Chapter Twelve: Fire and Brimstone
Two hands push Matt, roughly, and he stumbles, going down hard on the living room floor, rattling the whole house. He flounders, entirely disoriented at the sudden violence of the motion, having been lip-locked with the love of his life only moments before—
The love of his life—
He looks up at Jonah in dawning fear, feeling used and shaken at the look of absolute horror on the reincarnation's face, looking like he'd just seen some eldritch fucking monster rise from the depths, something unholy and damned. Matt staggers to his feet, immediately reaching for the medium, catching him by the wrist. Jonah's face twists into an expression of rage, so absolute, and Matt's heart fucking shatters, falling to the restored floor, as jagged and dangerous as shards of a mason jar littering the banks of a creek.
Matt's feeling of absolute devastation is compounded ten fold as he's dealt a searing slap, an open-handed blow, sharp and strong, from the medium.
The kid is crying, choking and hyperventilating on his own panic, wild-eyed and shaking as he staggers backwards away from Matt, each step feeling miles long.
"Jonah—"
"No!" he stammers, pointing at Matt like he's a villain, like he's some man, some stranger.
"I saw it, I saw you! I saw your fucking dream, Matthew—"
Jonah dry heaves, and Matt stumbles forward, as if worried, and Jonah makes a sound like someone shot.
"I saw the way you looked at me, Matthew!"
Matt's fast—he's always had good reflexes—as he catches Jonah's Jonah's wrist in his grip, and yanks him back, stopping the kid mid-flight.
"Jonah—"
"Let me the fuck go!" He wails, pushing at Matt with his free hand, trying to yank the other free with all his might.
"Fucking stop—" Matt seethes, his teeth gritted as he tries to restrain the other boy, wrist bones creaking in his palm.
He finally gets his other hand on one of Jonah's shoulders, manhandling the medium to face him. Tears flow down his cheeks in fast-moving streams that break at his chin, wavering before plinking to the worn wooden floors of Hell House.
"How long?" Jonah asks.
"What?"
"How long, Matthew? Have you thought of me like that?"
Matthew's mask of anger and desperation crumples as a new emotion rises in his sepia-colored eyes—grief.
"Forever?" He replies, his voice wavering with so many years spent possessed with what he had lost.
Jonah finally goes still in Matt's grip. The necromancer can't name the emotion he sees in Jonah's ever-expressive gaze. Something depthless and looming…he can only determine the emotions that look isn't.
"Is that why you brought me back?"
Matthew falters, hesitates, for too many seconds too long, half formed words rising and dying from his mouth. He stares into Jonah's flushed, tear-damp face.
It's pain. He realizes. The emotion swimming in the former-ghost's eyes is unfathomable pain.
"What will you do?"
"What? What do you mean—"
"What will you do," Jonah continues, so low he's almost whispering, as if afraid to wake someone, "if I don't love you back?"
"You don't have to." Matthew immediately replies.
He finally releases his grip on Jonah. The reincarnation steps back from his creator, and his eyes find the ground. He wraps a hand around his wrist, holding it to his chest. Matt winces as he spies the redness blooming in a ring around ghost-pale skin.
"Shit, Jonah, I'm so—"
"Did you just assume I would?"
"What? No, I—"
"Did you just assume I was a fairy?" Jonah's voice is distant. He won't look Matt in the eye.
"What? Jesus, no, what the fuck, kid!" It could almost be funny. If Matt could bring himself to laugh.
"You just thought I'd be your doll, then? Your baby—"
"No! No, I didn't assume anything of you—"
"You're lying."
Matt's gut lurches, his heart skipping a beat. He takes a step forward, hand outstretched as if to say, I surrender. Jonah flinches at the movement.
It smells like smoke—like something's burning—
"I didn't even ask to be here. You didn't even ask me—"
"I tried—"
"I don't even want to be here. How could I live like this? How am I supposed to look into your face every day? Knowing I'm not who you want me to be—"
"You don't have to be anyone for me—you just have to be yourself—"
"I don't know who I am, Matthew. Who am I supposed to be? I'm not even—"
Jonah pauses mid-sentence, struggling with what to say. A beat passes between the two of them, the cancer survivor and his savior. Matt can't bring himself to follow Jonah, as the medium leaves the room.
Matt's vision wavers, spidery at the edges. He looks down at his shaking hands and wonders if he's having a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. For the first time in a long while, he feels the urge to pray to God. What am I supposed to do?
