The Way It Haunted Him

Chapter 1

Michael Stein wasn’t a good person.

         The incision across his ribs was dripping blood by the time he pulled into the archive’s driveway. He’d spent the entire drive from the city picking at it through his shirt, sliding his thumbnail across the ridges of his ribs and into the valley of what should have turned, by now, to a faded scar, prying at the scab that had been trying valiantly to form for the last seven months.

         Putting the rental car into park, Michael leaned back against the padding of the driver’s seat, staring blankly at the building in front of him, trying to will himself to care that he was about to walk into a world-renowned archive and meet the exceedingly selective archivist while wearing a blood-soaked shirt and pretending that no, it wasn’t painful at all to stand up straight. But, like every other time he’d attempted to summon concern in the time since the altercation, there was just…nothing. A blank spot where his pride in his work and his self-assurance had once been, clawed out by the guilt and the unending, all-encompassing grief.   

         Michael Stein could no longer bring himself to give a shit, not when the world had been turned upside down and it was all his fault. Being here was a reminder of just how much repentance was impossible, and yet how desperate he was to try anyway. Even if nothing he could ever do would make things right, not anymore.

         Now that he’d arrived at the archive, tension was gathering in his shoulders, sweat breaking out on his palms. Breathing in deep caused the burn plaguing the incision to worsen, but he did it anyway, blinking in the weak fall sunlight just fading behind the tops of the old-growth, autumn-hued trees, their branches just starting to go bare. He’d set out early in the morning, not wanting to miss any time in the archives. The curator had been incredibly specific in the terse emails he’d read off of Nate’s pilfered phone, taken out of a bag of personal belongings that the hospital had accidentally left with him, since he was Nate’s emergency contact. There would be no admission to the archive before twilight, and once the sun was fully down, no new researchers would be booked in until the next day. Something about security, although Michael suspected it was one of those eccentricities that he’d learned over the last few years most academics tried hard to cultivate.  

         He held his breath, counting in his head until the burn in his lungs was too much, breathing out through pursed lips. It was one of the few useful things that the therapist Sarah and his family were forcing him to see had done for him over the last several weeks, teaching him these breathing exercises. At least they did something to calm the frantic pace of his heart, even if having one person in the world who knew the truth—someone who legally couldn’t tell anyone else what had happened—hadn’t done as much as he’d hoped to ease the vice he’d been trapped in. 

         His heart hadn’t stopped pounding like this since his boyfriend had died. Not since he’d had to reckon with what he’d done, and what he’d made his boyfriend do. The horrors that he’d inflicted on another person, so thorough and monstrous that he’d caused this, a situation that had trapped him in a prison of his own making. Lies upon lies upon lies, smearing Nate’s name to save his own. Choosing, at the end of it all, to keep being selfish.

         Everyone who knew Nate now thought he was a violent, crazed murderer. Someone who had snapped and attacked a random passerby. Someone who had clearly hidden his real self from his colleagues and his friends and his family.

         Only Michael knew the truth, which was that Nate hadn’t done anything wrong. Michael had. It was all Michael’s fault, not only Nate’s death but the smearing of his reputation. The stain on a brilliant scholar and loyal friend and phenomenal lover.

         This was what he owed Nate. Finishing the work he’d been known for, so that even now that he was dead, something of him would live on. So that the world would have memories of him that persisted, a legacy that wasn’t the one the media had cultivated for him, the obituary based on lies. So that Michael could think of Nate and remember something other than those last, desperate moments. It had always been Nate’s dream to publish his work, and no matter Michael’s personal feelings on the subject his research, he was going to leave his personal trauma and his own thoughts on the matter behind to finish this for Nate, to the best of his ability.

         Michael opened the car door, the chill of the air causing him to blink rapidly and wish he’d put a coat on. The air here was cold and crisp, a rough wind battering his cheeks the moment his skin met the air. The dry rustling of the leaves on the trees made him wince, so like the dry crackle of the absorbent pads laid down on his hospital bed when his persistent picking at his incision caused him to bleed on the sheets one too many times. He put one foot in front of the other, the gravel of the drive crunching underfoot, heading towards the imposing stone house in front of him. He fought back a groan and shifted his backpack to hang loose off his left shoulder, somewhat obscuring the rust-colored patch on his Henley.

