by Eli Easton
There wasn’t time to sort things out. Matthew scrambled to his feet and bolted for the bedroom door as Spartacus launched his muscular body through the air. The dog landed at the door just as Matthew went through and slammed it behind him. A hundred pounds of muscle smashed into the wood while Matthew braced it with his body. Spartacus tore at it with his claws, snarling savagely, causing the door to bang loosely in its frame. The stupid thing had been put on backward before Matthew and his mother moved in six years ago, so it opened out into the living room. It also had no lock. Only the short latch bolt, rattling loosely against the metal strike plate, kept it from flying open as the dog slammed his massive paws against it.
Matthew’s heart pounded in his chest, and his breath came in painful gasps. This isn’t happening! He was terrified, but not so much for himself as for Spartacus. Why had the dog suddenly snapped like this? Maybe it was rabies. Or a brain tumor or encephalitis. Unfortunately, it didn’t matter. Because if Spartacus didn’t calm down soon, somebody would take him away and have him put down. And that scared Matthew more than anything.
In between the barking and the slashing of claws against the wooden door, Matthew could faintly hear the phone buzzing insistently.
Damn it!
He’d left it in the room, along with all his clothes. It had to be Alejandro calling. His mother had already called before he went to bed, saying she’d be spending the night at her boyfriend’s apartment, so it wasn’t likely to be her. But Alejandro’s plane was supposed to be landing tonight. Since he was coming in so late, the plan had been for him to get a taxi home, instead of pestering Matthew for a ride. But nobody else would call him at this hour, unless it was a wrong number.
It took a minute for Matthew to realize some of the pounding he was hearing was coming from the apartment door, rather than the bedroom door. Terrific. One of the neighbors had heard the noise, and the knocking was starting to get insistent.
“Quién es?” he shouted.
“Señor Rojas! Qué demonios estás haciendo ahí?” (“What the hell is going on in there?”)
Matthew groaned. “Un minuto!”
The couch was nearby, so he took a chance that the door would hold for a moment against Spartacus’s assault and ran across the small room. Putting his weight against the opposite end, he slid the couch across the wooden floor until the other arm was wedged firmly against the bedroom door. That would hopefully keep the damned thing closed for a few minutes.
When he opened the door to the second floor landing, Mr. Rojas was standing there in his bathrobe, arms across his chest, glaring. Matthew himself was dressed in nothing but red-and-black checkered boxers. “I’m sorry if we woke you—” he began in Spanish. The man spoke English, Matthew knew, but it was rare to hear it in the apartment building.
“It’s nearly two in the fucking morning!” Mr. Rojas snarled. His eyes were puffy, and his thinning black hair was sticking up in all directions. “Some of us have to work in the morning, you know! What the hell is going on in here?”
The sound of his voice seemed to rile Spartacus up even further, and the dog increased his attack against the bedroom door. Matthew knew the cheap pressed wood wouldn’t hold up for much longer.
Mr. Rojas looked past the boy in horror. “What is that?”
Matthew didn’t want to stand there chatting while there was a chance the dog could break out and come after him again. Or worse, get out of the apartment. He had no idea what to do, but he knew he needed to get out of there. At least until he could figure out a plan. Maybe the dog would calm down if nobody was in the apartment with him.
And he needed to call Alejandro. He couldn’t think of anyone else. His mother would probably want to put Spartacus to sleep. It had taken her a long time to get over her fear of big dogs, but Spartacus’s affectionate nature had gradually won her over. Her fragile trust in him wouldn’t last long if she saw him like he was now. And the police would just shoot him. Matthew saw stories in the news all the time about police shooting big dogs at the slightest sign of aggression. Maybe not all police were like that, but he was too afraid to take the chance.
Alejandro loved Spartacus as much as Matthew did. He’d want to save him too. And maybe between the two of them, they could think of something.
“Mr. Rojas, can I use your phone?”
