by Isaac Thorne
He felt a surge of panic wend its way from his son’s brain to his nervous system. The boy’s heart went into overdrive, pounding against the chest wall and making rapid, irritating bump-bump-squish noises in Lee’s ears as blood raced through Graham’s body in an attempt to feed it what it needed for a fight. It was now or never, then. He hoped he hadn’t waited too long. That panic meant that the boy’s judgment was impaired and his defenses were up, which just made Lee’s job that much more difficult.
Knife in his hand with its edge up, Lee knelt in front of the bubble. He jammed the weapon point-first into the bottom center of the lens, pressing it into the flesh of the bubble with all the strength he could muster. It resisted the force, stretching outward behind the point of the knife and further distorting the images that were playing out in front of him. His shoulder was strained, and his hand began to quiver, his palm growing wet with the effort. Just as he began to fear that the non-corporeal blade was going to slip from his fingers, the point punctured the bubble. He felt the tip of the knife make its first cut into the film in front of him. The stretched area of the bubble settled back onto the blade, returning to its normal form, except now with Lee Gordon’s hunting knife stuck through it.
Lee glanced at the image in the bubble now. Therein, he saw that Graham had taken another step or two backward from the camera and the lights. In front of him, the black girl was staring wide-eyed with the fingers of both hands covering her mouth. The cuckold was on one knee, a hand stretched out in Graham’s direction as if he was proposing marriage. He was mouthing things that Lee couldn’t quite hear over the physical roar of his son’s panic, but it certainly looked like he was pleading. Lee shoved the tip of the knife into the cut it had made in the bubble and dragged upward on the handle, using the blade’s edge to open his escape route the way a camper might unzip the doors of a tent when it was time to brew the coffee.
The thought occurred to him that he might literally be damaging the stream beyond repair, that he might no longer be able to shove his son’s consciousness in here and keep him at bay until he found a way to destroy him. In that case, he might need to only allow the boy’s body to collapse to the floor or do whatever it did when no one was really in charge. With or without his physical body, he was stronger than his son. And now that he knew he could just think a weapon into existence and slice open his prison, what would prevent him from cutting his boy’s consciousness into tiny pieces that he could then just sweep into the stream, where they might float and drown forever?
When he’d formed a slit in the bubble that he thought was large enough for him to slip through, Lee Gordon unimagined his hunting knife and felt it fall from his grasp. He would try to recall it later—if there was a later—when he might have more time to experiment while his son’s body lay in a hospital bed or a jail cell. He shoved both of his hands into the slit and parted the middle of the bubble like a curtain. The image that had been distorted and wavering behind it at once became crystal clear in his non-corporeal eyes. He could see the cuckold still on his knees, the black girl still cupping her mouth and...was that a tear running down her cheek? He could also see regular splashes of red and blue light against the interior walls of the old house. They seemed to be coming from outside the open front door. The cops were finally here. The ambulance too, probably. They’d take him into custody first and maybe take him to the Emergency Room for a once-over before throwing his flabby ass behind bars. All that was only if he could yank control of the body away from Graham before the boy could finish whatever the hell it was he was about to do.
Lee Gordon shoved the walls of the bubble out of his way and stepped first his right Wolverine-clad boot into the physical body of his son—into the real world—and then the left. The walls of the bubble prison in what was about to be Lee Gordon’s exclusive stream of consciousness closed behind him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Graham Gordon was slipping away. Or maybe he was hallucinating, perhaps a result of low blood sugar and dehydration over the past twenty-four hours. It had to have been at least that long since he’d had a drink of water, and even longer since he’d had a meal. The world in front of him swam out of focus and back. Well, it swam “back” in terms of the sharpness of the images before him anyway. Although (the skinny man) Staff and (the black girl) Afia were clear in his field of vision, he could see two of each of them. (Skinny) stood beside Staff and (the black girl) stood beside Afia. Between them were two video cameras, each mounted on its own tripod. On the two (Staffs’) skinnys’ left there were two giant poles with bright lights mounted on them. On the two (Afias’) black girls’ right was an identical pair. The illusion was brief. When Lee Gordon stepped forward to regain control of his son’s body, the identical twins of everything began to merge again into single bodies and objects. Graham felt pressure on his chest as if an invisible hand was shoving him backward, forcing him out of the driver’s seat.
