by Amir Lane
But he still had to wonder about the missing pages.
Nina had kept every single page, even the ones where she talked about things that Ekkehardt would have been far too embarrassed to write and the ones where she detailed the process of reanimation. So what was on those pages that was so worth ripping out? And where in God’s name were they?
He turned to Liese. What was the question, again? Oh, right. Did Zven feel the same as he used to.
“I don’t know. It’s complicated. But I need to find the pages first. Do you even know how to do an exorcism?” When she looked away, he continued. “Those pages might. Or they might at least tell me what I did wrong.”
“It’s not like you can redo it,” she said quickly, as if trying to avoid giving him time to think of trying it.
He didn’t blame her. Given enough time, he probably would consider it. It still felt like the right thing to do. Reminding himself that this wasn’t his fault or his responsibility was no easier now than it had been when he’d woken up in the hospital. No, it was slightly easier, but only because he could actually think straight now.
“No, obviously not.” He would have liked to, though. Another try with the full set of Nina’s notes. But it wasn’t an option. “She might know how to do it. Exorcise him.”
His eyes flickered to the mirage moving back and forth as if pacing from his agitation. As if it felt what he did and reacted to his emotions. He rubbed the scar below his elbow through his sleeve. With how quickly the tissue had pulled itself back together, he had half-expected it to be gone by now. The scar was warm. He didn’t know enough biology to understand why, but he’d been under the impression that scars didn’t have many blood vessels. Wouldn’t that make it less warm? Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was his imagination.
He could feel Liese’s eyes on him but he didn’t want to see her expression. Judgment or sympathy, he didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to know what she thought of him right now.
“In the meantime, I will see if I know anyone who knows how to—” she hesitated, looking in the same corner of the room as Ekkehardt. “— lay him to rest. It’ll be better for him.”
Ekkehardt nodded in agreement. She was right. So why did it feel like he was planning on killing him all over again?
19
As much as Ekkehardt told himself he was only avoiding Liese to search aimlessly for Nina’s missing pages, the truth was that he was trying to put off exorcising Zven for as long as possible. He was growing to enjoy the constant blur in the air that was almost always at his side these days. He missed the conversation they would have but if he could only have Zven this way… Was it wrong of him to want to keep it?
Who was he kidding? Of course it was.
It was cruel and selfish. And maybe Ekkehardt was cruel and selfish. After all, no matter what he said, he did this for himself. Because he couldn’t or didn’t want to live with the guilt and the loneliness. Because he was weak. If he was completely honest with himself, it wasn't for Zven at all.
It still felt surreal to be back in classes. As understanding as his professors had been, he was still behind. It was going to take him at least an extra semester to graduate.
He sat at his usual spot in the second row of the only half-full lecture hall and ignored the looks and whispers he received from the other grad students. He pretended they weren’t talking about him and they were only looking in his direction because of where he was sitting. It was easier said than done, of course. Tuning out the whispers and not responding when he knew they were talking about him was nearly impossible, but he somehow managed to distract himself with his textbook.
Even though he was back here, he was still behind. His mind just wasn’t in it. He hadn’t even opened the book yet, even though it was approaching February. Now seemed as good a time as any. Which chapter were they on? Three? Yes, three.
Ekkehardt flipped through the pages until he found chapter three. His vision blurred over the words his mind couldn’t focus on enough to make out. He dragged his thumbnail back and forth over the sides of the pages. It kept getting caught on a small gap somewhere near the end. The first few times, he ignored it, but it quickly got on his nerves. What the hell was in here? Maybe some of the pages were folding together or maybe the girl he’d bought the book from at the last minute had left something in it. He hadn’t exactly inspected it. It was the only copy he’d been able to get on such short notice. He worked his thumb in between the pages and opened it, keeping his other hand on chapter three.
Doktor Fischer stood at the front of the lecture hall and pushed her thick glasses up the bridge of her nose. He’d had her once before, and he swore she spent more time adjusting her glasses than talking. She didn’t waste any time before diving into her lecture.
Ekkehardt didn’t hear a word of it.
All he could do was stare down at the familiar handwriting on age-yellowed notebook paper with torn edges. The first page was missing the entire top left corner, which was still attached to the journal.
“Herr Schneider. Herr Schneider.”
Ekkehardt’s head snapped up. He could barely see her through the mirages.
“Yes, Doktor Fischer?”
Shit, had she asked a question? He hadn’t heard a single word she’d said in the past— Oh, crap, twenty minutes if that clock was right.
“Are you going to be sick? You don’t look well.”
And now everybody was staring right at him. There was no ignoring it anymore. Heat rose up his neck and face until his ears were burning.
“I’m fine.” He cleared his throat. “I’m fine.”
She fixed him with a hard stare but turned back to the chalkboard and continued teaching. The formulas she wrote meant nothing to him. He flipped back to chapter three, even though he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about at this point. He understood all those words separately but together, it was a mixed up jumble of sound that didn’t mean anything to him. Had he honestly thought he would be able to focus on anything as mundane as chemistry after everything that had happened? That he could focus on Doktor Fischer’s lecture when the mirages moved lazily across the room and blocked his view?
