The Riverhouse by G. Norman Lippert Read Free Book Online

As Shane’s eyes adjusted, he could see a very dim greenish glow emanating from the nearby kitchen, cast by the digital clock on the microwave. Nothing moved.
    Could it have been Tom? Could he have gotten in? It hadn’t been a loud noise, but it definitely hadn’t been his imagination. It had been a sort of clank or knock, like a cup being put down on the counter, or a plate in the sink being disturbed by a curious, scavenging mouse. Certainly that’s all it had been. The cottage was old, after all, and rife with mice and spiders, bats in the attic and even the occasional snake under the basement stairs.
    And yet, for some reason, Shane didn’t want to walk through the kitchen. It was irrational, and he knew it, but that didn’t make the feeling go away. In the wake of the television’s constant noise, the silence felt huge and thick. It didn’t feel like the silence of emptiness. It felt like the silence of something being very, very quiet.
    Shane was beginning to freak himself out. This was his cottage, damn it. He’d slept here dozens of times. There was nothing here that he hadn’t put here, and there was nobody here but him, period. And that was probably the real source of his discomfort, now that he thought about it; apart from last night, every other time he’d stayed here he had been with Stephanie.
And that’s the first thing you thought when you heard that little knock in the kitchen, wasn’t it?
a little voice in Shane’s head said. It sounded a bit like Dr. Taylor.
You thought it was Steph, come out to make herself a cup of tea because she couldn’t sleep. And then you remembered: Steph isn’t here anymore, and she’ll never be here again. Steph is gone. Your marriage is dead. Dead as the manor house a quarter mile down the trail.
    Shane sighed and got up. Maybe that’s all it was. Surprisingly, what he felt was relief. The idea of his marriage being dead was a downer, for sure, but it was better than the
second
thing he’d thought when he’d heard that strange noise in the kitchen, when he’d remembered that he was, in fact, entirely alone in the house. That thought had been a lot worse, even if it had been entirely irrational.
    Shane reached to click off the floor lamp next to the couch. It snapped off and darkness flooded the room, pouring in from the rest of the house. And something—some
thing
that had apparently been standing in the darkness right outside the sunroom door, invisible in the shadows—
hissed.
The sound came from right outside the entry; long, diminishing, and strangely human, like a deep sigh, or a final exhale, expelled in one weak, sustained gust, rattling as the weight of the chest lowered, collapsing for the last time.
    Shane’s hair immediately stood on end and in the darkness his eyes shot wide open, straining. A dozen thoughts clambered into his head, all shouting possible explanations—Tom the cat, a leaking pipe, a gust of wind through a cracked window—but none of them worked, none of them fit, because there was no mistaking that sound. It was a human sound, but not a healthy sound. It sounded sick, deathly, pathetic, and that made it all the worse.
    Shane’s fingers were still on the switch of the lamp, but they were suddenly shaking so much that he couldn’t grip the tiny burled knob. He grasped and fumbled at it, his breath stuck in his chest, going stale.
    Shane had a vivid artist’s imagination, and he could all too clearly imagine the source of that awful, poison breath. He envisioned it moving—no,
floating—
across the floor of the sunroom, invisible in the darkness, reaching toward him with horrible long arms and fingers hooked into talons. He imagined the sort of mouth that could make such a sound; huge and gaping, dry, stricken into a grimace that could almost look like a grin of rapture, bearing down on him.
    And then, finally, Shane’s fingers grasped the floor lamp’s switch and he spun it. He turned it too hard, and the lamp clicked on