Authors: Joe Hart
“It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ardent
Falls
,
Minnesota
, August 2012
Lance scrambled down the narrow hallway, his eyes lost in the utter blackness of the house around him. With no real sense of space, he bumped randomly off the walls like a terrified pinball. His bare feet were wet and cold. The next instant he slipped and fell onto his back. In a matter of seconds, his clothing was soaked through to the skin. The chilly water moved around him like a conscious entity trying to hold him down as he attempted to regain his feet. The scraping sound of footsteps froze him in place, and he turned his head back the way he had come.
A single light burned in the kitchen, and although it threw no illumination to where Lance was, it outlined the thing that followed him all too well. It was man-shaped but hunched over grotesquely, its head hanging almost below its rounded shoulders. Hands balled into fists were at its sides, and the right held a pointed protrusion that looked black in the shadow framing it. The thing began to step once again, and Lance noticed that it dragged its toes when it walked.
Lance managed to get to his feet and feel his way down the rough wall until his hand closed over the doorknob to his room. When he turned the handle, it merely spun in his hand, and for a moment he thought the knob had laughed at him. He then realized the muffled chuckling came from the thing sliding down the hall toward him. The laughter had a nasal quality to it, as if whatever it was had a terrible head cold. Lance gripped the knob tighter and turned it with all his might. The cheap plastic held for a moment, and then begrudgingly rotated. He felt the air behind him part and heard what sounded like an intake of breath. A line of fire erupted on the back of his neck, and he fell into his bedroom headfirst.
There was only panic now, and he reacted without thinking. In a quick motion, he kicked with both legs and felt the door fly from the bottom of his feet. The sound the door made when it reached the doorjamb was somehow wrong. It was not the solid slam of the door locking in its place; it was more of a wet thump. As Lance began to crawl backward, he heard the door swing open and the scraping steps enter his room. He scrambled away from the sound until the back of his head met sharply with his bedside table. The thing was closer now and he could hear mucus catching the air as it sucked wind in through whatever was on its face that the darkness thankfully hid. Lance began to try to scoot sideways in an effort to circumvent the thing that still approached, but he heard it alter its course. As he slid closer to his bed, his hand brushed against the cord to the lamp that sat on his table. He followed it up until he felt the hard plastic switch beneath his thumb. The thing in the dark stopped a few feet from him, and he debated whether he wanted to die seeing or not seeing what was going to kill him. Water began to run over his feet again, as if a stream had been diverted from outside into his room. It rushed over his legs and soaked the crotch of his pants. The thing drew in a shuddering breath, and then it spoke.
“Welcome home, son.”
He screamed and switched the lamp on.
Lance awoke with a scream rising in his throat as he flailed out and punched the black marble lamp that sat on the bedside table. It skidded a foot on the table’s surface and then flipped off its edge, crashing on the bamboo floor. Lance sat frozen, half in, half out of bed. His arm locked in the direction of the ruined lamp and his right foot sitting on the cool surface of the floor.
“What was that?” Ellen’s voice rang across the large room as she sat bolt upright and startled Lance again. His heart knocked against his breastbone as if it wanted to be let out, and his breath hitched in his chest but seemed to give him no oxygen. He blinked into the darkness of the room.
His room.
His own room.
There was nothing moving ahead of him toward the large bay windows that filtered moonlight through their curtains. He listened over the sound of blood rushing in drumbeats but heard nothing else. No scraping footsteps hissed across the wood floor. Lance’s head dipped forward so that his chin nearly touched his chest, and he let out a stuttered breath of relief.
“Nothing.
Just a dream,” he finally said.
“A nightmare, you mean.”
Lance stood fully from the bed and nearly fell over, disoriented from sleep.
“Just a dream,” he repeated, and strode to the dark doorway of the master bath, the air conditioning cooling the damp skin of his bare chest as he walked. After closing the door behind him, he flicked the second switch on the panel to his left and the “mood lighting,” as his architect had called it, glowed inside the Jacuzzi tub and above the long expanse of mirrors on the wall over the dual sinks. The bathroom became a fuzzy shade of yellow through his sleep-crusted eyes as he sunk to the edge of the tub. Lance leaned forward and rested his elbows on his thighs as he rubbed his face with both hands, feeling the two-day growth of beard there.
Unbidden, the images from the dream assaulted him again, almost as real as they had been during sleep. He could hear the sliding of feet on the floor and feel the sweat-encased doorknob slipping in his frantic hand. The words in his father’s broken and blood-choked voice:
Welcome home, son.
Lance lurched off the edge of the tub and gripped the side of the yawning toilet just in time to release his half-digested dinner onto the smooth white porcelain. His stomach rolled into a ball so tight he feared it would tear itself loose inside him. He breathed in only to be assaulted by another racking cramp as his guts tried to will themselves out into the dim light.
When the final tremors faded and the sense of relief that only the aftermath of vomiting can bring was upon him, Lance fell back against the nearby wall and flushed the steak and sweet potatoes out of sight. He breathed in and tasted the acid that coated his tongue and teeth, and was nearly sick again.
The sensation of the dream continued to hang over him, and he imagined that if he looked up he would see it there, a black-clouded tumor with tendrils that reached down and clutched at his skull. Instead, he stared at the gray-tiled floor and tried to breathe deeply, but the taste in his mouth reduced his calming inhalations to mere gulps of air. Dejected, with his father’s voice still whispering in his ear, his hand slid to his wet forehead, and as quietly as he could, he began to cry.
The sunlight blazing into the room through the thrown-open curtains was a physical thing that pushed against Lance’s face, nudging him from sleep. He blinked his eyes and stared up at the white spackled ceiling of his bedroom. He looked to his right and studied the height of the sun out the window.
