by Lee Mandelo
“Andrew,” called his mentor from across the bar.
He slipped his phone into his pocket. Tinted bar windows completed the time dilation that haunted his afternoon, plunging the table into an almost-twilight as he sat across from West. The other man looked severe and troubled, divots pinching at the sides of his mouth and a crease wrinkling his brow. One of his wrists crossed the other loosely on the tabletop, but his fingers were tense. Foam rings crept down the interior of the almost-empty pint glass in front of him.
“What was your long-ass meeting about?” Andrew asked.
“Everything, nothing. You’ll get it when you’re six years in. What do you want to drink? On me,” West offered.
“PBR is fine,” he said.
West got up and approached the dead bar, one other patron at the far side of the space their only company. Andrew heard West add his beer to the tab as clearly as the speaker quietly piping in The Ataris overhead. Not the most private space to have a harsh conversation, but not the least either. How much, exactly, did Eddie fuck up your life. He took the tallboy he was handed as West scooted his chair close to the table once again. Dim tinted bar-glow brought out the russet undertones of his skin, in handsome contrast to his silver rings and thin, short necklace. Once again, Andrew caught himself seeing.
“I’ve got to apologize one more time,” West said. He lifted his own glass in salute. “I’m usually punctual, but when she calls, I come running. I’m buried in diss work, and her schedule is tight, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“I don’t know, she’s made a lot of time for me. She’s real interested in Eddie’s work,” Andrew said.
“She has been since day one,” West said with an unsmiling quirk to the side of his mouth.
Andrew took the risk and said, “To use for herself, so far as I can tell. Which I guess you’re familiar with.”
West took one long gulp of his beer, maintaining eye contact, before responding, “Was that a question, or a statement?”
“I think it could be a question, if you have an answer. Or a story,” he said.
“Sounds like you’ve heard some gossip about her and me, the whole ugly situation.”
“Clear it up for me,” Andrew said without confirming or explaining.
The song overhead switched to a Top 40 pop jangle. West reclined in his chair. Fine wrinkles edged his narrowed eyes. “I handed her the material for her Novel article as part of my first dissertation proposal. To be direct, she stole that research. When I brought it up, she threatened to accuse me of plagiarism in turn; the department swept it under the rug, with a strong hint that it’d be best if I stopped rocking the boat, lest I find myself dumped overboard. All implicit, of course. That answer your question?”
“But you’re still working with her,” he said. “Doesn’t that piss you off?”
“Who else would I work with?” The pint glass clunked against the table as West scoffed at him. “After selecting my committee and working with the same advisor for years, it’s a bad look to suddenly request a change. And, furthermore, if an accusation I had evidence for was dismissed, how do you expect they’d receive my request to change advisors? You’ve got the same stroke of luck with her Eddie did. She’s interested right now, but I’d advise you finish quick before she gets distracted.”
“Like she got distracted from you when Eddie showed up?” Andrew asked, frowning.
“Exactly. Use her interest while it lasts, or you’ll be fighting for every inch of cooperation,” he said, brittle and warning as he cast Andrew a pointed look. “Or maybe you won’t. Both of you have something else in common with her that I don’t benefit from, if you get my drift.”
“Guess the meeting didn’t go well,” Andrew ventured, pushing another inch.
“No, funnily enough it was mostly about you,” West snapped—the crack he’d been hoping for. “You and Eddie. She had pointed questions about his missing notes, as if I’m the one with a history of stealing research. Frankly, I’d have thought she had them.”
“So you didn’t take it on yourself to keep his notes, instead of her,” Andrew said. The tips of West’s ears flushed a deep mauve-red as he stared Andrew down over the table, then pushed his almost finished pint to the side.
“No, I didn’t. Thanks for asking as if I weren’t aware of the implications of the question. I’m getting out of here. Sorry again for missing our meeting—I’m sure Doctor Troth can catch you up better than me.”
He stood with a shriek of his chair on the tile.
“Wait,” Andrew said.
