by Isaac Thorne
That’s where the Beard kid saw her through the window, Staff thought. I knew it! He chased after her, video still rolling, but stopped short at the edge of the scrub bushes. He peeled the growth back a little with his hands, revealing two small broken-off branches of a tree that had been tied together in a cross pattern. The graying old thread that held them looked like it might be shoestrings from someone’s sneakers. He figured that it must be the remains of an old grave marker, or the makeshift mast of some kid’s old cardboard box pirate ship. Perhaps, he thought, this is where someone’s dog had been buried once upon a time.
“What the hell happened?” Patsy asked the air in front of them while Staff strained to see if he could make out any sign of the creature through the dense thicket of dead grass, bushes, and autumn foliage that remained on the trees. “Did you two see what I think I saw?”
“She just disappeared,” Afia acknowledged, “right into thin air.” She looked earnestly at Staff as he strode back to them. “What do you think spooked her?”
“Has to be something about the crawl space. That’s the obvious guess. Maybe it’s time we had ourselves a look-see?” He glanced at Patsy. She shrugged back at him, then nodded.
“Sure, whatever. What’s one more little act of trespass in a day full of it?”
Staff tapped the little lightning bolt symbol in the upper left corner of his screen and then tapped the word ON. He waved his hand in front of the camera and verified that the device’s LED bulb was lit. Then he knelt in front of the spot where the creature had been so furiously pawing at the ground and bent, ass in the air, to have a look inside the “mouse hole.”
“While you do that, I’m going to go back inside and tell Graham what’s going on,” Patsy said. “I need to make sure he’s all right, anyway. I’m sure he probably thinks we’ve forgotten all about him. Honestly, I thought we would’ve seen that ambulance pull up by now. Wonder what’s keeping them?”
“Yeah,” Staff agreed from his spot on the ground. “You go ahead and do that. We’ll be along right behind you. I don’t see much in this crawl space except for some mounds of dirt, a few stacks of cinder blocks, some plumbing, and—”
That was when he started to scream.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Well. Most likely, that was a fuck-up. Maybe he’d been dead too long. He’d forgotten how sensitive the black folks could be about being called out like that. He wondered if the anger he felt wafting off the kid with the lights and the camera and the embarrassment of news media work ethic just then was because he’d called the girl’s mother a black bitch. Just doing his job, he’d said. The problem is that his job involved butting in where he’s not wanted and trespassing on private property. Besides, the Afton bitch had deserved it. What right did she have to criticize the way he’d raised his own son? Spare the rod, spoil the child was the rule he’d grown up with, and there was no good reason he shouldn’t have applied it to his own boy. Sure, maybe he’d conditioned Graham to be afraid of him, but it was for his own good. Maybe he hadn’t turned out perfect, but look at him now! Town constable!
You said I only got the job because no one else wanted it, said the voice of the other inside his head. I thought that was my thought and I had just heard it in your voice, but it wasn’t, was it? It was you all along.
Lee Gordon spread a malicious grin across the face he was wearing. OH I’VE BEEN TALKING TO YOU EVER SINCE YOU KILLED ME, SON. I WAS JUST NEVER CLOSE ENOUGH OR STRONG ENOUGH TO GET INSIDE BEFORE. NOW THAT BOTH YOU AND THE BLACK MAN’S KID ARE IN TOWN, WELL, I GUESS I FINALLY HAVE A REASON TO EXIST AGAIN.
In response there came a low rumbling sound from somewhere in their shared consciousness. Lee Gordon paused, then shouted WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME, BOY?
The low voice returned, a little stronger, audible this time. I said, not if I have anything to say about it.
Lee Gordon felt a tug at the nerves and muscles in his right arm just then, signals emanating from somewhere in the stream and spidering their way from the brain stem, down the shoulder, toward the fingers. He clenched both his fists in response and squeezed his eyes shut, fighting the takeover. It was a drain on precious energy that he needed. He shouldn’t have turned down the black woman’s offer of food or water. If he didn’t get fuel soon, some kind of hot meal to nourish these cells and provide a few extra calories to burn, he risked losing his hold entirely. Lee wasn’t sure how he knew these things. Maybe it was instinct, like how you intuitively know how to suckle against your mother’s tit as a newborn. Either way, he could feel the energy drain away from him as he fought his son’s advance, pushing him back toward the stream. Lee’s will was stronger than Graham’s. For now, at least.
As his own consciousness swam the length of the nervous system and back to the fore of Graham’s body, Lee suddenly became aware of some kind of buzzing in his right front pocket. At first, he thought his leg was being shocked by something he must have touched while he was involved in the struggle with his son. Then he realized that it wasn’t a shock, but a vibration, and it was accompanied by the loudest, most annoying chiming sound he’d ever heard, as if someone were hammering the high notes on a kid’s xylophone that had been plugged into a PA system mounted right beside his ear. It was coming from that goddamned phone device the black woman had given him, the thing that looked like a tiny television screen except flatter and rounded at the corners and with no receiver antenna that he could see.
