The Wounds in the Walls

by Heidi Cullinan

  Bad things happened here. Pete wished he knew what the hell they had been.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” he asked. “Why do you see one room and I see another? Why do I look down at myself sometimes and see the wrong clothes? Why can walls move and doors vanish? Why can walls bleed?”

  “It’s energy.” Mike’s eyes were moving around the room. “That’s all anything ever is. This is energy that belongs with a person. With you as a person. Somehow you left this part of you behind when you were Peter Underwood, and now it’s trapped.”

  “So I’m supposed to absorb it?” Pete asked.

  Mike nodded. “Or release it.”

  But to where? Pete ran his eyes carefully over the walls. There were no wounds here. In fact, the plaster was completely smooth all the way around the outside walls and even across the abutment along the south wall where a stove pipe had been. The stove was long gone, but the space for it was there, along with that metal plate at the top marking where the pipe had protruded. The room was completely innocuous.

  Except this was where Ara had told him the bad things had happened. Had he been lying? Somehow Pete didn’t think so. Damn it, he needed answers, not more questions.

  “How are you so sure the dad was psychotic?” Pete asked.

  “Because the sister said he was. She had been trying to get him committed for years. Some said the tutor—” He faltered, then cleared his throat and tried to start again. “Some said she’d sent the tutor as a spy. But he hadn’t been any help at all. She’d complained that he’d been so fixated on his charge that he hadn’t paid any attention to the parent. And then the tutor died.”

  “But what happened once the tutor had died and the son disappeared?” Pete dogged him. “What happened to Carl Underwood?”

  “He fell down the stairs a month after his son went missing. The fall killed him, his sister inherited, she sold the place, and that was the end of it.”

  Pete stared at the walls. “Except for Ara.”

  “Except for the ghost,” Mike agreed. He rubbed at his cheek. “I suppose it makes sense that I’m the tutor. I’m still trying to help him.”

  “But you said he betrayed you,” Pete pointed out. “Him. Peter betrayed Michael Emery with another man. But who? I never saw another man.”

  Mike grimaced. “I don’t know, honestly. That’s the only memory I have. Just those two shards: of going up the stairs, hearing someone having sex in this room, and then the fight with Peter Underwood. I don’t even know how the fight resolved.”

  Pete began to pace. “I saw a lot, but it wasn’t like watching a movie. It was like looking at sand pictures that shifted. Sometimes I felt what happened and didn’t see it at all. It sped up and slowed down too. And I didn’t see anything of the end. I felt it, but it kept moving away from me. It didn’t want me to find it.” He shoved his fingers into his hair and swore under his breath. But he saw Mike out of the corner of his eye, and he stopped pacing to look at him.

  Mike was looking at him oddly. “You know, you’re right. You aren’t him, are you? Not even a little. You’re almost a polar opposite of the energy I’ve come to know here. It teases and wheedles, but you don’t. You’re practical and steady. You’ve had more visions than I have, and technically this is your pain in this house, but it doesn’t upset you in the slightest. Meanwhile I’m in eight kinds of denial, and then when I get one whiff of my own role, I come unhinged.” He shook his head. “Maybe you should be the paranormal psychologist.”

  Prickles of awareness were dancing across Pete’s skin. “What did you say? About my pain?”

  “Well—” Mike gestured at the walls. “If you’re Peter Underwood reincarnated, the energy here is yours. I just thought it was odd that—”

  “My pain.” Pete stared at the wall. “The wounds in the walls. All this started when I touched them. And he’s kept me from touching them since. Even the doors open for me. Because I woke it up, he said.”

  “It’s just leftover energy,” Mike said, and Pete snorted.

  “A supernova is energy,” Pete countered, “and so is an atomic blast. You can call him a ghost or you can call him Ara, but the spirit in this house isn’t ‘just’ anything.” He took a hesitant step toward the wall. But then he glanced at the far end again, and he stopped. “Wait. Are you seeing the same room I’m seeing? Pale walls, metal frame bed, white pitcher with pink flowers on the washstand?”

  “Yes,” Mike agreed. “Why?”

  Pete nodded at the abutment on the wall, at the metal plate painted over at the top. “Why isn’t there a stove in here? If this room looks period to us, why isn’t there a stove?”

  “The house wasn’t built in 1856,” Mike pointed out. “It was twenty years old by the time Mike Emery came. Likely someone wanted a stove in another room, or it might have been melted down for the iron, or sold.”

  It was a nice, normal reason, but somehow the answer just filled Pete with more dread. He did his best to shake it off. “I’m going to touch the walls,” he said, as steadily as he could. He stepped carefully around the bed and headed for the abutment. “I’m going to start with that one.”

  He felt the house shudder in protest, but it did so as if from very far away. It’s okay, Pete tried to whisper to it, or maybe he was talking to himself. It’s going to be okay.

  Holding his breath, he reached out and pressed his fingertips to the smooth, perfect plaster.

  The wall shimmered and rippled, and then, on a sigh, it gave way. Pete cried out, and as his hand slid down into the wall, he began to weep.

