The Gordon Place

by Isaac Thorne

  She nodded.

  “Ok. One,” Staff said. Afia shut her mouth and began to inhale. It sounded a little ragged to him, but he could see her back straightening and feel it broadening as she sucked in the air, which was good. Her lungs were filling. “And two.” He realized as soon as he’d reached the count that he’d forgotten to tell her to pucker her lips when she exhaled. She did it on her own anyway.

  “Again. This time, when you exhale through your mouth, let me count to four before you try to inhale.”

  She nodded again. When her second exhalation was complete, her autonomic systems took over. A painful-looking bruise was swelling on her right cheek, and large dark bags had appeared under her usually perfect television reporter eyes, but she was breathing again. He helped her to her feet and then jerked a finger at the creature and the man who claimed to be Graham Gordon as they rolled and fought on the overgrown dead grass in front of them.

  “What should we do?”

  Afia shrugged. “I guess we should help her.”

  “You get the arms, and I get the legs?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  The pair dashed forward, Afia stumbling a little as she struggled to regain her strength. The man who should have been Graham Gordon was thrashing on the ground. He was on his back. The creature was on top of him, biting at his throat as the man tried to hold her back with one hand and stabbed at her brown, hazel, brown, hazel eyes with whatever it was he clutched in the other. Staff straddled the man’s legs and shoved them together. He sat on them at the knees, hoping that would prevent him from obtaining any leverage against the ground.

  Meanwhile, Afia was attempting to grab at his wrists, but to no avail. The struggle between man and beast was too fast and furious for her to keep up. As soon as she grabbed for a wrist, it was gone from where it had been, and all she could snatch at was air.

  “Can’t get him,” she shouted to Staff. “They’re moving too fast!” Somewhere underneath Afia’s call and the grunts, groans, and growls of the battle in front of him, Staff thought he could hear another voice. He couldn’t make out what it was saying, but he could hear it. Afia called to him again, “Staff! What do I do?” He shushed her then, listening. There it was: a low, murmuring voice. It was coming from the man on the ground. He was saying words, but his voice was too low for Staff to make them out.

  “He’s saying something,” he shouted to Afia. “Can you make out what he’s saying?”

  She bent to listen.

  “Careful!” Staff admonished. “Don’t get too close.”

  She waved a hand at him, simultaneously indicating to him that she understood and that he needed to shut up so she could hear. From between flying fur and flailing arms, Staff saw her grimace, roll her eyes, and then sit back on her heels again.

  “He said, ‘Why didn’t the mummy go to the party?’“ she shouted. “‘Because he was all tied up.’ Jokes. He’s telling stupid kid jokes again.”

  A thrum of excitement ran up Staff’s spine. Stupid kid jokes, like the ones Graham was texting to Patsy when she’d gone with him to pick up the extension ladder. Like the knock-knock jokes he’d been telling when they’d discovered that he’d found a way out of the cellar through the crawl space of the old house, right before he said to them that he was “pothethed” by the spirit of his dead father. Stupid kid jokes, familiar and repetitive, like a mantra or some kind of incantation, a way to focus concentration and shut out distraction from a particularly difficult task.

  Graham Gordon was “pothethed” by the spirit of his dead father, and the stupid kid jokes were his way of breaking through the other man’s hold on his body. It had to be. Whenever he wasn’t spouting jokes and grimacing like he needed to take a shit and all the toilets were occupied, he was assaulting Afia and Staff.

  Those were the two Grahams: the need-to-shitter and the enraged fight-picker.

  “Holy shit,” Staff shouted. He leaped off the man’s legs and ran over to where Afia had pretty much given up trying to restrain the man’s arms. “It’s Graham. It’s Graham trying to break through, Afia! He’s Graham now! He’s Graham. Call off the dog thing!”

  She looked at him incredulously. “Why would I be able to call her off?”

  “Just do it. I’ll tell you after he’s safe.”

