Before he’d realized it, he had circumnavigated the chair and had come to rest where he’d started. Lance looked toward the door. It hadn’t moved, but something caught his eyes as he swung the light back toward the chair. The floor. He retreated a few steps and swung the beam back and forth. The wood looked darker around the chair, almost black compared to the rest of the house’s deeper bronze. A feeling began to form in his stomach, like a cold-water pipe had burst there.
Lance moved his light farther away from the chair. The floor’s color lightened. He walked to the far end of the room. The floor darkened directly behind the chair. Lance licked his lips, an idea taking shape. He felt his heart slam harder within the confines of his chest. He knelt behind the chair, laying the shotgun beside him. Slowly, he leaned forward, bringing his face closer to the floor.
His nose was an inch away from the wood when he smelled it—the distinct tang of rust and copper. He sat up, wondering if he’d imagined it. The thought hadn’t seemed possible, but now he actually smelled it—blood. The wood around the chair was stained with blood. The wood had gathered it there, sucking it thirstily, and somehow held its faint but unmistakable aroma for as long as the door had been shut. Years, at least.
A sound broke his reverie. He sat up, looking toward the door, his ears perked and his eyes wide. The doorway called to him with its light, beckoning him to leave.
The sound came again, and it made the hairs on the back of his neck stiffen. It had been the soft noise of air escaping the restrictions of a throat. A sigh. Pleasurable almost. But the worst part of hearing the sound again wasn’t its cause, it was its location.
The sigh had come from inside the room.
Lance swallowed a knot forming in his throat and turned his head toward the far corner, where the gun’s light shone on a pair of bloodless bare feet. They were facing away from him, toward the corner, as if their owner had been sent there for punishment. Lance tried swallowing again and realized all of his saliva had evaporated from his mouth. He felt his hands touching the hard stock of the shotgun, his eyes never leaving the feet. The gun slipped into his hands and he raised it, sliding the light up the form that stood in the corner.
The feet were attached to equally pale legs lined with blue veins, and above them were the sagging buttocks of an old man. As he rose to his feet, Lance could see the sharp line of the man’s spine, the gun shaking in white-knuckled hands. Stooped shoulders rested below a scrawny, wrinkled neck. The head was almost hairless, just a few wisps of white visible in the powerful beam’s throw.
The naked man sighed again as Lance took a careful step backward. With the sound of Lance’s foot touching the floor, the figure in the corner began to turn its head, its face coming into view. The eyes were blue, but below them, all normality fled. The man’s nose and upper lip had been hacked away, leaving an aborted stump of gristle with two black holes still visible. The teeth stood out abnormally white in the harsh glare of the flashlight, and a mixture of sinewy scars meshed the gum line. The thing finally turned toward him fully, its skin hanging off withered musculature and a shriveled snub of a penis poked at the air amidst a nest of white pubic hair. His grandfather’s ghost took an ungainly step toward him, and Lance saw that a malicious smile had spread across the dead, ravaged tissue of its face.
Lance’s finger tightened on the trigger. “Erwin?” he whispered.
The ghost’s maw popped open and a wet moan threaded its way from between the exposed teeth. It sounded eager, like it had waited a long time to let him hear it, and the longing within it tempted Lance’s bladder to release. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he noted that the thing before him cast no shadow.
Lance finally turned to run, dropping the light from the thing that now reached for him, and looked toward the door, his salvation.
A hand gripped his arm and stopped his flight. The grip felt beyond cold, like frosted iron left outside on a January night, but it was also familiar. He hadn’t felt it in over twenty years.
He turned his head and saw his father’s face floating in the darkness, just outlined by the suffusion of light.