by Isaac Thorne
The boy’s legs proved a bit more challenging to control once he’d accessed them. He could feel them down there, sort of. The sensation was not the same as in the arms. There was an uncomfortableness, a soreness combined with the pins-and-needles of returning blood flow after having cut off the circulation. The legs were there for him, but the commands he sent them at first resulted in a series of jerky motions at the knee that ended with a single straight-leg spasm and release. That, or he’d find the foot on the end of each leg rubbing against the other one irritably, as if he was using one foot to scratch an itch on the other. Other attempts resulted in the legs waggling about against the floor. Each time these things occurred, Lee discovered that he’d lose the pathway to the leg he was feeling. He would have to conduct a fresh search for it from all the way back in the boy’s brain. Maybe he was rushing it, he thought. He tried to lower the sense of urgency that had been building inside him since he’d taken control of the right hand, to take it slow.
Once the connection was reestablished with the right leg, he tried again to move it, first by wiggling Graham’s toes at the end of his Wolverine work boot on the right foot. Next, he contracted Graham’s calf muscle on the right side, then the thigh muscle. Finally, he was able to bend the right leg at the knee on command, without spasm, itching, or waggling, and without losing connectivity. The left leg was still being difficult. He reestablished his connection with it and then lost it when the entire leg spasmed, throwing itself into the air and then flopping around on the cellar floor like a fish that had been abandoned on shore by a summer flash flood.
Lee sighed. YOU’RE FIGHTING ME, AREN’T YOU, BOY? I SUGGEST YOU STOP IT RIGHT NOW. I WAS STRONGER THAN YOU BACK THEN AND I’M STRONGER THAN YOU RIGHT NOW.
Control of the left leg came more naturally after that. He located the path, and the sensation in that leg returned without the pins-and-needles feeling. He was able to wiggle the toes at the end of the left Wolverine, contract the calf, contract the thigh, and bend at the knee, just as he had with the right leg. For all practical purposes, Graham’s body was now his. He controlled the eyes, though the boy obviously needed glasses. He commanded the mouth and tongue. He managed the arms and legs. He decided to leave some of the autonomic systems alone, thinking it might be better for the boy to retain automatic control of things like breathing and heartbeat, functions he was accustomed to not having to think about. At least for now, until he could figure out how to get rid of him. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, the old saying goes. Besides, none of those things were pathways to the arms, legs, or head, and those were the relevant muscles, the ones that gave the appearance of control.
With a final heave-ho, Lee Gordon forced his son’s body to sit up. He gazed at his surroundings through slightly fuzzy but functional eyes. The Maglite that the kid had been tossing around like Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber lay on the floor beside him, still shining its beam against the cinder block wall to his left. Lee rolled on his new body’s butt until he was standing on his knees. He plucked the Maglite from the floor with the left hand, then placed the right hand on the floor and hoisted his new body to its feet. Pain from Graham’s injuries thrummed through him like electricity. He sent commands to every nerve he’d accessed to dial it back. He couldn’t filter it out entirely, not without losing all sensation and collapsing back to the floor, but he thought he could curb it enough to keep himself functional and the pain tolerable. He tested this by taking two steps toward the cinder block wall on which the Maglite was trained. The pain was still there, but felt like little more than a twitch now, an annoying muscle spasm that, with enough practice and a few glasses of water, could be easily ignored if not remedied.
Good. Very good.
Now to figure out what’s next.
He shone the Maglite on the wall that stood behind the busted cellar staircase, past the stringers that led from the floor to the door and along the joints where the cinder block wall met the floor and the other cinder block wall that was perpendicular to it. He halted the beam of light after he had scanned three blocks along the bottom of the cinder block wall from its corner and then eight rows up. There, patterned among the neatly masoned joints, sat a set of blocks that appeared to contain no mortar: his secret door.
STILL THERE, he thought. ALL THIS TIME AND IT’S STILL THERE. JUST LIKE I LEFT IT.
