Lineage(58)

“Are you all right? Do you need help?” Lance asked.

The naked form before him jigged like a marionette on electric wires, the head rocking backward and forward. Lance felt the urge to run away from the figure. His feet seemed more than willing to turn his body around toward the front door, storm or not. Instead, they moved forward, bringing more and more of the man and what he was doing into view.

Runners of blood and tissue were leaking out from beneath the seated man’s hands. He made no sound as his fingers worked at the flesh beneath them. Lance’s stomach flopped and the dinner he had eaten earlier threatened to come rushing out. He could feel wetness creeping up his pant legs and wondered why if he had wet himself it was traveling in the opposite direction. But when he looked down expecting to see urine spreading along his pant legs, he nearly cried out in surprise.

The floor was slick with blood. It washed around him as if there was a current beneath the few inches of fluid.

Rain finally began to patter against the large windows, but when he glanced in their direction, he saw the panes bleeding. Drops of blood spattered the house as if it were at the feet of a maniac butchering the sky.

A swallowing sound snapped Lance’s attention back to the man before him. As he watched, the man’s head turned as though on ball bearings, his fingers still clamped over the lower portion of his face. Blue eyes found Lance’s own, but there was no life there. Only the frosted milk of death looked out from the orbs, and before Lance could scream, the dead man’s voice punched through the silence.

“They did this to me. The usurpers, and you too. You did this. It all evens out in the end. Water, blood, wine, time. In the right light, they all seem to shine.”

The man dropped his hands from his face.

Below his eyes the flesh became a red-and-black pit of raw meat. Furrows deep enough to hide a penny in were gouged from the skin where his fingernails had burrowed their way through. Twin holes where there should have been a nose flared at Lance with corpse breath, and startling white teeth ringed in ragged tendon and dripping tissue grinned at him.

The teeth yawned open and the man leaped from the seat.



The cell phone beside the bed lit up and beeped as it vibrated across the surface of the table like an overturned insect trying to right itself. Lance’s eyes flew open and the scream that had eluded him in the dream cascaded from his open mouth. His breath heaved his chest up and down, and his eyes searched the darkness of the room. His mind finally began to relate what had happened to his struggling senses. “It was a dream,” he told himself, nearly yelling over the images that still ran on a repeating track, replaying every horrifying second of the nightmare.

Trying to calm himself, he lay back on the sweat-soaked sheets of the bed and stared at the distant ceiling. There were no sounds in the house besides his ragged breathing, and when the phone reasserted itself beside him, he nearly screamed again.

Annoyed and cursing under his breath, he reached over and picked up the glowing square of light. A message from Andy was centered in the screen: Are you okay? Tried to call earlier and you didn’t answer. Just leaving a party. Will call again when I get home.

Lance noted the time and composed a message, assuring Andy he was fine, while also telling him if he ever called or sent a text again this late, he would put his phone somewhere that had never seen the light of day.

The brightness of the screen blinded him in the dark, and after he sent the message, he noticed a feeling that had been building since he had woke from the dream. It raised the hairs on his arms with goose bumps and made his breath slow, and then stop. He listened as the phone dimmed in his hand. A moment before the phone blinked off completely, he grasped the feeling he had been trying to identify. It was the sensation of being watched.

The light went out on the phone’s display and a face loomed a few inches from his own in the darkness.

He had a vague impression of two wide, unblinking eyes before he cried out and swung a flailing strike at the floating face. His clenched fist hit nothing but air. Lance opened his eyes and stared frantically around the room, trying to find a deeper shade of black moving within the darkness. No shapes stirred, and the landing revealed nothing but the banister and the empty air beyond.

He threw off the covers and leapt from the bed. As he shuffled toward the doorway, every muscle tensed with adrenaline, he heard a thumping on the stairway outside his room.

Fear morphed into anger so quickly that he didn’t register the transition. Instead, he found himself flying out of the door and barreling down the steps after whoever had been in his room.