Hover & Sound – Chapter 1 (Eddie)

If you would like to read the two prologues that will be published alongside Hover & Sound’s core content, please check out the links below:

• Prologue 1 (Edvard Sr.) Journey of an Undone Man, [Supposedly] Spooky Stories, 2020
• Prologue 2 (VJ) [Supposedly] Sappy Stories, 2021

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Present day

  Falkhus was magical any season of the year. Set into the grasslands east of the strand, the ancient stone fortress boasted more hiding spots and odd corners than any game of seek-and-find could accommodate. 

  The stone was age-blackened and stood out against the surrounding green fields. In the summer, vibrant pink magnolias bloomed along the causeway that stretched across the lake. During the winter, the shallow lake — which centuries before had served as a moat — froze over and everyone could skate across the surface.

  Great, sprawling, hundreds-of-years-old trees dotted the grasslands that formed the bulk of Falkhus’ extensive acreage.

  Better than all of that, though, and more magical than anything, was the climate-controlled and acoustically-engineered music room in one portion of the old castle’s cellar. 

  It was there that Eddie left now, having recorded a sample of his latest song, Håbets Pine, on piano. He had the memory stick in his pocket, song intact, and he was far too sober to comfortably amble upstairs to his bedroom and upload the song for his boss at the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. He always shared bits of himself most easily when he was buzzed enough to not care what anyone said about it.

  So rather than ascend to the main floor of the house, Eddie texted his friend and neighbor, Jace, and left through the side cellar door to walk across the grounds toward Jace’s treehouse fortress.

  Eddie found him already half drunk, three single-shot bottles on the ground of his fort. He sat with his limbs limp at his side, his face angled toward the ceiling. He had his cell phone in his hands — he’d been texting someone besides Eddie, it looked like, because they sent him a stream of messages that lit his phone as Eddie approached.

  Jace angled his face toward Eddie and ran his hand through his ashy brown hair to smooth it. “Hej.”

  Eddie frowned. Jace was more expansively drunk than usual. “How’s your mor?”

  “She’s okay,” Jace said. He shrugged and took a draft of whatever he was smoking. “Try this shit. It’s good.” He offered Eddie a single shot bottle of a malt whiskey.

  Eddie opened the top and sniffed. The scent stung his nose. He licked with the tip of his tongue. It tasted of whatever barrel it had cured in. Eddie tried not to make a face as he downed the rest in one gulp.

  “Not even gonna enjoy it?” Jace teased.

  “The barrel wood is strong with that one,” Eddie joked. He sat down on the rough floor beside Jace. “So. She’s not okay.” He leaned his head against the wall, mirroring Jace’s posture. “Watching this is like watching my childhood in slow motion.”

  At least Jace was older. At least he would still have his far.

  “Maybe my far will off himself, or some shit,” Jace joked darkly. 

  If it was anyone outside of Falkhus, Eddie would have cringed. Niels — who wasn’t even here right now — would have then beat the person up. Before Eddie’s far had died from illness, Eddie’s mor had killed herself and his sister. It was ancient history. When people in town brought it up, it still stung, but…

  It was Jace. Eddie laughed, his tone matching Jace’s in darkness. Jace understood. People in town didn’t always, and people at school definitely, actively refused to understand.

  Jace passed him another shot — a cherry brandy. “This one is sweeter, lighter. You might like it.”

  Eddie didn’t drink for the benefit of his tongue. He pocketed the bottle. “Mind if I save it for later? Once I get to school I can get my own, but this week is…”

  “Sure,” Jace said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I know how Giana is about this stuff. My mor said when I was a baby she made sure to build this treehouse exactly teen feet further from the house than the fucks Giana gives.”

  Eddie laughed, but then he hesitated.

  When he saw the ghost of Far Viggo, the man could only travel so far down the causeway — just under halfway across the lake — before he vanished. Was that about how far his fucks went? Was he bound to the house, or was it about willpower?

  He couldn’t tell Jace about Far Viggo. It might given him unwarranted hope that when his mor died she would still be around.

  “Giana has a very strong will,” Eddie warned. “Are you sure we’re safe?”

  Jace swung his legs over the outside wall of his tree fort and kicked them back and forth while he gazed out at the hillock surrounding this particular tree. Grasslands rolled away from them in every direction. “They’re talking months.”

  “They did that once before, and she turned it around.”

  It had been twice before, actually, but Jace was younger enough that he wouldn’t remember the first time. Gemma Birky kept defying the odds. She also never got better, so she hovered in a perpetual limbo, sometimes healthy enough to have a baby and sometimes dying enough to be told she had months to live.

  “Ja,” Jace acknowledged. He sighed. “My far and mor were arguing about a treatment place. He doesn’t want her to go. I…don’t know. He said it’s dangerous. Whatever the fuck that means. She’s basically been bathed in plutonium at this point.”

