Chapter 27

27

Hello Andrew,

Have you been successful in your attempt to access the monograph you mentioned? I’ve been unable to locate a copy with colleagues. Additionally, how is your write-up coming along? I’m eager to read the full transcription of the interview.

—Jane

Hello Andrew,

Thom informed me during our morning meeting that he’s resigned from mentoring you after a disagreement over Edward’s research materials. I was unaware of your recent absences. Please reach out as soon as possible to discuss your situation. If you need to withdraw and defer, I’ll assist with the process; we’ll continue with the research regardless, if you’re willing.

Please allow me to help you.

Best,

Jane

The third and final email in his inbox from Dr. Troth, time-stamped to 11:45 P.M. from the prior night, was short and simple:

Hello Andrew,

I’m growing concerned, as I haven’t heard from you. Are you all right?

—Jane

Sam finished reading and said, “So y’all think something’s off about her?”

“Yeah, but him dying fucked her over too,” Andrew said.

Sam leaned on the arm of the couch and Andrew sat square in the middle. Rain pattered on the roof. Tested patiences weighted the air in the room like damp humidity. The distraction of Sam in thin sweatpants and a white undershirt, tired from his afternoon at the garage but clean-smelling from a quick shower, dragged at animal parts of Andrew that had lain smothered for months, or years. Bleak longing of another sort bided its time, his loitering shade casting its pall over their shoulders. The lump on the back of his head reminded him of its constant threat. With each successive slip-up his control grew weaker and less efficient; at this point a menacing chill clung to his bones whether he fought loose of the phantom’s influence or not.

“What about your lost lead?” Sam asked.

“West didn’t do it, he wasn’t even in the state. But Troth was using him and Eddie both, so it wouldn’t make sense for her to kill him. Eddie disappearing just threw a wrench in her plagiarism plans,” he said.

“Now she’s getting pushier because she thinks you’re going to give up before she gets hers,” Sam said.

Andrew sighed. “Yeah, so there has to be someone else. One of those other interviews, or just—something we’re totally missing.”

Sam hummed his understanding. He wormed his foot behind Andrew’s calf. Andrew swallowed and cast a glance to the side. Sam drew one knee onto the couch, letting his legs fall open with his thumb on his waistband. The sweatpants clung to an enticing bulge, and he allowed himself to notice. Andrew’s eyes tracked up from that imprint, across the wrinkles of Sam’s shirt and the pebbled bumps of his nipples to the divot of his throat, then at last met his welcoming stare. Caught and catching in turn. Thunder rolled overhead. The close call from the day before, his corpse-puppet hand hanging in the air, flashed through him like lightning. His jaw clenched around the impulse to warn Sam about the haunt, the risk he’d taken laying his hands on Andrew, the risk he’d be taking again if that really was what had kicked off the last, nastiest altercation—

“C’mere,” Sam said, cutting through his turmoil.

Andrew went, wordless. He ended up crouched over Sam in an ungainly hover, sneakers wedged between the couch arm and the cushion. Sam spread his thighs open to brace across Andrew’s, corded-taut hamstrings exerting a sturdy pressure above his knees. His outside heel hooked over Andrew’s calf while his other leg stayed pressed to the couch cushions. Andrew planted a hand on the seatback to support himself.

“I’m bigger than you, dumbass, just get in here.” Sam tugged Andrew close by his shirt collar, mashing their bodies together. The kiss landed off-center, noses bumping. Front teeth clacked. Sam grunted and moved Andrew’s head with a hand on his jaw, licking into his mouth. Andrew twitched with surprised, blazing pleasure. Such simple touches threw him. Sam said, muffled against his lips but undeniably eager, “Yeah, there we go.”