Lee set the Maglite on the cellar floor with its beam pointed at the general area of the loose rectangle of cinder block. He approached it and slid a hand into the gaps on either side of the door and near the bottom. There was a part of him that feared his son’s back wouldn’t be up to this task, so he tried to leverage his new knees as much as possible when he yanked on the rectangle and plucked it from the toddler-sized hole in the wall that it was plugging. He slid about ninety pounds of cement and aggregate between himself and the wall in front of him, listening as the rough surfaces grated against each other. The door finally landed with a thud on the cellar floor just in front of the Wolverines his son was wearing. The work boot brand loyalty was apparently the only thing his boy had ever truly learned from him. He was glad the stack of blocks hadn’t landed on his new toes, though. He might’ve been able to dial back the pain by sending it to his stupid son’s weakling consciousness, but if he broke them, he wouldn’t be able to walk even if he could ignore the pain.
He used both hands and his back to sturdy the door against the rear wall, then perched himself on top of it, so that he was seated beside the black hole it had revealed. Wet air crawled into the cellar from the outside, carrying with it a rotting odor. Lee thought it smelled like a mouse had died in the wall. Why did those things always manage to find a way in but then can’t seem to find their way back out? There was a musty, mildewy smell layered just beneath the dead mouse odor.
HOUSE IS OLD. IT SURE AS HELL AIN’T HAD NO UPKEEP.
He stretched his right hand into the hole and patted down the opposite side of the wall. The row of blocks there was damp, and a bit slimy in places. Years of rushing water from rapid downpours had overpowered what he’d once believed was a watertight seal he’d added around the foundation of this old place. But it didn’t matter. What he was seeking would not have been ruined by a mere stream of flood water. Or it shouldn’t have been, anyway. Just when he was sure he would never find it, the fingernails of his right hand tapped against something hard, creating a thin tink sound from within the hole in the wall.
GOTCHA! Lee fingered the neck of the glass bottle he’d happened upon, then gripped it in his fist. He pulled it from the hole and examined it as carefully as his fuzzy vision would allow in the beam from the Maglite. That was his brand all right. The red and white Budweiser label shone as bright as new. The bottle appeared to be unbroken, not even a chip out of it, and the cap was still sealed down tight. He twisted it off. The pssst sound it made as the cellar air met the amber liquid within was weaker than he remembered. He held the mouth of the open bottle up to his nose and sniffed. Yes. It was, indeed, still beer. Budweiser beer. And Lee was a man who liked beer.
You did have a stash down here! a small voice echoed in his head. I knew it! I knew you did!
Lee chuckled. YEAH. BUT YOU WERE TOO STUPID TO FIND IT EVEN AFTER YOU KILLED ME OVER IT. FAGGOT.
He silently toasted the room around him and then turned the bottle up to drink. He expected the first taste to have some bitterness to it, creating a shiver that started at the back of the throat and ran all the way down his esophagus. Instead, it tasted flat and coppery, not like a Budweiser at all. But it was cool, and after that first taste, it flowed effortlessly down his gullet. In his living days, Lee Gordon would have downed the entire bottle before moving on to a second. His son, however, was likely to be a lightweight, so he chose to drink only enough to ignite that little spark of fearlessness and immortality that comes with the onset of a buzz. He’d nurse it a little, and then keep it burning at a low simmer. The better his buzz without going full-on drunk, the easier it would be to keep the kid in
side him quiet, at least until he could find a way to get rid of him altogether.
You...can’t have...my...life, bubbled to the surface from somewhere inside the boy’s head, but Lee didn’t answer him. Didn’t need to. He took another swig from the Budweiser bottle in his right hand. Then another. Then the limp-dick little squirt of conscience inside him was silenced, submerged in a bubble of pleasant buzz-on in their shared stream of consciousness.
Lee set the Budweiser bottle between his legs on top of the cinder block door and peered through the blackness of the portal he’d opened in the wall. The beam from the Maglite on the floor didn’t reveal much about the darkness therein. Lee thought he could make out a few mounds of packed earth and the corner of a stack of cinder blocks on which that section of his old house rested. There was only one access to this crawl space from the exterior of the old home, and he had blocked it up in a fashion similar to the cellar wall portal so that from the outside it looked like nothing more than a couple of layers of inaccessible foundation. If he climbed into the entrance with the Maglite and commando-crawled his way through the space between the earth and the floor above, he could probably find that old access and kick it down easily enough. If luck were with him, it wouldn’t break into chunks. Then, once outside, he’d be able to place it back where it had been, at least until he figured out what he was going to do about the cellar staircase his idiot fatass son broke on his way down to this hell.
