Lineage: A Supernatural Thriller

by Joe Hart

  The black folder of business cards sat right where he had left it, in the top right drawer of his desk. He flicked through the small pages and panic began to creep into his chest when the card failed to reveal itself. On the second, much slower, inspection, the card was there. The taupe lettering on the gray background was a familiar sight that filled him with conflicting memories of fear and comfort.

  Turning the card over, Lance picked up the phone from his desk and dialed the number written in sloppily scrawled blue ink. Beneath the number Lance could see the words day or night written in the same looping hand. The line began to ring and he almost hung up, but before the receiver had left his ear, the phone on the other end was picked up.

  “Hello?”

  Lance froze, his mouth half open, as he sat in his boxer shorts with the phone pressed to his ear.

  “Hello?” the voice inquired again, and Lance could almost see Dr. Tyler’s lanky form hunched on the side of his bed—probably a mirror image of himself at the moment—his eyes beady from the lack of glasses that Lance had never seen him without.

  “Dr. Tyler?” A beat of silence, and Lance winced as he read the clock’s accusing hands on his desk.

  “Lance. What’s wrong?” The 650-odd miles that separated them did nothing to conceal the concern in the doctor’s voice.

  Lance exhaled and rested his forehead in his palm. “Nothing … I mean, not nothing, I wouldn’t have called you at this hour for nothing. I just …” His voice trailed off and he pressed his lips together until they became a white line.

  “It’s okay, Lance. Are you hurt? Are you in trouble?”

  “No, I’m not hurt. I think I’m having some sort of night terrors or a recurring nightmare. It seems stupid now that I’ve got you on the phone.”

  “Tell me.” The doctor’s voice left no room for argument. Lance began to talk. The words spewed out of his mouth. He described the events of the past six weeks—the dream, the sudden writer’s block, his missed deadline, and the meeting with Ellington & Field. Dr. Tyler asked him to describe the dream as best he could, and as Lance spoke, the doctor occasionally stopped him to ask about a minor detail or for him to repeat a certain part, but mostly he was silent. When Lance finished, he sat back in his office chair and closed his eyes, listening to the humming quiet of the doctor’s bedroom in Michigan.

  “Well, my boy, this is fairly simple. Your writing becoming inhibited by the dream’s presence is easily explainable. Your writing, the words you put down in your books, has been your shield ever since you learned to put pencil to paper. It’s been your refuge. We made huge breakthroughs several years ago, and the anger, along with the feeling of helplessness, was well within check, correct?”

  “Yeah, the last three years have been really good. Sometimes, days will actually go by when I don’t think of him or my mother.”

  “Exactly. And furthermore, I think you’ve done your best work recently.”

  “What, are you a critic?” The doctor laughed but then fell silent again. Lance nodded to himself. “Yeah, I guess I have.”

  “You were finally letting go, Lance. Your past and your future were separating and you were moving forward, but I think somewhere deep in your mind you realized it.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying the dream might be a self-protection mechanism.”

  Lance leaned forward in the chair again, resting his elbows on his thighs. His forehead wrinkled as he frowned. “You think I’m trying to hold on to my past?” Lance heard the anger in his voice before he felt it and immediately tried to calm himself.

  “I think you’re consciously ready to move on. The fear you have of your anger, it almost falls into obsessive-compulsive country, and that’s because your real fear is being anything like your father. Your father was a sadist, at best; you are a gentle person. Your father hated creating things, and that’s all you do. Do you see? You’ve changed your physical appearance by working out so you wouldn’t even resemble him in stature. You are as different from him as a rock is from water.

  “Lance, you’ve told me things that would curl the hair of many a child therapist, and unless you’re withholding something major from me, you’ve let all the monsters out of your closet.”

