Summer Sons(9)
At the end he pulled so hard he singed his bottom lip, flinching. The roach fell to his palm and he scuffed it in the ashtray. That was the last blunt Eddie would ever roll him, and he hadn’t been there to joke about Andrew getting it too soggy: you slobber like a dog, man, I’ve got so much of your spit in my mouth, as he’d said once. Every moment of his life that followed would take him further from Eddie, no matter his efforts to scrounge for the remains, but what else was there for him to do except draw what was left as close as he could? One thing: to find what or who had taken Eddie from him, since he was sure it couldn’t have been Eddie. Not on purpose. He unbuckled his belt and kicked off his pants in abrupt jerks, head swimming, then crawled up the mattress to drag the pillows around his head. The musk of sweat and hair product filled his nose.
Fabric stuck to his damp cheek. The moment he realized that tears had begun to leak from the corners of his eyes, the dam broke; he tucked his knees against his chest as he heaved with sobs almost deep enough to make him retch. Delirious, he imagined his ribs might shatter from the force and spike straight through his lungs. The uncontrollable weeping stretched on endlessly, to the start of physical pain then far past it. Streetlights hummed outside. Muscles spasmed across his sides, throat, and jaw as eventually his tension waned and he began to snuffle more than wail. Snot clogged his nose and exhaustion swaddled him, but as sleep descended, a prick of stinging sensation flared at the root of his spine. He had no time to resist the ice-cold press of an ankle slipped between his, the weight of a broad arm and elbow pressing around his shoulder and over onto the mattress. Bones like fingers combed through his hair. Indistinguishable murmuring touched the shell of his ear. He had a moment to think, Eddie, before the dream took him under.
The night of the haunt-dream had never known starlight: black, sightless. Andrew wore the wrong skin, small and fragile, with the knobby knees and gangly arms he used to smash into doorframes, bedposts, all sorts of things before he’d grown into them. The pooling liquid under his hands and shins was cold and thin, then thick and slick-hot. He scrambled to find footing; stone bruised him when he fell. This was familiar, bad dream and memory both. It had happened something like this, and he had no power to stop it. The littler him pushed forward until his seeking, stinging hands found cloth. He dragged himself through primordial and crushing darkness over the prone, still, also-adolescent body beneath him.
The fingers that reached up to touch his face streaked his skin wet, nose to lip. He was speaking but couldn’t hear himself. All he heard was a hissing sibilance that plugged up his ears. The fingers pushed into his open mouth and the iron poison of blood coated his taste buds. He gagged; the hiss rose to a chatter. The invasive hand dipped from his mouth, skated to his torn shirt and found the open edges of his flesh, pushed inside with questing, horrible tenderness, put him on his back. Good boy, he heard in his head with the force of a rung bell.
Ghastly fingers wrenching into his hair pulled him from the dream, wheezing and trembling. His shirt was rucked up to his shoulders, his own fingernails dug into his chest so deep that specks of blood dotted the pale skin. Salt gummed his eyelashes and the bridge of his nose, as if he’d continued to sob in his sleep. When he rolled flat into the freezing body-shaped dip in the mattress behind him he jolted away, teeth chattering, but didn’t get up. The cold receded an inch at a time without another touch, another word. The thing that had been Eddie abandoned him to its bed.
Andrew hadn’t dreamed about the night in the cavern in six years.
3
The front door slammed directly below where Andrew lay on the floor, bundled in a wad of bedsheets with a pillow wedged between head and shoulder. He flinched upright. The cast of the light coming through the curtain said afternoon. Masculine voices, boisterously conversing, filled the house. He pried himself off the ground, threw the sheets on the bed, and ducked into the bathroom to piss and wash the salt off his face. The nail marks on his chest had scabbed to four fine crescents; he tapped his fingers on them and swallowed at the recollection of his witching-hour visitor. One half of the loud conversation downstairs stalled, mid-sentence, as he turned on the sink.
Andrew paused on the landing as he heard a man say, “Hey, you all right?” The voice was familiar, at the edge of his brain, but he couldn’t place it.
“Shit, I guess I just … spaced out, sorry,” Riley said with an odd, unsettled tension to his tone. “Noticed something weird, don’t worry about it.”
Andrew remained frozen in place, remembering: the roommate Eddie had talked up, so cool, shares so many interests, you’re going to love him, and those notes, chock-full of the topic Eddie was forbidden from looking into. Riley presented a set of questions on top of the ones he’d already had.
Before he made the decision to turn tail and retreat, the other voice called out, “We hear you loitering, dumbass, just come on down.”
Caught out, he acquiesced, dropping a quick “hey” as he entered the room.
Riley had a rumpled, distracted look about him. His face was pale where it wasn’t flushed a dull red, and a pair of matte black plastic-framed glasses perched low on the bridge of his nose. But the other man, standing with thumbs in his pockets and a crooked black-and-violet snapback shading his eyes, caught Andrew’s attention in an instant. Andrew’s eyes locked on to a scabbed scrape on the left side of his jaw. The voice clicked into place from a twenty-second Snapchat video Eddie had sent a month before, howling with laughter and spitting filth while Eddie chased him across a field, throwing firecrackers at his feet. Sam Halse, cousin to Riley. The oldest of the group Eddie had fallen in with. A savage compulsion had radiated from him in Eddie’s stories; he was high on Andrew’s shit list. The twinge that had pitched camp in his chest, late at night while he’d listened to Eddie rambling on and on about Halse, reared to life again.