by Lee Mandelo
Andrew said in Eddie’s drawl, “Anybody here tonight asking for an ass-whipping?”
Sam said, “No, kid, none of them are going to mess with you like that.”
Before he could respond to the unexpected gentleness in Sam’s voice, the doorbell rang. Sam opened the door and jerked his thumb toward the hall. He took the hint and ambled to the bathroom for a mostly unnecessary piss, appreciating the brief solitude, then zipped his jeans and returned to the pack. In his absence, a stack of pizza boxes and a chair from the kitchen had appeared. He took the extra seat without a word.
Jacob put a slice of pizza in his hand and said, “No offense meant.”
The curious comfort faded as night descended, their meal reduced to an empty set of greasy cardboard boxes. Sam bounced his leg. Jacob whistled tunelessly under his breath. Ben sprawled on his corner of the couch like an indolent big cat. A soft roll of stomach peeked from underneath the high hem of his T-shirt. The trio on the other couch had drifted apart, no longer crowding the same square foot of space—and all of them had their eyes on him, the stranger in their midst.
“Dibs on the fresh meat,” Luca said.
Ethan said, “Oh, that’s unfair. I’m the best suited, our cars match.”
“You match the Supra, and he’s not driving the Supra,” Riley said.
“We’ll do this quick,” Sam said. The group turned to him as one. “Set the pairs here, block the street, get it done before someone notices.”
“Basic setup for his first time?” Ben asked.
“Far from my first time,” Andrew said. He stood and stretched, back cracking, arms over his head. The lengthening of his chest masked the strain in his voice as he continued, “Between me and Eddie I’m the better driver.”
“Let’s put him through his paces, then,” Sam said, slapping his stomach hard enough to crumple him. He thumped a loose fist on Sam’s arm in response. The wolf-grin made a reappearance as Sam, knees spread in his kingly position on the couch, dragged his eyes up the length of Andrew, as hot and stinging as the four faint lines his fingers had left behind. “Keep up, princess.”
The pack stood and gathered shoes, hats, ducked out for a last-minute piss. Andrew scrubbed the heel of his hand against the sting through his shirt, and Riley threw an arm over his shoulder, pulling him down to murmur next to his ear, “Welcome home.”
Andrew flinched. The arm slipped off his shoulders, palm glancing off the small of his back as Riley turned to his girlfriend and his—and Ethan. The trio were first out the door. Andrew hung at the tail end of the group with Sam, who stood on the top step of the porch to survey his crew. Andrew hopped off onto the lawn, and Sam tousled his hair from above. He stumbled two steps out of reach.
“You’re still wound too tight,” Sam observed.
No one had touched him so much in—weeks, months. Eddie had visited him at the end of the spring term and spent the whole five days manhandling him: scratching his scalp, digging thumbs into the knots of his trapezius muscles, rolling on top of him during naps, once gnawing absently on the knob of his wrist for a full five seconds during a movie. Eddie’s touch was a careless claim that meant home, home, home. These knockoffs hadn’t earned the right to handle him.
“You set the pairs?” Andrew asked.
“Consensus, I guess,” he said. “Luca called your dibs, though. That’s her car.”
He pointed to the fox-body Mustang Andrew had noted at the gas station. Andrew almost hadn’t expected her to mean it. Del hadn’t been much for their sport.
“She had a bone to pick with Eddie about his attitude toward girls, and I’m sure she’d love to pick it with you too,” Sam said.
“Shouldn’t be hard to beat that car, unless she’s packing something real impressive under the hood,” he said.
“Cocky little shit,” Sam said.
“What are you two gossiping about?” Riley shouted at them from the open window of his Mazda. “Hurry up, goddamn.”
“All he does is bitch,” Sam said with affection as he strode toward his WRX.
The roar of their motley crew careened off the hills. Andrew rode middle of the pack, the bulk of the Hellcat digging at the pavement. He pulled Eddie’s hat onto his head and kept a thumb on the brim, elbow on the edge of the open window. The dying light tinged the evening gold. He ran his tongue over his teeth. A dog bayed once, distant and eerie.
