Chapter 14 – Resurfaced
When I phased out of Mark’s body, he was in a daze. I glided to the corner of the room, hiding behind his dresser, and watched him. He was lying there, his chest covered in his cum, confused about what had just happened. His arms were at his sides as his chest quickly rose and heavily sank.
“What the fuck!” He said, looking down at himself, finally realising the mess he’s in. A thick serum of cum was embedded in the fur of his chest and stomach.
He rolled over to his bedside table, grabbed a handful of tissues, and dabbed himself clean.
When I stood up, I had accidentally knocked over an empty beer can from the top of his dresser, and he looked up, mid-wipe.
“Who’s there?!” He blinked. It was still a bit of a habit for me to freeze when eyes flew my way, but when I went and moved away from the dresser, he did something nobody’s ever done before. His gaze followed me.
He could see me.
The air grew icy, just enough to cause goosebumps to form on his forearms. I looked down at my hands and then held them up and twisted them.
I still had that greenish glow, but my form was flickering, but then, for what I can only assume was out of my desire for him to see me, I became more solid.
Still a little translucent, but I was otherwise corporeal.
He didn’t scream, nor did he flinch; instead, he widened his eyes. There was an ache in his voice.
“Eddy?”
I shifted forward; my feet hovered over his carpet. My form was clean this time. No rot or grim or green glow. Just me. The way I might’ve looked as if I was allowed to live.
He sat up, shifting back slowly, and threw his tissue to the side and quickly readjusted himself. He covered his body with the blanket. Stayed still, cautious that any other movement would scare me off.
“Hello Mark.” My voice echoed slightly. That was new. Must be the new form, because I swear, I’m not doing this voice on purpose to make Mark’s haunting even scarier. Although it was definitely a bonus.
“What are you doing here?” He asked, voice cracking. “I looked everywhere for you. You haven’t aged a day!”
Looked everywhere for me? You fucking liar.
I had felt a lump form in the pit of my gut that travelled up through my mouth and steeped as an insult.
I wanted to hurt him. Make him feel as much pain as I did when he had thrown me in the bin.
I eyed him up and down. “Whereas you have let yourself go.”
That must have caught him off guard, because he snorted, “Ha!” Seeing that I didn’t laugh with him, he composed himself and shook his head.
“When I left you there in the clearing after I slapped you, I felt awful and came looking for you, I swear. I came back to look for you, but the other guys said you left.”
Was he gaslighting me? “Don’t bullshit me, Mark. I know what happened. You beat the living shit out of me and left me to die in a bin!”
Mark stammered. “W…what?”
“Are you deaf, fucker? You beat me. Killed me. You never kept your anger in check!”
He hung his head and shifted in the bed. I hovered forward, coming into contact with the edge of his bed frame. I was drawn to him. Is this shame, regret, confusion he’s feeling? Did he truly think I was alive this whole time? Why would he be confused about something he clearly did?
After a long pause, he finally looked up at me. Looked at how I was floating, finally seeing me for the spectre I am. “You think I killed you?” He swallowed. “I didn’t, I swear.”
I froze. For a moment, I believed him. For one moment.
“Bullshit! I’m DEAD, Mark! And you did this to me!” I screamed at him with enough volume, grit and rage that showed how much pain and anguish I was in. Muffin barked from the laundry, but Mark didn’t tell her off.
He shook his head, looking down. “I hit you, yes.” He looked at me, his eyes full of honesty. “Only once. I regretted it. Was angry. I hated myself for it. For a lot of things. But I never meant to—”
“So, you did hit me?” I spat. “I didn’t just imagine it!”
“Yes. I was ashamed. I treated you like trash—” he winced at the word, making him pause for a moment.
“But after I slapped you, I left. When you fell… I ran away from you to my car and drove off. I didn’t kill you.
I think something happened after I left the clearing.
I didn’t know you were murdered there, Eddy.
” Tears were welling in his eyes. “You have to believe me.”
