Lineage (32 page)

Before he’d realized it, he had circumnavigated the chair and had come to rest where he’d started. Lance looked toward the door. It hadn’t moved, but something caught his eyes as he swung the light back toward the chair.
The floor.
He retreated a few steps and swung the beam back and forth. The wood looked darker around the chair, almost black compared to the rest of the house’s deeper bronze. A feeling began to form in his stomach, like a cold-water pipe had burst there.

Lance moved his light farther away from the chair. The floor’s color lightened. He walked to the far end of the room. The floor darkened directly behind the chair. Lance licked his lips, an idea taking shape. He felt his heart slam harder within the confines of his chest. He knelt behind the chair, laying the shotgun beside him. Slowly, he leaned forward, bringing his face closer to the floor.

His nose was an inch away from the wood when he smelled it—the distinct tang of rust and copper. He sat up, wondering if he’d imagined it. The thought hadn’t seemed possible, but now he actually smelled it—blood. The wood around the chair was stained with blood. The wood had gathered it there, sucking it thirstily, and somehow held its faint but unmistakable aroma for as long as the door had been shut.
Years, at least.

A sound broke his reverie. He sat up, looking toward the door, his ears perked and his eyes wide. The doorway called to him with its light, beckoning him to leave.

The sound came again, and it made the hairs on the back of his neck
stiffen
. It had been the soft noise of air escaping the restrictions of a throat.
A sigh.
Pleasurable almost.
But the worst part of hearing the sound again wasn’t its cause, it was its location.

The sigh had come from inside the room.

Lance swallowed a knot forming in his throat and turned his head toward the far corner, where the gun’s light shone on a pair of bloodless bare feet. They were facing away from him, toward the corner, as if their owner had been sent there for punishment. Lance tried swallowing again and realized all of his saliva had evaporated from his mouth. He felt his hands touching the hard stock of the shotgun, his eyes never leaving the feet. The gun slipped into his hands and he raised it, sliding the light up the form that stood in the corner.

The feet were attached to equally pale legs lined with blue veins, and above them were the sagging buttocks of an old man. As he rose to his feet, Lance could see the sharp line of the man’s spine, the gun shaking in white-knuckled hands. Stooped shoulders rested below a scrawny, wrinkled neck. The head was almost hairless, just a few wisps of white visible in the powerful beam’s throw.

The naked man sighed again as Lance took a careful step backward. With the sound of Lance’s foot touching the floor, the figure in the corner began to turn its head, its face coming into view. The eyes were blue, but below them, all normality fled. The man’s nose and upper lip had been hacked away, leaving an aborted stump of gristle with two black holes still visible. The teeth stood out abnormally white in the harsh glare of the flashlight, and a mixture of sinewy scars meshed the gum line. The thing finally turned toward him fully, its skin hanging off withered musculature and a shriveled snub of a penis poked at the air amidst a nest of white pubic hair. His grandfather’s ghost took an ungainly step toward him, and Lance saw that a malicious smile had spread across the dead, ravaged tissue of its face.

Lance’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Erwin?” he whispered.

The ghost’s maw popped open and a wet moan threaded its way from between the exposed teeth. It sounded eager, like it had waited a long time to let him hear it, and the longing within it tempted Lance’s bladder to release. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he noted that the thing before him cast no shadow.

Lance finally turned to run, dropping the light from the thing that now reached for him, and looked toward the door, his salvation.

A hand gripped his arm and stopped his flight. The grip felt beyond cold, like frosted iron left outside on a January night, but it was also familiar. He hadn’t felt it in over twenty years.

He turned his head and saw his father’s face floating in the darkness, just outlined by the suffusion of light.

“Where
ya
goin
’, boy?” his father rasped into his ear.

Lance screamed and pulled his arm away. He felt his skin tear in his father’s grasp and he pitched forward, turning and bringing the gun up as he fell. The muzzle flash and roaring of the shot were simultaneous. As he skidded on his back, still in motion from the fall, he saw in the fire that flew from the end of the gun’s barrel that the room was empty.

His ears buzzing with the concussion of the report, Lance scrambled backward until he was in the light of the living room. The box of books had been pushed out of the doorway and now sat to one side, almost where it had before he entered the room. Lance’s chest heaved with panic,
lungfuls
of air discarded as soon as they were taken in. The shotgun still sat in his hands, the smoking barrel pointed at the dark rectangle before him.

The door began to swing shut and Lance’s finger twitched on the trigger. No shot exploded from the end of the barrel. In blind terror, he remembered he needed to rack another shell into the chamber, and did
so
just as the door met its frame and clicked closed.

Without another look back, he struggled to his feet and ran for the front door, snagging his key ring as he went.

He could feel something in his hand and he knew what it was before he looked. The knife gleamed in the light shining through the living-room windows. Its edge grinned up at him in a smile that said so many things.
Wonderful things.
It spoke to him, asking for something. He could almost hear its voice, a high singing sound of flesh unzipping. A clicking overrode the knife’s voice, and he looked up.

The door was opening again, but this time it held no fear for him, only anticipation. Lance felt himself gliding over the floor and into the room. The door shut behind him and he almost sighed with relief. He wasn’t alone here.

The room’s darkness didn’t impede his vision as he thought it would, and now he could see why. A large window had been cut into the far wall, giving the room an open feel and a breathtaking view of the lake. He could see a man standing knee-deep in the water, his back to the house. The window wavered for a moment, as if he were viewing it through high heat.

Something else had changed in the room. The chair now faced the window, and a woman sat bolt upright upon it, her arms fastened in the shackles. He didn’t need to see her face to know it was Mary.