West strode with purpose toward the door and straight out of it, bell jingling merrily overhead. In profile, obscured by the tinted window, he snarled something inaudible and took off, away from the campus.
The bartender said, “He didn’t close the tab.”
“I’ll sign for it,” Andrew said.
He left his unfinished beer on the table and a seventy-five percent tip on West’s dime. Trekking from the bar through campus to the garage took him past the entrance to the humanities building. He considered the lit windows on the top floor, unable to pinpoint which might be Troth’s. Instead of going upstairs, he dropped his backpack on the lawn and sprawled next to it, breathing in the living smell of crushed grass. He typed a quick email to the professor on his phone to summarize his conversation with Masterson and his plans to continue pursuing the list over the course of the week. To close, he added, Would it be productive for me to share my findings with Thom as I retrace these steps? I understand that his research area is similar to Ed’s and mine but am unfamiliar with his work. Baiting a trap or sticking his fingers in one, he wasn’t sure which he was doing.
Phone on his chest and limbs splayed on the grass, Andrew observed the endless blue sky streaked with wisps of shredded clouds. The spread was so cavernously wide it compressed his lungs. The anger that had fueled him through the afternoon crackled, derailing his attempts to find his center and reorganize his thoughts. What could a person do out of desperation, driven to the brink out of fear for their career and their future—backed into a shitty corner by the whole system? He heard West’s voice: everything, nothing. Eddie had spent time alone with him. Eddie had bought him drinks and listened to him complain about their advisor, but his trust hadn’t run so far as to share the details of his work. Andrew rolled onto his side, scooping his bag strap over his shoulder as he stood.
In the garage, the Challenger welcomed him with the pungent, humid stink of leather and boy. He needed a change of clothes if he planned on crashing at Sam’s. That was as far as he let his skittish brain run before he pressed his thumb to the starter, waking its familiar purr. As he reached for the shifter, his hand passed into a patch of incongruous and impossible chill. He flinched out of it, startled. The same Misfits song that had been playing when he picked the car up from the impound lot burst from the speakers, crooning about skulls, and a casual stroke of fingernails scraped up his raised forearm before the spectral hand gripped his wrist. No time to escape, even less to scream, before the phantom settled on top of and through him, mimicking the posture of his slouch, bony knees spread on either side of the wheel in a mismatched fit—him inside the revenant inside him in terrible recursion. The garage wall pulsed and swam as his vision fogged; he arched forward to separate his chest from the ghost’s. His heart restarted as he escaped its rib cage, pounded hot and struggling and alive.
As he heaved a painful breath the specter disappeared, gone the instant it arrived, knocking him off his momentarily complacent pedestal. Based on the pattern of prior grim engagements, he’d drawn its attention somehow—but what had he done this time to tempt its casual and pervasive torment? The meeting with West, maybe, but what about it? He wiped his leaking nose with his forearm, panting through his mouth, then swallowed the fresh blood oozing down his throat from his sinuses in response to the traumatic visitation.
The campus garage in broad afternoon light didn’t seem like much of a locus point for
the revenant’s manifestation. But—if he ignored the bedroom visitations, most of the haunt’s worst interference had occurred inside the Challenger. Someone had left it at the trailhead while dumping Eddie’s corpse—and he hadn’t put much thought into the logistical implications of that, of the car being found with the body, of the revenant’s attachment to the car being more than just a lingering affectation from life. Once his nose stopped bleeding onto his wadded shirt collar he shifted into gear, tires chirping as he passed the red light at the garage exit with unnecessary force. No one parked in the gravel alley behind Capitol except for him and Riley, and Riley wasn’t home when he arrived. Andrew set the brake, steeled himself for the possibilities, and pushed the button to pop the trunk. Why hadn’t he thought of that before, when searching for the phone the first time?
For an extended moment he loitered at the open driver’s door with an arm braced on the roof, convincing himself that he needed to push through his fear and look, one way or another. Breeze nipped around his ankles, scattering dried grass clippings from the yard. The abandoned alley held an eerie solitude. His haunting’s abrupt reminder that he had a constant shade dogging his heels left him on edge, but the sun drifting toward the horizon marked a time limit he wasn’t keen to test.
