by Isaac Thorne
“They’ll be there in just a few more minutes,” the voice in her iPhone said. “Abe said they were rounding the square as we speak. That means they’re getting close. Apparently they had to come from all the way out at the Hollow River Mall. They were doing some kind of crisis training simulation or something out there.”
Patsy made a mental note to bring up this incident at the next town council meeting. Not that the town could tell the county sheriff how to do his job, but it didn’t make sense to Patsy that they’d take everyone out of the field at the same time for a training exercise. Someone had to patrol the streets.
“Ok, thank you Clara,” she said. “I’ll just keep looking for them, then. What about the ambulance? Any word?”
“They’re still not there?”
“No. No sign of them.”
“Hold please.” Click.
Patsy sighed. Knowing the sheriff’s department was on the way was nice, but Graham was hurt and, in her opinion, needed to be seen by trained medical professionals. Hollow County Sheriff Abraham Wickham was more likely to rough Graham and stuff him than offer him so much as a band-aid, constable or not. Personally, Patsy abhorred angry men. They were intimidating and all too often showed poor judgment in sensitive situations, typically escalating them when they should be stopping them. And ambulances don’t just vanish into thin air. They had to be somewhere.
Click. “I can’t raise them on the radio,” Clara reported. “I have no idea why. Do you want me to send another unit? They’ll have to come all the way from Medical, so it’ll be a while.”
Just then, a long white hearse-like car with flashing lights on top and a broadly grinning Jeremy Beard behind the wheel made a left onto Hollow Creek Road from SR-501. Patsy rolled down her window and flagged him down. Beside him sat another man who had dirt on his forehead but was otherwise dressed in what looked like a medical uniform. Someone else who appeared to be in a similar uniform occupied the space behind and between them. Jeremy rolled down his own window, his eyes gleaming.
“Back off, man,” he said. “We’re the EMTs.”
Patsy gaped at him. “What are you doing here? I thought you wanted nothing to do with this place now?”
Jeremy jerked a thumb at Jake. “These guys were having car trouble. Ambulance crapped out on them. I’m not staying if I can help it.”
“You might want to stick around.” Patsy showed him her most knowing smile. “I’ve seen some things out here today that might interest you. But what happened to the ambulance?”
Jeremy started to answer, but Jake cut him off. “Sitting on the shoulder of SR-501 a few miles back. We think it’s the alternator. Hopefully, we have everything we need but we’ll have to get another ambulance out here if we have to transport anyone.”
In her right ear, Patsy heard what she thought was the sound of fingernails tapping against the keys on a computer keyboard. “Clara?” she said.
“I heard,” came the response from her iPhone. “I’m letting Abe know now and I’ll have another wagon on the way shortly.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Who’th there?”
Shit. The boy was back. The words had come out of his mouth before Lee Gordon had even realized that his son’s consciousness was emerging from the stream they shared. It was again becoming a challenge to keep him down. He’d had a little time to rest, it seems, to gather his energy in the same fashion Lee himself had used when Graham had had his brief control over the body a minute ago. But this body was weak, and the energy Lee now had to expend on fighting its aches, pains, and demands for food was taking a toll on his ability to fight his son.
Graham hadn’t been under nearly as long as Lee had, and that meant he might still be weak enough to reign in. At least, he would be if Lee could get rid of the black girl and her cuckold first. The distraction from fighting them and that goddamned she-dog were what had allowed his son to come to the surface before. The dog was nowhere to be seen now, but that didn’t mean that keeping his son in his place while he murdered the two nosey news people was going to be any easier. What he needed was a weapon.
“Weapon,” he said out loud. “Weapon who?”
Goddammit.
