

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
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Mr. Clarke
Even before the silver Lexus pulled up in front of Pete Eason's trailer, he'd known something wasn't right.
The man climbing out of the car, looking like a newly minted hundred dollar bill, was Mike Clarke. He'd contacted a friend of Pete's because he'd heard Pete might be interested in an odd job. That was true. Right now, Pete was interested in any job he could get. But now that he stood here looking at the man who had hired him, Pete had a funny feeling that something just wasn't right. To start with, Pete wasn't usually hired by guys who looked like this one, and when he was, they damn well didn't drive out to his house in a Lexus to pick him up and take him to the site.
Pete rose from his seat on the bottom step and nodded a greeting.
The man nodded back and smiled. "Good morning."
Clarke lounged gracefully in the space between his open door and the body of his car, his casual stance making his suit coat gape wide. He didn't wear a tie, and his top two buttons were undone because it was a hot July Missouri morning. Pete could see Clarke's wiry, dark blond chest hair peeking out of the gap in his dress shirt. He tried not to look at them, but it wasn't like looking at the man's face was any better. Clarke was broad, handsome, and slightly scruffy in a way that belied his nice car and clothes and made him seem accessible in a way Pete knew damn well he wasn't.
Clarke was still smiling, and the gesture made his pale blue eyes dance. "Well? You ready to go?"
Pete bent down, picked up his lunch pail, and headed toward the passenger side of the car. Then he frowned. "You sure you don't want me to drive myself?"
Clarke looked puzzled. "But we're going to the same place."
Pete grimaced at the Lexus. "But I'm gonna get your car all dirty."
Now Clarke was amused. "It cleans up, Peter."
"Pete," Pete corrected. But he opened the car door and slid carefully into the buttery leather of the seats.
The car smelled good, like money and leather and man. The smell intensified when Clarke got back into the car, and as they turned out of the trailer court and headed back to the road, the smells converged around Pete, wrapping around him like a blanket.
"So," Clarke said as he headed south toward I-70. "How much did they tell you about the job?"
Pete shrugged and kept his eyes on the road. "Said somebody needed help clearing debris out of a house and that they paid good money."
He saw Clarke glance at him out of the corner of his eye. "That's it? And you just took the job?"
"Not a lot of jobs around here right now, Mr. Clarke."
"Mike," Clarke corrected.
Pete rubbed his hand over his mouth to hide a grimace. Shit. He hated it when the bosses wanted to pretend they were chummy. "Just here to do a job. That's all. Don't need to know much except where the Dumpster is."
Clarke was nodding, and Pete suppressed a sigh because he could sense more conversation coming. This one must be one of those bleeding heart liberals trying to get in touch with the "common man." Pete wondered what "Mike" would think if he knew how Pete would like to touch him. He got a swift, explicit mental image of the other man's horror, and it made him smile.
Which, of course, the bastard caught. "Care to share the joke?"
"Nope." Pete wiped his face clean and turned back to the road.
They got off the interstate and headed up into the hills. Clarke was driving them down rutted, rotten roads no Lexus was ever meant to see. Pete wondered what it was like to have so much money that you could drive a forty-thousand dollar car down a piece of shit road like this and not even break a sweat.
"That's quite a lunchbox," Clarke said.
Pete looked down at the beat-up black tin in his lap. "Is it?"
"It looks old. Are you into retro? Do you collect them? Lunchboxes?"
Pete gave him a long, slow look. "It was fifty cents at a garage sale. It looked like it could keep my sandwich in one piece even if I dropped a pile of rebar on it, so I got it."
Clarke smiled. Again. Hell, maybe he hadn't stopped. "Well, I think it's a great lunchbox."
Pete turned his head so he was looking out the passenger-side window.
"You from around here?" Clarke asked.
Pete kept his eyes out the window. "Lived in Blackwater all my life."
"So maybe you know the place we're going: Blind Pony Lake." Clarke was hedging toward something, but Pete couldn't figure out what.
"Never been to Saline County, no," Pete said.
This seemed to disappoint Clarke. "But it's practically next door!"
"Not much for lakes," Pete said.
There was some nice silence as Clarke frowned out the windshield for a while, clearly thrown by either the fact that Pete hadn't been to Blind Pony or that he didn't like lakes. Pete didn't care which it was. He just enjoyed it.
"So you've never been here at all," Clarke said, after a few more miles. The road was really awful now, and he had to fight to keep the Lexus on the road. Not that this kept him from yapping.
"Nope," Pete said.
"Maybe you know people over here, though? Relatives? Friends?"
"Nope." Pete craned his head to look up at the trees. He wished he could roll down the window. It was pretty in here, if desolate. He bet it smelled nice and loamy.
"Friends of friends, then."
Pete hesitated, knowing it wasn't gonna come to anything good to egg Clarke on, but he was kinda curious now. "How come it matters to you so much that I know somebody here?"
Now Clarke was flustered. "Well---it doesn't, obviously. I was just---you know. Making conversation. Trying to be polite."
It did matter to him, Pete could tell, and it was weird. But Pete still didn't care. "Polite ain't necessary, Mr. Clarke." He winced as they hit a particularly rough pothole and held on to the door handle to brace himself against more jostling. "And you should've had me drive us in my car. You're gonna need a new tie rod after this road."
Clarke grimaced as he swerved around another rut. "It wasn't this rough the last time."
"Maybe the rain wrecked the road," Pete suggested. Except it hadn't rained in a month.
"It's not the rain," Clarke said. He looked irritated. "Just defiance."
Well, that didn't make a lick of sense, but Pete just settled in as best he could and hoped the tie rods held out.
But it wasn't another half a mile before Clarke turned off the road onto a lane. This road was so unused that weeds were growing up over half of it, big fuck-off nettles as high as a man's head. Clarke drove straight over them and headed on. The road was ending ahead of them, stopping right in front of a weed-covered, dilapidated stone house with pillars. A shed or barn of some kind sat behind it, completely collapsed in on itself, but that was it. There wasn't anything else here. Pete thought for sure they'd taken a wrong turn, but Clarke just pulled the car up to the drive, parked in the least weedy patch he could find, and killed the engine.
Now it was Pete who was frowning. "The rest of the crew coming along soon, are they?"
"No crew. Just the two of us."
Whoa. "What?" Pete asked, turning to Clarke. "You telling me I'm the crew?"
Clarke just grinned his grin and pulled the keys out of the ignition. "Come on," he said, climbing out of the car. "Let me give you the grand tour."
Grand tour of what? Pete thought, but he didn't say it, just climbed out of the car to see what else this loony employer had in store for him.
"They called it Haven," Mike said.
Pete shifted uneasily on his feet as he scanned the weed-choked, overrun landscape. "Looks more like Hell to me," he said at last.
Hell was probably generous at that. To Pete's mind, Hell would be pretty dynamic, with lots of screaming and shouting and general carrying on. Torturous, that's what hell would be. Hell was an active, aggressive place, because you needed to feel the pain of how rotten you'd been in your life to end up there. This place was just dead. Lost and empty and forgotten.
The house had clearly been grand in its day. It was on top of a small ridge, and behind it some farmer was still planting a field. Back when the house had been built, the field was probably run by slaves. This had the look of some farmer with enough money to fancy himself local gentry, so he'd put pillars on the front porch, like that was all it took to make him great, and then he went and bought him some slaves. Whoever he had been, he was dead and buried now, and all that was left of his life were the pillars.
Pete turned to Clarke with a furrowed brow. "What exactly are we clearing out?"
There was that damn smile again. Clarke nodded at the house. "I just told you. Haven."
Pete's eyes went wide as he turned back to the house. One whole section of it was completely caved in, and the front door wasn't even there. "Buddy, you don't want a day laborer. You want a bulldozer."
"We'll do fine, the two of us, for what I have in mind." He took off his suit coat and tossed it over his arm. "Come on."
Clarke took him in through the front door, or the front opening, as it were. The steps were gone, so they had to hoist themselves up onto the porch. Except this place would call it a veranda, Pete figured. Anybody putting pillars on their porch was gonna call it a veranda. It must have been nice in its day, though. He could imagine ladies sitting sipping lemonade in wicker chairs, their beaus grinning down at them as they leaned on the pillars.
Funny how he kept thinking of the place in terms of the Civil War. He tried to get a more accurate sense of period by making a study of the windows and woodwork, but since most of them were rotted and fallen out, it didn't really matter. Probably he was just channeling a little too much Gone With the Wind. But as they came inside the foyer and Pete took in the big-ass staircase, the ornate remnants of a chandelier crashed in the center of the floor, and the shredded remains of drapery in the parlor off to the left, he started to wonder. Damn if the place didn't feel like 1850.
Clarke was watching him intently. "You look upset." He seemed to be expecting that, too, and weirdest of all, he seemed happy about it.
Pete couldn't seem to stop his eyes from roaming the house, moving from floor to ceiling and back again. "Just seems weird. Place shouldn't be in the kind of shape it's in for as old as it is." But as soon as he said that, he scratched his head. What kind of sense did that make? Shouldn't it be in bad shape if it were old? Except Pete couldn't shake the feeling that there was something wrong here.
It shouldn't be like this. It was never meant to be like this.
Pete shifted uncertainly on his feet and looked up at the ceiling, grounding himself on a crack wide enough to expose the beam beneath.
"And how old is it, Peter?"
Pete glared. "I told you once already. It's Pete."
Clarke was watching him like a hawk now. "Your name is important to you?"
"Yes, Mr. Clarke. 'Peter' sounds like some prissy uptight asshole. I'm Pete. I drink beer and watch wrestling and football on TV."
"And pick up women at the bars?" Clarke suggested helpfully. Except there was a hedge here, too, for some reason. And Pete had fucking had enough.
Pete looked him dead in the eye. "As a matter of fact, I suck cock. You got a problem with that, Clarke?"
It was a goddamn good thing Clarke didn't grin, but the twinkle in his eye was bad enough. "As a matter of fact, I don't."
Pete rolled his eyes and turned back to the room. God, but the place was stuffy for a joint without a single pane of glass left. He stepped around the chandelier and went into the parlor, checking the floorboards carefully each time he ventured deeper. They were in surprisingly good shape, though, and once Pete managed to get a good fifteen feet in, he decided to start trusting them. He looked up to take in more of the room than just the part that was underfoot.
And it was then that he saw the walls. They had gashes on them.
Frowning, Pete crept forward, moving with a hesitation he didn't quite understand but couldn't seem to stop. He felt like he was trying to keep something from waking, which made no sense, because there wasn't anyone or anything here. He didn't even feel spooked out. He just felt... hushed. Like he was visiting somewhere sacred that deserved his respect.
The gashes, though, were disturbing. From a distance he'd thought they were just cuts in the wallpaper, like Edward Scissorhands had wandered around in here drunk. But whatever had made these cuts had gone clean through the lath. Pete had chipped at that shit before, and it wasn't exactly like going through butter.
