It would have been much easier if I had a baseball bat on me. That’s why when we went out after that, we made Lucas always have a baseball bat. That way, in case we needed it, either one of us could use it—or we could have also used a hatchet, the one I stole from my grandfather, but that would be way too messy. Blood would stain our clothes. It’d stain his jacket. It’d stain my jacket. And it’d stain her skirt. Though he could have trouble remembering to hold the bat, it might slip out of his limp wrist, he didn’t have the most firm grasp sometimes.

I broke the bottle over his head. Right over his head. I shouldn't have been out. We shouldn't have been out, the three of us. He was limping, I was drinking, she was smoking. And the guy didn't do anything wrong. It was all in his eyes—I knew he had sinned. He'd cheated on his wife that same night; I hoped at least, that's how I reasoned myself when I had hulking Lucas, stumbling with his maimed leg, dragging the poor soul's unconscious body behind him. He was dead, hopefully he was dead.

"You're going to hell,” she said.

"We're going to hell."

"No, you are."

"I can't, I went to church."

"A year ago. Two."

He groaned.

And I've always thought that "longing" was too soft of a name for a miserable state of the worst kind of existence. When he lifted him up, when he put him over his shoulder, when he tossed him into the shallow grave I had dug just off of Second Street, near that part where the asphalt started to turn to gravel because the city refused to pave that far out. Far too tender, too easy of a word to say.

If I used a bat it would have smashed like a pumpkin. And two feet deep wasn’t enough for a grave, I could have tried three or four—we lacked the time.

“The church doesn’t save you.”

“You’re one to talk. Everything you do is a giant middle finger to God, a giant…” I hesitated. “Screw you.”

Insulting me, she put her hand over her mouth. “He swears now?” She wiped dirt off of her skirt. “If this guy’s blood gets on my clothes—.”

“He hasn’t bled.”

Lucas groaned again, wandering over to the two of us, walking like a dog that has a thorn stuck in its paw.

“Is he going to hell?”

“Is he dead?” I felt my necklace underneath my shirt, I was starting to sweat. I didn’t want to sweat; sweating made me uncomfortable. “I want him to be dead. Let’s hope so.”

“Listen to yourself, you’re wishing for this random—.”

I cut her off. “You’ve written a death spell before. You’ve read a death spell out loud before, when I was sitting on your love seat. You did it a second time when we were out on your back patio. Did it work, either of those times? No, it didn’t, and what a big surprise that was—is. Was.” I hate to think that my yelling made Lucas upset—there was no response, though. I guess he didn’t care. Was it my thing to worry about?

☠ ☠ ☠

“Popular.”

“What?”

“I wish I was popular.” We were debating on whether or not we wanted to walk in. It was eight-30, the party started at seven-30. The two of us took his car, his dad’s Audi Quattro, I suspected that my truck wouldn’t even start and we would end up being there at ten, could be even midnight. Might be an exaggeration.

“Popularity ain’t that big of a deal.” In the dark I could see the rings around his eyes. I think I put too much ink on, he looked somewhat like a raccoon.

“Coming from the person who is popular.”

“I ain’t that popular.”

We were saying the word so much that I felt like it started to lose its meaning. I slipped up a few times saying it, even. “Yes you are. Of course you are.” My hand motioned towards the house, colorful lights pouring out of the curtained windows, the front door open with some unintelligible noise spilling out. “Every person in there knows your name, everyone in there knows who you are. I can count the number of people that know me in there on my right hand.”

“Be nicer to yourself.” It could have been a suggestion, it could have been a command.

I was sitting on the hood of his car, he was standing in front of me, same jacket as always, his hands in his pockets as always. “Well,” I said. “That could help.”

“You’re a lot better than you think you are.”

We were going to get green face paint, though unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to. The most important thing to me was that, in the end, we were matching, and that we were going together. I had him walk in first, through the front door, asd I trailed behind him like a cat trying to take shelter under its owner—I’ve never owned a cat, I don’t know if that’s accurate or not. That’s not entirely true, actually, as I found a stray one for a day and kept it in my room, until my dad threw it out into the street and I never saw it again.

That’s something that I didn’t understand, an unknowable madness—how he was so popular. Yes, he was on the football team, yes he went to parties (usually), yes he would stay after school for long periods of time and talk to everyone. Well, that was probably the reason why. He was strange, incredibly strange. Everything that he did confused me. He was a foreigner from a world that was completely and utterly confusing to me. An alien, he should’ve come down in a flying saucer, there wouldn’t have been any difference, really. Confusing.