ALEJANDRO TRIED calling three times and then gave up. If Matthew was sleeping and the phone woke him up, he’d be pissed. Alejandro had left messages, but now he just needed to catch a cab and get home. He could poke his head in at Matthew’s when he got there.
His phone vibrated while he was in the cab, and he anxiously fished it out of his pocket. To his surprise, it wasn’t Matthew. The display read “Fernando Rojas.”
“Sí, Señor Rojas?”
“It’s Matthew,” his friend said in English, sounding frantic. “I’m using Mr. Rojas’s phone.”
Alejandro wasn’t sure whether he should feel relieved or not. Something was obviously off. “Why?”
“Where are you?” Matthew demanded, ignoring his question.
“I’m in a cab.”
“You’re heading home?”
“Yes.”
“Come next door as soon as you get in. It’s urgent!”
“What the hell?”
“I’ll explain when you get here.”
Chapter Four
MATTHEW FELT ridiculous, sitting in the Rojas’s kitchen wrapped in a blanket like a victim of hypothermia. It was July and about eighty degrees out. But Mr. Rojas had insisted he cover up rather than sit there in his underwear. The man didn’t want his daughters to wake up and see Matthew half naked.
So fine. At least he’d let Matthew call Alejandro. “Thank you,” Matthew told him, handing the phone back.
“De nada,” Rojas grunted. “I have to get some sleep. I have work in the morning. You can stay here until Alejandro comes, but don’t make any noise.”
“Gracias.”
ALEJANDRO DIDN’T bother going to his own apartment when the cab dropped him off. All he had with him was a laptop case and a carry-on bag with wheels and an extendable handle. So he just wheeled it up to Matthew’s apartment building. Before he could ring the buzzer, the front door swung open, and there was Matthew, standing there in nothing but a blanket.
“Don’t ring the buzzer!” he hissed under his breath. “And keep your voice down. If I wake Mr. Rojas again, he’ll kill me.”
Alejandro struggled to keep his gaze from searching the gaps in the blanket, trying to see whether his friend was really naked under there. He knew Matthew slept in his underwear, so it seemed unlikely. But it was hard not to speculate. “What’s going on?”
“Come into the stairwell.”
Matthew stepped back so Alejandro could enter. He helped lift the luggage over the doorstep so it wouldn’t bang against the wood, and while his hands were occupied, the blanket slipped off. Alejandro wasn’t surprised to see the familiar red-and-black checked boxers, but he was certainly disappointed. He’d seen Matthew naked on occasion, changing clothes, but… not enough.
Once they were safely inside, Matthew wrapped the blanket around himself again, though he was sweating in the summer heat. “There’s something wrong with Spartacus.”
That snapped Alejandro back to reality and away from thoughts of Matthew’s smooth butt. “What? What happened to him?” He remembered his bizarre dream on the plane. Had it been some kind of premonition, after all?
“I don’t know. Suddenly he’s acting like Cujo. I barely escaped from him without getting my face torn off.” He was talking calmly, but his voice sounded strained, and Alejandro could tell he was close to tears. “I don’t think he got bitten by anything….”
Alejandro felt a chill go through him. If Spartacus was rabid, that would be it. The poor pup would be put down. The thought horrified him—he’d never known a more awesome dog—and he knew it would kill Matthew. “When did it start?” He had no idea what that would tell them, but it
seemed like a good question to ask.
“He was fine before bed….” Matthew hesitated a moment before adding, “Oh, he chewed up your package. I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“He didn’t destroy the book. But he chewed up the box pretty bad.”
“The book?” It finally dawned on him what Matthew meant. Oh shit. Well, so much for owning his own copy of El Gran Libro. It hardly seemed important at the moment. “He attacked you, then chewed up the book?”
“No, the other way around,” Matthew replied, clearly growing frustrated.
It took a few minutes, but Alejandro finally got the complete story. And the more he learned, the more he was disturbed by it. Not only because of what was happening to Spartacus, but because he was becoming more and more convinced it might have something to do with the book. Matthew often poked fun at him for being too superstitious—it was hard not to be, living with Abuela—but Alejandro knew the reputation of the book, and he knew how it had felt when he touched it. The way Matthew had described Spartacus staring intently at it, the way he’d felt about keeping it out of his bedroom… it seemed possible, at least.