He plucked the thing from the right front pocket of his son’s uniform trousers and nearly dropped it when it vibrated again in his hand. As it buzzed and sounded its annoying chime, the screen of the thing lit up. He held it up so that he could see it. On the display was a blue comic strip balloon looking thing that contained black text. The headline of it was merely the word PATSY. This was followed by the message: “BRT. Dealing with something. Sending pic.”
Lee examined the message for a few seconds, uncomprehending. Then the screen faded to black, and the text was gone from his sight. “What the fuck does BRT mean?” he mused aloud. “And who is Pic?” He thought about yanking Graham back from the stream to ask him but decided that it wasn’t worth the risk. The message was not meant for him to reply. At least he didn’t think it was. There were no question marks, nothing to indicate that the old woman wanted any information from him. The blackness of the screen against the new bright white light that was falling into the cellar from the door above him revealed a reflection of his son Graham’s busted up face and what looked like smudges of fingerprints against the glass screen of the phone device. Lee raised a finger to wipe at one of the prints when the thing buzzed and chimed again in his hand.
The screen lit up immediately, and Lee was presented with another blue balloon that was labeled PATSY. There was no text within it this time, but there was something that looked like a small photograph with a translucent white triangle in the middle of it. The triangle obscured the center of the tiny photo, but he could see at its edges were the front and rear bumpers of what looked to him like a couple of cars. One of the fingerprint smudges on the glass was also visible atop the image. Lee used a thumb to try to wipe it away, and that’s when the picture in front of him enlarged and started moving.
What had been a small still photo in a blue balloon in the center of the phone device expanded to fill the entire display he held in his right hand. The translucent white triangle in the middle of it vanished and was replaced by the image of something that looked quite a lot like Graham’s stupid old English bulldog Brutus. Or was it Butch? He couldn’t remember. Whatever its name was, it looked like the dog he’d bashed to death for pissing on the floor when his son hadn’t put him out all those years ago. There was no way that dog had survived the beating. Even if it had, there was no way it would have lived an additional thirty-some-odd years following that. It had to be a different dog or...or, not a dog at all. Something was wrong about its head. Off, somehow. The thing took two steps closer to the screen he was watching, and then the i
mage was still again. It shrank back to its original tiny size in the center of the blue balloon on the screen. Lee mashed on it with his thumb, as he had when he was trying to rid the display of that fingerprint smudge, and the photo sprang back to life again, starting over from where it had begun before as if someone had rewound the tape for him.
This time he ignored the dog-like qualities of the thing in the frame and tried to focus entirely on its head, its face, which looked to him like a human head on top of the canine body. Not just human, but familiar. He thought that the face of the dog creature reminded him of someone he knows or used to know when he was alive. It was something in the shape of the mouth and the sad brown eyes. Then the thing on the screen opened its mouth, and the sad brown eyes turned downward in what looked like anger. Suddenly it clicked. The face he saw in the head of the dog thing was the enraged face of a thirty-something and very much alive Grace Afton. It was Darek’s wife that he’d slaughtered all those years ago, the one he had chopped into pieces and thrown into the crawl space beneath this old house along with the Bombshell’s whore and the mother of his son.
The video ended again, just as it looked like the face of Grace Afton was changing, transforming somehow into something else. The features he thought he’d recognized in the face had gone fuzzy. Now he wasn’t sure he’d seen the face at all. Lee Gordon stared at the reduced still image with the translucent triangle on it, hovering his thumb above it, for as long as it remained on the screen. He mashed down on it again just as everything began to fade to black, but he was too late. It was gone for now, and he had no idea how to get it back. He shoved the device into the front right pocket of his son’s trousers, ensuring that the back of the phone rested against his thigh instead of the screen. That was foolish and superstitious, of course, but it had become apparent to Lee that he knew very little about how the technology of whatever age this was really worked. Who is to say that the black bitch in the phone device’s movie wouldn’t somehow be able to transport its way from there to here like they used to do in that old Star Trek television series. If that was true, Graham probably could have simply transported out of the cellar in spite of the broken stairs. Except, of course, that he hadn’t had his phone with him.
Still. After all these years, everything had finally clicked into place. Grace Afton, the wife of Darek, mother of Afia, and a thorn in his side, was not only a black bitch. She was the black bitch, the thing that had been screaming and howling and scratching outside his old house for what now felt like an eternity. Lee felt a shiver travel up the center of his back, culminating in a warm prickly sensation at the back of his neck. Fear? Excitement? Maybe it was a little bit of both. The black bitch that had been sniffing around his house all this time was Grace Afton—or at least some part of her was Grace Afton—and she might finally be leading her own daughter to the door of the crawl space where he’d tossed her like so much yesterday’s garbage decades before. Carefully, the elder Gordon prodded the stream of consciousness he shared with the sentience of his offspring. BOY? he called. YOU AWAKE DOWN THERE?
