Lineage (17 page)

She smiled and turned to throw her empty soup container away, and before Lance could stop himself, the words that were echoing in his mind slid off his tongue and into open air.

“Would you like to have dinner some night? I don’t want to seem like a creep, but I like talking with you.” Outwardly he tried to keep his face and body language neutral, while inside his guts writhed in nervous agony.

Mary paused at the garbage, letting the Styrofoam bowl drop from her hand. Her face was obscured by her dark hair and Lance had the urge to push it back so he could see her expression. She turned her head and looked at him curiously, as if he had asked her an extremely difficult math problem.

“I’ll think about it” was all she said before turning and walking out of the deli and around a nearby aisle. Lance stood where he was, running over the words he had used to make sure he hadn’t said anything offensive during their conversation. When their exchange became a muddled mess in his head, he sighed and followed Mary’s path to the coffee, wondering all the while if he would ever be able to work up the courage to speak to her again.

The yard came into view as he rounded the last curve of the driveway. The house stood monolithic and as intimidating as ever, but it didn’t hold his attention for long.

The grass had been manicured within an inch of the ground and Lance couldn’t see a single stray clipping on the surface of the lawn. The bushes on the edges of the clearing had been shaped into neat corners, but there was no sign of the man responsible for the work.

As he walked up to the front door, Lance marveled at the amount of work John had accomplished in his brief absence. He could only conclude that year upon year of familiarity with the grounds and tasks at hand had streamlined the process for the old man.

The house was quiet and the click of the lock in the front door rebounded back to him like a shout in a cave. Lance carried the small bag of groceries to the kitchen and placed the items into their rightful places in the nearly bare cupboards. He set a pot of coffee brewing, the lacework pain of a caffeine headache beginning to tighten in the back of his skull.

When his mug was full of the steaming brew, he sauntered out to the front windows overlooking the lake. A bank of clouds, thousands of feet high, hung above the northern edge of the shoreline. He could see the mottled reflection of the storm on the surface of the water, short spikes of lightning arcing through it every so often. The light began to fade from the sky, throwing the shadows of the house into elongated phantoms.

A loud bang issued from behind the closed door a few yards behind him.

Coffee slopped over the rim of his cup, painfully searing the skin on his forearm as his body jolted with surprise. He spun and stared at the door as the seconds stretched into minutes. His eyes began to water because of his refusal to look away from the door, or even to blink. He waited. Slowly, a sound returned. It rumbled and grew in volume until it hit a crescendo with another bang, this time above the house.

“Thunder,” Lance said out loud in the hopes of calming himself with his own voice. He looked at the door for a few more minutes, a cavalcade of disturbing ideas prancing down the main street of his imagination like a demon parade.

He turned from the door and sat down with his back to it, at his computer desk. He could see the last escaping rays of sun cutting through the edges of the storm as they reflected off the surface of the lake. Gradually, they were extinguished and a dirty sheet of light settled across all he saw.

The computer screen before him lit up with a new Word document, the whiteness of the page blinding in the storm’s dusk beyond. He focused his thoughts until they became a laser within his mind. The familiar feeling of the story’s path opening before him was overwhelming. The plot began to unroll like a carpet before his character’s feet, and details that had been fuzzy only days ago were now sharper than the edge of a razor.

Lance breathed in, set his fingers on the keyboard, and began to let the world inside him flow onto the page.

It was six in the evening when he paused long enough to glance at the clock in the kitchen. The storm had raged over and around the house like something alive yearning to pry its way inside. Light rain still fell, the drops from the darkened sky rippling the face of
Superior
in all directions.

Lance arched his back and was rewarded with several muffled emanations from his aching spine. There were two chapters and twenty-two pages of words before him on the screen.
Not bad,
he thought, as his stomach issued a gurgle of hunger and his bladder felt close to tearing. His own sensations were normally background noise when his writing flowed well. He recalled different occasions in the past when trying to finish a novel, the ending rushing up to him, the call of nature and his thirst the only things that could divert him from his keyboard for a few moments.

His recent session had been a new level as far as immersion in the story was concerned. He had never felt so close to a character, nor had the plot been so clear before. His nerves thrummed with excitement even after nearly six hours of work, and the compulsion to continue called to him above the complaints of his body.

Reluctantly he saved the draft, hesitating when the request to name the document appeared. He typed two words and closed the page, exhaling a sigh of contentment between his lips.

He stretched again, and went to relieve himself in the downstairs bathroom. When he finished, the hunger pangs that had been slight earlier took on a life of their own and commanded food immediately. He rummaged through the refrigerator until he had cobbled a meal together from leftovers. He ate in silence at the small counter in the kitchen, listening to the patter of rain on the nearby alcove and relishing the sense of creation that washed over him in warm waves. The story was good. Better than he had guessed it would be. He now felt no guilt in asking Andy to give him space and time to produce something grand. He felt triumphant—his talent hadn’t died two months ago as he had feared. It lived and breathed in the pages he had written that afternoon.

After finishing his overdue dinner and cleaning the few dishes scattered on the counter, a crushing fatigue draped across his shoulders and all his thoughts began to revolve around the bed waiting upstairs.

His cell phone chirped at him from his nightstand above, its electronic cry like a bird being crushed beneath a heavy boot. Lance didn’t hurry to answer it. Instead, he
slowed,
hoping whoever wanted to speak with him would give up and try again in the morning.