Of course, when he explained his theory to Matthew, it didn’t go over well. “Oh please! I said he was acting like Cujo. I didn’t say we were actually living in a Stephen King novel.”
“I had a dream,” Alejandro said quickly, “when I was on the plane.” He described seeing something coming out of the closet where Matthew had admitted hiding the book, slithering through the apartment, and then honing in on Spartacus.
Matthew stared at him openmouthed for a long time after that. At last he gasped, “You fucker!” He glanced at the door to the Rojas’s apartment quickly and lowered his voice. “You sent me a cursed book!”
MATTHEW WAS furious. At least, at first. Alejandro was supposed to be the expert in this kind of thing. He was the one who’d grown up surrounded by all this stuff. He should have known better! True, Matthew had, by now, been around saints and floor washes and Florida Water nearly as much, but still….
Gradually, something occurred to him—something that caused his anger to evaporate. Or, nearly. “Wait a minute. If this is… possession or something… then it isn’t permanent, right? All we have to do is force the spirit to leave Spartacus, and he’ll be just like he was before!”
Alejandro looked uncertain. “Maybe. But I’m not sure how we can do that.”
“There has to be something!” Matthew insisted.
His friend frowned and glanced up the staircase. “What’s he doing now?”
“I don’t know. It’s been quiet for the last hour or so, but I think he got out of the bedroom. I thought I heard him pacing around up there while I was in the Rojas’s kitchen. I’m afraid if I go up, he’ll go nuts again. Even if he doesn’t rip me to shreds, someone might hear him and call the police.”
“Okay,” Alejandro said, surprising Matthew by placing a hand over his. It was an unusually affectionate gesture, coming from him. “Let’s go to the botanica. There are things there we can use.”
Matthew nodded, his gaze still locked on his hand, held in Alejandro’s. Then he recalled, “I need clothes. I can’t walk across town in a blanket.” Technically he could, but he didn’t need the police harassing him.
Alejandro opened his suitcase and dug down past several shirts to a pair of shorts. “These are… well, I’ve worn them. But they’re not that bad.”
“You were wearing underwear, right?” Matthew asked, eying them dubiously.
“Yes. Don’t be an idiot.”
Matthew took them and slipped into them. They fit, as he’d known they would. He and his friend had worn each other’s clothes more than once.
The shirts, however, were a lost cause. Alejandro sniffed them and grimaced. “You don’t want these, huero. They reek.”
“There’s nothing clean?”
“No,” Alejandro replied. “I just brought enough clothes for the trip.”
“Fine.” Matthew was happy with the shorts. It was hot enough to go shirtless, and he was relieved to get out from under the blanket. He folded it and quietly slipped it back into the Rojas’s kitchen. Then he rejoined Alejandro in the stairwell and said, “Let’s go.”
Chapter Five
ALEJANDRO KNEW his grandmother wouldn’t appreciate him raiding the supplies in the botanica. She wasn’t a wealthy woman, and everything he took had come out of her own pocket—at least, the reserves she had in the business bank account. If she didn’t sell it, she lost money. So he’d have to replace everything he took out of his salary.
But he was convinced what had happened to Spartacus was his fault. Or perhaps, like Matthew, he was hoping it was his fault… and that it could be undone. In any case, he had to try.
He started with the books on the shelves. He’d read about “duppies” in Jamaican voodoo—their word for malicious ghosts—but he didn’t know if what had possessed Spartacus was one. Could a ghost be bound to a book the way this spirit seemed to have been? Some practitioners of voodoo and Santeria believed in demons, but the difference between demons and ghosts seemed vague in the books. And he was having trouble finding anything useful for getting rid of them, apart from prayers and offerings to the saints.
