by Lee Mandelo
Breath rasped in his throat. Eddie’s notes about his visit to a graveyard—that was a fucking trip and a half—had not prepared him for the marriage of terror and release that washed through him. Eddie had finally managed to force his hand after death, and as he’d always insisted, it felt good to let the power flow through him at will, tingling and illicit. When the phantom weight of an arm slung over his waist and an eerily solid hand gripped his outstretched wrist, when the murmur in his head magnified to a roar, that was also a relief. The horrible, comforting weight proved to him that he hadn’t brought himself past the edge of control all on his own. He’d been drawn to this pit on purpose, pushed in. He caught a jumble of words in the distorted muttering: letgoletgoletgo.
A half hour prior he’d been calming his fluttering nerves while Halse petted the hood of the Challenger. Andrew tried to dredge that moment of vitality to the forefront of his head, but the shade hissed nastily and jerked on the loosened knot of energy filling him to the brim; the graveyard ghosts flared brighter as he groaned, slipping out of his control once more. Surrounded by old death Andrew was a less-than-human creature, strangled on the haunt’s leash while it fed off the battery of their curse. As he tilted forward into unconsciousness, the shade dumped him, disoriented but partially lucid, into the memory: the cavern. It had tried to pull him through time to this moment over and over—their binding, their breach of normal life. This time he let the dream take him.
He was a lanky boy with his friend’s bloodied hand pressed to his face. Crisp, limestone-rich water splashed under him as he clasped the shivering palm when it flopped onto his shoulder. He pressed it to his neck, heard himself whispering a mantra of “don’t, don’t, come on, don’t,” in the pitch black. It was impossible to tell the slickness of water from the slickness of blood. The moment he looped Eddie’s scrawny, limp arm over his shoulder, the scene clipped through time and place as if he’d fallen through a trapdoor. Horror-logic, haunt-logic; the specter’s dragging, shrieking static filled his ears. He was still blind, but no longer in his child’s body living a familiar memory. He was in another body, living a suffering he’d never known himself. Agony bloomed in a terrible sawing stroke through his (not his) forearm, gouged a divot into the bone of his (not his) wrist when the point caught wrong. Eddie’s forearm, he knew without thought, Eddie’s wrist, without question. Blood spilled out of him and carried life with it, vitality draining into the dirt as he struggled. The revenant forced him to remain, to experience, to understand how it died. Though he struggled to separate himself from the dying body with frantic, wordless, thrashing begging, it held him, collared and pliant.
Don’t make me see this. But the haunt’s recollection rolled onward. At the last moment—consumed with a primal rush of panic both his own and remembered—he (Eddie) dug into the gated, controlled power that coiled eternal and patient inside him, a dearest companion hissing promises of revival and salvation. But it slipped through his (Eddie’s) fingers, dripping out of him (not Andrew, Eddie) along the path of the pouring blood instead of responding to his call. Andrew’s lucid struggle to escape the revenant stalled in shock.
The revenant’s memories were muddled, distorted through dream logic and the trauma of death. The erratic lashing of Eddie’s dissolving power was unable to suture his bone-deep wounds closed, despite his last-ditch effort to harness it to that end. Unstuck from him and tearing loose of its moorings, the oozing thing in his blood leapt desperately toward another person, the only other person who carried it, too far away—and Eddie’s final coherent thought was, help me. The soil drank his sacrament and shot an echo into the world, an arrow that struck Andrew through the heart as he tore himself free of the mist with a shout, kicking leaf litter, mindless with the struggle to escape the married memories. Eddie’s death, his failure to connect in his final moments, had been forced on Andrew in cinematic, visceral detail. The revenant made its accusation implicit: at the bitter end, Eddie hadn’t wanted to die—Eddie tried to save himself, Eddie reached for Andrew. If Andrew had come home sooner—if he’d been there, to stop the whole thing—
When he staggered onto the road again, the moon had traveled farther across the almost-cerulean sky than he expected. Fresh dew beaded his hair, his clothes. Andrew Blur, the least willing of all to fuck with Eddie’s dumb gothic bullshit, had spent the night passed out in the woods amidst unnamed graves, and his new acquaintances were no doubt after his ass for disappearing. He couldn’t think of a single explanation that was going to make this seem reasonable. The true answer didn’t seem like the smartest: my best friend is dead, and I’m out of my fucking mind.