The passenger seat pricked at the corner of his right eye—the same straw paper and discarded shirt from the first afternoon remained, nothing remarkable on second and third glance—but there was a tug. Ethan’s taillights ahead guided him out of the hills alongside the rest of the pack, to an outlying suburb, then an unlit stretch of street leading into an industrial park. The grungy rumble of someone’s muffled electronic loops ahead of him bounced against his eardrums. The road through the boxy nondescript buildings was deserted and straight and nakedly public. Eddie would’ve said, kiss your plausible deniability goodbye. But he’d have been smiling when he said it.
Andrew had missed this too, no matter his other reasons for being in the pack tonight.
Practiced as choreography, Ben pulled onto the shoulder a stretch down the road while the rest idled in wait. Music throbbed through open windows, guitar and percussion and electronic fog clashing from all sides. Streetlights cast shadows behind Ben’s heels as he climbed out of his car with an actual orange cone in hand, like from high school gym class. He slapped it on the yellow line and bowed performatively at the group before hopping back in his Focus and reversing to meet them.
Sam hollered, “Let’s get this done before we have company!”
The Mazda rolled ahead of the rest and purred in the lamplight. Andrew was unsurprised to see Ethan match Riley, goosing the engine once their noses were even. It reminded him of his own habitual match with Eddie, first and last no matter what happened between—until now. Ben jogged to stand between the cars with a hand raised. Desire flamed in Andrew as both cars shot off the mark to Ben’s hand chopping the night air. The Supra’s whine shrieked over the Mazda’s lower register, plowing ahead first. Riley caught Ethan, though, at a too-abrupt shift. The Supra’s tail end went loose, a brief but unsalvageable slip that let the Mazda skate past the cone. Brake lights spilled bloody red over the road.
The Mustang rolled up next to Andrew, and Luca shouted to him, “Ben and Jacob have it next, then it’s us.”
“Clear,” he said.
The tattoo itched, a ring of tender prickling pain. Andrew rubbed his wrist on his jeans. Floater-specks danced at the edge of his vision while his nerves throbbed in asymmetrical tempo. The gunmetal WRX idled at the edge of the pack. Sam boosted himself to sit on the rim of his window, ass tucked into the notch of the door and one arm on the roof. Andrew was peripherally aware of the other pair squaring up with Ethan as their flagger.
The rest of him settled, attuned to the cigarette hanging from the corner of Sam’s mouth. His sunburned neck led to the swell of his paler, naked shoulders, where a hint of black ink slipped loose at the collar of his tank top. It was shapeless but bold in the gloaming light, too distant to guess at. Sam noticed his attention and flicked his cigarette onto the ground. Andrew’s hand lifted without his permission. He pointed a finger to his own chest and then at Sam. The bark of Sam’s laugh carried over the noise of the other cars bursting from their stop.
On the other side, Luca said, “Keep it in your pants, Jesus.”
Andrew twitched. She laughed when he turned from Sam, but it was good-natured, lighting her face. Her laugh gave him permission to look, but her seeing made him feel naked. High cheekbones, plump cheeks, the cloud of her hair wrangled free of her face with a toothed headband; the orange lipstick matched her short orange fingernails. He tried to imagine Del behind the wheel of her own car, doing her own work under the hood, and came up blank. Riley said Luca didn’t care for most of Sam’s friends, and neither did Ethan, but here they were: the core of the crew, the ones he should talk to m
ore.
Thinking about that, he called back, “Next?”
“Yeah, I figure I’ve got a point to prove for our first head-to-head,” she said.
“What’s that?” Andrew asked.
“Got to demolish the new boy to keep him in his right place, like the rest of ’em,” she said with a wink as she worked her left arm to roll her window up between them. The tint concealed her one mechanical inch at a time, smirking at him all the while. That was a brand of showmanship Andrew appreciated.
His spark of pleasure was unexpected, momentarily unbalancing. The outing he’d intended as an investigation kept distracting him with something close to fun. He thumbed the button for his windows and coasted to the line. The Hellcat rumbled under him. The interior hush, tinted windows cutting him off from the light, sparked at his fingers on the gearshift. The digital display changed as he shifted to sport drive, the 0.00 timer mode active. All tech, Eddie’s car, compared to the classic machine Luca had chosen for her own, or his Supra, waiting at the house on Capitol for his next outing.
