Lineage

by Hart, Joe

  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 sank 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.r />
  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.”

  John nodded in agreement, his eyes searching the lake against the glare of the water. Lance stared at the caretaker for few moments as they walked. John’s face had less lines than it had in days before. The caretaker wasn’t wearing his customary black hat and Lance realized his hair was combed. Something else was missing too, but he couldn’t put a finger on it.

  “I’m sorry, John.”

  John turned his head, a confused look on his face. “For what?”

  “For everything that happened to you because of this place and my family.”

  John’s lips pursed, and for a few seconds Lance thought that he might cry, but instead he merely smiled, something so sad it barely passed for such.

  “You know what keeps me going sometimes?” John asked. “Hope. Not God per se, but maybe something like him. Hope that someday I’ll see them again and that I’ll be forgiven for all my mistakes and shortcomings in this life. Without that, I don’t have much to get up for in the morning.”

  They reached the shoreline. The waves were gentle in the morning light, just a suggestion of what they had been in the storm the day before.

  John turned and put a hand on Lance’s shoulder. “You don’t need to be sorry about anything. Everything that happened couldn’t have been any other way, and questioning it will only nurture a little madness inside of you. I suffer every day, there’s no getting around it, but somewhere inside I believe that things will be righted. Otherwise, what’s this all about?”

  Lance smiled. The simplicity of John’s outlook tugged at him, pulled him toward something that he felt unfamiliar with. He had felt it when he knew that he would see Mary again and when she kissed him. There was a line drawn in the earth, and some lived on one side, while the rest lived on the other. The separation felt too great to step over right then, so he merely patted John’s hand with his own.

  “So when will you be leaving?” John asked, looking back out at the lake.

  Lance frowned, turning his head. “What makes you think I’m leaving?”

  “Well, you’ve uncovered your family history, which isn’t a pleasant one. You’re almost done writing your book, I assume, and now you’re sleeping in your car.” John’s eyebrows rose and he shrugged.

  Lance couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m not done yet. And I haven’t figured everything out.”

  “By ‘everything,’ I’m guessing you’re not just referring to the plot of your story?”

  Lance chewed at the inside of his cheek, looking over John’s shoulder at the large gazebo that sat several yards up the slope of the hill. “When was that built?” Lance said, pointing at the octagonal structure.

  John turned and surveyed it for a moment. “Well, I think it was about 1990. It was the second or third owner that built it after your grandparents lived here. Why?”

  “Just wondering,” Lance said, as he reached to remove his cell phone from his front pocket, where it buzzed like a trapped hornet. The number didn’t look familiar but he answered it anyway.

  “Hello?”

  “Lance? It’s Harold. You told me to call if I found anything. Well, I just remembered something that might interest you. Can you stop by sometime later today?”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour,” Lance said.

  “Great, I’ll see you then.”

  Lance thumbed the phone off and brought his attention back to John. John’s eyes were locked on the house. Lance followed his gaze. The front face of the building wasn’t as oppressive or menacing in the morning light reflecting off its many windows and slanted surfaces, but it still made him want to avert his eyes.

  “Looks like it’s waiting, doesn’t it?” John asked, his eyes glazed over.

  Lance looked at him, finally realizing what else was missing from the old man: the smell of liquor. Lance turned his head and stared at the house for a long time.

  “Yes, it does.”

  The historical building had only one man perusing its glass cases and cluttered tables when Lance made his way through the door. The man, who could’ve passed for Walter Cronkite’s older brother, gave Lance a short look over one shoulder before returning his attention to a display regarding the Korean War and the veterans from the surrounding area who had fought in it. The rear door leading to the kitchen opened as Lance neared it, and Harold stepped out holding an armful of papers.

  “Oh good, you’re here,” Harold said, turning in a few semicircles while searching for a sufficient place to set his armload. After resting the towering pile of documents on an unsteady three-legged stool, the older man turned and smiled at Lance the way an archeologist might after finding an undiscovered artifact buried beneath his porch. “Follow me.”

  Harold led him through another doorway in the main display room. A narrow hallway followed, and then they twisted left and down a flight of steep carpeted stairs. The steps emptied out into a wide basement that spanned the entire area of the building above them. The ceiling felt low and was sparsely lit with random banks of fluorescents every few yards. Each wall was fronted with towering shelves that held box upon covered box. A few folding tables were set up here and there, their surfaces covered with books and photo albums. Several shrouded pieces of artwork were stacked against the far wall, and Lance could even make out a row of early-model bicycles leaning on their kickstands in a shadowy corner off to his right.

  “This is our archival space. Any prior displays or information that isn’t pertinent to the public gets put here,” Harold said, walking to a shelf a few steps from the edge of the stairs. He hoisted a box from the bottommost shelf and hobbled over to a small table that had been cleaned.

  Lance approached the table as Harold lifted the cover from the box. Inside were dozens of leather-bound ledgers and a separate box no larger than a dictionary. “We received this from Dominion Inc. about twenty years ago. Dominion was the company that bought your grandfather’s shipping line after he died,” Harold said, lifting a ledger out of the recesses of the box and handing it to Lance.

  The leather felt cool and damp in his hand. Inlaid in gold lettering on the cover were the words Front Line Shipping Co. When he opened the large book, he saw that the thick pages had yellowed with time, but the writing and columns were crisp and clear, as if whoever had written in it was distinctly concerned with le
gibility and form.

  “Most of these are work ledgers. They have the day-to-day information about the employees, the loads that were being shipped, and whatnot. Dominion didn’t feel the need to hold on to them after they acquired Front Line, so they brought them to us. We did a display on Front Line quite a few years back, since it was the first shipping company in this area and a majority of the people here had worked for your grandfather at one time or another.” Harold’s eyes had taken on a shine that Lance assumed came from the vast knowledge of history held within the vault of his mind.

  Lance flipped through the pages, and then peered into the box. “How many are there?”

  “There’s a ledger for every year the company was in business, twenty-five years in total. Back then computers were nonexistent. Everything was handwritten.” Harold put his hands on the small of his back, stretching a knot there. “I figured you might want to see these, to give you a handle on the company your grandfather built.”

  Lance stared down the dusty tomes before him. Perhaps something of importance lay there, nestled in the pages, written by an unknowing hand, that would shed some light on what was happening to him and why.

  “Thank you, Harold. Do you mind?” Lance asked, gesturing to the table.

  “Not at all. That’s why I cleared this one off. Take as much time as you need, I have urgent business to attend to upstairs.” Harold widened his eyes and poked a finger at the ceiling.