Summer Sons(90)
“Ah, well, he doesn’t prefer to venture out of Nashville proper. I thought it’d be better not to split my attention tonight regardless.” She frowned in thought. “He was rather irritated at my questions about Edward’s missing research earlier this week, but I’d be a fool not to ask the one other person besides myself who had shown an interest. I hope you don’t mind that I brought it to his attention?”
The question couldn’t be unasked; what else was there to say but, “No, it’s fine.”
Troth turned down the hall to the left, lit dimly by the light from a far room. The darkened remainder of the hall stretched off to the right, cast under full shadow, a darkness that pulled at Andrew’s attention with a sweet whisper—unlike his revenant, but a presence nonetheless. Recalling the animate shadows that had oozed from the Challenger’s footwells, he forced himself to ignore the call. Troth led him to a bright, modern study out of place amongst the preservation chic of the house at large: Macbook on a pale wood and glass desk, sky-blue rugs on the hardwood floor, white cube shelving. An older man reclined on a chaise longue with a book open in his hand, lean and balding with prominent cheekbones.
Ghostly miasma pooled around him, stinking of premature rot. A retching spasm squeezed the back of Andrew’s throat. Ill health was a drastic understatement; he’d only encountered a handful of people so close to death in his years post-cavern, and he usually hightailed it away from them. He knocked back a fortifying swallow of bourbon to cover the pulse of his gag reflex and coughed, waving his hand as an apology. The man chuckled at him.
“Watch yourself, there,” he said, glancing at his wife. “Your student Andrew, I presume?”
“Yes, the one and only,” she responded, sitting at the end of the couch, her fine creamy-peach dress a contrast to his unfashionable sweater and sock feet.
She touched his exposed ankle with a tender fingertip, intimate, and then settled with wrists crossed daintily over the couch arm. Andrew hovered, awkwardly looming over the two of them on the reclined sofa.
Mark pointed to his desk chair. “Have a seat there, roll it over if you want.”
Andrew grasped the chair arm and scooted it closer to the couple. Writhing tendrils of impending death kept snagging his attention: shadows dripped over the man’s clavicle, fluttered at the hinge of his jaw. Hunger within Andrew crouched in eagerness, straining to reach out. Nothing good was going to come of that impulse, so he smothered it. The revenant’s continual interference over the past weeks had frayed his collapsing self-discipline, and Jane Troth’s husband was far enough along to taste and smell and provoke like a thing already dead. Andrew’s whole skeleton throbbed under his skin.
Mark said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Andrew. Edward was a great guy; we smoked cigars and shot the shit over scary stories a few times, my favorite kind of student. He fit right in, here.”
“Thanks,” Andrew said inadequately.
“I’d offer you the same, but I’m banned from smoking at the moment. Had a bad relapse last month and here we are,” he said. His polite smile never reached his eyes, though Andrew hardly blamed him. “Cancer’s a bitch. I’ve got some time left, though, so tell me this scary story while there’s still a chance.”
“Please do,” Jane said.
Her posture yearned toward the man on the couch, though she tried to lean away and keep him in her sight. The magnetism between them was strung tight as a spiderweb. Andrew propped a heel on the chair leg, forearm on his knee to support his glass. It unnerved him to witness Troth’s oncoming, inevitable hurt.
“The way the McCormicks told it to me, the second son of the Fulton family married young and his wife got sick, so he sacrificed his sister to the land the estate’s on as part of a, uh, sort of deal with death to keep her going.” He didn’t have the gift for spinning the yarn, not how Lisa McCormick did. “The version I heard has it that the power was already there, sleeping in the land, and he woke it up. It goes on that the wife does survive, but the power drives them both mad, and the family’s been cursed by the deal ever since.”
“That’s it, huh,” Mark said with a sardonic raised eyebrow.
Andrew said, “Sorry, I’m not a great storyteller. The McCormicks made the land itself seem the most important part of the story, not so much the Fultons in particular. They were like, collateral damage for the existing power they tied themselves to. It’s a little different than the usual devil’s bargain story, because the devil isn’t personified, and because the curse is still out there haunting the remaining descendants.”
“The bit about the young husband is familiar. People will go far for love, further than you’d expect,” Professor Troth said.
Her husband murmured, “And who wouldn’t want to be able to stave off death, right? Hell, what I’d do for that, curse or no curse.”
Her hands held each other on the couch arm, twisted tight enough to turn her knuckles white. Andrew looked out the window across the broad lawns to the edge of encroaching forest, the gloom of the settling evening as the stars came out. Troth knew her husband wasn’t going to see through another winter, and he felt a kinship with her over that—Eddie wouldn’t be seeing snow either, not even the wet slush that Nashville got in place of Columbus’s frozen tundra. Neither of them would be scrambling over the tiny ice-mountains scattered across parking lots up north, or shoving cold hands under each other’s shirts.