Weirdest was how many cuts there were and how randomly they were placed. Maybe Pete could have written them off as a tree branch or something if they'd been just here or there, but they were all over, like a kid had been bored one day and scratched the shit out of the living room---if the kid were twenty feet tall and had the strength of six or seven men. He couldn't make it make sense, no matter how he rolled it around in his head. And he hated to do it, but he couldn't help himself. He turned back to Clarke and saw that, yeah, the other man was watching Pete intently. Waiting.
Pete put his hands on his hips. "All right, wise guy. What's your game? And don't give me shit about you need help clearing out a house. There's nothing here to clear. There's just a really weird old house and a lot of weeds."
This seemed to throw Clarke. "You mean---you can't see it?" He motioned to the room. "You don't feel it? Nothing out of the ordinary?"
Pete gave the room another glance, just in case, but nope, it was the same old cruddy room. He shook his head. "I'd love to know about the gashes in the walls, but other than that, it looks like a pretty standard run-down house."
Clarke's eyes widened. "Gashes?"
Pete jerked his hand at the one he was standing beside. "Yeah. The gashes. The three-foot long cuts through wallpaper, plaster, and lath. I think I can see daylight through the one over by the south window. Those gashes."
Clarke looked at the window and then at Pete. He shook his head. "There aren't any gashes, Pete."
Pete raised an eyebrow at him.
"There aren't any gashes on the walls." Clarke nodded at the empty space beside Pete. "There is, however, a ghost standing right beside you."
Ara
This is it, Mike thought as Pete turned to the specter beside him. Here it is. He watched Pete look the ghost up and down, and he waited for the truth to sink in. Mike was ready with either technical explanations or soothing platitudes, whichever Pete would require. But in the end, Pete turned back to Mike and gave him, once again, a look that said without words that he thought that Mike was completely, utterly crazy.
He hadn't, Mike realized, seen a thing.
"I told you," the ghost said, its tone bored but amused. "I told you he wouldn't be able to see me, but you just don't like to listen, do you."
Mike ignored the ghost and kept his focus on Pete. "You don't see anything? Really?"
Pete gave Mike a long look. "You been drinking, Clarke?"
The ghost pouted in mock empathy. "Poor Mikey. All your little plans, ruined. Should I run and fetch your spreadsheets? They might make you feel better."
Mike fought the urge to set his jaw. "You said you saw gashes in the walls? How many?"
But Pete had clearly had enough of this game. "Buddy, you're gonna tell me what the fuck is going on here, or I am walking out that door. Either that or you're gonna write me a big fat check, because this kind of circus is gonna cost you."
Mike had his wallet out of his back pocket and several bills in his hand almost before Pete finished his sentence. "Here. Three hundred dollars, right here and now. Cash. Just to stand there and let me ask you crazy questions awhile longer. Okay?"
It was clear it wasn't what Pete wanted to do, but he came forward and took the cash out of Mike's hand all the same before moving back to his post by the wall. "All right, then. You want to know if I see little leprechauns in the ceiling? Because I don't. They're dancin' in a circle in the middle of the floor. They want to know who stole their Lucky Charms."
The ghost, who had moved out of Pete's way as he came back, snorted.
Mike gave up and looked at him.
The ghost was wearing a tweedy-looking pair of trousers held up by a pair of black braces over a pristine white shirt unbuttoned halfway down the chest. It had the half-starved look about it that it always did: its arms were a bit too skinny, cheeks too sunken, eyes a bit too pitted. But there was nothing dull about the ghost, and it grinned impishly at Mike through a messy mop of spiky hair.
The ghost pressed its hand to its chest. "Oh dear. Are you looking to me for help?" It shook its head. "You really are getting desperate, aren't you?"
This didn't make any sense. Mike had stood here just last week with the psychic, and she'd seen him. It, he corrected himself quickly. Because it wasn't a man. It was just energy. The remnant of a man.
But the psychic had seen the ghost. And she'd upset it, too, which was how Mike knew he was onto something. It was she who had given him Pete's name. "Peter Eason," she'd said, "in the black water." She'd drawn a picture of the man standing in front of Mike: tall, broad-shouldered, rugged, simple, but clean-cut, with short, curling brown hair. His face was exact down to the little scar about his left eye. And he'd lived in Blackwater, Missouri. This had to be the Peter she meant. The Peter she'd insisted had the key.
Except she hadn't mentioned that not only would Pete have no idea he had the key but wouldn't be able to see the ghost he was supposed to exorcise. And Mike wasn't sure what he was supposed to do now.
He crossed to the south window and ran his eyes up and down the wallpaper. Pete didn't see the ghost, but he saw gashes. Well, then, he'd start with the gashes. "Can you come here and show them to me? Point to where this one starts and where it ends. Please."
Pete came over, still moving a little carefully over the creaky floor, and pointed to a spot on the wall. "About a foot above here"---he ran his hand in a diagonal path three feet down---"to here. And it's about a half-inch thick."
Mike nodded, staring at the perfectly fine if somewhat faded paper in front of him. And that gave him an idea. "Describe the room for me, would you? Tell me what you see in as much detail as you can. What does it look like? What color, for example, is the paper in front of me?"
"Green," Pete said. "A pale green with gold designs." He made hash marks back and forth in front of the wall with his hand. "Diagonals."
The paper Mike saw was gray with raised velvet fleur-de-lis. "And the furniture?"
This earned Mike another dubious glance. "The room is empty. Unless you want to call the fallen beams from the ceiling a sofa."
Mike looked out across the room, taking in the red easy chair, the sagging plaid sofa, and the gaudy coffee table. He was beginning to understand why Pete had told him he needed a bulldozer. "Where's the beam, exactly?"
Pete pointed at the couch and the chair beside it. "There."
"And what's over there?" Mike pointed to the piano in the corner.
"A pile of crumbling wall. You sure you're okay?"
"I'm fine. I suppose there's no rug, either?" Pete's expression told him that no, there wasn't. Mike nodded. "Okay. I think we've seen enough here. Maybe we should try another room."
Pete shrugged. "So long as I don't fall through the floor."
Mike led Pete to the foyer again, heading toward the kitchen. He noticed Pete frequently took circuitous routes around floor rugs and end tables, often looking worriedly at the floor.
"You think this place is haunted, I guess?" Pete asked. "That what this is about?"
Mike weighed how much to tell him. It wasn't easy with the ghost standing there leering. He noticed, though, that it kept well away from Pete. It was a noticeable difference from how it behaved with Mike normally, or how it had been with the psychic. Usually Mike had been run through at least four times already. The ghost found it amusing when Mike retched afterward. But not this time. Outside of the wry remarks and the glares, the ghost was barely present.
Maybe this was the right Peter after all.
"Yes," Mike said at last, holding open the door to the dining room. "I think this place is haunted. In fact, I know that it is. That's my job, you see."
"You a ghostbuster?" Pete asked. But his eyes were fixed on the walls. He looked troubled.
"Paranormal psychologist." Mike followed Pete's gaze, but he saw only dust and cobwebs over a metal dining table and walls coated with hideous floral wallpaper. "What do you see in here?"
"More gashes." He frowned and gestured at the wall above the sideboard. "All of them are there, over the fireplace. Six angry slashes, right in a row."
Fireplace? Mike hurried over and ran his hand over the wallpaper, then laughed out loud. "My God, you're right! I can feel where they bricked it up."
"Bricked it up?" Pete repeated. He didn't come forward, just stayed in the doorway. He looked distinctly uneasy.
So did the ghost. But it glared at Mike.
Mike motioned to Pete. "Come here. I'll show you."
Pete and the ghost backed up as one, moving in opposite directions. "No," they said in unison.
Mike turned to the ghost. The dark eyes were no longer dancing in mirth. The young man manifested before Mike seemed to be shrinking inside himself, but the ghost held the image firmly. It shook its head. "No," it said again. "Take him away. Don't keep him here. Don't ask him any more questions. You don't know what you're doing."
"I'm here to help you," Mike said gently.
"You're not helping," the ghost shot back. "Just go. Get him out. And don't let him touch the walls."
"I need to get out of here," Pete said. He looked around the room, seriously worried now. When Mike started to protest, he pulled the money out of his pocket and held it out. "Forget it. Just take this. Find somebody else for this game. I'll eat tuna and ramen for another month before I put up with this shit."
Mike tried not to show how excited he was. This was it! This was what he'd been waiting for! This was the breakthrough he needed. But they were both nervous, so he had to tread carefully. If only I can get them to make contact with each other, he thought. Surely that will trigger something we can really use. He held up his hands and smiled. "Hey---no problem. It's okay. Take it easy. If the dining room makes you uncomfortable, we'll move on to the kitchen."
Pete looked pissed now. "I'm going out the goddamned front door." He swore and thrust the money out at Mike, and when Mike didn't move to take it, he threw it down on the ground. "Fuck this." He turned to go.
"Wait!" Mike hurried after him, ducking around the ghost as it tried to step into his path. He dropped his coat on the ground, but he didn't stop to pick up either it or the money. "Peter---wait! Just hold---ugh!"
He shuddered and caught the bile in his mouth as the ghost rushed through his body. Mike felt his organs jangling with the ghost's energy; the nausea caught up with him, and he stumbled forward, heaving.
"You okay?" Pete came toward Mike.
Mike tried to answer and vomited instead.
Swearing, Pete caught him by the shoulders, hoisting him up. "Easy, buddy."
Nice and strong, Mike thought, and then threw up again. It was dry heaves, at least, because he'd prepared for this and not had any breakfast.
But he was shaking now, and Pete continued to hold him up, aiming him at the door. "Easy. You'll be all right. You just give me the keys, and we'll go get some tea in you or something. We'll go somewhere fucking far away from here."
The ghost was huddled by the door, glaring. "Get him out. Get him out, and don't bring him back."
Later, Mike wouldn't be able to explain why he'd done it. There was no thinking at all, in fact, just some instinct he couldn't explain. Because one moment he'd been shivering against Pete, trying to figure out how and where this had gone so wrong, and the next he was ducking from underneath Pete's arm, grabbing his hand, and shoving it forward toward the ghost. He watched the ghost's eyes go wide and dark, no pupil at all, not even a white, just dark slits of fear as Pete's hand came toward it. A silent "no" formed on its lips, and as Pete touched it, the ghost shivered, then shattered.
So did Pete. Except his shatter was less literal. He didn't vanish, but he did seem to crumble inside. Except as Mike watched---and oh, he was watching, like a hawk---it wasn't the despair he'd seen on the ghost's face. In fact, Pete looked almost... sensual. It was as if the touch had been arousing, so pleasurable that it had undone him, and when he opened his eyes, staring straight ahead into the place where the ghost had been, they were dark with passion.
All this took mere seconds. One second, in fact, the longest, most intricately packed moment in Mike's life. The second that followed it, however, was quite different. Because it was in that sliver of time that gravity took hold, and Pete, propelled forward, continued on, all the way to the wall. In that second, Mike watched Pete's rough, work-worn fingers brush against the floral paper.
