by Lee Mandelo
Andrew watched taillights disappear into the growing dark. If Eddie had gotten himself into trouble, as West suggested, he had a feeling he knew where to find more of the same.
5
The next morning, when Andrew returned from his brief trip to the impound lot to retrieve his Supra, he found a sticky note on the coffee table next to a packed but unsmoked bowl. It read home after 3pm-Riley followed by what Andrew presumed was Riley’s phone number. His roommate had come and gone in the gap of time he’d spent picking up the car, at least for long enough to make him a weird little peace offering—which he did accept, taking the petite green glass pipe in hand. Eddie tended toward more outré paraphernalia, so he assumed it belonged to Riley. The lighter on the table sputtered at the first two flicks before it caught; he burnt himself a lungful or two, smoking with syrup-slow huffs. No reason to rush. After he cashed the bowl, he slipped out his phone and entered the number to fire off a quick hey it’s Andrew text.
Once again, his inbox had a number of missed calls and messages that a person more concerned with participating in his own life might’ve been ashamed of. Several were from unfamiliar numbers. He listened to two voicemails from the executor about the processing of the estate, one explaining the massive plot of land he now owned out in the goddamn country and the other inquiring, would you prefer the taxes to be paid from your accounts directly? Becoming a millionaire something close to overnight had made less of an impression on him than he expected, since it wasn’t much different than when Eddie had given him free reign over his cards.
Most of the texts were contained to Del’s ongoing thread; he wasn’t prepared to explore that. As he dallied in the inbox, a response from Riley came through: cool. text is the best way to reach me, i never check messenger
me neither he responded.
The conversation with West kept popping back into his head. He’d eyeballed the stack of Eddie’s notebooks again before bed, but his whole brain shied away from the thought of digging through the other man’s research on their—supernatural horseshit. Ugly memories and the high likelihood of provoking his erstwhile haunting to pay him another grueling visit lurked down that avenue. And aside from those notes, he still had one more person to track down on campus.
He fired off a message to West that felt stilted but workable: Can you introduce me to Dr Troth this afternoon
With no attempt to delay for propriety’s sake, West responded immediately:
Perfect timing, I was about to ask if you would be free to meet her. Today she mentioned she has something she was going to give to Ed, and thought you’d maybe be interested in it too.
Okay, how about in an hour
I’ll confirm with her.
Meet me in front of the humanities building?
Sure
Meeting the advisor would fill out the main cast from Eddie’s unsupervised months, though he had to assume Vanderbilt and its esteemed faculty had played little role in whatever violence had happened. If Andrew got the chance to leave Eddie’s hideous excavations half-buried, all the better.
He hopped in his Supra for the trip and found a close spot to park, striding purposefully to the assigned meeting spot and settling on a concrete bench to wait for West. Students bustled around him like disorganized cats, yowling and chasing each other. He propped his forearms on his thighs. The sun beat on the nape of his neck. A tingle twitched his fingers, recalling the scorching leather wheel grip and the thud of his heart in his mouth.
“Andrew,” West called out.
His cream button-up reflected a blinding amount of sun, open two buttons over a few inches of russet-brown chest. He strode confident through a crowd of underclassmen, sporting a hassled grin, his silver glasses absent. Andrew shied away from eye contact, drawn by the flash of a cuff earring at the top of his left ear. West offered his hand for a firm shake before leading Andrew into the building.
“Come on, she should still be in her office. I think she’s tried to email you, but you haven’t responded.” The crisply air-conditioned lobby turned Andrew’s prickle of sweat to sticky gum in an instant. West tapped the UP arrow with his thumb. “As your mentor: have you checked your email at all?”
Andrew said, “Sort of.”
“Okay, please fix that,” West said.
