There, he painted a jumble of blocky shapes, apparently thick with shadows. He thought he could recognize these—trunks and crates, mostly empty, merely stage dressing. A large cloth seemed to be draped over them, turning them into an abstract backdrop, but Shane knew that these were unimportant details. The focus of this side of the canvas was an upholstered chair, high-backed, with dainty wooden legs, each represented by one quick slash of curve.
There was something sitting on the chair. Not a figure, but another shape, smaller and indistinct, and yet familiar. Shane squinted at it, wondering, but then the focus of the story darted away again, moving back to the central figure. A shape formed around it, a sort of halo, perfectly round, framing the head and shoulders. The halo quickly became the centerpiece of the scene, partly because it was, in fact, in the exact center, but also because it was the only light-colored object in the scene, formed of a pale, dusty blue.
Baby blue
, Shane thought idly as his arm arced around, tracing the curves, making them perfect.
Wind suddenly switched outside the window, lifting the curtains out over the stairs and singing a high note in the screen. Downstairs, startling Shane badly, a dull slam suddenly reverberated. It shook the cottage, and Shane nearly dropped his brush. He sat back, his heart thudding, and drew a deep breath. He knew what had caused that slam—the changing air pressure had merely pulled a door shut downstairs, slamming it—but it had still unsettled him, broken his mental link with the story on the canvas.
After a moment, he glanced down at his watch and saw that he’d been at it for nearly two hours. His shoulder was tired, but not quite sore. He could paint more, if he wanted to. The story was still there, hovering in the air, crackling like electricity, waiting to find life on the canvas.
First, however, he should go downstairs and close some of the windows, just in case it did storm and the wind blew the rain in. As he passed the window over the stairs he felt the sudden cool of the air outside. It chilled the sweat on his brow and made him shiver slightly.
Shadows filled the downstairs as he moved through the rooms, pushing the windows down, rattling the handles of the front door and the door over the basement, making sure that they were securely latched and wouldn’t swing wide again with any more gusts of air.
Satisfied, he retreated down the short hall and pounded back up the stairs to the studio. The air from the window was much colder all of a sudden. Shane stopped at the top of the stairs, his hair prickling and his breath puffing out in a white fog.
The Sleepwalker was no longer on its easel. It was hovering in the air in the middle of the studio, facing him directly, its image looking stark and naked in the light of the window. Shane stared at it, his eyes wide, his hand gripping the top knob of the banister hard enough to turn his knuckles white.
Was it Marlena? Smithy? Somehow, he didn’t think so. This was both of them somehow, or neither of them. This was something larger, more pervasive, less human—almost like the ghost of the Riverhouse itself. It filled the studio with its cold presence, packing the space, making the air feel crowded and dense, almost too thick to inhale. Shane forced his lungs to fill and when he tried to speak, to ask who was there, nothing came out but a thin rasp.
The Sleepwalker began to drift slowly toward him, and as it did, it grew brighter, gathering the stormlight, focusing it, making the rough brush strokes leap off the canvas. The image loomed over Shane, but he could barely focus on it. Dimly, he realized he wasn’t breathing. His vision began to darken at the edges, spiked with angry pulses as his heart pounded. Still, the Sleepwalker pushed toward him, demanding that he look, that he make sense of the images.
And suddenly, vaguely, he thought he did. The shape on the right was indeed a bed. Someone was lying in it, covered roughly with a mass of blankets, their head buried in the pillows. The red slashes weren’t the light of a sunset, as Shane had originally thought. They were spatters of blood on the pillows, hiding the ruin of the figure’s head.
Shane felt dismay sink its claws into him, making him sway on his feet. And yet it was the object on the left side, the object sitting on the cushion of the high-backed chair, that followed him down into unconsciousness. He should have recognized it right away—and part of him had. After all, he’d already painted it once.
It was a purse. It sat open, its inside full of black shadow, its secrets already revealed. None of it made any sense. It was pathetic and frustrating and terrifying, all at the same time.
