The Gordon Place

by Isaac Thorne

Genres: Ghost; Horror; Crime Fiction; Supernatural suspense; emotional abuse; horror; ghosts; Social Issues; domestic abuse; supernatural horror; novel; hate

Synopsis

Lost Hollow constable Graham Gordon just walked into his abandoned childhood home for the first time in twenty years. Local teenagers have been spreading rumors about disembodied screams coming from inside. Now, thanks to a rickety set of cellar stairs and the hateful spirit of his dead father, he might never escape.

Meanwhile, Channel 6 News feature reporter Afia Afton—whose father is the victim of a local decades-old hate crime—is meeting with town administrator Patsy Blankenship. Her mission is to develop a ghost story feature for a special to air on the station's Halloween broadcast. When Patsy tells her about the screams at the Gordon place, the past and the present are set on a collision course with potentially catastrophic results.

Can Graham come to terms with his father's past and redeem his own future? Can the murder mystery that has haunted Afia for most of her life finally be solved?

It's a fight for the future and the past when spirit and flesh wage war at the Gordon place.

Release date: April 15, 2019

Publisher: Lost Hollow Books

Print pages: 362

Content advisory: Contains scenes and language that could be triggering for victims of abuse and hate.

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

“No wonder they think it’s haunted,” he said to no one in particular. And he was right. It was no wonder the local young folks traded chilling tales about agonized screams echoing from behind the dilapidated old structure’s walls in the dark of night. There was nothing about the old place that was not sinister.

The clouded dome on the lone security light that stood at the foot of the driveway hung askew on its hinge, providing no security and moaning creepy, creaking complaints at every cold autumn gust. Graham Gordon regarded the light for a moment, then stretched his left arm into the passenger window of his twenty-year-old Toyota Tacoma pickup and snagged his iPhone from its place on the seat. He dialed the town administrator’s office. Empty or no, the old house was still private property. No light at the road was an open invitation for hoodlums and hobos to use it as a hangout, something Graham could not abide even if he weren’t town constable. It was his place now, after all.

“Patsy,” he said when the harried voice on the other end of the line finally answered the ring, “I’m out at the old house on Hollow Creek. Can we get the power company out here to fix the security light?”

There was a short pause. Graham could hear the shuffling of papers in the background. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” Patsy’s voice came back to him some distance from the receiver. She had him on speakerphone so she could focus on something else.

Graham sighed. Her work hours for the week were waning fast, and Patsy had obviously already checked out for the weekend. He started over. “It’s Graham Gordon,” he said. “Your duly elected constable? I need you to call the power company and get someone out to Hollow Creek to fix the streetlight. It’s broken.”

The paper shuffling stopped. “Oh. The haunted house.” She sounded closer now, and her last was followed by a click as she swapped the speakerphone feature for the normal hands-on mode.

Graham rolled his eyes. “It’s not haunted. I own it.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not haunted, dear,” Patsy replied musically. “It’s almost Halloween, after all. I know where you are. I’ll take care of it. Oh, speaking of which, I need to tell you about who I’m meeting tonight. I meant to ask you before you left today if it’s ok for Channel—”

“Gotta go.”

Graham tapped the End button, cutting her off. He tossed his iPhone through the passenger window of his pickup and onto the seat, glad to be rid of the encounter and especially delighted to be rid of the device. He caught sight of himself in the passenger-side mirror as he stepped away from the pickup. The man who looked back at him from his own hazel eyes was rounder than he usually thought of himself, with sandy hair that contained a hint of red. He looked tired. More tired than normal. There was a puffy dark circle under each eye. The scar his dad had made under the right one stood out against his flesh. Graham fingered it, watched it turn white under the pressure, and then released it. It filled and restored itself rapidly with the weight of his index finger gone.

