by Isaac Thorne
But it had been murder, hadn’t it?
Self-defense, Graham consoled himself, both then and now as the memories surged to the front of his mind. It was self-defense. He was going to try to hurt me again. I know he was. I believe it.
The old man had been drunk when Graham showed up at his door with two armfuls of groceries from the Kroger in Hollow River, enough food and supplies to get them through another week without having to see each other. Pale, coughing almost uncontrollably, hurling obscenities between breaths, and waving a nearly empty bottle of Budweiser in his face, Lee Gordon had laid the blame on his son for the pain and chronic sickness he now suffered. It was Graham’s fault that his mother was gone. It was Graham’s fault that he’d had to work so hard all his life to provide for them both. It was Graham who had driven him to drink. Graham who was responsible for the smoking that had damaged his lungs so severely. The ungrateful brat had never been any help to him. He had never been anything but a waste of space.
These were all things the younger man had heard before. When Lee Gordon went into a drunken rage, it was like a needle stuck in a groove on a vinyl record. He repeated the same insults and accusations, as loud as his ruined respiratory system would allow and for as long as his target would stand there and take it. Most of the time, Graham quietly walked out, locking the door behind him and allowing the old man to continue ranting at him from inside. On this night, as he stood in the open doorway of the house with two armloads of groceries, the anger boiling up from inside him had become too hot for him to back down.
“Where’d you get the beer, dad?” he had shouted at his father over the tirade, setting the grocery bags down just inside the door, the same spot where his dog Butch had once let go of his bladder and then lost his life for it. “Who is bringing you the fucking beer? You know you’re not supposed to have it.”
The old man either hadn’t heard or pretended not to have heard him. He continued shouting at Graham instead, inching the bottle of suds in his hand ever closer to the bridge of the younger man’s nose as he railed. Looking back, Graham now thought it might have been that act that had ultimately sent him over the edge, the closing in of his father’s brutal hand: the hand that had punched him and pulled at him so many times over the years, the hand that he’d never had the strength to hit back at when it neared. Until now.
Suddenly furious, Graham snatched the brown glass bottle from his father’s hand. Lee Gordon, perhaps to his credit, had enough presence of mind to appear momentarily shocked by it. The younger Gordon next grabbed the collar of his father’s button-down work shirt and spun him toward the interior of the old house.
“Where is it?” he screamed in his father’s alcohol-pinked ear. “Where are you hiding this shit? Show me. I’m gonna pour every bit of it down the drain, and then you’re gonna tell me who’s been bringing it to you. Then I’m gonna find them, and I’m gonna rip their throat out. Do you hear me? WHERE IS IT?”
He shoved his father, intending to force him to walk forward, but Lee instead plummeted to his hands and knees on the hardwood floor beneath them. Even through his own anger and hate, Graham could see that the sudden turn of events had badly scared his old man. His arms trembled at his shoulders as he clung to the floor, apparently unable to raise himself back to his feet on his own. Graham set down the beer, grabbed two fistfuls of work shirt at those shoulders, and hoisted his father back to his feet.
“Where is it?” he growled again. Then it dawned on him. The cellar. “You hide it in the fucking cellar, don’t you? Of course, you do. Why wouldn’t you? There’s no reason for anyone to go down there anymore, is there? You don’t have any little kids left here to torment. So let’s just go have ourselves a look in the cellar.”
Graham stepped around his woozy father, who stood with his eyes half-lidded. The rest of him swayed in gentle circles at the ankle, trying to maintain his balance. The younger Gordon unlatched the cellar door and swung it open. He stretched his right arm into the door frame and flipped the light switch into the On position, bathing the dirt floor below with the loud white hum of tube fluorescents. He started to descend alone in search of Lee Gordon’s stash but thought better of it when he remembered that his dad, though dazed by his son’s pushback, was still very much in the throes of drunken rage. As such, Graham was likely to end up trapped down here if he allowed the old man to remain upstairs while he went down. It would be just like him to latch the door behind his nosy son and trap him down here for spite, at least until he felt the first signs of a hangover and needed someone to help him nurse it.