Not now, Graham thought. Please dear God, not now.
OF COURSE, NOW, his dead father’s consciousness shot back at him. YOU’RE TRYING TO KILL US. NOW IS THE BEST TIME.
In front of him, both Afia and Staff were pleading with the man they still thought was Graham to step away from the steep drop at the open mouth of the cellar. Stupidly, he had allowed them to distract him. There was, after all, a big part of him that would rather continue to live than sacrifice himself to destroy the evil spirit now residing within him. Staff and Afia’s voices had become distant, their words indistinct in his ears. The flashes of red and blue light from outside the house continued to pulse through the open front door behind them. Soon, Sheriff Abraham Wickham, a man who had dismissed him to his face as not cut out for law enforcement at his own swearing in ceremony, would stroll in and demand to know what was happening. Graham might lose his shot at ending his father’s reign of terror over his body if that happened, but right now that was less of a risk than losing control over his own decisions and movement again.
While he still could, Graham opened his mouth and shouted: “Knock knock!” He was immediately silenced by searing hot pain. It slashed in a ribbon across his mouth. It wasn’t from a punch or an impact, not like what he’d felt when his mouth hit the cellar floor yesterday afternoon. It felt more like a cut, like someone had sliced a Joker-smile across his face from dimple to dimple. He could feel the hot trickle of blood running down from there. His right hand—the physical one—went up to his face and patted it, checking for wetness and damage, but came away clean.
What are you doing to me, Dad?
From somewhere inside him, there was the sardonic sound of laughter.
I LEARNED SOMETHING NEW WHILE I WAS IN OUR LITTLE BUBBLE PRISON, BOY. NEAT, HUH? DON’T YOU WORRY ABOUT HOW OUR FACE LOOKS, NOW. I’M ONLY CUTTING UP THE INSIDE YOU. GONNA LEAVE THE OUTSIDE PRISTINE...WELL, NO LESS PRISTINE THAN IT IS NOW, ANYWAY. OUR BODY WILL BE WALKING AWAY FROM THIS MESS, BUT YOU WON’T. THE OLD SHERIFF AND THE REST OF THEM WON’T EVEN KNOW YOU’RE GONE. I’LL JUST BE YOU, LIKE I’D PLANNED, AND NOBODY WILL BE ABLE TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.
Graham tried to open his body’s mouth again, to start another knock-knock joke, try to regain control, but it was no use. His exertion and the stress of choosing to end his own life while he’d been in control of his body had sapped him. The words would not come, and now the pain he felt wasn’t restricted to only when he was in control of his physical self. His consciousness hurt, too. It was getting hard for him to remember any more jokes, or even focus on ones he’d already used, because of the hot pain in his metaphysical mouth.
There was another slash. He heard the swipe of a blade through air that was not there. Fresh pain burst from his phantom belly, just below the navel, and ripped upward from his pelvis all the way to his chest. If his consciousness had had intestines, they most likely would have spilled out through the opening. Graham screamed, and the full opening of his mouth stung his wounds there. But it was a scream no one could hear. No one could hear it except for the spir
it of his dead father, anyway. At the bottom of his thorax, the invisible blade made a left turn and cut open what should have been the flesh just below his rib cage. Then it twisted a hundred and eighty degrees inside the open wound and slashed in the opposite direction, flaying the belly of Graham’s consciousness open wide in two triangular flaps.
Please, he thought. Please. I only wanted to live my life. Why wouldn’t you ever allow me to live my life?