The house creaked with the storm. Andrew rocked in an unsteady rhythm, teased with friction but unsatisfied, fed with biting kisses. His hands gripped the couch while Sam’s nails dug stinging furrows into the gaps of his rib cage. Pain and desire sparked to a warm burn in the cold hollow of his belly, the cave of loss his revenant had dug out for itself filling instead with life. Sam’s hands dropped to his ass for an aggressive groping squeeze at the fat of his cheeks, fingertips pressing at the crease. The shocked flash of heat that bolted through Andrew in response had him choking on a whine. Forget spending the night talking in circles around Troth and the research, getting nowhere, he wanted—

A white flash cracked outside the big windows of the living room. The lamp on the table cut out, plunging the room into a darkness that radiated menace. Andrew froze. Sam paused as well, panting in the quiet against his slack mouth. The band around his ring finger radiated a bitter cold he hadn’t noticed until it contrasted with the fever Sam stoked in him.

“Andrew,” Sam breathed.

Static crackled from the surround-sound system. Sam gripped his waist spasmodically. The porchlight stayed dead. He held his breath. The hissing from the speakers hooked into his ears with the faintest hint of consonance, and a solid spike of pain drove into his head. He reared to a sitting position while static filled the room from end to end. A speaker popped. Sam grabbed his rising left hand and smacked him across the face with the other, as if attempting to wake him from the living nightmare unfolding around them. Andrew yelped, high and afraid.

The front door slammed open, rebounding from the wall it impacted, and the punishing shriek of the speakers cut short. A lamp flicked on to cast its welcoming glow. Riley stood soaked and furious in the doorframe with a bag dangling from his wrist. He bounded across the room, wrenched Andrew’s hand from Sam’s, and pulled the ring off, only to drop it immediately as if it burned. With a mundane clack, the band fell to the floor. Sam took Riley’s hand and turned his palm to the light. A blister marked where he’d touched the platinum. Andrew’s finger was hale and whole, unmarred.

“Where in god’s name did you get that thing,” Riley said, staring at the innocuous ring on the floor. “Can you not tell something is wrong with it? Like, seriously, extremely wrong with it?”

“It was Eddie’s,” Andrew said.

“Of course it was,” Sam said.

He struggled out from under Andrew’s unresisting form, kicking him in the thigh during his escape. As he leapt off of the couch, away from Andrew, he stepped with careful precision over the ring lying between their bodies.

Riley said, “Get me a towel or something.”

Sam disappeared into the kitchen. Riley’s clothes clung to him, water dripping from his flattened hair. The rich brown of his roots made a dual-color line in the dye. He held a hand out for the rag Sam passed him a moment later. The remaining tingles of fear and desire faded in the face of Riley’s intrusion and Sam’s—disappointment, maybe anger, Andrew wasn’t sure.

“Let me handle it,” Andrew said as he swung his legs off the sofa.

“Nah, that’s cool, man,” Riley said with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. “Frankly, I don’t think it should be in the same room as you. Seriously, you can’t tell?”

“Just get rid of it,” Sam said.

With great reluctance, Riley crouched and scooped the ring onto the rag, which he knotted into a pouch. Sam plucked it from him like a bag of dog shit. He left the room again and a kitchen drawer shut with a forceful wood-on-wood collision. The storm of his displeasure outdid the rain lashing the windows. Andrew shook his head and massaged his temples, a creeping ache settling into the sockets of his eyes.

“Don’t play games with him, Andrew,” Riley whispered so low as to be almost inaudible.

Before Andrew could respond, Sam called from the kitchen, “What are you doing here so early, cousin of mine?”

The fridge slammed. Riley glanced at Andrew and responded in a raised voice, “I finally got my hands on a copy of that monograph, but Andrew wasn’t home when I got back to show it to him and neither of y’all answered my texts. So, I figured he was probably out here with you.”

The kitchen light cast Sam in a dull yellow halo, beer in hand and barefoot, as he stopped on the threshold between rooms to regard the tail-tucked pair standing across from him. Andrew recalled their earlier fight in abrupt, scorching detail. He didn’t know if Sam had spoken with Riley or not in the interim—if he’d told him to stop looking, after Andrew hadn’t said a word.

“You should be glad I interrupted,” Riley grumbled.

“I got that ring straight from Jane Troth,” Andrew said.

“Table the spooky shit for a second.” Sam cut him off with deceptive calm. “I thought we talked, boys. I thought we each had a clear and cogent discussion about risk management. So how’d you go and end up being the person who found that book, Riley?”

