by Isaac Thorne
Thinking back on it, as he often did in the wee hours of an anxious, sleepless night, Graham sometimes wondered if his dear old dad wasn’t more insane than alcoholic. No matter how many times he discovered Graham in that cellar, Lee Gordon would never think to look for him there the next time he tied one on. Graham also wondered why his teachers never said anything about the massive bruises and swollen shut eyes he often sported at school. Lee coached him to say that he’d fallen down the stairs, or got hit playing baseball in the backyard, or some other ridiculously unbelievable lie. But it turned out he’d never had to say any of those things, never had to explain how he’d managed to get the marks on his face. No one ever asked.
Graham shivered. That booming, angry voice of his father Lee, now twenty years in his grave, was still able to cow him, even when it was only inside his own head. He heard it most on the off days, those times when no amount of the prescription Xanax his counsellor prescribed seemed capable of warding off anxiety, the foreboding paranoia that someone, everyone, wanted to hurt him. Everyone tried to bully him for his inadequacy, the sense of low self-esteem that always accompanies a man who has spent too much of his life trying to stay out of the way. He heard it on those long, desperate days when he wondered how he had ever managed to dupe the good people of Lost Hollow into electing him their constable.
He’d launched the whole campaign on a lark, in an unusual moment of supreme overconfidence following a first date with an online match from Hollow River who had turned out to have an over-the-top interest in community politics. Perhaps, then, it hadn’t been overconfidence at all, but overcompensation for his lack of confidence. Not to mention his simple-minded and overtly masculine desire to impress the pretty girl. He had never intended to actually serve as Lost Hollow’s constable, especially after his match had sailed away mid-campaign in search of more exciting waters with a single attorney from her own town who was running for state senate. In his naivete, Graham had deactivated his online dating account when he thought things were serious between him and Katie. She apparently had not. Now here he was, unexpectedly elected and trying to fake it until he makes it in a law enforcement role he understood only regarding the description he’d read in a Wikipedia article.
Why did they pick me?
YOU WERE THE ONLY ONE WHO WANTED THE JOB, IDIOT, the voice of Lee Gordon chided in his head.
It was true. No one had run against Graham, ridiculous as it might have looked for someone in a help desk position at a major retail electronics chain to pursue a career in law enforcement. He didn’t even own a gun. Didn’t even know how to load one, much less aim and fire one. The city was paying for him to take a gun safety and training course, but the classes hadn’t started yet. For now, at least, he was an unarmed and inexperienced law enforcement officer. How he was to go about enforcing laws without the protection of a piece (did they still call them pieces?), he didn’t know. He could have simply quit, resigned the position as soon as he’d won it. But that would have made him look even more the wimp. He’d made this bed, albeit with help from Katie, and how he had to lie in it and pray he didn’t shit it.
The only net gain for Graham, if it could be considered such, that had come out of the election so far was that he had been able to use the position to convince the town to turn his old homestead over to him for a song and a promise he’d clean up the blight. That had been another lark. In the same town board meeting that had seen him sworn in as constable there had appeared on the agenda a plan to demolish the old place as a means of curbing the juvenile delinquency it seemed to entice. The rumors being spread by the kids in town had reached the board’s ears, and they had come to the same conclusion he had: the place was turning into an attraction for vagrants and ne’er-do-wells. Therefore, tear it down.
When the time came for public input on the matter, he’d suddenly found himself standing—without having previously planned to do so—and arguing that the place had sentimental value for him and that he’d like a shot at restoring it. He might even turn it into some kind of tourist spot, an idea he’d come to by way of town administrator Patsy Blankenship, she whom he’d hung up on moments ago. She had already renovated one old local homestead into a bed and breakfast that hosted the occasional guest or local event. The board had balked at his idea at first, but after he’d promised to either clean up the blight or hand the old Gordon place back to the town for demolition within a year, they’d relented. Now he owned the home: a shelter for rats, snakes, vagrants, and bored teenagers. He had no idea where to begin.
Graham pushed the thoughts away. This was no time to go second-guessing his life choices and cost himself what little nerve he had summoned to search for trespassers. He sidled up the hall. The back of his shirt created a loud scraping sound against the faded and peeling fleur-de-lis wallpaper covering the entry hall, a remnant of his mother’s New Orleans roots. He left his own narrow trail of Wolverine sole prints in the dust on the floor, carefully avoiding stepping on the ones left by the previous visitor. The physical memories of life in the house came flooding back to him. The sound of his footsteps on the hardwood floor. The sound of his father’s footsteps. Even the scrape of the wallpaper against the fabric of his shirt bubbled up memories of him dashing all over the house, running his hands and fingers over the walls as he did, just as any normal wild young boy might do.