He had ruined everything! His entire fucking life!
A girl at the back of the class shrieked, and Ekkehardt looked up just fast enough to catch the small fireball a few rows back burn out. There was about half a second of silence before the smoke detector went off and anxiety descended over the hall. Doktor Fischer ushered the students out, her calls for single file going entirely ignored. Within minutes, word spread and the entire building was evacuated.
Later, students insisted they had smelled gas and over-reported the size of the flame. By the end of the day, the story was that the whole lecture hall had been on fire — then, the entire damn building — and they were lucky to escape with their lives.
“Why did you do that?” Ekkehardt hissed as he paced away from campus as quickly as possible.
Warmth ran through the back of his neck, not unlike the feeling of a hand on his skin. He pushed it away.
“You shouldn’t have done that. Can’t you control yourself?”
As he glanced over at the hovering figure — and the people who thought he was talking to himself — he realized that it wasn’t intentional. The fire had erupted when he’d become agitated. Even when Zven had lit up his bedroom, Ekkehardt had been in the midst of a nightmare. He stopped dead in his tracks, only to have cars honking to draw his attention to the fact that he had stopped right in the middle of the street.
“Shit.”
He ran to the sidewalk. His messenger bag thumped against his thigh, but his chemistry book was tucked under his arm. It seemed ridiculous to think that the entire goddamn textbook could disappear into thin air if he so much as took his eyes off of it. Given how Nina’s journal and these missing pages had appeared with no explanation, though, it made more than enough sense to Ekkehardt. Hell, he couldn’t even be sure that the pages were st
ill inside the textbook. It would be entirely his luck if they vanished by the time he got home.
They didn’t.
They were still there, right between pages 741 and 742 where they belonged. Ekkehardt let out a breath of relief and held them away from Zven when he got too close. He was worried Zven would burn them, intentionally or otherwise. A thought flashed through his mind that Zven might do anything to avoid being exorcised, and guilt filled his stomach for it. Still, he pushed his hand through the heat of his spirit to keep him away.
The first page was that same crude anatomical drawing from the other journal page, only slightly better. More practiced. He wondered if she’d drawn it more than just twice. This diagram had barely-legible notes on it. Nina’s neat cursive had become a messy scrawl. When he compared it to the old pages, he almost couldn’t tell that it was the same person who had written them. But there was a distinct point at the end of her fs and at the top of her as that clearly belonged to her.
“What happened to you?” he whispered. “What happened with Ludwig?”
He hadn’t looked through the pages in class. He’d been too worried about someone else seeing what was on them to flip through them.
The next page wasn’t another drawing. It was more messy scrawl, the same three word scribbled down again and again and again:
It didn’t work.
The next four pages were filled with the same words as the first:
It didn’t work.
It made him feel lightheaded and dizzy and borderline delirious. Of course it didn’t work. It had never worked, it was never going to work. Had Ludwig’s body also erupted into flames? Or was that only because Zven was a pyromancer?
There was trauma in these pages. Nina Kruspe had seen something awful. Many awful things, he was sure, just as surely as his parents had. They never talked about it. As much as he wished he knew more about his family, though, he didn’t blame them. He didn’t think he would talk about it either. When Liese had asked about the summoning, Ekkehardt hadn’t even been able to talk about what it had felt like to regain consciousness next to Zven’s lifeless body, let alone anything else.
He was expecting the rest of the pages to be the same, but the sixth was different. There were only two lines of writing on it, and then nothing.
January 27, 1943
They are coming. They are here.
20
No matter how much Zven’s spirit tried to warm him, there was a coldness inside his soul. There were no more words and no more missing pages. Maybe there was another journal, or maybe this was it. What difference did it make? Ludwig had died. Zven had died. He and Nina had tried to bring them back, and it hadn’t done them any good. They’d dragged the souls of the men they loved back from wherever they had been resting, and God knew what else they brought with them.
Ekkehardt woke most nights with bruises on his body, and worse. The phantom rope-burn on his left wrist was still bright red and painful. Every night, one spirit or another played out what he thought might have been their own deaths on him and every night, Zven warmed him and stayed by his side.
The spirits didn’t bother Liese and Jakob. They slept as well as ever, and their only nightmares concerned tests and exams. He’d never thought that was something he would miss.
“You can’t keep letting them do this to you,” Jakob said with a sigh, leaning against the bathroom doorframe as he watched Ekkehardt apply some of Liese’s concealer to the bruising over his cheekbone.
“I’m not letting them,” Ekkehardt snapped.
