by Lee Mandelo
“Hey,” Riley said from behind him. He startled and spun on his heel. “Sorry, didn’t mean to surprise you. I’m heading over to campus, do you need a ride to orientation?”
The expression on his thin lips and slightly furrowed brows hovered between earnest and awkward. His weight shifted to one foot as he cocked a hip, keys in his fist and messenger bag slung across his chest. Andrew swallowed against the crumbs tickling his throat, sat the cereal on the counter, and said, “No, I’m good. Thanks.”
“Okay, cool.” He had the door open and one foot out when he continued, tossing offhanded over his shoulder: “I’ll be home late, so I’ll catch you in the morning probably.”
Andrew sagged as soon as the door shut. Out the window, he watched as Riley unselfconsciously bent himself into a stretch with his wrists braced on the roof of his Mazda, feet spread wide, head hanging and spine long. Andrew’s neck and shoulders ached from the long drive plus a night spent on the couch. The other man slid into his car, and the coughing roar of an aftermarket engine rebounded off the house. Andrew tore his attention free and made a beeline for the fridge. The milk in the door was three days past its date, but it smelled fine, so he stole a swig direct from the carton.
The haunt that had visited him the night before, as brutally familiar as his own skin, was unimaginable in broad daylight. The absence stung somehow. Dust on the stairs stuck to his sweating feet as he ascended again. The door to Eddie’s room was nothing remarkable, but that didn’t stop his hand from stalling on the brass knob. He took the first two steps into the room with his eyes clamped shut, dragging his toes across the floorboards to avoid tripping. He nudged the door closed. Once it latched, he forced a breath out through his nose and opened his eyes again.
Rumpled sheets spilled onto the floor at the end of the mattress on its plain metal frame. Two pillows were crammed into a pile against the wall, and a third lay sideways in the center of the bed. Clothes lay in a scattershot circle around a full laundry hamper at the corner of the desk. A hideously neon-orange pair of boxer briefs and one sock with a giant hole in the heel dangled haphazardly from the edge of the pile. The chair was rolled back from the messy desk, covered in a scattered mountain of papers, pens, books, High Life cans, and a monitor with a headset hooked over it. A half-smoked blunt rested on the edge of a glass ashtray. A still life painting: One Boy’s Room, Summer.
On autopilot, he staggered across the room to collapse into the chair, the same chair from their shared apartment in Columbus. He gripped the armrests and laid his head against the divot they’d worn into the upholstery through the years. The room felt so freshly interrupted he was surprised the chair wasn’t warm to the touch. A snowdrift of loose-leaf paper drew his attention first—plain printer stock and ruled alike, covered with Eddie’s cramped sprawling handwriting in multiple colors of ink—but the broken-backed composition book splayed open on top of the unkempt pile was obviously the last piece touched.
Andrew dragged it onto his lap, caught the most recent lines in a jagged scrawl that implied excitement or distraction:
the land itself is the thing in most of these stories, right, it’s about people who are connected to the land in their inheritance (??) or blood or some shit. It isn’t inert, it’s the source—it’s a battery? or a character?—to the inheritors. There’s a cost the user has to pay to pick up the curse/gift. The earth has to be paid
He stared at the unfinished sentence. The hair on his nape rose in an abrupt wave, nerves tingling. He flipped to the beginning of the notebook, since Eddie had filled three-quarters of it already, and started reading.
Facts:
(1) I see dead people
(2) I didn’t before that summer
(3) The closer I get to home the worse it gets
(4) Andrew too, but not as much as me
So time to find out: why?
—and scrawled in the margin next to the damning number four was the notation, he’s gonna be so pissed at me.
