Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

  “My family kept their history close. Mark married in, but it’s the Troth name that carries on. I’ve got quite a collection,” she said.

  “You found the monograph?” he asked, zeroing in on the book—the one missing from campus, given the library sticker on the spine.

  “Yes, and as you suggested, it has much more information on the Fulton curse. Mark must have borrowed Eddie’s copy; neither of them told me about it,” she said.

  He picked up the petite hardcover with numb, tingling fingers. His tongue sat heavy in his mouth. The weight of age and haunting in the room pricked at him, plucking sore nerves, and waves crowded the edges of his vision. His phone buzzed in his pocket twice.

  He said, voice thick, “You said there were notes, too?”

  “Let me just get them for you.” She crossed the room to the far shelving. “I’m surprised to see you’re not still wearing his ring, Andrew.”

  “Still?” he asked with a swoop in his stomach that tipped him against the table. Sourceless sound rushed in his ears. He fumbled out his phone. Sam’s text was a garbled smash of letters. Fine shivering in his fingers wobbled the already-fuzzed screen, and the phone clattered onto the glass. His thigh muscles locked, then turned liquid as the carpet rushed up to meet him, fibers soft as silk on his cheek.

  “The other one’s passed out in the front room,” a man’s voice said.

  “I was worried about the dosage. I didn’t expect another guest,” Troth said.

  His phantom flickered in the basement of his skull, hissing with helpless rage, a miserable, useless warning. Euphoria and terror swirled, disconnected, while his fingers twitched. He grasped the table leg and kicked out, dragging one shoe across the carpet. An attempt to speak came out as a slurred moan. He got his knees under him, forehead still on the carpet and head lolling.

  “Poor thing,” Troth said.

  A gentle shove of her sneaker to his side sent him sprawling. Light dazzled his eyes, fractal patterns that spread and swam. Miasma covered him as her husband crouched alongside and pressed skeletal fingers to the pulse point in his throat. Oncoming death punched through the contact. He blacked out.

  29

  Static crashed wake up wake up wake up onto his eardrums. Andrew’s head bobbed on his strained neck. His hands and feet were numb; he sagged against the cord looped around his chest and arms. The seat under his ass was solid, hard wood. Drool slicked his chin and lips. He gagged. Flares popped behind his closed eyelids in starbursts. The brush of spectral fingers on his jaw made him flinch against a hard, slatted seatback, skull braced on the wood at an awkward angle. With slitted eyes, he saw his wrists were bound to the chair arms so tight his palms had turned a worrisome shade of maroon. His vision streamed like a ruined watercolor.

  “Troth,” he muttered in an anesthetized slur.

  Sam had followed him into the house. Sam had drunk the coffee out of polite discomfort, surrounded on all sides by wealth he’d never touch. He’d done it all because of Andrew. Coherency fled as chemical disorientation brought more spit to his swollen, dry tongue. He retched. Bile and coffee burned his esophagus, splattered his shirt.

  “Andrew,” she said from a distance. “You’re awake.”

  He forced the muscles in his face to squint through the throbbing, shifting room around him, a broad open space with a dirt floor, dimly lit, hay and tarps and chain. The sedate breathing of animals.

  “I keep horses,” Jane Troth explained, as calm as if she’d taken him on a tour of the grounds. Her cold hand cupped his chin, lifting his head; her distant expression wavered in and out of focus as he blinked sluggishly. “Thank you for putting the ring on. I needed to be sure of your role, verify you were the vessel he’d chosen—which I hadn’t expected, or I’d have approached the whole situation quite differently from the start.”

  Before Andrew mastered his tongue again, she left him with his head lolling under the weight of his skull. A sliding door creaked, rolled, slammed. The specter’s freezing palms petted his exposed, scabbed forearms. His unleashed, starving power hooked him to Eddie’s specter, but he had no grip over their connection. Drugged as he was, the unstable frequency thrummed uselessly. Nightfall loomed hours or minutes from the horizon. He’d come full circle, back to the kid trapped in a cavern with a broken ankle, waiting to die, best friend in his arms.