Even Zven showed up in his dreams some nights with the straight razor. It called into question his theory about the spirits’ deaths. Zven had been shot, not cut. Did the why really matter, though? The point was that what these spirits did to him in his nightmares somehow translated to real life injuries. They may not have been fatal or even long-lived injuries, but they were still injuries nonetheless. Injuries he had to explain to concerned classmates and professors. He could only brush them off as a bar fight so many times before people began to worry he was an alcoholic. And with his new drinking habit, he didn’t doubt that he was headed down that path. Not that anybody would worry much. He didn’t know a single person who didn’t drink far more than they should.
“Did Liese’s aunt have any tips for how to get rid of them?” Jakob asked.
Ekkehardt shook his head.
“Nothing useful. Salting the room, burning incense, crystals. That cross we put over the door.”
“I wasn’t going to ask why that’s there,” Jakob said.
“I even tried just asking them to leave.”
Jakob snorted, his expression twisting in a combination of disbelief and ridicule.
“Did that work?”
“Better than the cross.”
Jakob laughed. He was always so serious, it was nice to hear, even given the circumstances. Then, he didn’t say anything else for a moment. His expression quickly became more solemn again, though there was still something of a smile at the edge of his lips.
“Ekkehardt.”
“Hm?”
“Is he here? Zven, I mean? I mean, is he… His spirit, is it…”
Jakob waved his hand to fill in the rest of his sentences. As much as he believed in all of this now, Ekkehardt could tell he still felt a little ridiculous saying it out loud. Ekkehardt felt a little ridiculous saying it out loud, for God’s sake. It was ridiculous. Spirits, magic, none of it was supposed to be real. And yet, here they were — here he was — right in the middle of his own ghost story.
Ekkehardt looked up into the mirror. Liese was paler than he was, and it showed in the uneven patches that he had tried, not entirely successfully, to cover up. Behind him was the familiar warped figure that rarely, if ever, left his side.
“Yeah,” Ekkehardt said, “he’s here.”
“Can you tell him that I— That I miss him? I still have that tape he lent me that I never gave back. That rock band he likes. I never even finished listening to it.”
Jakob’s voice broke, and Ekkehardt was almost horrified to see him crying. It wasn’t just that his eyes were wet. That, Ekkehardt could have expected. But there were honest-to-God tears silently streaming down his cheeks. In all the years they had known each other, Ekkehardt had never seen Jakob cry, not once. Somehow, overwhelmed by and drowning in his own grief, Ekkehardt had forgotten that they had been best friends.
Ekkehardt looked back at Zven, and Jakob followed his eyes.
“He got that,” Ekkehardt said, though he couldn’t be sure.
He wasn’t entirely certain these spirits could even hear, let alone understand him. But Jakob smiled through his tears and Ekkehardt had to believe that truth or not, it helped.
“Jakob… What do you think I should do? If I find a way to get rid of the other spirits, he’ll go with them. Do you really want that?”
Ekkehardt wasn’t asking to judge. He wanted Jakob’s opinion. If he was able to bring himself to just make the damn decision to stop putting off finding a way, he wouldn’t need to ask. And he probably wouldn’t be having to do this every morning, either. But he wasn’t ready to let go, and he especially wasn’t ready to force him away. He needed someone else to make the decision for him. Again.
“Liese is right,” Jakob said, though his voice was tight and he continued to stare at the spot where Zven was. “It’s not fair to keep him here just because we miss him. We have to let him go, Ekkehardt. He can’t be happy like this.”
Ekkehardt looked over at Zven again. He really couldn’t tell.
* * *
Ekkehardt hated that the only way he could see Zven was in his sleep, and the only way he could sleep was after a few drinks. Every time he closed his eyes, his heart rate rose until he could feel it in his fingertips, and he couldn’t lie still long enough to fall asleep. He was days away from seeking a prescription for Valium. It likely wouldn’t keep the spirits from bothering him any more than the wine and beer they bought too much of
, but at least he would be able to get a few hours of fucking sleep.
“I found the pages,” he said.
Zven’s back was to him as they sat on his bed. Ekkehardt wished he could see his face to gauge his reaction.
“There was nothing in them. Nothing useful.”
“It didn’t work.”
Ekkehardt nodded.
“That’s what they said. It didn’t work.”
He really wished he had found those pages before all of this. It might not have deterred him from trying the resurrection anyway, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to try an exorcism without having as much information as possible. God knew there were a million and a half ways it could go wrong, and with his luck, it would. He didn’t want to make another mistake. He didn’t want to make things worse than they were, and he didn’t want to hurt Zven more than he already had.
“Zven, are you… Are you unhappy? Because I can… I can let you go. I can find a way to let you go.”
“No, you can’t.”
“What?”
He wasn’t sure he’d heard that right.
“It didn’t work.”
“I know that,” Ekkehardt said slowly, just on the edge of impatiently. “I know it didn’t work. That wasn’t what I asked. Are you unhappy?”
“Are you unhappy?”
“Zven, don’t be a dick. I’m being serious. Do you want me to exorcise you?”
“You can’t.”
Ekkehardt pushed his hand through his hair. This was his dream, wasn’t it? Would it kill Zven to— Shouldn’t Zven be slightly more useful?