  Lance sighed. “I haven’t kept anything from you, I’ve told you about every time that bastard hit me or my mother. How he liked to watch us in pain. He fed on it. Each time he beat either one of us, it gave him the energy to keep doing it. It was intrinsic violence at its purest. So no, I haven’t kept anything a secret.” Lance began to sweat again, the drops tickling his naked back like cold fingernails stroking his spine.

  “Please don’t get upset. All I’m trying to say is that somewhere in your subconscious you’re panicking because I think you’re ready to let go.”

  “Let go of what? I’ve vented everything that’s happened to me.”

  “Let go of it all. Of your hatred for a man so violently killed that the medical examiner did the autopsy in a bucket instead of on a table. Of your longing for a mother who disappeared, and the anger you harbored for her. Of the immense physical and emotional trauma you endured and overcame. Of your past, Lance. You can finally let it go.”

  The study began to blur as warm tears surfaced in Lance’s eyes. He breathed in deeply and released it, so surprised that he nearly laughed at the relief starting to ebb through his tangled nerves.

  “It makes sense. It feels right,” Lance said, his voice breaking. He could almost feel the doctor nodding on the other end of the phone, as he had done so many times before when a legitimate step had been made.

  “That’s because you’re ready. The writer’s block you have will pass. You’ll finish the novel, and the dream isn’t going to bother you nearly as much if you have it again. Personally, I don’t know if you’ll have it at all. If you need to, take a break or a short vacation to really come to terms with it. It’ll do you good.”

  Lance shook his head and smiled in spite of himself. “Oh man. Now you sound like Andy.”

  “Well, I always said he was a very intelligent person.”

  “He’s a foulmouthed Aspie that thinks he knows what’s best for me.”

  “Like I said, he’s a very intelligent person.”

  Lance laughed loudly and genuinely, and a smile remained after the laughter receded. “Thanks so much, Doc. I really owe you a lot.”

  “Lance, you were my first patient when I was fresh out of my internship. You were my favorite back then, and you still are today.” Lance’s eyes softened and he looked at his reflection in window across from him, the background beginning to brighten. For a moment he expected to see a boy staring back.

  “Sorry again for waking you.”

  “No need to apologize, but do me a favor and call me sometime just to chat. I want to know how your book ends before it’s published, okay?”

  “It’s a deal,” Lance said, laughing again.

  “Good night, Lance.”

  “Good night, Doc.”

  Lance pressed the end button and laid the phone face-down on the desk. He could just make out the looming silhouettes of trees in the growing light. His eyelids dipped slightly as fatigue, which had been elbowed aside by his terror a half-hour before, finally caught him firmly in an undeniable grip.

  He stood from the chair and made his way back through the house, turning off the same lights he had flipped on earlier. He paused at the base of the stairway and peered up at the unlit rectangle of his bedroom door. Instead of turning right and heading up the stairs, he went straight, into the sunken living room. He sprawled out on the large sectional couch and pulled a down comforter over him. Without so much as another thought, Lance looked one last time at the steadily graying light in the east before closing his eyes to the morning. As he gradually dropped into darkness, he heard the sound of scuffing footsteps, but they did not pursue him as he finally slipped deep into sleep.

  A muted chiming pried Lance’s sealed eyelids open t
o the sunlight-flooded living room. He licked his dried lips and tried to blink away the crusted sleep that scratched the corners of his eyes. The musical alarm continued until Lance sat up and looked about for its cause. By the time he realized that his cell phone all the way upstairs in his bedroom was the culprit of the noise, it had fallen silent.

  Lance sat up from the couch and squinted at the digital clock on the stove in the kitchen. “Shit, almost noon,” Lance croaked to the empty room. He stretched his jaw, as was his routine, and listened to the snap of tendons and bone. A deep rumble issued from his stomach and he felt hunger pangs working their way through his guts like thin knives. His head felt as though heavy syrup had been poured in one ear while he slept. As he rose from the couch, his phone began to vibrate and chime again above him. Lance stopped to listen to it for a moment, his head cocked to one side, before continuing to the kitchen to make breakfast.