He searched the thin veil of memories he could sense from the buzzed but still conscious presence of Graham in this body. The boy had not only somehow convinced the Lost Hollow electorate to make him constable but had also persuaded the town council to allow him to repurchase the old place from the town, to save it from blight. So he had been planning to restore it, apparently, or turn it into something else. That meant Lee could actually rebuild the cellar stairs at some point without people asking too many questions, he supposed. For now, he’d probably just go down to the hardware store in Hollow River, assuming it was still there, and buy a ladder. That would at least allow him to climb down here and set the portal door back to right.
Lee downed the rest of the Budweiser and then set the bottle over the portal threshold from where he’d obtained it. It was a struggle, but he resisted the urge to celebrate his new-found life in a more than slightly used body by shattering the empty against the wall beside him. Instead, he leaped from the top of the makeshift cinder-block door, retrieved the Maglite, and shined it over the portal threshold and into the crawl space beyond. Cinder block pillars stood smattered throughout the cave-like void below his house. A few appeared to have cracks in them now. Lee supposed that decades of supporting the weight of a place like this had taken their toll. Still, none of them were crumbling. That meant that the floors above them were still stable. The house was unlikely to crash down on him while he sought his escape from its bowels.
He’d need to be careful where he was crawling, of course. Rib bones have sharp points. So do some human teeth. Lee Gordon didn’t quite like the idea of getting stabbed or bitten by the remainders of any of the vindictive ladies he’d helped to disappear over the years. They were all still in there somewhere, undisturbed since the day he’d hauled each of their nasty high-falutin’ corpses inside.
Graham’s voice, incredulous and edged with panic, suddenly piped up in his head again. ...What?... Dad?... What? My God! What did you do?
Lee grinned.
YOU REALLY WANNA KNOW, BOY? YOU SURE YOUR LIMP ASS CAN HANDLE IT? THE FUNNY THING ABOUT IT IS YOU NEVER KNEW. ALL THE TIME YOU SPENT DOWN HERE HIDING FROM ME, NOT ONE TIME DID YOU EVER NOTICE MY LITTLE DOOR BEHIND THE STAIRS. NOT ONE TIME DID YOU EVER NOTICE THE STINK. WHY I WONDER? BECAUSE YOU’RE STUPID? OR WAS IT JUST THAT YOU THOUGHT CELLARS WERE SUPPOSED TO SMELL THAT WAY?
He laid his son’s head back against the cinder block and shut his eyes, allowing all the memories to surge forward at once.
***
Graham Gordon was living in a bubble. Literally. His world had gone from physical to metaphysical in an instant after his father had seized control of his corporeal being. He could see the cellar through the eyes of his body, but those eyes were distant from him. It was as if what had been his body was now merely a camera that was broadcasting images to a convex screen in front of his consciousness. He couldn’t look down at himself anymore. There was no body there. He was inside his body, but his body was outside of him and being controlled by someone else; someone who had always hated him.
He watched his father Lee remove that secret door made of concrete blocks from its home in the cellar wall. He felt the coolness of the amber liquid from the Budweiser bottle start to cloud his mind. On some level he must be still in touch with physical reality. But just as his life had been as a child, it was his father who ultimately controlled that reality. Killing him all those years ago had not enabled Graham to finally escape him. Yet if the younger Gordon was really still in touch with his physical body, it might be possible for him to gain control of it again. Maybe he could test that.
Reaching out with his consciousness, exploring his new interior surroundings, Graham felt two thin tendrils of limbs forming. They protruded from the cloud that was currently his being, thickened, and became his metaphysical arms, hands, and fingers. He poked at the convex screen in front of him with the ends of those fingers, watched it ripple in response to his touch. The cellar world just beyond his reach stretched and contracted, wavering on the screen. Just as it began to settle, his father’s voice in their shared head said something about killing high-falutin’ women, and Graham had been unable to conceal his shock. He’d accidentally broadcast the feeling from within the bubble and out to his father, who would now most certainly kill him for it. Better that than allowing Graham to continue to exist along with the possibility that he might someday escape and reveal Lee’s secrets to the world.
