Lineage (39 page)

He stepped inside and almost slipped in the wet slickness of more blood. It was everywhere. The wall near the doorway was spattered, and he could see the black edges where the fluid finally stopped near the far wall. His hopes of finding Ellen alive somewhere in the house vanished. She was here, but there was no way that she could survive with this level of blood loss.

One of the wide boards beneath his feet creaked as he shifted, and he started at the sound. He bent lower. A darker stain sat among the splatters. The knot in the floorboard held the distinct shape of a reaching hand. He heard the whistling sound again and turned toward the entrance of the room, expecting to see something standing there. The doorway was empty and the sound stopped. It had come from nearby, but he couldn’t pinpoint its location.

He turned back to the floorboard and looked at the hand embedded in the wood. His grandfather had put his instruments of torture below this board. He had kept them safe like a young boy’s treasures stored out of sight of parents’ prying eyes. He felt his fingertips sliding along the wet edge of the floorboard until they found enough purchase to grip. He lifted. The board moved, its edge coming free of its brethren. Lance pulled it completely out, exposing a long space nearly a foot wide in the floor. He set the board aside and peered into the gap, as Ellen’s bloodied face turned and leered up at him from below.

“Fuck!” Lance fell back from the opening, and heard the whistling of Ellen’s lungs pulling in a weak breath. The initial shock of seeing her there still reverberating in his bones, he leaned back over the space, his mouth opening in a silent scream.

Her legs and arms had been hacked from her torso and stacked beside her like cordwood. He could see the bloody stumps where the ax had cleaved muscle and bone alike. She had been stuffed into the space like a seamstress’s dummy, and somehow she was still alive. Her eyes bulged at him and her mouth worked soundlessly. The skin of her face looked waxen in the dim light.

“Ellen,” he whispered, watching her eyes blink. Her ruined torso began to spasm within the cramped confines of the hole and Lance reached down to try to pull her up from below. Her skin was sweat-slicked and cold, and as he struggled to find a way to pull her out, she stiffened and her face once more turned toward his. Her mouth opened again and her eyebrows went up. He leaned closer to her and waited. Waited, and began to cry as he heard the air expel from her lungs and saw a final shudder shake her body.

Lance released his hold from around her narrow waist and leaned back, his gorge finally rising in his throat. He choked it down and tried to breath, but the smell of blood was overpowering. It even held sway over the stench of gasoline that began to enter the room. The horror before him made his already taxed mind slip sideways, close to madness. He had caressed the body that now lay in the floor before him. He had held the hands at the end of the arms that now lay in a heap along with the legs below them.

With trembling hands, he reached out to replace the board and cover what was left of Ellen. He couldn’t stand to see her this way anymore. The board had almost slid shut over the space when he saw the coil of a belt and folds of leather tucked into the far corner opposite Ellen’s body. He hesitated and reached down to grasp the sheaths. He could hear the padded clunking of the knife handles bumping together as he drew the belt and its contents out into the open air. He set the board down, covering Ellen completely.

He stared at the belt of knives sitting on the floor beside him and wondered which one had killed Aaron’s
parents
years ago. He wondered which one Erwin had grasped to part the flesh of his wife, and then his son. He wondered which one would slide through his own skin and
end
his life.

Gripping the belt as he rose, Lance walked across the tacky floor to the chair and hung the knives from the right armrest. He eased himself onto the cold surface of the chair and sat slumped forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his face in his hands.

A tumult of emotions coursed through him as he sat where so many others had before him. He imagined Aaron’s face, contorted with rage and sorrow before he pulled the trigger to end Erwin’s life. Then his mother appeared, her features obscured with the distance time created, but the feeling of her hands on his shoulders and her words still so clear, like they had been hours ago.

She faded into an image of John, staring out over the lake and the weight of his secrets hanging on his kind face. Then it was Ellen. He had loved her laughter and her energy, untouched by tragedy. The memory faded before he could see what lay beneath the floor a few feet away, and Mary replaced it.

Mary.

He could see her eyes, two emerald points, searching for something.
Looking for it, not in the outside world but inside of him.
As John’s and Ellen’s blood dried to red crusts on his hands, Lance felt the wall within him completely crumble. The seismic echoes of its collapse rippled through him, and he knew then what he must do if he wanted to be truly free of it all.

Lance sat up straight and placed his wrists in the open shackles of the chair. The cold steel met his skin and he felt goose bumps flow outward from those points. He breathed in and exhaled, trying to rid himself of the fear filling his chest and prodding his heart into a gallop. He closed his eyes to the room.

The shackles snapped shut over his wrists.

His eyes flew open to the sight of a fish-belly leg stepping out of the shadows at the far end of the room. Erwin emerged into the gray light. He was still naked, and Lance could see that his bare feet were stained red where he had waded through the blood on the floor. Erwin’s mouth hung open, his upper teeth rimming the dark hole, and his piercing eyes were locked not on Lance but on something to his right—the knives.

“My tools.”
Erwin’s voice was low, the Germanic brogue still evident. “You’ve brought them back to me.”

The ghost’s eyes flashed to Lance’s face, and he felt a dread, so thick and palpable it nearly made him whimper, sink into him. Erwin’s eyes were the same as when Lance had first glimpsed
them—hungry
and longing—and now he knew why. The blood lust had been brewing for years, and now that it had been released on John and Ellen, there would be no quenching it.

Erwin shuffled closer and Lance could smell him. Putrescence of a kind he had never experienced before invaded his nostrils, and Lance felt his stomach revolt. He turned his head and tried to breathe as the thing that used to be his grandfather approached.

“We’ve waited so long for you, Lance.
So long for you to come.”

