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They keep all the curtains closed but the windows open.
It keeps the light out, one insists. It keeps it fucking dark in here, says the other.
They're cheap curtains anyway, and the light gets in just enough to give off the appearance of living underwater. They don't hold back the full-force sunlight or the lightning that sometimes rolls in. And when the breeze blows in from the woods, they cave so easily, any hope of darkness blown to hell. No one can sleep at that point.
Gavin was the first to insist on the darkness. Michael didn't argue. He preferred the night anyways, when they could go outside and have no one ask questions; when they could live without anyone bothering them; when you didn't have to look anything head-on.
---
Before;
before quiet hallways and louder nights
before a bewildered self isolation from everything
before anything, really;
there was the earth. There was a shovel in the man's left hand and a trashbag in his right. There was the dark, moonless cover of the night. There was the woods, tall motionless trees, watching in silence.
There was always the woods.
Michael dragged his garbage out to the safety of the trees and started digging. The earth here was soft but cut by pine roots a hundred years old. Each one stopped him in his tracks, resilient, to the point he almost went back inside for his knife. Almost. It would be hard enough to clean it already without worm shit all over it too.
He went to finish off his hole, wind howling in his ears, when he hit a thicker, awful root. Goddamnit. It didn't give when he slashed at it with the shovel. Michael angrily stabbed at it anyways, until something cracked hard under his weight.
He nearly fell in, although no one ever saw. Pity, because if he'd eaten shit into a long-buried coffin it would have been hilarious.
Correction: it was hilarious, and one person saw.
At first he thought the laughter was the wind, and then, terrifyingly, the bag he was burying. He began to bludgeon it with his shovel out of terror, but the wheezing continued. It was a squeaky, birdlike croak, shaking in time with the trees.
The dead man leaned forward in his wooden throne, clutching at his sides, his long hair dangling in ragged clumps across his face.
"That," he wheezed, "was bloody amazing."
---
At dawn (dusk? whenever the light fades) Gavin always kicks his way out of bed to go make himself "a proper cup". Michael calls this "the only time he gets any fucking sleep, you blanket hog."
They sit on opposite ends of the bed, Michael a blanket burrito near the head, Gavin sitting backwards with his cup and a book. He's always reading something. Although Gavin doesn't read as much as he absorbs, tracing the pictures with his fingertips as he slowly goes through his tea. The place is filled with those big coffee-table books, the kind that cost fifty dollars and are mostly paper documentaries. There are a few fifty-cent romance paperbacks as well, left behind by previous guests, but he devours them in equal measure.
(What are you doing? one ghost asks. You don't seem like you enjoy it.)
(I have so much to catch up on. says the other.)
----
The corpse climbs his own way out of his grave, because Michael is too freaked out to help him. He hadn't minded his home getting repossessed by a younger tenant. He had "no intent to return anyways".
Michael finds himself oddly reminded of an old noire novel, specifically with the phrase "legs up to here". Not in a sexual way, but in the way it's pitch black and the corpse keeps tripping over himself to look at the plants in the backyard or twisting his head in a matter that has to require breaking his spine to stare at the forest.
He wants his knife back.
The corpse keeps babbling; meaningless at first, like he doesn’t know how to create words anymore. After a moment he stops in his tracks, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. He runs his tongue over the inside of his mouth and inhales and everything is so clean, he doesn’t look dead at all. Just like some sad puppet that the Blue Fairy decided to fuck over. For a moment Michael blesses the silence.
It barely lasts. The deadman inhales another time and figures out how his out-of-use mouth works; after that he doesn’t shut up. Everything’s new and beautiful, the darkness and the trees, and where did all the stars go? Why are the lights on that building so bright?
"I'm having a fucking nightmare." Michael mutters under his breath.
"Language!"
"Don't language me, asshole, I will put you back in the fucking ground."
He'd left the back door open. Would corpses come shambling out of that too? Michael's legitimately not sure what's real right now, if his mind snapped along with the thread he'd been walking for weeks. He was finally alone.
