Chapter 24

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.

Aside from the outfits, he felt as if he’d stepped backward in time. The persistent, phantom itching ramped up; Andrew fought off the urge to gnaw on his fingernails. Jane Troth, seated on the far corner of one sofa, lifted her hand in an inclusive wave.

“Hello there, gentlemen,” she said.

“Hi,” Andrew replied.

Riley lifted his bottle in greeting before adding it to the array. Andrew had bought it without checking the cost, but he assumed it would work well enough. While he approached the couch to curious glances from the assorted guests, Riley poured them each two fingers in squat crystal glasses. Professor Troth stood up and smoothed her dress around her middle, then waved to her vacated seat.

“Take my spot, and I’ll go see if Mark is feeling well enough to speak to you about the project,” she said.

Andrew gingerly took the warmed corner cushion and Riley wedged himself into the middle space, their thighs pressed together, handing him his drink with a faintly spooked grimace. To Riley’s right sat an older white woman in a mauve blazer and corduroy slacks, chatting up the same student who’d led them inside. Andrew rearranged himself to tuck the arm of the sofa under his elbow and angle his body toward Riley, who leaned to murmur in his ear, “Are you, uh, feeling this place too?”

The tingling itch that had started the moment he set foot on the property marched along his elbow joints, merrily aggravating. Andrew closed his eyes slowly, looking inward, tugging on the roiling chill in his gut that was—suddenly responsive, so very eager, starved perhaps, for his attention. His whole body twitched. The faux gas lights flickered at the corners of his vision like the shadows might crawl up to snuff them.

Riley pinched his leg savagely and hissed, “Do fucking not. Whatever you just almost did, do not.”

“Sorry,” he muttered, cramming the messy tendrils of the curse-gift back into their metaphorical lockbox. He felt like some kind of idiot, trying to explore his magic.

“Christ almighty,” Riley said.

The house seethed around them, responding to his nudge. The anxious strangeness dogging his heels since his arrival resolved into a juxtaposition of realities: the boards under his feet were steeped in death, stained to the foundations with knowledge and time. Reverberations echoed for miles around, as if he stood at the center of a welcoming necropolis.

“Are you talking about the house?” said the young woman on the other end of the couch, startling Andrew.

Riley covered for him and said, “Yeah, just that I didn’t expect it to be so big.”

“It’s the original Troth plantation home. Been here, what, more than a hundred seventy years?” she continued, a little too starry-eyed considering the topic.

Riley’s nose scrunched in disgust before he schooled his face into polite boredom.

“A piece of the past,” the older woman interjected, turning to face them as well. “Nice to meet you, boys, I’m Dr. Koerner. Which program are you from?”

“American studies,” Andrew said.

“Oh, wonderful,” she said.

“We’re here to meet with Dr. Troth and her husband,” Riley said.

Andrew nodded as the room continued to tilt and warp at the edges of his vision. He didn’t care for strangers on a good night, let alone with the lurking, fatal mass of the house and its dead pressing on him from above and below. He snuck a swallow of bourbon large enough to qualify as a shot, and the caustic burn settled him, drawing him back into his real, living skin. If Troth had possessed even the slightest portion of his or Riley’s affinity for the dead, he was sure the malevolence of the place would’ve driven her right out of the countryside.

“Andrew,” Troth said from the entrance to the drawing room, as if summoning him.

“Be right back,” he murmured to Riley, guiltily leaving him to his conversation.

“Mark is, I must warn you, in ill health, and wasn’t feeling up to the party,” Troth said when he caught up to her in the foyer. Her low heels clacked resolutely on the wood of the grand staircase. “Would you be amenable to telling us both the story, however you heard it from the McCormicks? It might give him a lift.”

“Okay, I can do that.” Photograph after photograph lined the upstairs hall, most featuring a younger version of Jane Troth with the man he presumed was Mark. In some, there were two young girls, but one vanished as the family got older. His nape prickled with premonition. “Is West coming tonight? I’m surprised not to see him here.”

“Ah, well, he doesn’t prefer to venture out of Nashville proper. I thought it’d be better not to split my attention tonight regardless.” She frowned in thought. “He was rather irritated at my questions about Edward’s missing research earlier this week, but I’d be a fool not to ask the one other person besides myself who had shown an interest. I hope you don’t mind that I brought it to his attention?”