“Sam, do we need to do this right now?” Riley said, agitated.

“Yeah, I think we do,” Sam replied.

Riley said, “I called around to a ton of used bookstores and libraries, nothing fancy, nothing dangerous. Calm your bullshit.” His hand flapped in the direction of the front door, where his bag lay abandoned. Rain wetted the porch up to the storm door, splattering on the glass. “But I did skim through it in the store, and—”

“Fuck you is it bullshit.” Sam pointed a finger at his cousin from around the neck of his bottle. “The last guy we know who read that book is dead, and we don’t know who the fuck killed him, so I’d appreciate some more caution on your part.”

The room tilted on its axis as Andrew put one careful foot behind him after another until he bumped against the couch, taking a seat. Sam and Riley continued their bitter stare-down without noticing his wilting to the side.

Riley argued back, “I’m the only one who could have found this book, not that either of you were trying. While I was tracking it down, you idiots were warming up for a really, very, extremely bad hookup because neither of you had a clue that ring is, like, cursed. Please don’t talk at me about dangerous when I’m taking care of the boring shit neither of you want to handle.”

Wrenching, eerie hissing continued to twist and knot in the seams of Andrew’s skull. The energy was stymied, but it hadn’t vanished from the room. He interrupted the cousins’ bickering to ask, “What’s in the book? I assume there’s something, if you drove all the way out here on the off chance I’d be around when you couldn’t get me on the phone.”

“So, I don’t think the dissertation or his research were the reason someone stole that book from his shit, and I also don’t think it’s why they killed him anymore,” Riley said, irritated expression melting into excitement. “Based on the monograph? I think maybe he was killed for the curse itself.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Andrew said.

“I’m not done with what we were talking about,” Sam snapped at them as he took a step toward the couch.

Riley reeled on him and said, “I swear to god, you are not my dad.” He stepped up to meet Sam in the center of the room and stole the beer from his hand, knocking a swig of it down. “I told you I’d keep a low profile, and I have been, but this shit is too important for me to sit it out. I’m going to class, I’m teaching, and I’m a straight-A student, so please let me do my thing. I haven’t asked you to quit trapping.”

Sam jammed his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants. He asked, “What if I said I was going to?”

Riley shouted through his teeth, a gear-grinding sound, and stalked back across the room to grab the bag. He dug the book out and tossed it underhand to Andrew, who had melted into the embrace of the couch cushions under the weight of his migraine. He fumbled the catch, book thumping onto his sternum, anxious anticipation making him shake. The monograph fit neatly into one palm: taupe with frayed corners, the stitched binding loose from the board backing. A bright pink page-flag stuck out at a jaunty angle.

“How about we have that argument again after we get him fixed,” Riley said to Sam as Andrew opened the book to the marked page. “Because I’m not sure if you’re blind or something, but the ghost stuff, it’s getting worse. It’s like, hurting him.”

“I had to dig his ass out of a deer carcass he cuddled up with a couple weeks ago,” Sam said. “I think I’m aware of the situation.”

“What the fuck?” Riley asked, both existential and specific.

Andrew read: Elias Fulton is the center of the tale, though differing versions of the story disagree on the specific points of his culpability. There are, though, shared elements: in each version, Elias embraces the curse. In each version, the larger family appear to have agreed he was mad, and to have imprisoned him in their ancestral home. Madness is, after all, often displaced onto supernatural causes. Furthermore, theFulton curse narratives as a whole deviate from traditional folkloric norms in their emphasis on heredity, bloodlines, and land ownership over and above individual fault or hubris. While the element of the supernatural bargain itself is a familiar motif, the nature of the deal shifts across the various tellings available to us. In one version, perhaps the most urbane, Elias bargains for his wife Tiffany Fulton’s life, and their descendants are cursed. In another, he bargains for power over her death, with a similar outcome. But in the last, he bargains instead for an affinity to death and to the dying, becoming a sort of sorcerer—and it is in this story that he preserves her life, not by using his gift on his wife, but by sharing it with her and inducting her into the heredity of the power. She is, through a witchcraft that is not recorded, made blood of his blood and inheritor of the curse. It is the transferral that either heals her illness or makes it moot, as a secondary effect.