He balls his fists and tries to walk ahead, just keeping his mind on the blade sitting on the table. The corpse shrieks a little when the light hits him, throwing his hands up over his dark-accustomed eyes. One hand is an earth-dusted, normal piece of skin; the other, exposed bone, completely devoid of flesh. The little sick pit in his stomach bursts suddenly at the sight. It needs to go- his mind needs to leave him alone- he was FINALLY alone-
and yet with his knife in his hand one second and buried in the corpse's chest the next, the inhuman doesn't flinch. It closes that skeleton hand around the hilt and pulls it out, grinning. The knife is clean.
----
They play games of "what if" some mornings.
"What if I cut your fucked-up hand off?" Michael starts. "Would it grow back normal?"
"I'm tempted to let you try." Gavin persists he doesn't know what happened to his hand, only that he woke up with it bare. An animal, maybe, gnawing away while he was too dazed to notice. There is enough to curiosity in Michael to wonder how it works sans muscle or ligament, but not enough to actually find out.
Gavin sighs. “You’re boring. No creativity.”
“It was a legitimate question! You got a better one?”
"Ok. Hundred thousand dollars, but every time you speak, snakes come out of your mouth."
"I don't think you understand how much a hundred thousand is."
"Whatever a lot of money is now."
"You need to break at least a million. And fuck no. I like my tounge unbitten."
"True."
"My turn. What if you accidentally kill me?"
"Why are you so depressing? And that'd be lonely."
"Yeah, well, you're a fucking klutz, and it's likely."
"I knocked over a candlestick once, and that's only because you refuse to fix the electricity."
"Fine. Maybe it was a bit uncalled for."
Gavin thoughtfully runs his hand across his book. "In that vein, what if I'm still dead?"
"What if we both are?"
The truth is, they have no way of knowing.
-------
He gives up on trying to drive the corpse- sorry, Gavin- away.
He doesn't die. He doesn't leave. And Michael isn't sure if he's even there or just a figment of his imagination.
At first he comforts himself with at least he cooks, except the only thing Gavin seems capable of making is microwaved tea. Then his houseguest becomes practically a ghost, sleeping away the day- the light hurts his eyes, he claims, if he even has eyes to hurt- and creaking every stair on his way around the house at night.
He comes to expect the ghastly noises, even falling asleep to the sound of them.
One morning Gavin stays up late and cooks Michael an unusual concoction of ginger and some herb he doesn't recognize. Michael takes one sip and nearly dumps it down the drain.
"What the hell is this?"
"Elixir of Life. Guaranteed to make you live forever. Or at least, the recipe as I remember."
"It tastes like snake jizz."
"That might be an ingredient. It's a secret. I used to swear by it."
Gavin, it turns out, swore by a lot of "magic" elixirs back in the day, to the point where he had an air tube installed in his coffin on the off chance one worked. There was no way to tell which one it had actually been. His family had been in the business, producing hundreds of cure-alls. Gavin is determined to test every one of those he remembered on his new lab rat. And it's beyond hilarious to Michael that such an idiot could have actually stumbled onto the secret to eternal life and not known it.
----
Michael has nightmares some nights, terrible ones that leave his teeth ringing from trying not to scream. His entire head feels hollow from the weight of them, his hands not comfortable unless he’s holding his knife in them.
There’s a night he can’t keep his terror inside, one where he sees ghosts in the shadows of the curtains and the wind is in his ears and it hurts-
Gavin comes running in and ends up with his knife in his chest.
It’s an accident, he wasn’t hurt anyways, he can’t be, but it resonates on the inside of Michael’s skull with the force of a thunderstorm. He can’t stop seeing it, the impulsive flick of his wrist at the first form that moves.
So Michael leaves his knife in the safe of the room farthest away and farthest above. He swears it’s for safety reasons, so the mice or rats won’t get to it, but Gavin knows mice and rats can’t chew through four inches of tempered steel. Old flesh, sure, and they’ll eat enough wires to take the blame for breaking most of the electric lines, but never steel. Michael hides it away because his hands seize whenever he touches it, his breath shakier than a dying man in the foyer, because he can see it, every piece of floral wallpaper stained red and his hands covered so thick there might not even be skin there anymore and he doesn’t know why, just that he wants to bury it in Gavin’s chest again even though he knows there’s nothing in there to bleed. He locks it away so he never has to test if there’s anything in there again.