Almost instantly there were girls and boys alike trying to talk to him, and even with how short I was compared to him I did my best to try and put myself between them. I saw vampires, ghouls, criminals, Doc (which could have been me), two mummies, someone dressed as the devil, three witches who all came together, a handful of superheroes, a Marty McFly, Darth Vader, a Yoda—I saw a lot, all of the costumes melding into one colorful mirage that I got lost in multiple times. Not to mention the fog, the fake fog, made from a machine, a blanket that did its best to make sure I had no idea where my feet were. Even through my tennis shoes I stubbed my toes a few times. Marianna Cross’s parents had a pool, so it was inevitable for some of the football players to strip off their costumes and jump in the water—some of them didn’t bring swim trunks.

“Are you going to swim?” I asked, interrupting a conversation he was holding with a girl that I didn’t know the name of. She was a blonde, she was trying to get her hands all over Lucas.

“Sorry.” He felt the need to dismiss himself from the conversation. And she was the one who interrupted our conversation in the first place, five minutes before, when I was talking to him about how the punch didn’t taste right. Lucas took a sip of mine, thought for a second, then told me that maybe I was overthinking things. I was overthinking things “What’s that, Victor?”

“Victor?” the girl said. She didn’t understand. Somehow, she knew me, she knew the old name that I had—but he was the only one that knew my new name. “That’s Mark.”

“You know me?” I said, looking up at her slightly; she had four inches on me. She had too much makeup on—she was dressed as a cheerleader, with a skirt and pom poms, though the right pom pom was in her armpit, her hand holding a drink. The same outfit for school, barely even a Halloween costume. “How much of the punch have you been drinking, Luke?”

I looked down into my drink, saw some flakes or something spinning around in it. I drank almost every night, I don’t know how I couldn’t taste it. My stomach turned—if I could have one moment alone. But I didn’t want to be alone, I didn’t want to be by myself at the party.

“So what are you supposed to be?”

Lucas glanced over and down at me; I had broken my eyes away from my drink, I was analyzing the girl. Come to find out she was “some whore”. “We’re matching,” he gingerly pointed at me.

“With him? You’re matching with him?”

“Yeah, why not?” She didn’t like me—I didn’t like her. “Sorry, Victor, this is Stephanie.”

I don’t know if she was trying to patronize me, but she gave me the worst, most fake smile I have ever seen and reached down her hand like I was much shorter than I really was. “Mark.”

My stomach turned a second time. I could feel my eyes squint—I hoped that it wasn’t obvious. “Sarah.”

“Stephanie,” she said.

“Sarah.”

In the bathroom I tried to keep my composure, I tried to reorganize my thoughts, I tried to do something—anything—so that I could walk back out there, attached to Lucas’s hip, try to get the night over and go back to my place where I could relax and fall onto my bed like a brick. In the bathroom I searched for a toothbrush, my breath smelled bad.

And when I returned I got a horrible glare from Stephanie—Sarah, actually. I had interrupted their conversation, just like how she had interrupted my original conversation that I was having with Lucas, my very private conversation. The conversation that I didn’t want interrupted. The conversation that—.

“So as I was saying Luke, I think it’d be fun if, maybe once the season is over, we could go out sometime. What do you think?”

The urge to crush the cup in my hand was strong, but the urge to splash my drink in Sarah Tzu’s face was even stronger. Running mascara, a stained and ruined cheerleader’s outfit, the spoils of my victory.

If only I was that brave.

“I’ll have to see about that, Steph.”

I lied.

She didn’t scream, she was just shocked that some little pygmy like me would do something like that. I bet that’s what she thought I was, a pygmy. A small brick wall got in the way of her getting into Lucas’s pants—that wasn’t her place to be, so I had to exercise her. I thought that she would have cried, but she didn’t. And the dripping mascara made it look like she did anyway.

When I was sitting on the curb of the sidewalk, forced to get out of the party because I was the instigator (they used a much kinder word than that, of course), Lucas joined me. I was his ride, he had no choice but to join me.

“Are you mad at me?” A few leaves rolled past, picked up by a tiny dust devil that tapered off as it went down the black asphalt road, those few leaves then getting stuck to the ground because of how damp everything was. Why was it called a dust devil if everything was wet?

