Lineage(123)

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.