by Lee Mandelo
“I passed out. When I came to, Eddie had wandered off. The sinkhole was attached to some big cave system under the forest. By then, it was nighttime, so once I got a foot inside I lost the moon and I couldn’t see a fucking thing. No light at all, that’s the part I still … dream about a lot.”
“Horror movie shit,” Sam said.
Andrew snorted, but he was right: crawling through the pooled, brackish water, pawing at slick stones, banging his sore knees and throbbing broken ankle and stinging bloodied hands, wound pulling on his shoulders and hips. Surrounded in his blindness by a whispering susurrus, the illusion of movement in the black. The wrongness of the cavern. His fingers bumping into the limp hot warmth of Eddie’s leg and grasping it, shaking it, to no response. Not being able to wake him. Horror movie shit, truly, and it had stuck to him for almost a decade.
“I had to crawl through the cave, felt like forever,” he continued. “And I found him, but in bad shape. There was something in there with us, man. It never felt like we’d had an accident, no matter what people said. The thing in the cave wanted us there, I think, and it especially wanted him.”
“Fulton curse,” Sam said.
Andrew paused to orient himself and scratched at the scabs on his left arm. Sam smacked his hand loose to make him quit it. He finally said, “The story gets weirder from here, if you want me to stop.”
“When I was fifteen, my dad knocked me through the glass of the storm door,” Sam said. “Cut my ass up. Little less spooky, more domestic, I guess. That was the first time Mom had to take me to the hospital after something he did. Mamaw picked me up from the hospital, brought me here, and I never saw either of them again. Not one time, not even for fucking Christmas. She was a hard old bitch, but she was sure about keeping her grandbabies safe.”
“Well, shit,” Andrew said.
“Riley’s parents aren’t violent, but they’re real religious. His mom wouldn’t let him change his name. He came out here too after he got his ass whipped at school too many times.” He let out a breath. “Fifteen is the year for moving in with your grandmother, in our family.”
Sharing the grisly truth was easier if he didn’t have to acknowledge the shit being said, if each of them just—spoke out loud, to be heard without being dug at. So in turn, Andrew said, “Eddie wasn’t himself when I did find him,” though that was nowhere near the whole truth of it.
He remembered Eddie’s skinny arm crossing his shoulder and the sharp shock of Eddie’s fingers curling into his lacerated back, bringing the beastly muttering of the curse into his ears. Remembered pain bowing him, fresh blood rolling in fat drops from his armpit to his elbow to his wrist and then to the fingers supporting Eddie’s limp head. When the blood touched Eddie’s hair his neck turned, an unnatural jerk, and he flicked his tongue over Andrew’s wet skin. Dizziness struck Andrew while the mouth dragged up his arm, as if it was lapping up more than the blood alone; he collapsed facedown in the chill water, gasping and choking when it got into his mouth. Eddie loomed over him and palmed his cheek to turn his face out of the water, letting him swallow and spasm. One corpse-cold hand tilted his chin and squeezed his jaw open while the other slid bloodied fingers into his mouth, gagging him as it reached deep down his throat to make him consume, in turn, as he had been consumed.
The warmth had drained out of him into the ground. Eddie curled up around his inert flesh, whispering the cavern’s toneless whispers in his ear, words he had no recollection of later, except that he’d felt them changing him to his bones. The curse tied him to the ground and to the blood coating his throat, reached past the boundaries of his skin and turned him inside out. The edges of his flesh, split like an overripe tomato, pulled along the length of his back; under the cold, coagulating gore, the abrupt itch of healing stung.
He struggled to articulate even a portion of those memories, the violation of them, and managed only, “He did some fucked up stuff. Made me drink his blood. The Fulton curse, that shit’s real. I laid there all night, with him on me, and when the sun came up I like—felt it. I felt the ground warming up. Daybreak brought him around, back to normal, and he didn’t remember a thing. And then it still took two more fucking days for them to find us.”
Andrew stuck his thumbnail between his teeth and started to gnaw, curled on himself, too awkward to wriggle into the shirt again but feeling utterly naked. Sam lay a hand on his shoulder, one squeeze.