“Why would I be mad at it?” He sat down. “I thought it was funny, I wasn’t planning on doing anything with her.”

“You weren’t?”

“She tried to sleep with every guy on the football team. I’m waiting. For the right person, I might.” His eyes were stuck on his shoes. A leaf fell down, landed at the end of his sneaker.

“Whore.” I stole that line from Amber.

“That’s not nice,” he said, picking the wet leaf up, crushing it in his hand, then throwing it to the right. “That’s kind of true, but that’s not nice.”

I tried writing a play. Big mistake. Amber read it, she said that I lacked “any vision, creativity, or anything that playwrights have”. She said that I especially lacked the ability to put the characters' thoughts into what they said—I’d like to say that she was utterly wrong, I had the ability to do that, I just refused to.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. There’s no need for you to apologize—well, that’s not entirely true. You should probably apologize to her for splashing that in her face.”

Awkwardly, I laughed to myself; I couldn’t tell if I was laughing because I thought it was ridiculous for him to suggest that or because I thought it was funny that I threw the drink in her face.

“You ruined her outfit.”

“I changed the colors, it looks better now.” The school colors were white and red, yet the cheerleading team wore pink and white. It didn’t make sense at all, and now, she wore red and pink. More pink than red.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Can’t argue with that,” he mumbled. “Maybe I can, though. Red and pink don't go well together.”

I nodded, he couldn’t hear my nod, and I didn’t know if he was looking at me.

“You could be popular now. Everyone saw it.”

“You’re right.”

“And I’m sure that there are a whole lot of people that have been wanting to do that to her for a long time. Mary told me that she wasn’t even invited but since she is, allegedly, currently sleeping with another one of the football team players—.”

“Is she?”

“Allegedly.” He put his hands together like he was praying. “It’s always allegedly, never any proof. But since she is sleeping with another one of the football team players she had to come with him.”

“I thought you said it was allegedly, not that she ‘is’.”

“Well.” His hands unfolded, sat on his knees. A car drove down the road, its tires trying to stick to the moist ground, kicking up a few leaves that hadn’t glued themselves down to the asphalt yet. “The cat’s out the bag now, ain’t it?”

“How are you so sure?”

“Bruce cheated on Amber, right? She’s with Bruce now. Bruce cheated on Amber with him.” Apparently, I didn’t put two and two together. My brain couldn’t make four.

“Wait, you’re right.”

Someone shouted from the front door, calling for Lucas. I looked over at him, motioned for him to go. He cocked his head, then looked back, the person calling a few more times—it was Bruce, he was pointing in our direction. Shouted again.

“I think he’s calling for you, Lucas.”

“He’s calling for you.”

That’s when Bruce broke his stance, walking down the sidewalk. Were the two of them even dating? Did it matter? He was going to kick my ass anyways. It was about a forty second walk from the front door to where Lucas and I were sitting, but Bruce didn’t have the widest stride—make it fifty.

“Victor, we should probably go.”

I was right behind him, slipping on the wet asphalt, falling on my back; he grabbed my hand and pulled me up, I was struggling to keep up with him running in front of me. “Lucas, Lucas—Luke, come on!” My right shoe was tied; the air was cold. My head was reeling, imagining what it was going to be like when Bruce grabbed me by the back of my collar, lifted me into the air as my arms dangled and I kicked in every direction, for him to throw me across the road and into the front door of the nearest brick home.

The door was being held open for me, so I jumped in.

Barrelling down the road we kicked up leaves just like the car that came before us.

“She tried to cast a death spell on her.”

“She what?”

“Sarah—Stephanie, whatever her name was. Amber tried to cast a death spell on her.”

“As in, like, magic?”

“Yes.” It sounded so stupid. Of course it sounded so stupid; I didn’t want him to think that I believed in it, I had always refused to believe in it. “I don’t believe in it, I’ve always refused to believe in it.”

“That’s funny. How do you cast a death spell?”

“Have you ever heard of the Necronomicon?”

“Not a clue,” he turned the corner. We had slowed down somewhat, still going faster than we should have been going though. “What is it?”

“H.P. Lovecraft?”

“Also not a clue.”

“Alright.”

“What is it though?”