The elevator opened with a tinny ping. Andrew leaned against the rail, thumb in belt loop, while West punched the button for the top floor. The hush of the enclosed space amplified the sound of their breathing. The door dinged at them again on opening, a touch accusatory. Andrew followed West across the hall to a warren of offices. Three were open, the rest shut for the afternoon. West rapped on the frame of one with his knuckles and lounged against the doorjamb without crossing the unmarked boundary. His pose spoke of casual deference.
“Oh, come in,” a woman said from beyond the frame’s edge. “I wasn’t sure if you’d make it. I have a doctor’s appointment with my husband shortly, so we’ll have to keep things brief.”
“Of course, no worries. This is Andrew Blur—he had to drive over to meet you,” West said, glancing over his shoulder to confirm that he hadn’t lost his charge.
Andrew followed him inside an office cramped with stacks of folders in front of overflowing bookshelves and chose one of two chairs that would’ve fit better in a doctor’s office in the seventies. West propped his hip against a shelf beside the professor’s desk. She sat tall in her executive chair, a pair of reading glasses on top of her head and white-threaded red hair flopped over one shoulder in a loose braid. Her papery pale skin had a pinkish flush. Prominent collarbones winged above the scooped neck of her pine-green blouse, accented with a gold ring on a thin matching chain. She was understated but elegant; the hand she offered Andrew was thin and long-fingered.
“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Blur—or may I call you Andrew?” she said.
“Andrew’s fine,” he replied.
“Andrew, then. First and foremost, I’d like to offer my condolences. I knew Edward as a fantastic student in the short time I had with him, and we’re all grieving his loss.”
“We are,” West said, unobtrusively warm.
“Thanks,” Andrew replied.
“How are you finding your first week? Has Thom been taking good care of you?” she asked.
Andrew caught West’s eye and said, “As much as he’s able.”
She rested her wrists on the edge of the desk and leaned into the grasp of her office chair. Her gaze weighed him. He bet she found him lacking, but he affected ease, waiting for her to continue. What could she possibly have to give him?
She continued, “I understand this conversation will be difficult for you, and please let me know if you’d like to wait, but I thought it would be best if we got the messiest bits out of the way?”
“Which bits are those?” Andrew asked.
“To be frank, I wanted to discuss whether you intend to continue Edward’s research into regional occult folklore, as he’d said it was an interest you both shared and would be pursuing together,” Troth said. Andrew’s jaw clenched in reflex; her eyebrows pinched in response, empathetic but cool. “I imagine it’s stressful to consider following in that same direction right now, and possibly more so to think about doing anything else. So, please know that I’m your advocate. I’m still assigned as your advisor, but if your needs lead you to another faculty member, I’ll be available to assist with that as well.”
“I hadn’t decided,” Andrew managed.
Regional occult folklore. In truth, he’d begun to put the question of research out of his mind as soon as he met the raucous crowd Eddie had fallen into. The boys were the more obvious threat, and the scholarship made him more uncomfortable. He’d rather not face those notebooks with their secrets or the haunt stuck to the underside of his shadow, waiting for his guard to slip and allow it purchase. Letting his thoughts so much as drift in that direction made his heart stutter.
Troth continued, “I gathered a few texts from my partner�
��s collection, and some from other colleagues, for Edward. Would you like to take them with you for now, and see if you’re able to work with them?”
The ensuing silence pressed at his bones. West shifted, recrossing his arms as Troth waited for his response. Andrew’s phone vibrated between his ass and the chair, and he jerked, saying, “Okay, sure.”
Troth stood and looped the handle of a cloth tote sitting next to the desk over her wrist. When she lifted it, the sides of the bag strained with book-edges. “Here,” she said. Andrew took it from her. “No expectations, of course, but it’d be a shame to see his work go to waste. His exploration of local supernatural folklore was already going in unique directions. There’s so little source material that speaks to it sufficiently; he would’ve been able to publish. I was eager to see where it went.”
Andrew stood as well, the weight of the books dragging his shoulder off-center. The bag thumped against his calf. West said, “He was doing some impressive fieldwork for a first-year, that’s for sure.”
“Certainly,” Troth agreed.