In the third second they were both rearing back, because the house was shaking. The house, in fact, was growling. Pete turned to Mike in alarm, and Mike looked at him in much the same way.
This was not what was supposed to happen!
Peter, a voice whispered. It was disembodied, coming somehow from the very walls of the house itself. I've been waiting for you, Peter.
Mike heard a ripping sound. He turned in time to see the floral wallpaper peel away as gashes appeared there one after another, long, even scars forming in the wall above the sideboard.
"Fucking hell," Pete whispered, his hand tightening on Mike's arm.
"Agreed." Mike wrenched his gaze away from the gashes still forming in the wall and pushed him at the door. "You're right. Let's go."
Oh, I don't think so.
Mike could feel it happening before he saw it. He was running now, and so was Pete, and they were headed for the front door, but it was like a shadow was rising up behind them and extending just a few beats ahead over the carpet and toward the front of the house. It hit the front door---and the door vanished.
Pete cried out and skidded to a halt. "What the fuck! The doorway! It's gone! It's fucking gone!" He turned to Mike, full of fear. But there was also rage, and it was aimed at Mike. "What the fuck did you do?" he demanded, and he reached for Mike's shoulders.
"I---" Mike said, but it was all he managed before Pete slammed him against the wall. Stop, he tried to say, but couldn't. He just fought for the air Pete forced from his lungs, reaching up to clutch at the other man's collar.
And then the ghost was there, brighter and more vibrant than it had ever been. It reached out and touched Pete's arm. "Stop," it said. "Stop, Peter, and come with me."
Pete stopped. He pressed Mike hard against the wall and turned, eyes wide, face draining of blood as he took in the ghostly form beside him.
Well, Mike thought, as darkness closed in around him, at least now they can see each other.
There was a ghost standing beside Pete.
He tried to tell himself he was just seeing things, but after what had happened first in the dining room and now to the front door, hallucinations were a hard sell. Either these things were actually happening, or hallucinations had taken over to the point they might as well be.
The ghost's hand was cold on Pete's arm, but it was definitely there. It squeezed gently in reassurance. "Can you carry him? Because we need to get out of here, and we're going to need him."
Pete nodded and hefted Clarke up. He was a big guy, but Pete was no slouch, and it was only a little strain to heft the man over his shoulder. Clarke groaned, but other than that he stayed quiet. Feeling only marginally bad for knocking him out, Pete turned back to the ghost, waiting for further instructions.
He was looking at Pete, impressed. "You're stronger than I thought you'd be."
"You said you knew a way out?" Pete prompted.
"Of the house? No. That's not going to happen now. But I can get us somewhere safe. Can you get him upstairs?"
Pete looked in apprehension at the dilapidated stairway.
"They're in better shape than they look to you, I promise," the ghost said. "Can you?"
It wasn't just the construction of the house that was upsetting Pete. There was... something. Something waiting. He felt silly, even after all that had happened, and he couldn't look at the ghost while he said the words. "There's something bad up there."
The ghost didn't seem to find him silly at all. "Yes. There's something very bad up there. But I promise I won't let you go to those places." He held out his hand. "Will you trust me?"
Pete did, almost completely, and that unsettled him. "Why couldn't I see you before?"
"Because I was hiding." He looked sad but also curious as he tipped his head to the side. "You can really see the wounds?"
Wounds? "You mean the gashes in the walls?" The ghost nodded, and Pete looked around him. The walls were heaving, moving in and out like lungs. And yes, the gashes were here, too, though they weren't as deep or half as upsetting as the ones in the dining room. They were random like the ones in the parlor, and they barely cut through the paper. "I see them. How'd they get there?" Why do you call them wounds?
The growling started up again, and the ghost reached out and took Pete's hand. "Come on. We can't stay here. It's mostly bluster, but it can do damage enough."
Pete wondered what "it" was, but as soon as the ghost led him forward, the feeling of foreboding increased. He stiffened, and the ghost glanced over his shoulder to give him a gentle smile.
"Just up the stairs and down the hall." He tugged and ran a cold thumb across the back of Pete's hand. "Come along, Peter."
"Pete," Pete whispered, but he came along, cold sweat breaking across his brow.
The stairs held them fine, but Pete noticed the ghost didn't touch the railing or the walls. In fact, he kept very firmly to the middle. Pete decided it would be best to follow his lead.
"Do you have a name?" Pete asked.
"Everybody has a name," the ghost said. But it was five more steps before he said, "Call me Ara."
The careful phrasing caught Pete's attention. "Is that your name?"
"You have some pointed thinking for someone who wants everyone to think he's just a clumsy laborer." The ghost paused on the stair and gave Pete a rather focused look over his shoulder. His thumb moved absently over Pete's hand, and he smiled a slow, knowing sort of smile that did funny things to Pete's insides.
"How come I can feel you, if you're a ghost?"
"Because you're special," the ghost replied, "and after Michael's stunt downstairs, I suppose I am too." He squeezed Pete's hand. "Come. We'll speak more when we get to safety." He turned and started back up the stairs. "No, Ara isn't my name. But I like it, and it will do well enough."
"But why can't I call you by your own name?" Pete dogged.
"Because we can't both be called Peter," Ara replied.
Pete suspected that was some sort of dig against him, and he glowered at Ara's back. "My name is Pete."
"Hmm," Ara said, amused, but then the growling started again, and his amusement faded. "Come on. Have you still got hold of him?"
Pete nodded and hurried up the stairs as best he could with two hundred pounds of man on his shoulder.
The second floor was very dark, and it unsettled Pete far more than it had a right to. There was nothing remarkable about the darkness. No lights flashed, no ethereal ooze came out of the walls---nothing, really, except that it was dark and dull and stuffy hot. But Pete found he couldn't look at the darkness very long, because if he did, cold terror welled up inside him and threatened to send him to his knees. If it weren't for Ara's cold hand leading him, guiding him, he didn't think he could have made it.
"Go ahead," Ara said quietly. "Close your eyes. It might help."
"Why---what---?" Pete whispered, but he couldn't even finish the sentence.
"Because the tutor's room is down that way," Ara whispered back. "That's where the bad things happened."
Pete nodded and fixed his eyes on the floor. But he could still feel the darkness pressing on him, so much worse than the strange growling and heaving of the walls. Bad things. He could feel them. He could feel them reaching for him. And it was definitely him they were reaching for.
I've been waiting for you, Peter. That's what the voice had said.
"Just a bit farther," Ara said. "Almost there. That's the way. Come on."
Ara held open a door into the room and closed it behind them once Pete was through. Once the latch clicked in place, the groaning and heaving stopped. But it was here that Pete finally lost it, and he fell to his knees after all, sending Mike's limp body gracelessly to the floor.
Somewhere safe, the ghost had said. Fucking hell. Pete wasn't sure there was such a place, not anymore. Not after this. They had gone through the door on the second story of a dilapidated house where the front door had vanished and the walls had whispered and heaved---
---and now they were in Pete's bedroom, which looked exactly as it had when he'd left his trailer that morning.
Lover
Cold hands came down on Pete's shoulders, kneading gently. "Shh," Ara said. "Come now, Peter. Calm down."
Pete calmed, but only enough to regain his general concept of speech. "This---this is---it's my---"
"It's your room, I assume, yes?" When Pete nodded, Ara sighed. "If it helps, you aren't actually here. It just looks like that to you. To me, it looks like my room."
The ghost crouched behind Pete, still stroking and cooing softly, and Pete leaned back against him in defeat. "How? How is this happening?"
"I should have worked harder to keep him from bringing you," Ara said. "I tried to act like I didn't care, but he was too determined." The ghost stroked Pete's shoulder. "And I admit, part of me wanted to see you. After all this time, and you have the name too! Just like he has his. Can you blame me for my curiosity? But as soon as you walked in, I could feel the trouble coming. I should have worked harder to chase you out. I shouldn't have let him make you touch me."
"Touch you?" Pete repeated.
"Before you touched the wall and woke it, your hand went through me. I was standing there, pouting at Michael. Which I shouldn't have done, but I suppose I always do." He sighed and stroked Pete again, a sad gesture. "All this time, and I'm always the same. Do you think, Peter, that I don't grow because I'm a ghost, or because no one ever truly does?"
"What?" Pete asked, well and truly lost now.
"That's what he always told me," Ara said, nodding at Michael's still form. "He told me no one could change. He told me to forget what the preacher said in church, that we come into this world the same person we are when we leave it. At best, he said, we learn how to better be our true selves."
"I don't even know what that means," Pete said.
This seemed to please the ghost. "Oh, good. Because I always thought he was daft, myself. But he's very handsome. Don't you think?"
Pete studied Clarke's pretty, chiseled face. "Did I hurt him when I dropped him?"
Ara snorted. "With that thick head?" But he crept forward and studied Clarke, then turned a worried face to Pete. "Now you have me uneasy. Will you check to see that he's still breathing?"
Pete started to ask why Ara didn't do it himself, and then he realized. "You can't touch him, can you?"
Ara shook his head and motioned impatiently. "Please! I have no idea what happens to us if we kill him."
It wasn't you, it was me, Pete thought, but he reached out and pressed two fingers along Clarke's throat. He sagged in relief. "He has a pulse. He's fine. Unless I gave him a concussion." Pete pulled back one of Clarke's eyelids, but he wasn't really sure what he was looking for. "I didn't hear a big crack or anything. He's probably okay."
Ara relaxed. "You're certain?"
"Sure as I can be." He arranged Clarke a little more comfortably on the floor, then sat back on his heels and looked at the ghost. "So what do we do now?"
He wasn't ready for the wicked look Ara gave him. "Oh, I suspect we can think of something." The ghost had been kneeling on the floor beside Clarke, but as he spoke he crawled forward to Pete, looking feral. When his hand slid up Pete's leg, Pete jumped.
"Are you coming on to me?" Pete asked.
"I'm making love to you, if that's what that means," Ara replied, and he slid his hand higher.
Pete reached down and stilled Ara's hand. "You aren't my type," he said, panicking, but even inside of his apprehension, he was aroused.
Ara grinned. "That's funny." But then he studied Pete's face, and his eyes widened. "You mean---you don't know? This hasn't all been an act? You honestly don't know?"
"Know what?" Pete asked, his voice breaking at the end.
Ara tilted his head to the side and regarded him again, then shrugged and smiled his naughty smile. "Do you know, I think it's a bit more fun this way. The first time, at least."
"First time?" Pete gasped as Ara's hand escaped his and continued up his thigh. He shut his eyes when it closed over his groin, and he shivered when Ara leaned close and whispered in his ear.
"I'd like to suck your cock, Peter," he whispered.
Pete was having a hard time breathing. "You're a ghost."
"I'm a ghost with a very wicked mouth." Ara suckled lightly on the lobe of Pete's ear. "And I have a very clever tongue." He laughed, a very naughty sound that made Pete shiver. "Besides. I think we owe it to men everywhere as a sort of social experiment, don't you think? We can say we are men of science."
