Free The Wounds in the Walls by Heidi Cullinan

himself. “I’m going to finish this.”
     
    He drew a deep breath and shut his eyes. He could feel the house heaving, could hear it breathing, could feel its terror and its pain. But it was not the house. It was the energy, like Mike had said. No, it wasn’t Peter. Peter had died long ago and moved on, becoming so many other people. What was here was something else, but something just as important. It wasn’t an it, either. It was human. It was a man. It was Ara. The boy who named himself after the Armenian god of spring, who had waited one hundred fifty years for winter to thaw.
     
    Pete reached out, stuck his hand through the shimmering wall, and drew Ara out into the sun.
     
    There was a short, sharp cry, like someone falling. The plaster-dusted bones that fell into Pete’s arms were heavier than they had a right to be, but then, they had borne so much over the years that in a way, it made more sense that they were so dense. The house shuddered and shook, the walls even in here heaving now. But Pete didn’t let it bother him. He just held the skeleton close, rocked it gently in his arms, and whispered against the dusty skull.
     
    “I’ve got you,” he whispered. “I’ve got you now.” He hugged the bones as tightly as he dared. “And this time I’m strong enough to bear you.”
     
    Was it Mike who sobbed? The house again? Perhaps it was his own sigh escaping. Pete didn’t know. All he knew was that the walls breathed one last time, and then a rightness settled in his heart as the bones heated in his embrace, and he wept, this time for joy as Ara, flesh and blood and whole, sagged in surrender against his chest.
     

     

     
    Ara was alive.
     
    The three of them were lying on the narrow bed, Mike and Pete against the edges, Ara pressed tight between them. He was facing Mike, and Mike could not stop staring down at the boy. Flesh and blood. He had been a ghost, a manifestation of energy, but Pete had pulled his bones from the wall, had reached into the plaster as if it were but a curtain, pulled Ara out, and now he was alive. It was impossible. But it was true.
     
    Ara looked up at him, his dark eyes uncertain. “Are you angry with me?”
     
    The words cut across Mike like a knife. “Angry—why? Why would you think—?”
     
    Pete pulled Ara tight against his chest and kissed the boy’s ear. “He isn’t the same Michael. But even so, I don’t think that one would be angry with you, either.” He kissed him again, then looked up at Mike. “He left you at the lake that day, and his father found you. You drowned, yes—but first you were knocked unconscious.”
     
    It was odd, Mike thought, how little hearing about his own death affected him. Because it isn’t mine, he admitted. It seemed he had quite a bit to learn from Pete Eason.
     
    Then he looked at the wall, at the place from where Ara had come.
     
    “Was that—were you in there?” he asked.
     
    “The servants were still gone,” Ara said. “But he was afraid I would tell about Mikey. So he took an axe and hacked the wall open, tied me up, then shoved me inside and rebuilt the wall after. It took him half the day.” His face clouded. “I tried to fight, but I got so cold. He tied my hands so tight! And it seemed so unreal. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I begged and pleaded with him—I thought at first it was only going to be a punishment, but he never let me out. And then when I died, I didn’t—I felt part of me go, but part of me just couldn’t. I don’t know why.”
     
    Mike stroked Ara’s hairline. “You kept your pain so bottled, Ara. You couldn’t let it go, because you’d forgotten how. And it grew into a person. You.”
     
    “Am I really alive?” Ara asked. He held up one of his hands and looked at it dubiously. “I thought you said I would rejoin the universe.”
     
    “I thought he would absorb into me,” Pete confessed.
     
    Mike hoped it wasn’t sick, how quickly his mind turned academic.