She hadn’t been born a Fulton, and marriage hadn’t made her one, but blood had done the job in the end. Andrew recalled the coating of rotten copper that had clung to his gums even as the fire-and-rescue team scooped him up, whisked him from the darkness of the cavern: the reminder that no matter what came afterward, he belonged to Eddie in flesh and spirit. He hadn’t asked for that inheritance, but he’d gotten it regardless. His breath lodged in his throat in a wheeze.

“Andrew,” Sam barked, startling him out of his spiral.

He snapped the book shut in his hand, face stiff and hot. Juxtaposed against the version he’d gathered from the McCormicks, one shared point stood out: the fact that the curse wasn’t tied to the born-and-bred Fultons alone, but wove like a fat thread across their land and their blood, ready to stitch a fresh inheritor in at will—or, maybe, at knifepoint.

“You see what I’m seeing, yeah?” Riley asked.

Andrew nodded slowly, attempting to find the words to summarize. He said finally, “If the curse was just a hereditary problem for the Fultons, none of this would matter, but it isn’t. People can be brought in from the outside, and they might wanna be, because it works.”

Riley replied, “If it’s not actually a curse in the ‘all bad, no good, oops you made a mistake’ sense, but more like a magical inheritance that comes with a price, and if you could pass that power on to someone else consensually…”

“Or nonconsensually,” Andrew finished. “Someone might be able to force the issue, try to take it from you, if they knew. If they had reason to believe it was real.”

Sam shuddered with discomfort and swigged from his beer while the three of them tried that thought on for size. A motive that might’ve seemed far-fetched weeks ago slid into place with an ugly, neat click in Andrew’s head. The specter’s constant efforts to drag him into his power made more sense, at least in part, if he was generous to the creature.

“Except Eddie wasn’t the only one carrying it, last Fulton or not. And that wasn’t exactly common knowledge,” he admitted.

“I don’t like the fucking sound of any of that,” Sam said.

“Of course you don’t,” Riley snapped. “But what other leads do you have for us to follow?”

Sam held his hands up in deflection. “I didn’t say y’all were wrong, it just sounds like some nasty fucking business. And from the outside, I’ve got to say, I don’t like how that professor fits into this mess. She gave you back his ring when she shouldn’t have had it at all, if we’re being real, and Riley and you both seem to agree there’s something off about it. But I thought you said she just wanted his research, like to publish, some petty insider shit?”

Riley and Andrew regarded each other, separately parsing the same set of details and implications. Riley said first, “I’m not so sure about that anymore, but it doesn’t add up either way with the other shit we know about them.”

“Like, neither of them, Troth or her husband, would’ve been strong enough to handle Eddie’s body at the end,” Andrew said. “There’s got to be someone else in the picture with them. We need more information.”

“Their library was a trip though, and she keeps popping up. Plus, how much do you really know about the husband? Even if he’s sick right now, maybe he wasn’t as bad off over the summer,” Riley said.

Andrew grunted his agreement, turning the monograph between his palms while he wracked his aching brain. Eddie had found his answer, though. The pinboard of articles on their disappearance in the carrel, the haunted-house stories, the cemetery visits and late-night communions with the dead; all of that mess led him to one long paragraph in an old monograph. He’d worried at it like a sore tooth until he unearthed the rotten core. If Troth’s interest was more than academic—

“Wait,” Andrew said. “Was there more in this, like about her family?”

Riley cocked his head. “Uh, I dove straight into the index, read that Fulton bit, and booked it over here to share.”

“She talked up that fuckin’ library being full of her family’s stories, and you said it was massive—but when I mentioned this one book, she and her husband both pretended not to know shit about it,” Andrew said while he paged through the index.

Damp, aged-paper stink wafted off the print; he ran his thumbnail through the T section until he saw Troth, 32–41 with a series of subheadings: plantation, witchcraft, ritual magic, Civil War, genealogy. Ten pages in such a short collection meant a full chapter, a significant fraction of the material. What were the odds that she and the rest of her predecessors had missed out on the monograph for the last sixty years? It was circumstantial, but joined an increasing pile of bad coincidences surrounding her.