Before the election, Graham had thought those circles were side-effects of spending too many work hours staring at computer screens while troubleshooting technical problems at the Media Place Smarty Desk way over in Hollow River. He fixed other people’s computer problems for a living before he became constable. Now he’d made himself responsible for their real-life problems too. Mostly that terrified him. But in at least one way—the way that he and his counsellor had tried to convince him was the best way to frame it—he was fine with it. Being constable was at least different, maybe even a fresh start. He hated having the weight of the modern world’s technology in his life as much as having that iPhone in his pocket. Returning to his roots on Hollow Creek Road in Lost Hollow felt like a reprieve from modernity. It was a psychological return to a time before cell phones and social media and twenty-four-seven cable news.

A small part of him regretted hanging up on Patsy, the town administrator and very nearly the only other Lost Hollow town employee, but it had sounded like she was about to try to dump a new to-do on him late on this Friday afternoon. It created anxiety in him the same way that, without fail, a problem customer walking up to the Smarty Desk at closing time on a Friday night created anxiety. Right now Graham wanted to concentrate only on the task ahead of him.

After a beat, he swallowed his regret and allowed himself to drink in the rest of the sight. The driveway was short and rose at a slight angle toward the house. The surface had long been washed away. The earth it had covered was rutted, battered by season upon season of torrential Southern thunderstorms. Graham could see a hint of the path that once upon a time was a hard-compacted trail of reddish-orange Tennessee chert. Peppered here and there along it were footprints and more than a few meandering pawprints, the former from the local teen nightlife and the latter left by the local Lost Hollow wildlife no doubt. A few more years of neglect and the driveway would end up entirely reclaimed by nature. It already bore patches of overgrown clumps of Kentucky fescue that had turned brown and bent over in the wake of autumn’s arrival.

The quarter-acre plot of land surrounding the old home had once been a neatly kept Eden, at least in his childhood memories. The grass had been evenly trimmed under a mini-forest of enormous shade trees. Near the back of the lot had stood a swing set from which he’d spent many a summer afternoon pumping his legs until he’d climbed so high in the sky he thought he might just loop the loop. Thirty years on, the yard had become a pale greenish yellow field of grass and armpit-high cattails, many of them drooping or collapsed from the weight of their own overgrown heads. Some of the shade trees still loomed there, but they looked smaller now, dwarfed by the overgrowth. One of them was split in half by what must have been a lightning strike. The swing set was long gone. He had no idea what had happened to it. Probably stolen and carted off for scrap metal at some point over the years. Graham made a mental note to hire someone to bush-hog the place. He might also make next spring the one in which he bought a lawnmower.

The house itself put the final touches on the creepy vision before him. Straight out of The Addams Family, the two-story Victorian Gothic farmhouse towered over the surrounding landscape, its clapboard siding flecked and blotchy from years of unmaintained wear. The front door stood half open under the front porch gable, revealing a darkened interior that might as well have been a hole straight into the vacuum of space. Graham blinked and, for a second, thought he caught sight of a figure peering out at him from beyond the threshold. Then it was gone. Tired, he thought. Just tired. That’s all.

Three of the four evenly spaced rectangular windows that lined the first floor bore spidery cracks and jagged holes, no doubt the work of some kid bored out of his mind by living along this stretch of barren country road. The fourth window had been gutted almost entirely. Only a single vicious looking spike jutted upward from its frame.

The second floor, by contrast, sported three cathedral-shaped windows, two symmetrically positioned on each side of the gable above the front porch and one directly in the center. Ghostly white linen sheers still hung in those windows, even after all these years of empty abandonment. Their tops were stretched across the width of each window. The center window’s drape flowed straight down, shutting out the view. One side of each sheer on the outside windows was tied all the way back at the vertical center of the window frame. The effect that it created was of a pair of jack o’lantern eyes cut to the left over the triangle nose of the gable and the gaping, ragged toothed maw formed by the windows and door on the first floor. Graham thought it was an appropriate look for the place given the season. The sheer in the right window fluttered and settled as he watched, as if something had brushed past it.