The tiny hook and eye latch that had been meant to secure the cellar door was already undone when he got there. Graham didn’t know whether his father had initially installed that latch, but he’d always thought it a silly and unnecessary addition. The door to the cellar was no more than three uneven slats of painted pine carelessly supported along their backs by two horizontal two-by-fours. Large gaps between each slat rendered useless any attempt to keep the cooler air of the cellar out of the entry hall by just shutting the door. Besides, it had always managed to swing shut and stay closed on its own—even unlatched—which was one more reason the cellar had made for such an excellent hiding place.
A small wooden cabinet knob was mounted a couple of inches below the hook. Graham grabbed it and pulled. The door swung open easily on its spring hinges and without much complaint about the new tension; surprising after so many years of disuse. The ray from his Maglite spilled into the opening and revealed three splintery and slowly disintegrating steps, approximately one-quarter of the familiar set of plank stairs leading from the mouth of the door before vanishing into the damp darkness below. Graham felt for the light switch just inside the cellar door and flipped it on, but it produced nothing. He’d had service activated so he could begin work on the place. Maybe the power company hadn’t gotten around to it yet. That would certainly explain the state of the security light out front.
“Hello?” he shouted into the depths of darkness. “Lost Hollow Constable! Is anyone down there?”
There was no answer.
Graham stepped through the door. He’d covered only one tread before the sound of the creaking staircase started to get to him. There he paused, not allowing the door to swing shut behind him and not liking the soft and spongy feel of the tread on which he stood. It had much more give in it than he remembered from his youth.
From this position, the narrow beam of his Maglite enabled him to see the end of the staircase, but nothing beyond. The final step looked black and almost completely rotted away. The one above it didn’t appear to be in much better shape. If he went forward, he risked breaking those steps, which would make climbing out of the cellar much more difficult. If he didn’t go on, and someone was trapped down here, he might lose his job in disgrace. Worse, a real law enforcement officer, like a county sheriff’s deputy, might end up investigating the “screams” and finding a dead body he’d missed out of fear, in which case he could at the very least be accused of neglecting his duties as an officer of the peace.
Maglite secured in his left hand, Graham pawed at his right hip, immediately taking comfort in the shape of the county issue radio clipped to his belt.
He ran his fingers along the top of the device until they closed around the volume knob, which he turned to the right. A thin click and a spurt of white noise erupted through the tomb-like silence of the old house. It vanished just as quickly, leaving in its wake the distinct hum of radio silence. Even so, it was reassuring that he had not only remembered to carry his direct connection to the Hollow County Sheriff’s Department inside with him but it also appeared to be in proper working order.
“Let’s hear it for technology. Thank God.”
From somewhere inside his head, he thought, the darkness replied: GOD AIN’T GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
The next thing he felt was the bone-crunching shock of something blunt and heavy striking the back of his head. He heard what sounded like the shattering of thick glass. He was able to stay upright just long enough to feel what might have been a trickle of blood oozing from his scalp to the nape of his neck. A pair of unseen hands at his back thrust him into the darkness of the cellar, launching him down the full length of the rickety staircase. He fell forward, plummeting face first into the densely compacted earth beneath the house. The bridge of his nose exploded in a bright starburst of pain. His upper teeth crashed down on his lower lip, ripping open the pliable flesh. He felt an immediate swelling there. A thin stream of hot blood ran tear-like down his chin from the wound. Dimly, he heard the crack of splintered wood as his shins came down last, disintegrating the deteriorated lower steps in a fireworks show of wood rot and ancient dust.
His radio went flying when he hit. He heard it shatter in a hiss of static somewhere off to his right. The base of his Maglite struck the ground at the same time. It flew from his hand and bounced off the earth once, twice, and rolled some distance over the ground before coming to rest against the farthest cinder block wall of the cellar. The lamp behind the flashlight’s lens flickered madly, creating a nauseating strobe effect, a stop-motion version of Graham’s shadow on the wall beside him as he at first struggled to regain his feet and then gave up, collapsing flat to the earth.
The lamp finally steadied itself at a low burn, illuminating almost nothing about the cellar but the corner in which it had landed. It had come to rest too far from the limit of Graham’s reach. He stretched his left arm out for it anyway, hopeful that the darkness had merely created some sort of illusion of depth. His fingers clawed at the dirt for a second or two before they ultimately surrendered and lay still.
Graham Gordon lay broken and exhausted on the black earth at the bottom of the cellar stairs. In the fading last rays of his dying Maglite, he saw an eye: a disembodied, full white orb broken by jagged lightning-shaped lines of red capillaries. The iris in the center of the eyeball was a murky dark brown color, unshining and nearly black. Its pupil was but a pinprick in the beam from the flashlight.
It stared at him from just beyond the edge of the darkness, unblinking.
“Dad?”
The world went dark.
CHAPTER TWO
Joe “Staff” Stafford turned up his nose as the HOLLOW COUNTY sign grew large in the windshield. He rode in the passenger’s side of the ugly white Chevy S-10 pickup Channel 6 had assigned them for the week. A similar white topper with a common locking mechanism had been installed over the bed of the pickup to ensure that all of the station’s heavy, outdated video journalism equipment remained unmolested by any nefarious members of the general public during their stay in this small redneck town. Staff had always found these types of security efforts especially hilarious since there were glass windows on every side of the topper and the Channel 6 logo was emblazoned on the pickup’s hood, both its doors, and its tailgate. He could imagine a would-be thief approaching: “Oh, look! It’s Channel 6’s truck with some expensive, outdated camera equipment! Oh, wait. No. Nevermind. There’s a lock on it.”