No one answers, and the professor starts gathering things with numb hands. Everything his brain can muster as important. His cigarettes, wallet, and car keys, his laptop, and a bottle of whisky, carried to his truck and thrown loose into the passenger seat. He shoves the key in the ignition. Fingers numb, he fails to start it properly three times, revving and clicking, before the engine finally turns over. The dashboard lights blink to life, casting the devastated, wild-eyed man in a cold blue haze.
Eyes unseeing, Matt finally remembers. He remembers the dream, all of that pale skin slippery and wanting, and Jonah's gaze, in that dream, so full of the love Matt had projected unto the teen he forced back to life, the soul he ripped out of the ether and trapped inside a cursed haunted house. Every moment of this dream flashes in his mind's eye, so slick and warm, organic and so irrevocably damning, and Matt punches it out, banging his fists over and over on his steering wheel, the Jonah from his dream mocking him with his twisted little mouth and his writhing little body, arching up to meet his hands—
The vision fades eventually, and Matt comes back to his body to the sound of Blue Oyster Cult's Burnin' For You, of all songs, playing over the car radio. Matt sags, staring mindlessly, the only sound in his stream of consciousness, his own internal voice, singing along as if it's the most natural thing in the world. Home in the valley, home in the city, home isn't pretty, ain't no home for me…
He mumbles along, finally coming back to himself. He remembers to click his seatbelt and he cranks the window down, gasping in the cool night air. He searches for his cigarettes, pulls one forth, and lights one with shaking hands. He breathes in the nicotine, burning menthol, a small little smile warping his face. He backs down the driveway, slowly and careful trundles through town. Air blasts through the truck when he finally hits the highway, drowning out his voice, low and rough, still mumbling mindlessly along, muscle memory—I'm living for givin' the devil his due. And I'm burnin', I'm burnin', I'm burnin' for you…I'm burnin', I'm burnin', I'm burnin' for you…
Jonah's pale, vintage face remains emblazoned in the front of Matthew's mind, blameless and unassuming, and Matthew wonders just how badly he's manipulated his own perception of the dead boy.
Jonah is having a very strange dream. He's dressed all in green and riding a German Shepard—Bruno—like a horse, galloping across open fields, a sword strapped to his side. Eventually, he comes upon a house, and inside he finds Hell, a writhing mass of spiders with human faces and limbs, all marred and scarred with Latin, cloudy white eyes forever staring, unblinking. He fights them, and they burst into clouds of dust. In the basement of the house he finds a young Matthew, thin and sickly-looking, unscarred but covered with radiation burns. Matthew is scared of him. Jonah has to drag the weak boy out of the house himself before he sets the building ablaze. Jonah feels happiness, elation, even, as he watches it burn. He turns to Matthew to thank him, It's thank him for giving him the strength to burn it all away, but when he turns, he lifts his sword. He screams as, out of control, arm jerking as if pulled by a puppeteer's string, he runs Matthew through with his sword, straight through the chest. Matthew drops like a sack of sand, blood running and pooling from him endlessly, his brown eyes already clouded and unseeing—his eyelids are gone—
Jonah snaps awake, flailing and fearful in a tiny cramped space, banging fists on metal, he's choking, he's burning—
He falls out of the crematory, banging his head on the mortuary floor, sprawled in the low light of the basement windows. Disoriented, the room spins, all white, the half-finished mural swimming sickeningly before eventually coming into focus. He sits up and groans, feeling the back of his head gingerly, rubbing his face with sore hands. The medium doesn't even remember how he got into the crematory in the first place.
Distantly, a phone is ringing. He listens to it before it truly registers. The phone is ringing. It hangs up but soon starts ringing again, sounding insistent. Urgent. Why isn't Matthew—
Matthew.
It all comes rushing back.
Jonah is up and off the floor in a blink, unlocking the mortuary with clumsy hands, pounding up the stairs. He snatches up the receiver but it's too late. He stares at the wall and listens to the dial tone, a dead feeling of horror settling in his gut, dragging him to the floor. He listens to it for a while before hanging up the phone. He presses the button to redial the number that just called, and his heart leaps when he recognizes the series of numbers. It's Matthew's phone number. But when calls it, a woman's voice answers, tinny and unnatural sounding.