“Fieldwork?” Andrew asked, unsure of their meaning.
West and Troth shared an impenetrable glance. Their delicate dance of implication and tradition remained alien to him, and it pulled the air out of the room. West’s whole posture had changed in the presence of Dr. Troth, and Andrew figured his should’ve too, but he didn’t precisely know how. He felt exposed by the expectations sailing over his head, close enough to prickle his scalp but beyond his reach.
“Yes, fieldwork. Over the summer he was collecting oral traditions from families in the area with significant histories,” she said. “He started with me. The Troths have lived outside the Nashville area for seven generations. It’s the reason I became involved in his research; it appealed to me, the way his work joined the Southern gothic and the ethnographic.”
“Weren’t you both originally from over on the route to Townsend?” West asked.
Another choked response crawled out of Andrew while cold sweat broke out under his armpits: “Yeah. Grew up outside town, haven’t gone back.”
“Edward said that his research was spurred by his own, how did he describe it, spooky childhood experience in the hollers,” Troth said, her smile edged with invitation. Andrew’s lips glued themselves together, chapped and sticky. No one was supposed to know about those childhood experiences, and “spooky” didn’t begin to cover the horror crawling out of his memories like an oozing swamp. She carried on: “It’s a solid foundation for you to build from, since you do share it.”
“That was his business,” he forced himself to say over the pounding of his pulse in his ears. The corners of the books bit into his shin again as he stepped toward the door. “Thanks. I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“Andrew,” West said, rising startled from his slouch near the door.
He ducked past the other man without acknowledgement. He wasn’t running, but he was close. His shoes slapped on the tiles. He burst into the stairwell and slammed the door behind him with both hands. The cold metal against his forehead, the quiet of the enclosed concrete staircases: he zeroed in on those things, those things alone, then on the strap of the cloth bag biting into his wrist. White specks floated at the corners of his vision. I don’t want to be here. He swallowed the bitter acid crawling up his throat. Fuck going to class after that.
* * *
Riley’s modest pipe sat on the coffee table in the quiet of the abandoned house, but his weed was nowhere to be seen. Andrew’s lungs squeezed around nothing in a choking cramp. Troth’s careless conjuring of the night of the caverns—childhood experiences, goddamn—had kicked his head crooked, especially with the dream so close to the surface after the bleak nights in Eddie’s room. Sunlight warmed the stretched length of his calves on the couch, pouring through the front room’s big windows, as he hunched over his phone. The air conditioner hummed along, struggling to keep pace with the dog days. His thumb hovered over the screen before he flicked it to scroll down and selected his thread with Eddie. The penultimate messages from August 6th, at 3:32 in the morning, read:
come home
i’ll be waiting
And just below, his unknowing response:
keep it together I’ll be there soon
A drag of his finger spun the thread further into the past, stopping on a handful of messages that he heard in Eddie’s voice:
what’re you doing right now biiiiiitch
I hope you’re getting lit
but maybe not without me hmmmm not too lit
are you already drunk
I mean of course
sam and riley treat a boy right
The photo he’d sent was blurred, taken at an outdoor table on a second-floor deck with fairylights strung up all around, which threw the shading off something fierce. Eddie had turned his chair and lifted the phone to an exaggerated selfie angle above his face, grinning so hard his eyes narrowed, shaggy curls askew, streaked with pale grey washout dye that had already disappeared by his funeral a month later. On the opposite side of the table Riley held a tall glass in one hand, the other tilting the straw to his half-open mouth, startled, no glasses.
Halse wasn’t startled. He made strong, smirking eye contact with the camera—sprawled in his chair, one arm hooked over the back, T-shirt pulled tight over his full chest and the white lights casting a deep shadow into the divot of his collarbone. The table between them was littered with empty glasses and one sad tipped-over PBR tallboy. Andrew swallowed the knot in his throat. Eddie’s next text just said cmere, followed by Andrew’s response, would if I could asshole. He imagined the edge of a laugh in Eddie’s voice as he teased, endlessly, always fucking with him. It was unfathomable that he would’ve abandoned Andrew of his own volition. The brackish wrist-cut gore in his haunted dreams remained a fact without explanation.