The car started without a flinch as if it hadn’t betrayed him hours prior, and he drove the considerable distance to Capitol Street without incident. The lights were on in the living room, casting a dull, homey glow onto the lawn. He braced himself as he mounted the steps to the porch. The door was unlocked and he kicked his shoes off in the foyer, aware of his roommate struggling to sit upright on the couch, squinting with sleep. He was too tired to argue, too worn-out to be upset, and too shattered to be angry. It was the most he’d felt in control of his life in a long time, like the calm after a storm.
Riley said, “What happened, where were you?”
Andrew said, “I waited it out.”
“In a ditch?” Riley asked, gesturing to his dirt-smeared clothes.
Andrew stripped his shirt off. He left it and his jeans in a puddle on the floor without turning his back to Riley, digging through one of his trash bags of clothes for replacements. The pre-dawn quiet was almost as intimate as an apology. He might regret his silence after a real sleep, but Eddie’s death looping on repeat inside his head kept his other feelings at bay. The repetitive bite of knife into bone turned his starving stomach on itself, a sensation no person was meant to remember.
“Seems like he’s trying real goddamn hard to get your attention,” Riley said.
Andrew ground his teeth as he strode past his roommate. He’d had a brief moment of forgetful enjoyment behind the wheel alongside the pack, and in response the ghoul had dragged him to a vulnerable place and forced him through the isolated misery of its death—violent and violating. But how Eddie had gotten to those final moments, desperate to survive, was no clearer. That was what he hadn’t been able to explain to Riley: it was a haunt, and haunts didn’t go around feeding clues to the living left behind.
Still, as he mounted the stairs, he replied, “You’ve read your Hamlet, man, what do you think happens if I give it?”
Riley didn’t respond.
He climbed into the shower and scrubbed at his scabbing knees, head bowed into the hot spray. His core seethed with cold. Eddie had reached for him in those last moments, after violence was done to him, and Andrew hadn’t been there—not to stop it from happening, not to rescue him as he begged for help. That was all the haunt really had to show him. He didn’t blame it for rubbing that salt into his wounds.
* * *
Andrew untangled himself from Eddie’s stale, sweat-damp sheets once the afternoon sun heated the room too much. A scab on his knuckle had come loose during his nap, and a tiny streak of dried blood graced the pillow next to his nose. He pulled on a pair of cutoff sweats, groggy and sore. Tiny threads tickled the crease of his knee as he sat at the desk, considering the laptop once more. On impulse, he stuck his hand under the desktop and ran it along the wood—until he bumped against a piece of paper.
“You little fucker,” he muttered, peeling the taped paper off.
In Eddie’s blockiest script, the torn scrap of notebook paper read townsend2004.
He tapped in the password and unlocked the screen, waited with clenched jaw while it ran through an update. The desktop background was matte black, with threads of night-sky blue and maroon cracking through it like veins. Aesthetic and unnerving, provoking a strange pulse in Andrew’s skin. The visual reminded him of the ghastly instincts that rode his own blood. Four folders, all labeled with the n
ames of spring courses, were stacked along the right side of the screen, while the left held programs—a handful of video and voice chat options, all of which they’d used, word processing, games, and so on.
With his guts crawling up to his throat, suffocating the memories the revenant had forced into his skull of the knife and the vulgar wounds, Andrew opened the word processor and clicked to the most recent documents. The first was labeled “bullshit.” All of the file names listed beneath it appeared to be papers or assignments, with Fulton and a course number in their titles. He opened the document.