"The number you are trying to reach may be out of service at this time. To leave a message, begin speaking after the tone—"
Jonah slams the phone back into the cradle and dials again, and again, getting the same damned message each time. He finally gives up, storming away, almost to the front door when the phone beeps. He rushes back to it, finding one of the little translucent buttons is blinking red. He takes the receiver in hand, cradling it to his ear, and presses it.
A shrill beep sounds, and Matthew's voice echoes through.
"Jonah—"
"Matthew!" Jonah cries, frantic, his hands wringing in the cord.
"—left last night, I…figured you didn't want to see me. Which is understandable, kid—"
Matt's voice sighs through the receiver with a crackle. Jonah's heart is in his throat. Couldn't he hear him?
"Matthew?"
"—wouldn't want to see me either, after…after what I did, to you, oh—God—"
Matthew's voice wavers, the sound of his tears tinny and distant. It's a record, Jonah realizes, a cold feeling of despair washing over him. Like the lady said…Matthew had left a message.
"I'm so disgusted with myself, Jonah, I never…I never should have brought you back to life, dear one, I'm just so selfish and stubborn I—I just wanted you, here with me, so badly. I do…I do love you, unfortunately. I'm so sorry."
Matthew cries on the other end, miles away, God-knows-where, probably already somewhere across the county, a different state by now for sure, probably going back to that university he teaches at, back to the life he so willingly left behind, left on hold to spend his days with Jonah in his manufactured little slice of Heaven—
Heaven is here, if you want it, had been held out as a willing offering by Matthew's scarred hands, and Jonah had declined. Jonah had turned it down in favor of this lonely Hell, more catholic in taste than the Devil.
"I'll leave you alone. It shouldn't be all bad there, I think…I called and arranged to have groceries and cigarettes delivered to you every Sunday, the number for the grocery store is (860) 621-2128. Make sure you write that down. You can call to change the order, when you need to, whenever, request different food or whatever, and if you need other supplies, like…art stuff, or books, or…whatever, they can fetch that too."
"And, Jonah…if you ever…if you ever want me to end it…end this all, I mean—me and you, your existence—call them and tell them it's time. They'll call me, they know what to do, and I will. The second you need me to, I will. I…goodbye, Jonah."
The call ends with a dial tone, and Jonah screams, banging the receiver on the wall in frustration. He calls Matthew's number again and again, that same fucking message each time, and Jonah is absolutely livid to realize Matthew had his phone number disconnected.
He goes upstairs, one slow step at a time, until he's standing at the foot of Matthew's bed. The room looks ransacked, clothes strewn around, the closet open and half empty. A few shaking steps forward, and Jonah slowly sinks down onto the bed, rolling over to bury himself face-first in Matthew's pillows, pulling their comforter up and over his head, encasing himself in a soft little cave. Surrounded by Matthew's smell, so terribly familiar and comforting, he traces the finger-shaped marks around his wrist.
He cries for what feels like forever, unaware of the shifting, changing outside, of the sun setting, rising, and eventually setting again, trapped alone in the eternal walls of Hell House.
Days have passed like this, though how many, Jonah is unsure. Every few hours, he makes a pilgrimage downstairs to the phone to dial Matthew's old number, memorized by now. He hates that woman's voice. He listens to Matthew's final message frequently, just to hear his voice again. It's wrong, though. Matthew sounds so damnably sad in it, his voice hoarse and rough, all but worn away from screaming at each other, from hours spent crying. After some time, Jonah finds he's memorized the message, and it starts playing in his head on repeat.
He drinks gin straight from the bottle to get rid of it, but that doesn't work. He does this repeatedly too, on the days he can muster the energy to unscrew the cap will his throat to work. He blacks out, too, several times. By the phone, halfway up the stairs, over and over in Matthew's bed. One day, he doesn't know which and around one time, he runs out of the house drunk and crying, making it all the way to the sidewalk before his limbs start to burn horribly. He'd looked down and watched as his fingers started crumbling to ash, morbidly fascinated, letting them disappear down to the second knuckle before he'd staggered back into the house. The next time he woke up, his fingers were back.
One time, he'd called the grocery store. The man on the other end had answered with a question, asking Jonah what changes he wanted to make to the order. Jonah had fumbled his speech, slurring, asking desperately if they knew how to reach Matthew. The man had told him he wasn't allowed to disclose that information, and he'd hung up.
