by Lee Mandelo
“So did I,” he said.
“Funny how different y’all feel about that.”
The specter lifted their hand to hold the mug for warmth. Color drained from Riley’s face. The other boy’s laptop suddenly merited his dedicated attention. Instead of saying but I miss him, Andrew bolted the hot coffee in three gulping swallows, grabbed the Supra’s key ring from the table, and left.
The comfortable embrace of fall was working on the trees in the neighborhood, orange and red creeping in from the edges of leaves, a carpet of discarded foliage on lawns and porches. Time soldiered on without his agreement. The drive to the ranch house in the hills reminded him of childhood field trips. His revenant offered him a burst of twinned recognition and delight at the crisp breeze.
The WRX sat parked in the drive. Andrew carried himself and his passenger up the steps, listening with half an ear to the impression of missing–welcome–fun–irritation it offered at the sight of Sam’s place. He knocked on the frame of the storm door, then waited. Without much ado the main door opened. The sight of Halse standing barefoot, with bandages bright white against his tan face, settled and unsettled him at the same time.
Andrew broke the brittle silence: “I’m here.”
Sam said, “Fuck, shit,” and closed the door again.
“Halse,” he croaked. He banged on the frame again. “Sam, c’mere. Let me set this right.”
A muffled, “Go home.”
“Talk to me first.”
Seeing the bandages for a second time dropped his stomach to his toes. Sam flicked the storm door latch and pushed it open, forcing Andrew to step to the side. He stood in the frame with the door propped on one arm. Thin scabs ringed his wrists. He favored his right leg, another bandage peeking from under the hem of his basketball shorts. The bruises on his ribs matched Andrew’s. He said nothing, but his stare made demands.
Andrew said, pouring his conflict and longing into it, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t give me that,” Sam said. He sounded unbearably exhausted. “Not after what we had to do, both of us. Don’t be fucking sorry about it.”
The nip of fall skittered past in a gust of storm-tasting wind. Andrew stuffed his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall to watch Sam sidelong. The specter scratched inside his skin, inches too big in all directions for his body to hold comfortably. For the briefest flicker, Sam’s attention cast around as if he saw the same smoky presence Riley did. His frown turned rock-solid.
Andrew asked, “Can you see it?”
“Yeah, at the corners,” he said. “So, that, be sorry for that if you’ve got to pick something. I didn’t want to join your cursed-haunted-bullshit club.”
They’d comingled blood, Andrew remembered in a vertiginous swoop of guilt. He hadn’t spoken the words or finished the ritual, but he’d done enough with his fingernails under the handcuffs, the desperate hook of connection he’d cast. “That was an accident.”
“I bet you say that to all the guys,” Sam said without much humor.
Andrew reached across the distance between them but hesitated halfway. Sam made no motion to close the gap. The limp flop of Andrew’s hand back to his thigh went unacknowledged, until he said, “What are we doing?”
The question loomed.
Sam said, “Nothing, at this minute. That all right with you?”
“No,” Andrew forced himself to admit.
“Give me some consideration, Blur. If you’re going to be married to a fucking ghost, I’m not going to be your affair,” Sam said. His jaw clenched, one visible eye blazing at the challenge. The dead man abiding in Andrew’s bones hissed, displeased, and it drew a violent shudder across Andrew’s own nerves. His response stalled out as he regained control of his flesh. Sam said, “The debt’s clear, between me and Ed, and the thing with you and me has nowhere to go. With due respect and all, fuck off for a while. You already got what you wanted from me.”
The door swooshed open, caught in the breeze when Sam shoved it free of his bracing arm. Andrew stood dumb on the porch as the main door slammed shut, lock turning with a clack. The haunt chittered sympathetic nothingness at him and took clumsy control to maneuver him to the car. He was miles from the house before he regained himself enough to skip the on-ramp and pursue the route in the opposite direction of Sam’s place, following the track of the hills toward the swollen-bellied sun on the horizon.
