by Joe Hart
His hand grasped the shifter and slammed the SUV into drive. The tires caught on the pavement with a tearing sound, and the Land Rover leaned dangerously to the right as he floored the gas and aimed the car out of the empty lot. He had time to register several blue uniforms exiting the building, their arms waving in frantic motions, but he locked his eyes on the drive before him.
The first raindrop, fat and heavy, splattered against the windshield as he swung the vehicle left out of the driveway and pushed the accelerator to the floor.
Chapter 11
“Coincidences are nightmares come to life.”
—Unknown
Mary looked up from the words on the page before her when she heard the light tapping sound. For a few puzzling seconds she thought the sounds were coming from behind her, knowing full well that she was the only one in the store. The rows of books sat inert around her, and it was only when she raised her eyes to the windows on the far side of the room that she noticed rain speckling the glass. The storm that had held its humid palm over the area all morning was finally releasing a squall of moisture and wind. Mary watched the maple tree just outside the window, its leaves already turned an array of vivid oranges and yellows, bend back and forth. She saw several leaves fly off, no longer able to hold their moorings with the weather, and disappear from sight. Her mind turned to Lance, and she wondered if he was faring any better than the leaves.
She still didn’t truly know what to make of the man. She felt something for him that had been absent in her last two relationships. She couldn’t quite express it, but the vulnerability that floated just beneath the surface when he spoke to her was what intrigued her the most. If there ever was another person crying out for help without actually doing so, Lance Metzger was it. The way his eyes fluttered away from hers like he was trying to control and make sense of a thousand thoughts at once. The words he’d spoken the night on the shoreline had nudged something inside of her. Something cold and hard that she hadn’t thought anyone else understood. She could think of dozens of reasons not to see him again, but they all paled in comparison to the idea that he might be able to fathom who she truly was—and that he wanted to.
The phone jangled a few inches from her elbow, and she recoiled from it as if it had bitten her. She reached out a hand, and studied a number she didn’t recognize before answering.
“Stony Bay Books.”
“Mary.”
“Lance?”
“Yes. Could you come to the house as soon as you can?”
“Um, sure. Is something wrong?” Mary asked.
“No, I just want to show you something.”
“Okay, I can be there in a half-hour.”
The line went dead in her hand, and she stared at the phone as if it would expel an answer somehow. She hung up, the urge to call the number back almost irresistible. Her brow wrinkled as she sat back in her chair. His voice had sounded strange. At one point she thought she had heard a zipping sound, like someone closing a coat in the background.
Mary frowned as she made her way to the front door, stepped outside, and locked it. The wind around her felt warm and was peppered with drops of rain.
As she ran toward her car, she felt anticipation. Perhaps Lance had made a breakthrough in the investigation of his past. Or perhaps he just wanted to see her. She hoped that it was the latter, as she backed her car away from the curb and set off into the deepening dusk of the afternoon.
The same infuriating tone issued out of the phone and into Lance’s ear as he pressed it tighter, crushing the cartilage against the side of this head. There was a pause, and then Ellen’s voice began speaking in the casual way he had heard a hundred times. “You’ve reached Ellen. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you …”
Lance punched the end button and threw the device onto the seat beside him. Both hands gripped the steering wheel, and he glanced at the speedometer, not because he cared if he was speeding but to make sure he hadn’t dropped below eighty miles per hour. The needle hovered just under the ninety mark, and he braked to take the inside lane on a sharp curve.
He scanned the streets of Stony Bay as he tore through the sleepy town. Ellen’s silver Trailblazer wasn’t in any of the parking spaces along the narrow street. After passing the city limits, he hoped—foolishly, he knew—he would see her car on the side of the road around the next bend, a flat tire sinking its frame to one side or steam rising from its hood. Only the black glaze of wet pavement and an occasional lightning flash met his eyes after each turn.
Sweat trickled down the sides of his face, and every so often he could feel a drop fall away from the bottom of his chin. His eyes remained focused on the rain-slicked road, his concentration only breaking to check his speed.
Thoughts slithered to the edges of his mind. What if she’s already there and I’m too late? What if the things in the house that once were my father and grandfather met her at the door and pulled her inside? I locked the door on the way out, didn’t I?
The driveway came into sight.
As he turned in, water spraying from the wheels, he searched the mud for other tire tracks, but the rain had battered the soil into a meaningless jumble of puddles and divots. Dead leaves covered the breadth of the drive in a carpet of crimson and orange. The wind pushed the trees to their breaking points and then relinquished them, only to force them down again with a renewed vigor.
The Land Rover roared into the final curve, and Lance blinked at what he had glimpsed through the trees. For a moment he thought he’d seen two vehicles parked before the house, but the shafts of the swaying trees must have thrown his vision off. The last patch of oaks receded from his side view and his breath snagged in his throat.
Ellen’s vehicle sat just where he’d imagined it, the rain spraying off of its roof and sliding down its darkened windows. But the rusty pickup truck parked ahead of it should not have been there.
“Oh God, John,” Lance whispered as he drew even with the Trailblazer. There were no figures behind the glass of either car—he hadn’t expected there to be. His eyes landed on the front door.
