
The image expanded out of those initial brush strokes, filling the middle quarter of the new canvas, quite small, but rich with color and detail. It was the portrait of Woodrow Wilson, the one Gus Wilhelm had painted in an effort to win the post of official White House portrait artist. As Shane painted it, he turned it over and over in his mind, wondering, inventing.
Gus Wilhelm had not received the post he had painted the portrait for. Shane knew that much from the article he’d read on the Internet. The post had instead been awarded to another artist, a veteran portrait painter named Hallsley. Wilhelm’s portrait of Wilson had been returned to him with a note pinned to it: “This work is more suited to the bathhouse than the white house.”
Wilhelm surely would have kept that portrait, and the note as well, perhaps even leaving it pinned to the work, a constant reminder of his first major setback. Based on what he knew of Wilhelm, Shane imagined he’d looked at the portrait as a motivational tool. I’ll show them, he’d have thought to himself, firming his jaw, balling his hands into big fists. Reject me, will they? I’ll see them seeking me out someday, pleading with me to return and paint their damned portraits. And will I do it? Yes, I will, and I won’t even tell them how they once rejected me. That will be my little secret. That will be the jaunty feather in my cap, the one that only has special meaning to me, and me alone.
Shane imagined Wilhelm hanging the portrait in the Riverhouse, years after he had achieved fame and wealth, long after he’d met the challenge of that snide little note. And yet the painting remained, and always enjoyed a place of high honor. Why?
Because despite his braggadocio, that note had wounded him. He’d remembered it with great, vivid clarity, remembered the shocked numbness of that rejection. It lived in his mind, even after the writer of the note had been replaced, even after Wilhelm had indeed gone back and painted succeeding presidents. Because none of those latter portraits had bested that first one, the one that had begun in the hot confines of the Oval Office, surrounded by other artists while the sun dazzled just over the President’s right shoulder. Secretly, Wilhelm had believed it was among his best works, and he’d hated the fact that it had failed.
He often recalled the day of that rejection, remembered examining the returned portrait, confused and crushed. He had painted the president exactly as he had witnessed him; his glasses pushed up on his forehead, leaning over his desk with his chin resting on his cupped right hand. Wilson’s face was shaded, but a line of brilliant orange sunlight followed the angle of his cheek, his left ear, and his severely combed hair, glowing in the drab office like a halo.
Wilhelm had been confused because he’d felt that the portrait had perfectly captured the intensity of the man in his work. The line of backlit sunlight was like a streak of molten gold, starkly accenting the president’s features, implying the Olympus-like grandeur of the highest office in the land. Later, however, Wilhelm had seen the winning entry, and had understood. The winner of the post had painted Wilson in a completely invented pose; standing, fully lit, chin raised and hand on hip. Behind him the artist had even injected a pastoral scene of rolling fields and idyllic forest. Wilhelm had then realized that the winning painting, with its invented nobility and stiff formality, was the very antonym of his own portrait, which delved into the ethos of the man himself.
Apparently, presidential portraits were not meant to be portraits at all; they were only architectural renderings, displaying the mere meat of the man’s body and some contrived sense of what people expected of their leaders. Wilhelm told himself that, if such was the case, he had been granted a divine blessing in being passed over for the post. Perhaps he could even find it in his heart to pity the man who had bested him, George Hallsley.
Then again, perhaps not. Hallsley was perfectly content with creating mere painted waxworks. And he had been condescending to Wilhelm, looking down his long, skinny nose and peering through a fussy little pair of Pince Nez glasses, as if Wilhelm had been someone’s dirty-faced child with a slate and a chunk of colored chalk. Deep down, Wilhelm had hated Hallsley, and hated the rejection he represented. Gustav Wilhelm had spent the next decade furiously working to live down that failure. He’d succeeded everywhere except in his own mind.
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 hand
s.”
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 h
eart 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 Riverhouse Page 14