Inheritance

by Joe McKinney

  Anderson glanced at Paul, then followed his gaze out to the Morgan Rollins smokestacks. They were beautiful in their own way, the way cities turned to rubble can be beautiful.

  He went on. “After John died, my wife and I had a pretty hard time. I thought our marriage was gonna crash land. It didn’t, but it sure felt that way. One night, I’m sitting on the couch watching TV. My wife is in the bedroom crying her eyes out. Well, I’m sitting there, and this commercial comes on. I don’t even remember what it was for. I just remember it had all these kids in it, all of ’em about John’s age. I looked at the screen, and I swear to God, every kid in that crowd had John’s face. I felt like I was gonna die that night.”

  “I don’t see your point,” Paul said.

  “My point is this. I knew—well, I figured it out later, actually—that I was so emotionally invested that my mind was playing tricks on me. Lately it’s been happening to me again, only this time it’s Detective Bobby Cantrell that I’m seeing. He was my best friend, Paul. Aside from my wife.”

  “I remember you telling me that.”

  “Yeah, well, the reason I’m telling it to you again is because of what happened to me up there at Morgan Rollins.” He waited to see if Paul would say something to that. When he didn’t, he said, “But you know what happened to me up there, don’t you?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Paul said.

  “No, I think you do. As a matter of fact, I know you know what happened up there. That wasn’t a figment of my imagination I saw, was it? That wasn’t stress. That was real.”

  Paul inspected his shoes.

  “Nobody’s gonna believe you if you say a dead man tried to kill you, Detective.”

  “No, they won’t, will they?”

  “Nope.”

  “But you would believe it, wouldn’t you, Paul?”

  Paul looked at him then. His eyes had a glassy shine to them. He said, “Detective, I just don’t know what I believe anymore.”

  Chapter 19

  Rachel awoke around three a.m. to a miserable, suffocating heat. She had been sleeping with her knees tucked up against her chest, but now she threw off the scrap of covers still clinging to her feet, rolled over onto her back, and groaned. Her face was wet with sweat. Her entire body was wet with it. She was exhausted but wide awake, and she knew she’d never be able to get back to sleep now. She turned on a few lights and went into the kitchen wearing only a t-shirt and a pair of blue panties and fanned herself with a paper plate, trying to cool down. When that didn’t work she traded the paper plate for a glass of ice water and went over to her boxes of books. She’d finished Bruce Boston’s The Guardener’s Tale before she went to bed and it left her hungry for more science fiction, something dystopic and angry, like maybe Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly or George Orwell’s 1984, maybe even Paolo Bacigalupi Shipbreaker. She’d been meaning to read that for months now.

  But what she found instead was an open cardboard box, pictures and papers inside. Curious, she took out a stack of the pictures and looked through them. Not a one of them was familiar, though she figured the little white house with the rusted metal roof and rangy yard was where Paul had grown up. The man and woman in the pictures had to be his father and mother.

  One by one she flipped through the pictures. Paul had told her painfully little of his past, and what he had told her was primarily about his father. The only time he ever mentioned his mother, beyond what he told her the other night, was to say that he remembered her as one step above a vegetable. Someone who lived in the shadows, spiritually mired in depression. Looking at the pictures, though, she found that description hard to believe. The woman she saw was no vegetable. She looked strong, sturdy, and she reminded Rachel of the women from Louis L’Amour’s westerns. Here was a pioneer woman raising kids in Apache country, her face burnt by the sun, her hair tied back into a simple ponytail with a scrap of fabric.

  It was impossible to tell what year the photos were taken, though she guessed Paul couldn’t have been more than one or two in most of them. One in particular made her smile. It showed Paul—and God, he was a huge baby—sitting in the grass, wearing only a diaper, his mother touching the tip of his nose with her finger. Neither one was smiling, but there was still a warmth to the photo, a sense of love that was almost spiritual in its intensity. And then she caught a glimpse of something written on the back, and her smile dimmed.

  She read—

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  But they were fucked up in their turn

  By fools in old-style hats and coats,

  Who half the time were soppy-stern

  And half at one another’s throats.

  Man hands on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

  Get out as early as you can.

  And don’t have kids yourself.

  —and recognized it by its first line as one of Philip Larkin’s poems. That sense of a life filled with missed opportunities and the harsh reality that existence is mean and shabby and rarely lives up to its promises always left her feeling unsettled and a little queasy, and she had, as a result, steered clear of most of Larkin’s work. But she knew this poem, and finding it here, this poem especially, on the back of this photograph, made the goose flesh prickle across her skin.

  It was creepy, and wrong. What was it supposed to be? She could tell that the clean, gracefully looped letters in which the poem was written were those of a woman, and she could only imagine that Paul’s mother had copied it out here. But why? Was it supposed to be her apology to Paul? Or was it an expression of her own guilt and self-hatred in the face of a rising tide of depression that she knew would one day overwhelm her completely? Maybe none of that was right. Maybe it was a warning she left for herself, a message in a bottle sent out to her future self who perhaps might forget the elegant simplicity of this moment she shared with her child. Rachel felt her mouth turn dry. There were too many possibilities, and not enough clues.