“All right, Dad.” He leaned against the cellar door so that it remained open. “You first. I’m not leaving until you show me where you’re hiding it.”
The look on his father’s face went from dazed drunk to exhaustion, to anger, and then to resigned resentment in the space of a second. The older man bent down, wobbling a little at half-mast, and plucked his beer bottle from the floor where Graham had left it. He had a little trouble returning to a standing position, but Graham did not leave his place against the cellar door to help him. After some waiting and more wobbling, Lee Gordon stood mostly erect again with the bottle of Budweiser gripped by the neck in his right hand.
“Fine.” He shuffled to the cellar door while tipping the bottle and the remainder of its contents toward his open mouth. Graham snatched it from him again. He glared briefly at his son for his impertinence, but then went back to watching his own feet when Graham refused to avert his eyes.
Graham watched as his father descended the first step, then the second. The old man had become fat in that baggy, fleshy way an old drunk has. It was as if there was no muscle attached to his bones at all now, just mounds and mounds of blobby yellow fat creating pendulous bulges in odd places against crepe Hefty bag skin. His hair was still thick in most areas, although male pattern baldness had left a pear-shaped cul-de-sac of scalp on top from his hairline to his crown. Lee Gordon was no longer the frightening authoritarian strongman he had known for the majority of his life. He wasn’t even strong in the mean sense of the word, the way that bullies see themselves as strong. He was petty and weak, no longer a man in his son’s eyes. He was nothing more than a walking advertisement for the consequences of alcohol abuse. Some part of Graham felt sad for his father. Some part of him felt a little pity. Mostly, he felt rage. Rage that he had allowed a weak man like this to control him for most of his life. Rage that all he’d had to do to stop it when he was a child was to stand up to his father the way he had tonight. Rage that so many of his young years were lost to him now; years that could have been filled with the happiness of living elsewhere, away from the man who would rob him of a life well-lived, of pride, of courage, and of confidence. Rage. Graham’s fist tightened around the neck of the Budweiser bottle in his right hand.
Lee Gordon teetered a little on the second step down, and again on the third. On any other night of his life, Graham’s first instinct might have been to reach out and steady him. Not this time. Instead, Graham raised the bottle of Budweiser in his right hand by its neck over his head, dumping what little remained of its contents on the top step of the cellar in the process. He took two steps down the staircase behind his old man and brought the bottle down hard against Lee Gordon’s baldness. What happened next probably lasted only seconds, but to Graham, it felt as if everything around him had been slowed down and stretched into minutes.
The crown of his father’s head caved from the force of the blow, his skull crunching audibly beneath the thunk of the thick glass. The thin hot membrane of scalp covering the bone broke open as well, oozing thick red blood from the back of his head and into the hair below. The beer bottle did not break but remained clenched in Graham’s right hand as he followed through. Lee Gordon pivoted on the third from the top step of the cellar staircase so that he faced his son. His half-lidded drunken eyes fluttered wide open, fearful, questioning “why?” His right foot became tangled against his left one as he turned and, just lik
e that, he was pinwheeling his arms. Going down.
Graham heard a bone snap when his father’s back struck the lower half of the staircase. The blow catapulted the old man’s legs into the air and hurled him heels over head down the remainder of the stairs. When he crash landed against the cellar floor, he lay face down with his head pointed toward the stairs and his feet at the wall opposite them. His head was tilted at a weird angle, and the point of his spine appeared to now be visible through his shoulder, stretching it so that it looked very close to breaking through his skin.
But Lee Gordon was not dead yet. From his place on the stairs, Graham could hear labored moans of pain and suffering coming from the broken figure on the cellar floor. For a split second, he allowed his conscience to scream at him. What have I done? Oh my God, what have I done? He imagined himself calling for help, getting an ambulance, getting the sheriff’s department. He imagined trying to explain his boiled over rage and support it by revealing all the abuses he’d suffered at the hands of his father that he’d never reported to anyone before now. He imagined trying to explain to a judge and jury that it was temporary insanity brought on by a long history of horrible physical, emotional, and psychological torture. Then he imagined himself in prison, wearing an orange jumpsuit, confined to the same small box hour after hour of every day. Forced to shower, eat, bathe, piss, and shit with other men. Men who were actual hardened criminals. Men with no empathy. Men who would rape him. Men who would tear him up and eat him for breakfast every day for the rest of his life because of the one second out of a whole lifetime of them when he had finally found the courage to stand up for himself.
