Chapter 17

17

Sam drove them up the hill again, climbing toward the moon resting in place overhead. A fierce urge to piss battled with his head-fogging buzz. Something in his pocket jabbed the crease of his groin as he shifted; he adjusted it, rediscovered the paper packet, thumb finding the metal indent of the ring. Through the whole drive home he left his thumb there, and only when Sam parked them safe in the garage did he rouse from his distracted reverie. Even as he tromped up the steps to the house, Andrew found he wasn’t ready to leave the night behind them. Sam gestured over his shoulder, a crook of his index finger, without a word or a glance. Building nerves dispersed as Andrew followed after him through the kitchen, accepting a handful of mismatched blankets tossed at him from the hall closet. He dumped them on the couch and sat to unlace his high-tops, soaking in the intense release of pressure around his sweaty ankles.

Across the room Sam braced his arm above his head at the entrance to the hall, worming his scuffed sneakers off without bending over. His right sock caught on the shoe and slid to mid-foot; instead of fixing it, he kicked it free. His tattoo’s bold edges hinted from underneath the hem of his shirt as it rose above his waistline. As he straightened he caught Andrew staring and flashed a smirk before striding down the hall, one sock on and one sock off. A door shut in the depths of the house, and Andrew released the breath lodged in his chest from the abrupt eye contact.

Andrew availed himself of the bathroom and considered his reflection in the unlit mirror: mouth slack with exhaustion and drink, a hectic flush from cheeks to chest, hair a wind-snared mess. The bruises on his face were healing through a spectrum of mottled flat colors, unlike the nasty green of the fresh one Sam had left on his thigh. On the couch he wrapped himself up in blankets to check his phone. From Riley, a series of questions, then silence once it became clear he wouldn’t respond to them. Either that, or Sam had told him he’d collected their wayward charge. More surprising, three messages from Del:

I’ve given you some space to sort through a few things. I’m checking in now because I’m worried, and I’d appreciate you letting me know you’re okay.

I know you don’t want to talk about it, or about how you feel, but we were friends. I want to think we’re still friends. It shouldn’t be my job alone to make that happen.

Love you Andrew

He responded with a brief, Give me some more time. Love you too. He didn’t think he meant it, but it would give them both longer to sort out their relationship. For good measure he sent a quick message to his mother as well before shutting his phone off. Head turned into the couch cushions, he wondered if Eddie had slept where he was sleeping, if he’d driven those same roads and drank that same cheap liquor and passed out here with Halse. He hadn’t told Andrew if he had—but it made sense, more sense than dinner parties, than washing professors’ dishes. He pressed his thumbnail into his wrist bone over the tattoo, and felt the earth calling to his bones. There were answers somewhere out in these woods.

He slept easier than he’d expected.

The velvet twilight of the dream resounded with Eddie’s voice: further, come further, this way. Andrew stumbled toward the sound of his call over roots and rocks, the shadows treacherously misleading. Just as he glimpsed Eddie’s silhouette through the trees, the ground collapsed under his unsteady heels. Pain sliced from hip to scapula as he fell, the breath punched out of him in a cracked shout. He scrabbled for a grip on the dirt walls as he tumbled with the rotten leaves, tearing a fingernail loose with a pop. His full weight landed on his left ankle, crunching it to the wrong side. Overhead the light waned as his vision swam.

That was how it had happened, and also not how it had happened.

Further,he heard from within the cavern, across the dripping water and the rushing of a far-off stream. He crawled on elbows and knees, useless ankle stabbing at him. He’d lost someone, something. Blind and blinder fumbling led him into chill emptiness, bloodied and hurting. As a child, he’d reached out and touched the heaving warmth of his friend’s chest. This time he encountered a cool, slick, porous surface. Numbing tingles sparked up the length of his arm as the blood in his veins vibrated to life. His thumb slid around a strange, slick hollow, followed a ridge to a branching, rough length of—antler.

The hungering void lurched. Eddie’s cracked murmur filled his ear—further, you’re getting there, huskily intimate—whispering as the revenant had while dragging him through the graveyard, attempting to show him the truth. Hands closed over his, guiding his limp fingers to wrap around the damp-furred antlers. Power beat in a determined pulse at the base of his tongue. Reverberation pinioned him alive between the haunt’s bones and the antlers—conducting from their hands on the stag’s skull to the swelling neglected thing in Andrew’s belly with an agonized ripple.