"What?" Pete said, but then Ara stuck his tongue in his ear again, and he groaned. God, it felt so good. No, Ara wasn't his type, but there was something about him, something that pulled him to the man, or the ghost, or whatever he was. So he didn't fight it when Ara pushed him back down to the floor; he shut his eyes and let go, giving over to sensation. But when the ghost's cold fingers slipped beneath his shirt, he hissed.
"I know," Ara said in apology as Pete's belly flexed against his touch. "I know. But you'll warm them up, Peter. You'll warm all of me up. And it will feel so good, lover. Better than anything either of us has ever felt." He bent and pressed a kiss over the center of Pete's chest, then rubbed his cheek against Pete's shirt, like a cat. "It's been so long. So long. But I haven't forgotten how." His cool hand massaged insistently against Pete's rapidly hardening cock. "That isn't something I'm ever going to forget, not even in a thousand years."
Pete supposed he should have been more creeped out about the fact that someone who admitted he was dead was undoing his fly and taking his dick in his hand, and that the lips sliding over his nipple were cold and lifeless. Probably it wasn't the most intelligent of moves to be making out with a ghost or anyone else in a house that told you it had been waiting for you and imported your bedroom into the upstairs. But oh, Christ, Ara was right. Nothing had ever felt this good.
But thinking of the house drew another thought out of the fog of Pete's mind, and he put his hand on Ara's head to still him. He waited until the ghost lifted his head before he spoke.
"You asked earlier if I could see the wounds," Pete said. "What did you mean? Why did you call them that?"
"Because that's what they are," Ara said. Some of the lust had faded from his eyes. "They are the wounds in the walls. And no one has ever seen them before. Not since they were made." He bent and pressed cold lips over the center of Pete's chest. "Please, Peter. Let me love you."
Pete nodded, not even bothering to correct him on the name anymore. He just lay his head back and shut his eyes, opening his legs and inviting the ghost to do with him what he would.
Mike climbed out of the sludgy darkness of unconsciousness and into the haze of what could only be an erotic dream. It had to be a dream, because in real life he could not be looking at a half-naked ghost and fully naked man, chests heaving, lips locked, hips thrusting as they moved in desperate symphony, chasing a rhythm as old as time. By the looks of things, they were well on their way to finding it.
God, but they were a feast, dream or no. Mike's cock twitched in his pants, and he reached for himself without thinking. The ghost was on top, driving the act, making soft, sexy whimpers even as it reached down and pinched hard on Pete's nipple, making him groan and thrust harder against his tormentor. Both their cocks were out, trapped in one of Pete's hands, and they were thrusting together inside the sleeve his fist made, crying out with each new fissure of friction. Unable to stop himself, Mike cried out too.
The ghost lifted its head and looked at him, its eyes dark and white-less again. It smiled.
"Hello, Mikey," it said, its voice dripping with sex. "Won't you join us?"
It's just a dream, Mike tried to tell himself. But oh, it felt so real! "How?" he whispered.
The ghost laughed. "I've given myself a name, you should know. Call me Ara."
"Ara?" Mike repeated, confused.
The ghost shivered in pleasure a moment as Pete thrust again and lifted his head to suckle on the ghost's neck. "Yes. Ara. You told me once that it was the name of an Armenian god. The god of spring, if I recall correctly. I'm feeling a bit godlike today."
"I---told you---what?" Mike stammered, lost now.
The ghost rolled its eyes, then shut them as Pete bit down. Mike shivered, his eyes shifting to the sight of the rough, handsome man he'd brought here nibbling on another man's neck. Not man, he tried to remind himself. But it wasn't working just now. This wasn't an it. This was a man.
This was the hottest thing Mike had ever seen.
He'd never watched anyone have sex before, hadn't even known it was something he wanted, but suddenly it was all he could think about. God help him, but he wanted to watch them come, wanted both of them together. His cock swelled against his hand. He wanted to fuck them, fuck them both. He wanted to bend them over and take them so hard---
Mike tried to cut off the thought, but it lingered, and he groaned, his fingers shaking as he fumbled for his zipper.
The ghost, his eyes still dark, his body still moving in time to Pete's, his neck still a banquet for his lover, smiled at him. "It's good to see you admit to wanting me again. I'm tired of watching you play at being so aloof." His smile faded a little as he added, "I wish you could join us."
"What---" Mike watched Pete's tongue slide down the length of the ghost's throat and briefly forgot what he'd been about to say. "What---what is happening?" He looked around at the dusty, faded room, at the creaky metal bed in the center. "We're in the young man's bedroom?"
"My bedroom." The ghost pouted at him. "Why won't you see me, Michael? Why must you make it so clinical? Are you that afraid of me?"
It was hard to keep his professional distance when he was watching two men have sex, but Mike did his best. "You aren't a man. You are a manifestation of energy. You need to release back into the collective of the universe. I do not know you. We are not associated, except that I am here to help you find your way."
The ghost's expression turned dark and wicked. "I'm fucking him. Do you see that, Mikey? Do you see me fucking him?" His eyes went so black they burned. "Oh, it feels so good. So good to feel again, lover."
"You're not corporeal," Mike whispered, but his eyes were on those cocks, those sweet, fat organs sliding together between a hand and two taut stomachs. God, he wanted to lick the pair of them.
"I am for him." The ghost moaned and braced a hand against the floor. He turned to Pete, thrusting harder. "I'm real to him."
Mike looked at Pete, who had yet to even acknowledge that Mike was there. "Is he---all right?"
The ghost nuzzled Pete's cheek. "Peter? Mikey's awake. Tell him hello so he knows you're well, and then I'll make love to you again."
Pete turned a groggy head to Mike and looked at him. His eyes were as dark as the ghost's, and when he smiled, Mike shivered. "Hello, Mikey," Pete said, and then he turned back to the ghost, lifted his free hand to hold his jaw, then took him in a passionate kiss.
Mike couldn't help it. He couldn't do anything but take out his cock and jerk himself in time to the two men thrusting before him. He forgot all his rules, forgot his goal, forgot everything but the scent and sight of sex, and he rode with them as they bucked and moaned, calling out with them until they were all sweating and gasping and then coming, one after another after another, first Pete, then the ghost, and then Mike.
And then, only then, did Mike manage to put himself back together.
Wiping his hand on a handkerchief from his pocket, he tucked himself back into his pants and sat up. "This shouldn't be possible," he said to the ghost. "You shouldn't be able to touch him, let alone---"
The ghost was grinning. His eyes were back to normal, and he looked, Mike had to admit, fully whole, as if he were human. At worst, he was slightly pale.
"That's your doing, Mikey. You had to go and make him touch me." The ghost's face fell, and he nuzzled Pete's chest with his cheek. "I only wish you'd stopped before he touched the wall."
The dining room. Mike flushed, remembering his impulsive move. "I don't know why I did that," he confessed.
The ghost shrugged. "It would have found him eventually. I suppose he had to come here again someday." But he looked sad and defeated. It made Mike feel guilty.
"It's a good thing that he's here," Mike said. "Don't you see? He's the real Peter. He lives. You're only a ghost. Don't linger where you don't need to be. Let go. Be free. Go back and live again."
The ghost gave him an irritated look, but before he could speak, Pete lifted a groggy head and gave Mike another one of his looks. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
Mike decided enough was enough. "Pete, this is your ghost. This is, in fact, your house. You used to live here. A long, long time ago, you used to live here. And you died here. I don't know how, but I don't think it was a very good death. But you're alive again. You aren't a ghost. You just needed to come here so that the energy you left could see itself healed and then let go."
Pete stared at him a minute, his face blank. Then he shook his head and turned back to the ghost, cupping his chin gently in his rough-worn hand.
"So," he said, "Ara. How do you feel about sucking cock?"
The grin on the ghost's face was likely illegal in several Missouri counties. "I love it."
Pete's fingers stroked the ghost's cheek fondly. "Good. Because as soon as I can get it up again, I'd like to try out that wicked mouth." He glared at Mike. "Both of you are fucking crazy, and not a damn thing either of you say makes any sense. And I still don't know what the fuck is going on, or how I am humping cocks with a ghost." He turned back to the ghost. "But you, sweet thing, are fucking hot as ice, and I would jump your bones any fucking time."
The ghost looked fondly down at Pete. "You don't make any sense, either, but yes, I'd love to suck you. And fuck you. We have time for quite a bit of fun, I think."
"Time?" Mike repeated, but gruffly, because Pete was right. The ghost was fucking hot.
But all his erotic thoughts fled as the ghost lifted his head and looked at him with the saddest expression Mike had ever seen.
"You woke it up," Ara whispered. "You woke it up, and this time, for the first time, Peter is here. The real Peter, just like you said. And oh, Mikey, I'm afraid of what happens now."
For a moment, Mike was scared too. He'd lost control of this somehow, and something deep and heavy pulled at him from inside, like a great, old wave trying to pull him down.
"I just wanted to help you," Mike whispered, and though he couldn't explain why, his throat was suddenly thick with tears.
"I know." Ara's eyes were full of tears too. "It's all you ever want."
"Shut up, Ara," Pete said, "and bring your mouth up here."
Ara turned and bent down to him, moaning softly as Pete began to kiss him. "Oh, Peter," he whispered. "It's so much better with you here. I'm still scared, but I'm so glad you've come."
"Get your mouth on my cock, and I'll come again," Pete said. Ara laughed and slid down his body, and Mike felt his gut tightening in anticipation.
But then Pete turned to Mike, his eyes going dark again, the whites disappearing as they had before. He motioned Mike closer.
"You get over here too," he called, his voice rough and heavy with lust. "Get that monster of yours out and see if you can fit that bad boy down my throat."
Mike knew he should resist. He could feel the words of refusal in his throat, could taste them in his mouth. Rational arguments and scholarship tried to rise up, but they couldn't get through. Because Mike looked at Pete's mouth, lush and swollen from Ara's kisses, and all he could think of was what it would look like with his cock pushing in and out of it.
He should try to force reason into this, he knew. But he couldn't. All he could do was rise, head aching, and crawl across the room to Pete, and as he watched Ara bend Pete's legs back and steady himself as he dipped his head to take Pete's cock into his mouth, Mike undid his pants, pulled out his sex, and fed it to Pete as instructed.
Pete and Peter
As Clarke's thick cock slid into his mouth and Ara spread his thighs and suckled him, Pete let go of the last of his tension and let the pleasure of his attendants course through him.
Goddamn, but he felt alive.
It wasn't just that Pete had never had sex quite like this, either. It wasn't that Ara was a ghost, though that was decidedly a first. Pete had been with two guys before, and it had been good, but it had been nothing like this. Pete didn't know what this was that he'd gotten into, but whatever it was, it was intense.
