by Amir Lane
“The aunt with the seven cats?” Jakob asked in disbelief.
Seers, witches, he could believe, but spirits were where he drew the line?
“Eight. She got a new one. That’s not important right now. Ekkehardt, Zven was murdered. You were there. What do you think his imprint is like?”
Ekkehardt didn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question. He didn’t know how Zven felt, or if he’d even had time to register that he’d been shot, but he knew how he’d felt. He’d been terrified. Which meant that Zven had probably been terrified. And maybe angry. Definitely angry. Who wouldn’t be angry to die at 23?
“What do I do?” Ekkehardt asked. “There has to be a way we can put him to rest.”
Liese sighed and shrugged.
“Carry salt, and I’ll call my aunt.”
Ekkehardt and Jakob repeated at the same time, “Salt?”
“It’s supposed to help.”
“Supposed to?” Jakob asked, glancing over the fire damage cautiously.
Liese shrugged.
“We’ll see.”
17
The dreams didn’t stop after that. On the contrary, they grew worse. It wasn't the same one every night, either.
On Wednesday night, two girls sat on Ekkehardt’s chest — and not in any fun way — until their weight crushed him. He awoke thrashing on the couch and gasping for air. The mirages pressing their weight into him almost seemed to be laughing, and they disappeared when he grabbed at them. He couldn’t breathe properly, and his ribs ached when he touched them.
Thursday, a man maybe slightly younger than his father grabbed Ekkehardt by his hair and plunged a knife into his stomach. The coldness that tore through his abdomen forced him awake, and his stomach ached for days.
Zven was back on Friday. He made cut after cut into Ekkehardt’s face and arms and chest, and even a couple on his stomach and one on his thigh with a straight razor. Even though it was a dream, each cut burned and stung. He woke up crying from it.
Ekkehardt touched a spot on his cheek, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. His finger came away wet. He pushed himself up, all but rolling off the couch. Every inch of his body ached and standing only made it worse. He dragged himself to the wall and turned the light on, squinting as the sudden brightness blinded him. When his eyes adjusted, he found blood sticking his undamaged shirt to his skin. Dark red patches spread through the white cotton in the same spots Zven had cut. He peeled his shirt off, wincing at the pull that reopened some of his wounds and made them bleed again.
Heat spread through his right forearm arm, just shy of burning. It was the same thing he'd been experiencing for the past two weeks. This time, though, he wasn’t alone when he looked for a source of the heat. The mirage might not have had any distinct shape or features, but he knew who it was.
“Zven…”
Spirits were supposed to be cold, but Zven was hot. The closer Ekkehardt’s hand moved towards him, the hotter it was. By the time his hand reached the spirit, it felt like he was putting his hand on a stove element. But as soon as he touched it — him — he thinned out and vanished.
Gone.
His hand and arm still throbbed from the heat, but there was no physical evidence, aside from the cuts, that Zven had been there. Some of them were actually quite deep. Maybe not deep enough to need stitches, but still fairly deep. He swore under his breath and touched the one that ran through the sigil still scarring his arm. Electricity sparked beneath his skin.
Zven was a few feet away now. He was pretty sure it was still Zven. It felt like him.
Neither of them moved. It was almost like he was… standing guard. Ekkehardt didn't understand it.
“What are you doing?” Ekkehardt asked.
Zven didn't respond.
“Are you doing this on purpose? Why do you want to hurt me?” His voice broke. “I'm sorry.”
The ripples moved, almost as if Zven was turning his head away from Ekkehardt. Could he even understand what Ekkehardt was saying?
“Look at what you did to me,” Ekkehardt ordered. “Look at me!”
He did. Even though he had no face, no real features, Ekkehardt felt himself being stared down. Zven had never looked at him like that when he was alive. Ekkehardt watched him cautiously, but Zven didn’t move.
“You should go.” Ekkehardt’s voice wavered. He swallowed and licked his lips when Zven didn’t move. “Go!”
The hairs on the backs of Ekkehardt’s arms and neck stood on end. He inhaled sharply, a heavy panic rising in the back of his throat, and threw his arms over his face. He couldn’t explain why he did it, but in the next breath, Zven rushed towards him. A violent heat tore through his arm, a perfect imitation of the seal he’d carved into himself.
“Don’t!” he screamed.
Though his eyes were squeezed shut, he could somehow still see the mirage thinning out and vanishing. There was a sudden heavy stillness to the air. It felt like the only movement in the house — in the world — was Ekkehardt’s ragged breathing and his heart hammering in his ears. It wasn’t an exaggeration, he could actually hear it. He’d always been athletic, and his heart rate and blood pressure had always been low enough to correspond to it. Granted, after tearing his ACL and ruling out the career in soccer that he’d been working towards, he didn’t work out quite as much as he used to. But even so, his blood pressure had never been as high as it had been in the recent weeks, even after completely cutting caffeine out of his diet. It… It worried him. Not as much as his dead boyfriend apparently wanting to kill him, but it was definitely up there on his top ten list of concerns.