It was open.
He waited. The Land Rover hummed around him and runners of water kept obscuring the view through the passenger window. Just leave, the voice said. Just drive away. This isn’t your fight anymore. You didn’t ask Ellen to come here, and John’s fate was sealed as soon as he laid eyes on you. Don’t go into that house and see what you know you’ll see. Put the car in drive and just go. Try to forget and maybe someday you will.
It felt as though an electric cable had been stripped and set loose inside him. He thrummed with indecision, but as his hand touched the keys and twisted the vehicle into silence, he knew that there would be no leaving what lay in the house behind. His imagination would never let him rest. Horrific vistas would appear each time he closed his eyes, blood-soaked corpses of people he once knew. Perhaps he’d eventually tell himself that he didn’t know them, that it was all a story he’d imagined. But figments don’t contain memories and ghosts always know how to find you.
The rain soaked him instantly as he stepped out into its stinging embrace. The lake drew his attention as he walked around the back of the Trailblazer. He had never seen it in such turmoil. A calm area could no longer be found on the surface. All was churning and boiling waves that frothed and seethed onto the shore. Foam flew into the air as the waves pounded against the exposed rocks, and for a moment Lance thought the water looked closer than it had that morning. Not from the turbulence that gripped it but just generally higher, a new line on the shore where it refused to relinquish its hold.
As he approached the house, Lance watched the darkened doorway for movement of any kind. He wished more than he ever had before that Ellen would appear with John in the background, smiles of the newly acquainted on their faces. Only an arc of lightning on the far side of the house revealed that the entry was empty, its space devoid of both living and dead.
The rain was a roaring inferno bu
rning atop the house as Lance stepped onto the tile just inside the threshold. He threw a quick look into the bathroom to the right and saw nothing out of place in the dim light. He pushed the entry door shut behind him while his eyes roamed the visible portions of the rooms.
A dark oblong shape sat just past the entry on the floor. It looked flat and had a radiant shine to it like oil in moonlight.
Blood.
Lance edged through the entry and noticed a scent that assaulted his nose.
Gasoline.
The cloying vapors were thick in the house, and some other odor hung just below it. Lance eased forward and peeked into the living room to make sure nothing waited just beyond the archway. When he brought his scrutiny back to the puddle near the kitchen, he saw the boots. They were pointed up at the ceiling, as if the wearer had decided that this was as good as any place to take an overdue rest.
A sinking sensation plunged down to the lowest point in his bowels and his throat constricted. They were John’s boots. He had seen them propped up on the edge of his steps many times over the past month, a beer in the old man’s hand with a story partially told in the air around him. As Lance inched farther into the room, more and more of the scene came into view. The boots were attached to a pair of dark pants. Above the pants a dark shirt lay hiked up over a slice of pale belly. No, he was wrong. He realized the shirt had originally been white, now that he could see the upper section near the shoulders where a few spots still remained untouched. But the rest had been colored black with blood. Lance stepped closer and knelt beside the caretaker’s still form.
A massive wound had been opened just above John’s left shoulder at the meeting with his neck. Lance could see the shattered white of the other man’s collarbone within the cavernous hole that stretched almost all the way to the middle of his chest. Blood had pooled there, a black lake filled with chunks of muscle and pulp. But John’s face had been left untouched. A few speckles of blood stained the underside of his chin, but his cheeks and forehead were free of gore. A gas can lay on its side farther into the kitchen, spilling its volatile contents across the floor and making the air nearly unbreathable. He could see the head of a lighter clutched in John’s left hand. Absently, Lance wondered what John had seen to drive him inside and attempt to carry out the plan that was now clear.
Lance stared at his friend, tears welling up and tightening his eye sockets with their pressure. John’s own eyes were mercifully closed, and as a stroke of lightning gave the kitchen brief refulgence, Lance noticed something that stopped the grief he felt rising out of control. An unmistakable look of peace graced John’s aged features. The worry lines that had been so prominent in life were gone from his brow. The etched frown that had creased the outside of his mouth was smoothed. He’s finally dreaming, Lance thought. The weight of life had been lifted from him and death had released a fist that, until now, had gripped the old man tightly.
Lance swallowed and placed his hand on the inner part of John’s forearm. He felt blood coat his palm, along with the coldness of uninhabited flesh, but Lance felt no revulsion. Instead, a comfort flowed through him. John was no longer here, but the feeling that he had gone somewhere else, past what life had done to him, was all but a certainty.
Lance came back to his surroundings and looked over his shoulder, expecting to see the flash of the ax blade falling toward him. The empty living room was still behind him. Where the hell was Ellen? He listened for a few seconds, holding his breath and trying to make out the familiar features of the house. He stood and walked into the living room. More blood covered the floor there. He turned and looked at the point where John’s blood pool had stopped. The two areas weren’t connected.
Don’t try to make it anonymous—it’s Ellen’s blood. Now you’ve killed two innocent people through your stubbornness and need to know. You can have that on your conscience. Great resume you’re creating.
