Inheritance: A Novel Part 43

She pulled herself up and she fought him all the way up the hallway and into the front room. She kicked and bit and screamed as he handcuffed her to the rings on the wall, but he was too strong for her, and she never had a chance.

"I'm gonna stop you, you son of a b.i.t.c.h!" she screamed at his back as he walked away. "I'll stop you, I swear it!"

And the scene s.h.i.+fted again.

Paul was standing at the foot of his mother's bed in the front room. She was still fighting, still struggling to pull her hands loose from the handcuffs that held her to the rings in the wall. Her face was distorted by an almost animalistic rage.

Somehow she managed to get one hand free.

She looked at it with a mixture of rage and pain and victory. Then she stood in front of the other ring and began to pull her hand through the cuff. It took her several long minutes of grunting and screaming and hard breathing to get her other hand loose, and when it did finally come, her wrists and hands looked like they'd been dipped in red paint.

She could barely move her fingers, but somehow she found the strength to reach under the sheet and pull up the corner of the mattress and come up with a knife.

Paul gasped. He recognized that knife. Even after twelve years, he still recognized that knife.

Paul was numb as he watched the scene that followed. His mother raised the knife over her head and went screaming down the hallway.

His father was in the living room, preparing to make a lattice.

He turned and caught her arm and they fought.

She slashed at him the knife and missed.

He knocked her to the ground with a loud, echoing slap.

She scrambled to her feet and ran for the kitchen.

He hit her in the back of the head and knocked her flat. Paul followed them, an icy ball forming in his stomach as the most terrifying moment of his youth got closer and closer. Even as the fight rolled into the kitchen, he couldn't help but think what that kid up there in that room was going through. Right about now he'd be climbing out of his bed and ducking under it. He'd be curled up into a ball, convinced that his mother's insanity had finally crested into some kind of unstoppable, homicidal rage.

His mother climbed the stairs on all fours. His father was chasing her, screaming at her, "Don't do it, Carol! d.a.m.n it, woman, don't do it!"

And then she was inside the room, lunging for the bed. From the top of the stairs, Paul watched her stop when she realized the child wasn't where he was supposed to be. He saw her hesitate for just a second, and that second was all it took. Martin Henninger was on her. He hit her in the back of the head and caught her by the back of her neck before she sagged all the way to the floor. Paul watched the knife drop from her hand and stick into the floorboards.

There was no ceremony, no drama, after that. His father hauled her back down the stairs like she was a sack of goat feed, and Paul was left standing alone at the head of the stairs. And he guessed that was the way it should be. He had traveled back into a past that he always thought he understood, and was only now realizing that the water was deeper than he ever imagined.

But of course the worst was still to come.

Now he was standing in the barn, the scene lit by the silvered light of the moon. The night was cool. A breeze drifted through the gaps in the wood siding and sent bits of hay into the air.

He heard his father's voice behind him.

"Go on, Carol. Get in there."

He turned and saw his father shoving his mother into the barn. She had regained a little of her sense now, but she was still wobbly on her feet.

"You can't stop me, Martin. They'll see what you did to me. Look at my hands. You caused this. The cops see this, they'll take Paul away from you sure as Sunday. What do you think of that, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d? You lose."

Martin Henninger walked forward and grabbed her by the wrists.

"Is this what you mean?" he said. And as he held her wrists in his hands, the wounds began to heal.

It happened fast enough to make Paul's mother gasp. She looked at her hands, healed now so thoroughly that not even a speck of blood remained. The light went out of her. She wasn't going to be able to fight him like this and win.

"Don't look like that," he said. "You wanted to stop me? Well, you stopped me tonight."

She looked up at him, a question on her face.

"That's right. I'd wanted to tell Paul about his inheritance tonight, but you've made that impossible. It's gonna be six years before I can do it again. It'll take that long for the cycle to come back to this point. Six years. That's what you bought this miserable existence we call the world. Tell me, Carol, was it worth it? Was it worth dying to give the world six more years?"

"What do you mean?" she said. "Martin? Martin, please. Stop this."

But there was no stopping, not for her, and not for Paul. For even as she pleaded with her husband, he took control of her body, bending it to his purpose. Carol Henninger's hands took a long length of hemp rope from the wall and looped it into the coiled pattern of a noose.

"Martin, please..."

The rope went over a rafter. She secured one end to the steering wheel of a dilapidated tractor and pulled the noose over her head. She climbed onto the back tire of the tractor and tried to plead one more time with him for her life. But her pleas were in vain. With his mind he nudged her, and she stepped off the tire...

...and Paul gasped as he came to. He was standing in the barn. The daylight was failing, though it was still hot and the air very close with the smell of rotting wood and weeds.

For just a moment he had a vision of his mother swinging by her neck from the rafters, and the vision was so startlingly vivid that he even imagined he heard the creaking of the rope and the moaning of the wood that supported her weight. She seemed to waver in front of his eyes like a distant figure walking down a road filled with heat s.h.i.+mmers, and then she was gone. Everything was still again, and he was alone.