  “Fuck it.”

  Lance placed the clean plate in the wire dish-drainer and wiped his hands on the towel near his waist. His stomach was overly full due to the seven-egg omelet he had consumed along with two pieces of toast and a glass of orange juice.

  As he climbed the stairs to his room to see who had incessantly called him during the morning hours, he had a sudden stab of melancholy. He mulled over the feeling, like a man rolling a misshapen rock in his hands, before realizing that Ellen might never climb these stairs with him again. He paused at the landing until the feeling became less poignant, and then entered his room.

  When he turned his phone on, the list of missed text messages and phone calls filled the screen. Most of the numbers had a New York area code.

  “E and effin’ F,” Lance murmured as he scrolled down the messages. There were two from Andy, both encouraging him in no uncertain words to call his publisher and basically set them straight, and five from Rashir Smith, the assistant to the executive publishing rights agent at Ellington & Field.

  Lance threw the phone onto the bed and made his way back downstairs without answering a single request. As he strode purposefully in the direction of the basement with full intentions of putting himself through a grueling workout, something stopped him near the door to the study. Lance’s eyes narrowed as he listened to the silence of the house. He had heard something. Something like a word, a whisper in the air the second before as he stepped toward the stairway. He shook his head and began to move again, but paused when he noticed another sensation.

  A slight pressure had begun to build in his head. It felt as if he were driving down a long hill toward the sea and the heaviness of the descent was pushing its unrestrained fingers at his eardrums. Lance stopped and turned toward the study. He half expected to see the room in shambles—the computer screen overturned, the books thrown from their shelves, and the knickknacks broken upon the floor. Instead, the room looked tidy, just as he had left it earlier that morning.

  The pressure abruptly intensified.

  The chair before his desk was turned toward the door, empty and inviting. Lance found himself sitting before he realized he had crossed the space from the dining room to the study. The black screen sat before him. He stared at it, dropping into the depths of the darkness that the pixels held. His hand reached up and moved the mouse on its pad. The screen blazed into the white light of a blank page. He didn’t remember leaving a Word document open. The cursor blinked mindlessly at him from the upper left corner of the page—a warning, a whisper, a curse, a hunger. His fingers touched the keyboard. He began to write.

  Lance awoke, his hand and arm pressed against the top of the desk, his forehead lying firmly against his arm. He inhaled and looked, wide-eyed, around the room. His chest expanded and contracted like a giant heart pumping air instead of blood.

  “What the hell?” he said to the spines of books on the shelves. When they didn’t respond, he swallowed and blinked at the afternoon rays that shone through the windows onto the desk before him. The computer screen was black again; the memory of sitting in the chair earlier drifted back to him. He reached forward and then froze, his hand hanging motionless over the mouse. He had dreamt it, certainly.

  “Doesn’t hurt to check,” he said as he shoved the mouse across its pad.

  The black Times New Roman text contrasted against the white of the page. The sight stopped Lance’s breath. Words. He hadn’t seen his own written words on this screen in over six weeks. They stunned him to the point that his eyes couldn’t focus on what they said. Instead, he saw a short rectangular paragraph, and it was beautiful in a way that he could barely describe. He was sure even a man dying of thirst and looking upon a sweating glass of water couldn’t have more desire than he did now staring at the words on the screen. His eyes finally started to recognize the words of the first sentence, and he began to read.

  The structure loomed above him like a beast bent on murder. It wasn’t a home, but a house. Nothing so cold could ever be considered a home. There was grief here, old and new. The old he didn’t yet know; the new he himself brought. The gray waters of Superior were stark beyond the stone walls and they offered him no comfort. Each wave was only another moment of suffering, a barb in the flesh of his soul.

  Lance read the words four times, small bursts of ideas showering down in the corners of his mind. He could see the house on the shore, each detail becoming focused, like a photographer twisting the lens of his camera.

