Summer Sons(47)
Don’t make me see this. But the haunt’s recollection rolled onward. At the last moment—consumed with a primal rush of panic both his own and remembered—he (Eddie) dug into the gated, controlled power that coiled eternal and patient inside him, a dearest companion hissing promises of revival and salvation. But it slipped through his (Eddie’s) fingers, dripping out of him (not Andrew, Eddie) along the path of the pouring blood instead of responding to his call. Andrew’s lucid struggle to escape the revenant stalled in shock.
The revenant’s memories were muddled, distorted through dream logic and the trauma of death. The erratic lashing of Eddie’s dissolving power was unable to suture his bone-deep wounds closed, despite his last-ditch effort to harness it to that end. Unstuck from him and tearing loose of its moorings, the oozing thing in his blood leapt desperately toward another person, the only other person who carried it, too far away—and Eddie’s final coherent thought was, help me. The soil drank his sacrament and shot an echo into the world, an arrow that struck Andrew through the heart as he tore himself free of the mist with a shout, kicking leaf litter, mindless with the struggle to escape the married memories. Eddie’s death, his failure to connect in his final moments, had been forced on Andrew in cinematic, visceral detail. The revenant made its accusation implicit: at the bitter end, Eddie hadn’t wanted to die—Eddie tried to save himself, Eddie reached for Andrew. If Andrew had come home sooner—if he’d been there, to stop the whole thing—
When he staggered onto the road again, the moon had traveled farther across the almost-cerulean sky than he expected. Fresh dew beaded his hair, his clothes. Andrew Blur, the least willing of all to fuck with Eddie’s dumb gothic bullshit, had spent the night passed out in the woods amidst unnamed graves, and his new acquaintances were no doubt after his ass for disappearing. He couldn’t think of a single explanation that was going to make this seem reasonable. The true answer didn’t seem like the smartest: my best friend is dead, and I’m out of my fucking mind.
The car started without a flinch as if it hadn’t betrayed him hours prior, and he drove the considerable distance to Capitol Street without incident. The lights were on in the living room, casting a dull, homey glow onto the lawn. He braced himself as he mounted the steps to the porch. The door was unlocked and he kicked his shoes off in the foyer, aware of his roommate struggling to sit upright on the couch, squinting with sleep. He was too tired to argue, too worn-out to be upset, and too shattered to be angry. It was the most he’d felt in control of his life in a long time, like the calm after a storm.
Riley said, “What happened, where were you?”
Andrew said, “I waited it out.”
“In a ditch?” Riley asked, gesturing to his dirt-smeared clothes.
Andrew stripped his shirt off. He left it and his jeans in a puddle on the floor without turning his back to Riley, digging through one of his trash bags of clothes for replacements. The pre-dawn quiet was almost as intimate as an apology. He might regret his silence after a real sleep, but Eddie’s death looping on repeat inside his head kept his other feelings at bay. The repetitive bite of knife into bone turned his starving stomach on itself, a sensation no person was meant to remember.
“Seems like he’s trying real goddamn hard to get your attention,” Riley said.
Andrew ground his teeth as he strode past his roommate. He’d had a brief moment of forgetful enjoyment behind the wheel alongside the pack, and in response the ghoul had dragged him to a vulnerable place and forced him through the isolated misery of its death—violent and violating. But how Eddie had gotten to those final moments, desperate to survive, was no clearer. That was what he hadn’t been able to explain to Riley: it was a haunt, and haunts didn’t go around feeding clues to the living left behind.
Still, as he mounted the stairs, he replied, “You’ve read your Hamlet, man, what do you think happens if I give it?”
Riley didn’t respond.
He climbed into the shower and scrubbed at his scabbing knees, head bowed into the hot spray. His core seethed with cold. Eddie had reached for him in those last moments, after violence was done to him, and Andrew hadn’t been there—not to stop it from happening, not to rescue him as he begged for help. That was all the haunt really had to show him. He didn’t blame it for rubbing that salt into his wounds.
* * *
Andrew untangled himself from Eddie’s stale, sweat-damp sheets once the afternoon sun heated the room too much. A scab on his knuckle had come loose during his nap, and a tiny streak of dried blood graced the pillow next to his nose. He pulled on a pair of cutoff sweats, groggy and sore. Tiny threads tickled the crease of his knee as he sat at the desk, considering the laptop once more. On impulse, he stuck his hand under the desktop and ran it along the wood—until he bumped against a piece of paper.
“You little fucker,” he muttered, peeling the taped paper off.
In Eddie’s blockiest script, the torn scrap of notebook paper read townsend2004.
He tapped in the password and unlocked the screen, waited with clenched jaw while it ran through an update. The desktop background was matte black, with threads of night-sky blue and maroon cracking through it like veins. Aesthetic and unnerving, provoking a strange pulse in Andrew’s skin. The visual reminded him of the ghastly instincts that rode his own blood. Four folders, all labeled with the names of spring courses, were stacked along the right side of the screen, while the left held programs—a handful of video and voice chat options, all of which they’d used, word processing, games, and so on.