Stream of consciousness: a handful of cramped, single-spaced lines. He read,
Are you losing control, my good pal? The clock is ticking and you can’t put him off for much longer. If you can’t hunt down this stuff in time you’re going to drag him into it, and if he responds to the source the same way you are, it’s going to be a disaster. How do you think he’ll thank you when he wakes up in the yard or fucking hallucinates when he walks past an apartment where somebody offed themselves? Not good. He’ll freak. Get it together
Not putting this in the journals
That was all. Had he gone through all that effort to hide one file, one paragraph? Andrew sat back in the seat with one hand gripping his chin, index finger over his mouth. He squeezed spasmodically to feel the pressure on his gums and teeth through his lips. Are you losing control, Eddie had asked himself, as private as possible—keeping it out of his journals, out of his texts, out of his lies. And he had lied. Eddie had lied to keep him away, keep them apart. He clicked through the other documents but found nothing out of the ordinary.
His haunt-memories had dragged him face-first through the death, the undeniable cut wrists. No one had sliced him up after he died of a fucking overdose or a fight or an accidental drowning or whatever other wildness he might’ve fallen into. He’d been alive for the cutting, and scared. But he’d been keeping Andrew apart from him while he dug up his own history’s bones for answers no one needed, spending his time and attention on all these strange men and their friends—keeping such a mountain of secrets. Had he known Eddie at all, in the end? He rejected the wispy cloud of a thought even as it returned to flit treacherously across his mind, reminding himself that he was sure someone else had been the one to inflict that violence on him.
Andrew shook free of the passing horror of his smothered, tiniest doubts, abruptly needing to recenter himself with an alive person, a real human, and lay out a concrete path again.
Downstairs, Riley sat cross-legged on the couch in a pair of basketball shorts and a loose tank top, notebook open to one side and a stack of printouts on the other. His glasses were perched on the tip of his nose. Andrew’s planner sat on the coffee table where he’d abandoned it days before. The calm of the night’s trauma lingered, coating his brain in a thin patina of exhaustion. Riley spread his hands theatrically to welcome him to the room, taking one look at his face and offering, “You want a smoke?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, hoarse.
Riley’s knee popped when he slid off the couch. He disappeared up the stairs. Andrew sat in front of his own abandoned laptop and notes. He stuck the base of his pen in his mouth and gnawed, his knuckles sore and still faintly swollen, aggravated from typing and flexing. In his notebook, he scrawled as loosely as he could:
the phone
who was E with
enemies/fights?
research??
sam
After a split second, he amended the last line with halse. The few points he was able to list didn’t add up to much. He had to keep considering the angles, keep looking for connections. Whether he wanted it to be or not, the fieldwork he’d heard about was part of it, as much as tracking the pack’s involvement during Eddie’s final hours.
“Here,” Riley said as he rounded the corner, smoke billowing from his mouth.
Andrew took the blunt and pulled a long, deep drag. He passed it back as he exhaled, the smoke hanging lazy in the air. Andrew opened his laptop and logged in to his student email. Fifty-six unread messages spilled down the page in a stream of bold black. Two were from West, plus one from Professor Troth that had arrived since his last look. The rest were announcements or push notifications from his courses. He deleted those and read West’s most recent outreach from two days prior while listening to Riley’s pen scratch on paper.
Hey Andrew,
Dr. Troth asked me to see if you’ve been getting her emails. She’s looking to set up a review session with you to share her notes on Ed’s research and to discuss the material she gave you. It would be in your best interest to keep her as your advisor if you’re at all interested in the same subject—she was getting hands-on with Ed and would be a great asset to you, since she cares about the topic so much. Trust me, that doesn’t always happen with a thesis advisor.
And let me know if you get this, too.
He fired off a quick acknowledgment before opening and skimming West’s other email—nothing significant—then opening the message from Professor Troth. He agreed to the meeting she wanted, willing to give it another chance for more information about Eddie.
“Shit, I’m hogging,” Riley said abruptly and handed him the blunt. Riley watched him as he took a drag, breathed out slow, ashed it, and took another hit. “Hey. Are you okay?”
