by Isaac Thorne
“Orange who?”
“Orange you glad it’s almost Halloween?”
Behind him, Afia groaned.
“They don’t have to be funny,” he shot back at her. “They just have to be something he can concentrate on while he’s fighting.” He allowed himself to glance at his surroundings, looking for anything that might prompt a memory of another joke. Behind Graham, the front door of the old house stood slightly open.
“Hey, Graham,” he said brightly. “When is a door not a door?”
Graham’s mouth twisted into something that vaguely resembled a smile again. “When it’th ajar!” he replied.
Mounted to the right of the door frame was a doorbell button, the kind that should glow when power is applied to it. This one was utterly dark.
“Knock knock,” Graham said.
“Who’th there?”
“Figs.”
“Figth who?”
“Figs your doorbell, would ya? It’s broken!”
That one got another chuckle out of the body of the Lost Hollow constable. Staff hoped that meant that somewhere inside that body, Graham was winning his fight to stay in control.
“Knock knock.”
“Who’th there?”
“Wanda.”
“Wanda who?”
“I Wanda when that ambulance is going to get here?”
Graham frowned. Not good. Might be best to stick to jokes that didn’t necessarily directly apply to the situation at hand. Afia, who saw that he was struggling, crouched beside him then.
“Hey, Graham,” she said. “Remember when we used to sing songs in school? You know, songs like ‘Pop Goes The Weasel’ and ‘The Hokey Pokey?’ Remember those? Can you sing one of those songs with me? I’ll start:
“You put your right foot in, you take your right foot out...”
“You put your right foot in,” Graham sang. “And you thake it all about.”
“You do the hokey pokey, and you turn yourself around—”
Something had gone wrong. Staff felt the muscles in Graham’s shoulder tense. His eyelids had narrowed over those walnut irises. His brow furrowed in the middle, creating an arc in his eyebrows that made him look angry. The smile on his lips had faded and transformed into something that—if his lips hadn’t been busted wide open—would have looked like an angry sneer. His nostrils flared dramatically with each breath he took. Staff wondered whether Afia’s participation in their little game might be upsetting to Graham. She’d reminded him of their school years together, and it was during those years that Graham had tried to pull down her pants on the playground. His idiot father had told him that black girls have tails. If that memory crept in, Graham’s guilty feelings about it might have broken his concentration on fighting his father’s possession.
Staff put up a hand to try to stop Afia’s song. He’d go back to telling knock-knock jokes or making silly puns, or even dirty jokes if he had to, anything besides Afia’s song.
“Knock knock,” Staff said. He could hear the panic in his own voice and hated himself a little for it. His mind raced to come up with a new response for whenever Graham spoke the next line. But it was too late. Graham’s hands, which had been resting atop his knees, clenched into fists and began to tremble. His face screwed up with strain, the cords standing out on his neck as blood rushed to the surface of his skin and colored him red from the neck to the top of his head. Staff again was reminded of those old episodes of The Incredible Hulk, when David Banner would inevitably get hit or hurt, become angry, and then Hulk out. Except that the Hulk was a gigantic green hero, not a red bully who had murdered at least three people and maybe four.
That’s when Lee Gordon thrust himself forward again, shoving Staff backward onto his butt and leaping to his son’s two feet.
“THAT’TH WHAT IT’TH ALL A-FUCKING-BOUT!” he roared.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Graham Gordon watched in horror from the stream of consciousness in which the spirit of his dead father was trying to drown him. It was quite literally like watching events unfold from just behind a full glass of water. Images fish-eyed in front of him, growing larger in his vision as they approached the center of his window into the real world, and shrinking as they departed to the left, right, or down. The sounds from the outside world were audible to him but muffled and distant as if he was hearing them from another room while his ears were stuffed with cotton balls.
