Lineage (13 page)

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.

The house he had seen in his mind was the third to the last picture on the bottom edge of the page. The picture had been taken from a boat a short distance from the shore. Even from the position and angle the picture had been taken, Lance could tell it was the same building.  White rollers could be seen in the base of the picture, and the darkened sky overhead confirmed that a storm was pushing its way across the lake. The house sat on a short rise, its two bay windows jutting out like bulging eyes, as if a horrible event was occurring beyond the photographer. The gazebo was just where Lance had pictured it, the hexagon-shaped building a few yards off the closest point of the house, mere steps from the rocky shoreline. The house itself had a base of large gray stone that ran up to the second story. From that point the construction consisted of logs stained a deep brown. The gables were also framed in wood of the same color, only smaller and hung just below a steeply pitched roof that reminded him of European Gothic churches. A spacious area was cleared around the house, what could actually be called grounds when paired with the huge home that sat upon them. There was only one feature that Lance didn’t recognize: a glass alcove added on to the house. The small area that jutted away from the structure was crisscrossed with black supports for the panels of glass and had a sweeping curve where it met the outside wall at the top, some ten feet from the ground.

Lance sat back from the computer and stared at the image. A soft whisper made him turn his head toward the hall outside of the room. He stared, waiting for movement or another sound that might give away what was there. Unnerved, he stood as quietly as he could and tiptoed across the study to the door. He listened for a full minute before breaking the silence.

“Hello?” His
voice sounded calm and reassuringly clear
in the quiet of the home. There was no response and no further noises. When he sat back down in the chair at the desk, an idea struck him like a mallet. He reached out and moved the mouse so that the arrow on the screen hung directly over the picture of the house, and clicked.

A website opened behind an enlarged version of the picture. A banner at the top of the page that read
Open Water Realty
rippled with clever animation, and Lance could see text of a real-estate listing disappearing behind the picture in the middle of the screen. He closed the picture and started to read the description. His heart began to snare-drum in his chest once again, and he double-checked the date of the listing in the upper right-hand corner of the page. His hand left the mouse and grasped the phone that lay a few inches to the right. His numb fingertips dialed the number that blinked hypnotically on the bottom of the screen.
Just ask for Carrie!
jumped
out at him as he placed the receiver to his ear and listened to the first ring.

When a pleasant voice answered in perfect unison with the rippling title of the company on the screen, Lance almost smiled and told himself he hadn’t heard the soft whisper again. He ignored the fact that this time he heard his name.

Chapter 6

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

—
Auric
Goldfinger

“I told you, I’m just doing a little sightseeing and some research for a future project,” Lance said into the phone. Andy’s irritated voice, punctuated with bouts of cussing, kept flowing out of the earpiece like a stream of aggravated white noise. Lance checked the Land Rover’s rearview mirror and changed lanes, although at ten o'clock on a Thursday there wasn’t much traffic on this section of I-35. “Listen, listen.” Lance paused and then tried again. “Will you listen for a minute?” Lance waited until the angry ranting in his ear tapered and finally fell silent. “I’m going on a short trip, just like you said I should do. I’m sorry that it’s concerning a new book, but right now, my friend, I’m taking what I can get.”

Another string of sentences laced with several four-letter words peppered Lance, and he rolled his eyes in exasperation. Instead of riding out the storm of cursing, he decided to intervene and try to cut off the flow.

“Andy, just calm down.
I’ll finish
Harbinger
, don’t worry. I don’t know what’s happening right now. All I can say is that I finally wrote something and I saw this house. I have to go see it in person, okay? If it’s just a house, I’ll come home tomorrow and plop my ass right back down in front of the keyboard. If it’s something else, then we’ll see. I’m only asking you to keep
Rashir
off my back for a few days.” Lance listened to the mumbled reply on the other end. “That’s actually your job, you know.” Lance winced but smiled at the same time at the explosion of new expletives coming from the phone. He held the receiver away from his ear and began looking for a sign that would tell him how far he was from
Duluth
. When Andy’s outburst died down, Lance spoke as soothingly as he could without losing the smile.

“You’re my best friend and I know you’ve got my back. There’s a story here, buddy, I know there is. Just give me some time and I’ll put out the best novel of my career.” There was a long pause of silence on the other end of the phone before a begrudging reply. “Thanks, Andy, I owe you. Next time we go to dinner at
Fosa
Rachel’s
I’ll buy you that port you like. Love you, Andy.” Lance nodded and shut his phone off completely. He didn’t want distractions now, not when he was getting close to the house.