“Jesus fucking goddamn.” Rough hands jerked under his armpit and around his waist. “Wake the fuck up, come on Andrew.”

The antler in his hand was attached to a dead deer. Andrew recoiled in deranged panic, phantasm superimposed onto reality. Halse dragged him farther from the animal’s remains as he kicked at the ground and struggled to shove himself free. Coarse, gore-matted fur clung to the deer’s corpse, its rot-eyed skull. Scavengers had begun their work long before he’d stumbled onto this dead thing in his sleep. The overpowering stench gagged him. The roiling cold the haunt had raised in his blood lashed toward the deer without his consent, pouring from his fingertips into the earth—and from there to the corpse, its sucking gravity drawing the spill.

Andrew swore a hoof twitched in response, or the shadow it cast did.

“You in there?” Sam said, crouching in front of him to block out the sight of the deer. He was wearing nothing but basketball shorts and house shoes.

Andrew resisted the hair-raising urge to peer around him and confirm the corpse hadn’t moved, grunting out, “Fuck.”

“So do you sleepwalk often,” Sam said, flat.

His clothes stank. The brackish streaks on them, he realized with a burst of nausea, were almost certainly from lying near, or on, the rotting stag. He made a disgusted noise and pulled first one arm then the other into the shirt, careful to strip it over his head without turning it inside out.

“I heard the door open, figured it wasn’t a big deal, and then remembered you’re the poster child for doing insane shit when no one is looking,” Sam said. “Took me like twenty minutes to find your dumb ass. Get up. I’m tired.”

Andrew dropped the shirt on the ground and got to his feet. Sam turned from him. The glow of his phone cast eerie shadows from under his chin while he flicked the flashlight on, a bubble of white light cutting into the forest ahead. Sam started walking; Andrew stumbled after, footsore. Under muted moonlight, filtered through the leaf cover, the stark lines of his tattoo crawled in spiny, feathering geometric shadows across his pale back.

After a few steps he glanced over his shoulder and said, “I haven’t charged this thing in like a day and a half, so get a move on before we end up lost in the woods.”

The final brambles of the tattoo crawled under the waistband of his shorts.

Andrew winced at the bite of sticks and underbrush on his lacerated feet, each step stoking the hurt higher. He couldn’t remember if he’d had a tetanus shot recently. Sam moved at a comfortable lope through the forest debris, tracking their dot on his phone’s map until the vegetation cleared into his backyard. On the porch, under clearer gold light cast by a bulb studded with blundering moths, Andrew noticed that the tattoo lines curled between a scattering of thin, raised white scars. Sam opened the door and raked another look over his filthy body.

“I’m gonna shower,” Andrew said, hoarse as a crow’s caw.

“Yeah, I’ll find you something to wear,” Sam said. “A dead deer. Christ, man.”

His tone was incredulous and disturbed, a pair of emotions Andrew could relate to. He stripped to his boxers and threw his pants onto the porch rail, resolving to add them to the list of things he wasn’t going to deal with if he didn’t have to. Sam called from the hall, “Dropped you some shorts in the bathroom. Figure you didn’t want to touch them until you’re clean.”

An hour later, he sat at the kitchen table with a glass of bourbon and ice. He was scrubbed pink, ticks removed and peroxide liberally applied to all of his minor wounds. Sam sat across from him, watching Andrew over the rim of his own tumbler. Andrew had nothing to say for himself. Last time the revenant had hijacked him, it had at least shown him the death he deserved to see; he wasn’t sure of the point of dragging him into the woods, which was almost more disturbing.

The stag’s hoof had moved, he was sure of it.

“Here’s some free advice for you,” Sam said, turning his glass in his hands. His accent crept thicker as he spoke. “Our grandma, Riley’s and mine, she owned this house. She told us one thing from the time we were little: don’t fuck with what’s outside your scope. There’s a lot of that weird shit out in these parts. Keep your hands off it, it’s no good for no one. I told Ed and Riley the same thing, they just didn’t listen.”

“I hear you,” Andrew muttered.