Sam strolled past the hood of the car, one proprietary hand trailing over the sleek, glossy paint. He nodded to Luca first, but then his whole focus shifted to Andrew, eyes on his, hand raised. Andrew held the clutch and eased onto the gas, pushing revs while the digital readout reminded him to hold it, wait for the right moment to explode. Sam’s fingers touched the rim of the moon hanging in the sky. A shudder ripped across the bones of Andrew’s forearms, terror and delight and the promise of risk bringing him to life.
Smashing forward into motion was as natural as breathing when Sam’s bicep bunched and he chopped his hand at the ground. He felt his own heartbeat and the car’s lurch off the line, pinning his stomach to his spine with sweet vertigo. At that precise moment, his pulse bit between his teeth, the flick of shadow yanking at the corner of his eye from the passenger seat distracted him—and he dropped the bridge of his foot too fast. Tires shrieked in the fractional second before his traction bit. Luca zipped ahead smooth as a shot, white smoke wafting in his trail as he fought to shift to catch her. Disorganized noise and adrenaline and the image of Halse’s inked shoulder blade fought inside his head with the desire to push himself. No time to think; only time to react. The tach jumped to match his punishing acceleration. He shifted to second, then third almost instantaneously to boost his speed, a buzzing roar to fourth, but her taillights had barely begun to approach his grill and the orange cone was closing fast—
Zero to sixty in the Challenger was advertised below 3.0 seconds, but Andrew had fucked that up. The timer feature read 4.7 when Luca snapped over the line, a full car length ahead of him. The startling reality of his failure rattled him as he downshifted sloppily, while she blazed ahead to top out her speed in the distance before her brake lights flared, her horn blaring a cheery note as she rolled to a stop. The Challenger shook miserably at his rough handling. He dropped his head onto the wheel, panting from adrenaline and the increasing pressure around his wrists, behind his eyes. A hiss, too sibilant and muffled to understand, rattled from the gravity well of the passenger seat that had been sucking at his head all night. Oh fuck, he had time to think, before the blackness crawled up from the footwell in a hallucinatory blur, over the center console and across his legs.
He pawed at his seat belt and jerked it loose. His hands vibrated with fear, embarrassment, and guilt—he’d lost track of his purpose for a selfish moment in the excitement of the race, and the haunt had fucking noticed. He had to get the door open. The handle stuck. His revenant reared in patchy rotting fragments of oxidized light, pinned between him and the steering wheel in a manner impossible for a real living body, stinking with malevolence. He groaned in the base of his throat and shoved against the hard planes of the door, fingernails squeaking at the window glass. Eddie kept on breaking the rules in death, his shade manifesting without regard for witnesses, as unpredictable as he’d ever been—and growing stronger the more blood and desire and attention Andrew paid him. The static whisper rolling from between its unhinged jawbones sank into his ears like hot nails, jealous and unwilling to be forgotten. He caught the possibilities of words in the scratch of sound inside his skull—can’t or can or this or you—and tore at the handle again. It opened with a click. Andrew tripped himself out of the car, crashed to his knees, and puked.
12
Riley’s boots thumped on the pavement in a sprint as Andrew spat a last mouthful of stringy bile and saliva onto the ground. The asphalt scraped his palms as he swayed and gagged again, overwhelmed by the rancid stink. He used his cleanest hand to bunch his shirt up and scrub his face with it. Riley crouched next to the car, saying, “What the hell was that?”
“Bad timing,” Andrew slurred.
The miasma clung to him in a tenacious film, prying at the cracks in his focus the moment he directed attention to Riley. The dead thing would not allow him to refuse it for much longer, each pull more vicious than the last. I’m trying, he wanted to scream.
“What’s wrong with you? That felt like a goddamn bomb going off,” he hissed. “None of them would know, but I can—”
Andrew staggered to the driver’s seat and swung his feet back inside the car, wincing under the ghoulish pressure attempting to crack into his skull. “Tell them I’ve got a fucking head injury, I don’t care.”
“Andrew,” Riley said again, grabbing the doorframe with trembling fingers in a last-ditch effort to stop him.
Touching wholesome, living Riley seemed like the worst option while ridden by a ravenous spirit; he recoiled when the other boy reached for him. Riley let his hand hover in midair. The haunt dug at Andrew’s control, an insistent but unclear demand he had no resistance against—an incursion that prodded at his constant, habitual grip on the eerie power he’d shared with Eddie. As soon as he directed half a thought to it, the oily streaks in his blood pulsed to attention; the haunt blanketing his flesh reverberated in sympathy, prompting a revolting crawl across his skin. Riley flinched backward like a startled cat.