It made no sense. Rage and grief had written him into my memory like a villain. But it wasn’t my blood on his hands. Now I wasn’t so sure. And it wasn’t just written on my face.
My form flickered like static.
“What do you mean you didn’t know?”
“I saw the missing posters your mum and her friends put up. I was even brought in for questioning, but they cleared me of any charges. I thought… I hoped….” He pressed his fists into his forehead.
“I thought you ran away like you always said you would. I thought my moving away had inspired you. Then I found out you had died. They found your remains in the dump.”
“I was left in a bin to rot” I whispered. “This entire time I thought you did it. How can I believe you? What if you’re lying now?”
He stared at me, unshifting his gaze. My eyes locked on him. And then he did something I wasn’t prepared for.
He held out his hand, palm up. Not to touch me, but in offering.
“Look,” he said. “How can I prove it wasn’t me?”
I stared at his hand as if it was a curse in itself. A trap. A test.
But something in me trembled. Some old instinct from when I believed he could be better. That maybe he hadn’t been the one. That maybe, all this time, I’d been rotting with the wrong man’s sin etched into my soul.
I stepped forward.
My fingers hovered above his palm.
I hesitated.
He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. Just waited.
And I…
I took hold of his hand.
Our fingers touched, and the world changed around us once more.
His awake mind was messy. Strange. Like a junk drawer brimming with loose change, postcards, broken pens, old love.
I floated through it, half-formed, tethered only by his touch. His regret. Mark was beside me, his mind cracked open willingly, offering no resistance this time. “I need you to see,” he whispered.
The room fell away. His bed, walls and house were gone in a blink. It was replaced with a haze of static and fog. It was thick. We moved through it, and at some point, it felt less like we were moving forward ourselves and more like we were gently being pulled. Memories flew by us.
His mind wasn’t orderly. Some memories were of him as a kid, some of him at his current age. No surprises there.
It wasn’t a reel of chronological flashbacks or a curated archive. It was a dumpster fire of suppressed emotion. Locked with chains, doors and taped-over regrets.
We stopped moving. I peered ahead of us, and the memory, hidden deep in the back, called to us. This is what Mark wanted me to see.
I shot forward and realise I’m at the reservoir clearing. The sun was bleeding through the treetops. Everything looked golden.
Soft. Too soft.
Like his memory was trying to romanticise the last time he supposedly saw me. Or was he hiding the true nature of it, the way I saw it, from himself? Grief and guilt had a way of distorting memory, after all.
I stood to the side, spectral and still.
Mark was driving, parking up the car with me in the passenger seat. We had arrived just as I remembered.
Then the current Mark standing next to me noticed too. And he flinched.
“This was our last good day before…”
“Good day?” I asked. “This was the worst day, the last time I thought I was safe.”
The memory flickered. The sun snapped, and we were suddenly standing under a shade-covered gazebo. He was ordering me not to get any ideas with his friends, not to speak unless spoken to. My eyes saw past-Mark grip my arm, the warning. It made past-me wince.
“See?” I snarled. “This is the man I remember. The aggressor.”
Mark hung his head in shame. “What was I thinking? I just wanted everything to be right. Wanted you to be mine.”
“You were a coward. Too worried about what others thought, even around others like you. These men were all sick, violent. Abusive. These were not friends. They were cruel sadists.” I stood in front of him and made him look at himself. “That included you.”
“No! I…I…” he stammered. He was shaking, and I didn’t let go. “I had a bad temper back then…I…”
Everything went hazy. Mark’s mind was taking us elsewhere. A graveyard.
Past-memory-Mark walked through the graveyard and, like it was tethered to him, my body followed him.
He stopped at a small grave plaque in the ground, and I shuffled around him to look at it. Nothing prepared me for reading my own grave plaque.
It was smaller than I thought it would be. Simple. Tilted a little to the left, like even in death no one gave a fuck about me. The inscription read:
EDWARD “EDDY” JAMES
Loved by few. Forgotten by too many.