He was a mellow guy. He worked, but not too hard. He did nothing to excess, but he didn't withhold himself on principle, either. He would fuck or be fucked. He would drink or not drink. He would stay home or go out. In general, Pete found that much of life made no difference to him one way or the other. Sometimes life was good, and sometimes it wasn't so much, but overall everything was no big deal.
He did not feel that way right now. Clarke was fucking his mouth, and Pete loved the fact that the man didn't want to and yet couldn't seem to help himself. He loved seeing that professional distance crumble. And he loved the slick, smooth taste of Clarke on his tongue. He loved the sweaty smell of his groin as it thrust against Pete's nose. He liked the way Clarke groaned and grabbed at Pete's hair, holding on tight as he gave in and fucked Pete's mouth with abandon.
Below, Ara was taking him in deep as well. His hands weren't half as cold now, but they were still cool against Pete's thighs, which he pressed open as he bobbed up and down on Pete's cock. Oh, yeah, he was a wicked cocksucker all right. His lips were sealed around the shaft, but his tongue danced inside the dark, wet cave his mouth had made around the heated flesh as he rose and fell. It felt so good. It felt. There was a pulse rising inside of Pete, a pulse that climbed along on top of his orgasm, but it had nothing to do with semen. It had barely anything to do with sex. It was something inside him which had been dark and quiet, a limpid pool, and now it was a stormy sea, cresting and rising, reaching up and up and up---
Wait, Pete thought, his mind feeling very far away. I don't even know what a limpid pool is.
And on the heels of this realization came another thought: Who is this, rising inside of me?
He knew a moment of panic. And then the pleasure of Clarke's fucking and Ara's sucking overwhelmed him, and he shivered, and shuddered, and came. He flooded the ghost's mouth with semen.
And the something that had been rising inside him lifted, rose, and sailed easily out of his body, taking Pete along with it. He rose like mist from his own body, a soul, a spirit, a ghost himself---he didn't know, and it didn't matter. He was up. He was out. That was what mattered.
Move. He had to move.
There were bodies below him, ripe with sweat and sex, but they were not the bodies he sought. The room was changing again, and as it did, the bodies left as well. Pete watched as the air shifted and shimmered around him. The modern bed and end table littered with condom wrappers and beer bottles vanished. The closet faded, as did the dresser and the TV on a stand in the corner. A new room came in its place, a lens coming into focus. Pete saw a great wooden bed with quilted covers. A heavy oaken stand stood to the side, with a bowl and pitcher atop it, and a towel hung over the side. The walls were papered now in yellow above painted wainscoting. A rug was in the center of the room.
A young man was lying on the bed.
Ara.
He was no ghost here. There was a life about him that drew Pete closer. Such a handsome young man. Ara looked as if he might be seventeen at best, and he was dressed just as the ghost had been. His dark hair still spiked in all directions, unruly, untidy. His shirt was unbuttoned, as were the buttons of his trousers. His knees were bent, his legs spread open as he stared up at the ceiling near the space where Pete was, his eyes glazed with passion as he touched himself.
"Michael," he whispered as if the name were a prayer. He stroked again, then shut his eyes. "Oh, Michael."
Pete watched as the young man came. He watched as, when finished, Ara lay there, his fingers splaying in the semen on his stomach, his eyes still shut in pleasure. Eventually he rose and cleaned himself, but not with the towel at the basin. He used a rag he kept tucked under the mattress, and when he was finished, he tucked it back again.
Righting his clothes, he headed for the door and into the hall. Pete followed.
It was a bright, sunny morning in the house. The hallway which had filled Pete with such dread before was now bright and cheerful, and there were people moving through it. Servants, Pete thought. Most of them were black. Ara was polite to them, but distant, and he hurried down the stairs toward the dining room.
Clarke was waiting there, and when Ara came in, he smiled.
Pete watched Clarke carefully as Ara helped himself to food from a sideboard and then sat down. Clarke was dressed in the same old-fashioned clothes as Ara, except he wore a suit coat as well and had an ornate neck tie knotted at his throat. As Ara had come into the room, Clarke had smiled politely. But he'd lit up, too, and when Ara's back was turned, he gazed with longing at the slope of the young man's back and tugged absently at the knotted tie. By the time Ara turned around again, however, Clarke had recovered himself completely and was focused on his plate of bacon and eggs.
"Are you ready for your lessons today, Peter?" Clarke asked.
"Yes, sir," Ara said. He wasn't bothering to hide his longing.
Clarke nodded and picked up his mug of coffee. "Excellent. We'll begin in the library. But first I thought we might take a stroll down to the lake. You could do with some exercise.
Ara looked as if he'd just been told Christmas was coming early. His face, already bright, lit up even more. "Oh yes---thank you, sir."
Clarke smiled, then wiped at the gesture with his napkin. "Don't thank me yet. You'll be quizzed on flora and fauna on the way."
Ara didn't seem to mind.
Pete, still hovering in the doorway, settled in to watch.
There was a lot to see. Time seemed to ebb and flow around him as he followed the pair out the back door, down through the woods to the edge of the lake and back to the house again. He followed them through weeks on high speed, seeing what only the invisible can see: how enamored each was with the other. At night Clarke would masturbate with the same intensity as Ara, except he whispered Pete's name. Peter. Which was what, Pete understood, Ara had been called when he was alive. Peter Underwood, the son of the master of the house. And Clarke was Michael Emery, the tutor hired to teach him. Peter Underwood was in love with Michael Emery and was clearly trying, without having to use words, to tell him so. Michael Emery loved him back---it was clear from his tenderness with the young man as well as the passion with which he cried out his name as he came. But Clarke---Emery---it was muddling in Pete's mind---would not act on his feelings. Some of it was because he was a teacher.
Most of it, Pete knew, was because of the father.
Mr. Underwood was hardly present in the house, but when he was, it wasn't good. Pete followed him for a while and soon learned all he needed to know. Carl Underwood was a sick man. He was vicious to the kitchen staff, and one visit to what he'd done to the field slaves had been enough for Pete. Carl beat his son, but carefully, leaving no marks and only the most discreet of bruises. Pete didn't get to see this part. Carl would take his son into his room at night or during the day into the tutor's room if the tutor was gone, but Pete could not follow there. But when Peter Underwood came out, he looked miserable and spent, and when he undressed in his room, he was bruised and sore. Pete got the sense that the abuse had been less since the tutor had come, but the beatings still happened. It hurt Pete to watch, even though he couldn't see the act, but it seemed to hurt him more than it hurt Peter Underwood to bear both the blows and the words. The young man simply endured it all.
There was no mother, and no one ever spoke of her. Pete had the sense that she had run away. He couldn't blame her.
The tutor, Pete learned, had been hired to "make a man" of the boy, but from the gossip of the servants it was clear this was some outside pressure, and Pete suspected it was the dictate of an aunt who sometimes visited and gave Carl strict scoldings. After she left, the beatings he gave his son were usually the worst.
Then one day the tutor found out about the beatings.
The scenes from the past usually flew by, churning like strange colors across water, but when the eddies slowed, Pete paid close attention. In this image, tutor and student were working in the library. Emery put his hand on young Peter's back to soothe him as he struggled with some problem laid before him, and Peter cried out. The dialog was hushed from where Pete watched, and time started shifting again, rushing and slowing in waves, but the end result was that Emery suspected the truth, Peter tried to hide it, and somehow this ended with Emery ordering Peter to undo his shirt and his braces and show him his back. Emery had cried out at the sight of the bruises there.
Peter had taken hold of his tutor's hand and placed it squarely in the center of his own naked chest. There was a brief pause, the weight of the moment hanging in the air. And then time advanced, and soon Pete watched the pair of them writhing on the rug, mouths locked.
Young Peter was the aggressor. It began in that library, but took days to play out: Emery still clung to his nobility, but Peter wore him down. It wasn't long before Emery was locking the door and backing against it, shuddering in forbidden pleasure as Peter claimed a suckle at his tutor's cock as a reward for lessons well-completed. The walks down to the lake turned into trysts in the grass. And Pete liked to watch. As a ghost, he appreciated the sex, but his real pleasure came in watching their play with one another. Yes, it ended with Peter naked and kneeling on all fours as Emery thrust into him from behind, but it began with the young siren leading him there, kissing him and whispering how he wanted his teacher to touch him, how much he liked the taste of his cock, of how good it felt when he filled him.
Pete watched it all. He could not leave with Emery on the days he left Haven, but he knew enough from watching the man in his bedroom, from the letters he wrote and the diary he kept, that Peter Underwood had become his world. He was arranging college for the young man, or at least an escape from his father's hold. He struggled between his desire to keep his lover with him and his certainty that it was wrong to do so. His love for his student was so deep that what he wanted most was to set him free. His own carnal desires were inconsequential next to this.
Pete Eason watched it all, entranced.
But he felt something else rising too. The waters of the past churned around him, moving faster, and he felt a current pulling from the bottom. Something was coming, something dark. Pete began to move around the house and grounds of Haven hurriedly, as if he could find it and stop it before it was too late. But he could not find it. He whirled and whirled, faster and faster and faster, moving like light now, he streaked so fast, playing the past over and over and over as the walls of the house pushed in closer and closer around him.
But it was no use. No matter how he moved, no matter how he searched, the water kept churning, pulling him down, and the walls of the house cried out and split in agony as he went down, and down, and down---
---and then he was back in his body, his shoulders pinned back to the floor as Ara leaned over him, his dark eyes full of worry as he begged Pete, please, please to stop screaming.
Mike stood at the end of the bed with his hands in his pockets and waited.
Pete lay on the bed before him, propped up by pillows, attended by the soothing whispers and gentle touches of the ghost. The ghost, he reminded himself once more. Not "the boy."
The ghost wasn't focused on Mike; it was too busy taking care of Pete. It had taken some doing for the specter to get Pete onto the bed, because first it had to defuse the alarm Pete had felt at the room, which he said had "changed again." Mike had wanted to ask him what he meant by that, but a professional instinct told him to keep quiet. He did, and he waited, watching Peter Eason's every move.
There was little left of the taciturn, dismissive man who had stood in the living room and joked about leprechauns. Pete was agitated and pale, and it had to be an illusion, but he looked thinner and slighter. The shadows in the room made his hair seem darker. The curtains were drawn tight against the windows, and it might as well have been night outside for as dark as it was in here. A small lamp cast incandescent light over the faded dusty quilt and the rough hem of Pete's jeans and button-down shirt. His cap had come off somewhere, and his curly hair had straightened, going dark and spiky.
Mike frowned, thinking that didn't quite make sense.
But Pete was looking down at himself in alarm. "Oh God. I'm wearing his clothes. Fuck---I'm turning into him!" He turned to the ghost, looking sick. "I'm turning into you."
"It's reaching out to you," the ghost said, trying to rub soothingly at Pete's shoulder, but mostly it was clutching at his shirt. "You have to resist, Peter."
"I saw it," Pete said, looking down at his hands. "The past. I saw Peter Underwood. I saw them. I saw it all." He looked back at the ghost, terror in his eyes. "I felt it coming. The bad thing."
