A burn of acid traced across the back of his neck. Lance stumbled through the doorway, his good hand covering his neck as he checked the damage there. He could feel only a shallow cut, and when he brought his palm to his face, a slight smear of blood coated the skin. His dream. This was his dream. He would fall soon and watch the vile thing stoop over him, and then he would die because now he knew that was why he always woke just before the light came on in the dream—it was death waiting for him in the darkness.
Erwin came into view in the doorway, his pallid skin a steep contrast to the black of the room behind him. Lance backed away toward the bay windows of the living room, but stopped when another sound rose above the noise of the storm outside. It was a soft thumping sound that emanated from the entryway. A pause, and then a muffled voice began to speak from the other side of the door.
“Lance? Are you okay?”
Mary, he thought, and looked at Erwin, whose mouth had opened again in a wide grin.
“Let her in, my boy. Let her join us in our dance.”
Lance turned his head toward the door and prayed to God that he had locked it behind him when he’d entered earlier, although he knew he hadn’t. Movement off to Lance’s right drew his attention. He risked a glance out the window, then looked back to Erwin, but in that moment he had seen something that burned itself into his brain like a branding iron.
The lake was definitely closer.
He hadn’t imagined it earlier. Waves rolled constantly against the shoreline as the wind hurled the water into the air in seething plumes. But something else was in the waves. Lance saw it before he looked away, unsure that it had been real or if the trauma he was enduring had pushed his mind beyond its boundaries of sanity.
The waves had looked like hands. Great black hands that clawed at the rocky shoreline with wide diaphanous fingers. There had been hundreds of them in the surf, made of water. All of them reaching past one another to pull at the shore. He had seen one clutch a boulder the size of a car tire and drag it backward beneath the crest of another that did the same to a smaller pile of rocks. The ground seemed to erode like a landslide within the pressure of the grasping breakers.
The pounding from the front door returned, and Lance’s eyes flicked there as Erwin moved toward him, covering the floor between them in jerky strides.
“Mary! Run! Run away!” Lance screamed, as he braced himself for the attack that Erwin was preparing.
The ghost’s tawny muscles flexed beneath thin skin, and its eyes flashed hatred as it waved the thick blade back and forth in front of its face. The ghost lunged and the front door opened.
Mary screamed.
Lance caught Erwin’s wrist with his left hand, the gleaming edge of the knife held above him. He fell backward and felt his writing desk connect with his lower back. His keyboard crunched audibly beneath him and he braced his arm as best he could, as Erwin struggled to plunge the knife into his throat. Lance’s mangled right hand pushed against the ghost’s chest as he tried to hold its murderous bulk away. Erwin’s flesh felt clammy and disgustingly pliable, like chicken skin ready to slip free of the meat. The ghost leaned closer, its eyes black and reminiscent of Anthony’s only minutes before. It was so strong. Lance felt the knife drawing closer to his throat, and he reached away with his bleeding hand and scrambled at the belt of knives that hung around Erwin’s bony hips.
An impact shuddered through the ghost’s body, and Lance saw shards of wood fly at the edges of his vision. Mary stood off to his left, holding the remnants of a wooden stool from the kitchen. Only two of the legs were still in her hands, the rest had obliterated on Erwin’s back in a shower of debris.
Erwin’s head snapped toward her and glared. Mary’s mouth hung open; a scream caught in her throat as she backed away and clutched the stool’s legs to her chest. Lance felt a handle slip into his palm and his thumb clamp down around it. Digging into the last reserves of his strength, Lance pushed with his left arm and pulled a knife free of its sheath.
“Go to hell,” Lance grunted from between his clenched teeth.