There was a fascination that he had. He wanted to hear what I had to say. He desired to hear what I had to say—was he trying to entertain my conversation because—.

No. Lucas was my friend. This is what friends did, right?

“H.P. Lovecraft was a writer. He wrote a whole bunch of different stuff but one of the main things in one of his stories was this thing called the Necronomicon, Book of the Dead, Kitab al-Azif.”

“Ain’t that Arabic?”

It was. “Yeah, it is. It is Arabic. So, it’s the Book of the Dead in his story, and it’s full of spells that when you read them out loud someone dies, that’s what a death spell is. None of it’s real, of course. It’s a fictional book in a fictional story. Kind of like the King in Yellow.”

“Another thing that I have no idea about.”

This time I actually laughed, and I knew why I was laughing: he knew about a lot of stuff that I thought he wouldn’t know about, stuff that I didn’t think people like him concerned themselves with, but I had finally found things that could stump him. “The King in Yellow: a book about a fictional play that makes people go crazy when they read it. Or something like that. I haven’t read it.”

“Makes sense as to why you’re not crazy. So is it that you go crazy because the play is magical, or do you go crazy because the play is that bad?”

I didn’t know—like I said, I hadn’t read it yet. I wanted to, but I didn't. “I’ll get back to you when I read it. And with the Necronomicon, you can bring people back from the dead too. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in it. It’s pretty cool.”

“So Amber thinks that she can bring people back from the dead?”

“No, she’s a novice.”

“So she thinks that she can kill people with magic?”

“She’s a novice.”

“I’d like to see some proof of either of those things.”

So would I. I could have mentioned the Shambler from the Stars, the Color from Outer Space, the Shadow over Innsmouth, all those things that I found a weird, obscure, wild interest in, and the majority of which I have yet to read. I did have a copy of The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre—that sat next to Frankenstein. And I still didn’t understand how I didn’t know its second name.

☠ ☠ ☠

“I was accepted.”

“You were accepted for what?”

Amber stood about twelve feet away from the man’s grave—Lucas was at my side, me standing almost practically over the grave. “I was accepted into a coven.

“They exist?”

“Of course they do. A few girls at school—.”

I interrupted her, cutting her off even though I wasn’t looking at her; I was looking at him, him at me. “There’s girls that do the same things as you?”

“It’s taking the world by storm.” No it wasn’t. “Someday, it’ll replace every other religion and people realize that times are going to have to change and that we’re right.” No they weren’t. “And—.” No.

“I get it.”

“Well we were supposed to have a meeting tonight.”

“On a Sunday night? Isn’t that sacrilegious?”

“Isn’t your necklace sacrilegious? Isn’t he—.”

“Stop.” I placed my hand over his chest, having to reach up somewhat. “No. Don’t say that.”

He grunted, looked over at Amber; he understood that we were having a conversation, and maybe he understood what we were saying.

“You can’t come with me.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.” Yes I was—I wanted to peer into a world that I didn’t understand. Well, I understood it, but it was more that I discredited it. And if I was to say that I didn’t believe in something I would have to at least experience it once.

“Yes you were.”

I was looking at her now. “Why can’t we?”

“First of all, you’re boys.”

“So only girls can be witches?”

“Of course.” She was not right. That much I knew.

“I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”

“I’m sure that at least one time they wouldn’t mind, but they definitely would mind a dead man walking into their meeting.”

I was trying to think of what the meeting would be like—a cauldron in the middle, every girl there dressed in black pointy hats and long, black gowns, holding brooms and putting green paint on each other, the event probably being held in a rental hall, the sort of thing that families would use to hold Christmas parties or maybe a random organization would use to hold a pageant.

“How are you sure they would recognize him?”

“He’s Lucas Beaumont waltzing in, as if they were on set for Night of the Living Dead. He’s undead. We brought him back.”

“That’s a good movie.”

“Shut the hell up.”

“I never understood how the chainsaw hand thing worked, it never made sense to me. How can he even move his hand if—.”

“I said, shut the hell up.”

“It’d make the perfect surprise for All Hallows Eve.” What was I even saying—Halloween was twenty-7 days away.

“You don’t get it, do you, Mark? We killed a man.”

So? “I killed a man.”

“Exactly.”