His reemergence into his own body had not lasted as long as he had hoped. He’d been able to use his father’s distraction, the fight with the creature that had turned out to be an amalgam of Lee Gordon’s murder victims, to his advantage. While his father was busy with that, Graham had used his knock-knock joke technique and the tendrils he’d been able to fashion from his consciousness to peel apart the thin bubble membrane and surge forward again. What he hadn’t anticipated was how unaccustomed he had already become to physical pain. It had pricked and stung him like a swarm of angry bees at first. Then it had drained his strength once Afia and the young man she was with had pulled the spirit off him. Holding on to his body had taken every ounce of energy he could spare, but it turned out he hadn’t had much in the way of extra.
Graham watched his own hands reach out and grab for Afia Afton, who had no injured testicles, hadn’t been thrown down a flight of stairs the day before, hadn’t been attacked by a supernatural creature, and wasn’t fighting another entity for control of her own body. She quickly dodged his grasp. He watched her run from him, relieved in a way that his physical body had been so horribly battered. He wasn’t in shape. It’s possible that she could have outrun him anyway, but the less strength and agility he had right now, the better for his father’s would-be victims. A smidgeon of envy for her ease of escape from the man who had made his entire life a living hell crept into his heart. Not only that, but she had made something of herself. She was on television every night, being a professional and reporting the news. She had made opportunities for herself in spite of having lost both of her parents to his angry, hateful father, in spite of having the handicap of growing up the only black kid in an otherwise all-white, rural elementary school full of the children of Southern carbon plant employees. Meanwhile, Graham had squandered his own opportunities by trying to fit in, trying to be one of those typical redneck offspring of Southern industrial workers. His accidental election as constable had been scary, but part of him had secretly hoped it would mean a fresh start for him, a path forward to all the generosity of the universe that he had previously squandered. Instead, his father was trying to take that from him, too.
He watched Afia’s young cameraman—Staff, was it?—leap into the middle of the chase and manage to turn the weight of Graham’s own body against his father with a simple grab and twist of his shoulders, the way a defender brings down a runner on any given Sunday in the NFL. He was lithe in his movement, like a dancer or an illusionist. He was a Bugs Bunny-style bullfighter, dodging and annoying the brute as it charged him. Graham felt another stab of jealousy at that. He’d always been fascinated by the world of entertainment but had never had the opportunity to pursue it. Dance was for girls and magic was for fags, at least that’s how it was perceived in Lost Hollow. This Staff person was a young white male who had traces of a Southern accent. Maybe he hadn’t had the barriers to entry and prejudices that Afia would have experienced, but he also hadn’t been held down by a need to be a part of the group. He was an individual who had pursued a career behind a camera, something a simple redneck son of a carbon plant worker who spent his days just dreaming about one day being able to afford the things his father was able to provide would have never even considered pursuing. Staff and Afia had seen and done the things that he’d always been afraid to see and do because of the way he might be perceived for seeing them and doing them.
Dully, Graham felt the flash and then the throb of pain in his nose and mouth as his father toppled to the ground and smashed his face into the hard dead earth there. Blindness and rage
were wafting from his father’s consciousness, filtering their way through the stream. Graham could feel it but was able to remain distant from it, an observer of the outer world from within his own head. Lee Gordon was no longer following a plan, even if he’d had one when he threw his son into the cellar and subsequently assumed his identity. He was operating on pure adrenaline and animal instinct. If the response to a threat was fight or flight, Graham’s father seemed to have all of the former and none of the latter, and Graham now believed he knew why.