         He should have worn the red one. He’d learned over the last few months that it was easier to hide bloodstains if the color matched.

         The wind sent his nose numb before he made it down the long, tree-lined drive and up the expansive stone steps leading up to the front door, but that was alright because the rest of him was numb too. The building didn’t look much like a synagogue anymore, save for the large rose window that had been set high into the front. Anything external on the façade that may have indicated that it was a place of worship had been removed, replaced with ivy creeping over the age-worn bricks. The bushes out front may once have been neatly clipped but had now been left to run somewhat wild. The only reason that Michael didn’t worry he was about to accidentally knock on the door of a very rich person with very poor gardening skills was the small brass plaque that read “Schechter Institute for Judaic Studies.”

         Michael hesitated before ringing the bell, rehearsing his speech in his mind. He hadn’t disclosed to the archivist that he wasn’t Nate—he’d heard far too much over the last months of Nate’s life about how picky the archivist was to attempt to switch researchers on the old man. Eleazar Schechter was something of a legend among the comparative religion crowd studying Judaism, Nate had assured him, having amassed the largest private collection of Eastern European Jewish archival material pertaining to the folklore, magic, and traditions of the Pale of Settlement Jewry.

         But two years ago, he’d stopped admitting researchers to the archives. The doors were shuttered and increasingly terse emails met inquiries to visit the collection—there were excuses first about water damage, and then delays because of renovations needed because of the water damage, and then there just hadn’t been any excuses at all, only silence.  

         Nate’s advisor’s email to Schechter begging to use the archives had gone unanswered. Nate’s hadn’t.

         Michael shifted his backpack so he could pick at his scar more. The fabric of his shirt was wet and tacky under his fingers. He stared down at the blood under his nails, wondered if the archivist would think he was a serial killer, and then decided that he didn’t care and rang the bell anyway. Everyone should know the horrors he was capable of, and maybe it was safer after all if everyone could see who they were dealing with.

         Nothing happened for long enough that Michael took out his phone to check the time, tapping his thumb against the cracked screen to light it up and make sure the clock was right at 6:38pm, the time when his weather app had assured him was the official beginning of sundown. Sarah had been begging him to replace it—it had been broken in the attack, as she and everyone else called it—but he hadn’t been able to. Just like the torn skin on his ribs, he needed to see the damage so that he wouldn’t forget what he had done.

         Not that that was likely. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Nate’s convulsing body lying on the pavement. Every time he woke up from sleep, he started gagging at the memory of waking up with a breathing tube down his own throat. Every time he made the circuit of their small studio apartment, he was plagued by memories of Nate sitting on the couch and reading a book, working on his dissertation at the table, lying in their bed. Memories that only he had, memories that only he would ever be able to dissect, because when the time had come to tell the truth he’d lied.

         Just like the monster in every story he’d ever been told, he’d hidden the truth when it mattered. He’d obscured his own nature. He’d tricked everyone—the police, his family, his friends, his colleagues, the world—into thinking that a brilliant young PhD student had snapped on the sidewalk and attacked a random person. And like the villain in so many stories, he’d gotten away with the lie. It had worked, even when he was silently begging someone to find the truth so that he could be punished appropriately for what he’d done.

         Because he was too much of a coward to admit it, and now his only punishment was the way it haunted him. He hoped it would never stop, that the guilt would never ease, because right now he deserved to be in prison for the rest of his life and the only thing stopping him was his own intense cowardice. His own ability to evade the truth, honed through so many years of lying to everyone around him, all of those who loved him, that it was now as much a part of him as breathing.

         So he was left to punish himself. This trip was part of his repentance. He couldn’t repair what he had done, but he could repent. And owning the harm that he had caused was the first step.

         Michael shifted on his feet, his ribs aching, and was about to ring the bell again when the door swung open. But standing on the other side wasn’t an old man who was apparently notorious for his loudly colored argyle sweaters.

         No, this man was his age, and he was hauntingly beautiful.

