by Hart, Joe
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 s
een.
“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.
“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 liqui
d 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.