"Push it away," the ghost whispered.
Mike could keep quiet no longer. "Pete, you're remembering a past life. This is all perfectly natural. You have nothing to fear."
"Fuck you," Pete said, turning on him. "You knew, didn't you? You knew it was going to do this to me. You stupid piece of shit! I wish all you'd wanted was a fuck. God damn, but I wish it."
Mike tried to shutter himself. "Pete, what happened just now, on the floor---that was just my weakness---"
Pete's laugh was dark. "Jesus. Ara, you're right, he doesn't fucking change. That's the same shit he said to you, isn't it?"
Mike blinked, confused.
"He doesn't know," the ghost said to Pete, sounding sad. "He never knows who he is. Don't bother trying to convince him. It won't work."
"I'll fucking make it work," Pete said.
Mike was beginning to feel uneasy. "This isn't my past," he said, trying to be gentle. "I'm just a researcher, an academic. This is an old case, one of high intensity, and I---"
"Shut up." Pete rode over his protests, aiming a shaking finger at him. "Just shut the fuck up. You're the tutor, you dumbass." When Mike drew back in alarm and started to sputter, Pete drove on, merciless. "I saw you. I watched it all, and it's you. His name was even Michael. Michael Emery."
"Just because our names---" Mike began, but Pete leaned forward, red-faced in his fury.
"It was you. You sat up in that room and jerked off the same way he did. And eventually you kissed him and sucked him and fucked him and even taught him how to fuck you. Not that he needed teaching. Jesus, you're thick. You think you're leading this dance, but you're not. You think you're controlling this, think you're impartial, but you aren't. You're as neck-deep in this as I am."
It was all nonsense, but suddenly Mike felt ill and exposed. "No," he whispered. "No."
Pete turned to the ghost. "You keep saying 'he always'. What do you mean?"
The ghost cast a sad glance at Mike. "He comes back. Every time he is reborn, he comes back to try and save me. He buys the house. Usually he comes with a family, though he always ends up here a bachelor. But it always ends the same." The ghost's tone indicated this end was never good.
Mike tried to give a calming, belittling smile, but inside he was reeling. He was not the tutor. He couldn't be.
Because if he were---
The ghost looked thoughtful. "He's unsettled. That, Peter, has never happened before. Not like this."
Mike worked to keep his voice even and controlled. "Pete, don't let the spirit lead you into its madness. You have the control here. You are the one who is living. Whatever visions it shows you, whatever lies it tells---it is not real. Only you are."
Pete glared at him. "And what about you, wise guy? Are you real?"
Mike tried again for that calm, clinical smile. "I am merely a facilitator---"
"Why are we here?" Pete shot back. "Why did you bring me here?"
Mike laced his fingers together in front of himself. "Because you're Peter Underwood reincarnated. A psychic told me your name now, and where you were---"
"Why are you obsessed with this case, Clarke?" Pete dogged.
"I'm not obsessed. It's just very compelling. It's a very intense haunting: the house looks different to almost everyone, and the ghost is very aggressive. It affects the whole landscape, all the way to the---"
"Famous in the paranormal history books, is it?" Pete asked.
"Well---no, I discovered it myself," Mike admitted.
Pete's smile was knowing. "How'd you do that? Just wandered by?"
Mike didn't like this line of questioning. "I was led to it in a dream, which is a perfectly legitimate---"
"Funny, isn't it, how I'm named Peter and you're named Michael?" Pete's gaze was like a dagger, pinning Mike into place. "Except I insist on being called 'Pete'. I wonder how firm you are about being 'Mike'. And isn't it interesting how we're both gay? Just like them? And here we are, both of us back at this house where a Peter and a Michael were lovers. What's the history here, Clarke? What's the story of the Underwood family?"
Mike was reeling. "Not much is known. The father was very strict. I suspect he might also have been borderline psychotic---"
Pete grimaced. "He was a bastard. Hopefully he's in hell."
Mike ignored him. "There was a tutor, as you say. And you remembered the name correctly, too, which is a good sign. There were rumors of an affair between him and young Peter, but they couldn't be confirmed. What is known is that the tutor turned up drowned in the lake, and Peter Underwood's body was never found. The official declaration was that they were swimming and drowned. But the servants whispered that there had been a murder. Those servants later turned up dead as well."
The ghost had gone quiet. It always did, when Mike spoke of this story. Mike waited, hoping now that it would tell the truth to Pete, that he would hear, and the energy would at long last be released.
But it was Pete, not the ghost, who spoke.
"That's not what happened," Pete said, shaking his head. "I don't know what actually happened, but it wasn't that." He turned to the ghost, and Mike held his breath.
But the ghost just looked sad. It was also looking at the walls.
Pete did then, too, in apprehension. "Is it coming?"
The ghost shook its head. "Not yet. It's hard for it to come in here."
That didn't seem to comfort Pete much. "I can't see the end. I can feel it coming, but I can't see it."
Mike placed a hand on the end of the metal rail of the bed. "Tell him," he said to the ghost. "Tell him what you need him to hear, and you'll both be free."
The ghost looked at him in deep pain. "You think it's so easy, don't you? You always do. You won't see. You never will."
Mike refused to back down. "Stop trying to connect with me. Connect with him! He is who you are!"
"And who are you, Mikey?" the ghost shot back.
Except it wasn't the ghost speaking, not this time. Pete Eason had leaned forward, and it was he who had said the words, but it was in a voice that was not his own, or at least was not his alone. Man and ghost had merged, one overlaying the other, and when they spoke, it was as one.
"When will you see us and believe?" they asked him, their voices full of hurt and pain and betrayal. "When will you know the wounds in these walls as your own?"
It was as if the words were a bell, tolling deep inside Mike, its rumbling reverberations shaking his very core, rattling a wall of glass he hadn't known he kept inside him. Man and ghost reached toward him, but could not touch him through the barrier, and he understood now that it was a barrier he'd put up himself. For a moment, the whole world held its breath.
Then Mike reached forward, and the glass cracked and shattered, falling like dust to the floor as three hands touched, and the walls of the room breathed and ached, and waited.
The Tutor's Room
This was the day, Michael Emery knew, when everything would change.
He touched the lapel of his jacket as he bounded up the stairs of the house two at a time, his heart quickening with every step. The tickets were there, tucked inside the letter. He knew Peter would balk at first, but this was the right decision. Peter needed to see something besides the madness of his father's house. He needed to experience the world. Very probably he needed to have other lovers. Michael didn't like that part, but he accepted it. He'd need to teach Peter how to be discreet, how to keep others from finding out. How Carl had not found them out yet was a mystery he'd never understand, but then, the man was clearly disturbed. Perhaps the boy's aunt was right. Perhaps the father should be committed.
Whether that happened or not, Peter needed to leave this place. And by God, Michael was going to be the one to get him out.
The house was oddly quiet as he entered. "Clara?" he called out, but the housekeeper didn't answer. Michael peeked into the parlor, the dining room, the library, and then finally the kitchen, but the house was empty. It was very strange.
A muffled thump and a cry came from up above, and Michael looked up at the ceiling. Some instinct made him head for the back stairs instead of the front, and he crept quietly, pressing his hands along the walls as he ascended. The thumping was rhythmic now, as were the cries. They were coming from his own room, and they were... familiar. Heart in his throat and dread in his heart, Mike rounded the corner and listened---
---and then the dream stopped, and he was Mike Clarke again. He was on his knees and vomiting as the ghost ran through him, back and forth, its fury radiating in Mike's bones.
"No!" it cried. "No! You remember nothing for over one hundred fifty years, and then you remember that? No! No!"
Mike tried to cry out, but he just heaved, over and over and over, until he began to bring up blood.
And then suddenly it stopped. He looked up, blearily, and saw the ghost and Pete Eason struggling on the bed, the specter flailing beneath Pete's hold.
"You're going to kill him!" Pete shouted at the ghost.
The ghost started to sob. "He wasn't supposed to remember that!"
Around them, the walls of the bedroom began to swell.
Keeping the ghost pinned, Pete turned to Mike. "You okay?"
Mike couldn't answer. He still felt sick, but some of it was from what he'd seen. He was the tutor. Pete was right. The ghost was right. He always does this, the specter had said. Which meant Mike had come here before. He was caught in a loop too. He and the ghost both were.
He looked up at Pete. "But not you," he whispered. "We're caught, but you're not."
"You remembered something," Pete said, ignoring him. "So you admit now that you're involved? That you're Michael Emery in the same way that I'm Peter Underwood?"
Mike nodded and swallowed against a raw throat. "I've been a pawn. This whole time, I've been a pawn."
And as he said the words, he heard them echo across time, and the present faded once again into the past. He was standing beside a lake, standing in the tall grass with Peter Underwood.
Peter was shaking. "I didn't want you to know," he whispered. "I never wanted you to know."
Michael Emery laughed bitterly. "Of course you didn't. I couldn't look properly like a fool, could I, if I found out you were with another man?"
Peter began to cry. "Mikey, please," he whispered, and then his voice deepened. "Clarke. Clarke!"
"Clarke!"
The past faded, and Pete Eason was gripping Mike's shoulders. The ghost was hovering behind him, looking miserable.
"He remembers," it was whispering. "He remembers what I did."
"I don't," Pete snapped. "So someone had damn well better tell me what was going on."
Mike looked at the ghost and felt his heart break from one hundred fifty years away. "I caught him. I caught him with another man."
Pete frowned. "Really?"
"It's not what you think." The ghost was drifting now, rising up from the floor, and Mike could see through him. Past and present kept flickering before Mike, like a lamp with a bad connection, and then the past was back again, stronger than ever.
"It's not what you think," Peter Underwood whispered. But all Michael could see was that the boy's mouth was swollen from sucking on another man's cock.
"Here I thought you were an innocent. Here I thought---" Michael broke off, then began to pace. "And you did it in my room." The tickets and letter in his pocket were a weight now. He felt like such a fool.
"Mikey, please," Peter begged. "Please, don't---please!" He reached for Michael.
Michael tried to step back, but then the past flickered and returned to the present. Pete Eason was watching him intently.
"I need to get out of here," Mike whispered. He tried to rise.
Pete kept him from it. "Ara?" he called, not looking away from Mike. "What happened to Mike the other times he came to this house? In his other lives?"
"Bad things," the ghost said. Ara. Mike stared up at him, hating him, fearing him. Man, ghost---he couldn't tell what Ara was anymore. My ruin.
"I need to know what those bad things are," Pete said, "or I can't stop them from happening."
"You can't stop them." Ara was drifting back, shaking his head, his gaze fixed on Mike. "I was a fool to hope. I was a fool to let you in, either of you. You can't help me. No one can." Ghostly tears slid down his transparent face, rivulets of energy that glittered in the lamplight. "You're right, Mikey. I'm not real. I'm not Ara, and I'm not Peter. I'm not anything. But I can't go back, can't leave, can't go anywhere, because there's nowhere to go, nowhere for someone as awful as me."