He’d wondered how long the study session could last before they circled around to the night before. He said, “I’m pretty goddamn sore.”
“Not really what I was referring to, but I’ve been thinking about what happened,” Riley continued. He flopped against the back of the couch and spread his arms along it. “His ghost is fucking attached to you at the hip, and you’re telling me it doesn’t matter.”
Andrew closed his laptop and stood.
“Don’t—come on, please,” Riley said.
“I can’t,” Andrew said.
Riley pitched forward to grip his own knees and said, forceful, “He told me he thought it was a waste of my potential to spend half my time making ends meet, instead of focusing on school. He said that when he’d known me for, what, a week? Two? I care about this, Andrew, I care about it a fucking lot. I want to help him, and you’re being shitty.”
Eddie hadn’t told him why he’d offered to adopt Riley and create some little household. The thought that he’d made it so fucking tender, such a meaningful offering—
Andrew was speaking before he caught himself, almost spitting in automatic reaction, “He kept me from coming here and he lied to me about the shit he got up to, especially with you and your whole fucking crew, and it seems like it fucking killed him, so tell me again how I owe you something?”
The room dropped still after his last words, Riley’s startled silence cushioned by the continued stream of music. Andrew’s chest heaved as he caught his breath, winded from the sudden shouting. Apparently he wasn’t too exhausted to lose his temper. Riley’s tense mouth had gone slack.
“Shit, I’m sorry I asked,” Riley whispered.
“Have a little respect, all right?” He tucked his laptop into his backpack.
The last thing he needed was to trap himself in this house, cycling through the same conversations he didn’t want to have and accomplishing nothing. He hefted his bag over his shoulder. The sour ache at the small of his back twanged. As he crossed to the front room to find his shoes, the music cut off.
He had the doorknob in hand when Riley said, “He changed my whole life and it was nothing to him, pocket change. I don’t think either of you could understand, but I can’t get out from under that, and I don’t take handouts. He isn’t here for me to repay. I’m not judging whatever you were to each other, man, but at least let me try to make his generosity right by you.”
“There’s nothing to make right.”
“Bullshit,” Riley said. “I don’t leave debts. Sam neither. You’re here, we’re here, Ed’s not. And I really do think you need our help.”
Eddie had left him this. Andrew rested his for
ehead on the doorframe for the space of a few heartbeats, then slipped out into the world again. It welcomed him with a sticky-hot burst of air and the rich ripe smell of cut grass left to bake in the sun. He hiked his bag higher and set off for the car in his sweatpants and running shoes, just another student in the grip of summer’s end.
13
Stop fighting kids it’s giving me grey hairs
And I’m too hot for that
Come over
Hey fuckass come over
Come here
Asshole
Answer me princess
“Jesus, Halse.” Andrew swiped another text notification off the screen of his phone. The café buzzed with harried students and unhurried retirees. A half-finished drink sat sweating at his elbow, separating into layers of melted ice and cream and overpriced coffee.
He hadn’t been home except to sleep and shower for three straight days. His head was full of music criticism and debates about the future of the academy; he’d begun to dip his toe into a survey of early American novels. He’d missed close to three-quarters of his course meetings without meaning to—time skittered past him so easily—and if he intended to pursue the path Eddie left behind and maintain his access to Troth and West through his patchy scholarship, catching up was a necessity.
And it gave him an excuse to take a breather, sort out his head, which he needed whether he liked it or not. He hadn’t spoken to Riley or responded to the increasingly extravagant string of texts from Sam, though it was flagrantly obvious that progress would remain stalled until he reconnected. Halse and Riley were the ones who’d been with Eddie most when he hadn’t seen fit to share the details of his entire life in Nashville with Andrew, and instead of talking to them, he was sitting in a suburban Starbucks twenty minutes outside of campus, reading articles he’d forget again by the next month. He had to admit that he felt raw, lost, stuck in the memory loop of the revenant’s awful death, though it had remained absent—spent, maybe—since that incident. The schoolwork let him pretend he was making progress.