Andrew hurled the notebook at the door as if it scorched his hands. It slapped the wood and thunked onto one corner, landing on its cracked back, pages riffling open. Our ghost story, Eddie called it sometimes when they were drunk, or partway asleep, or catching their breath after a race—whenever he thought Andrew would forgive him for bringing up the thing he’d promised to let lie. Andrew had sworn them to silence that summer, and pretended afterward unto amnesia that he’d never floundered through the grasp of revenants that crawled hungry from their graves at his passing step. Pretended that he hadn’t spent most of his life ignoring desperate whispers at the limits of his hearing, and that his bones kept quiet under his skin instead of flaring to life with a terrible itch of potential during the blackest depths of night. Eddie hadn’t ever wanted to pretend, from their first night to his last, judging from his fucking notebook and the stack of texts that, Andrew realized with a tremble, had titles like Tennessee Folklore and True Ghost Stories of the South and Granny Magic.
Through the past decade, Eddie had agreed over and over again to Andrew’s demands for silence, but here he was, fucking up the moment he left Andrew’s sight. He shouldn’t have been in Nashville in the first place, considering the force with which Andrew had protested their application to Vanderbilt, far too close to the teenage past they’d skinned loose. But Eddie was a convincing liar with a long list of fake reasons; his decision had withstood Andrew’s meager arguments. In hindsight, it looked a lot like Eddie had led him by the nose around his loathing for the prospect of homecoming, led him with promises of comfort, promises that he wouldn’t get him into the same trouble again, promises that it was the best place for his research—not Oregon or California, states with more ocean and fewer hollers, none of their shared childhood ghosts.
“American Studies my ass.” Eddie and his Southern gothics. How had he thought the inevitable reveal was going to go? Did he think there was any way Andrew would welcome the truth: that he’d brought them South to chase haunts? Was that why he’d kept putting Andrew’s arrival off? “You fucking—fuck, fuck, fuck.”
And he’d collected an unnecessary roommate in the interim, based on unspecified “shared interests.” Andrew wildly wished Riley was home for him to tear into about this goddamn mess Eddie had made for himself, but the house was still and hollow, mocking in its brightness.
The colorful scrawl warped under the damp blur of his furious stare. He swept the pages onto the floor in a fit of frustration. He needed to go outside. He needed to be somewhere else.
The neighborhood unspooled as he strode away from the house on Capitol, leaving the door unlocked behind him when it occurred to him he had no keys. After forty minutes or an hour or more, he had no idea, he’d ended up in a more ragged area: smaller houses, fewer cars, sagging stoops. The pounding beat of his heart had cooled a fraction, but he lied to me ran on a cacophonous loop through his skull. Or had he been lied to? Eddie had steered him around the truth of his work at Vanderbilt with dissembling answers that passed for straightforward. Andrew had been misled, misdirected, misused. Now he had nothing left but to piece together the scraps. He reached for his phone and found nothing, then realized it was still on the table back at the house. His steps slowed. At first glance, the neighborhood street felt familiar as if he’d been there before, but on a closer look he recognized none of the road signs—and then nothing around him was familiar at all.
* * *
With the help of a handful of strangers giving directions, and a detour to a café for an iced tea and a giant cup of cold water, Andrew made it home in the late evening, footsore and sunburnt as hell. Riley was absent, as promised. An eerie hush settled over the house as he shut the door and flipped the dead bolt behind him, almost a pressure against his eardrums. The muffled sensation dogged him on his begrudging trip to the second floor. The bedroom door hung open, papers scattered across the landing. Andrew bent and gathered them, frowning, to drop on the desk once more. The old blunt sat exactly as Eddie had left it
, half-smoked on the lip of the ashtray. Seventeen days had dried the wrap enough to crack. Andrew licked his thumb and smoothed the split in short strokes. The pinched end fit between his lips natural as breathing. He grabbed the purple Bic, flicked the fire to life, lit the charred end.
The initial drag tasted of burning dust and aged ash first, sweet earth and smoke second. He pictured Eddie in the same spot beside the desk, washed with white summer sun, rillo dangling from his mouth while he balanced on one foot to pull on his sneakers. Andrew kicked his off instead. He sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress, holding each drag until his lungs strained. There was no hand to pass to, and the only smoke in his face came seeping from between his own lips.