As the Sleepwalker drifted toward him, suspended in the grip of that awful, nameless force, Shane began to black out. He fell forward, collapsing as if in slow motion, all the strength evaporating from his arms and legs, and as he did, a gust of cold wind pushed through the open window, belling the curtains over him, sighing in the window screen. The sigh of the wind sounded almost like a word, and that word followed Shane down into oblivion, echoing, tolling like a bell.
Riverhouse,
it said, over and over, backwards and forwards, beckoning and warning, teasing and threatening.
Riverhouse… Riverhouse…
Shane awoke some time later, startling to the sound of a door slamming again somewhere in the cottage. His ribs hurt and he rolled over, pressing his hand to them, remembering everything in a rush—the Sleepwalker floating in the air, looming over him, the air going dense and poisonous, the revelation of the images on the canvas, and finally himself falling forward, collapsing onto the top few steps, bruising his ribs.
He jerked upright, suddenly sure the painting was still hovering over him, descending on him like a set of gaping jaws. The painting wasn’t there, however. Neither were the stairs, or the rest of the studio. He blinked in the darkness, looking around. He was in his bedroom, on his own bed. It was rumpled, the pillows damp with sweat, as if he’d just awoken from a very restless nap. He drew a shaking breath and felt another pang of pain in his ribs. It hadn’t been a dream, of course. Had it?
He frowned, squinting into the muddy twilight of his bedroom, staring toward his dresser. The antique silver baby rattle sat on top, next to his wallet and a wooden bowl filled with loose change. The rattle caught the waning light, condensing it into watery glimmers.
He remembered the sound that had awoken him, the sound of a door slamming somewhere in the cottage. He listened: footsteps, light but purposeful, and then a dull thunk. Shane knew what that sound was, and smiled to himself, in spite of everything. Christiana was home. She’d just put her bag on the kitchen counter. Another thump; the refrigerator closing. She liked a Diet Coke when she got back from work. It was nice to know someone’s habits like that.
“I’m in here,” he called, his voice thick and raspy. “Just took a little nap. Apparently.”
Nothing. Shane listened for another moment, and then climbed off the bed. His legs felt weak beneath him, nearly geriatric. He leaned on the bedroom door for a moment.
“Chris?” he called again, but no answer came.
The cottage was suddenly perfectly silent. The hallway into the kitchen was packed with shadows. He walked slowly along it, his hair prickling. Christiana’s bag sat on the kitchen counter. An open can of Diet Coke sat next to it, already beading in the humid evening stillness.
“Chris?” he said, his voice faltering. Where could she be? A surge of frustrated hopelessness welled up in him. It was his job to protect her, wasn’t it? It had only been a few minutes. Surely Marlena couldn’t have gotten to Christiana in such short a period of time. Could she have? Worse, what if it wasn’t Marlena at all? What if it was that nameless, pervasive force—the inhuman spirit of the Riverhouse itself—he’d felt (or dreamed he’d felt) in the studio?
Panic tried to shimmy up Shane’s spine like a monkey, but he fought it back. She had been here only a moment earlier; she couldn’t have gone far. He moved through the kitchen, into the library, and then stopped.
The sunroom was the brightest room in the cottage, filled with diffuse twilight from the low sky outside. Something was standing in the center of the room, blocky, silhouetted against the dim blue light.
Shane sucked in a breath, his heart pounding, but the figure didn’t move. It wasn’t a figure at all. It was a painting on an easel. He recognized it. It was the portrait of Marlena, the one he thought of as “Dear M”. It stood on the smaller of his two easels, looking incongruous in front of the cushioned ottoman.
A flicker of heat lightning lit the painting, illuminating it brilliantly—Marlena’s shocked eyes, her white fingers gripping the letter, the blood red fireplace behind her. And the purse in the shadow of the sofa, of course; Steph’s purse, its mouth open and dark.
Shane continued forward, drawn to the painting, his eyes widening. It was almost magnetic. The paintings were portals, after all.
“Chris?” Shane said one more time, his voice barely a hoarse whisper.