——--
There are rules, in this house. The spoken ones, like closing the curtains or taking care of the plants out back; but there are the ones they don't speak about as well.
Michael never asks why an immortal man was buried, and Gavin never asks why he was burying a mortal one.
These are rules.
----
He stays up late to speak to his houseguest whenever he finds his pantry nibbled on by mice or ghosts. They light candles in the lobby if it's too dark to sit in the moonlight. The power went out a few days ago in a bad storm. Michael will get around to fixing it eventually, but there's so many more of those storms lately he's not sure it's worth it yet.
"I'm not a burden on you, am I?" Gavin asks him. "I probably don't have to eat."
"Nah, you're fine. Delivery guy gets here at noon, thing's on autopay anyways."
"Autopay?"
He's vaguely explained the idea of the Internet and credit cards, one night? day? weeks ago. "I set it up so it'll pay until the account's empty. Don't have to do anything."
"And how long will it last?"
"I don't know. Maybe a year." He pauses before his next question, but then again his tact is so very small. "Were you awake, all that time?"
Gavin takes a few seconds to answer. "Sort of. It was like being in a dream state. I knew things were happening, I just wasn't awake enough to process them. Not enough air, maybe? I'll have to make an improvement on that." He pauses, as if he's actually thinking about changing the design on his old coffin. "People used to visit, back when people were still around. I had a cousin who would come sometimes. But it's been quiet for so long."
There are four floors in this hotel, four rooms to a floor, forty miles to the nearest human civilization. It's the kind of isolation he begged for, the kind of palace that would be perfect empty.
No, not perfect. It's old enough, isolated enough that it needs a single lovely ghost.
It's a light enough night he can blow out the candles at about two am. The white light turns Gavin into a full skeleton, sitting long and bony in his chair with his focus elsewhere.
(On the subject of leaving the house: Michael did try. He made a couple of solid attempts, which include:
-
That one time he actually tried to take out the trash and got lectured by the trash guy on why he’d let it pile up so long and why did it smell like he’d febreezed it eight times and the fact that he was generally a piece of shit, etc., etc.,
-
The time he tried to go grocery shopping and get something fresher than the canned food that was delivered to the hotel every month and bought like an actual container of strawberries and coffee that wasn’t in ground form. He was so proud of himself for actually managing to be a functional adult but he also made the mistake of getting a six pack of red bull that Gavin tore into and he immediately regretted purchasing, because that asshole was out tending his sad little garden about four hours after they normally went to bed and singing ridiculously off key the entire time. It wasn’t even anything he recognized, but he was pretty sure it was the equivalent of top 40 in the 1800s, and he made a quiet decision to never let anything stronger than tea into the hotel again
-
When he realized that he couldn’t stand Gavin wearing the same dirty-ass rags all day and tried to go get him so new clothes, but he was feeling like being an asshole so he went to the thrift shop with the largest vintage collection and tried to find something “era-appropriate”. The counter guy, Geoff something-or-other, was extremely helpful and he ended up with armfuls of these long puffy blouses in about eight different pastel shades and felt So Proud of himself for being such an asshole. He’s snickering the entire way down the country roads on his way back home, but then Gavin is legitimately happy about it and doesn’t even realize they’re not normal and also probably from the 1970’s. He lounges around the house in this really ridiculous baby blue suede shirt thing and a gray vest that probably belonged to an old lady at some point because it still smells like smoke and hard candy with his hair in a ponytail, and the whole image is so ridiculous that Gavin could be from any decade except this one, except it’s also simultaneously hot? So it’s half “why am i suddenly interested in nailing a corpse” and half “shit my plan failed” and because of some bullshit math those halves end up equaling leaving the hotel is a bad idea.)
-----
Back when he had a job, Michael kept the hedges out back, trimming them into kitschy squares and diamonds for the pleasure of his boss. He made sure the trees never stepped a root over the line and kept the garden from being eaten by deer.
