Summer Sons(46)

The radio clicked on to aggressive white noise and the time on the digital display flickered—3:18, 9:30, 12:02—before blanking to a row of zeroes. His hands quivered on the shifter and the wheel, but he kept driving. The horror movie shit was flat unnecessary. He skated past frightened straight into furious at the intrusive, crawling thing attempting to wrest more and more life out of him. It wasn’t Eddie, not in the ways that mattered; letting it eat at his pain and yearning wouldn’t bring Eddie home, it would only strip him down to the bones. But he had to admit—alone, still devouring ground on a street he didn’t recognize that was growing ever less populous—that on another level, it was Eddie, so it knew him inside and out. Knew his tells and his weaknesses, how to force him to see and hear and sacrifice. Nothing remotely close to this extravagant personal haunting had ever happened to him before, not even in the weeks after the cavern when the curse was fresh and awful. He was in uncharted territory.

The engine sputtered dead five minutes later, leaving him in the thick of nondescript empty land, a field of undergrowth on his left and a copse of young trees to his right. Andrew let the car coast to the side of the road. The radio had died too, small mercy, no longer filling the interior with raw static. No houses, no headlights on the road in either direction. He tried the starter button again and nothing happened.

With no options left, apparently, but to see the haunt’s detour through to its intended conclusion, he got out of the car and stood in the center of the street. His phone vibrated again as he waited for the next spectral signal. He pulled it from his pocket, saw Sam’s number, and tossed it on the driver’s seat, where the accusatory glow lit up the dash from below. He crunched into the dry grass on the berm. The ground swam under his feet as he paced through trees, the sour taste of his mouth recalling his experience in the back seat of the Mazda—blanketed in the revenant and dreaming about possession.

The trees cleared again and he stuttered to a stop outside a collapsing square of iron fence overgrown with creeping plant life: saplings, vines, flowers. The gate, thigh-tall, hung loose. Age-polished gravestones tipped and trailed through the plot of land. The iron taste in his mouth intensified, and he unsealed his teeth from the protesting flesh of his lip, a drip of blood beading and falling from the split.

That drop struck funeral ground and a taut wire strung his lungs to the soil, taking him to his battered knees. One time, in a high school friend’s basement for an illicit party, there had been a Ouija board amidst the cheap beer and plastic bong packed with someone’s ditch weed. Andrew remembered Eddie’s feral smile, I know something they don’t know, and the nudge of their fingers together on the planchette. The other kids had shrieked with laughter and jostled to push the wooden pointer, spelling out girls’ crushes and spooky movie threats. But then Eddie hummed one breathy sigh and loosened up on the indefinable dam inside himself, relaxing that fist-taut muscle and pricking a sympathetic twinge at the tip of Andrew’s tongue. A chill nipped at their ears and fingers. Eddie’s stare held steady as he trickled more and more of his corpse-cold pressure over the board. The giggles died as animal instinct rippled through the room in a fearful wave. And then the wood had cracked, provoking screams and a universal recoil like a bomb had detonated—except for Eddie, except for Andrew, touching separate halves of the fractured game piece.

Andrew felt like that planchette: broken open. He crawled across the boundary of the forgotten cemetery, each drop of blood striking the earth with the force of a church bell pealing. As his heels crossed the perimeter a rush of wind scoured through the trees. Leaves rattled overhead. He lay on his side, fingertips touching a smooth stone, a twig jammed against his scalp. Greyish mist seeped up from the earth with an unreal tinge like the afterimage from a lens flare, remnants heaving themselves free from their grave-plots to trickle up his wrist, enveloping his arm, his torso, his ankles, in a tingling embrace that was not illusory.

Breath rasped in his throat. Eddie’s notes about his visit to a graveyard—that was a fucking trip and a half—had not prepared him for the marriage of terror and release that washed through him. Eddie had finally managed to force his hand after death, and as he’d always insisted, it felt good to let the power flow through him at will, tingling and illicit. When the phantom weight of an arm slung over his waist and an eerily solid hand gripped his outstretched wrist, when the murmur in his head magnified to a roar, that was also a relief. The horrible, comforting weight proved to him that he hadn’t brought himself past the edge of control all on his own. He’d been drawn to this pit on purpose, pushed in. He caught a jumble of words in the distorted muttering: letgoletgoletgo.

A half hour prior he’d been calming his fluttering nerves while Halse petted the hood of the Challenger. Andrew tried to dredge that moment of vitality to the forefront of his head, but the shade hissed nastily and jerked on the loosened knot of energy filling him to the brim; the graveyard ghosts flared brighter as he groaned, slipping out of his control once more. Surrounded by old death Andrew was a less-than-human creature, strangled on the haunt’s leash while it fed off the battery of their curse. As he tilted forward into unconsciousness, the shade dumped him, disoriented but partially lucid, into the memory: the cavern. It had tried to pull him through time to this moment over and over—their binding, their breach of normal life. This time he let the dream take him.

He was a lanky boy with his friend’s bloodied hand pressed to his face. Crisp, limestone-rich water splashed under him as he clasped the shivering palm when it flopped onto his shoulder. He pressed it to his neck, heard himself whispering a mantra of “don’t, don’t, come on, don’t,” in the pitch black. It was impossible to tell the slickness of water from the slickness of blood. The moment he looped Eddie’s scrawny, limp arm over his shoulder, the scene clipped through time and place as if he’d fallen through a trapdoor. Horror-logic, haunt-logic; the specter’s dragging, shrieking static filled his ears. He was still blind, but no longer in his child’s body living a familiar memory. He was in another body, living a suffering he’d never known himself. Agony bloomed in a terrible sawing stroke through his (not his) forearm, gouged a divot into the bone of his (not his) wrist when the point caught wrong. Eddie’s forearm, he knew without thought, Eddie’s wrist, without question. Blood spilled out of him and carried life with it, vitality draining into the dirt as he struggled. The revenant forced him to remain, to experience, to understand how it died. Though he struggled to separate himself from the dying body with frantic, wordless, thrashing begging, it held him, collared and pliant.