  And then the picture moved.

  At first the movement was so subtle she couldn’t tell for sure whether she had really seen it or not. But the figures in the picture were moving. The woman touched the boy’s face and pressed the ball of her finger against his lips. Then she turned and looked straight at Rachel. Rachel wasn’t scared, though. If anything she felt dizzy, like she might fall over. She put out a hand to steady herself and blinked, and that was all it took.

  She was drifting…

  ***

  …into the darkened living room of a house she didn’t recognize. There was a kitchen behind her, small, dingy, the floor in front of the screen door discolored by years of brought-in dirt and mud. To her left was a narrow, almost tunnel-like stairway that led up to a closed door. In front of her was the main room of a country home. Disassembled machine parts were scattered around on the floor and on a few of the chairs here and there. She saw an ancient couch, the arms worn to a smooth shine. There was a box fan clicking noisily in the corner. A battered, man-of-the-house style recliner in plain brown fabric lurked next to the couch. The walls were bare. There wasn’t a book in sight, but there wasn’t a TV either.

  A sudden panic swelled within her. This was somebody’s house. Somebody lived here. She was in somebody’s house in the middle of the night.

  You get shot for that in Texas.

  She turned to run out the screen door, but it was too late. A man in a white, long-sleeved shirt, black pants, black boots, and a worn Stetson cowboy hat was coming in the screen door, carrying an armload of sticks.

  She screamed. Then she put up her hands, palms towards the man, and started babbling. “Please,” she said. “Mister, I don’t know where I’m at. I know I don’t belong here. I’m leaving, okay? I didn’t take anything. I swear. I’m leaving.”

  But the man gave no sign of hearing
a word she said. He didn’t even look at her as he strode through the kitchen, passed within a foot of her shoulder, and went straight into the living room.

  Rachel trailed off and turned to watch the man, for now that her initial terror had subsided, she realized she knew the man—and she couldn’t believe it. He was Paul’s father, Martin Henninger.

  But that’s impossible, isn’t it? Martin Henninger is dead. Has been dead for at least six years.

  “Mister, I’m just gonna—”

  He dropped the sticks and they clattered against the wooden floor. She half-expected him to turn around on her then and start yelling.

  But he didn’t.

  Instead, he dropped to his knees and picked up the sticks and put two of them together like a cross and began to twist some kind of wire around the intersection of the two pieces.

  It would have been the perfect time to leave. Every instinct in her body told her it was. Get out and go! Run as far and as fast as you can. But something held her there. It was the hypnotic speed of the man’s hands as they worked on the sticks, grabbing them seemingly at random, assembling something, something familiar—

  A lattice of sticks. Oh my God. Just like Paul made in our apartment.

  It seemed like the world had suddenly dropped away beneath her and she was caught in that terrifying moment just before freefall.

  Oh my God.

  A woman’s screams snapped her back to the moment. They were coming from her left, from the room towards the front of the house that she hadn’t seen until just then. And it was a horrible sound, a banshee wail of a woman angry and in pain and full of lunatic fury.

  Rachel turned in time to see a woman waving a huge knife in the air as she sprinted towards her. The woman’s thin, wiry hair was streaming out behind her. Her face was gray and emaciated, like a corpse’s face. Her eyes were rimmed with red and so full of craziness they were enough to freeze the blood next to Rachel’s heart. She was too stunned to move, too stunned to do anything but throw her hands over her face and scream.

  The woman darted past her and entered the living room, still screaming, still swinging that knife like the very air around her was full of devils and she meant to hack them all to pieces.

  The man in the black cowboy hat rose and turned on the screaming woman. His eyes had rolled back into his head. His mouth was open in a wide O, and for a single, incongruously funny moment, he reminded Rachel of Donald Sutherland in the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, pointing an accusing finger at Veronica Cartwright and raising the terrible, high-pitched howl of the alien hue and cry that announced an intruder among the faithful.

  But the man made no sound. There was no scream coming from him, not even a glimmer of surprise in his features. He extended one hand and then drew it back again as the woman—Paul’s mother, Rachel realized—slashed at it with her knife.

  She slashed again, this time at the man’s face. The knife whistled harmlessly past him, not even jostling his hat.

  He stepped forward and punched the woman square in the mouth.

  She crumpled to the floor and stayed there.

  “Don’t move,” the man said. His voice was cold, implacably calm. And it sounded so exactly like Paul’s that Rachel, for a moment, saw her husband standing there.

  “I won’t let you have him!” the woman said, though it was hard to understand her. Her mouth was full of blood and she was hysterical, practically spitting the words at the man. “You can’t have him!”

  “It ain’t your choice to make,” the man answered, still calm, unmoved.

  She slashed at his knees with the knife. He took a step back, and when he did, she jumped to her feet and slashed at him again and again and again, screaming as she did, “I won’t let him become like you. I won’t, you bastard!”