Gravel crunched as he rounded the tail end of the car. The trunk hung an inch open. He almost expected, when he slipped his fingers under the rim and lifted it, to find some gaping maw. Instead, the trunk contained a spare tire and a discarded spray bottle of Armor All with a greasy rag tied around it. Same as at the oak tree, Andrew wished he had a better option to get his answers, but—
Equally eager as it had been the first and last time he let it loose on purpose, the knotted spool of potential that pulsed in his veins responded with a vital, ugly spark the moment he nudged at it. He resisted the urge to push it back down as it unfurled beneath his bones. It was a leeching, corpse-cold thing; he wasn’t going to think of it as a real part of himself. It spread from its home in his belly through his veins, his teeth, his fingernails. The corpse of the neighbor’s house cat, buried three feet behind him in the yard under fresh-turned dirt, gave a homing pulse. Andrew jerked his attention from the welcoming rot and instead planted his hands against the trunk’s rough upholstery.
Barbs hooked through his palms on contact, echo calling to echo, blood answering blood. Slippery gore welled from the carpet as he crumpled over the trunk rim, sliding in the mess and struck stupid with borrowed agonies. His mouth filled with a taste that crossed old meat with the sick-sweet ooze of a cold sore. He gagged. If the vision at the tree had been hallucinatory, the trunk had no time for illusions. Images smashed through him, reeling like film stock and pulling like muscle memory.
A tarp filled the trunk and the slack, sluggishly bleeding body toppled into its plastic embrace. The remnant that had once been Eddie clung to its recent flesh, claws sunk into the inert matter of the corpse, unwilling to separate. One hand flopped loose over the rim of the trunk, the wound below gaping raw and wet; the ravaging memories of pain lanced through the remnant and the vision and Andrew. The dead hand was lifted and dropped on the corpse’s chest with distaste, like a marionette gone limp.
The sound of Andrew’s shoes sliding on gravel faded into the rush of his pulse in his ears as he lost consciousness.
21
“Almost there,” Eddie’s whisper vibrated in his ear.
Aged floorboards moaned threateningly under each cautious step. Twilight hung in the foyer, gathered in the folds of disintegrating curtains and wrapped around the collapsed banister of the grand stair. Andrew had no recollection of arriving, and that knocked him lucid enough to understand the rotting grandeur surrounding him wasn’t real. The front room had aged to nothingness in shades of grey and taupe, all other color drained to dust. Andrew struggled to determine if he knew the house, but the pernicious doubling between himself and revenant and imagination and memory made it familiar. As soon as he thought of the specter, he realized that the thing was him, that he was the thing, Eddie’s hands within his hands and feet within his feet as he moved through the cobwebbed mausoleum of a home.
Rooms yawned from the hall, dark and cold; no life scurried underfoot, not so much as an ant. No longer in possession of himself, Andrew stepped over a hole broken through the old warped boards, a dead-alive creature being dragged along toward some fresh revelation. The drawing room was black as starless night, its gaping shadows corroding the relentless grey pallor of the foyer, the long hallway. Though the haunt hadn’t shown him this dream before, a forebodingly similar aura of rot and ruin hung suffocating in the still air, familiar from the cavern and the stag’s skull in the mud. Ahead stood a locked door; he understood without attempting the knob that the door was barred, blocked off from him—unless he desired it open.
“Here,” the revenant said with their mouth, to him and through him.
As he reached for the knob, his sight blurred. He made contact with the icy brass and the pulse of power that rolled off of it knocked the haunt loose from his bones; abruptly, he occupied his body alone, with sole control of his limbs and nerves and tongue. His chest heaved for breath, heart solid and unmoving as a stone. Slickly cold, the doorknob slipped out of his grasp as he collapsed to his knees.