         “Nathanial Lieberman?” The man looked down at a printout of an email, slightly crumpled around the edges like it had been well-handled for some time. His eyes flicked back up to Michael. “You look nothing like your website photograph.”

         “Uh.” Michael’s palms were suddenly slick with sweat, and he didn’t know if it was from the edge in the man’s voice, or the fact that he could have walked right off the runway and into this archive. “That’s because I’m not Nate.”

         The man’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline, and the way he cocked his head and narrowed his eyes was disconcerting. He was a few inches shorter than Michael and he looked like he hadn’t eaten in days by the sharpness of his cheekbones and the pale cast to his skin. He had purple bags under his eyes, and his skin was drawn. He looked as depleted as Michael felt inside. Still, his body was lithely muscular, the planes of his chest evident though the thin cotton of his white button-up shirt, the muscles in his forearms ticking as he fiddled the paper in his hands. And his eyes were preternaturally green, fringed with the darkest lashes Michael had ever seen on another man.

         Michael realized that he was assessing the man standing in front of him like he could be another mindless hookup, and reminded himself that this was real life and not an app. That he was here to do something for Nate, not take yet another thing for himself. That he was supposed to be trying to tame the demon inside of him, not feed it.

         “Who are you then?” The man crossed his arms. “This archive is by appointment only, and I’m expecting a Nate Lieberman.”

         “Well,” Michael retorted, “I was expecting an Eleazar Schechter. He’s eighty-six years old. You either aren’t him or you must share your skincare routine.”

         The man’s eyes widened and he looked more than a little taken aback. Michael winced. He hadn’t used to be cuttingly nasty—far from it. But these days, everything came out of his mouth with venom in it. Like the grief he was keeping inside was rotting him from the inside out.

         But then, the man snorted and extended a hand. “Touché. Jacob Schechter. Eleazer is—was—my grandfather. He passed on a year ago. I’ve only just gotten the place back up and running. It’s been something of an ordeal.”

         His hand was warm and dry when Michael grasped it, his grip surprisingly firm for someone who looked like he could break with the lightest touch. Michael’s mouth filled with saliva at the thought, nausea rising up in his throat. He drew his hand back, putting careful distance between himself and Jacob. Michael was, after all, too good at breaking people.

         “May his memory be a blessing.” It took him a moment of swallowing hard to both remember his manners and make sure that he wouldn’t vomit when he spoke. The idea of mourning a grandparent cut him through, the mess of emotions constricting his breathing. Would he manage to be sad when his grandparents died, or would their memories be yet another casualty of his inhumanity? “I’m sorry to confuse you. It’s just that Nate…”

         His voice petered out, leaving him staring at the stone of the steps. Jacob didn’t try to fill in the silence, though, just waited for him to keep speaking. Eventually, he worked up the courage.

         Name what you did.

         “Nate was my boyfriend. He died in an…an incident over the summer.” Michael couldn’t quite bring himself to say I killed him, because he was quite sure that that would lead to Jacob shutting the door and calling the cops. And even though that would have been the best possible outcome, the only one that would allow Michael to properly take responsibility, he had already established over and over that he was far too much of a coward to turn himself in. “I’m here to continue on with his research. His dissertation. The project on folktales illuminating very real, unexplained phenomena which were dismissed because of the religion of Eastern European Jews and the way they were seen as liars by larger society.”

         The last part came out in a rush. Michael was a translator, not a scholar, and so reciting an argument sat strangely on his tongue. His job was, and had always been, to faithfully convey the words and meanings of another person. It was what he’d gone to school for, what he’d won awards for, and how he’d made a decent-enough living that the people in his life were proud of him.

         “I’m sorry to hear that.” Jacob was looking at Michael like he might collapse. His eyes kept flicking down to Michael’s ribs, which Michael supposed was quite understandable given the fact that the gray fabric was stained in blood. “May his memory be a blessing.”

         “It’s—it’s from surgery.” Michael gestured helplessly to his ribs. “I have an incision that won’t heal. I’m sorry. I know it’s disturbing.”