  But Afia hadn’t needed to call her off after all. The beast had either heard and understood their conversation or had on her own determined that he was no longer a threat. It seated itself to Graham’s side and remained there, watching Afia. The thing’s continually transforming face had more-or-less settled now on the sad brown eyes and Cupid’s bow lips. This was the face Staff had hoped Afia would see. The creature and she gazed at each other, and Staff heard Afia say, “daughter?” It was the same word that the creature had said to her when they’d both been piled on top of Patsy, trying to protect her.

  The creature stood up again and sauntered the distance between herself and Afia, seating herself face-to-face with Staff’s coworker. Afia stretched out her hands and attempted to part the fur, or hair, away from the beast’s features. A tear crept from the corner of her right eye and ran over the swelling bruise on her cheek as she for the first time examined its face in detail. Then, suddenly, she threw her arms around the creature’s neck and pressed her face into the soft fur there.

  “Mom?” she cried. “Oh my God, Mom? Is that really you in there?”

  A sudden blast of cool energy threw Afia backward then. The creature in front of her became enshrouded in a white mist. It was a thin membrane of cloud at first, but soon thickened into a pillar that obscured the creature behind it. As Afia and Staff watched in amazement, the cloud began to dissipate, and the figure standing in front of them was no longer a composite of canine and human, but the full-height figure of a woman: a smiling woman who Staff thought looked a hell of a lot like Afia herself. It was a relieved and radiant human smile that warmed her sad eyes.

  “Daughter,” she said. “Afia. My daughter.”

  Afia raised herself from the ground in front of the figure and approached her, tears silently streaming down her face. “It is you. What happened to you? I don’t understand what’s happening right now.”

  Grace Afton stretched out her hands, cradling Afia’s right one in both of hers. “I can’t hold this form for very long,” she said. “This...thing...I can become is made up of all the energy and rage of those who have suffered and died at the hands of Lee Gordon.” She glanced to her left and indicated the form of Graham lying in the dead grass. “His father. Your father is in here with me. So is the Gordon boy’s mother. There are faint wisps of another woman, a white woman with long blonde hair, along with the jumbled thoughts of a dog that I think once belonged to the Gordons.”

  Beside them, in a half-asleep voice, Graham said, “Butch.”

  “Butch it is, then. Right now, I’m the strongest of these entities. The others have allowed me to come forward so I can talk to you. I knew one day you’d come back here, just as I somehow sensed that one day Lee Gordon would try to leave this house and return to the living world.”

  She shook her head, looking down at the ground in front of her. “I don’t have any memories after Lee Gordon murdered me. The next thing I knew, I had been sucked into this...thing, whatever it is. This other entity. We don’t know who brought us together, but we do know why. We, the victims of Lee Gordon when he was living, are here to prevent him from hurting anyone else.” She sighed. “Until we’re rid of him, your father, Graham’s mother, the dog, the other woman, and I are stuck here together. Occasionally we exhaust ourselves, and then we must separate in order to regain our strength. Those occasions do not last for very long. Then we’re thrust back together, forever patrolling the perimeter of the Gordon place.”

  Afia furrowed her brow. The spirit of Grace Afton allowed her daughter’s hand to slip out of her own. “But we saw you,” Afia said. “As the creature, you ran out in front of our truck yesterday afternoon while we were on our w
ay into town.”

  Grace nodded, smiling. “We have found that we are not entirely tied to this spot in Lost Hollow. We can move outside of this plot of land, but we start to pull apart if we stray too far. We have gone almost as far as the square, but never farther than that without losing our cohesion. Sometimes, we can borrow energy from other things to hold our form for a little longer. Electronic devices, things that use batteries for power, can boost us. We try not to use them often, though, because doing so can tether us to the living.

  “Yesterday, I sensed you when you and this one were near.” She cocked her head at Staff. “I had to find you. Lee Gordon was never punished for all those he murdered, and I knew that he wasn’t done. We could smell him waiting somewhere inside that old house. Well, Butch could smell him, and that meant that the rest of us could, too. I didn’t know what he was waiting for, but then Graham showed up and started poking around the old house. I watched him from just outside the door, and I saw the hateful ghost of his own father smash him over the head with a phantom beer bottle. I saw Graham fall, heard the stairs collapse beneath him. We didn’t know what to do then.” She smiled again. “And then I sensed you.”

