Lineage(126)

“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.”