Without bothering to brush his teeth, he walked into the room near the top of the stairs and undressed. The sheets on the bed were cool and welcoming as he slid beneath them. A peace he hadn’t felt in weeks fell over him, and as he slipped into dreams of his story, his characters started
speaking,
their words comforting like the sounds of home.

He walked down the stairs of the house. He could see the living area below him. It looked very wrong for some reason. The floors were no longer darkly stained oak. Instead, they were burgundy.

Lance stepped on each stair, each new tread feeling strangely more wet than the last. He could see someone sitting on a chair facing the lake. A storm was blowing across the water toward the house; spires of lightning and twisting clouds suggested high winds, but the house neither creaked nor groaned with the assault of the tempest outside. He could see the man was holding his face in his hands, as if he were abhorred at the sight of the approaching storm. Lance could imagine the man’s face frozen in a soundless exclamation, a dark O where his mouth should be.

“Who are you?” Lance heard himself ask.

The man didn’t turn toward him or even flinch at the sound of his voice. Lance wondered if he was homeless and had somehow wandered inside to escape the rain that would surely be falling soon.

The man’s arms jumped and his head twitched oddly. Lance stopped at the base of the stairs and stared at the now-jerking man before him. He suddenly realized that the man was naked, and Lance could see sinuous muscle ripple and writhe below the pale surface of the man’s skin as his arms worked back and forth, driving the hands at their ends in work Lance couldn’t see.

“Are you all right? Do you need help?” Lance asked.

The naked form before him jigged like a marionette on electric wires, the head rocking backward and forward. Lance felt the urge to run away from the figure. His feet seemed more than willing to turn his body around toward the front door, storm or not. Instead, they moved forward, bringing more and more of the man and what he was doing into view.

Runners of blood and tissue were leaking out from beneath the seated man’s hands. He made no sound as his fingers worked at the flesh beneath them. Lance’s stomach flopped and the dinner he had eaten earlier threatened to come rushing out. He could feel wetness creeping up his pant legs and wondered why if he had wet himself it was traveling in the opposite direction. But when he looked down expecting to see urine spreading along his pant legs, he nearly cried out in surprise.

The floor was slick with blood.  It washed around him as if there was a current beneath the few inches of fluid.

Rain finally began to patter against the large windows, but when he glanced in their direction, he saw the panes bleeding. Drops of blood spattered the house as if it were at the feet of a maniac butchering the sky.

A swallowing sound snapped Lance’s attention back to the man before him. As he watched, the man’s head turned as though on ball bearings, his fingers still clamped over the lower portion of his face. Blue eyes found Lance’s own, but there was no life there. Only the frosted milk of death looked out from the orbs, and before Lance could scream, the dead man’s voice punched through the silence.

“They did this to me.
The usurpers, and you too.
You did this. It all evens out in the end.
Water, blood, wine, time.
In the right light, they all seem to shine.”

The man dropped his hands from his face.

Below his eyes the flesh became a red-and-black pit of raw meat. Furrows deep enough to hide a penny in were gouged from the skin where his fingernails had burrowed their way through. Twin holes where there should have been a nose flared at Lance with corpse breath, and startling white teeth ringed in ragged tendon and dripping tissue grinned at him.

The teeth yawned open and the man leaped from the seat.

The cell phone beside the bed lit up and beeped as it vibrated across the surface of the table like an overturned insect trying to right itself. Lance’s eyes flew open and the scream that had eluded him in the dream cascaded from his open mouth. His breath heaved his chest up and down, and his eyes searched the darkness of the room. His mind finally began to relate what had happened to his struggling senses. “It was a dream,”
he told himself, nearly yelling over the images that still ran on a repeating track, replaying every horrifying second of the nightmare.

Trying to calm himself, he lay back on the sweat-soaked sheets of the bed and stared at the distant ceiling. There were no sounds in the house besides his ragged breathing, and when the phone reasserted itself beside him, he nearly screamed again.

Annoyed and cursing under his breath, he reached over and picked up the glowing square of light. A message from Andy was centered in the screen:
Are you okay? Tried to call earlier and you didn’t answer.
Just leaving a party.
Will call again when I get home.

Lance noted the time and composed a message, assuring Andy he was fine, while also telling him if he ever called or sent a text again this late, he would put his phone somewhere that had never seen the light of day.

The brightness of the screen blinded him in the dark, and after he sent the message, he noticed a feeling that had been building since he had woke from the dream. It raised the hairs on his arms with goose bumps and made his breath slow, and then
stop
. He listened as the phone dimmed in his hand. A moment before the phone blinked off completely, he grasped the feeling he had been trying to identify. It was the sensation of being watched.

The light went out on the phone’s display and a face loomed a few inches
from his own in the darkness
.

He had a vague impression of two wide, unblinking eyes before he cried out and swung a flailing strike at the floating face. His clenched fist hit nothing but air. Lance opened his eyes and stared frantically around the room, trying to find a deeper shade of black moving within the darkness. No shapes stirred, and the landing revealed nothing but the banister and the empty air beyond.

He threw off the covers and leapt from the bed. As he shuffled toward the doorway, every muscle tensed with adrenaline, he heard a thumping on the stairway outside his room.

Fear morphed into anger so quickly that he didn’t register the transition. Instead, he found himself flying out of the door and barreling down the steps after whoever had been in his room.

The downstairs looked darker than it had the night before, and without the light of the moon, harmless everyday objects became attackers. Lance crossed the living area and went out into the entry, fearlessly flipping on lights as he went. His rage boiled and frothed within him as he stalked from room to room, now looking for someone to unleash his pent-up wrath upon.