Staff’s partner in crime for the weekend (his supervisor for this particular outing, really), reporter Afia Afton sat behind the wheel. Her eyes were on the road, and her long fingers with glossy black polished nails were curled around ten and two. She didn’t see him sneer as they blew by the rusty old sign full of buckshot holes and half-buried in Virginia-creeper, but he hoped she could hear the vexation in his voice.
“This? This is what we drove fifty miles on a Friday afternoon to see? I’m going to fucking kill Joanie.”
Afia scoffed. “It’s just the county line. We have a few minutes before we hit Lost Hollow proper. I used to live around here, you know. Back then, the town was pretty much all woods and farmland except for the church, the school, and the cemetery. Those who weren’t farmers worked at the carbon plant way over in Hollow River. There was a tiny public square in the middle, but it was mostly used for town offices and a couple of small mom and pop places. If you wanted to get gas or mail a package or buy groceries or see a movie you had to drive to Hollow River.”
“Where the carbon plant was.” He might have sounded bored. He didn’t intend it, but he felt it.
“Right. It might still be that way, but I can’t imagine that the kids who grew up here wouldn’t have made some progress by now. Well, if there were any kids who grew up here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the Lost Hollow I remember was aptly named because it was kind of a lost place. It’s where people lived or died or disappeared without anyone noticing much one way or the other. Fuck, I was only eight years old when my mom vanished. Twelve when my dad went. If his murder hadn’t been all over the news in Hollow River and the other bigger cities back then, I don’t know what would’ve happened to me. I got lucky, I guess. Got into the system just when it became fashionable for rich white folks to foster orphaned black kids.”
She sighed. Staff shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He hadn’t known that about her parents, and he wasn’t sure how, or if, he should respond. But at least he wasn’t bored anymore.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Afia continued, “my foster parents were good people, not like the horror stories you hear from a lot of kids who got handed to abusers or straight-up predators in those days. They never adopted me, but they did see me through high school and four years of college. I doubt I’d be here if it weren’t for them.”
Staff laughed. “You mean back in Lost Hollow?”
“I mean in the news business, asshole.” She smirked at him. “But there has to have been some progress here since then. I know it. We’re booked at a bed and breakfast right in the middle of it, aren’t we? That certainly wasn’t here when I was a kid.”
“Yeah,” Staff said, his voice distant. “A bed and breakfast that just happened to be completely vacant in a supposedly haunted small town in the middle of October. I’m sure. I hope you brought something with some DEET in it. I sure as hell don’t want to go home with Lyme Disease.”
Afia rolled her eyes.
“It’s October, Staff, like you said. The risk of you getting a tick bite out here is about as good as us getting real ghost footage this weekend. I’m not happy about having to come back here, either, but this woman we’re meeting has Joanie convinced that there’s a story to tell. People love to hear about ghost shit this time of year. I just hope we can come back with something because I never heard so much as a single disembodied ‘boo’ the whole time I lived here.”
Staff grunted. “All I’m saying is that you wouldn’t see ‘Channel 6’s Own Dan Matthews’ running around a dusty old house and leaping at shadows on the nightly news. He reports on real stuff like government shutdowns and disasters and robberies and murders and Republican corruption.”
“Dan sits behind the anchor desk. He doesn’t actually do the field work anymore. I’m not even sure he’d remember how. Like I said, I’m not happy about it either, but I try to remember that there will come a day when we won’t be the ones they send to cover the puff entertainment shit. Channel 6 has viewers out here. Probably someone complained that we never cover them, so this piece is supposed to be their fluffy little make-good for the small town on the big city news. There’
s not going to be any leaping at shadows if I have anything to say about it, and I do have something to say about it. This is my story now. We’re going to talk to some townsfolk and explore a house or a cemetery so we can tell their tales and give the viewers something to talk about. If the town is lucky, they’ll get a few tourist dollars out of it for Halloween, but we’re not fucking Ghost Adventures.”
That settled him a little. Afia was on the same page, then.
“Yeah. We’re not fucking Ghost Adventures. I just feel like we should’ve graduated from stuff like this by now. I paid my dues with groundbreakings and artsy-fartsy feature stories and make-good puff pieces when I was a newspaper photographer, for Christ’s sake. You wouldn’t know it to look at the credits, though. The Review never gave credit for in-house photography to anything but STAFF. Everything always said STAFF PHOTO at the lower left, even though I was the only photographer on the payroll. That’s why I adopted the nickname. If they’re going to credit STAFF for every photo, I might as well be Staff.”
Afia laughed. “You’ve only told me that story a hundred times.”
