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“I wasn’t here with him,” he said. Nashville held the last of Eddie, the unseen weeks. Andrew willed her to understand, even though she hadn’t yet, not one time.
He’d loved her once, or something close to it, years ago before the three of them had settled into their off-kilter unit. Now her paroxysm of grief and anger played out in front of him like a film, or the panic of a stranger, while he drifted in the void left where Eddie wasn’t. After
Eddie had come to Nashville alone. He’d left in a box, a handful of weeks before Andrew was due to join him, without so much as a warning—leaving him a car, and a house, and a graduate program, and a fortune, but nothing that mattered as much as himself. Without Eddie, there was no point.
When he thought too long about the fact that Eddie’s big hand was never going to clap across the nape of his neck again, or that the brief, happenstance videos left on his phone had captured the final remnants of Eddie’s human voice for endless stale replay, a nothing-numbness severed him from himself at the root.
the land itself is the thing in most of these stories, right, it’s about people who are connected to the land in their inheritance (??) or blood or some shit. It isn’t inert, it’s the source—it’s a battery? or a character?—to the inheritors. There’s a cost the user has to pay to pick up the curse/gift. The earth has to be paid
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.
He’s gone, you don’t have to follow him into the trouble he made for you,”
Home was where Eddie was; home was nowhere, now.
Which of us did you love best, he almost asked, but he knew the answer: no one who’d met them both could prefer him over Eddie. Even he didn’t.
haunts are mediocre til you feed them & then you’ve got a fucking problem, moral of the story.
Manifestations this physical were not supposed to happen while he was awake, gloaming light shining through the big bold windows in streaks of red-gold, but Eddie had always been an exception to the rules.
Don’t, he thought, but he reacted instinctively to the first brush across the knobs of his spine with a yearning, flexing shudder.
An icy burning gripped the back of his neck in the rough outline of fingers, their shape more familiar than his face in the mirror. Against good judgment and survival instinct he leaned into the too-solid hold. It hurt, b...
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Crouching in the hidden hollow of the closet, scruffed by the revenant that dogged his heels, he felt terribly and paradoxically alive.
Andrew floated like driftwood in a sea of crushing voices and unfamiliar faces.
Behind him, a man said, “Can’t believe Halse lets those faggots come around here.” Andrew bunched his shirt up and held it to his nose. Red spread across the fabric and behind his eyes. Another man said, “I hear the last one he got all buddied up with cut his wrists. Guess that one’s boyfriend is hanging around too, now. Can’t get fucking rid of them.” “Well, one of them’s his cousin—”
When he put his hand on the ground, pain and something other pulsed up his forearm from the grass, the earth he was oozing onto, clinging to his bones with a tar-stickiness. The surrounding forest rustled in an eerie cacophony of wind and leaves.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t be. I wouldn’t let someone talk shit about him either. And he was your—you know, he was yours, you were together.”
If Eddie had been Riley’s friend, he wasn’t that for Andrew. That friendship was a muted fraction of the real thing, the marrow-thing, that tied them together. Through the cavern and their hauntings since, through a life spent with Eddie keeping him leashed but cared for at the same time, he couldn’t find a label that fit where he needed it to go. Maybe instead, just a hard stop: he was yours.
Andrew tore his stare off of the wet red droplets mapping the contours of his torso and found Eddie watching him instead. The white light of the bathroom made his sixteen-year-old face look older, more angular. Something he might consider handsome.
The weight of his unfiltered regard made Andrew float inside his skin as he listened for words that weren’t being said. The funny, airy feeling he’d been drifting through since he watched the fight clung to him in wisps.
“Was it worth it?” “Of course. He shouldn’t have touched you,” Eddie said. How come, he hadn’t asked. The night it really happened, Eddie had rolled over and gone to sleep, leaving Andrew to his curious lightness. He hadn’t reached out to pinch his bottom lip between sharp fingernails as the shadowed room dropped abruptly to blackness, whispering in a ghoulish voice that hissed like static, “You’re not his.”
His heaving breath calmed in degrees as Riley’s died down, an increment at a time. As the dregs of his dream faded, the bitter urge to allow the connection with his dead thing banked to a smolder, though the sensation it left behind after consuming part of him still vibrated through his cells—almost a communion.
No unsettling shade lingered; it had disappeared as soon as it was interrupted. The first time he’d shed enough blood to take, there it was, ready and ravenous.
The haunt-thing that wasn’t Eddie had taken blood from him. That had no chance of being good, and he doubted the revenant coming after his first lonesome fire-night, one where he’d ended up with other men’s hands on him, could be a coincidence.
“For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?”
He was acting on one impulse after another, hoping he’d find the right direction while dodging the shit that he’d rather ignore.
Riley had exposed him on multiple levels, like he’d stripped off his topmost layer of skin. Andrew wasn’t prepared to see himself, let alone show someone else.
Sam said, “Don’t you know how to make friends, Blur? It goes like this: you meet them, you like them, you get to spending time with them, then your shit to deal with is their shit to deal with. Ed did that with us before you even showed up, so we have to help you out for his sake. Blame him if you’re feeling fussy.”
Exhaustion fogged his head, but the constant conflict of the past week left him wired: the vision at the tree, and connecting with Troth, and Del’s axis-wrecking goodbye speech all together, stacked against a whole afternoon spent with Sam—Sam feeding him, and refusing to let him fade out of conversations, and constantly touching him.
He wasn’t cut out for the life he’d inherited. It should’ve been him, not Eddie, in the ground.
And uh, the optics, you know? Rich ol’ white Tennessee lady versus the Black student from up North, et cetera. I wouldn’t put it past her to have some secondary motivations for fucking him over, frankly.
Riley choked on a laugh and said, “When isn’t this academic shit petty?”
Troth’s ghastly, undaunted appetite for Eddie’s research, even though she thought him to be a suicide, spoke for itself. And she had a real obvious, uncritical hard-on for her family histories, which even Andrew had an inkling might indicate some tension between her and a Black student from Massachusetts.
“Troth said she approached Eddie first because of his name; her family knew his. He didn’t initiate contact with her.”
“She’s kept him here years longer than he needed, and his job prospects are dwindling. People have done worse for a whole lot less,” Riley said.
None of this academic shit seemed worth killing someone over, but nothing ultimately did, in the grand scheme of things.
Both of them were spoiled enough to assume they’d be their own undoing, he guessed, but Eddie had paid the price.
Dim tinted bar-glow brought out the russet undertones of his skin, in handsome contrast to his silver rings and thin, short necklace. Once again, Andrew caught himself seeing.
“I’m usually punctual, but when she calls, I come running. I’m buried in diss work, and her schedule is tight, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
Use her interest while it lasts, or you’ll be fighting for every inch of cooperation,” he said, brittle and warning as he cast Andrew a pointed look. “Or maybe you won’t. Both of you have something else in common with her that I don’t benefit from, if you get my drift.”
To close, he added, Would it be productive for me to share my findings with Thom as I retrace these steps? I understand that his research area is similar to Ed’s and mine but am unfamiliar with his work. Baiting a trap or sticking his fingers in one, he wasn’t sure which he was doing.
What could a person do out of desperation, driven to the brink out of fear for their career and their future—backed into a shitty corner by the whole system? He heard West’s voice: everything, nothing.
most of the haunt’s worst interference had occurred inside the Challenger. Someone had left it at the trailhead while dumping Eddie’s corpse—and he hadn’t put much thought into the logistical implications of that, of the car being found with the body, of the revenant’s attachment to the car being more than just a lingering affectation from life.
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.
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.