Chapter 31

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.

The expansive, roaring catch of the fire dazzled them both with its ferocity and heat, as if it were burning off the contagion along with the aged wood and plaster. Fire wouldn’t cleanse the history from that earth, but maybe it could put the bones to rest.

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.

“Goodbye,” he said.

Then he pulled the ring off his finger and pitched it into the hole. The cuticle-rip of the haunt tearing loose kneecapped him. Spit filled his mouth until he gagged. His forehead rested on the ground. Frantic with loss, he reached for the hole, about to fling himself in to recover the ring and the last vestiges it housed—but before instinct could transmute to action he forced himself to hold fast. He caught a sobbing breath. Knowing it was the right thing to do, to preserve the memory of Eddie as he’d really been, rather than what he’d become, didn’t fix how bad it hurt to be well and truly alone. When the first wave of the dispossession’s ache abated, he rose to his feet and edged back from the cavern, one step at a time, by himself.

Eddie’s remnant had let him go, but the vibration of their bloody inheritance remained in his veins, sensitive to the sucking pressure of the caverns regardless of the resolution of his more personal nightmare. Curses weren’t as simple to put aside as a ghost willing to be laid to rest; that grim weight would nest inside of him until the end of his life. Andrew trudged through howling winds toward the glowing blaze of the fire. Each crunch of forest debris under his shoes put another foot of distance between the person he had been and the person he thought he might become. Eddie had left him this, also: a future to see through.

---

In Eddie’s old bedroom, Andrew sat at the edge of the bare mattress. The sheets at his feet were destined for the washing machine. The final clean load of Eddie’s clothes lay spread on the bed. He wasn’t sure whether to keep or donate them, but the small constant pain of cleaning Eddie’s space, putting to rest the mundane remains of his lost companion, kept him grounded. Without the haunt dogging his steps, the process of grieving was mechanical but raw.

He came downstairs and collapsed onto the sofa. Riley pulled on his high-tops, smoke leaking out around the blunt pinched between his lips. Luca and Ethan were horsing around in the kitchen in preparation for a night out; he’d been spending more time with them, since the hospital. Luca’s sense of humor made him smile four times out of five, and he needed that. Tonight they were celebrating. The review committee had accepted Riley’s thesis proposal, revised to adapt Eddie’s unfinished work on folklore studies.

Andrew swilled the remains of his beer and texted Sam three times, dropping more stones into the well:

laid him to rest and burnt the old house down

it’s just me in here

and i’m ready whenever

He didn’t expect a response, but he got one five minutes later as he shut the front door behind their cadre of rolling mischief. See you tonight. He stared at his phone for a beat before meeting Riley’s gaze.

“Don’t fuck it up,” Riley said.

“I won’t,” he said, but he wasn’t sure he knew how to keep the promise.

Riley led his group of four to their cars, as gaudy and unruly as ever, including the Supra, which still sported its hideous reddish mauve wrap. Their pack met at a gas station on the opposite side of the neighborhood this time. Andrew parked next to Ethan, who flicked him finger-guns when he went inside for his requisite candy bar and bottled water. The clerk eyeballed the fresh pink weals tracking up his wrists to his elbows with disdain.

Andrew curled his lip and said, “Got a problem?”

“No way, man,” the clerk said.

He crammed a quarter of the Payday in his mouth on the way out the door. Caramel stuck inside the cracks of his teeth in a stinging rush. Riley called out, “Leading tonight, Blur?”

“Yeah, sure,” he agreed thoughtlessly, then heard a familiar engine.

The WRX rolled over the bump of the entrance curb and coasted past the service station door in front of Andrew. He swigged a mouthful from his water to wash down peanut-grit, covering his burst of conflicted nerve-biting emotion. Sam parked next to his cousin and rolled his window down, languid, unmarked perfection as seen from the left side.

“Good news, I’m not blind,” he said. “I can still drive.”

“Bad joke,” Riley said.

“Who said it was a joke?” he fired right back.

Andrew approached them, breathless for no reason and drinking in the sight of Sam, in his car where he belonged, like a parched man in a desert. A matte black patch covered one half of Sam’s arresting stare, but the visible eye regarded him with the ferocity he had been missing.

“Y’all go on,” Andrew said to Riley as he strode past the Mazda. “We’ll text and catch up, after.”

He didn’t wait to see if his direction was followed, just opened the passenger door of the WRX and flopped inside, the closest he’d been to Sam in far too long. Time and distance hadn’t cooled his interest while he settled into himself as a single man. The passenger seat was as comfortable as he remembered.

Sam scratched his own chin, nails scraping over stubble with a rasp, and said, “You got something to tell me?”

“Yeah, I do.” Andrew chewed the inside of his cheek. Words piled up in his throat. He hadn’t explained himself much to Sam since he’d moved to Nashville, but this was the one time he needed to be direct. He fought the urge to blurt out a grandiose, ill-conceived, revealing offer, do you want to open a garage together, or something like that. Instead he said, “I thought about the whole thing, start to finish. How much you did for me and how much I didn’t do for you, just kept taking. And I know I want to do shit for you, with you. I do.” He sipped a quick shaken breath and finished with crushing simplicity. “You’re worth it to me.”

Sam said, “I’m not jealous of him, it was never about that. It’s about reciprocity.”

“I can do better.”

“Prove it,” Sam said.

Andrew leaned across the gearshift. Sam stopped him with an open hand to the sternum that slid up, firm and sure, to the base of his throat. Fingers spread careful but grounding across the width of his neck; a thumb notched onto his pulse on the other side. Andrew’s eyes traced over Sam’s scarred brow, his narrow cheeks and evening stubble. Possibilities swirled in the smell of gasoline and the crisp October night. He swallowed, throat bobbing against the webbing of Sam’s thumb joint. His stare rested on Sam’s mouth—telegraphing his intentions, though the other man held him at a careful distance. Tension shivered between them.

Then Sam said, with more gentleness than Andrew expected, “Nah, we’re a while from doing that again. Get back in your ride, Blur. Let’s try to start fresh.”

Andrew collapsed back against the passenger seat, Sam’s nails drawing faint stinging lines across his skin with the suddenness of his retreat. He shuddered, swallowing again. After another moment stolen to calm his racing heart he opened the passenger door, casting a last glance at Sam—and found him staring. Their gazes met, sparked, split again with equal speed. Andrew returned to the embrace of his Supra with a flushed, hot face. The engine turned over, a rumbling whine, as it had countless other nights and would for countless more to come. Sam rolled out first. Andrew followed after him under the fog-yellow glow of streetlights, on the heels of their pack.