         Because you keep picking at it, Sarah’s voice taunted him. She was his best friend and had been since they’d been in the same master’s program, and apparently took that as license to nag him about how the surgical scar inflicted when his lung was reinflated and his shattered ribs repaired wasn’t some modern-day mark of Cain. He shifted on the stoop, dead leaves crunching under the heels of his sneakers.

         Jacob just shrugged. “We all bleed. God knows that I’ve seen enough blood in my life to be used to it by now. Come in.”

         He stepped aside and gestured for Michael to enter, and he did. “I know it’s not kind for me to show up basically unannounced, but I didn’t want to risk losing the spot.”

         “Are you still here to do the research that was discussed in our correspondence?” Jacob closed the door behind him, and the rush of warmth from stepping inside made Michael’s cheeks tingle in a faintly unpleasant way. “Because those are the materials that I’ve sequestered for you. It hasn’t been easy getting the archive back up and running, and so I’m afraid that I won’t be able to help you if there’s other materials that you need.”

         “No, no.” Michael looked around at the entryway, which had been decorated with items that were clearly from the building’s use as a synagogue—cases full of decorative pointers for reading Torah, embroidered clothes hanging on the wall in varying states of decay that likely covered the Holy Ark in some far-flung synagogue. The lighting and the carpet were clearly modern, but with the huge oak staircase dominating the entryway, and the way the walls had been turned into part of an archive, Michael couldn’t help but feel that he had stepped back a bit in time. The smell of old books—musty, slowly decaying paper, a smell that still managed to be comforting—permeated the air, along with something sharper. “It’s my fault that I’ve surprised you, and I’m really just here to continue Nate’s research. I’m going to finish his dissertation. For him.”

         Jacob leaned against the wall, perilously close to a beautifully crafted menorah balanced on a small table. The lights in the entryway were low, as though they’d been put on a dimmer turned all the way down, and in the soft, warm glow, Jacob was gaunt but still undeniably beautiful. “That’s very kind of you. Did you work on the same thing, or is this a tribute to him?”

         Michael couldn’t help but give a grim laugh at that. “I’m not a scholar. Nate and I met—” He broke off, because this was the first time that he could remember telling anyone about his relationship with Nate. The word boyfriend had slipped out so causally moments ago, and now he was remembering himself, remembering the fact that he’d insisted on hiding what they’d had from the entire world. It was the reason they were in this mess.

         But now was a time for confession, and Jacob Schechter didn’t know anything about what had happened seven months ago in a city seven hours away. And something magnetic in Jacob’s eyes was coaxing part of the truth out of him, like a fisherman reeling in catch. “Nate and I met when he hired me to complete a translation project. I was looking over documents he’d collected on a research trip to Poland and he was giving me the context for his work.  Nate was arguing in his dissertation that folktales were illustrating a real phenomenon, and that household demons actually were plaguing Ashkenazi households. Me, I…didn’t. I don’t. We started arguing about it, and we were talking so long that we ended up going to dinner to keep up the discussion, and that was it.”

         “So you don’t believe in demons?” Jacob brushed a lock of dark hair out of his eyes. It was shorn close on the sides, but left long on top, a trendier haircut of the kind Nate would have gotten. “Not even the small household ones?”

         “No.” He shifted his backpack. Its weight was making his ribs twinge, and this was veering uncomfortably close to conversations—arguments—he’d had over and over with Nate. He didn’t know why the archivist was so interested in this part of things. “I don’t. I was raised by my grandparents who were very much believers in mazzekin and dubbyks and all sorts of old folktales. They wouldn’t drink water left out overnight and they put salt across their windowsills. And, well, I think it’s all bullshit.”

         “Too bad.” Jacob smirked. “Because this place? It’s full of them.”

         Michael froze. Every muscle in his body tensed up at once, the way his parents’ cat would go stock-still if she thought there was a threat. “Demons aren’t real.”

         It was the one thing that he knew to be true, that he’d argue for to the end of time, even if in every other sense he’d roll over and show his stomach if someone disagreed with him strongly enough. Because those folktales were stories that scared people told themselves in the dark, and now they were nothing more than ways for an older generation to stubbornly cling to harmful ideas that hurt real people. They allowed people like his grandparents to cling to old prejudices and avoid confronting the truth when they needed to the most.