  “So you tried to stop us when we got close to the house,” Staff said. He was smiling. Fuck Channel 6 News and their Halloween special. The events of the past twenty-four hours were starting to make sense, and that was more satisfying at that moment than any potential paycheck or reimbursement. Grace nodded, but she did not look at him. Her eyes remained fixed on her living daughter.

  “I don’t have long now,” she said. “We were elsewhere only moments ago. We borrowed from some batteries to build ourselves up for this fight, but we’ve used up too much of ourselves. I have to allow us to separate, recover our strength so we can form again when we need to.”

  Afia looked troubled. “Patsy—Patsy Blankenship, the town administrator—told us that the black bitch is a death omen. She said anyone who encountered you was bound to suffer horrible consequences. The other places you’ve been seen had to have been farther away than the square.”

  Now it was Grace Afton’s turn to look troubled. “They were not us,” she said. “Over decades we have come to realize that the fabric between the living and dead is thin in Lost Hollow. Too thin. Whatever brought us together to fight Lee Gordon seems to be benevolent, on the side of peace and justice. But there are others. I don’t know if they’re the spirits of other dead people. They might be demons. Hell hounds from another plane.” She fixed her eyes on Afia, her mouth turned down in a grimace. “Don’t pursue them, Afia. You and this gentleman here. Stay away from them. If they latch onto you, tether to you, you’re cursed.”

  Fresh tears formed along the rims of Afia’s eyelids. “All right,” she said. “Is there no peace, then? Is there no rest after this life is over?”

  “There can be,” Grace replied softly. “We can rest. We have been commanded not to for as long as Lee Gordon remains earthbound. When he is gone, and there is no more danger of his return, your father and I will rest together while we wait for your time to come.”

  “What can we do to stop him?”

  Afia’s mother shook her head.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that, sweetheart. If I did, he would be gone already.” She looked at her own hands. “We’re starting to fade. That fight drained us more quickly than usual. I can feel us losing cohesion. We’ll be back when our strength returns again, be sure of that. While we’re gone, try to find a way to help Graham stay in control of his body. Do not let the other one through. He cannot win.

  “I have to go,” she said then, and turned to face the shadow between the Channel 6 pickup and Graham’s Tacoma. She walked toward it, but stopped when Afia called out to her.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “I love you. Both of you. You and dad.”

  Grace Afton smiled at her. “I love you, too. Good-bye for now.” She took three long strides, the last one into the shadows between the pickup trucks, and vanished.

  On the ground, Graham—Staff hoped he was still Graham, anyway—rolled onto his hands and knees and was struggling to stand up. Staff thumped Afia twice on the shoulder and pointed to him. “What do we do?” was what he intended to convey. A shrug was her response to him. Staff nodded and then motioned her back, toward the shadows where her mother’s spirit had vanished a moment before.

  “Graham?” Staff said, taking a single step in the groaning man’s direction. He had risen to one knee and was resting his forearms on it. He looked exhausted. “Graham, is that you?”

  The kneeling man sighed heavily and nodded without looking at the two journalists who had been trying to restrain him only moments before. “Yes,” he said. “It’th me.”

  “How do we know that?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he replied. Staff sensed defeat in his voice. It was evident even with the lisp. It might have even been funny under other circumstances—if this were a movie, for instance—and had not become a matter of life and death. “I don’t know. But I’m sick of it. I justh want it to be over now. My dad is suppothed to be dead. I killed him. Pushed him down the cellar stairs a long time ago.” He paused for a beat, appearing surprised at his own admission of guilt. “I should’ve done it when I was a kid. Maybe my mother and Athia’s parents would still be alive then.”