  But Eddie wasn’t his only company, not in this reprise of his nightmares. He pried his eyes open. The gloom of the barn wreaked havoc on his no-doubt blown pupils as he waited for the blurring to resolve. Tilting his chin allowed him to measure the length of the stalls to his side. He froze at the sight of a sprawled body at the far corner. His heart tripped. Sam wasn’t moving. His hands lay cuffed in front of him, ankles tied to one of the posts. No one would tie up a corpse. Andrew sipped minute breaths to keep himself from vomiting again.

  “Sam,” he croaked.

  Eddie had left him a mess of clues to follow, but he’d stepped straight into the trap with the same blind confidence that had gotten them to the caverns the first time. Except he’d been the one to drag Sam along with him, unwilling but dedicated, repeating the cycle of his inheritance. The haunt continued to paw at him, cold flecks dusting across his nape and over his throat as if begging entrance. The rolling door opened. Neither Jane nor Mark spared him a glance as they crossed the barn floor together. She laid a canvas bag a few feet from Andrew, then unfolded a nylon tailgating chair closer to Sam. Her husband sat gingerly in it, wearing a thick sweater despite the sultry heat of the evening.

  With him settled, she pecked a kiss on her husband’s forehead and returned to her bag. Andrew’s attention split between the heap of Sam and the woman unzipping a tote in front of him. As she removed a bowl and a set of small, stoppered vials, she began to speak: “I’m sure it doesn’t comfort you, but I hadn’t originally intended to kill Edward, and I do regret that I’m doing this.”

  “Then don’t,” Andrew managed.

  Troth’s smile was grim. “You’re my one chance to keep my partner alive, and I’m finding there are few limits on what I’d do to save him.”

  “Sorry,” Mark contributed with an unnecessarily chipper tone.

  She gave him a sour glance and said, “If you would, please, don’t be rude.”

  Silence as she mixed her ingredients in the bowl, kneeling elegantly on the packed-dirt floor. Sunset called to Andrew from a distance, as if reaching through time for him. His bones ached alongside the draining dusk while his revenant passenger whispered another phrase to him, indistinguishable though forceful, before seeping into the dirt with a pulse of communion that reverberated into the soles of his feet. The death-laden earth of the Troth estate was the revenant’s home, as much as the trunk of the Challenger and more so than the oak tree in the park. Eddie’s blood had spilled here in a corruptive consecration. Ghoul joined ground, and a taste as fetid as rot seized the base of Andrew’s tongue. If he were able to draw out another moment, another hour—

  “Why did you kill him?” he asked.

  “I remember the night when the curse came to life again. It woke me out of a dead sleep,” she said. “I dreamed of a black wave that rose up and up and crashed over us all. Both my daughters were crying in their rooms. I saw you two in the newspaper, and I wondered, but when your parents moved you and Edward away I thought I’d never learn the truth. Imagine my surprise when the prodigal Fulton son returned all those years later, searching for answers to his special gift. And then Mark took a turn for the worse, so I made a decision.”

  “He didn’t tell you he was looking for the curse,” Andrew said.

  “Of course not, but he wasn’t careful about the hints he gave me, or suspicious about the interest I showed. A very self-centered young man, Edward.”

  The drugs were either wearing off or he was acclimating to the dosage, judging from the increased responsiveness of his tongue behind his teeth. He gave silent, hysterical thanks to Eddie’s bad habits and his own lack of survival
instinct. Troth hadn’t planned for two of them, and she wasn’t that kind of doctor. He was willing to bet she hadn’t accounted for his and Sam’s wealth of experience functioning under the influence. She drew a knife from the bag, swirling it through the contents of the bowl. Recognition rocked him at the sight. That edge had bit through Eddie’s flesh first. He remembered its touch from his nightmares.

  “His power should’ve passed to me, according to the ritual I researched. I was surprised—and upset—that it slipped through my fingers, that even death didn’t cut it loose from him,” Troth explained. “The only possible explanation was that Edward wasn’t the sole heir, that he shared custody of the gift. His portion escaped the moment I tried to take it.”