What next, he thought.
No classes for the afternoon. No one prodding him to come with them or speak to them or do things for them; no next steps implied in Eddie’s leavings; no role to step into or space to inhabit. All he had were questions, with no idea how to begin looking for answers; he oscillated between a frantic crush of ignorance and a hollow exhaustion that turned him to stone. The combination of adrenaline crash and lack of direction provoked a miserable shiver. What next?
A wellspring of need dragged him up the stairs with the grace of a zombie. He froze as he turned the landing’s corner. One sheet of notebook paper, filled top to bottom with purple gel pen, sat on the step above him. The end fluttered, dangling. He tracked the spilled sheets in visual slow-motion, skin crawling, to the point where the trail disappeared into Eddie’s room. The door was still closed. The thought of sidestepping the pages and giving them his back flipped Andrew’s nerves on end, so he gathered them as he ascended the final steps.
The floor of the room was no better. The book he’d used as a paperweight stuck out from under the edge of the bed as if someone had thrown it there. Pages were scattered in a whirlwind around the room, chaotic except for the trail that led out to the hall with utter disregard for the door—as if an immaterial hand had dragged the remaining sheets out like a trail of breadcrumbs to lead him inside. Andrew’s shuddering hands collected the mess in a much messier pile than before. He cast around for a better hiding spot, and ended up stuffing it under a stack of towels in the dim, doorless walk-in closet.
How would a normal person explain that? Just the wind, he lied to himself. He knew better, and his knowledge had the taste of fear. Revenants appreciated the vital spice of terror when leeched from the living. If he hadn’t been shaken before, he was now. Message received. The creature was not gone, nor resting.
He knelt next to the bed on instinct and reached beneath. Eddie only had one hiding place, it never changed. Sure enough, the antique wooden box carved with birds he’d gotten Eddie for his nineteenth birthday was right where he expected it to be. Andrew opened the box on its gliding, well-oiled hinges and snagged the respect
able Ziploc full of weed from its nest amid Eddie’s pipe and accoutrements. On second thought, Andrew tapped the grinder, found its catch partially full, and carried it with him to the living room as well. The bedroom felt a bit too—occupied.
The tan leather couch whumped with how hard he fell on it. Distracted and distraught, he packed himself a bowl and reclined against the arm, right foot on the cushions and the other trailing on the floor. The stretch ached in his hips. After the bowl burned to ash, he set it aside and lifted his arm overhead. His shirt rode up and his hip bones stood out like small hills, drawing an artificial holler between them above the band of his briefs. He turned his marked wrist to and fro, flexing a loose fist. The round dots of faded blue-black ink were uneven, a poor imitation of an organized line. Where the loop should’ve joined at the knob of his wrist, one dot overlapped another in a crooked Venn diagram. The glossy healing patches of the cold burns—the grave-touch—were almost gone.
Andrew remembered holding Eddie’s wrist on his lap with his legs crossed and one knee propped against the sliding glass door of their postcard-sized campus apartment balcony in Columbus. The last cigarette drifted between them for a puff each, methodically fair. Eddie had bought the ink, bundled a set of needles together with string and electrical tape, then sterilized them with peroxide from the sparsely stocked medicine cabinet. Andrew finished off the cigarette and flicked it from the edge of the balcony.
Eddie locked eyes with him, grinning his best wolf’s grin. Andrew fumbled for the needles sitting on a saucer at his knee, unable to unlock their gazes, not even to watch the first stab of ink. The corners of Eddie’s smile flinched, eyes flicking down, then his mouth opened a fraction. His wrist twitched in Andrew’s grip.
“Ouch,” Eddie whispered.
“No shit,” Andrew said. He inspected the welling spots of blood, a lively ruby red.