There was no reply. And that was good. Because now Lee figured that he was going to have some pretty strenuous work to do, and it was going to require almost all of his remaining energy if he meant to do it right. Lee raised his palms to his occupied son’s face and spit directly in the middle of them. He rubbed them together lightly, spreading the saliva across his palms and onto his fingers. He glanced up at the cellar door and, satisfied that Patsy, the skinny kid, and the black girl were all otherwise occupied, strode to the rear cellar wall, the one that stood directly beneath the stringers of the broken staircase. He crammed his son’s fingers into the mortarless joints that formed the frame of the false wall and heaved it, allowing it to slide down the wall and come to rest on the floor in front of him. Next, he retrieved the Maglite from the cellar floor, ensured it was switched on, and crawled through the portal and into the dark void beneath the old house. The black bitch was outside, and might right this moment be leading her uppity daughter to where her earthly remains had been scattered.
There was no more time left for him to wait on a rescue. If the black bitch intended to take him down by trapping him and then exposing his little gravesite work to the news people, she had another thing coming. And coming soon. Lee Gordon shone the beam from the Maglite around the narrow height crawl space that stretched out before him. He’d not seen it with human eyes for more than twenty years now. The crawl space had to have been more than twenty-five square feet given the size of the rooms above him that it supported, but from his angle—akin to a World War I infantryman crawling on his belly under a barbed wire fence—the expanse of it appeared vast. A wave of panic and uncertainty washed over him. What if he was wrong about the nature of the black bitch? What if he slithered his way to the other end of the crawl space only to find that he’d revealed his own long-buried secrets to a group of busybodies because of some dumb disfigured animal that just needed to be put out of its misery?
He considered reaching for the phone device in his pocket so that he could try to figure out how to rewatch the little movie Patsy had sent him. Maybe he could try to reach out to Graham again, search the boy’s memories and knowledge to determine how to operate the thing. Then again, by the time he figured it out, it might be too late to stop the black bitch from revealing his criminal past to the entire world on the nightly news. So he slid forward on his belly instead, dragging himself on his knees and elbows along the dirt inside the crawl space. The mound of earth under him was so high on his first slide that he felt the floor joists above him scrape against Graham’s fat back. The stupid kid never did know how to eat right. Not that either of them had done much eating right after he’d chopped up the boy’s mother and tossed her bits into this little hidey hole that he was passing through.
That memory spooked him a little. His nosey bitch of a wife was in there with him somewhere, probably little more than scattered yellow calcified bones by now. But she wasn’t alone, was she? There was the whore from Bombshell’s, too, who was no longer able to shake her curvy little ass in his face or jiggle her naked titties at him while she gazed on him with her lying-ass come-hither eyes and her fire engine red lips parted by her teasing tongue. The old human remains of the black bitch were also strewn around somewhere. At least, they should have been. It was creepy, though, crawling through this wet vegetation smelling patch of ground under the house, able to see only what lay directly in front of the Maglite’s beam, and continually thinking he saw movement in the shadows at the edges. Each time he trained the light on a darkened area of the crawl space where he thought he’d detected movement, whatever he thought he had seen there either vanished in the light or was never there to begin with.
Twice, Lee noticed yellowish white protrusions sticking up from the coating of dust that lay atop the compacted earth below him. Bones, probably. The first one lay directly in his path from the cellar portal to the makeshift cinder block access “door” that would serve as his escape hatch from the house. The second one he’d noticed after shining the beam of the flashlight to his left, where he thought he’d seen something move. That turned out to be a small gray field mouse. It stood on its rear haunches, white belly exposed to him, watching his progress from its beady black eyes. Beside it lay what looked like it once might have been a part of a finger or a toe.
Half-way across the crawl space, and after crawling over a second tight squeeze that resulted in an itchy scratching sensation that traveled down his son’s fat-ass back, Lee saw what he thought was probably daylight shining through a small arch-shaped hole in the cinder block of an exterior wall. Above it, a much thinner line of sunlight shone through, indicating that the joint formed by the blocks at that location was not mortared. He’d found the old access door.
***
Through the bubble lens, Graham Gordon watched his own body crawling, without any effort or concentration from him, through the dank mess that was the crawl space under the hou
se. Hatred welled up in him. He hated his father for the things he had done to Graham as a child. He hated him for the things he had done to his mother, to Grace Afton, to Darek Afton, to the stripper with the fake name. But for the first time, he also felt a glimmer of hope. Had he known about the crawl space, he might have been able to escape the cellar before his father had grabbed hold of him. He might have avoided all this. Then again, he might’ve only delayed it because he had been planning to renovate the place, which meant he would have been spending much more time here than he already had. Now, he thought he could feel his father losing some of the initial strength he’d found to imprison Graham. He hadn’t eaten or had any hydration for a long period of time now and that fact was beginning to take a toll.