One time. He and Sam had managed one night together. His whole being remembered the stretch of his jaw and the grip of broad fingers on the base of his skull, thighs solid under his palms, sheets tangled around his knees. An abyssal gulf opened in him at the thought that he had wrecked the potential for that to happen again. The endless taunting text messages and the raw late nights, fistfights and firelight, the one bright savage thing he’d gained from all the loss since the turn of summer—nothing else kindled him to human, eager life. Sam Halse wasn’t going to be another almost. He’d made that mistake over and over in total ignorance for almost a decade, and he wasn’t going to do it again.
He whipped a U-turn, returning to the house on Capitol in the gloaming hours. His roommate sat on the couch where he’d left him, buried in homework, fanning himself with a book in languid flaps while he typed one-handed on the laptop at his side. Three crushed cans of High Life cluttered the coffee table alongside a discarded lighter and pair of sunglasses.
“I need your help,” Andrew said.
Riley dropped his book, bolting upright from his slouch. The leftovers of Eddie Fulton roiled, toneless and agitated and dead. Andrew swallowed against the lump in his throat, choking off the bitter curiosity about what he and the revenant could become together, as he waited for an answer.
Then Riley said, “Of course.”
31
The lock at Townsend had rusted through. Andrew fought the creaking grind of the key against the tumblers. Exerting so much torque strained his stitches. Riley thumbed his baseball cap higher on his forehead as he watched. Tall grass rustled in the overgrown field of the Fulton yard, swishing and swirling, topped with grains. Despite the burnished gold light of afternoon, bleak shade crept at the corners of the porch and behind the age-grimed glass of the house’s tall windows. The lock gave abruptly with a shower of corroded metal. Andrew swung the door open on its hinges. The fourth board past the old welcome mat croaked with his weight, as it had when he and Eddie were kids playing hide-and-seek. His heart soared and crashed all at once. Sheets eaten through in patches hung over the abandoned furniture. Haphazard packing revealed gaps, losses, the final lingering pieces of the family’s life from a near-decade before.
“You grew up here,” Riley said.
“The suburb on the other side of the woods,” he said.
“Nice house.”
“This isn’t the house that matters, I don’t think,” Andrew said.
Riley cast him a grim look. “The one from your dream, then, the old plantation?”
Andrew closed his eyes and let the power creep out around his ankles in a spill, the revenant dragging with it to slide past memories. As boys they’d been happy here, together, and he felt scraps of the lifelong yearning Eddie had dragged to his grave with him. Riley smothered a shriek when the haunt lapped across him. Andrew recoiled at the faint, bitter taste of his friend’s remarkable aura in his throat.
Riley said, shaken after the brush, “You sure it’s safe to use your, whatever, powers after what happened to Troth?”
He said, “I did what I did for Sam.”
The spreading power retracted once more into the film of shade cloaking Andrew head to toe. He’d found nothing in the house worth pursuing further—it was as inert as it could be. He’d expected as much, but he had to find out for sure, leave no corner unchecked.
Riley removed his hat and tugged at his hair before he said, “I know that. It doesn’t seem fair to insist on thanking you for saving him, when I know it cost you something to get him out of there, and you’re not going to tell
me how much.”
“Will you come with me to the plantation?” he asked, changing the subject.
Riley allowed it, responding, “How do we find it?”
“I think I just walk,” he said.
Riley grimaced. Andrew clenched his fists on his next exhale and relaxed his control again. Denied free rein once already during their outing, at his second offer the ghoul overtook him with such urgency it felt as if his ribs might crack from the pressure, the sluggish beat of his pulse smothered beneath its stagnation. He pictured the dreaming vision of the house he’d suffered through previously in detail, feeding that image to the spectral operator of his flesh. The ghoul walked them out of the home from their childhood at once. Riley followed in his wake, with the hot fear of one candle in a vast darkness.