At the end he pulled so hard he singed his bottom lip, flinching. The roach fell to his palm and he scuffed it in the ashtray. That was the last blunt Eddie would ever roll him, and he hadn’t been there to joke about Andrew getting it too soggy: you slobber like a dog, man, I’ve got so much of your spit in my mouth, as he’d said once. Every moment of his life that followed would take him further from Eddie, no matter his efforts to scrounge for the remains, but what else was there for him to do except draw what was left as close as he could? One thing: to find what or who had taken Eddie from him, since he was sure it couldn’t have been Eddie. Not on purpose. He unbuckled his belt and kicked off his pants in abrupt jerks, head swimming, then crawled up the mattress to drag the pillows around his head. The musk of sweat and hair product filled his nose.
Fabric stuck to his damp cheek. The moment he realized that tears had begun to leak from the corners of his eyes, the dam broke; he tucked his knees against his chest as he heaved with sobs almost deep enough to make him retch. Delirious, he imagined his ribs might shatter from the force and spike straight through his lungs. The uncontrollable weeping stretched on endlessly, to the start of physical pain then far past it. Streetlights hummed outside. Muscles spasmed across his sides, throat, and jaw as eventually his tension waned and he began to snuffle more than wail. Snot clogged his nose and exhaustion swaddled him, but as sleep descended, a prick of stinging sensation flared at the root of his spine. He had no time to resist the ice-cold press of an ankle slipped between his, the weight of a broad arm and elbow pressing around his shoulder and over onto the mattress. Bones like fingers combed through his hair. Indistinguishable murmuring touched the shell of his ear. He had a moment to think, Eddie, before the dream took him under.
The night of the haunt-dream had never known starlight: black, sightless. Andrew wore the wrong skin, small and fragile, with the knobby knees and gangly arms he used to smash into doorframes, bedposts, all sorts of things before he’d grown into them. The pooling liquid under his hands and shins was cold and thin, then thick and slick-hot. He scrambled to find footing; stone bruised him when he fell. This was familiar, bad dream and memory both. It had happened something like this, and he had no power to stop it. The littler him pushed forward until his seeking, stinging hands found cloth. He dragged himself through primordial and crushing darkness over the prone, still, also-adolescent body beneath him.
The fingers that reached up to touch his face streaked his skin wet, nose to lip. He was speaking but couldn’t hear himself. All he heard was a hissing sibilance that plugged up his ears. The fingers pushed into his open mouth and the iron poison of blood coated his taste buds. He gagged; the hiss rose to a chatter. The invasive hand dipped from his mouth, skated to his torn shirt and found the open edges of his flesh, pushed inside with questing, horrible tenderness, put him on his back. Good boy, he heard in his head with the force of a rung bell.
Ghastly fingers wrenching into his hair pulled him from the dream, wheezing and trembling. His shirt was rucked up to his shoulders, his own fingernails dug into his chest so deep that specks of blood dotted the pale skin. Salt gummed his eyelashes and the bridge of his nose, as if he’d continued to sob in his sleep. When he rolled flat into the freezing body-shaped dip in the mattress behind him he jolted away, teeth chattering, but didn’t get up. The cold receded an inch at a time without another touch, another word. The thing that had been Eddie abandoned him to its bed.
Andrew hadn’t dreamed about the night in the cavern in six years.
3
The front door slammed directly below where Andrew lay on the floor, bundled in a wad of bedsheets with a pillow wedged between head and shoulder. He flinched upright. The cast of the light coming through the curtain said afternoon. Masculine voices, boisterously conversing, filled the house. He pried himself off the ground, threw the sheets on the bed, and ducked into the bathroom to piss and wash the salt off his face. The nail marks on his chest had scabbed to four fine crescents; he tapped his fingers on them and swallowed at the recollection of his witching-hour visitor. One half of the loud conversation downstairs stalled, mid-sentence, as he turned on the sink.
Andrew paused on the landing as he heard a man say, “Hey, you all right?” The voice was familiar, at the edge of his brain, but he couldn’t place it.
“Shit, I guess I just … spaced out, sorry,” Riley said with an odd, unsettled tension to his tone. “Noticed something weird, don’t worry about it.”