Lee forced himself to ignore the black girl and her cuckold for a moment. He had to deal with his son first. It wasn’t wise to switch gears in the middle of his standoff, but he did it anyway. He turned inward where his boy was trying to break free from the stream. If that happened, the fight with the two newsies wouldn’t amount to anything anyway. WILL YOU SHUT UP YOUR FAGGOTY ASS ALREADY? YOU’RE NOT GETTING OUT AGAIN, AND I HAVE ENOUGH TO DEAL WITH UP HERE RIGHT NOW. SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.
“Weapon we’ll find a way out of this mess?” he heard Graham’s voice say from the mouth that Lee thought he had been controlling.
WHAT ARE YOU, IN FUCKING KINDERGARTEN? THAT’S NOT EVEN FUNNY! he shouted into the depths. What floated back to him was most definitely his son’s voice, except that it didn’t sound fearful anymore. If Lee Gordon had known the word obsequious, he would have said that his boy no longer sounded obsequious and unsure of himself when he spoke to his father. Graham’s thought beacons were calm and collected, even serene.
It doesn’t have to be funny, he said. It just has to be for me.
“Knock knock,” Lee heard his son’s voice say from outside his own head. He turned outward again, examined his surroundings with Graham’s body’s eyes. The black girl and the skinny man had drawn closer to him while he was inside. They had seen that it was happening again. They had crept up on him while he was occupied, trying to surround him and knock him down. What then? Their she-dog had not returned, and neither of them appeared to have weapons on them other than those stupid little phone devices. He had one, too, in fact. If only he knew how to use it. Instead of trying to figure that out, Lee took two lumbering steps backward, putting some distance between him and his would-be captors.
“Who’th there?”
It was like having the fucking hiccups. Uncontrollable now. Just when you thought you were over them, up another one bubbled and out it came before you had time to stifle it. Lee took another step backward. The heel of Graham’s right Wolverine bumped against the riser of the lowest level in front of the porch. Lee raised the right foot and stepped up onto it. If the skinny man and the black girl insisted on confronting him, it would have to be inside the house, the place where he’d lived almost his entire life, the place where he’d died, the power supply for all his residual energy on this plane.
“Graham.”
Lee sighed. There were also weapons inside the house, at least of a sort. They might not be guns or swords or knives, but he could convert a beer bottle into a cutting tool lickety-split, just like in all those old westerns he used to watch on television. There were plenty of bottles strewn about the main living area, including three easily accessible ones that the black girl herself had used to prop open the cellar door when she claimed that she was keeping him company while her cuckold and the old bat had gone to get a ladder to rescue him. Then they’d gotten nosey, and the she-dog had shown up. Things had suddenly changed for everyone. If they’d only gotten him out of the cellar like they’d promised, everything would have been fine. Well, not for Graham, but Graham didn’t really matter. He was a lazy pussy good for nothing who wouldn’t have been able to handle the responsibility of being town constable for more than a month. At most.
“Graham who?”
Fuck it, then. Fuck it. Lee Gordon decided that he was tired of playing this game. He climbed the rest of the way up the front porch steps, backward, eyes on the two others who were closing in on him more rapidly now. Not running at him, at least, but not taking their time, either. The front door was ajar (ha-ha). He would not need to turn from them to enter it. If they did run at him, he’d have to face front to run inside, but that was a mere spin on the balls of Graham’s feet. Lee Gordon was still in absolute control of those. For now.
“Graham my favorite color!”
> The skinny man groaned audibly from the front yard. The black girl glared at him and then shushed him. He shrugged back at her. They were distracted by each other. This was Lee’s chance. He spun around and bolted for the front door. If he was fast enough, he might even be able to close and block it somehow before the skinny man and the black girl were able to shove their way across the threshold. He was able to get as far as that threshold before he suddenly stopped moving, as if he’d struck an invisible barrier of some kind in the doorway. He tried to push the legs under him, but couldn’t. He couldn’t feel them at all anymore. He sent runners from the brain to the spine and out from there to the leg paths he’d learned in the cellar, but something had gone wrong with those connections. They’d been severed or had moved. It was as if he was standing in superglue or quicksand. He couldn’t pull up the Wolverines.