There's a bit of a garden, still, but he can't believe he can live with the state it's achieved.
The yard is overgrown with tall grass and cocky long-leafed pines. The little petunia garden is carefully maintained and covered only through a joint effort. Gavin uses the space for the various little plants used in his experiments. It becomes a quiet agreement, and then an established do your fucking job and weed the garden exasperation to keep it clean.
Michael is aware of how easily he could uproot and leave. But he remembers the times he tried. How much they made him want to come back home.
He doesn't know where he'd go if he did, anyways, so he stays.
He stays and mothers plants and chases mice out of the boxes Gavin leaves open and puts up with the petunias shoved in vases with other old dead flowers after Gavin rips half the garden up to make more room for his projects. He is equal parts annoyed and amused by the ghost living in his hotel.
It doesn't matter when it stops being "ghost." It doesn't matter when they start coordinating the rooms they sleep in, because Michael's lost track of time.
Sometimes he hates the utter absence of time because he can’t remember the first time he fell in with Gavin, the first time they kissed or slept in the same room or any of those things. He remembers, isolatedly, the first time he held his bony hand, sitting in the living room downstairs and marveling at the clean whiteness of the thing that shouldn't exist. Gavin was reading again, curled up in a musty old loveseat, and he picked up the loose one to compare it to his own out of some sort of wonder and gavin just held back and squeezed, and he suddenly realized he had to be, at the very least, alive. He had to be, to remember that and the odd smooth feeling of bone that lived.
(What if you got it right and we've been living here for centuries?)
When they get tired of one room, they move up to the next instead of cleaning it. Nothing's permanent.
There's still ten rooms left empty.
Ten rooms, a forgotten amount of time until autopay runs out, and a confused forgetting of mortality.
—-
Gavin has nightmares too, sometimes, but they only start after they start sharing a bed. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t even shake, just wakes up with dead eyes and a mumbling mouth. Something about not being able to look at Michael and red hair.
He’s never asked about Michael’s, even after he starts to spill his own guts about the decade he lived in once.
Michael thanks every deity in existence that he doesn’t.
(Because it wasn’t Michael’s fault, what happened. They were just driving home; it was raining; he got blindsided by an SUV. Their little car didn’t stand a chance, these kind of accidents happen, the reporting officer said, it wasn’t his fault, he’d done nothing wrong, but he still felt that if he’d noticed a hair faster, if he’d just been more careful-
He broke his wrist. Lindsay broke her neck.
And so he got the job at the hotel because it put him away from everyone, because he couldn’t stand the neighbors looking at him like that because they were just so sorry, and it was so awful- if he didn’t feel like talking at the hotel he was just the creepy gardener, sometimes the kitchen staff would whisper about him, but that was it-
except for the owner, who never shut up, he kept going on about how “I bet you killed her and got away with it” and Michael hated him with every ounce of his being, every time he railed against Lindsay he wanted to choke him out in the foyer but he held back for so long.
He had this butterfly knife he used to trim the back hedges, and whenever he got especially mad at his boss he’d flip it in his hands absentmindedly, until one night after all the other staff had gone home his boss goes one step too far and he just snaps, even though she’s been dead for almost two years now he can’t stand this, and the habitual flipping of his knife takes over and he throws it, so cleanly and instinctively he barely realizes he’s done it, and it lands straight in the owner’s heart and oh, jesus, there’s so much blood-
and Michael is not exactly a killer but he knows slitting his throat will at least kill him faster, and there’s blood on the couch and the old floral wallpaper and all over his hands and he panics-
He sends out an email firing the rest of the staff with the blood still on his hands, everything is shaking and it takes him twenty minutes to get the two sentences free of extra letters, but the old man is just crazy enough and a bit of loner that it’s believable that he might do something like this.
And with the corpse in his living room and the blood barely masked, he keeps expecting the cops to show up but they never do.)
—--
There's a last rule, a deal they don't talk about. Until the rooms run out, Gavin will keep working on his magic potions and Michael keeps his knife locked up in the safe in the lobby.
One way or another, they stay together.