Lineage(41)

A slight pressure had begun to build in his head. It felt as if he were driving down a long hill toward the sea and the heaviness of the descent was pushing its unrestrained fingers at his eardrums. Lance stopped and turned toward the study. He half expected to see the room in shambles—the computer screen overturned, the books thrown from their shelves, and the knickknacks broken upon the floor. Instead, the room looked tidy, just as he had left it earlier that morning.

The pressure abruptly intensified.

The chair before his desk was turned toward the door, empty and inviting. Lance found himself sitting before he realized he had crossed the space from the dining room to the study. The black screen sat before him. He stared at it, dropping into the depths of the darkness that the pixels held. His hand reached up and moved the mouse on its pad. The screen blazed into the white light of a blank page. He didn’t remember leaving a Word document open. The cursor blinked mindlessly at him from the upper left corner of the page—a warning, a whisper, a curse, a hunger. His fingers touched the keyboard. He began to write.



Lance awoke, his hand and arm pressed against the top of the desk, his forehead lying firmly against his arm. He inhaled and looked, wide-eyed, around the room. His chest expanded and contracted like a giant heart pumping air instead of blood.

“What the hell?” he said to the spines of books on the shelves. When they didn’t respond, he swallowed and blinked at the afternoon rays that shone through the windows onto the desk before him. The computer screen was black again; the memory of sitting in the chair earlier drifted back to him. He reached forward and then froze, his hand hanging motionless over the mouse. He had dreamt it, certainly.

“Doesn’t hurt to check,” he said as he shoved the mouse across its pad.

The black Times New Roman text contrasted against the white of the page. The sight stopped Lance’s breath. Words. He hadn’t seen his own written words on this screen in over six weeks. They stunned him to the point that his eyes couldn’t focus on what they said. Instead, he saw a short rectangular paragraph, and it was beautiful in a way that he could barely describe. He was sure even a man dying of thirst and looking upon a sweating glass of water couldn’t have more desire than he did now staring at the words on the screen. His eyes finally started to recognize the words of the first sentence, and he began to read.

The structure loomed above him like a beast bent on murder. It wasn’t a home, but a house. Nothing so cold could ever be considered a home. There was grief here, old and new. The old he didn’t yet know; the new he himself brought. The gray waters of Superior were stark beyond the stone walls and they offered him no comfort. Each wave was only another moment of suffering, a barb in the flesh of his soul.

Lance read the words four times, small bursts of ideas showering down in the corners of his mind. He could see the house on the shore, each detail becoming focused, like a photographer twisting the lens of his camera.

“It’s rough-hewn stone, big pieces,” Lance said, rising from the chair and looking out across the flat green of his backyard. “Two stories with two huge bay windows facing the lake. The upper floor is stick-built.” He turned and walked, as if in a trance, into the hall near the empty dining-room table, and stopped with one hand resting on the back of a chair. “There’s a gazebo near the water.” He continued, nodding to himself as he walked away from the table into the living room. “With a fireplace, I think.”

Lance stopped walking, leaned against the kitchen counter, and blinked at the floor beneath his feet. For nearly two minutes he tried to come to terms with what had happened. When he approached the events in his mind, a barricade of reason came up to shield whatever truth lay beyond, and he was left with the image of the house sitting on the shore of the gray lake, silent and alone. Although the pictures in his head were disembodied and without purpose, the words on the screen in his study were undeniable.

“That’s a beginning,” he said aloud to the empty house.

Lance moved toward the study again, convinced that the writing would be gone when he arrived. But when he stopped in the doorway to the room, the words were still there. They floated on the screen, their presence indisputably real.

Without hesitation, he walked to the computer and sat in the chair. A cluster of nesting-doll ideas giving birth to one thought after another. With a click of the mouse, he pulled up Google Images and typed a few words into the search bar. The processor hummed assuredly for just under a second before the screen lit up with square blotches of color pictures. Lance’s heart began to pick up speed. He could hear the blood rushing in quick pulses in his ears as he scrolled down the page past picturesque buildings and landscapes alike. He studied each one, searching for something that surely didn’t exist. On the last roll of the scrolling wheel, the end of the page appeared and Lance’s breath ceased while his heartbeat stuttered and then double-timed its pace.