As he approached the cottage, that glint of sunlight played across the tiny round upstairs window again. For a moment, it didn’t quite look like sunlight reflecting off the old glass panes; it looked instead like a small interior light source, glowing just inside, like a candle on the windowsill. That was especially impossible, of course.
“Keep the imagination on its leash,” he said to himself, shaking his head as he began to unload the tools into the shed. “Don’t let it turn cannibal on you, now. Keep the muse in her place and you’ll be just fine.” He sighed, and for no reason, he thought of the horrible rattling sigh that he’d heard the night after he’d arrived in the cottage. His own sigh turned into a shudder, and he glanced aside, toward the tiny, filthy basement window near his feet. The basement light was off this time.
“Keep the imagination on its leash, Shaney boy,” he muttered to himself again. “Keep the muse in her place and you’ll be fine. You’ll be just as right as rain.”
Shane didn’t feel as tired that night as he’d expected to. He sat in the sunroom after dinner, thumbing his way through the satellite channels, not finding anything interesting enough to watch. It was funny, he thought (and not for the first time), that the number of good television programs seemed to be inversely related to the amount of available channels.
When he’d been growing up, an only child living in a small apartment in suburban New Jersey, his parents had had only one television, an old Zenith console model, and it only clearly displayed three channels, four on stormy nights. He remembered begging to be allowed to stay up one more hour to watch whatever was coming on next; the A-Team, or the Dukes of Hazzard, or Knight Rider, with the irrepressible David Hasselhoff. Sometimes he would be allowed.
Sometimes—these were the best of times—his dad would even make popcorn, or scoop bowls of ice cream for himself and Shane, and they’d drape on the couch, watching TV and snacking like kings, cheering whenever Mr. T blew something up or whenever the Duke boys gunned the General Lee and rocketed it over some defenseless creek along the back roads of Hazzard County.
Shane’s mother was a nurse, and back then she worked the third shift at a large nursing home in Hoboken. She was usually leaving for work, wearing her funny nurse’s hat and white crepe-soled shoes, around the time Shane was supposed to be brushing his teeth and heading to bed. She’d appear at the bathroom door just as he was finishing up, and she’d adjust the bobby pins that anchored her odd little white hat in place and glance down at Shane and say, “Don’t let your father let you stay up too late, now. Big boys need their sleep. And don’t go eating ice cream after you’ve brushed your teeth.”
Shane would nod obediently, knowing he’d do both, and with wild abandon, if his dad was in the mood to allow it that night. His mother knew it, too. She’d sigh in a businesslike manner and squat down, still primping her black hair and nurse’s cap, and deftly touch the corner of her mouth with a finger, summoning a goodnight kiss. Shane complied easily enough. Back then, he was still young enough to be unselfconscious about kissing his mother.
After she’d leave, driving off in the big gold Chevelle, Shane would usually go to bed. But sometimes he’d stand by the entry to the narrow hallway and ask, and his dad would pat the couch cushion next to him, and Shane would run across the living room and hurl himself up onto the couch next to his dad, into the glorious blue glow of primetime television. It didn’t happen as often as he wished, but it happened more often than his mother knew. That was all right. Mothers knew all about how many vegetables boys needed every day, and how much vitamin D they needed in their milk, but fathers knew other things. Fathers knew about a boy’s recommended daily allowance of explosions and car chases.
Shane sighed, still flipping through the channels. Maybe television had just been better when he was a kid. More likely, his tastes had just been simpler.
Of course, a big part of the fun had been staying up late, snuggled up next to his dad, who was huge, with giant, meaty mitts for hands and a belly like a medicine ball, round but tough.
Both of Shane’s parents were dead now; his dad had died of a heart attack when Shane was seventeen, and his mother had succumbed to cancer the winter before Shane’s marriage had fallen apart. At least she hadn’t lived to see that. June Bellamy had always loved Steph, had always called her the daughter she’d never had. She’d still had black hair then, up until the chemo finally made it disappear. It had probably not been her real color anymore, but she had always been very fussy and careful about her hair, having it done by the same stylist for almost two decades, right up until her death.