Lee Gordon’s father had taught him the same fictions that Lee had tried to teach Graham: that the feminine and the dark-skinned were weaker, less moral, and less intelligent. It was virtually impossible to lose to them unless you had become weak, stupid, and loose morally. It was what his counsellor had once referred to as “toxic masculinity,” this line of thought and lesson. It was an eternal fire, always combusting and fueling itself on generation after generation of hate and fear of the “other” that exists only to threaten its dominance. It was the fire that had consumed his father’s father, his father, and Graham himself in a way. Why else would he have stayed in Lost Hollow? Why else would he be driving a pickup and running for town constable just to impress a girl? He was living the life that Lost Hollow’s culture of toxic masculinity had demanded from him, not the one he had wanted for himself. Had he been allowed to continue to live his quiet life in his own skin, he supposed he would have eventually sought a wife (as much to quell the rumors among the population of Lost Hollow that he was a gay man as to actually obtain a partner). That wife might have even produced some offspring with him, to whom he would have undoubtedly passed the toxic flame so that they could suffer the same lack of identity, the same lack of individuality, that he had experienced. Then his offspring could pass the toxic flame along to the generation after them in an endless stoking of the fires of manhood’s own crematorium.
Through the bubble in the stream, he watched the landscape come into view again as his father stood up, wiped the dirt from his eyes, and then scanned the area for his prey. The duo had split up. Afia stood at the corner of the house, peering around it at him, ready to bolt if he ran for her again. Staff, on the other hand, was standing in front of Graham’s Tacoma, watching him from there. He supposed they planned to gang up on him. Whoever he went for, the other would leap onto his back. Lee could not fight them simultaneously, but neither could they do anything to free Graham’s body from his father’s hold over it. It was a stalemate, and Graham felt great disappointment from that. He’d given them the answer, after all. He needed them to lead his father back to the cellar stairs, fight him inside, get him to fall into the cellar again. The physical damage his body had thus far suffered meant that another fall like that, especially if he went down head-first, would probably kill him. Kill the body, and the spirit leaves. Of course, that meant that Graham himself would die as well, but at least his death would have some meaning. He would be free of the prison of his father’s toxic masculinity, and he would be freeing history of the mystery of what had really happened to Anna Gordon, to Grace Afton, to Darek Afton, and maybe even to that Bombshell’s stripper, who might have had a family somehow, somewhere along the way who missed her.
But that’s not what was happening. Instead of being slammed head-first into the compacted earth of the cellar, Graham’s body was playing a game of chicken with the Channel 6 News reporters. He supposed if he waited long enough, the sheriff’s deputies and the ambulance would eventually arrive and do...something. Shoot him, maybe? Only if his father remained insanely enraged enough to act out around them when they got here. Even then, the great blue shroud of police camaraderie might spare him a death in the field, which would give his father time to regroup and rethink, to strengthen his hold over Graham’s abused and fatigued shell. He had no guarantee that Staff and Afia could continue to remain free of his father’s clutches long enough for the cavalry to arrive anyway. Besides, what right did he, Graham, have to ask them to lead him to his death? A Lost Hollow town constable dead at the hands of two members of the news media, one of them a black woman, would most definitely prick the ire of the conservative majority of Hollow County and fellow members of law enforcement, whether they respected him and his job or not. When it came down to us versus them, harm to even the least of “us” was enough to rain down hell on “them.”
So it would have to be Graham who led his father to the cellar door, who shoved him over the edge of it and forced him to fall as Graham himself had done only yesterday and as Lee Gordon had some twenty years or so before. The flames of toxic masculinity were a binding fire, tethering father to son throughout the ages, flinging their ashes heavenward only to have them discarded and broken apart on the cold ground outside the radius of the fire’s warmth. He’d found the strength to shove his father back into the stream before, to temporarily take over his own body to get his story out there, to fight back. If he could summon that strength one last time, he might be able to walk under his own power to the mouth of the cellar and cast himself in this time, headlong into the abyss, something he’d never dared to achieve before.