  She laid her knife lengthwise across the bowl to stand, dusting off her knees. He shifted in his bonds but was pinned immobile as she drew her thumb along his tattooed bracelet. He said, “He’d have given it to you if you asked. He’d have helped.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have,” she said.

  “For good reason,” Mark contributed. “I’m alarmed by this whole process myself.”

  “You share so much with him; I could tell the moment you stepped into my office,” Troth said. “You thought you were hunting me, but you were being herded along.”

  Andrew peeled his lips from his teeth.

  “I’ll need your cooperation to bond the halves of the curse he fractured, before the ritual will function. I don’t have any reservations about harming you, or your friend, more than would be necessary to ensure that I get it. Do you understand?”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “I expected as much,” Troth replied.

  Bowl in hand, she approached him. The substance she’d created was murky, gelatinous, and flecked with dried plant matter. She scooped up two fingers of the oily sludge to smear across his forehead, his lips, the palms of his hands. With clinical detachment, she rucked up his shirt and added a dab above his belt-line.

  “Open up,” she said.

  Andrew stared at her and then shook his head once.

  “I will make you,” she said.

  He clenched his teeth shut and she gave a disappointed sigh—before grabbing his face in both hands and jamming her thumbs into the joints of his jaw. Weak from the drugs, Andrew felt his mouth pop open a fraction. She stuffed two fingers straight to the base of his tongue. The points of her manicure stabbed at his gag reflex. He swallowed convulsively, tongue forcing her nails against his soft palate. She withdrew fast, while he was still reeling, not giving him a chance to bite. The paste clung to the inside of his throat, coarse and stale, after she removed her hand.

  “I’m not certain you swallowing is necessary, but I’d rather not skip a step to find out,” she said.

  “Are you going to narrate the whole thing?” he rasped.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s soothing for me. I’d rather consider this as theory instead of practice.”

  This being his murder, he realized.

  From across the room he heard a brief scuff and a hoarse groan. The entirety of Andrew’s being rocked in Sam’s direction within the restriction of his bonds. Troth glanced over his shoulder. The knife dangled from her left hand, smeared with the ritual concoction.

  “Keep an eye on him, darling,” she called to Mark.

  “Will do,” he responded.

  Sam scrabbled through the pile of hay scraps to roll onto his side with a heaving gasp for air. Andrew strained for him once more, cord sawing at his skin. He cursed through his teeth when Troth knotted a fist in his hair and wrenched his head toward her.

  “It’s better if you focus on me,” she said. “Remember that I don’t need him, except to keep you cooperative. You can earn my kindness.”

  His nostrils flared with the force of his breath. He expected nothing to be revealed on her face—but the pinched frown marring her expression hinted at some internal struggle. She transferred the knife to her dominant hand. The veneer of respectability slipped further for a moment as she tracked her stare from his head to his feet.

  “To think that an old bloodline ends here, with someone like you. At least no one will be overly concerned about your disappearance—or his, from what I assume,” she murmured.

  Helpless rage made Andrew scuff his toes against the dirt, as much movement as he had left, while her left hand took hold of his forearm and spread the skin around his scab with the air of a clinician. The knife pricked pristine flesh an inch above the existing wound. Despite himself he groaned, strangled, as the blade split him open. His skin separated in a searing line as she bisected the scab efficiently, shallower than the memory he’d received from Eddie’s specter. Her careful cut overlapped with strong hands that had filleted him to the bone.

  Shallower, but more than deep enough. Blood welled and spilled over the pale sick line of white. Her palm smeared through the mess, tearing another unwilling yelp from his chest. She dabbed her tongue to her fingers with a crinkled nose. The spectral chill he’d grown used to rose in undulating spirals around his trapped ankles, rustling his clothes and hers.

  “I’ll need you to welcome him in, Andrew. Let Edward come to you. I’m surprised you’ve refused him so long already,” she said.

  The knife found his other wrist. Andrew tossed his head and screamed as she cut him again. The pain was intimate. She shushed him out of reflex, squeezing his swollen hand for a split second. Behind him, Sam shouted a blurry invective. Rope creaked. Andrew’s blood pooled in the hollows of his elbows, dripped from his fingers. The haunt croaked with renewed desire as it wrapped around his shaking calves, climbed his thighs toward his wounds. The sorcerers in stories all fed ghosts blood to bring them life, and in this version, he was summoner and sacrifice at the same time.

