Lineage (40 page)

“You deserved to die,” Lance said. He raised his head and met the dead eyes of his father’s ghost. “You hated me because your father hated you.” Lance shifted his sight to his grandfather’s ghost, which merely grinned wider.

Anthony’s mouth opened, revealing blackened teeth and a decaying tongue. “I hated you because you were weak. I hated you because of who you were, even though I didn’t fully know yet. I hated you because you weren’t my own.”

Lance leaned away, physically pushed back by what the ghost’s words implied. “What do you mean?” Lance heard his voice, but it sounded far away and not fully his own.

Anthony’s face was a contorted mask of loathing as he stepped closer to him. “You
ain’t
my flesh and blood. I’ve never called you son, and I never will. Molly was barren, couldn’t have kids herself. We went to the doctor when we were young and she wanted a family. Fucker said it was my sperm that was the problem, but I knew. I knew deep down she couldn’t carry life. I could see it in her eyes. She was broken and worthless even when I first met her.”

Lance’s mind reeled at what he was hearing. His mother hadn’t given birth to him? The thing that stood in the room hadn’t fathered him?

“I was …”

“Adopted.
Yeah, she wouldn’t let it go. Said a baby would make us happy. Turns out you were just a curse.”

“Fate is just a circle,” Erwin said, moving closer. The words were garbled, and Lance could see the bloodless scars where he had removed a portion of his face. “What was set in motion that day at the end of the war was a loop that had to be connected.”

“What do you mean?” Lance asked. His eyes felt like they were going to fall from his skull as he shifted his vision back and forth between the stinking revenants.

“We never met the person we adopted you from,” his father said. “Else I might’ve figured things out and killed you on the spot. I never knew until the moment that packing arm cut me in two. Death showed me who you were. Your mother was a young girl from
Iowa
.
Had a baby out of wedlock.
Shame drove her from her hometown.
Shame of knowing that the man who fathered her child was a murderer.
The same man who killed my father.”

Lance stared at the dead thing before him. He felt thoughts begin to flow over his mind like water pouring in through a crevice. Not his father. Anthony Metzger was not his father,
Aaron
Haff
was. A feeling of elation bounded through him. The constant fears that he had been predetermined to be violent like the
apparition before him were
gone. No blood bound him to this family of secrets and murder. He was not of their flesh.

But just as quickly, the feeling of happiness was eclipsed by another revelation. His mother wasn’t truly his mother—Harold’s daughter was. A woman he had never met, and now would never meet. He was an orphan, cut free of his true family and placed within the nest of vipers his real father had set out to destroy so many years ago. Anthony’s voice roused him from his thoughts and pulled him back to the darkness of the room.

“Everything works out in the end. That old man out there got what was coming to him, and it was a nice surprise that
your
little ex showed up unannounced.” Anthony leaned closer to Lance, and he could smell the foul air expelled from his rotting mouth. “I just can’t wait to cut up your new flame.”

Lance looked into the blue eyes of the thing that was no longer his father, and watched them turn black.

“Oh yeah, she’s coming here for a little rendezvous. I can’t wait to carve her up.
That sweet skin parting over a blade.
And what tops it off is
,
it’ll all tie up so neatly. When the police finally show up after the place gets stinking bad, they’ll find quite a mess. Seems the famous writer went
a bit nuts
and sliced up a few people he knew and loved, and then slit his own throat here in this room.” The ghost came so close that Lance could feel icy waves rolling off its skin and onto his face. “And that’s how you’ll be remembered.”

“Kill him now, son,” Erwin said. The Nazi’s naked pale flesh jiggled in impatience as he pointed toward the knives hanging from the chair’s arm. “Avenge our deaths.”

Lance watched as Anthony reached toward the handles and then
hesitate
. Something wavered within the ghost’s eyes. The knives, Lance realized. The memories they carried were painful, even for the departed soul before him. The agony experienced by the man Anthony had once been held power even after death. Erwin looked from the handles to his son’s back, and almost lunged for them when Lance spoke.