         Jacob’s answering laugh and the gleam in his eye went straight to Michael’s gut in a way nothing had since…a long time ago. Sometime in between being approached about the wildly well-funded project that would have sent him to Lithuania for a year to translate an entire recently discovered archive into English, and now. “Tell that to the mazzekin who crawl all over this place. They’re mostly harmless, I promise. But when your notes go missing or your pen caps end up lodged somewhere they shouldn’t be, that’s what’s happening. The best thing is simply to learn how to live with them. They coexisted very peacefully with Eleazar.”

         Michael opened and closed his mouth a few times. Jacob looked serious and not like he was trying to pull one over on him. And how hard could he argue for the idea that there was no such thing as household demons that created minor annoyances when he was, in fact, here to do research to prove that such a thing was true?

         The tension made his stomach ache.      

         Nate would have loved this, his treacherous brain supplied. And then his equally treacherous eyes began to water, and his traitor of a throat began to close. Because he could see it, the way Nate would have been giddy to meet the archivist who had household demons inhabiting his shelves. A research trip and a practicum, all in one. He would have gotten so excited that he wouldn’t even notice his glasses sliding down his nose or that he was close to knocking something over with his massive six-foot-three bulk, a mere four inches taller than  Michael but so much sturdier. And just like always, Michael would have delighted in the way that his boyfriend was so intelligent, so passionate, and so alive with the desire to learn, even if he disagreed with the subject.  

         “Are you alright?”

         The question brought Michael back to himself and he swallowed painfully, realizing that there were actual tears running down his cheeks. Fuck, he hadn’t started crying in public since his first trip to Whole Foods after he was allowed to leave the house again, when he saw Nate’s favorite brand of coffee on the shelf and started to sob in the dry goods aisle, all of his buried grief coming to the surface.

         “Yes.” He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hands. “I’m so sorry. I’m fine.”

         “I was going to offer you the spare bedroom, but if you’re that distressed by the thought of household demons, perhaps that wouldn’t be wise?” Jacob stared down at the ground, his cheeks a bit flushed.

         Michael bit his lip to hide the fact that he was taken aback. He hadn’t known that the archive had a guest room—he’d never heard of such a thing, and his contract translation projects had sent him to archives all around the world—but he supposed it made sense with the place being a former synagogue instead of a purpose-built archive like most of the modern ones. Plenty of rooms probably meant that they could be used for other things.

         “I mean.” Michael’s voice came out scratchy again, and he swallowed past the gradually receding lump in his throat. “I booked an Airbnb in town for the next two weeks, but I’m on a tight budget. I wouldn’t say no to free lodging. That’s very kind of you.”

         He was self-funding this trip, and he’d had to push back or forgo three different projects in order to do it. Combined with not having been able to work reliably for the last several months, his bank account was suffering. The funder of the large Lithuania gig had told him that the project was still waiting for him, that he’d have as long as he needed to recover from the “horrific mugging,” as she’d put it in an email, and that the archive wasn’t going anywhere. But until he was able to travel internationally to take that on, he was left watching his bank account slowly deplete. Unlike Nate, he wasn’t loaded.      

         “Of course.” Jacob nodded, crossing over the foyer to gently pry Michael’s bag away from his shoulder. When the back of his knuckles ghosted over Michael’s bicep, he felt that gut-punch sensation again. He couldn’t help but notice that Jacob smelled like books and pachouli and the slightest hint of woodsmoke, an altogether intoxicating combination. “Here, let me take this from you. I can show you to the room. You may wish to get cleaned up before I introduce you to the archive.”

         “Thanks,” Michael managed to get out. “I appreciate it.”

         “Of course.” Jacob paused with Michael’s bag over his shoulder, one foot on the bottom stair. “And I should have said, like Eleazer always did—welcome to the Schechter Institute. May you find truth here.”

         The hair on the back of Michael’s neck pricked, his eyes locked with Jacob’s, a sense of something like foreboding running through him.

         He wondered if he would find truth, and if he did, what it would be, and what it would mean for him when he found it.