He really needed to talk to Abuela, but he was frankly more frightened of her than of the spirit, at the moment. She’d kill him for sending that book to Matthew’s apartment. At any rate, he wasn’t going to wake her up at three in the morning—not until he’d tried some things on his own.
The botanica had incense, sprays, and floor washes for cleansing a house of evil. Those seemed like a good place to start. He grabbed some of the ones he’d seen his grandmother pushing at customers and a couple of others that looked good.
But when he said, “Okay, let’s go,” Matthew stopped him.
“We can’t! If we go into the apartment, he’ll flip out again!” Matthew was still sounding like someone on the edge of a nervous breakdown. “They’ll call the police and take him away!”
“Okay, okay,” Alejandro said, caressing his back to soothe him. “We’ll wait until Mr. Rojas goes to work. Then we’ll tell Mrs. Rojas and the girls not to call the police if they hear Spartacus barking.”
“That’s not going to work!” Matthew protested.
It might not. But Alejandro was counting on the fact that few people in their neighborhood really liked dealing with the police. As long as they weren’t keeping everyone awake in the middle of the night, the other people in the building might be more prone to look the other way. Or listen the other way, as the case may be. “We’ll talk to the Torres’s too.”
“Don’t you know a spell or something to put him to sleep? You know, without harming him?”
Alejandro waved his arm in a gesture that took in the whole shop. “You’ve been working here too. Do any of these powders and sprays claim they can do that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so either. And the only spell I can remember is putting your nightie over your husband’s face when he’s asleep to keep him from waking up. I don’t think that applies. Besides, you don’t own a nightie, so you’d have to use your underwear.” An image of Matthew stripping out of his underwear flashed into Alejandro’s mind, making his mouth go dry, but he deliberately shoved it away.
Matthew frowned and said sullenly, “Fine.”
“When does your mother get home?”
“She has to go directly to work from her boyfriend’s house,” Matthew replied. “She won’t be back ’til tonight.”
“Perfect! We’ll just wait until about nine.” That was five hours away.
It was Matthew who found the potential flaw in that plan. “We probably don’t want to be here when Abuela opens the shop.” He glanced at the small stack of supplies they’d “borrowed.” It was going to be difficult to explain all of this.
“Why don’t we go to my apartment?” Alejandro suggested. “Abuela’s asleep now. We can snea
k in and crash in my room until morning.” They’d slept over at each other’s apartments plenty of times over the years. Even if his grandmother saw them, she wouldn’t think twice about it.
“Okay.”
THEY SNUCK into Alejandro’s apartment to avoid waking his grandmother. Matthew felt completely at home there, just as Alejandro felt in Matthew’s apartment, so he quietly used the bathroom and grabbed a glass of orange juice from the kitchen while his friend stashed their ill-gotten booty in his bedroom. Matthew entered the room, juice in hand, to find Alejandro already stripped to his boxers and pulling down the blankets on his bed. The sight of so much smooth, warm beige skin was distracting enough to make Matthew hesitate a moment, the desire he’d been feeling for years welling up in him again. But he forced himself to ignore it, as he always did.
He sat in the chair next to Alejandro’s desk and attempted to take another sip of juice. But his hand was shaking, and Alejandro noticed it.
“He’ll be okay,” Alejandro said softly.
Matthew wasn’t convinced. All they had to work with was an assortment of powders and sprays he didn’t have a lot of faith in. But he tried to smile as he set the glass down on the desk.
“I’ll be right back,” Alejandro said. He slipped out of the room for a moment—probably to use the bathroom.
Normally, when he stayed over, Matthew slept on the floor, on a mat and sleeping bag Alejandro had stowed in his closet. So he got up and went to the closet to fish those out. He unrolled the mat and then laid the sleeping bag down on top of it.
But when Alejandro returned, he glanced at the sleeping bag and asked, “Do you want to share the bed?” When Matthew’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, Alejandro quickly added, “I’m not gonna make a pass at you. I just thought… you know… you might want to be… near someone tonight.”