“Only her hairdresser knows for sure,” Shane’s father used to say, quoting the old commercial. “For all I know, her real color’s been gray since the day I married her. She’s there every second Tuesday, sure as death and taxes. For what it costs me, I can only hope they’re hiding gold bars in those curls.”
Shane finally turned off the television. He was surprised at how awake he felt. He realized now that part of the reason he’d worked so hard on the footpath, clearing and trimming it, was because he was hoping to be exhausted and ready for bed early. It wasn’t any fun staying up late to watch television anymore, not without his dad and a big bowl of over-buttered popcorn. There was no novelty in it anymore.
But more importantly, for the last few days he’d been staying up too late for other reasons, working on the painting of the manor house. He’d put more energy into it by far than he had the matte painting that he’d just finished. It was disrupting his schedule, interfering with his shift. It wasn’t so much that he was too tired in the mornings; it was that the painting obsessed him, distracted him from his regular work, even after he’d stayed up late the night before, working away at it. Tonight, he’d hoped to be so tired that he’d forget the painting and just fall into his bed.
Maybe he
was
tired, and just wasn’t feeling it yet. Maybe once he got into bed, he’d fall right to sleep. He’d read for a little while from one of the paperback books on the bookshelf. Better yet, he’d take the laptop with him and finish the online article about Gustav Ferdinand Wilhelm. That would surely do the trick.
He sighed and didn’t get up. He tossed the remote onto the oversized ottoman in front of the couch and turned his head toward the one uncovered window, the one that overlooked the patio. It was quite dark outside, but the yellow bug light next to the sliding back doors was on, illuminating the flagstones and the big brick barbecue with its weird buttery glow. Moths flitted around the light, lit like tiny constellations. Sitting on the ledge of the barbecue, merely a sleek shape against the black of the night, was Tom. He sat perfectly still, his bullet head raised, peering toward the river.
There was something in the pocket of Shane’s sweat pants. He felt the unforgiving shape of it pressing against his hip. He took it out, and it jingled. It was the object he’d found under the bench along the footpath. He held the ivory handle and looked at the smiling cherub’s face. The jingle bells were nearly black with tarnish, but they tinkled easily as he turned the object in his hand. And suddenly he thought he knew what it was. He held it up and smiled a little, and beyond it, in the darkness of the library, something moved.
Shane froze, his fingers tightening on the strange silver shape. His eyes slowly went wide and his breath stalled in his chest. Whatever it was, it was a very pale gray, almost pearlescent, like a shape made of incense smoke. It glowed very faintly against the darkness as it drifted across the library, moving silently toward the kitchen. Bits of it shifted in and out of focus, implying a solid shape, but never quite maintaining it.
Shane wasn’t exactly frightened of it, but every fiber of his being had come alert, as if he’d never been as awake as he was at that moment. The gray, smoky shape stopped moving toward the kitchen. It wavered and drifted, as if affected by some massive, slow current that Shane could not feel, and then it seemed to turn, to look at him. Shane felt its gaze settle on him, and with it came a sense of simmering rage, indignant and confused. The thing began to approach, moving toward the doorway that separated the library and the sunroom.
“Wai…” Shane said, and his voice came out as a breathy squeak, feeble and weak. He inhaled and pressed back into the couch. “Wait. Wait. No, it wasn’t me.”
He didn’t know what he was saying, and yet the words piled up behind his lips entirely of their own accord. The figure advanced slowly, fighting that strange, otherworldly current. It became more solid as it came, as if the effort was focusing it. Shane could make out the suggestion of arms and legs, clad in something like a streaming robe or dress. Long streaks of hair wafted out behind the head, as if the figure were underwater, pushing upstream. Shane clambered backwards, up onto the back of the couch, gasping for breath.