We could have buried him in Chapel Hill Cemetery, maybe then he would have had some neighbors; of course, if we did that it would be extremely suspicious. Here, on the side of the road, about ten yards away from passing cars, hidden within the treeline, who would ever find him? And he cheated on his wife, he didn’t deserve a proper burial. He didn’t bleed—maybe he wasn't human. Humans bleed, and he didn’t.

Lucas’s eyes were what caught me, milky and graying. Even though I couldn’t see within his mind I could see through the window into his soul—”Victor, what are we to do now?” That’s what I thought. That’s what I thought he thought. That’s what I hoped he thought.

“We’ll figure something out,” I said to him quietly, but not quite enough for Amber to not pick up on it.

“You’re not coming with me. He’s not coming with.”

“What are we going to do with him then?”

She thought for a second—I think she was doing it for dramatic effect. “Oh—I don’t know, put him back in the ground? Put him where we got him from so that we don’t have to worry about having to deal with him anymore?” That was a simple answer, yet to me it wasn’t the right answer.

“Wrong. We can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“He’s our problem now.”

“Mark, he’s your problem. I may be an accomplice but I’m going to wash my hands of this.”

I wouldn't be having that. She was the one that came with me to dig him up, she was the one that leaned over the edge of the grave and told me that someone was coming, she was the one that helped me drag him up from the ground and heave him into the bed of my truck. “Not happening.”

“And you're not coming to my meeting if he is.”

Did it matter? Of course not. But I wanted to. I was stubborn. I’ve always been stubborn, that’s what my mother said.

“We’ll bring him back to my house.”

“You can do that, I’m leaving.”

“What time is your meeting?”

“Midnight.”

“Oh no! It’s the witching hour,” I said, poking fun at her. “We have two hours.”

“Not we—you.”

Lucas understood how to get into a car; I was the one that had to open the door, of course, and I was the one that had to buckle his seat belt, but he sat where he was supposed to sit and he stayed seated. When I drove he was deadpan, facing forward, his eyes never coming off the road. Maybe he was mesmerized, maybe the road hypnotized him in a sort of unnatural, ethereal way. She convinced me that she would be able to walk to the meeting in time—outside the Chapel Hill Church. For some reason, the cemetery and the church weren’t attached to each other. If they were, the cemetery would be called Chapel Hill Graveyard; it wasn’t. It was Chapel Hill Cemetery.

When he laid on the floor of my bedroom the year before, he was restless; all of his movements were done in order to try and make himself comfortable, yet he could never achieve the state that he desired. And I would have thought that he would do the same thing, tussling and jostling himself so that he could be casual, comfortable in his own cold skin. He didn’t. I wanted him to be comfortable, I desired for him to feel that he was at ease constantly.

In a way, I suppose, we did abandon her. But I was going to see her once I put him in my room, once I made sure that he couldn’t open the window, once I made sure that the door was locked and my father wasn’t home. Business trip, I came to find out—he never told me that. I don’t know why I even expected him to in the first place though. And it worked out for me in the end, he never was going to see Lucas.

He asked me something before I left; me, he asked me something. I tried his best to vocalize his concerns, he tried his best to form a sentence that I was able to understand:

“Victor, where… going?”

How I felt in that moment—it wasn’t her who I abandoned, it was him who I was abandoning. I was going to be spending time with her and only her for one of the rather uncommon occurrences lately. He was confined to my room—he was trapped. And he didn’t know why.

“I have to go, but I’ll be back.”

“Where going?”

The second time I was hurt. Hurt even more than I already was. “Away.”

There was no emotion on his face. His mouth didn’t change, his eyes didn’t change. There was no expression, there was no joy, there was no sadness, there was no anger or fear or madness or somber or humility or embarrassment or anything that I thought I had the ability to experience. There was nothing but a blank stare—but I could hear it, I could feel it, and I could sense it as he sat on the side of my bed as though he was made of stone.

“I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“Okay.”

“Okay”. Did he really mean that? Was he actually “okay” with me leaving? I couldn’t tell, I couldn’t discern what he was thinking, I wished I could. And, you know, maybe I couldn’t see behind those coffin eyes, maybe I couldn’t figure out what he was thinking, maybe I couldn’t decipher what he was trying so desperately to tell me through his gazes, his pauses, his mouth agape, his eyes seeming as though they wanted to close so that he could fall back asleep as a fly landed on his temple and he didn’t even dare to bat it away. It was too cold for flies, why was one out now? I thought they all died.