He turned away from the cavernous hold of the barn and walked out into the yard where the goats had once grazed. It was full of sunflowers now, and many of them had grown as tall as Paul. The road that led down to the horse pasture was carpeted over by weeds.

He turned away from it and walked back to his truck. There was a stiffness in his lower back and a soreness in his muscles that surprised him. He felt tired and old before his time. It was the vision his father had shown his mother that had done it to him. He knew that now. A long time ago his father had told him that his inheritance was a power money could not buy, the kind of power that changes the course of history and stamps itself upon the minds of men forever. Paul realized now that he had never truly understood what that meant. He'd listened to his father's promises and he'd envisioned a quiet, peaceful revolution spreading over humanity, a sort of glimmering golden age of prosperity and justice and good sense.

He was only now realizing that the vision his father had in mind was nothing short of an apocalypse, an end to this world and the birth of a new one populated by the risen dead. Power, true power, he saw now, had to be by logical necessity absolute, or it was not power at all. It was not enough to teach a man what to believe, or tell him what he should hear and say and do. It was not enough to punish him for doing or even thinking wrongly. It was not even enough to reprogram him from the inside out when the threat or application of force failed to compel total submission. The Inquisition had tried to do just that. And they failed. The totalitarian states of the communist block had tried also, in their way, and they had failed. All across the world cult leaders were continually trying to a.s.sert their own brand of absolute power upon their little communities, but each of them were destined to failure, as well.

Every system invented by man to control other men was, by the virtue of being created by a man, inherently flawed, for men lacked the capacity for absolute control. No matter how efficient the system, that system could not obliterate the spirit of man that was synonymous with life. As long as a man lived, that spirit was with him. It drove him to create art, to speak, to love, to accept the possibility that the world was not lost, not yet, and that the future for which he fought today and may never see was still, nonetheless, worth fighting for. Only death could stop that. Only death could erase the individual and make him truly one with the whole. It could clean a man's mind of all erroneous thought and make it a blank slate upon which that new perfect whole could be created. And Paul was the means to make that happen.

He was sitting behind the wheel of his truck, crying quietly to himself. He understood now why his mother had cried when his father forced his vision into her mind. She had seen right away what it meant. She grasped intuitively that it was more than the loss of life. It was more than the suffering and the pain and the sky smeared red and black by fire. She mourned those things also, but it was for the loss of the spirit of man that she cried. And the thought that the one person she loved more than all the world, more even than her own life, her child, was to be the agent of that loss, was emotionally crippling beyond anything Paul could imagine.

"You miserable b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said to the picture of his father that suddenly appeared in his mind. "My inheritance-you want me to do to the world what you did to me. It's a lie, all of it, and I won't do it. Do you hear me? I won't."

He banged his fists down on the steering wheel.

"Do you hear me? I won't do it!"

Chapter 21.

She'd called Paul half a dozen times at least during the day. At first she was angry. Rachel told herself that when he finally answered his d.a.m.n phone she was going to lay into him and say all the things she didn't get to say when she threw him out the first time. But as the day wore on, and he still hadn't answered his cell phone, she started to fray at the edges.

The air conditioner was blowing, but not doing much of anything to cool down the apartment. She sat in a kitchen chair with a box fan blowing over her and tried calling him again.

She got his voicemail.

"Paul," she said, "I'm sorry. Please call me back. Just talk to me. I was scared earlier. G.o.d, I was so scared. So much has happened in the last few days and I don't know what to do about it. But I know I love you. Please believe me on that. I don't want you to leave. I want you to come home. Please, if you can get off work tonight, come home. I don't care if we have to stay up all night, just come home. We can talk through this." She swallowed the lump in her throat and sniffled. "That's all I wanted to say, Paul. Just know that. I want you home with me."

Then she hung up.

She thought of calling him right back, leaving another message to tell him that she believed him now. After seeing his mother-G.o.d, after touching the breaker switches covered with human skin-she believed him. But she didn't call back. Calling him too many times before he was ready to talk might only serve to drive him away, and she couldn't afford that.

When he finally decided to call her, she would tell him she believed it all now. She would talk to him, and she would keep the whiney little girl buried deep down inside her. Paul didn't need to deal with that. He needed someone who would stand by him, and that was going to be her.

Their love was worth it.

And she was still telling herself that at 11:45 that night, though her brave face was starting to crumble. She was in bed, reading a book upon which she couldn't concentrate. The pages just looked like a blur. She folded the book down across her stomach and looked around the apartment.

Something was wrong, and it took her a long moment of staring out across the apartment to figure it out.

It was so quiet.

She listened to the silence and thought how strange that was. No matter what time of day, there was always traffic going by on the street below. Three o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday and you could still count on a car or two every couple of minutes. And that dog next door- about the only time of day that thing was quiet was in the heat of the afternoon when it was too hot to do anything but lay in the shade and pant.

She waited and listened and the silence stretched out interminably.

Finally, she couldn't take it anymore.