The answer was simple, really. It was as simple as the humor in a knock-knock joke. As a kid, he had loved those old jokes, had sometimes even dreamed about writing jokes and telling them for a living. If he’d had the artistic chops, maybe he’d also draw a comic strip for the daily newspaper. He’d never been the class clown, the guy that everyone always assumed was going to have a career on television or doing stand-up. But maybe if he’d been brave enough, maybe if he’d had the guts to defy the toxic masculinity of Lost Hollow one time and step out of the radius of its warmth and comfort, he could have at least tried. Maybe he would have failed at it, and possibly failing wasn’t a very masculine thing to do, but did it really matter if he failed at it as long as he had once upon a time had the drive and the ambition to follow his own path in the world? He felt anger begin to boil beneath the surface of his consciousness, making the bubble of water through which he was viewing the world burst into smaller bubbles around him. He was angry with himself for not seeing the truth about his world before it was too late to do anything about it. He was angry with his father for seeing fit to strap him into a going nowhere culture and lifestyle like this one. He was angry with his mother for not being strong enough to stop his father from abusing him when he was little. He was angry with his city, his county, his state, his country, his entire world for putting him in this box from which he had never been able to escape. Now that there was a crack in that box through which he was finally able to see light, Graham Gordon decided that it was time, finally, to grab hold of his one shot at redemption.
Knock knock, he thought.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jake Wakefield rubbed his eyes and then shaded them from Lost Hollow’s balmy October sun. To the oncoming car, whatever the hell it was, it probably looked like he was saluting. Jake and his partner EMT Alan Potts had figured it would be only a matter of time before someone came looking for them. He just hadn’t expected that someone would be driving something that looked like a hearse that had been painted white and converted into something almost, but not quite, resembling an ambulance. As the strange vehicle with the Ghostbusters movie logo on its passenger side door pulled up alongside them near the shoulder of SR-501, Jake thought he recognized the fellow behind the wheel.
“Hey,” Jeremy Beard said after he’d rolled down the passenger side window. “Something happen here?”
“Ambulance broke down,” Alan shouted from his spot in the driver’s seat. Jake motioned for him to shut the fuck up.
“I think our alternator’s bad,” he told the kid who had only a year or so before asked his younger sister Brandi to the prom. Brandi had rejected him, and that hadn’t gone over well. He’d developed some kind of obsession with her. Their parents had had to talk to this kid’s parents about how creepy and stalkerish he was acting. Shortly after that, he’d backed off. At least, Jake was under the i
mpression that he had. “How’s it hanging, Jeremy?” He hesitated, not wanting to scare the kid off but also not wanting to encourage contact. “You still keeping away from my sister?”
Jeremy Beard looked at his hands. “I talk to her every now and then if we happen to see each other. But it’s not like that anymore.” He grinned. “I was just a kid back then. No hard feelings. Anything I can do to help?”
Jake looked at Alan, who shrugged and rolled his eyes. “At least there’s room to load some kits in there,” he said. “We can attend to the patient on-scene even if we can’t transport him.”
“The siren and flashers work on this thing?” Jake asked Jeremy.
“Oh, yeah. I’ve spent days getting her ready for this event we’re doing at the comic store. Everything works. Well, except the traps and proton packs, of course. They’re just special effects.”
Jake slapped the roof of the ECTO-1 with his right hand and turned to Alan again. “Grab the kits. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a ride.”
Jeremy looked confused. “I’m supposed to—”
“You’re supposed to be somewhere, I know. But the way I see it, you owe me for stalking my sister last year.”
Alan tossed two medical kits in the backseat of the ECTO-1 and then climbed in. Jake sat down in the shotgun seat, slammed the door, and pointed through the windshield ahead of them.
“Move. I’ll tell you where we’re going on the way.”
***
Patsy Blankenship sat at the mouth of Hollow Creek Road, her iPhone pressed to her right ear, and nervously tapped the index finger of her left hand on the steering wheel of her Sonata. The Hollow County dispatcher’s hold music wasn’t music at all, but dead silence. Patsy kept pulling the phone away from her ear so she could check the screen and make sure that the call was still connected. Clara had put her on hold only a minute ago, but to Patsy that minute seemed like it had stretched into five. She felt the tension in her shoulders release when she heard the click on the other end of the connection that meant Clara had returned.
