Summer Sons(117)

“You grew up here,” Riley said.

“The suburb on the other side of the woods,” he said.

“Nice house.”

“This isn’t the house that matters, I don’t think,” Andrew said.

Riley cast him a grim look. “The one from your dream, then, the old plantation?”

Andrew closed his eyes and let the power creep out around his ankles in a spill, the revenant dragging with it to slide past memories. As boys they’d been happy here, together, and he felt scraps of the lifelong yearning Eddie had dragged to his grave with him. Riley smothered a shriek when the haunt lapped across him. Andrew recoiled at the faint, bitter taste of his friend’s remarkable aura in his throat.

Riley said, shaken after the brush, “You sure it’s safe to use your, whatever, powers after what happened to Troth?”

He said, “I did what I did for Sam.”

The spreading power retracted once more into the film of shade cloaking Andrew head to toe. He’d found nothing in the house worth pursuing further—it was as inert as it could be. He’d expected as much, but he had to find out for sure, leave no corner unchecked.

Riley removed his hat and tugged at his hair before he said, “I know that. It doesn’t seem fair to insist on thanking you for saving him, when I know it cost you something to get him out of there, and you’re not going to tell me how much.”

“Will you come with me to the plantation?” he asked, changing the subject.

Riley allowed it, responding, “How do we find it?”

“I think I just walk,” he said.

Riley grimaced. Andrew clenched his fists on his next exhale and relaxed his control again. Denied free rein once already during their outing, at his second offer the ghoul overtook him with such urgency it felt as if his ribs might crack from the pressure, the sluggish beat of his pulse smothered beneath its stagnation. He pictured the dreaming vision of the house he’d suffered through previously in detail, feeding that image to the spectral operator of his flesh. The ghoul walked them out of the home from their childhood at once. Riley followed in his wake, with the hot fear of one candle in a vast darkness.

The woods were deep. No person had disturbed the undergrowth in years, but the expected rattle and skitter of small animal life was absent. Riley struggled to beat a path, Andrew nominally in control of his feet and elbows—his ghastly driver had not gotten the hang of his height, his reach. After almost an hour, a faint homing drone rose up from the earth. Andrew hesitated at the same time his roommate recoiled.

“That’s really unpleasant,” Riley choked out.

“It’s that obvious?” Andrew pressed out through clumsy lips.

“Hard to miss, yeah. Like a big ugly lighthouse.”

The trees thinned. Light dappled the green bushes and twisting ivy across their path. Andrew burst free into a clearing, almost swallowing his own tongue at the shock of resonance that struck him. The dilapidated plantation home was grandiose in death: sagging veranda, gaping windows like hollow sockets, rotten wood and worse aura. The sun made no dent in its malicious shadows.

“Oh, fuck that,” Riley said an octave higher than his usual.

“The library,” Andrew said. “We need the library, that’s the room I dreamed about, there’s got to be something on how to lay him to rest.”

“If the house doesn’t eat us first.”

“It won’t, it wants me to come learn from it,” said the revenant with his vocal cords. Riley trilled a whine at the back of his throat. Andrew said, “Sorry, Christ.”

“Do not ever do that again,” Riley said, spooked to the whites of his eyes.

To be fair, Eddie’s dismembered voice coming out of Andrew’s body wasn’t Andrew’s favorite thing, either. The inheritance he’d taken up was nothing but poisoned ashes. It held only a fraction, a splinter, of Eddie’s adoration and anger and need. Sometimes he imagined an alternate future, him and Eddie in Nashville without Troth, growing freer under the influence of the pack. Maybe one night, Eddie would’ve seen him right at sunset all doused in gold and grabbed him with both hands, and put their mouths together. Maybe he wouldn’t have. And even if he had, maybe he’d have been a fucked-up, controlling, monstrous disaster of a partner. Andrew had to accept that he was going to take that maybe to his grave.

Andrew entered the house through the busted window on the groaning porch. The images and impressions from his vision rushed at him in greyscale, identical from the hole in the floorboards to the terrible age of the house itself moldering around them. The miasma of the Troth estate was nothing compared to the Fultons’ original home, itself a dead creature and the locus of constant horrors. The manor resonated on the same frequency as the alien curse-gift latched to his insides—his to claim, if he would just accept the mantle of power and the cruelty that came with it. He shuddered, sick to his stomach.

“You can wait there,” he said over his shoulder to Riley, who was loitering outside with a pale face and clenched fists.

“No, I need to see it,” he said as if to convince himself. “Plus, if it fucking eats you, I’ll be stuck waiting out here after nightfall.”

Andrew entered the hall, which continued to match his vision. Eddie must’ve come here before his murder for the memories to be so fresh. Or maybe Eddie’s ghost had visited on its own, autonomously; he didn’t know if that was even possible. Earth crooned at him in welcome from an invisible cellar underfoot. His ghost fluttered in sympathetic vibration. Riley caught tiny, desperate breaths, almost sobs. The house clutched around them. Andrew put his hand on the library doorknob and twisted as Riley’s fist snagged at the hem of his shirt. The door swung loose on crying hinges. A stinking wave wafted out of the hot dark room, mildewed paper choking the air. He lifted his phone flashlight to inspect the tall shelving on all sides, the antebellum chairs and rugs.