“You’re still afraid of them, aren’t you?” His voice drew Anthony’s eyes from the wooden handles, and Lance stared into the black orbs. “Those things were the source of all your fears growing up. And not only when he strapped you in this chair and cut you to ribbons.
But before that, when you had to listen to the screams of men being tortured here in this room.
When you watched your own
mother kill
a man right in front of you.” Lanced didn’t drop his gaze when the ghost’s hands began to clench in anger. “When she let you be led in here instead of her.”

Lance saw Anthony’s left hand twitch and move toward the knives. He’d done it. He’d angered him and threw him off. It was now or never.

“I’ll hand it to you,” Lance said in a cold voice. “You know a lot about me, but you don’t know everything. Even if you kill me here in this chair, you won’t win, because I’m not like you. I don’t have hatred running through my veins. Your lives were wasted on a weakness that you couldn’t control, while I created things that people will enjoy for years to come.” He paused and stared at the bloodstained floor. “I found someone I want to love.”

Lance saw Mary smiling at him from across the table in the restaurant and felt the smooth skin of her hand in his own, and he savored the memory for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the two things were staring at him, waiting for his submission. Waiting for him to bow his head and expose his neck, and so he did just that. He waited two beats of his heart, clearing his mind of all thought, and then spoke, perhaps the last words of his life.

“But what you don’t know is that I unscrewed these shackles earlier.”

Lance jerked both hands up and listened to the mooring bolts sliding free of the chair. A surprised look flew across Anthony’s face as Lance’s hand closed on the handle of the closest knife in the belt and jerked it free. Lance swung the knife in a tight arc that his own eyes barely registered, and felt the blade bog down in the solidity of Anthony’s stomach.

He hadn’t known if it would work until that moment. The idea had formed after Anthony had grabbed hold of his arm in the room several nights before, leaving the bruised finger marks. Lance had reasoned that if the ghost had enough form to grasp a living person, then it, in turn, could be touched. The knives held a tangible fear and seemed only right for the weapon he could use, a talisman of sorts that could cut the flesh of the living and dead alike.

Lance pushed as hard as he could and felt the knife tear free. The ghost’s face hovered less than a foot from his own, and a surprised expression remained plastered there. Lance looked down and saw a long gash had opened just above Anthony’s navel area. He could see darkness between the parted white flesh, and for a moment it held like some sort of membrane.

Doubt flooded Lance’s mind. It hadn’t worked. The blade had passed harmlessly through this thing that had masqueraded as his father, and now, he would die and Mary would die just like John and Ellen had, along with his mother so many years ago. Then darkness rushed out of the wound in a gush of inky fluid that seemed to have both liquid and gas properties. It splashed to the floor, a darker
ichor
upon Ellen’s drying blood. The outer portions of the fluid hovered around the flow and crept outward, slower than its liquid counterpart.

“
Ahhhhh
,” Anthony began, his mouth hanging open like a broken casket, the smell of death leaking from within. The ghost’s hands reached to stanch the flow of the black tide that dropped between its fingers and continued to pour onto the floorboards.

Lance felt his own jaw clench and his fist tighten its grip on the knife. There was movement from Anthony’s other side as Erwin reached for his belt, but Lance was already swinging the knife again. He drove it backward in a stabbing motion, his thumb wrapped over the end of the grip. He watched as the point buried itself in the soft spot just behind Anthony’s temple. The blade barely slowed as it cut through whatever resided within the ghost’s skull and emerged from the other side. Lance gave the handle one last shove for good measure, and watched Anthony’s head rock toward his shoulder from the pressure. He released his grip on the knife, and the ghost’s body
spasmed
and the muscles beneath the clothing flexed. The same fluid ran out freely on the knife’s handle and tip protruding from the other side.