The tender grasp of a bony fist knotting in his hair choked off another breathless gasp. Andrew allowed the hand to tilt his chin while his mouth worked like a fish drowning in air, leaned his head on the revenant’s too-solid hip. Kneeling on the ground before the creature, he stared up at hollow sockets regarding him with all the warmth of a grave. His vision wavered again, popping with white sparks; the haunt grew denser and richer as vital heat leeched from Andrew’s skull, from the press of his nose and cheek on its femur.
“Through the door,” it said.
As borrowed life colored in the revenant’s edges, its tattered wrists began to ooze fresh red. Andrew saw that his, too, were shorn open to the bone, gushing with slow, determined pulses—matched and matching, in death as in life. No wonder I’m cold, he thought with a horrified clarity.
Biting, gagging cold, struck his face and forced up his nose. He woke with a shock, gasping, flailing. He banged his knee on metal. Water soaked his shirt and hair. He blinked to shed the skin of the nightmare superimposing itself over Riley, who stood astride him in the alley with an empty plastic pitcher in his hand. His eyes were wide in his wan face. His mouth moved, but the sound passed along like wind: unparseable noise. Coughing and sputtering, Andrew fumbled to shift his leaden body. Ice cubes tumbled loose from the creases of his shirt. While struggling to sit up, he planted one hand on the gravel and a bolt of liquid pain seared through him. The arm refused to take his weight and he flopped to the side.
“What is it?” Riley bent to grip his hand.
From his palm to nearly his elbow, a fresh furrow dripped sluggishly. All of the bright red blood spattered on the gravel was his. White patches spread fuzzy over his sight. He heard himself mutter, “What the fuck?” as if from outside a room, eerie and distant.
“It’s fine, it’s okay, you’re okay,” Riley chanted. Sturdy hands scooped under his armpits, forced him to sit up. “It’s not deep, stop looking at it. Please don’t pass out, dude, I can’t drag you into the house, and I do not fucking want to call Sam about this.”
“Yeah,” Andrew rasped with a swollen throat.
On the long ride from the place where he’d died to the oak tree, already stripped of his power, Eddie’s hideous spectral remainder had sheared itself off from his corpse in the trunk of the Challenger. Those oily leftovers had clung to the interior, and Andrew had opened himself up to them. He’d forgotten the danger of knowing, given into the temptation, and paid the price. An unnatural breeze rose around him as he thought about the haunt, a cold, hungry touch brushing over two warm-blooded creatures.
“Oh, hell no,” Riley said, hauling him on his ass toward the house.
At the fence he helped drag himself t
o his feet using the chain-link, heels sliding, listing onto Riley’s shoulder like a drunk—not so different from the last time they’d done this dance. Pounding agony in his skull eclipsed his dread. Night loitered in the shaded basement stairs and the silhouette of the house on the grass, waiting to descend. He didn’t want to be outside when that happened. The ripe possibilities of a horror movie chased their heels on their shuffling struggle up the porch steps, despite nothing being technically present to spook them.
Riley left the door hanging open and dumped him on a kitchen chair, then skidded over to the pantry. He grabbed the blue container of table salt and popped the spigot. Andrew turned his throbbing arms over on his thighs, palms up in benediction, gouges still glistening with lymph and clotting blood. No flesh under his short nails; the wounds bloomed stigmata-like from his skin. He looked up at the sound of a rushing hiss. Riley paced a circle around his chair, a blue container of table salt pouring a trail behind him. The sight struck him as patently and suddenly hilarious. He choked on an inappropriate guffaw.
“Shut up.” Riley finished the circle, stared at it for two seconds, and threw the salt container out the door before kicking it shut. “Salt is a thing, right? I’m making this up as I go along.”
“What is this, an episode of Supernatural?”
“Looks just like one,” he agreed without humor.
Andrew angled to the side and tucked into a hunch to better support his own sagging weight. Exhaustion dragged his muscles loose. The quiver that rippled from his sacrum set up shop in his molars. One messy salt circle made no difference to him.
“Bed, please,” he requested.