  Then she took off running for the kitchen. Paul’s father chased after her. He caught her just as she entered the kitchen and knocked her to the ground with a punch to the back of her head. The woman hit the ground, bounced up, and staggered backwards onto the stairs. The man reached for her, then dodged back to avoid another knife slash.

  “Don’t you do it,” the man said. “Don’t you go up there.”

  He stepped onto the bottom stair.

  “Don’t you do it.”

  Rachel heard the woman scream, “You stay away from me! I swear to God I’ll cut your fucking balls off!”

  And then he ran up the stairs, chasing after the screaming woman. Rachel walked towards the stairs, aware, on some level at least, that she wasn’t part of this, that the man and the woman couldn’t see her, didn’t know she was there. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked up. The door at the top of the flight was open now, and she could hear the woman screaming from somewhere beyond it. She could hear the beating that ensued.

  Feeling queasy with fear she climbed the stairs and stopped in the doorway of a young boy’s bedroom—Paul’s bedroom. The man stood with an iron hand clamped down on the back of the motionless woman’s neck. She was doubled over at the waist, arms hanging limp, a puppet in his hand. The beating had stopped. The knife was sticking into the floor next to the woman’s feet.

  There was an empty bed in front of the woman, the covers tossed back hastily, as though Paul had scrambled away from it at the last moment. Off in the opposite far corner was an old pioneer trash stove, probably eighty years old. Next to that was a wooden desk and chair, a small window above that, the blue moonlight pouring into the room. There was a child’s set of football shoulder pads at the foot of the bed and a poster of a mean-looking black pro football player on the wall and another poster of a blonde in a pink bikini standing in a hot tub, her hips cocked to one side, a thumb tucked under the waistband of her bikini bottom. The room was almost quaint in its juvenile simplicity, its perfect statement of what was important in the world from the eyes of a teenage boy, and the horrible domestic violence superimposed upon it was all the more terrifying in contrast.

  “You’re done, woman,” the man said, and dragged her past where Rachel stood and down the stairs, leaving the knife where it was.

  Rachel was near tears, watching the knife and listening to the sounds of the man moving through the house below her. She had never seen a man beat a woman so viciously before. She had read about it plenty of times, but never seen it, and she never wanted to see it again. So much cruelty.

  And then she became aware of a small, sad sound coming from under the bed. She took a few steps forward and knelt down and looked under the bed. Paul was there. A twelve-year-old Paul, curled into a fetal ball, his whole body shaking.

  “Oh my God,” she said, and reached out for him.

  ***

  But he was gone. The vision was gone. She was sitting on the floor, back in the apartment she shared with the Paul she’d married. She felt the heat trying to smother her. She could smell the dust in the air. She was back again, and the cloud was lifting from her mind. But the picture of Paul and his mother was still in her hand. She let it fall from her fingertips and it tumbled back into the box. She couldn’t bear to look at it now.

  “Maybe you’re going nuts,” she told herself.

  She shuddered. She couldn’t accept that. It had felt too real, the images too vivid and detailed to be anything but a vision of events that had actually happened.

  So then why those events? Why was I shown that nasty little scene?

  She walked over to the couch and sat down heavily. Her mind chased itself in circles. Lately the apartment had become so much of a burden. It was infinitely nicer than the little house on Huisache, and it had far more room than the Chase Hill apartment she and Paul had shared briefly after graduation, but none of that made her feel better about what she was looking at. The appliances would have been antiques in her mother’s kitchen. The floors creaked and groaned with every step. The traffic on the main road outside sounded like a marching band moving through her head. And of course there was that damned air conditioner. What a joke that
thing was. And, almost as if the apartment could hear her thoughts and was trying to add insult to injury, the lights flickered and then went out.

  “Damn it!” she shouted at the dark. “Come on.”

  She forced herself to think. The air conditioner burned out the fuses. Paul told you that might happen. Okay, so what do I do?

  Ah, the fuse box.

  The fuse box was in the kitchen, inside the pantry. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark enough for her to see the outlines of the living room furniture, and she made her way there, half-seeing, half-groping her way through the obstacles. She opened the pantry door and reached inside, fumbling along the wall until she found the latch on the far edge of the metal faceplate. She opened the metal door and reached inside and her bowels almost let go as she realized the switches were covered, not with hardened plastic, but with what felt like human skin.

  Not real not real not real not real, she thought, and threw the breaker switch.

  The lights came on. She drew her hand away and turned back to the kitchen. And walked straight into the woman from her vision. She was small and weak and sadness poured out of her. Rachel felt it like the smell of putrescence washing over her. Her hair was gray and wiry and uncombed, her face gray, the lips cracked and peeling. She had her arms wrapped around her chest, her body covered in a loose-fitting yellow house dress that made her look like a beanpole with a sack on it.

  Rachel covered her face and screamed. She fell backwards into the pantry, landing on the trash can, spilling a wall of cans onto the floor and into her lap.