The longer Andrew stalled, the deeper the creature attempted to burrow, emboldened by the bonding communion he’d offered up on accident during his night of bad choices. It had bided its time for another shot at him, and the situation had spiraled out of his control. He jerked the door closed, even as white-faced Riley attempted to grab for the handle again. His phone hornet-buzzed in his pocket as he put the car in gear. He drove past Luca standing next to her Mustang and waving at him to stop. In his rearview, the confused pack mingled, Riley gesturing broadly at Sam as he jogged the distance to them.
The radio clicked on to aggressive white noise and the time on the digital display flickered—3:18, 9:30, 12:02—before blanking to a row of zeroes. His hands quivered on the shifter and the wheel, but he kept driving. The horror movie shit was flat unnecessary. He skated past frightened straight into furious at the intrusive, crawling thing attempting to wrest more and more life out of him. It wasn’t Eddie, not in the ways that mattered; letting it eat at his pain and yearning wouldn’t bring Eddie home, it would only strip him down to the bones. But he had to admit—alone, still devouring ground on a street he didn’t recognize that was growing ever less populous—that on another level, it was Eddie, so it knew him inside and out. Knew his tells and his weaknesses, how to force him to see and hear and sacrifice. Nothing remotely close to this extravagant personal haunting had ever happened to him before, not even in the weeks after the cavern when the curse was fresh and awful. He was in uncharted territory.
The engine sputtered dead five minutes later, leaving him in the thick of nondescript empty land, a field of undergrowth on his left and a copse of young trees to his right. Andrew let the car coast to the side of the road. The radio had died too, small mercy, no longer filling the interior with raw static. No houses, no headlights on the road in either direction. He tried the starter button again and nothing happened.
With no options left, apparently, but to see the haunt’s detour through
to its intended conclusion, he got out of the car and stood in the center of the street. His phone vibrated again as he waited for the next spectral signal. He pulled it from his pocket, saw Sam’s number, and tossed it on the driver’s seat, where the accusatory glow lit up the dash from below. He crunched into the dry grass on the berm. The ground swam under his feet as he paced through trees, the sour taste of his mouth recalling his experience in the back seat of the Mazda—blanketed in the revenant and dreaming about possession.
The trees cleared again and he stuttered to a stop outside a collapsing square of iron fence overgrown with creeping plant life: saplings, vines, flowers. The gate, thigh-tall, hung loose. Age-polished gravestones tipped and trailed through the plot of land. The iron taste in his mouth intensified, and he unsealed his teeth from the protesting flesh of his lip, a drip of blood beading and falling from the split.
That drop struck funeral ground and a taut wire strung his lungs to the soil, taking him to his battered knees. One time, in a high school friend’s basement for an illicit party, there had been a Ouija board amidst the cheap beer and plastic bong packed with someone’s ditch weed. Andrew remembered Eddie’s feral smile, I know something they don’t know, and the nudge of their fingers together on the planchette. The other kids had shrieked with laughter and jostled to push the wooden pointer, spelling out girls’ crushes and spooky movie threats. But then Eddie hummed one breathy sigh and loosened up on the indefinable dam inside himself, relaxing that fist-taut muscle and pricking a sympathetic twinge at the tip of Andrew’s tongue. A chill nipped at their ears and fingers. Eddie’s stare held steady as he trickled more and more of his corpse-cold pressure over the board. The giggles died as animal instinct rippled through the room in a fearful wave. And then the wood had cracked, provoking screams and a universal recoil like a bomb had detonated—except for Eddie, except for Andrew, touching separate halves of the fractured game piece.
Andrew felt like that planchette: broken open. He crawled across the boundary of the forgotten cemetery, each drop of blood striking the earth with the force of a church bell pealing. As his heels crossed the perimeter a rush of wind scoured through the trees. Leaves rattled overhead. He lay on his side, fingertips touching a smooth stone, a twig jammed against his scalp. Greyish mist seeped up from the earth with an unreal tinge like the afterimage from a lens flare, remnants heaving themselves free from their grave-plots to trickle up his wrist, enveloping his arm, his torso, his ankles, in a tingling embrace that was not illusory.
