(ON HOLD) Spellbound (BxB)

Chapter 2 | A Match-Lit Night

In the week that followed, everything went exactly as Asher had expected it would: it turned to shit.

Despite himself, he rode his skateboard to school, then again in the halls, dressed in the suffocating grip of his Kinglsy uniform. Though Dean Riley agreed to pay his tuition and board, he didn't agree to fork up the costs for a four-hundred dollar ensemble. Ash didn't have the nerve to tell his dad that the slacks were too tight—that he was constantly tugging at his crotch and stretching his legs when he sat. He couldn't tell him that the fabric made him itch. That he'd already pulled a seam on the left shoulder of his blazer.

That when he overshot his speed and took a spill into a cluster of band lockers, his Kingsly badge had torn right from the pocket.

That in a single day, he'd ruined a four-hundred dollar suit.

So he didn't tell his father. Instead, he rode his skateboard into town.

Like everything else in this place, the thrift shop was thirty-years outdated and lost in an eternal eighties timeline. Women with bushy bangs shopped around for ceramic dolls, plucking Guns N' Roses shirts from the racks to shake their heads in disapproval and place them back. After an hour of browsing through sales tags, Ash managed to find a pair of slacks that nearly matched the shade from his uniform, then he purchased a loom of black silk thread and rushed back to his dorm.

Mimi taught him to sew, the both of them cross-legged on his twin-sized bed. She helped him with the snag on his shoulder, then left him to do the rest on his own. It was morning by the time Ash had finished, but not soon enough to wake for school. He shut his eyes for a matter of minutes, and when he opened them again, it was to the face of a dead woman, standing at the foot of his bed. The cold air gripped his lungs and he let out steamy breath, but he didn't dare move.

His last psychologist called it sleep paralysis, and for years, Asher believed him. He believed that if he shut his eyes and listen to his own heartbeat for a matter of minutes, the pale-faced demons in his room would vanish as easily as they'd come.

But then they started to touch him.

Hard fingers would grip him through the sheets—always on the wrist, like they knew just where to grab. Once, a hand clawed into his face—long, spindly fingers clamping over both cheeks, palm over his mouth. One whispered hideous things in his ear, and another pinned him to the mattress, the feel of heavy knees on his chest. They were inconveniences at first. Tiny nightmares, who crept before dawn and vanished at sunrise. Then they grew into something hideous.

Asher laid awake, his nerves alive and prickling. His body knew of the pale thing in his room, but he refused to acknowledge it and instead looked to the tiny sprinkler on his ceiling. They fed from anger and anxiety, from fear and distress. They even fed from exhaustion—which was probably what'd drawn it in to begin with. They were feasting on his sleepless night. They were hungry for him.

Asher watch the pale, stone slabs of his ceiling, the mortar between, the slight cobweb, shivering in the corner. A shadow shifted, blocking out the glow of his night light. He reached for his wrist and gave his rosary beads a snap. Sometimes he brought them to his mouth and whispered the Deliverance prayer and sometimes he begged the spirits in his own words to leave. Sometimes he yelled, sometimes he cried. Sometimes it didn't matter what he did.

The shadows shifted again. He snapped the rosary beads.

Don't look at it, he told himself. Don't look at it.

The electricity in the air was ebbing, but for a moment, Ash was back in the steam-thick walls of his former bathroom. For a moment, he was trapped beneath scorching water, those hands on his throat, pressing him hard to the porcelain. He was swallowing the acid-hot bath, screaming soundlessly into a dark, empty ether, eyes hot and straining to see through the murky, bleary sky above.The hands that weren't hands squeezed, and he clawed at his own flesh. He clawed and he prayed for their release.