The blade stopped moving. An answer exploded in Graham’s ears as if his father were screaming into a megaphone that he’d jammed against his head. DID YOU ALLOW ME TO LIVE MY OWN LIFE, YOU LITTLE SHIT? YOU CAME WARBLING INTO THIS WORLD BECAUSE YOUR PIECE OF SHIT MOTHER WANTED YOU, NOT ME. I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW SHE WAS FUCKING PREGNANT. IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOUR FACE AND YOUR CHOICE IN BOOTS I WOULDN’T EVEN THINK YOU WERE MINE. WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I WAS BREAKING MY BACK IN THE CARBON PLANT? WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I WAS TRYING TO PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE? ALL I EVER WANTED WAS THE RESPECT I DESERVED FOR THE HARD WORK I DID. A LITTLE FUCKING APPRECIATION. BUT ALL YOU AND YOUR MOM COULD DO WAS SUCK UP THE MONEY AND BITCH ABOUT THERE NOT BEING ENOUGH OF IT.
There was a thunk sound just then. Graham perceived one, anyway. A bright new bolt of pain struck him on top of his head, puncturing it, and sheathed itself into what, if he were a physical being just now, would have been his skull. It pierced his brain, too, he thought and hammered the base of his skull where it was attached to his spine. Whatever the knife was that his father had dreamed up from their shared stream of consciousness—probably a hunting knife like the one Graham had auctioned on eBay after his death—it was a long one.
Whatever remained of Graham in his cerebrum was fading fast. With the first two cuts, his father had meant only to injure him, he supposed, to prevent him from retaking control of the physical body they had been sharing. He’d saved the most destructive blow for last. Flashes of memories from his life paraded before the eyes of Graham’s consciousness. There was the elementary school playground, with little Afia Afton standing beside the see-saw, about to climb onto it. He could see his little boy hands stretched out in front of him, sneaking up on her, preparing to try to get a look at the tail his father had told him that black girls had. There was Butch, his English bulldog, quivering beside a pool of his own urine at the front door of the old house, that shamed expression in his eyes as Lee Gordon stomped and shouted and screamed at them both. There was his mother, Anna, seated on the edge of his bed at night and stroking his hair, telling him that dad didn’t really mean all the horrible things he did and said, that dad was just a hard worker who was under a tremendous amount of pressure to do a good job and provide for his family. There he was crouched in the cellar, abandoned by his mother—who was long gone from the house to God knew where—and rocking back and forth on his butt with his hands cradling his knees, tears streaming down his face. Above him, the sound of his father’s Wolverines on the hardwood floor created thunder. There he was winning his campaign for town constable, and asking the town council to allow him to purchase his old family home back from them, to restore it. Finally, there he was at the bottom of the destroyed cellar stairs, broken and bloody, and wondering why he had ever bothered to survive his atrocious, abusive upbringing in the first place.
The pain receded. He was losing the physical sensations he had clung to in his abstract form. So much the better. At least he would not die hurting. His vision began to fade at the periphery, closing down toward the center like the iris fades in one of those old black-and-white monster movies from the thirties. He’d never enjoy one of those again. That fade created a tunnel effect in front of him, and from the center of that tunnel, he could see a bright white light. In the center of the light was a small dark figure. Not human, exactly, but a figure nonetheless. Graham felt gravity take him. He fell forward, toward the light and toward the figure, which then grew more substantial in his vision as a result. It was definitely not a person. It might be a dog, sitting on its haunches and staring at him.
The brilliant white light surrounding the figure began to dissipate then, and Graham could see that it actually was a dog. It was an English bulldog. It was Butch! Butch had come to greet him and welcome him into the afterlife. Graham tried to force the muscles in his face to smile at the dog, but couldn’t tell for sure whether he was successful. He tried to stretch out a hand to him, to rub the tips of his fingers together, calling the dog toward him so that he could pet him again, feel his soft fur and cold, wet button of a nose against his skin one more time. To his relief, the gesture seemed to have worked. The dog started forward, blocking out some more of the white light that was radiating out from behind it.