“What?” she said from directly behind him.
Shane startled violently, barking a hoarse bellow of shock and spinning so quickly on his heels that he nearly fell on top of her. She screamed in surprise at
his
surprise, dancing backwards away from him and nearly dropping the bottle of wine in her hands.
“What the hell!” she cried, her eyes wide but already beginning to laugh. “Don’t
do
that! What’s wrong with you?”
Shane moved forward, taking the bottle from her hands and touching her shoulder, flush with relief. He drew her into his arms and began to laugh weakly.
“Sorry, Chris. I didn’t know where you’d gone. You just disappeared. I was… worried, I guess.”
“I was in the basement, you big dope,” she said against his shoulder. “Getting a bottle of wine. Excuse me for living. Do I need to get a permission slip next time?”
“Maybe you do,” he said, letting her go and looking down at her. Her cheeks were red. She seemed caught between annoyance and amusement.
“So why so jumpy?” she asked, looking up at him critically. “I mean, apart from the usual?”
Shane shrugged and shook his head. “What’s the occasion?” he asked, raising the wine bottle in his hand and nodding toward it.
Christiana sighed her characteristic businesslike sigh, taking the bottle away from him. “Well, I’ll have you know that your girlfriend has been asked to host a new gallery showing, this time on the main floor of the Art Museum, not in some little side hall. I got a call today from an organization called the American Aesthetic Underground. They want me to host their annual Women in the Arts exhibit. It’s bigger than anything I’ve ever done so far, but I didn’t tell them that, of course. Apparently, they read Penn Oliver’s review of my last show and figured I had the know-how and connections to make it happen. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that I wear a skirt to work, but I’m willing to take every break I can get.”
“
I’ve
never seen you wear a skirt to work,” Shane said, following her into the kitchen. She ignored him, flipping on the overhead light.
“So tell: what’s got you so antsy?” she asked, setting the wine bottle on the counter and picking up her Coke. “Besides the obvious, of course. Something to do with that painting in the sunroom? Is that why you moved it?”
Shane shook his head and leaned against the counter. He didn’t want to worry Christiana any more than she already was, and he didn’t want to taint her good fortune with any more otherworldly weirdness. He shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said a little lamely. “I just… I like it in there. It was… in the way upstairs.”
To Shane’s surprise and dismay, Christiana shuddered. “‘Riverhouse’ I can deal with,” she said, “But that Marlena painting creeps me out. Sorry. Maybe it’s just the story you told me about her, but I don’t think that’s it entirely.” She shook herself and looked up at him. “Whatever. Time to talk dinner. If it was up to me, I’d just drink your wine all night—my stomach’s already in knots about this new show—but I think I used up all my ‘get out of a hangover free’ cards when I was in college. You got any more of those pork steaks in the freezer?”
Shane nodded, smiled, and crossed to the refrigerator.
Behind him, Christiana took a sip of her Coke and then said, “You know what I first thought when I got here and saw that painting in the sunroom?”
“What’s that?” Shane said, opening the freezer compartment and peering inside.
“I thought you’d moved her into there because of what you said about the sunroom, about how her ghost doesn't seem to be able to get in there. I had this crazy notion that you were trying to… sort of, put her to sleep or something. Like maybe the sunroom was some kind of dead zone for her.”
Shane nodded as he closed the freezer. “I guess that would make sense, wouldn’t it?”
He was thinking of the Sleepwalker, thinking about how he’d worried that if Marlena found him painting it, she’d be upset—maybe even dangerously furious. He thought of the weird force that had held the Sleepwalker up in front of him, forcing him to really
look
at it.
Maybe Christiana’s theory was partly right. Maybe locking Marlena’s portrait up in the sunroom, instead of leaving it upstairs, within sight of the Sleepwalker, was a way of keeping the secret just a bit longer, a way to keep her from interfering, just long enough to finish the new painting. It did make a certain, strange kind of sense. Moving Marlena into the sunroom was a pretty good idea.