Summer Sons(4)
With nothing else waiting on him, he drove.
After a coasting trip around Centennial Park to the lawyer’s offices, where he had to discuss investment accounts and multiple properties and cold cash funds, then an additional circuitous drive through campus, he rolled to a stop in front of 338 Capitol Street—Eddie’s house, now somehow Andrew’s property. The place was a sedate old Craftsman six blocks from campus, shaded by a looming oak that shed branches on the rooftop and yard in twiggy tangles. The photos Eddie had sent, framed over his shoulder with a grin or the corner of a crinkled, smiling eye in view, had made it look verdant and charming, not quite so summer-withered. Lights glowed through the front windows. He pulled out his phone to swipe through saved snaps from Eddie that spanned the past six months.
He lingered on a shot of the roommate, Riley, flicking a wave with a rillo between his lips and a dimple at the corner of his smile. He was wiry, sporting an undercut colored black on top and a shade of yellow too close to orange to be natural on the scruffy stubble beneath. A scar crossed from the bridge of his nose down to the top of his cheekbone, thin and pale pink. Andrew flipped through more photos of strangers, recalling their names where possible—Ethan, West, Sam, Luca, a handful more whose faces he’d glimpsed but couldn’t place. The people who’d been around Eddie most, until the end.
Eddie’s assurance that he’d introduce him around as soon as he arrived left him stumbling now. Over the past week, he and Riley had traded a few awkward, terse DMs about what time Andrew would be arriving, but nothing more. He knew that Riley was also in their American Studies program, and that Eddie had invited him to be their roommate after knowing him for two weeks, despite having absolutely no need to share expenses on the house he’d flat-out purchased: an incursion on Andrew’s space that rankled. He pieced together the home from a series of stills: a foyer with a bike rack, leading through to the sprawl of the living room and kitchen; upstairs, three bedrooms and a bathroom off of a landing. It was close and charming. It was supposed to have been theirs.
Andrew cut the engine. The warm night outside blinked with fireflies while he sat adrift. Fatigue throbbed in the soles of his feet and in his tailbone. He would walk in and see Eddie’s things, pace over his footprints like he was waiting for him to arrive—like he’d gotten held up after class and had Andrew pick his car up from the shop. He crossed his wrists over the steering wheel and dug the fingernails of his right hand into the blotchy bracelet of inked dots around his left wrist, then bowed his head between them.
Glowing red digits ticked out time, methodical, on the dash clock. He wondered if Riley was concerned that the mysterious stranger who now owned his house might be about to kick him out. The thought of mounting those front steps, crossing the threshold, and introducing himself to his inherited roommate made his skin crawl. Instead, Andrew fumbled for the seat adjustment and tipped into a recline, flinging the seat belt aside and tucking one knee over the other. The soft nap of the red leather headrest held a faint animal scent.
Enough minutes slid past that the interior displays cut out with a click and plunged him into streetlight-banded darkness. He counted his steady breaths, continuing to squeeze his own wrist. The underside of the steering wheel dug against the outside of his leg, huddled crooked as he was in the bucket seat. Weighed down by the shittiness of the interminable drive, the conflict-riddled afternoon, and the impending rest of his life, he allowed exhaustion to drag his eyelids shut for a brief rest.
Freezing pressure crushed his lungs. He woke with a heaving spasm less than a single blink from the moment he’d drifted off, or so it felt to his disoriented brain. His bones throbbed under his muscles, wracked with another shudder that torqued him against the seat. His right hand scrabbled at the divider; superimposed over his limp left arm was a headache-inducing vision of a skeletal limb dripping brackish blood.
Mist fogged in front of his face from the wheezing gasps of his breath. His own distorted, huffed yelps brought him further out of his stupor, enough to fling himself across to the passenger seat headfirst. The gearshift slammed into his calf. His temple cracked against the window. He scrambled upright, dragging his leg to the other footwell as if escaping a monster’s claws. A hollow silhouette constructed out of negative shadow occupied the driver’s seat in his stead, claiming the seat where it had belonged in life. He wasn’t alone in the way Del imagined—far from it.
The enclosed space stank of summer-boiled earth, swamp-wet and fetid. Andrew snapped his teeth shut on a scream. The dead thing shifted through banded gold and black darkness, refracting the suggestion of a jawbone or a half-lidded eye, an elbow propped through the window without regard for the glass. It lifted a hand from the wheel to reach for him, uncanny as a marionette; searing cold fingertips tapped the tattooed bone of his wrist. The streetlight overhead popped at the instant of contact, bursting in a flare of light that left him part blinded—and when his eyes cleared, the thing was gone. Abandoned again.
It was the third time in fifteen days that the haunt had visited him.
He yanked open the glovebox and fumbled through junk for Eddie’s spare cigarette pack: four left, lighter tucked inside in case of emergency. Three tries to light it, hands and lips shaking too ferociously to line up in the necessary order. He coughed out his first burning pull and sat with the glow of the cherry balanced between his knees while he caught his breath. Fragments of the nightmare drifted with the smoke curling tongues around his face.