The nightmares persist. Though they vary in general tone and theme, they are all most definitely horrifying. Jonah running, about to leap, when he falls into a May Day fire and burns alive, again. Jonah in the pews of the church father insisted he attend, until the sceances started, and the townsfolk ran them off. Matthew sits in the pew next to him, a hand on Jonah's thigh, slipping up, unbuttoning Jonah's trousers as he listens to the church service, an innocent expression on his face. Matthew, ashen-faced and pleading, as the doctor—the one that looks too much like Father, so much like him he just has to be—drags him down the hallway hospital, kicking and screaming, to the electroshock room. He's had that dream a few times, though the people in it change. Sometimes he's the one being dragged, and sometimes, the doctor looks like Peter Campbell.
In one particularly horrible and vivid dream, he and Matthew are making love on the bank of the creek. Jonah feels pain, it hurts, and he looks down to realize that Matthew is stabbing him in the stomach, over and over, with a knife, his cock in his other hand. When he finishes, and he does, with a groan and a shudder, Matthew picks up Jonah's corpse and slings it across his shoulder like a rucksack. He carries it all the way up the creek and to the clearing. He dumps Jonah's body into the well before sliding the slab back home, trapping him down there. Forever.
The nightmare he has the most frequently, however, is a memory. The memory of the night before he died. The memory of another mouth, a different mouth, on his. The memory of Father's face, and his hands, and how badly they had hurt him—pinned down, broken, to the cold wooden floor.
Jonah wakes from one such dream to a sound he hasn't heard in absolutely decades. He thinks he's imagining it at first, and he lays still, listening intently, blood running cold as the doorbell rings again, twice this time, persistent. He almost trips on the stairs, he runs down them so fast.
"Matthew! Matt!" He exclaims, scrabbling to wrench the door open. He does, and his feeling of intense excitement fades immediately, morphing into confusion at the stranger on the porch. He opens the screen door and steps outside, barefoot and shivering in what seems to be the very early morning, the streetlamps still on.
It's the elderly lady from the house next door, the one who had seen him. Her eyes are quite striking, Jonah observes, as her gaze holds his own for a few seconds longer than most used to, before they skirt to his feet, traveling slowly up, literally looking him up head to toe.
"Well, don't you look a state," she admonishes in a voice rough from years of smoking.
Jonah can't help but laugh, an off-sounding cackle that doesn't quite reach his eyes.
"You're quite a sight too, ma'am. Though the pattern of your house dress is lovely. It compliments your house shoes," he snipes back, irrationally angry at the elderly woman for daring to be anyone but Matthew, returning home.
The woman laughs, and it does reach her emerald eyes, crinkling skin as thin as the onion pages of a Bible.
"Still just as clever, I see," she states with a sigh, "still as smart as a whip."
"Uh, excuse me?" The familiarity of her statement, spoken as if she knows him, settles a chill deep in Jonah's bones.
"Grandma! Shit, Grandma, get back over here!" A voice calls, frantic, and Jonah turns to spot the young woman from before bounding down the steps of their house, running over the lawn.
"You're that boy," the old woman states, ignoring the other woman's call, "the Aickman boy."
Jonah freezes, his blood running cold, as the young woman runs up, grabbing her grandmother by the arm.
"I told you you can't go wandering off on your own, stay in the fucking house!"
The elderly woman levels her granddaughter with a stare that could freeze over before turning, slowly making her way down the steps.
"I'm so sorry about that," the young woman gushes. She won't meet Jonah's eyes. Coward.
"I turned my back for a second and she was just gone! She's confused, my grandmother—"
"It's fine," Jonah interrupts, already stepping back inside to shut the screen door.
"Wait! Wait, uh…Granny and I saw you out here, the other day…crying? Are you okay?"
"I'm outstanding."
"Well, um…she's worried about you. Granny, I mean. That man, the one with all the scars? He took off in one hell of a hurry…I was out taking the dogs out, it was the middle of the night—"
"Do you know how to reach him? Matthew Campbell?" Jonah interrupts again, his tone one of desperation and urgency.
"Er, uh…no. But, um, I know what it's like, when someone leaves you. Breakups are crushing, dude. If you need anything, like food or anything, company, you can come over sometime. Granny and I are home all day, every day."
"So am I. But I can't leave this house. Thanks for your concern, though." Jonah shuts her down, nauseous. Breakups. How fucking trivial.