  “There we are,” Troth said.

  She folded herself cross-legged on the ground in front of him. The tributaries of his gore soaked her jeans as she began to chant a sibilant alien language as familiar as his Social Security number. The revenant shade settled inside him, skin with skin and bone with bone, its hands upturned, its mouth panting in mimicry of his own, while Andrew resisted. His heartbeat stuttered, off-kilter. He gathered his ragged control to stem the pour of his inheritance onto the starving ground, holding the power inside, preventing the union of his phantom and his flesh through force of will alone. If she wanted that consummation, he would thwart it as long as he was capable.

  “He’s struggling. Mark, if you could please make a point for me about how much more unpleasant this could be,” Troth said in a normal voice.

  “Pocketknife will do?” he queried. She murmured an agreement.

  The fabric chair rustled. Troth grabbed Andrew’s chin, forcing him to watch as her husband approached Sam, prone and trembling in the barn dirt. Mark knelt with a flip-knife in his hand and laid it against the apple of Sam’s cheek. Sam kept his eyes and mouth pressed shut. He made no sound.

  “Don’t,” Andrew said.

  “Do as I ask,” she said, “and we won’t.”

  Andrew released his fervent resistance with a pop like cracking knuckles. The remainder of the power he’d used to barricade himself gushed into the dirt and the waiting haunt. Without that final barrier holding it away from the deepest parts of him, the revenant rushed in and filled him to the brim. Troth’s expression went slack with surprise. She lifted a hand to the air in front of him, grasping at something he was unable to sense through the haze of reunification. He had become a passenger in his flesh, one half of a whole, as he’d thought of himself for so long.

  Eddie stretched at the boundaries of his being with a tearing discomfort. Their union was not the pleasure he’d imagined it might be. Andrew’s pulse struggled to beat, erratic. The knife glistened in Troth’s hand, droplets of Andrew plunking to the ground beneath their feet.

  The sun set, and the revenant stilled, the taut pause of a predator.

  Their inheritance was strong—not Andrew’s thought, though it occupied his h
ead. A concentric ripple washed from the site of his unmaking, his possession, through the earth and dust and bones the plantation was built on. The thing that had been Eddie was him, and he had become it as well. The crush of their beings slid home together, filling the gaps and crannies he had left, coursing through his blood and occupying his wounds. The pain lessened in his arms.

  “Now give it over to me,” Troth commanded.

  He remained silent. She drove her thumbs into the meat of his arms; he shrieked again. One of the horses whinnied in empathetic distress. Another kicked the stall. The witch-lights of Troth’s own power, some other eldritch thing with its own unwritten histories, set her eyes aglow with desire.

  “Fuck,” gasped her husband across the room.

  Sam snarled with the wildness of a trapped bear. Andrew heard a choked, wet gagging and a thump. Troth glanced up, startled, and her expression morphed into a mask of desperate fury. She released Andrew, scooping her knife from the floor mid-stride. Sam and his captor were struggling in the dirt, the sick man’s legs kicking while the handcuff chain sliced across his throat like a garrote. Sam buried his face into the bony hollow of the man’s shoulders as he scratched and slapped, clumsy with loss of oxygen. The nervous horses whinnied and bickered. Troth sprinted across the barn with her weapon at the ready as Sam rolled onto his back, Mark’s spasming form shielding his chest and face. He maintained the choke-chain pressure.

  Troth grabbed one of Sam’s forearms and angled her knife at his unprotected side, but he twisted to slam their combined weight into her, throwing her aim. Her stab skidded harmlessly across the dirt. Three bodies writhed in violent tandem, indistinguishable. The revenant that was Andrew wrested himself an inch left and an inch right, straining at his ropes without loosening them. Troth slashed at the meat of Sam’s thigh, splitting denim and skin. His blood mingled with the same earth that had drunk Andrew’s, and Eddie’s, feeding the growing storm beneath it—and as if called, the rush of death beat through the room like a hundred pairs of wings. Mark had gone limp.