  Eddie’s far had never argued about treatment. He’d been clear what his wishes were from the beginning, partly because he knew his illness was guaranteed to be terminal. It was only a matter of when. “What does she want? My far wanted to die here at Falkhus. His hospital stay was supposed to be brief — just IV antibiotics to treat pneumonia. No one expected him to get a blood infection. He…” Eddie bit back a word that wanted to hook on something at the back of his throat. After a moment, he tried again. “He wouldn’t have gone to the hospital if he’d known he would die there.”

  Jace glowered at the grass beyond the tree house. “I think cancer is a demon, chasing her, never letting its grasp go except to make her try harder. Like a cat and a mouse.”

  Eddie agreed. At least his far had gone quickly. Jace had been watching his mor fight for her life for as long as Eddie could remember.

  He was not drunk enough for this conversation. He held up the shot bottle. “Do you have more of this?”

  “I have tons of that,” Jace said, and offered up a full bottle of it. He took a sip from it and passed it to Eddie.

  Eddie gulped two mouthfuls and set the bottle on the coarse boards between them. “I think more treatment — or not — should be up to her. No matter what your far says. This place is special, and if she wants to be here, maybe that matters.”

  If there was any chance Gemma could become a ghost, be there for her children, she should stay.

  If there was any chance Gemma couldn’t become a ghost, that Eddie could mention it and get Jace’s hopes up for nothing, Eddie shouldn’t utter a word about it.

  “Ja,” Jace agreed. “I want to tell her, you know? Say, it’s okay. Tell her she can…stop…if she wants to. We’ll be okay.”

  Eddie’s far had never looked sick enough, or suffered horribly enough that Eddie had time to think maybe it would be better if his far was allowed to move on.

  But he remembered Far Viggo, VJ’s far, withering away for more than a year, until he was a sallow, waxen man with deep-set eyes and a perpetually-exhausted expression. It had been a relief for Eddie, when Far Viggo died. Eddie would have rather Far Viggo miraculously get healthy, but in the circumstances, death seemed preferable to continued suffering.

  “We did that with Far Viggo,” Eddie admitted. “Sort of. He said his goodbyes to us on his terms.” He looked at Jace, who had never stood on the other side of the line which defined an orphan. “Don’t do it until you’re ready.”

  “Does it get better?” Jace asked. “Missing them?”

  Eddie didn’t miss his far. He had Far Viggo, the generous and loving man Eddie had always wished was his far anyway. Sure, he was a ghost and no one else could see him, but Eddie didn’t miss his own far. He had a far.

  How would it be for Jace? He tried to remember at first, when his far just wasn’t there anymore. “It’s hard. When you go to a thing and you want to tell them something. Or a joke you think they’d laugh about, but they aren’t there. There will be little reminders.”

  “But what if this place my mor knows…what if it was the cure?” Jace downed another shot. “What if there’s always a what if. Always one more option.”

  Eddie hadn’t named his song Håbets Pine — The Torment of Hope — for nothing. He understood well. 

  “She doesn’t even seem sick,” Jace lamented. “Except when treatments mess her up.” He looked up, angled so he could see the sky and not the beams of his tree house ceiling.

  Eddie looked up too. “Nobody lives as long as we wish they would.”

  “Ja.” Jace’s voice was tight, closed. “I know.”

  Eddie looked at him. What was he hiding?

  Jace swung his feet like a little kid. “Do you ever feel like…everyone around you is more fragile than you?”

  Eddie’s thoughts ran to VJ, to how tender and vulnerable he was compared to Eddie’s relative coldness about life. “Do you think VJ is in danger?”

  Jace laughed and kicked Eddie’s leg. “I was talking about me. Christ.”

  Like Niels, Jace was an oldest sibling. He put the needs of his younger brothers and sisters before his own. Eddie didn’t understand what Jace was saying. “Are you fragile, Jace?”

  “I am drunk,” Jace said expansively. “And not explaining it right. But you have pretty eyes and pretty music, so you don’t need to understand.”

  It was the same gap as usual, the same assumption that Eddie didn’t belong among the rest of the kids. He was an adult now — it shouldn’t hurt him anymore, to be cast as distinct and separate.

  He looked at Jace and asked, with great care to keep his voice neutral, “Maybe I don’t need to understand, but I want to?”

  “Okay,” Jace said. “So. I tried to die. And I didn’t. It was a good try. And everyone else is breaking. Giana is sick, my far takes happy pills, my mor is dying, Li’s mor is dying. Everyone and everything is dying. Even the wood of this thing—” Jace slammed the heel of his palm into the soft, decaying wood floor of his tree house to demonstrate. “-And I put in a good try, and nothing.”

  Eddie’s throat was dry. “When did you try to die?”