“Knock knock,” he said again.
Graham’s body turned on its own, against Lee Gordon’s will, to face the skinny man and the black girl, both of whom had managed to climb onto the front porch behind him and looked braced for an attack.
“Who’th there?”
In front of him, the skinny man began to smile. The black girl maintained what was probably her poker face if she was smart enough to play cards.
“Legth.”
Lee groaned. The sound came from somewhere deep inside Graham’s body, though. Lee was still in charge of his eyes, possibly even his ears, and his nostrils, but Graham seemed to be reclaiming everything else. He felt the sensation in his hands fading away to a tingle, and then nothing. He had previously been able to feel the sweat trickling down Graham’s cheek from the top of his head. That sensation was gone now, too.
“Legth who?”
The body Lee was beginning to feel imprisoned in took two more involuntary steps backward, into the entryway of the old Victorian Gothic home that he and the boy had shared for much of three decades. Lee fought, flailing against his son’s sudden surge of strength with all he had left, and tried to regain control of the boy’s motor functions, but he was not letting up. Lee felt Graham’s teeth clench together in his mouth. Then that sensation was gone.
“Legth get this over with, shall we?”
His vision changed. The world in front of him suddenly went from clarity to something that lay just beyond his vision, as if he was looking at everything through a bubble or a glass of water. He’d been dunked into their shared stream of consciousness, where he’d been holding his son throughout this ordeal. He pounded against the “glass” with phantom fists but succeeded only in rippling the surface of the bubble-like enclosure in front of him, making the images there appear to waver outward from the center. When they steadied, he could see that the skinny man and the black girl had crossed the threshold and were standing only feet away from him. He tried to stretch out Graham’s arms, to make fists and strike at them, but nothing happened.
Someone—Graham, he thought—was speaking now. It was distant and muffled from where Lee was confined, and his flailing was drowning out some of it by his disturbing of the psychic solution in which he was suspended. He stopped fighting, allowed the stuff to settle around him, and listened.
***
At the mouth of Hollow Creek Road, Patsy Blankenship had just turned her car around so that she could follow Jeremy Beard’s ECTO-1 back to the Graham place. Jeremy, Jake, and Alan sat in the painted hearse and waited for her to complete the maneuver. It ended up being a five-point turn. Just as she was straightening the wheel of her Sonata, a new set of flashing lights arrived behind her. Sheriff Abraham Wickham and another car that contained at least three deputies had arrived.
***
“It’th the only way,” Graham said. The skinny man was nodding. The black girl was only gawking at him, open-mouthed and with sorrowful eyes. “If I destroy the body, he has no vessel to posseth anymore.”
“What would keep him from just leaping into one of us?” That was from the black girl.
“I don’t think he can,” his son replied. “He’th tied to this house. To my blood. I think the only reason he was able to posseth me is because I am his kin. And to some degree, he’th alwayth been able to control me.”
“Graham, there has to be some other way, some way to get rid of him and allow you to live.”
“I don’t see how. He’th so hard to fight. I don’t think I can keep going thith way.”
So they were planning to kill him: father, son, and body. Destroy the vessel, and neither consciousness had anything to fight for anymore. He’d float into the Ether again, trapped in this old house with only occasional glimpses into the real world when the spirit dogs come sniffing around the perimeter. And Graham? Well, who knew? Maybe they’d be trapped here together. Maybe Graham would go on to some other place. Hell, possibly. That would be nice. Lee hoped Graham would go to Hell. Of course, that was only the outcome if Lee permitted it, and he would be damned if he was going to resign himself to that when he’d come so far already.