The bathroom felt so far away from the living room. Ekkehardt shuffled down the hall, each step reminding him of the cut trailing blood down his thigh. Jakob had insisted they keep a fully-stocked first aid kit under the sink rather than just the box of plastic bandages that Ekkehardt and Liese had been sure was enough. At the time, it had seemed like a pointless investment, but now, he was glad Jakob had a habit of being overly cautious. There wasn’t enough gauze to cover all the cuts, so Ekkehardt only worried about the worst of them.
At first, he was too distracted by the work of poking at each wound to find which were the deepest to notice anything else. But as he finished covering one just beneath his ribs, he caught sight of his reflection and paused.
There was something… off about it, but he couldn’t quite figure out just what it was. His own confused face stared back at him. The cut on his cheek made his face look lop-sided. Ekkehardt frowned and leaned closer. He turned away from the mirror with his hand on his cheek, then turned back around to look back at himself.
The cut was on the wrong side.
All the cuts were on the wrong side. Even the tight, puckered scar tissue barely an inch shy of his heart, was on the wrong side. He reached up and touched the scar. His reflection did the same, but there was something knowing in its eyes. The corners of its lips were almost pulling up into a smug smile. Ekkehardt wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t his imagination, though. He reached up towards the mirror. His reflection did the same.
At somewhere near the last second, the reflection’s arm reached through the mirror, blurring out into a ripple of air, and grabbed him by the throat. The face twisted, morphing into someone else, someone he didn’t recognize, someone his eyes were blurring too much to make out. Ekkehardt clawed at it, trying to pry the fingers away without much success. It was like trying to hold onto a handful of water. He couldn’t get a solid grip. From the corner of his eye, he could make out the fuzzy outline of a straight razor. One hand still on the mirage, he grabbed it and flipped it open. He slashed at the arm holding him. Pain tore through his own arm in the same spot he had cut again and again to draw blood, but the pressure on his windpipe lifted and his vision cleared. He gasped in a lungful or air.
Blood splattered against the white ceramic sink. His blood.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
The razor clattered onto the floor as he let
it go to grab his arm. Blood seeped through his fingers. How the hell—?
“Shit,” he ground out through clenched teeth.
Zven wasn’t the only person he’d brought home, was he? Or maybe the rest had always been here and he was only just able to notice them now. Why hadn’t they hurt him before? Had they just… not been able to?
He distracted himself from the questions by bandaging the new wound. At this rate, he was going to be losing more blood than he could frigging replace.
* * *
Ekkehardt was still in the bathroom when Liese found him, sitting against the tub with his head in his hands. He hadn’t gone back to sleep. Who knew what would happen the next time he did? His chest was still bruised from the girls sitting on him, his stomach still hurt when he ate, and the cuts all over his body were proof enough that whatever happened to him in these dreams happened to him in real life. The dark red handprint on his neck proved that they could hurt him while he was awake, too, but at least he could fight back when he was awake. Even if it did backfire spectacularly.
“Was it Zven again?” Liese asked.
Ekkehardt hesitated before nodding. The second one hadn’t been, he didn’t think, but the cuts were Zven.
“We need to do an exorcism,” she said.
“What?”
“Well, you do. You’re the one who brought them here.”
He looked up at her. “What?”
He was a broken record, wasn’t he?
“When you tried to bring back Zven, you must have brought more. You did do it in a graveyard, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Is that why… they’re hurting me?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Are they going to kill me? Is— Is he going to kill me.”
“I don’t know.”
Ekkehardt laughed bitterly and pressed his forehead to his knees.
“I just wanted him back. I wanted to bring him back. I didn’t mean— I didn’t want this.”
“You have to get rid of him.”
Her voice was quiet. He wondered if she didn’t want Zven to be gone forever either. They obviously hadn’t been as close as him and Zven, but they were friends. She’d been the one who brought them together, who’d warned him that they were going to disappear from her visions. And then they’d both died. Only somehow, Ekkehardt… came back. So why not Zven? Why… Why had it gone so wrong?
“So I need to exorcise him,” Ekkehardt said. “This is just fucking great.”
He was going to need a drink. A lot of drinks.
18
You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Zven was sitting on the edge of the kitchen counter with his legs crossed in the way that always drove Jakob crazy. But Jakob wasn’t going to see him because this wasn’t real. It was another dream. Ekkehardt was starting to get pretty good at knowing when he was dreaming. The fact that Zven was bleeding profusely from the gunshot wounds but didn’t seem to notice was a pretty big indicator.
“I know,” Ekkehardt admitted. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t let you keep… being here.”
“It isn’t what you think.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I would never hurt you,” Zven said.
Ekkehardt swallowed and nodded. He wanted to believe it. Part of him did. But he was still healing from the last time Zven had shown up in one of his dreams. Maybe it was true when Zven was alive, but now? Now, Ekkehardt wasn’t so sure.
“It isn’t what you think.”
“You already said that.”
Zven fixed him with a hard look. His jaw was set, lips pursed, and there were creases in his forehead. He inhaled, slowly and evenly. Practiced. It was the way be breathed before an exam or before a swim meet.
“You should never have trusted her,” he said.
Ekkehardt frowned and looked back and forth.
“Liese? She’s one of our best friends.”