He imagined all of that. Then he descended the rest of the staircase with the beer bottle. He smashed it against the back of his father’s head again, listening intently for the new crunch of a broken skull beneath it. Then again. Again. And again. Until, finally, he realized that he was no longer bludgeoning a living and breathing human being, but a giant sack of bones, fat, and alcohol-withered muscles. Not a nerve twitched in the body that lay below him. Not a sound of breath flowed from its nostrils or from between its lips.
At last, Graham tossed the beer bottle from his hand, allowing it to smash into brown shards against the hard-packed earth of the cellar floor. He was grateful to it for having lasted as long as it had. Finally. Finally, Lee Gordon was dead.
I KNEW IT! Graham Gordon’s dead father’s voice reverberated through his skull, ringing his sinuses and rolling his broken body back to the cellar floor. The Maglite fell from his hand again but did not flicker this time. It went a short distance away from him and landed with its beam pointed where the staircase’s stringers ended. I KNEW IT! YOU MURDERED ME YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE SHIT. I BROUGHT YOU IN THIS WORLD. I BROUGHT YOU UP BY MYSELF, AND YOU FUCKING MURDERED ME FOR IT! I SHOULD’VE KILLED YOU FIRST WHEN I HAD THE CHANCE. I SHOULD’VE KILLED YOU WHERE YOU STOOD WHEN YOU WALKED IN MY HOUSE THAT NIGHT. YOU UNGRATEFUL LITTLE SHIT!
Graham, in a semi-fetal position, rolled back and forth on his left hip and shoulder. He squeezed his eyes shut tight and clenched his hands mightily at his ears, trying to shut out the sound. The pain was worse now, not so much like a single railroad spike stuck in his brain, but more like the repeated stabbings of a pickaxe, as if his dead father were digging a deeper hole inside his head with every ferocious word. His father must be in his head after all. How else could he have known what Graham was remembering?
As the pain began to subside, Graham opened his eyes, intending to locate the Maglite and shut it off, conserve the battery. What he saw before him instead was the broken body of Lee Gordon as he’d last seen it in this place, lying on the cellar floor in the beam from the flashlight, eyes open, glaring back at him. His neck was still broken and twisted on his shoulders at an impossible angle. The fingers of each of his dead hands were dug into the cellar floor, his palms raised above them as if he’d been clawing his way across it. Dried blood and dirt were smeared over his gray and wrinkled face. His brown eyes had skimmed over with some kind of greenish-gray film. His mouth hung open, barely a tooth within, and thick black filth oozed from the corner that lay nearest the floor. As Graham watched, a glistening pink earthworm protruded from the slime, dislodged itself, and then went slinking along its way. Runners of pus crept from the corners of dead Lee Gordon’s eyes and dripped on the floor beneath him.
“Noooot yeeeeet,” the thing in the cellar with him groaned. It stretched one broken and twisted arm out toward Graham, impossibly digging the fingers of the attached hand into the compacted earth floor, and pulled itself forward, dragging its lifeless feet behind. “Iiiiii’mmmm noooot iiiinnnn yooouuurr heeeaad yeeeeet, buuuut IIIIiiii wiiiill beeeee soooon.”
The remains of Lee Gordon stretched its other hideous hand forward, dug in its fingers, and pulled. The shoe on his left foot slid off as he did so, revealing gangrenous toes poking through threadbare socks. Graham could hear its toenails scraping against the cellar floor, gouging it, as it inched toward him, as if the gravity surrounding the animated corpse was pulling on him harder than it was pulling on Graham, trying to sweep this thing not of nature under the rug of the earth.
