Lance managed to get to his feet and feel his way down the rough wall until his hand closed over the doorknob to his room. When he turned the handle, it merely spun in his hand, and for a moment he thought the knob had laughed at him. He then realized the muffled chuckling came from the thing sliding down the hall toward him. The laughter had a nasal quality to it, as if whatever it was had a terrible head cold. Lance gripped the knob tighter and turned it with all his might. The cheap plastic held for a moment, and then begrudgingly rotated. He felt the air behind him part and heard what sounded like an intake of breath. A line of fire erupted on the back of his neck, and he fell into his bedroom headfirst.
There was only panic now, and he reacted without thinking. In a quick motion, he kicked with both legs and felt the door fly from the bottom of his feet. The sound the door made when it reached the doorjamb was somehow wrong. It was not the solid slam of the door locking in its place; it was more of a wet thump. As Lance began to crawl backward, he heard the door swing open and the scraping steps enter his room. He scrambled away from the sound until the back of his head met sharply with his bedside table. The thing was closer now and he could hear mucus catching the air as it sucked wind in through whatever was on its face that the darkness thankfully hid. Lance began to try to scoot sideways in an effort to circumvent the thing that still approached, but he heard it alter its course. As he slid closer to his bed, his hand brushed against the cord to the lamp that sat on his table. He followed it up until he felt the hard plastic switch beneath his thumb. The thing in the dark stopped a few feet from him, and he debated whether he wanted to die seeing or not seeing what was going to kill him. Water began to run over his feet again, as if a stream had been diverted from outside into his room. It rushed over his legs and soaked the crotch of his pants. The thing drew in a shuddering breath, and then it spoke.
“Welcome home, son.”
He screamed and switched the lamp on.
Lance awoke with a scream rising in his throat as he flailed out and punched the black marble lamp that sat on the bedside table. It skidded a foot on the table’s surface and then flipped off its edge, crashing on the bamboo floor. Lance sat frozen, half in, half out of bed. His arm locked in the direction of the ruined lamp and his right foot sitting on the cool surface of the floor.
“What was that?” Ellen’s voice rang across the large room as she sat bolt upright and startled Lance again. His heart knocked against his breastbone as if it wanted to be let out, and his breath hitched in his chest but seemed to give him no oxygen. He blinked into the darkness of the room. His room. His own room. There was nothing moving ahead of him toward the large bay windows that filtered moonlight through their curtains. He listened over the sound of blood rushing in drumbeats but heard nothing else. No scraping footsteps hissed across the wood floor. Lance’s head dipped forward so that his chin nearly touched his chest, and he let out a stuttered breath of relief.
“Nothing. Just a dream,” he finally said.
“A nightmare, you mean.”
Lance stood fully from the bed and nearly fell over, disoriented from sleep.
“Just a dream,” he repeated, and strode to the dark doorway of the master bath, the air conditioning cooling the damp skin of his bare chest as he walked. After closing the door behind him, he flicked the second switch on the panel to his left and the “mood lighting,” as his architect had called it, glowed inside the Jacuzzi tub and above the long expanse of mirrors on the wall over the dual sinks. The bathroom became a fuzzy shade of yellow through his sleep-crusted eyes as he sunk to the edge of the tub. Lance leaned forward and rested his elbows on his thighs as he rubbed his face with both hands, feeling the two-day growth of beard there.
Unbidden, the images from the dream assaulted him again, almost as real as they had been during sleep. He could hear the sliding of feet on the floor and feel the sweat-encased doorknob slipping in his frantic hand. The words in his father’s broken and blood-choked voice: Welcome home, son.