Granted, if they had ignored her premonition about, well, nothing, things might have worked out differently. This might never have happened. Or maybe it just would have happened another way.
“You should never have opened that journal, Ekkehardt.”
Wait, the journal? Nina’s journal? Ekkehardt shook his head. He opened his mouth to ask how the hell Zven knew about the journal, but no sound came out.
“It isn’t what you think.”
“Zven, what isn’t?” he demanded. “What do you even know? You’re dead. That journal was my only chance of bringing you back. And maybe I fucked up. Okay? I fucked up.”
He paced the kitchen, pushing his hands through his hair.
Zven didn’t move from his spot on the counter. His dark eyes followed Ekkehardt. It made him feel too hot and too cold at the same time.
“What am I supposed to do, Zven?”
“Find the missing pages.”
He was looking away from Ekkehardt now. Ekkehardt followed his field of vision, but he didn’t see anything.
“I don’t know where they are. They might still be in Leipzig, but they’re probably long gone by now. How am I supposed to find them? What’s on them?”
“It isn’t what you think.”
“What isn’t? Zven, what the hell are you talking about?”
Zven slid off the counter and walked towards the front door. Flames formed beneath his feet and travelled up his legs until he was fully engulfed. The fire swallowed him up, and when it burnt out, Zven was gone.
* * *
Find the missing pages, Zven had said. Like it was that goddamned easy.
“I don’t know, Mama,” Ekkehardt said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “They’re kind of yellow. They were white originally, but they’re really old so they’re yellow now. Small notebook size.”
“Well, where did you leave them?”
He rubbed a hand over his face and suppressed a groan. It would have been easier if he had actually left them somewhere, but he’d never had them in the first place. He’d already searched the entire house here in Berlin and found nothing. Having his mother try to find them in Leipzig was his next — and only — option.
“I guess they’re either in my room or maybe in the attic.”
“Why would they be in the attic?” Hida asked.
“I don’t know. I spent a lot of time up there. Maybe that’s where I left them.”
Oh, God, what if it was in a different box? She was never going to find them in that case.
“You really should keep better track of your things.”
He screamed internally, grinding his teeth together to keep from screaming aloud. One thing that he couldn’t find, and it wasn’t even his.
“Yeah, I know. If you find those pages, can you… send them to me?”
Hida sighed, and Ekkehardt held his breath, expecting her to tell him he was crazy if he thought she was going to look for a few freaking journal pages that were, as far as either of them knew, blank.
“I will call you if I find them.”
He let out a relieved sigh and thanked her before hanging up.
“What was that about?” Liese asked from the doorway, scaring the ever-loving shit out of him.
There was a pain in his back just shy of his left shoulder blade that might have been from his heart, and there was a tight pinch in the middle of his rib cage when he tried to breathe deeply. He really should have gotten that looked at, but it was one of those problems that he hoped would go away if he just ignored it enough. Nothing a doctor could tell him would be good news, and his parents had enough to worry without adding to it. Hell, he had enough to worry about without adding to it.
“My aunt’s journal. The one where she talked about spirits. There were some pages torn out. I’m trying to find them.”
“Why?” There was only curiosity in her voice. “What’s on them?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just think it might have some have some answers about… about what went wrong, and how to fix i
t.”
“And by fix it, you mean…?”
“Put him to rest.”
There was movement in the corner of Ekkehardt’s eyes, a jerky shift of the light. That warmth flooded his right arm again. Apparently, Zven wasn’t looking forward to it either.
Liese put her hand on his shoulder.
“It’s for the best, Ekkehardt. But it isn’t him anymore. You know that. You must know that. Does he feel the same to you?”
Ekkehardt stared at the ripples in the air. The hips and shoulders were tilted at a short angle in the same direction, making it just slightly lopsided. That tilt was why Zven had never been fast enough to swim competitively. He used to practice in the University pool, pulling himself through the water for hours at a time while Ekkehardt watched from the bleachers with his books. Zven had never wanted to compete; he swam because he enjoyed it. He never cared about being a professional, not like Ekkehardt.
Injuring his knee had been the worst thing that had ever happened to Ekkehardt up until, well, getting shot. He could still play casually, but the Olympics were out of the question.
But Zven was never angry over not being able to compete. Over anything. He didn’t care that he couldn’t swim professionally, he shrugged when a course he needed got cancelled, he barely even complained when his parents cut him off. And though Zven had set his room on fire and cut him up, Ekkehardt didn’t feel any anger from him. Even in his dreams, Zven didn’t seem angry. He seemed… apologetic and worried, even.
He didn’t feel like the other spirits.
He was fragmented, sure. Bits and pieces of half-formed emotion. But the Zven in his dreams was coherent, more so than the other ones.
Those were dreams, though; his subconscious putting together a version of Zven that he wanted to see instead of what he was now. And what he was now was a spirit. No matter what he told himself, no matter what Zven told him, he was a spirit. He was something that shouldn’t have existed, something that wouldn’t have existed if not for Ekkehardt’s stupid, desperate need to have him back in any form. Liese was right; getting rid of him was the only way to put things right and give Zven peace.