His dead father’s rotting face loomed inches away from Graham’s own. He blinked, hoping again that all this was just a product of the concuthion. He held his breath, thinking that maybe if he could no longer smell the presence of the thing it would somehow become less real to him. When he could hold it no longer, and dead Lee Gordon was close enough for his living son to see the rage undulating behind the putrid film over its eyes, he opened his mouth and tried to scream. But nothing came out.
The thing closed in.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Afia and Patsy Blankenship were already bathed, dressed, and drinking coffee at the breakfast table by the time Staff teetered down the stairs to the kitchen on Saturday morning. He glanced at his Fitbit, which informed him that it was only six-thirty, a ridiculously early hour for any sane individual to be up and ready to go on a weekend, work to do or no work to do. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that Patsy was a morning person. After all, she was both older and an entrepreneur. Afia, on the other hand, typically worked the late morning-to-late afternoon shift at Channel 6. Perhaps her wine snooze following dinner the previous evening in addition to a good night’s sleep had enabled her to get a head start this a.m.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” Patsy sang in that abysmally cheery and loud voice morning people save just for these moments. “There’s fresh coffee in the carafe and some scrambled eggs, bacon, and sausage on the table. I made some biscuits and sausage gravy, too. Afia seemed to like them. There’s some diced fruit in the fridge, if you would rather have that.”
Staff groaned an appreciative affirmation. It was all he could manage. He poured the remainder of the carafe into a mug that had been placed upside-down beside it and pulled up a seat at the kitchen table next to Afia. No food yet. Mood fuel first. He held up a hand when Patsy pointed out the sugar bowl and the small silver pitcher of creamer she had placed on the table. Staff was a man who liked his coffee bitter and black, just like his soul before eight o’clock. After three long slurps from the steaming mug, he finally discovered his voice.
“You two are up bright and early.” He managed to make it sound less like an accusation than it felt. “I haven’t even had a shower yet. I hope you don’t mind having to wait for me before we set sail.”
“Not at all,” Afia replied. She had definitely brightened since the previous night’s onslaught of memories of injuries past. “Patsy and I have just been sitting here doing a little planning and waiting already. She texted the constable a few minutes ago about meeting us out at the Gordon place, but I don’t think he’s replied yet.”
“He hasn’t,” Patsy said. “If I don’t hear from him by seven, I’ll call instead. Some people don’t even bother to look at their phones unless they’re ringing, believe it or not, even in this time when it seems like everyone has a screen permanently flo
ating in front of their eyes. Mr. Gordon is one of those types. I don’t think the constable cares much for being always in touch with the rest of the world.”
“Don’t blame him.”
“Young Mr. Beard, on the other hand, is already on his way over.”
Staff nearly spit out his coffee. “What?”
Afia was laughing. “She called him last night. He was excited about being interviewed. Said he’d be here by seven. We can talk to him while Patsy tries to contact the constable again.”
The cameraman poured the remainder of his morning fuel down his throat and stood. “Guess I’d better get moving, then. I have to get showered and unload the equipment.”
A blast of classical music from somewhere near the entryway interrupted him. Bach. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. It was the doorbell. He hadn’t noticed what it was playing when Afia had pressed it the day before. He’d been distracted then, though. Staff noted Patsy’s broad grin as the pipe organ tones rang out.
“Like it? Young Mr. Beard taught me how to set it up for Halloween. I didn’t even know you could change doorbell music. That’s probably him now. He’s a little early.” Patsy pushed back from the kitchen table.
“Well, I guess I won’t be getting that shower after all,” Staff said to Afia. “I’ll go get the equipment.”
There wasn’t much to Jeremy Beard. He was a slight fellow with dark hair and almond eyes. Today he was wearing a black T-shirt with the Ghostbusters logo on it over a pair of dark denims with a hole worn in the right knee. Staff surmised that the young man’s wardrobe choices would be similar the next day, and the day after. He might change out Ghostbusters for the Batman insignia or Green Lantern, but that would be about as far as he was willing to branch out. Staff caught his eye and nodded at the shirt.