His eyes roamed the edges of the highway and took in the healthy trees growing around the houses that lined the road. The day was bright, and without thinking, Lance reached to the dash and turned the radio on, letting the sounds of Green Day pour out of the surrounding speakers. A sign bearing the words
Duluth
5,
Stony
Bay
47
approached and flew by the right side of the Land Rover. As he hummed along with the song, Lance went over the events of the day before yet again, as he tried to make sense of what had actually brought him to this point.

When the phone was answered, he didn’t have to ask for Carrie. She was the one who picked up the line, and when he inquired about the house, there was a pause, as if she had no recollection of listing it. When the pause elongated into an uncomfortable silence, Lance began to describe the property and Carrie suddenly exclaimed and apologized. The house hadn’t been shown in a while, she explained, but she was happy to set up a time for him to tour it. He chose the earliest slot available that allowed for travel from
Ardent
Falls
.

By the time Billie Joe Armstrong quit telling everyone where he would be found when he came around, the city of
Duluth
rose up on his left and
Lake Superior
stretched out on the opposite side. Lance kept looking at the lake. The far side of the shoreline stretched out and around in a sweeping arc that gradually narrowed until it faded from view completely, as if it were the last edge of Atlantis slowly slipping below an ancient unnamed sea. He had seen the ocean several times but had never ventured this far north of the cities, and
Superior
reminded him of the
Atlantic
. It looked cold, even on a warm August day with the sun beating down. The city around him was smashed into the side of the steep hill that shot up to his left. It was as if an asteroid made of homes and businesses had fallen and dashed itself against the edge of the rise, leaving scattered pieces of
itself
mingled in with the winding roads and rocky landscape.

Lance looked at the liquid-crystal display and relaxed. It was just past 10:00 a.m. and the showing of the house wasn’t until one in the afternoon. His stomach ached with hunger, and he resisted the urge to turn off on an exit promising dining at a local restaurant.

The story had begun to pull at his mind the way most of his novels did, but for some reason his thoughts were limited. He could see the main character: a man his age, long blond hair and a sharp nose.
A deep aura of sadness surrounding him, as if he had seen heaven and had been sent away.
Lance could see him standing, facing the gray waters of the lake that expanded to his right, and waiting for something. But what was it?

“What are you waiting for?” Lance said to himself as he tried attacking the story’s plot at different angles, but to no avail. The story was like a shape behind a gossamer curtain—there in form but without detail. Having a story stunted in his mind felt unlike anything he had ever experienced before. Perhaps the writer’s block had only loosened its grip and was still there, waiting to whisk away the idea at the slightest hint of creation.

The city gradually gave way to a more rural landscape, and soon signs that informed him he would have to make a choice in the near future as to the route he would take to get to Stony Bay began to appear. To the right was the scenic way—a winding road that appeared to hug the edge of the great lake according to the SUV’s GPS. To the left, a narrow highway shot directly through the rocky, wooded countryside.

Lance hesitated for only a moment before turning on his right blinker and angling the vehicle off the interstate, onto a two-lane blacktop so near to the edge of the cliff that Lance veered the SUV closer to the middle of the highway.

“The road less traveled for sure,” he said to the empty car. Collective Soul now blasted through the speakers and Lance began to sing along with the chorus. Sunlight glared off a billion points in the water and made the lake look as if it were a shifting pool of jewels. Sets of long-forgotten train tracks began to appear on either side of the road. They stretched off in the distance, sometimes close to the road, and at others disappearing completely from his view. The twin steel rails crosshatched by many dark timbers supporting them were like constant reminders of a memory beginning to fade. Every so often a line of boxcars would appear, their sides tattooed by graffiti that was just slightly less faded than the paint it graced, the artists long having grown up and surely moved on to less juvenile practices.

On a particularly sharp curve, a large white cross made from laminate or wood had been pressed into the soil a few yards off the road. As Lance drove past, he could see brightly colored yellow ribbons hanging from the cross, spinning and dancing in the breeze. Another, much smaller, cross came into view, next to its parent. Pink strings of color waved from its arms, and as the road straightened out, Lance pressed on the brake and guided the vehicle to a stop on the gravel shoulder.

“It was a car crash,” he said breathlessly. “He was driving. His wife and daughter were with him.” Lance looked over to the passenger seat and could almost see a dark-haired woman smiling prettily back at him. Her eyes were a deep green, sea-foam green he would’ve called them. When he turned his gaze to the back seat, the kicking legs of a small girl in a pink sundress caught his attention. She was perhaps six, with black hair to match her mother’s. She was looking wistfully out of the window at the sunlight streaming in. There was a curve at each corner of her mouth, as if she knew something wonderful but couldn’t quite put it into words yet. She was beautiful. Lance looked forward at the highway ahead of him,
then
saw something in his rearview mirror. When he leaned closer, there was straight blond hair where his should have been.

