by Lee Mandelo
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, the Fulton 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.”
28
“I’m in Dr. Troth’s office,” West said.
Andrew tapped the speakerphone icon and balanced the phone on his palm, saying, “Tell her hello from me.”
West continued, “She stepped out for a minute. I tried your phone but no answer. She’s pushing me to explain to her what you’re doing, and she seems mad. I don’t find the tone of this conversation pleasant, Andrew. Help me out here.”
Specks of color swam across his field of vision, pounding to the tempo of his heartbeat. He said, “Fuck it, tell her I said I’m going to drop out. That’ll get her off both of our backs, won’t it?”
“You’re sure I should pass that on?” he asked, voice flat through the phone line.
Riley made a violent throat-cutting gesture and sketched a set of negative slashes in the air—but Troth had given him the ring, with its nasty psychic rider. Her eagerness for him to retrace Eddie’s steps and report them to her might be sinister, or it might not, but it made her as good a suspect as he had to date. Plus, his radio silence had her pissed enough to involve a resistant third party once again, and that wasn’t normal.
Andrew was finished with letting things happen to him out of pure coincidence. He had a trap of his own to bait, this time; if she was involved, she surely wouldn’t let him slip from her grasp without a fight. Like she’d said, he was the heir now.
He said, “Yeah, tell her,” and hung up.
“Let’s get it,” Sam drawled.
Riley threw his hands up and said, “What was that supposed to achieve, how are we going to question her now?”
“He’s playing the game, trying to provoke her,” Sam answered for him.
“If she’s pissed, she’ll be off her stride,” Andrew confirmed. “What, did you expect me to ask if she killed Eddie during office hours?”
“You’re going to need me, still,” Riley said, gesturing to the monograph on the sofa. “Give me that and I’ll start digging into her fucking family, too.”
Sam started in with, “I said—”
“Thank you for helping.” Andrew cut him off.
The cousins shut up. He dropped the phone and rubbed his face with both hands. If he paid close attention to the air currents wafting through the house, he could feel a faint pulse drag at him from the kitchen. He focused on it and reached his hand out while he tried to grab on to the strangeness. Foul, sucking tendrils reached for him through the wall, his own cold, clear power flickering out in turn—or so he pictured it behind his eyelids. On contact, the two ghastly energies skittered off each other. His breath caught at the crawling, clashing sensation.
“Stop it,” Riley said, shaken.
Andrew made a fist to cut his clumsy outreach short. Lamplight dazzled him when he blinked the room into focus again, squinting at the pale fright on his roommate’s face. Though the ring recognized him, its taste was alien compared to the familiar rot of his haunts. It carried more intention, though he was hard-pressed to explain the difference. He’d spent his whole life repressing the inheritance Eddie had inflicted on him out of careless adoration; using it on purpose was like learning another set of limbs.
“Y’all shouldn’t be messing with that shit. Nothing good comes of it,” Sam reminded him.
“I don’t think I’ve got a choice,” Andrew said.
“He needs to settle
the haunting eventually,” Riley agreed.
Andrew thumped a hand on his shoulder twice, and said, “Go to class, hold down the fort, and don’t draw her attention. Eddie didn’t want you to waste your potential either, he’d be pissed if I fucked that up on his behalf. We’ll handle the haunting fine.”
“Sam hates spooky shit,” Riley said.
“Sam does hate spooky shit,” the man himself said. “So take me serious this time. Keep out and keep safe. I swear I’m not disrespecting you, Riley, it’s just the right choice.”
Understanding passed between the cousins for a wordless moment. Riley’s concession followed in the form of a shrug, no more. Andrew heaved a sigh and thumbed at the monograph—such a small book for such a big guess to ride on.
He said, working through his thoughts aloud, “West stole his notes, but he said he didn’t take the book, and I’m hard-pressed to see a reason for him to lie about that. I never found the phone, either. But Troth said Eddie mentioned a breakthrough to her over dinner, at the same time he supposedly left his ring behind—sounds convenient, huh?”
“So you’re thinking, what, he shares his findings and she makes the leap to ‘if I murder him I’ll get superpowers’? Because I’m not sure that adds up either, it sounds nuts,” Riley said.
“Yeah, I don’t know, but I guess we’ll find out. Wonder how long she’ll wait to get in touch,” Andrew said. “God, my head hurts so bad.”
Sam rose from the couch and said, “Go home, y’all. Night’s been long enough.”
Andrew hesitated on the couch—he’d still assumed he was sleeping over. When he opened his mouth to ask, Sam bent and planted a hard kiss on his parted lips, then abandoned him in the living room. Riley shifted awkwardly. Andrew grabbed the book and his phone and his stung pride to escape out the front door without another word.