Anthony stuttered across the floor. Lance backed toward the doorway and looked on as the ghost
jittered
a strange step on the hardwood. The clothing Anthony wore looked different somehow. It was beginning to fray in places and pieces of it were floating into the air. Soon more chunks tore free, and Lance realized that it wasn’t only clothing that was vaporizing, it was also flesh and tissue breaking off like an aspirin in water. The pieces flew away and broke down further in the dreary light, until they were dissolved completely. More and more parts diverged from Anthony’s main mass, until it looked as if a small tornado of white flesh was spinning in the room. The ghost’s gaping face still sat at the top of the twisting clot, its eyes staring at Lance’s until they began to look past him. Lance watched as they widened, seeing something beyond the house around them. Utter terror flowed through them before they disintegrated too, and the knife fell to the floor, where it stuck solidly in a board as
a gout
of black fluid rained down around it. Lance thought he heard a scream echo in his ears, and then all was still.

Lance felt the wall press against his back and stop his rearward progress. He looked at the spot where the dead thing had stood, and watched as the last traces of the dark gas dissipated from view. A clicking noise pulled him out of his awe at what had just transpired, and he raised his attention to Erwin as the apparition snapped the last buckle home around its narrow waist. The ghost’s hands lowered to the handles at its hips, and caressing them with a fondness that nearly made Lance recoil.

“You were right,” Erwin said, as he took a step toward Lance and drew a blade out of its sheath. It was cleaver-like in shape, but thinner and threatening in a way that he couldn’t describe. “He was always afraid of these.” Erwin looked lovingly at the shine that issued from the edge of the knife. Lance pictured the ghost’s tongue extending from its dead lips to lick the knife’s curve, and shivered. “His mother too,” Erwin continued. “Their beauty was lost on them. They couldn’t appreciate their shapes or the blood they could bring forth.” The ghost convulsed in what Lance could only call ecstasy, and he saw the stub of a penis below the
belt begin
to stiffen.

Lance’s fingers clenched and released as his gaze dropped toward the floor where the knife stood stock-still, its point buried within the grains of the wood. The naked abomination across the room followed his sight to the weapon. Erwin twirled the blade in his hand around a finger in a quick flicking motion.
A dare.
Lance braced his hands against the wall, and then pushed off as he dove toward the knife in the floor.

Elation filled his chest as he realized he would reach the knife in time. His knees skidded on the bloody floor and his fingers closed around the handle. He began to pull up on the weapon, already seeing the path the blade would take as his hand drove it straight into Erwin’s thin chest, but then there was a burning in his fingers that were pulling on the knife. He yanked again, but there was something wrong with his hand.

He saw his fingers falling away from the handle as the pain ignited at the end of his arm. All four digits dropped to the floor, cut cleanly through just behind the second knuckles. Blood flew from the stumps that still tried to grip the knife. Lance pulled his hand back to his chest and stifled a scream of agony as he scooted toward the door, crab-walking with his good hand and legs beneath him. His eyes found his missing fingers on the floor, and he watched in awe as they curled reflexively like dying worms. The flat places that were left in his fingers’
steads
pumped blood in streams like four small garden hoses. The pain was immense, a throbbing drumbeat of misery.

Erwin stood holding the cleaver-like blade close to his face. A red line traced the cutting edge, and Lance watched as the ghost’s tongue slithered out from behind its exposed teeth to lick the blood from the steel. Its eyes closed, and then flashed open again.

“Just how I remember it.”

Erwin bolted toward him, his arm swung back. Lance jumped to his feet and turned toward the door. His shoes slipped and he cursed his legs. Every cell in his body reached for the opening, knowing what followed only feet behind him.

A burn of acid traced across the back of his neck. Lance stumbled through the doorway, his good hand covering his neck as he checked the damage there. He could feel only a shallow cut, and when he brought his palm to his face, a slight smear of blood coated the skin.
His dream.
This was his dream. He would fall soon and watch the vile thing stoop over him, and then he would die because now he knew that was why he always woke just before the light came on in the dream—it was death waiting for him in the darkness.