The image in front of Graham changed then, darkened and winked out like an old-fashioned television screen when the power is cut. Suddenly Graham felt himself yanked toward the bubble screen, into it. It wrapped itself around him like plastic cling wrap, squeezing him, forcing life out of him the way a proto-sociopath might torture a roach before ultimately juicing it with his thumb against a cold basement floor. He thought his father might have found a way to snuff him out, to finally solve his “problem” child.
Then that feeling was gone. Graham was somewhere else. No, not just somewhere else. He was someone else. He was Lee Gordon, fresh off a Friday at the carbon plant in Hollow River, nose hairs singed and clothes still reeking of burnt coal from stoking the fires. He sat in a plush square cube with an open front at Bombshell’s, a strip joint. Standing over him, her legs forming a triangle with her ass at its apex and bent at his eye level, was an all of nineteen-year-old blonde. She was naked except for a white thong that glowed brilliantly in the house black lights that were used to indicate the beginning and end of a particular dancer’s set on the center stage. She’d told him her name was Star, but it was probably really something more mundane like Jennifer or Kristy. The bass beat of the house music pulsed inside his skull, making his brain feel as if it were about to ooze through his ears. The young woman slapped her own butt cheek with the palm of her right hand in time to that beat. Lee took that to mean that it was time for him to tip her again. Graham could see the dollar in Lee’s hand, rising up to meet the waistband of her thong, which she had helpfully stretched from her hip to receive it. She was gorgeous, Graham could hear himself thinking as Lee; a hell of a lot prettier than the woman he’d married and who had then begat him his sickly wimp of a son. She was watching him enjoy her beauty, smiling at him, making eye contact from behind the temptation of the mounds of jiggling flesh she was shaking in his face. Lee wanted her. She knew it. They didn’t usually smile at him or make eye contact, those Bombshell’s dancers. Maybe she wanted him too.
Suddenly the scene swam in front of him, dissipated and reformed into a new one. Graham was in an old Ford F-150 n
ow, still looking and smelling like a much younger version of his dead father. Star was leaving the strip joint for the night. She was clothed modestly, effectively hiding most of the assets to which Graham and his father had been privy inside the club. She clutched with both hands the handle of the purse that dangled over her left shoulder. The bag was open. Her left hand was positioned where the handle was fastened to the bag as if she wanted to have quick and easy access to its contents. Pepper spray, no doubt. Or a handgun. And who could blame her? Lots of crazies probably hang out around strip club parking places at night.
And you’d deserve it, Graham thought at his father. What are you doing?
Graham as Lee climbed out of the cab of the F-150, unable to prevent himself from doing so. He was approaching Star or whoever she was. He called out to her, announcing himself while her back was to him so that he would not startle her. Graham heard himself proposition her, inviting her first to a late dinner, then to his F-150, or a motel room somewhere off the highway. He heard her reject him. He watched her laugh when she did. The heat of rage boiled up from the collar of Lee’s work shirt. Graham felt it. Tried to reason it away, soothe it. But it was no use. Lee had thought he had connected with Star. He had thought she wanted him. But it turned out that she was just another cock tease working in another roadside bar, happy to take his money and allow him to masturbate over the memories, but not willing to get to know him outside of those bounds. Graham felt Lee’s rage boil over into fury. Star saw it, too, apparently, because the next thing both Graham and Lee felt was hot, searing pain in his eyes. Tears streamed from them, tickling what felt like fresh sunburn around the sockets. His lungs were on fire as well, forcing him to cough up shit from within his sinuses that he hadn’t even known was in there. Lee was hurt. Graham felt like he was dying. But he was glad. He was glad that his father was getting some comeuppance. The stripper, on the other hand, had made a run for it while he struggled. There was a pay phone on the wall outside the club. Would she call the cops? Probably. He sure as hell didn’t think she was going to call an ambulance for him.