As it drew closer, Graham began to think that it might not be Butch after all. Its body resembled Butch, but its face...its face was a human face. It was Afia’s face. No, wait. Not Afia. It was Afia’s mother’s face. It was the face of the creature that had looked in on him as he lay broken on the cellar floor, the beast that had fought his father down to the ground in the front yard when Graham had been unable to regain control. It was the she-dog that had told them all that she was some part Butch, some part Grace Afton, some part Darek Afton, and some part Anna Gordon. The entity sat down in front of him and smiled at him with her human smile, showing him her human teeth. Her sad brown eyes were warm, inviting, reassuring to him. She was here with him, with all of them, and very soon things were going to be all right again.
Graham stretched out his hand to her and stroked the side of her face. He smiled back at her. He could feel it this time, his genuine smile. Then she crouched on her haunches in front of him, her eyes drifting up, somewhere above him. She looked like a bird about to take flight. She leaped toward him.
Then the lights went out.
Graham Gordon was gone.
***
Lee Gordon smiled when the consciousness of his limp-dick son went dark and disappeared from the body they’d shared. He was relieved. Overjoyed, even. The battle was won, and it was the climactic battle of the entire war. With Graham dead, he had full control over the body, and he could start making excuses for his bad behavior that morning as soon as the sheriff walked through the door. There was still the skinny man and the black girl to deal with. They’d met the black bitch, had talked to her. It was unlikely that he could convince them that the whole fight for control of Graham’s body had been some kind of psychotic break brought on by his entrapment in the cellar. They could tell their side of the story, but who would the authorities really believe? Him, or a fantastic story cooked up by two television reporters who were in search of a spooky tale for their Halloween broadcast?
That was another problem, though, wasn’t it? The old bat had sent his son some kind of film footage of the creature on that devil phone device that Lee was still carrying in the right front pocket of what were now his beige constable uniform pants. He could probably destroy that little device. What would he need with one of those things anyway? But the bitch reporter and her cuckold had both been pointing their own phone devices at him when he had finally emerged from the crawl space (on his own, thank you very much). Could he convince them to destroy their footage out of some kind of guilt or remorse for their failure to rescue him? That’s assuming they truly believed he was Graham, of course. They might not. Could he confiscate them as constable? Claim they were some part of an investigation into the bodies that he, Graham, had discovered in the crawl space while he was clawing his way to freedom? That’s one he’d have to think about but now was not the time. Now was the time to step forward, claim complete control of his new body, stall the sheriff, and silence the two nosey interlopers.
Lee felt the hunting knife drop from his phantom hand, lose its cohesion, and disappear into the Ether from which he had summoned it. Then he stepped forward. The real world in front of him swam in his vision, so he blinked what were once upon a time his son’s eyes to clear it. His view came into sharp focus just in time for him to see the fur-covered, angry face of the dog creature clo
sing down on him from somewhere in mid-air. At first it resembled Grace Afton then, in rapid succession, it transformed: first it was his dead wife Anna’s face, then it was Darek Afton, then a face he thought might be the stripper from Bombshell’s. There was a brief transition after the stripper into something that looked like an English bulldog. Then, just before it hit him, there was this body’s own face glaring at him: the face of Graham Gordon.
The front paws of the black dog were stretched out in front of it, as if it were some kind of super dog flying to the rescue. Strange tendrils of bright yellow light were tethered to each of its legs. One of those beams connected to the camera the skinny man had set up. Two others connected directly to the black girl and the skinny man. The beam that connected to the black girl was attached to the hand in which she held her phone. The beam that was attached to the skinny man appeared to be connected to his hip. Another beam connected from the creature to the right front pocket of Lee’s beige uniform pants. All of these beams were pulsing, as if they were drawing some kind of power from the sources to which they were connected. A final beam shot out of the back of the creature’s head. It blew out one of the front windows of the old house and connected to something outside that Lee could not see.
Lee had time to utter a single startled gasp before he felt those paws land directly in the center of his brand new chest. The force knocked him backward. There was time to see the world panning down in front of him. The skinny man and the black reporter woman were staring at him with wide eyes and open mouths. Then their faces were gone, and he was staring at the old and yellowed ceiling of the main living area of his house. Then that, too, was gone, and his vision was filled with a pattern of gray cinder block as he plummeted backward and headlong into the cellar below.