  “It’s rough-hewn stone, big pieces,” Lance said, rising from the chair and looking out across the flat green of his backyard. “Two stories with two huge bay windows facing the lake. The upper floor is stick-built.” He turned and walked, as if in a trance, into the hall near the empty dining-room table, and stopped with one hand resting on the back of a chair. “There’s a gazebo near the water.” He continued, nodding to himself as he walked away from the table into the living room. “With a fireplace, I think.”

  Lance stopped walking, leaned against the kitchen counter, and blinked at the floor beneath his feet. For nearly two minutes he tried to come to terms with what had happened. When he approached the events in his mind, a barricade of reason came up to shield whatever truth lay beyond, and he was left with the image of the house sitting on the shore of the gray lake, silent and alone. Although the pictures in his head were disembodied and without purpose, the words on the screen in his study were undeniable.

  “That’s a beginning,” he said aloud to the empty house.

  Lance moved toward the study again, convinced that the writing would be gone when he arrived. But when he stopped in the doorway to the room, the words were still there. They floated on the screen, their presence indisputably real.

  Without hesitation, he walked to the computer and sat in the chair. A cluster of nesting-doll ideas giving birth to one thought after another. With a click of the mouse, he pulled up Google Images and typed a few words into the search bar. The processor hummed assuredly for just under a second before the screen lit up with square blotches of color pictures. Lance’s heart began to pick up speed. He could hear the blood rushing in quick pulses in his ears as he scrolled down the page past picturesque buildings and landscapes alike. He studied each one, searching for something that surely didn’t exist. On the last roll of the scrolling wheel, the end of the page appeared and Lance’s breath ceased while his heartbeat stuttered and then double-timed its pace.

  The house he had seen in his mind was the third to the last picture on the bottom edge of the page. The picture had been taken from a boat a short distance from the shore. Even from the position and angle the picture had been taken, Lance could tell it was the same building. White rollers could be seen in the base of the picture, and the darkened sky overhead confirmed that a storm was pushing its way across the lake. The house sat on a short rise, its two bay windows jutting out like bulging eyes, as if a horrible event was occurring beyond the photographer. The gazebo was just where Lance had pictured it, the hexagon-shaped building a few yards off the closest point of the house, mere steps from the roc
ky shoreline. The house itself had a base of large gray stone that ran up to the second story. From that point the construction consisted of logs stained a deep brown. The gables were also framed in wood of the same color, only smaller and hung just below a steeply pitched roof that reminded him of European Gothic churches. A spacious area was cleared around the house, what could actually be called grounds when paired with the huge home that sat upon them. There was only one feature that Lance didn’t recognize: a glass alcove added on to the house. The small area that jutted away from the structure was crisscrossed with black supports for the panels of glass and had a sweeping curve where it met the outside wall at the top, some ten feet from the ground.

  Lance sat back from the computer and stared at the image. A soft whisper made him turn his head toward the hall outside of the room. He stared, waiting for movement or another sound that might give away what was there. Unnerved, he stood as quietly as he could and tiptoed across the study to the door. He listened for a full minute before breaking the silence.

  “Hello?” His voice sounded calm and reassuringly clear in the quiet of the home. There was no response and no further noises. When he sat back down in the chair at the desk, an idea struck him like a mallet. He reached out and moved the mouse so that the arrow on the screen hung directly over the picture of the house, and clicked.

  A website opened behind an enlarged version of the picture. A banner at the top of the page that read Open Water Realty rippled with clever animation, and Lance could see text of a real-estate listing disappearing behind the picture in the middle of the screen. He closed the picture and started to read the description. His heart began to snare-drum in his chest once again, and he double-checked the date of the listing in the upper right-hand corner of the page. His hand left the mouse and grasped the phone that lay a few inches to the right. His numb fingertips dialed the number that blinked hypnotically on the bottom of the screen. Just ask for Carrie! jumped out at him as he placed the receiver to his ear and listened to the first ring.