  Because he remembered now. He remembered everything.

  Chapter Six

  The Wounds in the Walls

  There was a reason, Pete decided as he shuddered under the weight of Peter Underwood’s memories, that people lived their lives one day at a time. He hadn’t had an awfully eventful life, but it wasn’t as if nothing had ever happened to him. When he was six, for example, he had broken his arm. He remembered that it had happened, and he remembered, as if from a great distance, that it had hurt, a lot. He remembered the white-hot bite of the pain, and the burn of it, and he even remembered thinking that it was too much and that he was going to die. Later he’d felt silly for that—and that was just the point. The intensity of that moment had faded almost as quickly as it had happened, and now, no matter how he tried to recall it, that moment would not come back.

  Touching the wall that held the weight of Peter Underwood’s pain was like touching a lifetime full of broken arms all at once and with a flame of intensity that never, ever meant to burn away. For several seconds, the pain was all Pete knew, and unlike his arm, he was fairly sure this time it could kill him. But then the blaze receded, and he was being pulled back and into the shelter of Mike Clarke’s great, strong, good-smelling arms.

  But Pete still remembered, and so he still wept.

  And he felt like a fool, because he realized now that he had seen it all before but had not realized what he had been seeing. He had seen a beautiful painting of a life before without realizing all the tones of red he saw were not paint but real blood. He realized that Mike had been right about the father, but so had he. That was the first secret. That was the first wound Peter Underwood had whispered to these walls. And the ghost hadn’t lied. All the bad things had happened here.

  The first was the smothering of Peter’s mother. She had moved into this room because she was sick and because the stove made it warm, and also because her husband made her uneasy. Peter liked to play in the room and be with her. He had come to her one afternoon, arriving just in time to see his father lifting the pillow from his mother’s face. She was sleeping now, Carl Underwood had told him. It had taken Peter years to fully realize what he had witnessed, and even then there were times he could not be sure.

  And that was the way of everything with Peter’s father. At first Peter thought the touches in the middle of the night were dreams, but then he had woken enough to acknowledge that no, they were
actually happening. They made him feel strange at first. But then they felt good, too, in a lonely sort of way. Once again, as time wore on, he understood that what was happening was not exactly supposed to happen. But by then he didn’t know how to stop it.

  He knew it wasn’t good when his father hurt the kitchen women, and what he did to the field slaves was too awful to say. Peter wasn’t even sure it was actually happening sometimes. It all seemed so surreal. Sometimes he thought he was the crazy one. Sometimes he wanted to go for help, but who was there to turn to? The slaves said his father had a demon in him and told Peter he should help them escape. Sometimes Peter thought he should. But he feared what would happen if his father found out.

  And so he did nothing. He let his father come to him in bed, and then, when his father was too wild and unhinged, he came to him during the day to quiet him. He took him into the small room so that no one would hear, because it was over the library. No, he didn’t like it. Yes, he wanted a real lover. Yes, he wanted to leave. But where would he go? Lonely. He was so lonely, and so scared, and the world seemed so heavy that there were days he didn’t think he could go on. The stove in the small room was long gone, but he sat in the corner where it had been, and he whispered to the walls, telling them his sorrows and his fears, whispering his prayers to the plaster.

  And then they had been answered. He had come. Michael. Mikey.

  Peter loved Michael Emery with a passion he feared truly was madness. Mikey said such wonderful things, such things that could never happen but were still wonderful to hear. “I’m going to take you away from here,” he would tell Peter as he held him in his arms in the grass. “I’m going to take you away from this horrible place,” he would say, “and you will have a new life.” Oh, how Peter had wanted that! But he knew it would never happen. He couldn’t leave. He had barely been to town. He could never handle the world. He was ruined, he knew. It was enough to have Mikey in his life at all, even for a few years. It was more than enough.

  But then had come that day.

  In Mike Clarke’s arms, Pete Eason settled back into his own self, and in his misery he turned his face into Mike’s throat.

  “It was his father,” Pete whispered. “The other man you heard—Michael heard—Peter with was his father. The tutor never saw. He was too hurt, and he left. But Peter had heard him on the stairs. He knew he’d been found out. He let Michael think it was another man because he knew that would be better than hearing he’d been having sex with his father.”

  Mike’s hands tightened on Pete’s arms. “The sick bastard—he was raping his son?”

  Pete laughed darkly. “That’s just the trouble. It’d been going on so long. It’s hard to explain—you have to feel it to truly understand, but it’s like Peter could either go insane, too, or he could find a way to make it a pleasure. Peter was a survivor. So he found a way to like it. That’s the part he couldn’t bear Michael to know.”

  Mike’s hands were flexing now, and when he spoke, his voice was full of frustrated impotence. “But that—that isn’t his fault! It’s what you said! He was a child of unconscionable abuse—none of it is his fault! It doesn’t matter that he found a way to survive it, that he found some pleasure in it!”