“It wasn’t me,” he heard himself say again, his voice high and wavering. “Others came to tear it down. I saw it afterwards, when it was all done, but I didn’t make it happen. It was old and falling apart… dangerous…”
The figure suddenly pulsed and grew, and rage beat off it like heat from a furnace. It reached the entry to the sunroom, but couldn’t seem to push through. The silent current tore at it. For a fleeting moment, Shane thought he could see a face surfacing out of the misty shape of the head. The features were those of a woman, white and smooth like a statue except for the eyes; the eyes were dead black, as if the eyelids opened onto emptiness. The face pushed through the doorway, fighting that streaming current, and it grimaced in a mixture of effort and fury, baring its teeth.
Terror fell on Shane like a wave, more at the wounded rage of the thing than even its ghostly appearance. He raised his hands to ward it off, just as the shape reared to lunge, trying to force its way into the sunroom.
And suddenly, seamlessly, that pulse of broken rage
changed
. It dulled and deepened, sinking back through anger and hate, turning inward, transforming, to Shane’s dismay, into a sort of miserable sadness, so huge and seamless that it was like an ocean.
Shane had squeezed his eyes shut, but he slowly opened them again. His hands were still raised in front of him, his left opened, splayed, palm out. The right hand, however, still clutched the object he’d found under the bench. The silvery cherub’s head and jingle bells protruded from his fist like a cross warding off a vampire. The ghostly figure looked at it, as if entranced by it, and that sense of horrible sadness came off it like cloyingly sweet perfume. The otherworldly current still pushed at it, but the shape hung motionless against it, the hair still streaming back into the library.
“This is yours,” Shane whispered. He lowered his left hand, but held the right hand higher, as if offering the tarnished silver object to the ghostly shape. “Isn’t it?”
He hadn’t expected a response, but the figure looked up at him. Its black eyes appeared fathoms deep, filled with sadness. It shook its head very slowly.
“I found it,” Shane said, and he realized his teeth were chattering. It was suddenly very cold in the sunroom. “On the footpath. I didn’t know what it was at first. But you know what it is, don’t you?”
The figure nodded now, slowly, looking back at the silver shape in Shane’s hand.
“Do you know whose it was?”
The figure nodded again, even more slowly.
“I didn’t knock your house down,” Shane said, shivering so that his voice shook. “It seemed like a nice house. I… I’m painting a picture of it.”
The ghost glanced up at him again, and the mask of miserable sadness seemed to lighten a little. The shape was fading, drifting backwards now. Shane found he was no longer frightened of it. If anything, he felt a deep sorrow for the pathetic, broken figure.
As it drifted backwards, fading, becoming insubstantial again, it maintained eye contact with him. And then, just as it evaporated into nothing, the mouth opened, as if attempting to speak. It made that awful, rattling sigh again, the same one it had made a few nights earlier, only this time the sigh formed a word. It lingered and elongated, falling away to nothing as the shape vanished, leaving only the echo of it in Shane’s mind, like a memory of a dream.
“
Riverhouse
…” it had whispered, as if it were a sort of plea. Shane didn’t know what it meant, at least not yet, but the sound of it played over and over in his mind, plugging into his imagination, firing it up with hundreds of fizzing, frantic images and ideas.
Shane allowed himself to slide off the back of the couch, plopping down onto the seat cushions. He exhaled harshly. Adrenaline was still throbbing through his body, making his heart trip-hammer and widening his eyes.
Whatever that had been, it hadn’t been Tom the cat, or a leaky window, or the idiosyncrasies of an old cottage. It hadn’t been Smithy. The thing in the library had been a ghost. And Shane had a pretty good idea of whose ghost it was. It was the woman in the painting; the one reclining on the front steps with one arm raised to shade her eyes from the sun. She was the one that the painting—no, the
muse
—had asked for, and Shane had obliged.
