Summer Sons(78)
The sound of Andrew’s shoes sliding on gravel faded into the rush of his pulse in his ears as he lost consciousness.
21
“Almost there,” Eddie’s whisper vibrated in his ear.
Aged floorboards moaned threateningly under each cautious step. Twilight hung in the foyer, gathered in the folds of disintegrating curtains and wrapped around the collapsed banister of the grand stair. Andrew had no recollection of arriving, and that knocked him lucid enough to understand the rotting grandeur surrounding him wasn’t real. The front room had aged to nothingness in shades of grey and taupe, all other color drained to dust. Andrew struggled to determine if he knew the house, but the pernicious doubling between himself and revenant and imagination and memory made it familiar. As soon as he thought of the specter, he realized that the thing was him, that he was the thing, Eddie’s hands within his hands and feet within his feet as he moved through the cobwebbed mausoleum of a home.
Rooms yawned from the hall, dark and cold; no life scurried underfoot, not so much as an ant. No longer in possession of himself, Andrew stepped over a hole broken through the old warped boards, a dead-alive creature being dragged along toward some fresh revelation. The drawing room was black as starless night, its gaping shadows corroding the relentless grey pallor of the foyer, the long hallway. Though the haunt hadn’t shown him this dream before, a forebodingly similar aura of rot and ruin hung suffocating in the still air, familiar from the cavern and the stag’s skull in the mud. Ahead stood a locked door; he understood without attempting the knob that the door was barred, blocked off from him—unless he desired it open.
“Here,” the revenant said with their mouth, to him and through him.
As he reached for the knob, his sight blurred. He made contact with the icy brass and the pulse of power that rolled off of it knocked the haunt loose from his bones; abruptly, he occupied his body alone, with sole control of his limbs and nerves and tongue. His chest heaved for breath, heart solid and unmoving as a stone. Slickly cold, the doorknob slipped out of his grasp as he collapsed to his knees.
The tender grasp of a bony fist knotting in his hair choked off another breathless gasp. Andrew allowed the hand to tilt his chin while his mouth worked like a fish drowning in air, leaned his head on the revenant’s too-solid hip. Kneeling on the ground before the creature, he stared up at hollow sockets regarding him with all the warmth of a grave. His vision wavered again, popping with white sparks; the haunt grew denser and richer as vital heat leeched from Andrew’s skull, from the press of his nose and cheek on its femur.
“Through the door,” it said.
As borrowed life colored in the revenant’s edges, its tattered wrists began to ooze fresh red. Andrew saw that his, too, were shorn open to the bone, gushing with slow, determined pulses—matched and matching, in death as in life. No wonder I’m cold, he thought with a horrified clarity.
Biting, gagging cold, struck his face and forced up his nose. He woke with a shock, gasping, flailing. He banged his knee on metal. Water soaked his shirt and hair. He blinked to shed the skin of the nightmare superimposing itself over Riley, who stood astride him in the alley with an empty plastic pitcher in his hand. His eyes were wide in his wan face. His mouth moved, but the sound passed along like wind: unparseable noise. Coughing and sputtering, Andrew fumbled to shift his leaden body. Ice cubes tumbled loose from the creases of his shirt. While struggling to sit up, he planted one hand on the gravel and a bolt of liquid pain seared through him. The arm refused to take his weight and he flopped to the side.
“What is it?” Riley bent to grip his hand.
From his palm to nearly his elbow, a fresh furrow dripped sluggishly. All of the bright red blood spattered on the gravel was his. White patches spread fuzzy over his sight. He heard himself mutter, “What the fuck?” as if from outside a room, eerie and distant.
“It’s fine, it’s okay, you’re okay,” Riley chanted. Sturdy hands scooped under his armpits, forced him to sit up. “It’s not deep, stop looking at it. Please don’t pass out, dude, I can’t drag you into the house, and I do not fucking want to call Sam about this.”
“Yeah,” Andrew rasped with a swollen throat.
On the long ride from the place where he’d died to the oak tree, already stripped of his power, Eddie’s hideous spectral remainder had sheared itself off from his corpse in the trunk of the Challenger. Those oily leftovers had clung to the interior, and Andrew had opened himself up to them. He’d forgotten the danger of knowing, given into the temptation, and paid the price. An unnatural breeze rose around him as he thought about the haunt, a cold, hungry touch brushing over two warm-blooded creatures.
“Oh, hell no,” Riley said, hauling him on his ass toward the house.
At the fence he helped drag himself to his feet using the chain-link, heels sliding, listing onto Riley’s shoulder like a drunk—not so different from the last time they’d done this dance. Pounding agony in his skull eclipsed his dread. Night loitered in the shaded basement stairs and the silhouette of the house on the grass, waiting to descend. He didn’t want to be outside when that happened. The ripe possibilities of a horror movie chased their heels on their shuffling struggle up the porch steps, despite nothing being technically present to spook them.
Riley left the door hanging open and dumped him on a kitchen chair, then skidded over to the pantry. He grabbed the blue container of table salt and popped the spigot. Andrew turned his throbbing arms over on his thighs, palms up in benediction, gouges still glistening with lymph and clotting blood. No flesh under his short nails; the wounds bloomed stigmata-like from his skin. He looked up at the sound of a rushing hiss. Riley paced a circle around his chair, a blue container of table salt pouring a trail behind him. The sight struck him as patently and suddenly hilarious. He choked on an inappropriate guffaw.