He was drifting back, farther and farther until he was all the way to the head of the bed.
"Wait!" Peter called, but then the ghost backed up into the wall, and then he was gone.
The walls, heaving heavily now like an animal pushed too far, expanded out. A deep, angry gash appeared above the bed, and as Mike watched, the wound began to bleed. And then the gash rent in two and peeled away into a crude, clumsy door, which opened on its own. A set of stairs appeared, leading out of the house, down into the woods, to freedom.
Feeling disoriented and heavy, caught between the sense of foolishness from the past and the confusion of the present, Mike surrendered. He's right, I can't save him, he thought, and rushed forward to his escape.
Pete caught Mike by the collar and drew him up short. Mike struggled, but Pete held fast.
"You got a death wish, buddy?" he demanded.
"He's letting me out," Mike cried. "Let me go before he changes his mind."
Pete looked at the hole in the wall, at the great gap where the wall had been but was now just empty space with jagged pieces of lath sticking out of it. He could still hear some of the plaster and siding hitting the ground below. "Yeah. I'm starting to get an idea of how the bad things happened before." Had Ara done this? Was that what this meant? Had the ghost set all this up? Or was this some other force inside the house? How was he supposed to be able to tell? Pete suddenly felt very tired. "I am so fucking out of my element it isn't even funny."
Mike was swaying on his feet. "I keep having visions of the past. One second I'm here, and the next I'm back in 1856." Tears were running down his cheeks. "I didn't know. I swear to you, I had no idea I was the tutor. Good God, how could I not see it? How could I be so stupid?"
Pete looked around at the walls. They had calmed a little, but they were still breathing, and there was an apprehension about them now. "We need to figure out what's going on. And you're the psycho-whatever. This is your gig."
"Paranormal psychologist." Mike's reply was shaky but, as usual, calling on his professionalism seemed to center him.
"Right," Pete agreed. "So tell me, starting at the beginning, why you brought me here. And pretend, for the sake of argument, that absolutely nothing you say makes sense to me, so be extra clear."
Mike swallowed and nodded. "I started researching this place about a year ago. You're right---I was drawn here for reasons I can't explain. I ran some tests, and then I met the ghost. It was the strongest apparition I've ever seen. And it's hands-down the most determined not to be released of any I've encountered or heard documented."
"So you do this a lot, do you?" Pete prodded.
"Yes. Ghosts are just energy trapped. Like an air bubble in a gas line. With care and focus, they can be worked through and released."
"And that's why you brought me here?" Pete asked. "To help release him?"
"It," Mike corrected. He opened his eyes again, looking more centered, at least until he took in the heaving walls once again. "That isn't Peter Underwood. It's an energy manifestation. You are Peter Underwood."
Pete grimaced. "But I'm not. I will buy that he and I seem to be connected, but I'm not this kid who had a fling with his tutor and got beat up by his dad. I'm Pete Eason, of Blackwater. My parents may have raised their voices to me on occasion, but that's about it. They live in a house three streets over from me, and I still see them on Sundays for dinner. I'm not Peter Underwood. Not even by half."
But Mike was looking intently at Pete now. "Carl Underwood beat his son?"
Pete shrugged. "In the memories I saw, he did. Or, I saw the after-effects at any rate. Carl was a real bastard. He was nasty to everyone and everything."
"But that doesn't make any sense," Mike insisted. "Carl was locked away most of the time. He was so ill he could hardly rise. I told you, he was borderline psychotic. Half the time he didn't know his son was there, according to the reports."
Pete felt cold dread rising inside him. "But that's not what I saw. I had this---I dunno, it was like a movie of the past. I saw the dad running around, having his way with God and anybody. I think he murdered two of the slaves. I couldn't look, so I'm not sure. And he always had the son in a locked room. When he came out, he was bruised and dejected."
"That's not possible," Mike said, looking uneasy too.
Around them, the walls began to heave and groan.
No, they whispered. No. The shutters on the windows banged open and shut, and a cold wind tried to suck them into the gaping hole in the wall. No. Leave. Leave me alone. I don't want you here anymore, Peter Eason. I don't want you either, Mikey. I don't want either of you to come ever again.
Pete ran his eyes over the ceiling, widening his stance and gripping Mike tighter as he braced himself against the wind. "We need to get out of this room."
"But where will we go?" Mike asked, clinging to him. "What if the stairs disappear as we go down them? How can we get out still alive?"
Pete said nothing, because he knew the walls were listening. He took a firm hold of Mike's hand and led him back toward the door. He had been half-afraid it would be locked, but it opened up before he could even touch it. "Come on," he said to Mike and led him into the darkness of the hall, letting memory guide him.
He could not see, but he could feel the gashes in the walls. They were deep and numerous, and they were bleeding. And when the house realized where Pete was heading, the walls began to scream.
"Where are we going?" Mike shouted over the din.
"Your room," Pete shouted back.
No! the walls shrieked, but once again, when Pete neared the door, it swung open for him. Still clutching tight to Mike, Pete led them both inside.
The door slammed shut behind them, and there was silence.
The room was dark, but slivers of dull daylight cut through the curtains, revealing a small room with a narrow bed, a desk, and a washbasin and stand. The room felt close and musty, but it also felt... clean. Whatever presence had been in the rest of the house, it was not in this room.
Bad things happened here. Pete wished he knew what the hell they had been.
"What the fuck is going on here?" he asked. "Why do you see one room and I see another? Why do I look down at myself sometimes and see the wrong clothes? Why can walls move and doors vanish? Why can walls bleed?"
"It's energy." Mike's eyes were moving around the room. "That's all anything ever is. This is energy that belongs with a person. With you as a person. Somehow you left this part of you behind when you were Peter Underwood, and now it's trapped."
"So I'm supposed to absorb it?" Pete asked.
Mike nodded. "Or release it."
But to where? Pete ran his eyes carefully over the walls. There were no wounds here. In fact, the plaster was completely smooth all the way around the outside walls and even across the abutment along the south wall where a stove pipe had been. The stove was long gone, but the space for it was there, along with that metal plate at the top marking where the pipe had protruded. The room was completely innocuous.
Except this was where Ara had told him the bad things had happened. Had he been lying? Somehow Pete didn't think so. Damn it, he needed answers, not more questions.
"How are you so sure the dad was psychotic?" Pete asked.
"Because the sister said he was. She had been trying to get him committed for years. Some said the tutor---" He faltered, then cleared his throat and tried to start again. "Some said she'd sent the tutor as a spy. But he hadn't been any help at all. She'd complained that he'd been so fixated on his charge that he hadn't paid any attention to the parent. And then the tutor died."
"But what happened once the tutor had died and the son disappeared?" Pete dogged him. "What happened to Carl Underwood?"
"He fell down the stairs a month after his son went missing. The fall killed him, his sister inherited, she sold the place, and that was the end of it."
Pete stared at the walls. "Except for Ara."
"Except for the ghost," Mike agreed. He rubbed at his cheek. "I suppose it makes sense that I'm the tutor. I'm still trying to help him."
"But you said he betrayed you," Pete pointed out. "Him. Peter betrayed Michael Emery with another man. But who? I never saw another man."
Mike grimaced. "I don't know, honestly. That's the only memory I have. Just those two shards: of going up the stairs, hearing someone having sex in this room, and then the fight with Peter Underwood. I don't even know how the fight resolved."
Pete began to pace. "I saw a lot, but it wasn't like watching a movie. It was like looking at sand pictures that shifted. Sometimes I felt what happened and didn't see it at all. It sped up and slowed down too. And I didn't see anything of the end. I felt it, but it kept moving away from me. It didn't want me to find it." He shoved his fingers into his hair and swore under his breath. But he saw Mike out of the corner of his eye, and he stopped pacing to look at him.
Mike was looking at him oddly. "You know, you're right. You aren't him, are you? Not even a little. You're almost a polar opposite of the energy I've come to know here. It teases and wheedles, but you don't. You're practical and steady. You've had more visions than I have, and technically this is your pain in this house, but it doesn't upset you in the slightest. Meanwhile I'm in eight kinds of denial, and then when I get one whiff of my own role, I come unhinged." He shook his head. "Maybe you should be the paranormal psychologist."
Prickles of awareness were dancing across Pete's skin. "What did you say? About my pain?"
"Well---" Mike gestured at the walls. "If you're Peter Underwood reincarnated, the energy here is yours. I just thought it was odd that---"
"My pain." Pete stared at the wall. "The wounds in the walls. All this started when I touched them. And he's kept me from touching them since. Even the doors open for me. Because I woke it up, he said."
"It's just leftover energy," Mike said, and Pete snorted.
"A supernova is energy," Pete countered, "and so is an atomic blast. You can call him a ghost or you can call him Ara, but the spirit in this house isn't 'just' anything." He took a hesitant step toward the wall. But then he glanced at the far end again, and he stopped. "Wait. Are you seeing the same room I'm seeing? Pale walls, metal frame bed, white pitcher with pink flowers on the washstand?"
"Yes," Mike agreed. "Why?"
Pete nodded at the abutment on the wall, at the metal plate painted over at the top. "Why isn't there a stove in here? If this room looks period to us, why isn't there a stove?"
"The house wasn't built in 1856," Mike pointed out. "It was twenty years old by the time Mike Emery came. Likely someone wanted a stove in another room, or it might have been melted down for the iron, or sold."
It was a nice, normal reason, but somehow the answer just filled Pete with more dread. He did his best to shake it off. "I'm going to touch the walls," he said, as steadily as he could. He stepped carefully around the bed and headed for the abutment. "I'm going to start with that one."
He felt the house shudder in protest, but it did so as if from very far away. It's okay, Pete tried to whisper to it, or maybe he was talking to himself. It's going to be okay.
Holding his breath, he reached out and pressed his fingertips to the smooth, perfect plaster.
The wall shimmered and rippled, and then, on a sigh, it gave way. Pete cried out, and as his hand slid down into the wall, he began to weep.
Because he remembered now. He remembered everything.
The Wounds in the Walls
There was a reason, Pete decided as he shuddered under the weight of Peter Underwood's memories, that people lived their lives one day at a time. He hadn't had an awfully eventful life, but it wasn't as if nothing had ever happened to him. When he was six, for example, he had broken his arm. He remembered that it had happened, and he remembered, as if from a great distance, that it had hurt, a lot. He remembered the white-hot bite of the pain, and the burn of it, and he even remembered thinking that it was too much and that he was going to die. Later he'd felt silly for that---and that was just the point. The intensity of that moment had faded almost as quickly as it had happened, and now, no matter how he tried to recall it, that moment would not come back.
Touching the wall that held the weight of Peter Underwood's pain was like touching a lifetime full of broken arms all at once and with a flame of intensity that never, ever meant to burn away. For several seconds, the pain was all Pete knew, and unlike his arm, he was fairly sure this time it could kill him. But then the blaze receded, and he was being pulled back and into the shelter of Mike Clarke's great, strong, good-smelling arms.