Nearly nine o’clock,
he thought, guessing by the angle of the rays. He slid a hand out to his left and wasn’t surprised not to feel Ellen’s soft form beside him. At the same moment he heard a clatter of pans being dragged from beneath the kitchen counter downstairs and smelled the faint aroma of coffee.
Lance swung his feet to the floor, and for a moment he knew that something was wrong but couldn’t put his finger on it. It felt like walking out of the grocery store after forgetting your list at home, knowing you were leaving something key behind in the aisles. The dream from the night before came rushing back with all its splendor and queasiness slid through his stomach once again. He let the images run through his mind on a high-speed reel, not letting any stay for more than half a second. The film ended and he breathed out, trying to dispel the tension he felt gathering in his chest.
“Nope, not
gonna
spend another morning like this,” he said to the empty room, as he heard Ellen turn on the flat screen in the living room. Absentmindedly, he opened his mouth wide and moved his jaw to the left. A loud snap echoed in the room and his jaw loosened considerably. He reached up with one hand and rubbed the right side of his face as the pain that was a constant morning companion faded away.
Sloughing off the remnants of sleep and nightmare, Lance walked to his bathroom and flipped on the powerful showerhead in the large stall. The satisfyingly normal sound of the water hitting the tile comforted him, and by the time he stepped into the hot spray, he had begun to feel better.
After toweling off and dressing in a pair of light shorts and his favorite cut off T-shirt emblazoned with the words
Hell waits for no man
in archaic script, Lance opened the door to his bedroom and bounded down the carpeted stairs outside.
The house sprawled out around him in nearly every direction. It was as open as a floor plan could get. When it had been built, he had made sure there were no narrow halls or rooms that felt small or confining. Instead each and every space in the house was airy and light.
Lance stepped off the last stair and turned into the open kitchen outlined by two perpendicular stone counters. Ellen leaned against the far edge of the counter housing the sink and dishwasher, sipping a cup of coffee. He could see her blue eyes above the cup’s rim through the steam. Her blond hair was pulled up tight behind her head, and she wore the skirt and blouse she had arrived in yesterday afternoon.
Here we
go,
he thought as he put on his best “good morning” smile and sat on the edge of the nearest stool. Ellen finished sipping her coffee and lowered the cup to reveal a mouth that was prettily pink, but unsmiling. She turned and set her coffee down near the sink to tend to a hot pan on the stove. Her movements were jerky as she scraped a well-done egg off the bottom of the nonstick pan and
flopped
it onto a nearby plate, next to a solitary piece of turkey bacon. She set the plate in front of Lance with a bang, and he feared for a moment the impact with the stone countertop had snapped the glass into pieces.
“Breakfast,” she said as she turned and began to cross the kitchen back to the refuge of her coffee cup.
“Ellen, what’s wrong?” Lance
asked,
his voice low.
Ellen responded by snorting air out of her nose as she picked up her cup. God, he hated it when she did that.
“What’s wrong? Lance, if you really have to ask that, we have more problems than I thought.” Lance raised one eyebrow but remained silent. Sometimes silence answered questions that hadn’t yet been asked. “I heard you in the bathroom last night, throwing up. You had that nightmare again, didn’t you?”
Lance exhaled and stared down at his plate. The one egg and slice of turkey bacon seemed so pathetic and small that he nearly broke out into laughter, but instead tried to follow the well-worn track he had taken all the times before. “I had a dream. It was a bad one, yes, but just a dream.” Ellen rolled her eyes and sipped angrily at her coffee, as if it were the one holding things back. “It’s nothing, can’t we just have a nice breakfast together and figure out something fun to do today like we’d planned?”
“Yeah, that’s typical Lance. Just shove things aside and do something else. That’s how you function. Have you ever actually been to a therapist?”
The words drove down into his stomach and sent runners of guttural anger radiating outward. He breathed in, trying to calm the rage that bloomed in the back of his mind. “Yes, Ellen. I’ve been to a therapist. I told you that before. I also—”
“You told me just what you wanted to tell me, and nothing more. You’ve never told me anything about your past. Do you not think I’m worthy? Is that it?”
“No, that’s not it. I told you before, it’s a pretty sensitive thing with me and I’m just really not ready to open up about it yet.”
Ellen stood with her arms crossed, running her tongue over her front teeth, something she did when she was irritated. Lance had once watched her do it for an hour when their flight to
Colorado
had been delayed unexpectedly. He had wondered then if she would rub her teeth right out of existence.
“Andrew knows though, huh.”
“Yes, Andy knows. He’s also my oldest friend. Please don’t take offense to this. Can’t you just leave it alone until I’m ready to talk about it?”
“We’ve been together for over six months. We’ve been sleeping together for five. How long do you need to wait?”
“Why do you care so much?” Lance said, raising his voice several decibels. Ellen’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t regret letting her know how he felt. He was through being badgered.
“I care about
you
,” she said, the tone of her voice saying anything but. “How am I supposed to understand when you won’t tell me anything?”
“You care about being in control, nothing more,
nothing
less. If you can’t have it, you rage against it,” Lance said, finally losing the battle in caging off the anger. Ellen’s eyes widened in surprise, and Lance knew then that he’d gone too far. Not by saying anything wrong, but by putting his finger directly on the truth.
She turned and dumped the remainder of her coffee into the sink and walked past him to the entry. Lance sat for a few seconds, not looking at her, not wanting to. Finally, he felt reason wade its way into the chest-deep fury of his thoughts and try to calm him.