Summer Sons(65)

Further, he heard from within the cavern, across the dripping water and the rushing of a far-off stream. He crawled on elbows and knees, useless ankle stabbing at him. He’d lost someone, something. Blind and blinder fumbling led him into chill emptiness, bloodied and hurting. As a child, he’d reached out and touched the heaving warmth of his friend’s chest. This time he encountered a cool, slick, porous surface. Numbing tingles sparked up the length of his arm as the blood in his veins vibrated to life. His thumb slid around a strange, slick hollow, followed a ridge to a branching, rough length of—antler.

The hungering void lurched. Eddie’s cracked murmur filled his ear—further, you’re getting there, huskily intimate—whispering as the revenant had while dragging him through the graveyard, attempting to show him the truth. Hands closed over his, guiding his limp fingers to wrap around the damp-furred antlers. Power beat in a determined pulse at the base of his tongue. Reverberation pinioned him alive between the haunt’s bones and the antlers—conducting from their hands on the stag’s skull to the swelling neglected thing in Andrew’s belly with an agonized ripple.

“Jesus fucking goddamn.” Rough hands jerked under his armpit and around his waist. “Wake the fuck up, come on Andrew.”

The antler in his hand was attached to a dead deer. Andrew recoiled in deranged panic, phantasm superimposed onto reality. Halse dragged him farther from the animal’s remains as he kicked at the ground and struggled to shove himself free. Coarse, gore-matted fur clung to the deer’s corpse, its rot-eyed skull. Scavengers had begun their work long before he’d stumbled onto this dead thing in his sleep. The overpowering stench gagged him. The roiling cold the haunt had raised in his blood lashed toward the deer without his consent, pouring from his fingertips into the earth—and from there to the corpse, its sucking gravity drawing the spill.

Andrew swore a hoof twitched in response, or the shadow it cast did.

“You in there?” Sam said, crouching in front of him to block out the sight of the deer. He was wearing nothing but basketball shorts and house shoes.

Andrew resisted the hair-raising urge to peer around him and confirm the corpse hadn’t moved, grunting out, “Fuck.”

“So do you sleepwalk often,” Sam said, flat.

His clothes stank. The brackish streaks on them, he realized with a burst of nausea, were almost certainly from lying near, or on, the rotting stag. He made a disgusted noise and pulled first one arm then the other into the shirt, careful to strip it over his head without turning it inside out.

“I heard the door open, figured it wasn’t a big deal, and then remembered you’re the poster child for doing insane shit when no one is looking,” Sam said. “Took me like twenty minutes to find your dumb ass. Get up. I’m tired.”

Andrew dropped the shirt on the ground and got to his feet. Sam turned from him. The glow of his phone cast eerie shadows from under his chin while he flicked the flashlight on, a bubble of white light cutting into the forest ahead. Sam started walking; Andrew stumbled after, footsore. Under muted moonlight, filtered through the leaf cover, the stark lines of his tattoo crawled in spiny, feathering geometric shadows across his pale back.

After a few steps he glanced over his shoulder and said, “I haven’t charged this thing in like a day and a half, so get a move on before we end up lost in the woods.”

The final brambles of the tattoo crawled under the waistband of his shorts.

Andrew winced at the bite of sticks and underbrush on his lacerated feet, each step stoking the hurt higher. He couldn’t remember if he’d had a tetanus shot recently. Sam moved at a comfortable lope through the forest debris, tracking their dot on his phone’s map until the vegetation cleared into his backyard. On the porch, under clearer gold light cast by a bulb studded with blundering moths, Andrew noticed that the tattoo lines curled between a scattering of thin, raised white scars. Sam opened the door and raked another look over his filthy body.

“I’m gonna shower,” Andrew said, hoarse as a crow’s caw.

“Yeah, I’ll find you something to wear,” Sam said. “A dead deer. Christ, man.”

His tone was incredulous and disturbed, a pair of emotions Andrew could relate to. He stripped to his boxers and threw his pants onto the porch rail, resolving to add them to the list of things he wasn’t going to deal with if he didn’t have to. Sam called from the hall, “Dropped you some shorts in the bathroom. Figure you didn’t want to touch them until you’re clean.”

An hour later, he sat at the kitchen table with a glass of bourbon and ice. He was scrubbed pink, ticks removed and peroxide liberally applied to all of his minor wounds. Sam sat across from him, watching Andrew over the rim of his own tumbler. Andrew had nothing to say for himself. Last time the revenant had hijacked him, it had at least shown him the death he deserved to see; he wasn’t sure of the point of dragging him into the woods, which was almost more disturbing.

The stag’s hoof had moved, he was sure of it.

“Here’s some free advice for you,” Sam said, turning his glass in his hands. His accent crept thicker as he spoke. “Our grandma, Riley’s and mine, she owned this house. She told us one thing from the time we were little: don’t fuck with what’s outside your scope. There’s a lot of that weird shit out in these parts. Keep your hands off it, it’s no good for no one. I told Ed and Riley the same thing, they just didn’t listen.”