“So, as a kid, you knew you were going to die,” he said.
“Yeah, I did, after that first night. I thought I had died already.” That part, he’d never said aloud, not once—not even to Eddie. “I thought I was some sort of really visible ghost, for a whole week after. Took burning myself on the stove making tomato soup to realize I was still kind of alive. After we got out, we both, we weren’t…” normal. He couldn’t say that, couldn’t keep talking. His offering to Sam dried up.
“I kept raising Riley out here, after our grandmother died,” Sam offered in return. “On paper, all I am is a good-for-nothing piece of shit mechanic who gets drunk four nights a week and lives in his dead mamaw’s house. But Riley’s better than that. He’s the only one in our family who’s gotten to college, and he deserves to get out from under all our history. That kid’s the reason I’ve kept it together.”
Andrew said, “That’s all good, but he deserves to live how he likes too. And coming from outside, that age difference between y’all seems like nothing. He’s just another guy to me.”
“To me he’s always going to be the kid that came here with a backpack and nothing else, and asked me to shave his head in the bathroom. I’m responsible for him,” Sam said.
“Except he’s grown,” Andrew repeated with care, “and you’re not his father.”
Sam stood, knees cracking. “Fine, I’ll be the one to talk to him, but I’d still prefer you not pull him in deeper. The pair of us, that’s different, we can handle it. Just keep him on the edges.”
Andrew kept sitting, lost in thought, though he jolted when Sam palmed the topmost point of his scar as he brushed past—glancing, curious. The hydraulic stop on the screen door released with a hiss when Sam went inside. Drained from the conversation and the argument preceding it, Andrew was glad to be alone for a minute or thirty. The unlit living room welcomed him later on with sustained quiet and a pile of blankets on the couch, all for him and offered without comment.
* * *
Andrew let himself into the house on Capitol at 7:30 A.M., buzzed on gas station coffee and Sam’s good-morning blunt, and was relieved to find that the other cousin wasn’t waiting for him on the couch like a sitcom dad. Andrew showered, washed a few dishes, swept the dirt outdoors, spending the first hours of the morning on mechanical tasks to distract him while he twisted the information he’d gathered into mental knots and then unpicked them again, trying to find a clearer angle of approach. There was a curse on the Fultons, their land or their line or both, and Eddie had been searching for an explanation—a search that seemed to also be connected to his murder, no matter the angle Andrew held his internal puzzle at. If he found the monograph, that might point him in the right direction, since it was Eddie’s last stop too.
After he took the garbage out to the cans, he gripped the frame of the back door and used it to stretch, popping his shoulders, rolling his neck. Sleeping on a couch wasn’t the most comfortable experience, but the reprieve from bad dreams left him more rested anyway. He felt scoured from the intimate conversation, occupied by the picture of a miserable teenage Sam Halse tumbling through a single-pane glass door ass-first, bleeding on the upholstery of some cheap sedan on a long ride to a hospital. Mundane, personal, and monumental at the same time.
“Hey,” said Riley from the stairs.
Andrew jumped, fingers slipping off of the lintel. His roommate squinted at the clean kitchen in his boxers, bedhead puffed out in crowning glory. Andrew dragged his glance past the scars on his bare chest, caught out the moment he met Riley’s eyes.
“Stayed with Sam again?” Riley asked.
Andrew said, “It was closer.”
“Sure, yeah.” Riley patted his waist companionably as he shuffled past him to the fridge. “Good for you, putting yourself out there. Also, I’m feeling charitable this morning, so if you want to ask me a set of invasive, personal questions you’ve been stocking up, now’s the time.”
Andrew paused, then asked: “Are the glasses only for aesthetics?”
Riley burst into surprised laughter and thumped his forehead onto the fridge door, continuing to chuckle for a long moment after. Andrew had questions, but as he crossed to the living room and flopped onto the couch, he thought he’d made the right choice not to ask them. His firm limit on hard conversations per month had been exceeded multiple times over, and the one with Del lingered like a leviathan under the rest. Riley joined him a few minutes later with two mugs of coffee. He offered the second to Andrew as he asked, “How long has it been since you actually made it to class?”