Unless her concern wasn’t the research, as Riley suggested, but getting at the curse.

“Can I ask you something?” Riley murmured, splitting the tension.

Andrew lifted his chin and found both cousins watching him, one sympathetic and the other upset, with the same flat set to their mouths. His incisors had marred Sam’s neck with their imprints; a matched pair of thumbprint bruises sat at the upper notch of his biceps. He’d put those there when he grabbed on for dear life. He remembered how his vocal cords had cracked on a startled sound he’d not made before.

“Okay,” he said slowly, holding Sam’s judging stare.

“If he passed the curse on, like you implied, you’re the … carrier, I guess?”

“No shit,” Andrew said.

“Then I think maybe we need to go out to Townsend, to your estate,” Riley said.

“No chance.”

“Hear me out.” Riley paced closer with cautious deference. Sam crossed his arms. Riley laid the back of his hand on Andrew’s forehead, swaying on his feet with his brow scrunched like a television psychic. After another second passed he let his hand drop and continued, “I’m not hot shit at the sixth-sense stuff, but that thing is eating you alive. Your aura is like a broken bone, it hurts to look at, and it’s getting worse all the time.”

Sam lowered himself to sit on the other end of the couch and wedged his foot under Andrew’s thigh. With them crowded in close and human he breathed easier, the atmospheric pressure crushing his chest lessening by degrees.

“It has gotten worse,” he admitted.

“What if it’s getting worse because you’re ignoring the whole thing? You could embrace it, like the book says Elias did, and get control,” Riley said with an animated gesture toward the hills outside. “We go to the old place, you commune with the land or whatever needs doing to set all the broken parts whole, and then—maybe once you’ve got your death power on lock, you use it to ask Eddie who killed him or something?”

Before Andrew could process the absolute revulsion he felt at Riley’s suggestion, Sam grabbed his forearm and turned it over to show the scabs. “No, fuck no. Look at these. You think asking for more of the same is going to help? The story said this gift drove the Fulton guy off the fucking deep end.”

Riley huffed. “I think we’re running short on time, and it might eat him before we find out who killed Eddie, so we gotta find a solution that solves both problems.”

Getting rid of the curse entirely, Andrew thought, would solve his problem. Eight long summers had passed since the cavern, since his life leaching into the earth with Eddie’s blood in his mouth. The poetic circularity was compelling, that the thing he’d avoided at greatest length would continue to be the cause of his worst problems. He flexed his hand. His haunt pushed at him with increasing force, come home come home come home. When he listened to it—

Fluttering chill burst to life in his finger bones. Riley flinched away. Muscle and tendon rippled as he rolled his wrist to break Sam’s grip. Eddie had written that he felt stronger the closer he got to the land, but that he was still missing something that needed to be set into place. During his last haunt-dream, the revenant had shown him a decrepit estate and a locked room, invited him to pry loose the door. And at the same time, it had tried to stop his heart and had cut his wrists from stem to stern. Embracing his inheritance felt like accepting the grave. Sam twisted loose fingers into the hair at the crown of his head.

“I won’t do that,” he said. “It’s a goddamn trap.”

“Fine, shit,” Riley said. “Then what’s your plan?”

“Focus on Troth, find where her stories don’t line up. She’s got to be involved,” he said, tapping the monograph cover again.

“I’ll help,” Riley offered instantly.

“No,” Sam said. “Absolutely not.”

“Seriously, fucking quit that,” Riley said.

Andrew leaned forward against the burning grip on his scalp; Sam cinched his fist another fraction tighter, provoking a short, grunting gasp. Sensation helped settle him into his bones again, alive. Riley made an uncomfortable sound, but before he could respond to their affection, his phone rang—a charming melody of bell tones.

He answered with a hostile, curious, “Hi, West, this is Sowell speaking.” The frown morphed into a curled lip. He held out the phone and said, “Call for you, Andrew.”