The woods were deep. No person had disturbed the undergrowth in years, but the expected rattle and skitter of small animal life was absent. Riley struggled to beat a path, Andrew nominally in control of his feet and elbows—his ghastly driver had not gotten the hang of his height, his reach. After almost an hour, a faint homing drone rose up from the earth. Andrew hesitated at the same time his roommate recoiled.
“That’s really unpleasant,” Riley choked out.
“It’s that obvious?” Andrew pressed out through clumsy lips.
“Hard to miss, yeah. Like a big ugly lighthouse.”
The trees thinned. Light dappled the green bushes and twisting ivy across their path. Andrew burst free into a clearing, almost swallowing his own tongue at the shock of resonance that struck him. The dilapidated plantation home was grandiose in death: sagging veranda, gaping windows like hollow sockets, rotten wood and worse aura. The sun made no dent in its malicious shadows.
“Oh, fuck that,” Riley said an octave higher than his usual.
“The library,” Andrew said. “We need the library, that’s the room I dreamed about, there’s got to be something on how to lay him to rest.”
“If the house doesn’t eat us first.”
“It won’t, it wants me to come learn from it,” said the revenant with his vocal cords. Riley trilled a whine at the back of his throat. Andrew said, “Sorry, Christ.”
“Do not ever do that again,” Riley said, spooked to the whites of his eyes.
To be fair, Eddie’s dismembered voice coming out of Andrew’s body wasn’t Andrew’s favorite thing, either. The inheritance he’d taken up was nothing but poisoned ashes. It held only a fraction, a splinter, of Eddie’s adoration and anger and need. Sometimes he imagined an alternate future, him and Eddie in Nashville without Troth, growing freer under the influence of the pack. Maybe one night, Eddie would’ve seen him right at sunset all doused in gold and grabbed him with both hands, and put their mouths together. Maybe he wouldn’t have. And even if he had, maybe he’d have been a fucked-up, controlling, monstrous disaster of a partner. Andrew had to accept that he was going to take that maybe to his grave.
Andrew entered the house through the busted window on the groaning porch. The images and impressions from his vision rushed at him in greyscale, identical from the hole in the floorboards to the terrible age of the house itself moldering around them. The miasma of the Troth estate was nothing compared to the Fultons’ original home, itself a dead creature and the locus of constant horrors. The manor resonated on the same frequency as the alien curse-gift latched to his insides—his to claim, if he would just accept the mantle of power and the cruelty that came with it. He shuddered, sick to his stomach.
“You can wait there,” he said over his shoulder to Riley, who was loitering outside with a pale face and clenched fists.
“No, I need to see it,” he said as if to convince himself. “Plus, if it fucking eats you, I’ll be stuck waiting out here after nightfall.”
Andrew entered the hall, which continued to match his vision. Eddie must’ve come here before his murder for the memories to be so fresh. Or maybe Eddie’s ghost had visited on its own, autonomously; he didn’t know if that was even possible. Earth crooned at him in welcome from an invisible cellar underfoot. His ghost fluttered in sympathetic vibration. Riley caught tiny, desperate breaths, almost sobs. The house clutched around them. Andrew put his hand on the library doorknob and twisted as Riley’s fist snagged at the hem of his shirt. The door swung loose on crying hinges. A stinking wave wafted out of the hot dark room, mildewed paper choking the air. He lifted his phone flashlight to inspect the tall shelving on all sides, the antebellum chairs and rugs.
“Go check there—I’ll cover these.” Andrew directed Riley with a gesture to the far shelves.
Riley began to run his own flashlight over spines of books. Andrew inspected novels and collections of poems, children’s books, all the Fulton family’s gathered texts from their rich and awful life. Then, on impulse, he lifted the light to the topmost shelf for a flash of titles: The Oldest Ways and The Ruined Gods, Witchcraft in Salem, and more. The predictability might’ve been comical if it hadn’t stoked his crippling terror higher with each passing second. But alongside the fear came a worse impulse: interest, the temptation to give in. If Sam rejected him again, if this bought him nothing, he’d lose the last connection he had to Eddie and to his line.