  “You can say that now,” Pete replied, collecting himself a little, “but could you have said that then, as Emery?”

  “People don’t change,” Mike said with conviction. “Yes. I would have, because I do now.”

  “Bull,” Pete shot back.

  “We are constant matter,” Mike said. “We may change form, but we are always ourselves.”

  “But we temper,” Pete argued. “Like steel. It takes patience and cultivation to build up the strength. Maybe you had it then. Maybe you didn’t.”

  Tears shone in Mike’s eyes. “I have it now,” he whispered.

  “Me too.” Pete untangled himself from Mike’s arms, standing on unsteady legs.

  “What are you going to do?” Mike asked, rising with him.

  Pete stared at the abutment, girding himself. “I’m going to finish this.”

  He drew a deep breath and shut his eyes. He could feel the house heaving, could hear it breathing, could feel its terror and its pain. But it was not the house. It was the energy, like Mike had said. No, it wasn’t Peter. Peter had died long ago and moved on, becoming so many other people. What was here was something else, but something just as important. It wasn’t an it, either. It was human. It was a man. It was Ara. The boy who named himself after the Armenian god of spring, who had waited one hundred fifty years for winter to thaw.

  Pete reached out, stuck his hand through the shimmering wall, and drew Ara out into the sun.

  There was a short, sharp cry, like someone falling. The plaster-dusted bones that fell into Pete’s arms were heavier than they had a right to be, but then, they had borne so much over the years that in a way, it made more sense that they were so dense. The house shuddered and shook, the walls even in here heaving now. But Pete didn’t let it bother him. He just held the skeleton close, rocked it gently in his arms, and whispered against the dusty skull.

  “I’ve got you,” he whispered. “I’ve got you now.” He hugged the bones as tightly as he dared. “And this time I’m strong enough to bear you.”

  Was it Mike who sobbed? The house again? Perhaps it was his own sigh escaping. Pete didn’t know. All he knew was that the walls breathed one last time, and then a rightness settled in his heart as the bones heated in his embrace, and he wept, this time for joy as Ara, flesh and blood and whole, sagged in surrender against his chest.

  Ara was alive.

  The three of them were lying on the narrow bed, Mike and Pete against the edges, Ara pressed tight between them. He was facing Mike, and Mike could not stop staring down at the boy. Flesh and blood. He had been a ghost, a manifestation of energy, but Pete had pulled his bones from the wall, had reached into the plaster as if it were but a curtain, pulled Ara out, and now he was alive. It was impossible. But it was true.

  Ara looked up at him, his dark eyes uncertain. “Are you angry with me?”

  The words cut across Mike like a knife. “Angry—why? Why would you think—?”

  Pete pulled Ara tight against his chest and kissed the boy’s ear. “He isn’t the same Michael. But even so, I don’t think that one would be angry with you, either.” He kissed him again, then looked up at Mike. “He left you at the lake that day, and his father found you. You drowned, yes—but first you were knocked unconscious.”

  It was odd, Mike thought, how little hearing about his own death affected him. Because it isn’t mine, he admitted. It seemed he had quite a bit to learn from Pete Eason.

  Then he looked at the wall, at the place from where Ara had come.

  “Was that—were you in there?” he asked.

  “The servants were still gone,” Ara said. “But he was afraid I would tell about Mikey. So he took an axe and hacked the wall open, tied me up, then shoved me inside and rebuilt the wall after. It took him half the day.” His face clouded. “I tried to fight, but I got so cold. He tied my hands so tight! And it seemed so unreal. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I begged and pleaded with him—I thought at first it was only going to be a punishment, but he never let me out. And then when I died, I didn’t—I felt part of me go, but part of me just couldn’t. I don’t know why.”

  Mike stroked Ara’s hairline. “You kept your pain so bottled, Ara. You couldn’t let it go, because you’d forgotten how. And it grew into a person. You.”

  “Am I really alive?” Ara asked. He held up one of his hands and looked at it dubiously. “I thought you said I would rejoin the universe.”

  “I thought he would absorb into me,” Pete confessed.

  Mike hoped it wasn’t sick, how quickly his mind turned academic. “But you see—you can’t be together now. You were severed, and you both grew. You are of the same source, but you aren’t the same person. You aren’t even close. You grew out of your pain, Ara. Pete grew o
ut of the absence of that pain.”

  “So we’re brothers?” Ara’s face shuttered a little. “And back in my room I—”

  “Not brothers,” Mike said quickly. “No more than any other men are brothers to all other men.”

  Ara relaxed. Pete, Mike noticed, didn’t seem to give a damn either way. But then, that was Pete for you.

  “So he gets to live now?” Pete asked. His fingers were stroking Ara’s arm. “His own life? Alive?”

  “It appears so,” Mike said. “I don’t understand how. But yes. Ara is as alive as you and I.”

  Ara looked surprised and a little uneasy. “But what do I do? Where will I go?”

  “Anywhere you like,” Mike assured him.

  “I want to stay here,” Ara said. “For now. Can I?”