Andrew remained frozen in place, remembering: the roommate Eddie had talked up, so cool, shares so many interests, you’re going to love him, and those notes, chock-full of the topic Eddie was forbidden from looking into. Riley presented a set of questions on top of the ones he’d already had.
Before he made the decision to turn tail and retreat, the other voice called out, “We hear you loitering, dumbass, just come on down.”
Caught out, he acquiesced, dropping a quick “hey” as he entered the room.
Riley had a rumpled, distracted look about him. His face was pale where it wasn’t flushed a dull red, and a pair of matte black plastic-framed glasses perched low on the bridge of his nose. But the other man, standing with thumbs in his pockets and a crooked black-and-violet snapback shading his eyes, caught Andrew’s attention in an instant. Andrew’s eyes locked on to a scabbed scrape on the left side of his jaw. The voice clicked into place from a twenty-second Snapchat video Eddie had sent a month before, howling with laughter and spitting filth while Eddie chased him across a field, throwing firecrackers at his feet. Sam Halse, cousin to Riley. The oldest of the group Eddie had fallen in with. A savage compulsion had radiated from him in Eddie’s stories; he was high on Andrew’s shit list. The twinge that had pitched camp in his chest, late at night while he’d listened to Eddie rambling on and on about Halse, reared to life again.
“Heard so much about you, Blur.” Halse strode across the room and offered his hand for a shake. Andrew moved to accept, right-to-right, but Halse hooked their thumbs and yanked their joined hands into a tight clasp between their chests. His knuckles jammed against Andrew’s breastbone. He had a few inches of height on Andrew, and a couple more through his broad shoulders. “Some of it real good.”
“Sam, be chill for once in your goddamn life,” Riley said.
The exhaustion in his tone kicked the smile from Halse’s mouth. The shift left his face wolfish, closed off. Andrew looked straight at him with his chin up.
Halse asked, “You treating my cousin all right?”
“Of course he is, he’s been here like twenty-four hours,” Riley said.
“Okay, sure.” Halse dropped Andrew’s hand and rounded the coffee table to sit next to Riley, shoving his feet to the side to make room. “Ed was a good guy, and he made it sound like we’d all hit it off. You into the same weird shit?”
“Define weird shit,” Andrew said as his skin prickled.
Halse barked a laugh and took his hat off, tossing it onto the other couch. His buzz cut was a fraction too close-cropped to obscure the paleness of his skin, one stage past stubble. “That’s a yes.”
Riley kicked him in the hip. He frowned and scooted farther across the couch.
“It’s probably a no,” Andrew said.
“Whatever you say,” Halse
drawled. “But, hey, give me your phone. I’m going to put my number in there.”
“I think it’s dead,” Andrew replied.
He listed to the side to lean against the living room doorframe, hovering outside the cousins’ space. Halse took up too much air with his presence alone, and Andrew was too tired to muscle his way in. Restless nights, two in a row lost to his revenant visitor, and the stop-motion bedroom upstairs—he’d had the intention of questioning Eddie’s new friends on arrival, but the reality of the situation tripped him over his own feet. He couldn’t marshal his thoughts past his raised-hackles resistance to their being more at home than Andrew was in the middle of his own living room.
“C’mon, man,” Halse prodded.
“You don’t have my number, either,” Riley said.
Easier to give in than to keep arguing. Andrew slipped the phone from his back pocket and tossed it into Halse’s outstretched hand, satisfied when he pressed the home button and nothing happened. Halse grinned, showing a broad white slash of teeth.
“You weren’t bullshitting,” he said.
“I don’t, much.”
Riley stole the phone from his cousin and fished around next to the couch until he found a dangling charge cord.
“This is scratched all to shit,” he said as he plugged it in.
“And the screen’s cracked,” Halse said.
The family resemblance was abruptly clear. Both of them looked at him with the same tilt to their heads, the same dimple-cornered mouths, identical cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes. The differences were telling as well. The bump of a past break on Halse’s nose, his squarer jaw, the thinner, ginger-tinged stubble on the line of Riley’s jaw—someone on that side of the bloodline was a blonde.