He stared into his mother’s eyes.
“Please, Lance, don’t do it! Look out the window! Please!” It was fully his mother now. Her hair was just as he remembered it. She even wore the same faded sweatshirt and jeans that she had that fall night so long ago when they’d made their short-lived escape.
“She left you, boy. Up and left. You tell me if that’s right,” Anthony said, closer now, almost inside his ear rather than next to it. “I know you hate her. Just show her how much.”
Lance saw his hand ascend from his side. He now held a thick-bladed cleaver. If the knife had smiled, the cleaver grinned. He felt the hatred boiling over. Long years of regret and pain, tripping over each other to be heard first as they brought his arm up, up, up. His grandfather stared at him, nodding his approval. His mother’s wet eyes pleaded in silence, reflecting in the broad blade above her.
“Please,” she whispered. “Look out the window.”
Lance looked to his left, out at the lake. Gerald Rhinelander stood in the shallows, watching him. His blond hair hovered at the sides of his head. One arm pointed toward the depths of the lake. Lance watched as Gerald turned and sunk below the water, as if he’d been pulled under by something unseen.
“There’s nothing out there for you, boy,” his father’s voice said, but it came from a distance. His mother still sat in the chair, but now her head nodded up and down. A tapping drew his attention back to the lake.
Hundreds of wrinkled white fingers were scrabbling at the glass of the window. The hands they were attached to were spongy with rot. The fingers danced across the glass, intertwining and sometimes melding with another set beside them. They looked like white spiders crawling over one another as they tried to find a way inside. The tapping grew louder and louder, the glass shaking with their efforts to get in, to stop him. To stop his arm from falling. He was falling.
“Lance?”
Lance jerked awake, his breath burning in his throat. A scream vibrated in his chest, on the verge of cutting its way free, as he looked out his vehicle’s window at John, whose fingertips were still pressed against the driver’s-side glass.
Lance let the scream filter out in a breath from between his clenched teeth. Sweat poured from his body and his neck felt as if the vertebrae there had been replaced with broken glass. His stomach was too full, and he wished that John wasn’t there so he could lean out of the car and vomit its contents onto the driveway.
“You okay?” John asked, his voice muffled from outside the car.
Lance swallowed and nodded as he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. The muscles of his right arm ached with the movement, and when he looked, he could plainly see the rough outlines of wide bruises in the shape of fingers. There were a few scratches filled with blood where the fingernails of his father’s ghost had torn the skin of his arm, gory furrows as reminders of the night before. The shotgun still sat angled in the passenger foot-space, where he had left it positioned, its grip within easy reach. Lance unlocked the door and stepped out of the Land Rover’s stuffy interior. The crisp September morning air met him like a cold shower and he breathed it in as John moved back to give him room. Lance shut the door and leaned against the car, rubbing his aching neck with one hand, his eyes shut against the sunlight that filled the yard.
The nightmare began to fade, but the feeling of the knife in his hand remained. He wiped his palms on his jeans and tried to disassemble the dream into something coherent. What had he felt as he was about to slash his own mother with a blade? His stomach flipped again as he remembered the urge to do it. To cut her and let all of the hatred he felt for her release in one fell swoop. He shuddered.
“You okay?” John repeated, examining Lance’s rumpled clothes and the bags below his.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”