  Staff couldn’t be one hundred percent certain he was talking to Graham, but something about the admission that Lee Gordon hadn’t merely fallen down the cellar stairs on his own made him think he probably was talking to the son. There was regret in his words, as if he was the hero of a story who had done the right thing, but too late for that thing to have been of any benefit. As shocking as it was, it wasn’t the admission of having committed murder that convinced Staff, but that he regretted not having done so sooner.

  Staff strode the rest of the distance to where Graham knelt and extended a hand, assisting him to his feet. Graham wobbled a bit but was able to steady himself after a few seconds. He looked from Staff to Afia and back again, his expression sorrowful beneath the blood and grime that were smeared and caked all over his face.

  “He’th fighting me,” he said. “I can’t hold him back forever. He’ll take over again soon, and I won’t be able to stop him.” He teetered again, almost went down, but Staff caught him under his shoulders.

  “Let’s get you over to the porch steps so you can sit down. It’s got to be harder to keep fighting him if you have to fight yourself just to stand up.”

  Graham nodded and allowed Staff to lead him to the front porch steps. Afia followed, aiding them by taking Graham’s other arm as he eased his bottom down onto the second of the three porch steps, his Wolverine-clad feet situated on the ground in front of him. He exhaled a long, pained sigh as his muscles relaxed against the steps.

  “Thank you. I don’t know how much longer I can last. He’th coming back now.” Graham gulped audibly. “The keyth are still in the yard.”

  “I’ll get them.” Afia ran for the spot where Graham’s body had toppled while Lee was still in control. Staff watched her long enough to verify that she’d found the Tacoma keyring among the clumps of overgrown grass. She held them high so that he could see.

  “Pocket them! If we have to run, he’ll still be able to get away, but he won’t get as far on foot as he would in the truck.” Afia nodded and shoved the keyring into the front pocket of her jeans, then hustled back to the porch steps.

  “He can’t get them now.”

  Graham looked at her from tired, lidded eyes. “He’ll try. He’th coming. You should probably run.”

  “Hold on just a little longer,” Staff said. “The police and ambulance are on their way here. If you can hold him back, we can get you strapped onto a stretcher or something, get you restrained so that when he does come back, he won’t be able to do anything. Maybe then we can figure out how to get him out of you.”

  Graham scoffed. It looked lik
e he was trying to smile, but couldn’t quite make his face muscles work. Something was happening in those exhausted eyes, too. Staff could see them changing, transitioning similar to the way Grace Afton’s eyes had transitioned to that lifeless matte black when she had become more dog than woman and gone sniffing around the edges of the house. Graham’s eyes didn’t go matte black, but transformed from what Staff assumed were his ordinary hazel to a much darker, almost black color, a walnut maybe. The lids widened around them, and Staff, who had placed a hand on each of Graham’s shoulders while they were chatting, felt the muscles beneath his palms tense against them.

  “He’th coming,” Graham said again. He sounded as if he was speaking from somewhere inside a deep state of hypnosis. “There’th only one way to escape him. Downstairs. Hide. He doesn’t alwayth look in the cellar.”

  Staff had a flash of memory of an old episode of the CBS television show The Incredible Hulk that he’d watched in syndication when he was a kid. It was the episode in which Bill Bixby’s David Banner had to land a plane mid-way through a Hulk-out and was trying to somehow stay in control of the transformation long enough to do so. He did it by focusing on the task and by listening to the air traffic controller constantly repeating the phrase “stay in control,” like an incantation, or a mantra. A mantra. Suddenly, Staff had an idea.

  “Knock knock,” he said, maintaining his grip on Graham’s shoulders.

  From behind him, Afia snickered, “Staff, what the hell are you—”

  He shushed her. “Graham. Listen to me. Knock knock.”

  The smile that Graham had tried to form earlier finally began to surface on his malformed lips. “Who’th there,” came the robotic voice from somewhere deep inside him.

  There was a beat as Staff attempted to remember a knock-knock joke, any knock-knock joke, from his childhood. Then it came to him. “Orange!”

  Distantly, Graham chuckled. “I’ve used that one already.”

  Staff tried to resist shaking him. “Orange!”