But Pete still remembered, and so he still wept.
And he felt like a fool, because he realized now that he had seen it all before but had not realized what he had been seeing. He had seen a beautiful painting of a life before without realizing all the tones of red he saw were not paint but real blood. He realized that Mike had been right about the father, but so had he. That was the first secret. That was the first wound Peter Underwood had whispered to these walls. And the ghost hadn't lied. All the bad things had happened here.
The first was the smothering of Peter's mother. She had moved into this room because she was sick and because the stove made it warm, and also because her husband made her uneasy. Peter liked to play in the room and be with her. He had come to her one afternoon, arriving just in time to see his father lifting the pillow from his mother's face. She was sleeping now, Carl Underwood had told him. It had taken Peter years to fully realize what he had witnessed, and even then there were times he could not be sure.
And that was the way of everything with Peter's father. At first Peter thought the touches in the middle of the night were dreams, but then he had woken enough to acknowledge that no, they were actually happening. They made him feel strange at first. But then they felt good, too, in a lonely sort of way. Once again, as time wore on, he understood that what was happening was not exactly supposed to happen. But by then he didn't know how to stop it.
He knew it wasn't good when his father hurt the kitchen women, and what he did to the field slaves was too awful to say. Peter wasn't even sure it was actually happening sometimes. It all seemed so surreal. Sometimes he thought he was the crazy one. Sometimes he wanted to go for help, but who was there to turn to? The slaves said his father had a demon in him and told Peter he should help them escape. Sometimes Peter thought he should. But he feared what would happen if his father found out.
And so he did nothing. He let his father come to him in bed, and then, when his father was too wild and unhinged, he came to him during the day to quiet him. He took him into the small room so that no one would hear, because it was over the library. No, he didn't like it. Yes, he wanted a real lover. Yes, he wanted to leave. But where would he go? Lonely. He was so lonely, and so scared, and the world seemed so heavy that there were days he didn't think he could go on. The stove in the small room was long gone, but he sat in the corner where it had been, and he whispered to the walls, telling them his sorrows and his fears, whispering his prayers to the plaster.
And then they had been answered. He had come. Michael. Mikey.
Peter loved Michael Emery with a passion he feared truly was madness. Mikey said such wonderful things, such things that could never happen but were still wonderful to hear. "I'm going to take you away from here," he would tell Peter as he held him in his arms in the grass. "I'm going to take you away from this horrible place," he would say, "and you will have a new life." Oh, how Peter had wanted that! But he knew it would never happen. He couldn't leave. He had barely been to town. He could never handle the world. He was ruined, he knew. It was enough to have Mikey in his life at all, even for a few years. It was more than enough.
But then had come that day.
In Mike Clarke's arms, Pete Eason settled back into his own self, and in his misery he turned his face into Mike's throat.
"It was his father," Pete whispered. "The other man you heard---Michael heard---Peter with was his father. The tutor never saw. He was too hurt, and he left. But Peter had heard him on the stairs. He knew he'd been found out. He let Michael think it was another man because he knew that would be better than hearing he'd been having sex with his father."
Mike's hands tightened on Pete's arms. "The sick bastard---he was raping his son?"
Pete laughed darkly. "That's just the trouble. It'd been going on so long. It's hard to explain---you have to feel it to truly understand, but it's like Peter could either go insane, too, or he could find a way to make it a pleasure. Peter was a survivor. So he found a way to like it. That's the part he couldn't bear Michael to know."
Mike's hands were flexing now, and when he spoke, his voice was full of frustrated impotence. "But that---that isn't his fault! It's what you said! He was a child of unconscionable abuse---none of it is his fault! It doesn't matter that he found a way to survive it, that he found some pleasure in it!"
"You can say that now," Pete replied, collecting himself a little, "but could you have said that then, as Emery?"
"People don't change," Mike said with conviction. "Yes. I would have, because I do now."
"Bull," Pete shot back.
"We are constant matter," Mike said. "We may change form, but we are always ourselves."
"But we temper," Pete argued. "Like steel. It takes patience and cultivation to build up the strength. Maybe you had it then. Maybe you didn't."
Tears shone in Mike's eyes. "I have it now," he whispered.
"Me too." Pete untangled himself from Mike's arms, standing on unsteady legs.
"What are you going to do?" Mike asked, rising with him.
Pete stared at the abutment, girding himself. "I'm going to finish this."
He drew a deep breath and shut his eyes. He could feel the house heaving, could hear it breathing, could feel its terror and its pain. But it was not the house. It was the energy, like Mike had said. No, it wasn't Peter. Peter had died long ago and moved on, becoming so many other people. What was here was something else, but something just as important. It wasn't an it, either. It was human. It was a man. It was Ara. The boy who named himself after the Armenian god of spring, who had waited one hundred fifty years for winter to thaw.
Pete reached out, stuck his hand through the shimmering wall, and drew Ara out into the sun.
There was a short, sharp cry, like someone falling. The plaster-dusted bones that fell into Pete's arms were heavier than they had a right to be, but then, they had borne so much over the years that in a way, it made more sense that they were so dense. The house shuddered and shook, the walls even in here heaving now. But Pete didn't let it bother him. He just held the skeleton close, rocked it gently in his arms, and whispered against the dusty skull.
"I've got you," he whispered. "I've got you now." He hugged the bones as tightly as he dared. "And this time I'm strong enough to bear you."
Was it Mike who sobbed? The house again? Perhaps it was his own sigh escaping. Pete didn't know. All he knew was that the walls breathed one last time, and then a rightness settled in his heart as the bones heated in his embrace, and he wept, this time for joy as Ara, flesh and blood and whole, sagged in surrender against his chest.
Ara was alive.
The three of them were lying on the narrow bed, Mike and Pete against the edges, Ara pressed tight between them. He was facing Mike, and Mike could not stop staring down at the boy. Flesh and blood. He had been a ghost, a manifestation of energy, but Pete had pulled his bones from the wall, had reached into the plaster as if it were but a curtain, pulled Ara out, and now he was alive. It was impossible. But it was true.
Ara looked up at him, his dark eyes uncertain. "Are you angry with me?"
The words cut across Mike like a knife. "Angry---why? Why would you think---?"
Pete pulled Ara tight against his chest and kissed the boy's ear. "He isn't the same Michael. But even so, I don't think that one would be angry with you, either." He kissed him again, then looked up at Mike. "He left you at the lake that day, and his father found you. You drowned, yes---but first you were knocked unconscious."
It was odd, Mike thought, how little hearing about his own death affected him. Because it isn't mine, he admitted. It seemed he had quite a bit to learn from Pete Eason.
Then he looked at the wall, at the place from where Ara had come.
"Was that---were you in there?" he asked.
"The servants were still gone," Ara said. "But he was afraid I would tell about Mikey. So he took an axe and hacked the wall open, tied me up, then shoved me inside and rebuilt the wall after. It took him half the day." His face clouded. "I tried to fight, but I got so cold. He tied my hands so tight! And it seemed so unreal. I couldn't believe it was happening. I begged and pleaded with him---I thought at first it was only going to be a punishment, but he never let me out. And then when I died, I didn't---I felt part of me go, but part of me just couldn't. I don't know why."
Mike stroked Ara's hairline. "You kept your pain so bottled, Ara. You couldn't let it go, because you'd forgotten how. And it grew into a person. You."
"Am I really alive?" Ara asked. He held up one of his hands and looked at it dubiously. "I thought you said I would rejoin the universe."
"I thought he would absorb into me," Pete confessed.
Mike hoped it wasn't sick, how quickly his mind turned academic. "But you see---you can't be together now. You were severed, and you both grew. You are of the same source, but you aren't the same person. You aren't even close. You grew out of your pain, Ara. Pete grew out of the absence of that pain."
"So we're brothers?" Ara's face shuttered a little. "And back in my room I---"
"Not brothers," Mike said quickly. "No more than any other men are brothers to all other men."
Ara relaxed. Pete, Mike noticed, didn't seem to give a damn either way. But then, that was Pete for you.
"So he gets to live now?" Pete asked. His fingers were stroking Ara's arm. "His own life? Alive?"
"It appears so," Mike said. "I don't understand how. But yes. Ara is as alive as you and I."
Ara looked surprised and a little uneasy. "But what do I do? Where will I go?"
"Anywhere you like," Mike assured him.
"I want to stay here," Ara said. "For now. Can I?"
"You might be happier somewhere a little more functional," Pete pointed out.
Mike, though, looked around. "It seems to have stuck in the 1856 mode, at least in here. It might be in better repair than we think."
"We also would have to own it," Pete said.
Mike grinned. "I do."
"He always does," Ara said. "He's owned it five times since he died."
It was sad, Mike thought, that that sentence made sense. "But we need to do some upgrades, Ara. And you should see the world. At least the rest of the county."
"I don't live but thirty miles from here," Pete said, running fingers up Ara's arm and pressing his lips against the boy's ear. "And I have a queen-sized bed."
Ara shut his eyes and sank into Pete's embrace; erotic as the image was, Mike felt the wall inside him go up again, and he tried to hide his dejection. But then just as quickly, the wall was back down as Pete looked up at Mike with wicked eyes.
"Of course, Moneybags here could probably afford to spring for a king, and then we could cozy up all three of us together with room to wiggle, even."
Mike reached out and put a tentative hand on Pete's hip. "You---you want me with you?"
Pete laughed. "Fuck yes, we want you with us. I can't figure out who is attracted to who in this gig anymore, and we sure as hell can't leave Ara to fend for himself." His eyes darkened and his grin widened. "Besides, I didn't get near enough time at that fat cock of yours."
Desire pulled low and hard in Mike's belly. He slid his fingers under the hem of Pete's shirt, then closed his eyes as Ara's mouth found the pulse of his throat. "There's not room enough on this bed for this," he whispered.
"Then we'll go to the floor," Pete said, his fingers sliding down Ara's stomach, and then Mike lost track of whose hands were where, and he let go, sliding into the safe space they had made together, into the magic, into the miracle, and into the love.
Midsummer's Nightmare
The Dreamspinner Press 2010 Daily Dose package of thirty stories is available at http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com.
Heidi Cullinan has always loved a good love story, provided it has a happy ending. She enjoys writing across many genres but loves above all to write happy, romantic endings for LGBT characters because there just aren't enough of those stories out there. When Heidi isn't writing, she enjoys cooking, reading, knitting, listening to music, and watching television with her family. Heidi also volunteers frequently for her state's LGBT rights group, One Iowa, and is proud to be from the first Midwestern state to legalize same-sex marriage.
Visit Heidi's web site at http://www.heidicullinan.com and her blog at http://amazoniowan.livejournal.com/.
Find more stories by Heidi Cullinan at
Dreamspinner Press
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The Wounds in the Walls ©Copyright Heidi Cullinan, 2010
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Released in the United States of America
June 2010
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