That thought—wasn’t his. But it prompted his hand to pet across the looming books without his consent. He snatched his hand to his chest again as the hair rose on his nape. The remembered bitter sweetness of Troth’s soul clogged the base of his throat.
“Change of plans. We need to get rid of all this. Burn it,” he said. Otherwise I might stop resisting. And would the Fultons have collected information on willfully relinquishing their power, anyway?
“Let me take a couple of those books, I’ve never seen them before,” Riley said.
“No—no, but I’ll give you the research I’ve already got. For your dissertation. Just not these, we don’t need to keep these,” he rambled, tense as a hunting dog on point.
The house groaned again, purposeful. The cellar under the floorboards offered a barbed, engaging promise of more more more, as if there were bones buried there calling for him to come pay tribute. The haunt slavered in response. His power wanted to become stronger; he struggled to keep his feet from moving closer to the shelves again. He was not as in control of the situation as he’d hoped.
“Andrew?” Riley whispered uneasily.
With a herculean effort he turned himself toward the door and gasped out, “Run.”
Riley bolted fast as a rabbit, and he followed at a pell-mell stagger out of the library, into the rotted foyer, and out the broken window again. Andrew tripped over his own feet in the grass and fell. Riley tumbled next to him on purpose, smacking a hand onto his chest twice.
“Haunted fucking houses, dear fucking god,” he said.
Catching his breath while crushing the irritable revenant beneath his frayed will, he said, “I have some gas in the trunk. I figured we’d probably need to take care of it.”
“Are you getting more psychic, or what,” Riley tried to joke.
Finding the path to the car, then returning to the plantation with canisters of gasoline and his matchbooks and lighters, ate another two hours. The sun had crossed to the edge of the sky overhead. Andrew poured gas around the crumbling foundations, steeling himself before hopping onto the veranda again.
“Come get me if I’m not back fast,” he said, then vaulted through the window to sprint for the library.
The land’s offer tugged at him as he splashed fuel across the lightless barren hell the Fultons had created, preparing to put the past to rest along with the books. Eddie had left him this, all of this, but keeping it—allowing its horror to continue to thrive for another generation—struck him to the core as wrong. He would get closure, by force if need be. When the can was empty, four more striding leaps back through the rotting house carried him outside, safe and hale. Together he and his roommate set a respectable fire at the foundations, flames licking hot and glowing into the homestead’s recesses.
Though within him, the haunt pressed at Andrew, unchanged.
Riley said, “I grabbed the ring from Sam’s. You still think you need it to do the rest?”
“Yeah, I do,” Andrew said.
The land seethed with death and need under his hands. He dug his fingers into the dirt, recalling the idea he’d had the night before. In his mind he turned the thought on end and breathed through the revenant’s instinctive resistance, waiting for that to pass, then held out a hand to Riley regardless when it didn’t. Impulse and Eddie’s damned memories told him symbolism was half the engine of magic. His roommate dropped the curse-tinged platinum band onto his palm. The revenant latched onto the metal it recognized in a heartbeat, despite its unwillingness to abandon him.
“This is yours,” he whispered inside himself and outside at once.
Riley remained at the edge of the conflagration, a safe but eerie distance as the wooden frame cracked and collapsed. Andrew walked into the woods with the fire at his back, casting his writhing shadow into the tree-shade. The sinkhole was closer than he remembered. His legs were longer now. Unnatural chill rose from the gaping edge, the entrance to the caverns and the site of his first death. Eddie’s, too. Andrew slipped the ring on and lifted it to his mouth. Metal stung his lips with cold. He urged the slithering weight of the haunt out of his flesh, cramming it into the band. Unpracticed though he was, Eddie had made him powerful—powerful enough to control a haunt, though he hated the idea of forcing him out. Come on. I love you, but this is no life. And, for once, it cooperated. His acquired memories slithered free with a mournful pang.