She went to the patio door and opened it and walked out onto the covered patio. The night was still, but not in a peaceful way. A faint breeze brushed against the Italian junipers that flanked the yard. Her bare legs were damp with sweat but she felt no chill from the breeze. If anything it was more stifling out here than it was inside. It was almost like a giant black blanket had been draped over the world. She could feel its smothering presence.

She was about to walk back inside when a car pa.s.sed on the street below. Rachel watched it glide by, but didn't notice until it was out of sight that it made no sound.

"What in the...?"

There was a moment of self-doubt in the car's wake. She wasn't sure what she had just experienced. Maybe she just hadn't been paying attention.

She waited for another car to go by. One followed seconds later, and that one too pa.s.sed in complete silence. No throaty exhaust notes. No tires slapping on concrete. No incoherent echo of a stereo played too loudly. The stifling night air suddenly felt dangerous. That was the first thought that came to her mind and it refused to leave. Something about all this was dangerous. She was in danger.

Rachel hurried back inside, closing the door behind her with a palpable sense of relief.

But the relief didn't last.

She thought of seeing Paul's mother and reaching into the pantry for the breaker switch and touching human skin instead. She asked herself why in the h.e.l.l she was still here.

"Okay, right. Time to leave," she said. "Time to get in the truck and get the h.e.l.l away from here."

She slid into a pair of jeans and put some clothes and her toothbrush into an overnight bag and headed for the backdoor.

Rachel got out onto the landing at the top of the wooden stairs that led down to the backyard and stopped.

Something was wrong.

She scanned the yard. On the other side of the carport was the familiar shed and concrete slab where the neighbors kept that miserable dog of theirs. It was standing up now on that concrete slab, facing her, its chain trailing out behind it and disappearing into the darkness on the other side of the shed. The dog was barking furiously, but there was no sound. And the yard was filled with shadows. More than the various objects along the fence line could account for. They looked intensely black against the green of the lawn.

Something was definitely wrong.

Rachel felt afraid. She had a sense that something was coming, the way one can smell the air and know a storm is on the way, and it paralyzed her. She tried to move her feet and just couldn't.

Then the dog was gone. She was watching it when it was sucked up into the darkness behind the shed. She blinked at the empty spot on the concrete slab. One moment the dog had been there, the next it wasn't. It was if some giant thing had grabbed the other end of the chain and yanked it back into the darkness with an almost cartoonlike suddenness.

"Oh my G.o.d."

She dropped the overnight bag next to her foot and clamped a hand over her mouth. There were naked men coming out of the shadows, moving like flowing water around the shed and across the lawn and over the fence into her yard.

One of the men in the front of the advancing crowd crossed into a yellow circle of lamplight and the sight of him took Rachel's breath away. He was a bent, gray-colored, skeletal thing. The face was grotesque and strangely protruded because of the way the body was bent forward. The skin seemed ill-fitting over the skull, almost like it had started to sag off the cheek bones. The eyes were vacant. The mouth seemed drawn-in, puckered like an old apple. But the most horrible thing about the man was his staggeringly advanced state of emaciation. His knees and elbows and knuckles seemed engorged. His thighs looked sickly. His biceps were so thin she could have probably encircled them by putting her thumb and forefinger together. His stomach had a sunken-in shape that made her wince.

She was thinking heroin addict until she saw the black Y-shaped st.i.tching on his chest. It was only then that she thought of death.

She screamed.

There were more of them now.

Her eyes darted back and forth across the yard in blind panic. They were staggering across the yard in fits and jerks. They seemed so slow, and yet the distance between them and the house narrowed every second.

One of them hit the wall below her. She looked down at him, and he turned a dead face up at her.

"No," she said, barely able to make a sound for the painful beating of her heart. "No, you stay away!"

But the dead thing never hesitated. It slapped its hands against the wall and started to scale upwards, climbing with an insect-like motion that brought a fresh wave of screaming to Rachel's lips.

She ran inside and locked the door and scanned the room for something she could slide against the door to bar it. She saw the couch and got behind it and shoved it all the way across the floor to the door. It hit with a thud that was answered by a pounding from outside. She screamed, then screamed again as a hand punched through the top of the door and pushed it inwards. A man's gray, sunken face appeared in the hole, followed by his bare arms and shoulders.

She staggered backwards into the coffee table.

There was a crash to her left. Another one of those things was punching its way through the wall. Actually tearing its way through the G.o.dd.a.m.ned wall. Behind her, there were more of them breaking through the gla.s.s patio doors.

"No," she whimpered. "Stay away! Oh Jesus please, stay away!"

She was cut off, and they were getting closer. She tried to scream but couldn't. All she could make herself do was stumble backwards towards the bathroom and beg them not to come any closer.

She tripped over one of her boxes of books and when she looked up one of the dead things was almost on her.

She scrambled to her feet and picked up the box and threw it at the thing with everything she had. It hit the dead man in the shoulder and the box exploded open, spilling paperbacks everywhere, but the dead man didn't even flinch from it.