The words were soft and close. Lance turned his head and saw his father emerging from the corner of the room. The clothes he wore were familiar, and it took him only a moment to realize why. They were the same ones Anthony had been wearing the day the baler had swallowed and gnashed his body to bits in its steel innards. His father was nodding as he drew closer, a cold smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

“You really did it this time, boy. Got
yourself
in a spot.” His father stopped a few feet away and appraised him. “Finally listened and decided to end it, huh? Smartest thing you did since this started.”

Lance felt his hands tighten into fists. “It was the block, wasn’t it? You did that to me. That’s how you drew me here.”

Anthony’s pale face sneered in the dim light. “You did that to yourself, boy, just regular old writer’s block is what it was.
Would’ve passed away as easily as it came if you were someone else.”
Anthony bent closer to him and the same rotting smell buffeted Lance’s senses. “But we were waiting.
Waiting for our chance.
That writing of yours kept you just out of reach for years. When you had a gap in it, that doubt and fear started to build up, you know what I’m talking about.”

Lance remembered the anxiety he had felt sitting at his computer in his home. The cursor blinking on the page before him, without words to fill the empty space. His father was right. The fear that had gripped him was unnatural. A creeping sense that he had lost some intricate mechanism that kept the horror of his past at bay. That night the nightmare had gripped him and the block had become complete.

“You led me here. You showed me the house and the story,” Lance said. The pieces were forming a picture, and he was afraid of what it was beginning to look like.

“Just gave you enough to whet your appetite,” Anthony said. “A few things slipped through, like that boy my momma killed and that pretty girl you’re after. You took it from there. Came
runnin
’ like a starving dog.”

Lance looked past his father’s grinning face and saw Erwin rocking back and forth in anticipation, the permanent smile carved by his own hand and a malevolence that transcended time in the blue depths of his eyes.

“Why?” Lance asked.

Anthony threw back his head and laughed. It was a bass mocking sound that belied the ghost’s thin frame. It bubbled up from a fathomless place, as if his father’s body were playing host to a depth deeper than any cavern on earth. His laughter subsided and his burning stare came back to Lance.

“Well, that’s the question of all questions, isn’t it, boy? Why? Because it just is. Things just are and we can’t change them. We do what’s inside of us, and everything else
be
damned. You can’t change what you are, so why try. My father embraced it. Took me a while, but then I did too.” Anthony leaned closer to Lance and stared into one eye, and then the other. “I’ve been waiting in the dark for all these years.
Waiting for the chance to even things out.
To kill the man that killed me.”

Lance blinked. The words rebounded inside his head until he was able to speak. “No one killed you. It was an accident.”

Anthony’s white face became more skull-like as anger tightened it on the frame beneath the skin. “You don’t remember, boy. Let me show you.”

Before Lance could recoil, his father’s cold hand had grasped his face and he was falling. His vision faded into blackness, and he feared the ghost had blinded him somehow. But then his sight began to lighten and he felt a shifting beneath his feet.

“Stay right the fuck there. Don’t you move until I tell
you.
Understand?” His father’s voice rang out, and then Lance could see Anthony bend out of sight behind the baler’s surface.

Lance was standing on the hay wagon again and he could feel the sun on his head and neck.
I’m going to drift off now,
he thought.
I remember this. I imagined I was flying in the clouds, and when I open my eyes, he’ll be pinned.
But instead, the vision remained constant and he felt himself easing down to the bed of the trailer. Then his feet were on the ground, the stubble of the cut hay snapping beneath his shoes. He didn’t remember this. He heard his father cuss as he wrestled the rusted wire from the baler’s forks. Lance was moving around the end of the big machine now, and he could see his father pulling and wrenching, his back to the tractor. The Case chugged away in rhythm with his heart as he neared it, and he felt the steel, warmed by the sun, beneath his hands. He turned and looked at this father, bent over the baler’s open maw, oblivious that his son now stood on the tractor’s platform behind him. Lance felt the lever in his hand and looked down at his fingers clenched around the handle. He watched his father reach deep into the baler and grasp the last looping snarl of wire there. He pushed down and heard the tractor’s motor labor as the PTO shaft spun into life. The baler’s beater bar jumped into action and rolled his father’s hand tight within the wire. Lance pulled up on the lever and watched as his father swore and turned toward him.
This isn’t what happened,
Lance thought, as Anthony’s bulging eyes found him and widened as they saw his hand draped over the lever.

“No! No! Stop! Shut it down!” His father’s scream echoed in his ears, and he felt his hand reach for something.

He looked over and saw that his fingers had landed on the Case’s throttle. He shoved it open and the tractor’s engine roared behind him. The PTO lever was in his hand again, and his father was furiously yanking at his snagged appendage. Anthony’s eyes narrowed in hatred through the heat of the day and the fumes from the engine. There was no pleading there, but something else. Something
like
a promise.
I’ll get you.

Lance’s arm shoved downward and the shaft adjoining the two machines spun fully into life. The beater bar turned and sucked his father off his feet and out of sight. A scream met Lance’s ears so piercing that he felt his eardrums flutter with its strength, and then he realized he was screaming as he felt his father’s icy fingers release his face.

His vision exploded into spots of pulsing light, which ebbed into his view of the room and the two ghosts still standing before him. His breathing came out in hitching gasps, and he shook his head to clear it of what he had seen.

“You got me, you little shit, I’ll give you that,” his father snarled. “Had my back turned for a minute and then you were there behind me.”

Lance felt vertigo assail him and he feared he would pass out. “No, that’s not—”

“Oh, you did it all right, boy. There’s no changing what I showed you.” Lance felt the cold fingers squeeze into the meat of his shoulder, bringing him back to full consciousness. “You’re a murderer,” Anthony whispered. He released his hold on Lance and stepped back.