Lineage(91)

He continued, hoping his voice would spur her on. “I moved there a little while ago. I didn’t know it was yours.”

The events that had transpired over the past weeks replayed in his head. In this dark room, they seemed all too real. Strange and otherworldly, but real. That was really why he had come to see this catatonic woman. To see if she could tell him why these things were happening to him. To give an explanation other than what his mind kept creeping toward like an open grave.

“I’ve been seeing things,” he started, his voice much lower than before. “Strange things in the house. I don’t know why, and I’m beginning to worry that nothing’s really there. That it’s just me. It’s always been me, and it’s something that’s broken inside my mind.”

His breath came in short bursts and he felt the clawings of anxiety. He sat back in his chair and tried to calm himself. The atmosphere of the building pressed upon him. He felt its institutional presence like a hand on his shoulder that waited to steer him into a room of his own in some quiet, dark corner. Maybe someday he’d see what the man in the hall saw. Maybe someday he would run from it too.

Lance tried to shake the thoughts and calm the panic that threatened to spew out of his chest. Annette still hadn’t moved, her arms resting at her sides, her face slack. What was he doing? Sitting here in a room with a woman he didn’t know, asking her questions about his own sanity when she hadn’t spoken a word since the day she had seen her husband’s gray matter sprayed across the floor of their home. Tell her the stain is still there, the voice intoned evilly.

Lance almost stood from his chair and left the room, knowing that his present location and his thoughts were terrible company, but something stopped him.

The surface of the desk before Annette held a folded piece of paper and a short nub of a pencil. He hadn’t noticed them before. Lance leaned forward, squinting in the dim light of the room. He realized that a crossword puzzle lay before his grandmother, its small boxes completely filled with letters. He reached out toward the puzzle, half expecting the old woman to lunge at his outstretched arm and tear at it like a snarling beast. Annette remained motionless as he slid the paper toward him with a soft scraping sound.

It took a moment for him to understand what had been written in the blank spaces of the puzzle. Most of the boxes overflowed with letters, their harsh outlines scratched deep into the page outside of the boundaries by the worn pencil. There were only two words on the page: WULF and RHINELANDER. Names, he corrected himself as he read them. The two names were repeated everywhere, scrawled by the unsteady hand of the woman beside him.

Lance looked at his grandmother, her hair floating weightless around her shrunken head, her eyes still staring at the growing storm outside. “Who are they?” he asked, his eyes locked on her face, looking for any signs that she’d heard him. “Can you tell me who they are?”

Nothing. No recognition. She was a husk, hollowed out by time and tragedy. The leavings of a mind all but eaten up, her last thoughts echoing out of an eroded memory and onto the page before her. And nothing that served as answers to his questions.

Lance stood from the chair, giving his grandmother one last look. He crossed the room and stepped into the hall, where the nurse stood staring at an alarming brown stain on the floor near one of the other doors.

“Thank you,” he said.

The bulky woman pulled the door shut and locked it. She grunted in reply and led the way back to the elevator. As the floor hummed its descent beneath them, Lance turned to the nurse.

“You don’t by any chance know anything about the names she wrote on the crossword in her room, do you?”

The nurse sighed through her nostrils. “I don’t know anything about Wulf. Sounds German to me. But Rhinelander rings a bell. He might have been a missing person quite a few years ago. Something like that, but I could be wrong.” Her shoulders rose in a dismissive shrug.

“Why a crossword?” Lance asked.

The nurse shrugged again. “She always gets one, has ever since I started here. Never seen her write on it, though. We bring her a fresh stub of pencil every now and then, and those words are just there, over and over. Heard the scratching coming from her room late one night when I was doing the rounds. It stopped when I got within a few feet of the door, though, and when I peeked in she was just staring at the wall, not moving.”

The image nearly coaxed a shudder from Lance, but he fought it back and followed the nurse out of the elevator as the doors opened onto the first floor.