Rather than answering, Andrew sipped his coffee too soon and seared his taste buds.
“Okay, uh, consider fixing that before you can’t. If you want to, that is,” Riley said.
“Message received,” he said.
With the rest of the bullshit going on, time passed fast and loose, but he’d managed a couple of course meetings for each class so far, and had turned in a few assignments, sort of on schedule. He had to get it together, he couldn’t afford to lose his access to Troth and her ilk while he kept searching. Riley got up and scratched his flat, lightly furred lower stomach; Andrew looked elsewhere a second late.
“I’m heading out, morning class to teach and all. Hit me up if you’re on campus later,” Riley said.
He carried his coffee upstairs, floorboards creaking overhead as he prepared for the day. Andrew logged onto his student email, laptop precariously balanced on one thigh and coffee in his free hand. Two from West, the unanswered warning from Troth, and several from his courses. He responded to Troth first: I had an interesting breakthrough with the McCormicks, can we meet to discuss? Free this afternoon. The emails from his mentor came from five minutes after their ill-advised beer and then the previous night at 11 P.M.
West’s first email was brief:
Hey Andrew,
Sorry for the abrupt departure. Full disclosure, I was already pissed about Troth spending half of our first dissertation meeting in a month going on about you and Ed and that missing notebook. I can’t pretend to be in a good place about it. The problems I have with her aren’t yours to deal with, though, so again, apologies.
—West
The second email, sent after Andrew had missed the class he shared with West and Riley to go off hunting stories with Sam, read,
Hey Andrew,
I haven’t seen you in class. Troth asked me about our mentorship meetings and I had to admit we hadn’t had one in forever. Let’s meet this week?
—West
Andrew popped another sliver off the ragged edge of his thumbnail with his eyeteeth. His cursor blinked at the start of an unwritten response. During the vision, or haunting, from the trunk—the scabs on his arms ached as he remembered—the person had been strong enough to lift and drop Eddie’s body into the trunk. That narrowed the field considerably. Out of the minuscule list of potentially culpable parties in Andrew’s head, West ticked the boxes for access, ability, and motive. The relationship between West and Troth had been fraught before Eddie came into the picture, and worsened after—suggestive in a way that his other options, all suspect due to circumstance or opportunism, weren’t.
He typed, Yeah sure, when’s good? and received another message almost instantaneously, this one from Troth: Come to my office this afternoon around 3pm, if you’re able? Andrew responded with a quick agreement. The shower’s hiss traveled through the vents. He ducked upstairs to change into another lightweight shirt with long sleeves, and scribbled a note for his roommate that he slapped on the closed bathroom door. It read going to look for the monograph myself text me the title.
The requested text arrived fifteen minutes later as he parked on campus: Appalachian Folk Knowledge and History by E. Gerson, circa 1943. In the hours following, he combed the library stacks one shelf at a time, repeating Riley’s work, looking across the full spectrum of reasonably related shelves—tedious, eye-straining work that turned up nothing. The alarm on his phone rang at 2:45. He crossed campus to Troth’s office, sore-eyed from the fluorescent lighting and towering, shaded shelves.
She greeted him from her desk. “Welcome, Mr. Blur. I hope you’re having a productive afternoon?”
“Something like that,” he said, taking his accustomed uncomfortable seat.
“Let me get the door.” She pushed it closed, the thick wood muffling the enclosed space in an instant. “You said you’d had a breakthrough?”
“Yeah—or, I guess I caught up to the breakthrough Eddie made at the end? I talked to the McCormicks,” he said.
“And what came of that?” she asked with laced fingers, elbows propped on the desktop.
Andrew spread his hands on his knees and sat deeper into the vinyl chair. Their distinct postures, her leaning in and him withdrawing, struck him. “So, the last thing Eddie was looking into was the Fulton family curse itself. Mrs. McCormick knew a version of that ghost story, and she told it to me. She said he postponed their interview because he found another version somewhere else.”
Troth smiled, uncomfortably eager, and said, “Excellent, to be making progress so soon. Were you able to record the interview for transcription? I’d like to hear the original, as soon as possible.”