A semi blasted by Lance’s window, close enough to rock the Land Rover on its springs, accompanied by a rude honk of its horn. Lance jerked back in his seat, his muscles straining and his stomach tightening into a hard ball. The imaginings in his car evaporated as though they had been made of steam and light. When he pushed his face closer to the mirror in the center of the windshield, his own face was there to meet him.

He sat back and breathed deeply, trying to calm his heart rate and drain off the rush of adrenaline that pounded in his temples. When his hands no longer visibly shook, he put the gearshift into drive, checked his mirrors twice, and pulled onto the deserted road.

Stony
Bay
appeared when Lance wasn’t expecting it. There had been no sign welcoming him to the small town just before the bend that hid it from view. It simply emerged from the land; the single road he had been following opened up into a thoroughfare lined with small shops and businesses. As Lance slowed the vehicle to abide by the speed limit, his head turned on a swivel, taking in each shop’s front and what it offered.

There were two cafés nearly side by side, a store that proclaimed souvenirs of all kinds, an ice-cream parlor decked out in colorful blues and reds, and an ornate-looking business with the simple word
Books
over the wooden front door. Lance could see several bars and a contemporary restaurant made almost entirely of stone scattered closer to the slight rise on the lake side. A relatively new gas station sat forlornly at the far end of the long street, seemingly an outcast among the older stores. Lance took it all in—the wide sidewalks, the flags flying from every lamppost, the people strolling along the fronts of the businesses and every so often entering them for a look at their wares. It was a northern tourist town at its best, so quaint that it was memorable enough to return to year after year, not large enough to tempt visitors to put down roots permanently.

Lance pulled into a parking spot directly in front of the twin cafés and glanced at the clock again before turning the Land Rover off. He had another hour to kill before he had to be at the house, and his hunger had become a living thing in the past ten minutes. The remainder of the drive to the town had been uneventful. No more visions or breakthroughs had come to him, but a part of his mind began to glow with a small flame. Despite how unsettling the drive had been, the story was starting to take on a shape and the fire burning in his brain was one of hope.

The inside of the café on the left was narrow but long, lined with worn wooden booths and tables that rocked back and forth no matter how you turned them. Lance ordered a club sandwich and a bowl of chicken-and-wild-rice soup from the middle-aged waitress, who smiled at him with no recognition in her eyes. Being a best-selling author was a good thing, but being unable to enjoy a quiet lunch without being accosted by at least one person for an autograph was something else altogether. 

After appeasing his aching stomach with the sandwich and soup—which were surprisingly good—Lance stepped out of the café onto the sidewalk. Like the waves that beat on the shore of the great lake to his right, the sun’s rays pummeled his shoulders and back as he strolled down the sidewalk, and he began to regret wearing a black shirt in the heat. After checking his watch, he realized he still had time to kill before the showing. Lance ran his fingers through his hair and squinted at several of the signs on the buildings, silently cursing himself for not grabbing his sunglasses from the car. His eyes finally landed on the bookstore he had noticed, and without thinking, he made his way up the building’s short walk and opened the heavy oak door.

A bell dinged once somewhere out of sight in the rear of the store as he shut the door behind him. Dark wood floors held row after row of chest-high shelves, which in turn housed the spines of thousands of books. Lance’s eyebrows rose in surprise. He hadn’t expected such a selection from the outward appearance of the small building. Glancing around, he found that he was the only customer within the quiet shop. As he made his way down the first aisle of books, he mused that there wasn’t another silence like that of an empty bookstore. It was as if hundreds of thousands of people were biting their tongues, waiting for the moment to release their voices with the opening of a cover.

A particular book caught Lance’s eye as he strolled down the row, its dark cover emblazoned with sharp zigzags of lightning. Lance pulled
Legends of the North Shore
from the shelf and examined the inside flap. His attention was so drawn to the overview of the book that he didn’t hear the soft footsteps approaching from behind.

“Hi, can I help you?”

The voice was as bright as the light that filtered in through the high windows of the store, and when Lance turned, startled by the question, his breath caught in his throat. The woman who stood at the end of the row was a spitting image of the vision that had sat in the passenger seat of his car no more than an hour ago. Her hair held the same dark shade and her eyes—there was no mistaking them. They were the deep green of an oak leaf in midsummer. She was petite and wore a long-sleeved white T-shirt and khaki shorts. She leaned easily on the shelf nearest to her, her head tilted with inquiry.