The knife felt heavy in his hand as he approached her. Its tip pointed at her, as if to say,
Yes
, that one.
As her features came into view, he was surprised to see that she looked calm. Her eyes rested on the lake outside the window, and even though blood seeped from wounds on her ankles and wrists beneath the steel that held her, she sat placidly.

“I’m not the one you know. You haven’t found her yet.” Her voice sounded dead, like something filtering out of a grave. He felt indecision sway the resolve that had been so strong mere seconds before.

“Who?” he asked.

Mary turned her head and looked at him. “You know who,” she said, her form blurring as she swam in and out of focus.

Movement to his right caught his attention, and he saw that his grandfather now stood on the far side of the chair. He still wore no clothes, and his eyes never left Lance, who felt air brush his shoulder.

“You’re more like me than you know, boy,” his father whispered beside him. “Got that anger down deep where it burns. Let it out, it’ll feel real good.”

Lance nodded, the words making so much sense. The knife had become a part of his hand now. He couldn’t imagine ever letting it go; it would be like losing a piece of
himself
. He looked down at the chair and saw his grandmother now sitting before him. Her translucent crown of hair wavered around her, as though she were floating in water. Her mouth hung open, and suddenly, all Lance wanted to do was cut her tongue out so she had a reason not to speak. He started forward, the blade catching the light, and stopped when she turned her head to look at him.

He stared into his mother’s eyes.

“Please, Lance, don’t do it! Look out the window! Please!” It was fully his mother now. Her hair was just as he remembered it. She even wore the same faded sweatshirt and jeans that she had that fall night so long ago when they’d made their short-lived escape.

“She left you, boy. Up and left. You tell me if that’s right,” Anthony said, closer now, almost inside his ear rather than next to it. “I know you hate her. Just show her how much.”

Lance saw his hand ascend from his side. He now held a thick-bladed cleaver. If the knife had smiled, the cleaver grinned. He felt the hatred boiling over. Long years of regret and pain, tripping over each other to be heard first as they brought his arm up, up, up. His grandfather stared at him, nodding his approval. His mother’s wet eyes pleaded in silence, reflecting in the broad blade above her.

“Please,” she whispered. “Look out the window.”

Lance looked to his left, out at the lake. Gerald Rhinelander stood in the shallows, watching him. His blond hair hovered at the sides of his head. One arm pointed toward the depths of the lake. Lance watched as Gerald turned and sunk below the water, as if he’d been pulled under by something unseen.

“There’s nothing out there for you, boy,” his father’s voice said, but it came from a distance. His mother still sat in the chair, but now her head nodded up and down. A tapping drew his attention back to the lake.

Hundreds of wrinkled white fingers were scrabbling at the glass of the window. The hands they were attached to were spongy with rot. The fingers danced across the glass, intertwining and sometimes melding with another set beside them. They looked like white spiders crawling over one another as they tried to find a way inside. The tapping grew louder and louder, the glass shaking with their efforts to get in, to stop him.
To stop his arm from falling.
He was falling.

“Lance?”

Lance jerked awake, his breath burning in his throat. A scream vibrated in his chest, on the verge of cutting its way free, as he looked out his vehicle’s window at John, whose fingertips were still pressed against the driver’s-side glass.

Lance let the scream filter out in a breath from between his clenched teeth. Sweat poured from his body and his neck felt as if the vertebrae there had been replaced with broken glass. His stomach was too full, and he wished that John wasn’t there so he could lean out of the car and
vomit
its contents onto the driveway.

“You okay?” John asked
,
his voice muffled from outside the car.

Lance swallowed and nodded as he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. The muscles of his right arm ached with the movement, and when he looked, he could plainly see the rough outlines of wide bruises in the shape of fingers. There were a few scratches filled with blood where the fingernails of his father’s ghost had torn the skin of his arm, gory furrows as reminders of the night before. The shotgun still sat angled in the passenger foot-space, where he had left it positioned,
its
grip within easy reach. Lance unlocked the door and stepped out of the Land Rover’s stuffy interior. The crisp September morning air met him like a cold shower and he breathed it in as John moved back to give him room. Lance shut the door and leaned against the car, rubbing his aching neck with one hand, his eyes shut against the sunlight that filled the yard.

The nightmare began to fade, but the feeling of the knife in his hand remained. He wiped his palms on his jeans and tried to disassemble the dream into something coherent. What had he felt as he was about to slash his own mother with a blade? His stomach flipped again as he remembered the urge to do it. To cut her and let all of the hatred he felt for her release in one fell swoop. He shuddered.

“You okay?” John repeated
,
examining Lance’s rumpled clothes and the bags below his.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Jesus, son.
What’re you doing sleeping in your car?”

Lance sighed. The prior night’s events flashed behind his eyes as they had a hundred times before he had finally fallen asleep. He realized he could taste something too—blood. He wondered if he’d bitten his cheek while he dreamed. He didn’t think he could tolerate any other explanation right then.

“I had a bad dream. It had something to do with the house, so I came out here to sleep.” Lance watched a skeptical look cross John’s face, which changed to concern.

“Walk with me, son,” John said, motioning toward the lake.

They strode across the lawn in the direction of the expanse of water below, neither in a hurry to get there. Lance felt the air beginning to cool the sweat formed during the nightmare, wicking it away. He wished the horror of what he had seen would fade as well.

“I want to say again how sorry I am. It was wrong of me to keep all of it from you,” John said, not looking at Lance.

Lance glanced at the older man. “It’s okay. It’s just how things worked out. That’s how life is. One thing that leads to the next, and pretty soon you
have
a whole line of dominoes waiting to get knocked over.”