Even if that were true, that stung.
Memory-Mark knelt in the dirt as if it owed him answers. His fingers were filthy; nails packed with soil. He wasn’t crying, not really. But his whole body looked like it had been weeping for years.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I should’ve been stronger. And been with you for real. Protected you. I shouldn’t have taken you there.”
I stepped closer. Reflex, maybe. Habit. I still wanted to comfort him. Even now. Even after everything. He bowed his head and breathed out my name like a prayer.
The haze returned, and the surrounding scenes changed as if Mark’s grief was unpacking before my very eyes.
When the surrounding haze dissipated, I knew exactly where we had ended up. It was my mother’s front room. You never forget the smell of your childhood home.
My mum sat in her old chair, the one with the floral cushions and the busted spring. She looked older, frailer, but her eyes still had that spark. That steel.
Mark was kneeling beside her, holding her hand like it was the only thing anchoring him to the earth.
“I let them take him,” memory-Mark said to my mother, shame spewing from his throat. “I stood by. I didn’t swing. I didn’t scream. I didn’t stay. I just let him be a victim to those sick assholes!”
She said nothing at first. Just looked at him with that quiet knowing she always had. I wanted nothing more than to reach out to her and say I am sorry. Tell her I love her. Tell her in my last moments I thought of her.
“I didn’t know my son by the end. I regret that most of all.
I regret not having given him a safe space to live in.
A home to be himself. Love. I regret not having loved him like he deserved.
” My heart, if I still had one, wanted to burst out of my chest. “He was thrown in the trash, and died alone, did you know? But my son wasn’t trash.
He was my son!” She was crying now, and Mark tightly gripped her hand.
The real Mark stood next to me and took hold of my hand. “She loved you.”
I murmured some sounds in agreement. A pained cry.
Another scene bled through, this time the motel. It was our first time.
The same cheap sheets. The same fucked-up dynamic. I saw myself in the mirror, hickeys down my neck, bite marks across my shoulder. But the worst part?
I looked grateful. I wanted to hurl up my stomach contents, but I had not eaten in years.
I grabbed him. The real one. Here. Now. Beside me and made him face me.
“You let me believe that what we did was love,” I whispered. “You knew I had nowhere else to go. And you made me feel wanted. But only on your terms. Only when no one else could see us together.”
Mark’s voice shook. “I know.”
“I wasn’t just trash, Mark.”
He looked at me. Eyes full of something finally breaking open.
“I know.”
I turned away from him. Let the motel fade. The clearing dim. Let the weight of what could have been collapse like a building behind us.
Then there was silence. I let it extend around us until it echoed in our ears. The kind of silence where you could hear your heart thump through your chest. The silence where you can hear your blood pumping up from your feet and back down again.
I paused. I knew what I needed to do.
For him.
For me.
To move on and overcome my past. I needed to say the words. And mean them.
“I forgive you.”
It echoed around us and hugged him.
He gasped. A real, ragged sound.
“But not because you deserve it. But because we both need it.”
He nodded. Trembling.
I stepped closer. My voice is quiet now. Bitter. Human.
“You should have been kinder to me. Not just at the end. From the start. You shouldn’t have treated me like something to hide. Something to use. Something you could just throw away.”
“I know,” he said again, softer.
“Because I was never trash.”
His eyes met mine. And he said it, not with excuses, not with deflection. “I see that now.”
“It’s too late for me, but you are still alive, Mark. You need to go live your life and stop living in regret and in the past. I am fine. I have accepted my fate.”
The memoryscape trembled. Cracked at the seams. Light bled in from the real world.
I looked down at our still-touching hands.
One last surge passed between us. And I knew he felt it too. Not peace. Not healing.
But truth. Truth about my death. Truth that he and I were never meant to be together. Truth that I was going to be OK. That I am OK.
And that is exactly what I had needed to move on.