“Seems like you’re smarter about it than those two chucklefucks, but I still keep catching you at it.” He gulped the rest of his drink and stood. “C’mon.”

Andrew carried his bourbon with him. Sam’s tattoo moved with the defined muscles of his back, trailing from the complex physical machine of his shoulders across the sweep of his lats as he strode to his room. Andrew paused in the doorway, the quiet urge to stay catching him. Sam sprawled onto his bed with a creak of springs, arms over his head, ambient light from the window caught on the hollows of his knees and the central valley of his chest. He tilted his chin expectantly. Andrew knocked the door shut behind him with his heel, set his drink on the dresser, and considered the floor with its pile of laundry. He hadn’t brought his blankets, but he grabbed a pillow off the bed and flopped onto the gritty roughness of the rug.

Sheets rustled; the bed frame creaked.

“Just get up here,” Sam said.

Andrew blinked into the black space under the bed. He sat up. Sam had turned onto his side to face the far wall. The mattress was at least queen-sized—and he was allowed this one thing, he thought, after the fucking nightmare and the dead deer. He missed sleeping beside a warm, breathing body. Andrew tossed the pillow into its proper spot and laid stiffly on the cool twist of sheets, tucking his lacerated feet and calves under them as unobtrusively as possible. Sam sighed. Andrew breathed to his rhythm.

He woke up alone the next morning in an empty house and wore his borrowed shorts home to Capitol, unsettled by the fleeting, sleep-muddled recollection of Sam’s knees pressed into the backs of his own, alive and sweat-damp. Underneath, the stirring whisper of further, further, you’re getting there. Riley was standing in the kitchen cooking eggs when he opened the porch door and Andrew paused, feeling inexplicably naked in borrowed clothes that he knew Riley would recognize. His soiled jeans dangled from a plastic bag looped around his wrist. The ring was still in the pocket, in the professor’s fancy paper packet. Riley glanced over at him, started to speak, then did a filmic double-take before shutting his mouth.

“Slept there, it was too late to get back,” Andrew said, not addressing the fact that he’d been with Sam in the first place. If he didn’t, he figured Riley wouldn’t.

“Sure,” Riley said, awkward. “Uh, how come you left after talking to Troth?”

“She gave me back Eddie’s ring, and brought up all that stuff about his research, their families. Couldn’t get a word in edgewise,” he admitted.

“Overwhelming, huh,” Riley said as he turned the burner off and scooped his scrambled eggs onto a plate.

Andrew sat at the table. The stag and the mud and the bones hadn’t quite dispersed under the strong summer light. Riley plopped down across from him and tapped the tines of his fork on his plate a couple of times, chewing his bottom lip. Andrew raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, so, I got curious,” Riley blurted out. “And I’m sorry, I know, but I went and dug out his notes in your room? I figured you were going through it so I’d help out. You didn’t miss the field notes—they’re not there. I can show you?”

Andrew let the whiplash range of emotions wash over him, from anger to exposure to reluctant interest; then he said, “Show me.”

Riley dashed up the stairs, leaving his eggs unattended. Andrew stole a bite with his fingers, then snagged the bag of shredded cheese from the counter to snack out of. On his return, Riley thumped the stack of journals and pages onto the glass tabletop—looking eager to present his research. With a flourish he spread them out.

“This is all personal stuff—like, his journaling and planning and thinking, but not the ethnographic stuff like demographic data and transcriptions and shit. I remember seeing his field notebook; it was like, this grey Moleskine. If this is everything you found, there’s a ton of shit missing,” Riley said. “Have you checked his carrel?”

“I didn’t know he had one to check,” he replied.

“Well, shit.”

The men stared at each other for a long moment.

“It’s under both our names, but I haven’t gone back since. He kept the spare key upstairs,” Riley said. “It’s reserved all through the semester.”

“Then let’s go see,” Andrew said.

“Let me change,” Riley said, cramming two bites of eggs into his mouth before jogging upstairs again.