Lance pushed the voice away but couldn’t help acknowledging the truth of the words. He could’ve left when things had begun to accelerate out of control. He could’ve done just what John had intended to do. He could’ve burned it to the ground and walked away. But he knew that it wouldn’t have freed him of what resided here. He knew that no matter how far he ran or how many times he told himself that it hadn’t been real, he would’ve secretly been waiting for the night when he would wake to see the massacred face of his grandfather hanging in the darkness and his father’s voice in his ears.
Lightning crawled across the sky just above the tossing waves of the lake, and Lance saw the stain beneath the fresh blood on the floor illuminate in its membranous shape. There were footprints trailing out of the fresh pool. They were the crescent outlines of bare feet leading away from the splattered floor. Lance followed them to the hanging shards of the door. They disappeared inside. A trail to follow.
Lance peered into the darkness, waiting for something to lunge toward him, but the gloom within was still. He could hear something though, an intermittent whistling. It sounded like the wind catching just right on a jutting piece of eave or hollow on the house and making it sing, but it came from inside the room, not from the storm outside. His eyes adjusted to the gloom, and when he leaned across the threshold, he could see that the space was empty.
He stepped inside and almost slipped in the wet slickness of more blood. It was everywhere. The wall near the doorway was spattered, and he could see the black edges where the fluid finally stopped near the far wall. His hopes of finding Ellen alive somewhere in the house vanished. She was here, but there was no way that she could survive with this level of blood loss.
One of the wide boards beneath his feet creaked as he shifted, and he started at the sound. He bent lower. A darker stain sat among the splatters. The knot in the floorboard held the distinct shape of a reaching hand. He heard the whistling sound again and turned toward the entrance of the room, expecting to see something standing there. The doorway was empty and the sound stopped. It had come from nearby, but he couldn’t pinpoint its location.
He turned back to the floorboard and looked at the hand embedded in the wood. His grandfather had put his instruments of torture below this board. He had kept them safe like a young boy’s treasures stored out of sight of parents’ prying eyes. He felt his fingertips sliding along the wet edge of the floorboard until they found enough purchase to grip. He lifted. The board moved, its edge coming free of its brethren. Lance pulled it completely out, exposing a long space nearly a foot wide in the floor. He set the board aside and peered into the gap, as Ellen’s bloodied face turned and leered up at him from below.
“Fuck!” Lance fell back from the opening, and heard the whistling of Ellen’s lungs pulling in a weak breath. The initial shock of seeing her there still reverberating in his bones, he leaned back over the space, his mouth opening in a silent scream.
Her legs and arms had been hacked from her torso and stacked beside her like cordwood. He could see the bloody stumps where the ax had cleaved muscle and bone alike. She had been stuffed into the space like a seamstress’s dummy, and somehow she was still alive. Her eyes bulged at him and her mouth worked soundlessly. The skin of her face looked waxen in the dim light.
“Ellen,” he whispered, watching her eyes blink. Her ruined torso began to spasm within the cramped confines of the hole and Lance reached down to try to pull her up from below. Her skin was sweat-slicked and cold, and as he struggled to find a way to pull her out, she stiffened and her face once more turned toward his. Her mouth opened again and her eyebrows went up. He leaned closer to her and waited. Waited, and began to cry as he heard the air expel from her lungs and saw a final shudder shake her body.
Lance released his hold from around her narrow waist and leaned back, his gorge finally rising in his throat. He choked it down and tried to breath, but the smell of blood was overpowering. It even held sway over the stench of gasoline that began to enter the room. The horror before him made his already taxed mind slip sideways, close to madness. He
had caressed the body that now lay in the floor before him. He had held the hands at the end of the arms that now lay in a heap along with the legs below them.
With trembling hands, he reached out to replace the board and cover what was left of Ellen. He couldn’t stand to see her this way anymore. The board had almost slid shut over the space when he saw the coil of a belt and folds of leather tucked into the far corner opposite Ellen’s body. He hesitated and reached down to grasp the sheaths. He could hear the padded clunking of the knife handles bumping together as he drew the belt and its contents out into the open air. He set the board down, covering Ellen completely.
He stared at the belt of knives sitting on the floor beside him and wondered which one had killed Aaron’s parents years ago. He wondered which one Erwin had grasped to part the flesh of his wife, and then his son. He wondered which one would slide through his own skin and end his life.
Gripping the belt as he rose, Lance walked across the tacky floor to the chair and hung the knives from the right armrest. He eased himself onto the cold surface of the chair and sat slumped forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his face in his hands.
A tumult of emotions coursed through him as he sat where so many others had before him. He imagined Aaron’s face, contorted with rage and sorrow before he pulled the trigger to end Erwin’s life. Then his mother appeared, her features obscured with the distance time created, but the feeling of her hands on his shoulders and her words still so clear, like they had been hours ago.
She faded into an image of John, staring out over the lake and the weight of his secrets hanging on his kind face. Then it was Ellen. He had loved her laughter and her energy, untouched by tragedy. The memory faded before he could see what lay beneath the floor a few feet away, and Mary replaced it.
