Summer Sons(89)
Another student opened the door for them with a smile, a perky young woman whose face he vaguely recognized but couldn’t put to a name.
She said, “Hi there, come on in!”
The entrance hall ceiling soared to the full height of the house, chandelier casting eerie gold light in pools through the bannister of a sweeping staircase. Their classmate walked into a room on the right, French doors thrown wide. Andrew followed with Riley at his elbow. Sedate conversation filled the handsome space, electric sconces on the walls dim enough to articulate the idea of gas without the need for fuming poison. Two long couches and a sideboard loaded with drinks took up most of the drawing room’s floor space. Gleaming, rich hardwood paneling spread underfoot with no rugs to obscure its lavish shine. The handful of faculty attendees were in their fifties or older, scattered with a sparse number of students. There were no staff to speak of.
Aside from the outfits, he felt as if he’d stepped backward in time. The persistent, phantom itching ramped up; Andrew fought off the urge to gnaw on his fingernails. Jane Troth, seated on the far corner of one sofa, lifted her hand in an inclusive wave.
“Hello there, gentlemen,” she said.
“Hi,” Andrew replied.
Riley lifted his bottle in greeting before adding it to the array. Andrew had bought it without checking the cost, but he assumed it would work well enough. While he approached the couch to curious glances from the assorted guests, Riley poured them each two fingers in squat crystal glasses. Professor Troth stood up and smoothed her dress around her middle, then waved to her vacated seat.
“Take my spot, and I’ll go see if Mark is feeling well enough to speak to you about the project,” she said.
Andrew gingerly took the warmed corner cushion and Riley wedged himself into the middle space, their thighs pressed together, handing him his drink with a faintly spooked grimace. To Riley’s right sat an older white woman in a mauve blazer and corduroy slacks, chatting up the same student who’d led them inside. Andrew rearranged himself to tuck the arm of the sofa under his elbow and angle his body toward Riley, who leaned to murmur in his ear, “Are you, uh, feeling this place too?”
The tingling itch that had started the moment he set foot on the property marched along his elbow joints, merrily aggravating. Andrew closed his eyes slowly, looking inward, tugging on the roiling chill in his gut that was—suddenly responsive, so very eager, starved perhaps, for his attention. His whole body twitched. The faux gas lights flickered at the corners of his vision like the shadows might crawl up to snuff them.
Riley pinched his leg savagely and hissed, “Do fucking not. Whatever you just almost did, do not.”
“Sorry,” he muttered, cramming the messy tendrils of the curse-gift back into their metaphorical lockbox. He felt like some kind of idiot, trying to explore his magic.
“Christ almighty,” Riley said.
The house seethed around them, responding to his nudge. The anxious strangeness dogging his heels since his arrival resolved into a juxtaposition of realities: the boards under his feet were steeped in death, stained to the foundations with knowledge and time. Reverberations echoed for miles around, as if he stood at the center of a welcoming necropolis.
“Are you talking about the house?” said the young woman on the other end of the couch, startling Andrew.
Riley covered for him and said, “Yeah, just that I didn’t expect it to be so big.”
“It’s the original Troth plantation home. Been here, what, more than a hundred seventy years?” she continued, a little too starry-eyed considering the topic.
Riley’s nose scrunched in disgust before he schooled his face into polite boredom.
“A piece of the past,” the older woman interjected, turning to face them as well. “Nice to meet you, boys, I’m Dr. Koerner. Which program are you from?”
“American studies,” Andrew said.
“Oh, wonderful,” she said.
“We’re here to meet with Dr. Troth and her husband,” Riley said.
Andrew nodded as the room continued to tilt and warp at the edges of his vision. He didn’t care for strangers on a good night, let alone with the lurking, fatal mass of the house and its dead pressing on him from above and below. He snuck a swallow of bourbon large enough to qualify as a shot, and the caustic burn settled him, drawing him back into his real, living skin. If Troth had possessed even the slightest portion of his or Riley’s affinity for the dead, he was sure the malevolence of the place would’ve driven her right out of the countryside.
“Andrew,” Troth said from the entrance to the drawing room, as if summoning him.
“Be right back,” he murmured to Riley, guiltily leaving him to his conversation.
“Mark is, I must warn you, in ill health, and wasn’t feeling up to the party,” Troth said when he caught up to her in the foyer. Her low heels clacked resolutely on the wood of the grand staircase. “Would you be amenable to telling us both the story, however you heard it from the McCormicks? It might give him a lift.”
“Okay, I can do that.” Photograph after photograph lined the upstairs hall, most featuring a younger version of Jane Troth with the man he presumed was Mark. In some, there were two young girls, but one vanished as the family got older. His nape prickled with premonition. “Is West coming tonight? I’m surprised not to see him here.”