Andrew bounced his leg, waiting. His phone had a text from West, asking him what had happened with Troth at the party, and he responded she returned one of Eddie’s rings to me and ambushed me about his research, I had to go after that. West’s typing bubble popped up, disappeared, popped up again. Riley returned before the message arrived, twirling keys around his finger and wearing a grey Henley, the bright butter-yellow of his sneakers offsetting black jeans. His glasses narrowed the lines of his face. Andrew was struck again at the chameleon effect of his roommate: one minute a grubby punk with an ugly, fast car, the next a svelte young academic. The contradiction made his skin crawl with sympathy. He had to fit in somehow.

“This might be nothing,” Riley said, as if to convince himself.

They drove the short distance to campus in tense silence, and a feral energy pushed their pace striding across the weekend-emptied quad, dotted with a bare handful of students appreciating the weather. The carrels were located in the central library, up a few flights of well-trodden stairs. Overhead fluorescents hummed ominously across the rows of cubicle-esque box offices. Riley strode through the first row, took a turn, and cut across two more before he stopped in front of number 32. Andrew unclipped the small brass key and fit it into the petite lock, scarred from decades of clumsy student handling. It turned with an audible click.

Riley said, “I can go first, if you want.”

“Wait out here,” Andrew said.

He turned the knob and the door sagged into his grip, worn on its hinges. He let it swing open. The high walls of the carrel and the wan track lighting overhead turned the compact space into a chiaroscuro relief. He flicked on the lamps, one for each corner, and braced his hands on the solitary chair tucked under the desktop. The carrel had two long, pale wooden desks with drawers at one end, joined at the far corner in an L-shape.

Books, as he’d expected, scattered the far desk: historical survey texts, local journals, a lone mismatched graphic novel with an envelope sticking out of it as a bookmark. Two more composition books, flat and pristine, were tucked into the top corner. Andrew sat in the chair, laid his hands on the working desktop, and thought where the fuck are these notes?

“Riley,” he said.

The other man peered around the edge of the door, a briefly disembodied head and one shoulder. “Sup?”

“What’s missing?”

Riley pulled the door shut behind him as he crammed into the small space. The light flashed on his glasses as he turned his head to inspect the full range of the carrel. He said, “Check the drawers.”

Andrew pulled out the bottom drawer and found a package of granola bars, unopened. The middle contained nothing but a binder clip and a pen, while the top offered a spiral-bound purple notebook, battered and dog-eared, but it had Riley’s handwriting on the cover. The chair spun when he kicked the floor to face the other man again, empty-handed. Riley stood near his knees, leaning against the other desktop in the confined space. Neither spoke, but Riley’s face had gone a hectic scarlet, scar standing out in silvery relief across his cheek and nose.

Andrew’s hands clenched and unclenched on his knees. He’d almost expected to find Eddie’s phone, his notes, a neat trail that said met with a crazy old man in the woods, here’s his address, he tells good stories. Clean answers to an impossible situation. The disappointment outweighed his understanding that the lack of material was also significant.

“Andrew,” Riley started, sounding on edge already.

He wasn’t ready to be interrogated while his brain continued to spin its emotional gears, so he pointed to the bridge of his own nose at the same spot Riley’s scar was and asked, “Where’d that come from again?”

“Someone hit me and I fell on some glass,” he said, undeterred by the redirection. “Andrew, there’s nothing here.”

“Sam take care of that person for you?”

“There’s nowhere else his notes should be,” Riley said, doggedly having the conversation Andrew wasn’t participating in.

“I’ll ask Troth first thing on Monday, it doesn’t … mean shit yet. Not yet,” he said.

Riley shook his head. Andrew stood, curving his chest and hips to avoid contact in the one-person room.

“West said she wanted me to follow up with her, and she was talking about his research at the party, before she gave me the ring. She definitely wants me to keep working on it. The notes might be with her, might be somewhere else. Don’t get your hopes up.”

He was reminding himself as much as telling Riley, who nodded.

Next to the door, pinned to the cloth wall from top to desk, were a set of eight-year-old newspaper articles, some clipped, some printed, some scanned. Local Boys Found After 72-Hour Search, read one headline paired with a black-and-white photograph of two skinny-limbed kids in cargo shorts and sneakers posing for a camera. The picture had been taken at his twelfth birthday. Eddie had pushed him into the swimming pool with his flip-phone still in his pocket an hour later and they’d had a muddy fistfight in the yard. The other headlines weren’t much different. He shoved his hands in his pockets to keep from tearing it all down.