He shuts the door in her face and locks it. He trudges back upstairs, fully intending on crawling right back into bed, when he catches sight of himself in the full-length hallway mirror. He certainly is in a state, his nose wrinkling in disgust at his own reflection. He's still wearing the clothes he was wearing the day Matthew left, too-big sweatpants that pool and sag awkwardly at his hips and crotch, and one of Matthew's strange, nonsensical band shirts. His hair looks lank and greasy, dull and plastered to his skull. His skin has a weird color to it, almost yellowing, and his face looks absolutely gaunt, his lifeless eyes sunken into their sockets, ringed red and adorned with bags that have their own bags, which have their own bags. I look like a corpse, Jonah thinks, and laughs, a hollow-sounding thing. Absolutely, horrendously pathetic. Disgusting. Some creature, crawled from the gutter, some body, washed up and bloated.
Jonah strips and goes to the bathroom, starting up the shower, the way Matthew had showed him. He stands under the spray, staring at the tile wall as the water pounds his back, so hot it stings.
You're that Aickman boy.
We saw you crying.
Jonah yells, a wordless, angry sound, and punches the wall. He does so again and again, drowning out the sound of their strange, uncaring voices with the sound of his knuckles on the damp tile. Again and again till his knuckles bruise and bust, blood running down his wrist, dripping to the floor to swirl red and then pink, before disappearing down the drain. He stares at the blood, fascinated, so bright red, relishing the pain traveling through his hand and wrist and up his arm like little electrical currents. He hasn't truly experienced pain in this new life, he certainly hasn't bled yet. It looks so real, he marvels. It is real.
Jonah's vision tunnels black at the edges. It's like sighing, the way he leaves his body.
Dissociating to float away from it all, warm and secure, as his body loses it, a mess of sound and limbs as he thrashes, banging every limb and joint as hard as he can. Even after the body slips and falls, banging its head with a cracking sound on the edge of the tub, the limbs and lungs just keep on going, kicking and thrashing.
It's been quite a few decades since he's had quite a fit, Jonah ponders. If he were in the hospital, they would have injected him with sedatives. If he were home, his Father would have pinned him down under hands and curses and beat him back, beat the emotion and panic right out of him. With no one to intervene, it lasts for what feels like forever, until the body grows sluggish, banged up and bloody.
By the time Jonah comes back to himself, he's too exhausted and sore to move, staring up into the now-cold spray of water. He feels it rain down on him and turns the conflict over and over in his mind. He had spent the entirety of his first life denying his homosexuality. He'd been confronted with it, done his best to hide it. He was always figured out though, and punished for it. Father had even threatened to turn him back into the hospital, after he found out. He'd tried to exorcize it out of Jonah himself, tried to bang it out of him with the Bible and his fists. Jonah had always thought it was a little ironic though, how quick Father had been able to condemn him, be disgusted with him, when it was the old man who dug up bodies and turned out graves, defacing and dehumanizing the dead, tampering with souls and flesh. Of all the damned and cursed things Jonah participated in in his previous lifetime, he would never have assumed his preference for the male gender would've been the curse to haunt him in his next life.
But the more he thought about it, the more he traces the lines and curves of Matthew's face in his mind's eye, the more it made sense. They'd changed each other's lives, after all. According to Matthew, their initial interactions in this damned and inevitably burned house, had haunted him, remained in the forefront of his mind even after he was granted a second chance at a healthy life at seventeen. Jonah just couldn't wrap his head around how long Matthew had spent dwelling…he'd spent his whole life saving his money and studying his ass off just so that one day, he'd be able to come back to the house, be able to give birth to and then gaze upon Jonah's face, unmarred and whole again.
How ungrateful Jonah has been, to look directly into the face of love and devotion just to cast it aside and damn it to Hell. Why should Jonah even care if they're queer? Out of everything the two of them have been through and have done, to earn themselves places in Hell, in the Devil's favor, wanting to romp around in a bed together is probably the least of their offenses.
Jonah smiles and summons a weak little laugh, turning this mental image over and over in his mind's eye again, as his vision blackens and tunnels at the edges, slipping away from himself again. Clean sheets and dirtied bodies. Matthew's hands and all his skin, scarred and taunt, warm brown eyes and his handsome, timeless face. Always watching Jonah, always adoring, waiting gently for Jonah to make up his mind, to get over it and come join him, truly, at his side.