Andrew winced; that hadn’t occurred to him, but he knew it was proper procedure. “I didn’t get audio, no, but I’ll send over the notes I took. The setup was more casual, and I haven’t done an interview since my thesis. The story doesn’t stand out much from, you know, the standards of the genre, but it’s about his own family, so I’m sure it had special interest.”
Her manicured nail tapped her first knuckle on the opposite hand, a hint of agitation cracking through her veneer of concerned care. “Of course. Next time, do make a recording; it would be good to return and request an oral history from the participants. Otherwise, it doesn’t count much for the archival record. And while I’m sure the text Edward found was fascinating enough for him, an original interview contributes more to the field than any rehash of prior work.”
The concept of returning to the McCormicks and sitting through that tale again, with his phone recording as they sat around their sunny table, made him feel sick. Troth needed to wrangle a publication out of the mess, but that was beyond Andrew’s scope or interests, and he wouldn’t be derailed.
“Sure, but if the other version he told them he found is out there, I’d appreciate seeing it for comparison’s sake,” he said.
“Certainly, and I wouldn’t want to discourage good research habits. If you’ll send me the title, I’ll look into it as well.” As he started to respond, half a consonant out of his mouth, she cut him off to continue, “I’d also intended to extend you an invitation to a small gathering of students and faculty at our home this Friday, but lost track of time. Would you be able to attend?”
“That’s tomorrow,” Andrew said.
“Yes, I apologize for the short notice, but I believe you’d benefit from speaking with my partner. He might prove most helpful on your research into family lore. And you are my advisee, after all. If you’d care to, bring the notes along and tell us both the tale. We’ll offer feedback on avenues worth pursuing. I believe Mr. Sowell and some of your other cohort-mates will be attending,” she said.
Andrew hesitated. The invitation was forceful and abrupt, and she hadn’t extended it to him at the same time as the rest of her students. But, an opportunity was an opportunity.
“All right, sure, sounds useful,” he agreed.
“Perfect. I’ll email the invitation with the address, and the gathering begins at
seven. I do have a course to prepare for, though—if you’ll excuse me?” She gestured him to the door.
Steamrolled, he got up and crossed the room without another word. As he pulled the door shut between them, sweating palm slipping on the cold door handle, she pressed the bridge of her joined hands to her mouth, giving him no further notice.
24
The bottle of top-shelf bourbon Riley clasped by the neck was their contribution to the get-together. He cleaned up well, as usual: hair styled in an artful side part, glasses perched on his nose, a grey sweater-vest over a black Oxford. Andrew’s combination of persistently stubbled jawline, rumpled Henley, and black jeans were shabby in comparison, but he doubted it mattered. Impressing the faculty and making it through to graduation weren’t his driving motivations.
“I don’t dig this place,” Riley said under his breath as he rang the doorbell.
The house was grand, ancient, about an hour from campus. Cars speckled the paved drive. Extensive lawns spoke to the builders’ life of leisure, as did the ostentatious columned veranda and the house’s two tall stories that sprawled far in either direction. The ancestral home creaked at the seams with the weight of contained histories, a constant pressure that ached in his nail-beds and molars. While Andrew hadn’t run across much detail about the Troths during his perusal of Eddie’s research, he bet with enough dedicated attention he’d unearth their ghosts as well; no old families around these parts came without some monstrous history. He scratched at the seam of his jeans to soothe the soreness of his fingertips.
Another student opened the door for them with a smile, a perky young woman whose face he vaguely recognized but couldn’t put to a name.
She said, “Hi there, come on in!”
The entrance hall ceiling soared to the full height of the house, chandelier casting eerie gold light in pools through the bannister of a sweeping staircase. Their classmate walked into a room on the right, French doors thrown wide. Andrew followed with Riley at his elbow. Sedate conversation filled the handsome space, electric sconces on the walls dim enough to articulate the idea of gas without the need for fuming poison. Two long couches and a sideboard loaded with drinks took up most of the drawing room’s floor space. Gleaming, rich hardwood paneling spread underfoot with no rugs to obscure its lavish shine. The handful of faculty attendees were in their fifties or older, scattered with a sparse number of students. There were no staff to speak of.