The question couldn’t be unasked; what else was there to say but, “No, it’s fine.”

Troth turned down the hall to the left, lit dimly by the light from a far room. The darkened remainder of the hall stretched off to the right, cast under full shadow, a darkness that pulled at Andrew’s attention with a sweet whisper—unlike his revenant, but a presence nonetheless. Recalling the animate shadows that had oozed from the Challenger’s footwells, he forced himself to ignore the call. Troth led him to a bright, modern study out of place amongst the preservation chic of the house at large: Macbook on a pale wood and glass desk, sky-blue rugs on the hardwood floor, white cube shelving. An older man reclined on a chaise longue with a book open in his hand, lean and balding with prominent cheekbones.

Ghostly miasma pooled around him, stinking of premature rot. A retching spasm squeezed the back of Andrew’s throat. Ill health was a drastic understatement; he’d only encountered a handful of people so close to death in his years post-cavern, and he usually hightailed it away from them. He knocked back a fortifying swallow of bourbon to cover the pulse of his gag reflex and coughed, waving his hand as an apology. The man chuckled at him.

“Watch yourself, there,” he said, glancing at his wife. “Your student Andrew, I presume?”

“Yes, the one and only,” she responded, sitting at the end of the couch, her fine creamy-peach dress a contrast to his unfashionable sweater and sock feet.

She touched his exposed ankle with a tender fingertip, intimate, and then settled with wrists crossed daintily over the couch arm. Andrew hovered, awkwardly looming over the two of them on the reclined sofa.

Mark pointed to his desk chair. “Have a seat there, roll it over if you want.”

Andrew grasped the chair arm and scooted it closer to the couple. Writhing tendrils of impending death kept snagging his attention: shadows dripped over the man’s clavicle, fluttered at the hinge of his jaw. Hunger within Andrew crouched in eagerness, straining to reach out. Nothing good was going to come of that impulse, so he smothered it. The revenant’s continual interference over the past weeks had frayed his collapsing self-discipline, and Jane Troth’s husband was far enough along to taste and smell and provoke like a thing already dead. Andrew’s whole skeleton throbbed under his skin.

Mark said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Andrew. Edward was a great guy; we smoked cigars and shot the shit over scary stories a few times, my favorite kind of student. He fit right in, here.”

“Thanks,” Andrew said inadequately.

“I’d offer you the same, but I’m banned from smoking at the moment. Had a bad relapse last month and here we are,” he said. His polite smile never reached his eyes, though Andrew hardly blamed him. “Cancer’s a bitch. I’ve got some time left, though, so tell me this scary story while there’s still a chance.”

“Please do,” Jane said.

Her posture yearned toward the man on the couch, though she tried to lean away and keep him in her sight. The magnetism between them was strung tight as a spiderweb. Andrew propped a heel on the chair leg, forearm on his knee to support his glass. It unnerved him to witness Troth’s oncoming, inevitable hurt.

“The way the McCormicks told it to me, the second son of the Fulton family married young and his wife got sick, so he sacrificed his sister to the land the estate’s on as part of a, uh, sort of deal with death to keep her going.” He didn’t have the gift for spinning the yarn, not how Lisa McCormick did. “The version I heard has it that the power was already there, sleeping in the land, and he woke it up. It goes on that the wife does survive, but the power drives them both mad, and the family’s been cursed by the deal ever since.”

“That’s it, huh,” Mark said with a sardonic raised eyebrow.

Andrew said, “Sorry, I’m not a great storyteller. The McCormicks made the land itself seem the most important part of the story, not so much the Fultons in particular. They were like, collateral damage for the existing power they tied themselves to. It’s a little different than the usual devil’s bargain story, because the devil isn’t personified, and because the curse is still out there haunting the remaining descendants.”

“The bit about the young husband is familiar. People will go far for love, further than you’d expect,” Professor Troth said.

Her husband murmured, “And who wouldn’t want to be able to stave off death, right? Hell, what I’d do for that, curse or no curse.”

Her hands held each other on the couch arm, twisted tight enough to turn her knuckles white. Andrew looked out the window across the broad lawns to the edge of encroaching forest, the gloom of the settling evening as the stars came out. Troth knew her husband wasn’t going to see through another winter, and he felt a kinship with her over that—Eddie wouldn’t be seeing snow either, not even the wet slush that Nashville got in place of Columbus’s frozen tundra. Neither of them would be scrambling over the tiny ice-mountains scattered across parking lots up north, or shoving cold hands under each other’s shirts.