Lee cocked an Ethereal arm inside the stream and threw his hardest punch. His fist slammed into the wall of the bubble in front of him, which wavered as it had before, but did not give. Before the visage in front of him had time to settle, he threw a second punch, and then a third. The film made a warbling noise with each hit, and that noise rippled outward from the center along with the concentric circles that he could see warping his view of the real world outside of Graham’s body. Were the sounds real? Was the bubble itself? Lee didn’t know for sure and, at this point, he no longer cared. Even if they were only symbols that his and Graham’s minds were able to conjure to represent each of their psychic imprisonments by the other, they were reactive to the punches he perceived he was throwing at them. That meant that he might be able to regain some control before his idiot son did something that permanently damaged one or both of them, before he could commit suicide for both of them.
He threw punches until his psychic arms were screaming at him to stop, and then allowed the bubble to settle so that he could check for damage. There was none. There were no signs that he’d been punching it, no rips or tears, not even a knuckle-print on its surface. Beyond the film, he could see the black girl and her cuckold walking toward Graham with slow and careful steps, as if they were approaching a sleeping dragon. Their faces were contorted by the shape of the bubble, but Lee could see that they expressed concern, caution, pleading. They were trying to stop Graham from doing whatever it was he was planning to do, and that was good. Lee would take help now from wherever it came. Each time the dynamic duo in front of him stepped forward, he felt (and could see) Graham step backward. At each side of the bubble, he could see his son’s hands, raised in front of him and palms out in a warding off gesture. Distantly, he heard the black girl saying something about getting in touch with a church, finding an exorcist or a Reiki master to somehow channel the evil spirit out of him. Evil spirit? Lee couldn’t help but be amused by that label. He’d performed much more evil when he was alive than he’d ever done as a ghost. As a spirit, all he’d wanted was his second chance to walk the Earth in a physical body. Was taking over his son’s life really so evil? Mainly since it was his son who robbed him of his? For Lee, it felt justified, more like a reckoning than a crime. A crime might have been when he used his hunting knife to slice open Darek Afton’s throat. Even then, he wasn’t sure he would have been held to account for that in Lost Hollow, even if they’d ever bothered to find out who did it.
His hunting knife.
It hadn’t occurred to him before, but if the physical sensations he was experiencing as a consciousness trapped in a bubble in a stream in his son’s body were really only his own creations—his twisting of the energy that remained of him into physical signals in order to comprehend them—then maybe throwing punches at the bubble wasn’t his only means of bursting it. His idiot son had been successfully using some kind of hippie guru-style mind games that involved horrible knock-knock jokes in breaking free of this little Ethereal force
field. Surely he could do better than that. If Lee Gordon could manifest a visible form in the cellar where he possessed his son’s body, why wouldn’t he now be able to manifest his hunting knife and merely slice through this thin fabric of a prison that was keeping him from controlling that body?
Lee closed the eyes of his consciousness for a moment, shutting out the distorted visions of the real world beyond the bubble, and curled his phantom right hand into a shape that approximated a fist. He left a little space between the tips of his fingers and the palm of his hand, what he thought was probably about the width of the handle of his trusty old hunting knife. He squeezed the fingers and the palm lightly, imagining the feel of the wood pressing into his palm as he applied the pressure, forcing himself to feel the weight of the weapon there.
With the fingers of his non-corporeal left hand, he glided along the spine of the blade. He pinched it in several places, calculating its width as it formed between his fingers. He tapped the tip of it with his forefinger, felt its steel fang-like point, and then gently slid all four fingertips of his left hand along the blade’s tip and down its edge. It was sharp, razor-like. If he had put even a fraction of an ounce more downward pressure on it, he would have sliced open his own fingers. Lee smiled broadly and opened his eyes.
The distant, muffled sound of police sirens wailed their way through the fabric of the bubble and to Lee’s ears. It was perhaps the only time he’d ever thought of them as music. They were the distraction he needed. On the other side of the bubble, the black girl and the cuckold craned their heads simultaneously, peering out the open front door of the old house, searching for the arrival of their cavalry. At first, he was surprised that the sheriff’s department would come up on a scene like this one with all guns blazing. They didn’t know what they were getting into. Why would they telegraph their presence?
