The Riverhouse by G. Norman Lippert Read Free Book Online Page A

and off instantly, like a bolt of lightning. He turned it again, barking a little yelp of fear, and light flooded the room.
    There was nothing there.
    Shane gasped a breath and looked around, eyes wide and heart pounding. He caught a glimpse of his own reflection, on the glass of the one uncovered window, the one that overlooked the patio. He looked pale and slightly insane, hunched in a sort of alert crouch, his right hand still buried under the shade of the floor lamp. The room was empty. He peered out, through the doorway that led into the library. It was dim there, but not completely dark. He could see the shapes of the room; the bookcase and one of the chairs, the little round table with the cordless phone on it, its power light glowing green. There was nothing there. There was no one in the house but him. That’s how it had been all night, of course, because he lived alone now.
    But
what
had made that awful sound?
    Shane drew a breath, and then, horrified that he was even giving voice to such a thing, he called out, tremulously, “Smithy? Is that you?”
    There was no answer, of course. In truth, Shane was quite certain that, whatever it had been, it hadn’t been Smithy. Probably there was no such thing as Smithy. It was just the personality that Shane and Steph had assigned to the house’s erratic idiosyncrasies. Probably. Smithy might be mischievous, but he’d never been scary. But there was something else. Whatever had made that horrible, ghastly sound had not been… what? What was the thing? Shane couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
    His heartbeat was returning slowly to normal. The house no longer felt watchful. It just felt empty. He left the light on in the sunroom and approached the doorway leading into the library. Nothing happened. Slowly, hating himself for being so squeamish, Shane reached around the doorway, found the wall switch for the overhead light, and clicked it on. Brightness flooded the room, chasing every shadow into the corners. The light not only made Shane’s previous fright seem a little silly, it made everything in the room feel strangely dull and lifeless, from the bookshelf to the oval rug in the middle of the floor. There were no lurking, gasping ghosts there, that was for sure. Whatever had made that noise, it was gone now.
    Was it possible that maybe it had been Tom the cat after all? Shane knew that cats could make eerily human noises, sometimes when they were in pain, sometimes when they were in heat. Maybe Tom was just outside, getting it on with some lady friend beneath the library window. Was the window cracked enough to let in such a noise? Shane looked, and sure enough it was, propped open with one of the books from the bookshelf, something called “the Diary of Mary Todd”. One of Steph’s old books, apparently.
    Shane drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, shakily, feeling some sense of relief. A small part of his mind insisted that that sound had been no cat, no way no how, but the rest of his mind shouted it down, like the lone peace protester at a war rally. Still, as Shane made his way through the kitchen, stripping off his shirt and running a hand through his hair, he left the library light on. He’d turn it off in the morning, but for now there was just something comforting about its harsh, banal glow. Nothing wrong with that.
    He got to his bedroom, stood at the foot of his bed, bare-chested and disheveled, heart still thumping dully from his strange experience in the sunroom, and realized something odd: he no longer felt sleepy. In fact, he felt a sneaking, unexpected energy. Something nagged at him, like a name he had recently forgotten, or a post-hypnotic suggestion.
    As he stood there, his shirt dangling from his fist, two things occurred to him simultaneously. The first was what it had been about the sound of that awful sigh, what had convinced him that it couldn’t be Smithy, even if Smithy
was
real: something in that horrible breath had been