“I’ll write it down better than I told it,” he said. “But I’m looking for a book, too, to fill the story out some more. Appalachian Folk Knowledge and History from an E. Gerson, published in the forties.”

“Huh, haven’t read it, but the title sounds familiar. Have you tried the library?” Mark said.

“It’s not there, I’ve looked,” Andrew said.

Silence settled for one beat, dragged into a second and a third. Mark hummed, a bit dismissive, without taking his eyes off of Andrew; the continued attention seemed too intense, paired with his noncommittal response.

Dr. Troth tapped her husband’s ankle again as Andrew sat caught-rabbit still, and he cast a long glance up at her. “Sorry darling, getting tired. I might be done for tonight.”

“I’m sure, dear, I understand. We’ll let you rest,” she replied, gesturing Andrew out.

He waited for her far enough into the hall to avoid eavesdropping on their goodbyes. Troth joined him minutes later, standing in front of one of the photos on the wall: a husband and wife, a pair of young children. Her face crumpled, pinched, as a crimson flush of emotion colored her paper-white skin brighter than her hair.

“Shit,” she said, strained.

Andrew cleared his throat and asked, “Those your kids?”

Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, gathering herself. In her heels, when she turned to look at him, she must’ve topped six feet; he lifted his chin to meet her eyes. “Yes, I believe I mentioned them once before. The oldest is at Cambridge for her doctorate currently; the youngest would’ve been your age.”

Below them, a door creaked, then shut with a snap. Troth frowned in the direction of the noise, chandelier-light catching on the creases of her face—immediately as remote as she’d been before her brief flare of naked feeling.

“That’s the library downstairs,” she said. “I’d rather not have guests spilling wine on the family papers, if you’ll pardon me.”

The nude bumps of her uppermost vertebrae showed above the draped, elegant neckline of her gown as she strode away. On impulse, Andrew slipped his phone out of his pocket and texted Riley: if that’s you leave she noticed. His inbox held two texts from West and seven from Sam. He descended the stairs behind Troth, jogging to catch up to her fast clip. As her heel touched the final step, the imposing door on the far side of the hall opened to divulge Riley.

With a dazzling smile, academic charm at its full wattage, he said, “Andrew, I was looking for you—Sam’s having car trouble and needs a ride. I thought you’d be in there but you weren’t, my mistake. Nice library, Dr. Troth, really impressive.”

“Of course, thank you,” she said coolly and turned to Andrew, laying a hand on his arm. “Will you be going already, then?”

Riley said, “Andrew drove, but if we need to stay longer I can ask Sam to wait.”

His perfect amiable mask didn’t slip an inch. Chameleon, Andrew thought again with admiration. Troth looked between them without a word as Riley waited for a response, not one single bit of unease written on his face.

“Let’s go get him,” Andrew said. “Dr. Troth, I’ll email you the write-up as soon as I finish it. I’m sorry the story wasn’t what your husband was looking for.”

“No, it’s not your fault, it was perfectly intriguing. If you’d spoken to Mark a month ago, before the downturn, his response would’ve been far more enthusiastic. And you’re right, most devil’s bargain stories don’t treat supernatural gifts as hereditary or landed, that’s worth further research,” she said.

Civilized chatter and clinking glasses emanated from the drawing room as the trio stood outside the warming boundaries of its influence. Troth’s premiere hostess guise had firmly reassembled; vanished were the personal agonies Andrew had witnessed five minutes prior.

She offered them both another manicured smile and said, “Thank you for coming.”

On the front steps, the moment the door slammed shut, Riley turned to him with a grimace. He said, “First of all, fuck that creepy-ass house full of only white people, Christ. You caught me before I finished, I only had a second, but her library is chock-full of fucked up occult shit, spook-factor top to bottom.”

“Huh,” Andrew murmured, casting a long glance over his shoulder at the hulk of the house retreating behind them as he strode toward the Supra. “More than you’d expect? I mean, she does research it.”

Riley gave another grim shake of his head. “No, I’m talking super bad vibes, dude. Not real surprised she’s excited about a weird death curse; that library felt like it’d seen a few of its own. Maybe go on and add her to your list.”