Indeed, he thought, the house looked like a screaming kind of place. No less so because it happened to be the abandoned childhood home of one Graham Gordon, the newly elected constable of a sleepy little Southern burg known as Lost Hollow. Graham hitched up the waistband of his town issue beige, braved the stroll through what remained of the old driveway, and placed a hand on the rough wood of the weather-beaten front door. The gable windows had not looked broken. He doubted the wind had moved that sheer. Maybe someone was inside after all.

“Hello?” He shoved the door all the way back against the wall so what remained of the afternoon light forced the inner darkness backward a pace. He jiggled the interior doorknob as he stepped inside. It would not turn. The bolt was lodged inside its housing in the door. There would be no means of locking the rapscallions out of it tonight. “Is anyone here?” His voice bounced off the walls of the empty hallways inside. “Constable!”

There was no answer, save for the scratching sounds of what might have been a family of rats scurrying around the aging supports in the walls. He stopped to listen. It sounded to him more like the clawing was coming from beneath the hardwood floor. There was also the crunch of broken glass under his boot when he stepped over the threshold. A quick look down revealed the shattered remnants of a Budweiser bottle, its label still valiantly clinging to the shards. More bottles, some whole and some broken, lay scattered about the interior. The golden late afternoon light glinted off them as it beamed through the door behind him, light that once upon a time would have been filtered through the front yard shade trees.

“Stupid kids.”

That same light from the setting sun elongated his shadow across some of the broken glass and down the ancient oak floor of the entry hall. Ages of dust had settled there. There were dozens of impressions of footprints in the whitish blanket created by the fallout. Some of those prints were coated in a second, finer layer of dust. Others, larger ones that appeared to have been made by the thick rubber soles of someone’s work boots, looked more recent. Within the tread marks of those prints, the floor was pristine. Graham glanced at his own feet. He braced himself against the hall wall and hoisted his right foot, which he supported around the ankle with his left hand. The newer footprints were perhaps a size larger than his own, but they could have been made by a pair of Wolverines, just like the ones on his own feet.

He slid his Maglite out of the holster at his hip. The weight of it was comforting in his hand. He gripped its shaft in his right fist and switched it on, steadying it at shoulder height and shining the beam along the path of dusty footprints. Several paces down the hall, the prints veered off in all directions: some toward the kitchen, some toward the formal dining area and the living room, others toward the stairs that led to his old bedroom on the second floor. It was difficult to tell which sets of prints had gone where because whoever had been there had apparently toured the entire house, leaving overlapping trails in the dust as he (or she?) crisscrossed the hallway. Curiously, the prints leading from the front door into the entry hall did not overlap with a set of departing ones. It was as if whoever had most recently trespassed on his abandoned childhood estate had never left.

A final trail—one created by the larger pair of Wolverines—petered out in front of a small plank door that was inset into the same wall that formed the back of the stairs to the upper floor. Graham remembered that door well. It used to open onto a second, more rickety set of stairs leading down and ending in a simple old-fashioned cellar. It was a mostly underground cool spot where, in the old days, it might have been convenient to store that autumn’s potato harvest or any other vegetable that needed to be guarded against ruin by winter freezes or preserved from early rot by the blistering heat and stifling humidity of late summer.

The cellar also made a damn near perfect place for a ten-year-old boy to lay low while his enraged drunken father paced the house, slapping his biggest leather belt against his tree trunk thighs and threatening at the top of his voice to “beat some sense into that lazy good for nothin’ limp-dick son of mine.” His thundering footsteps boomed up and down the entry hall. Each thud felt like it ricocheted against the walls of Graham’s skull. If Graham were able to remain silent, the old man would eventually become either too drunk or too tired to care where he’d hidden. He’d settle down and go away. And forget.

Most of the time, he’d pass out on the couch, belt loosely gripped in one factory-chafed hand and an empty bottle of Budweiser dangling precariously from the other, long before he ever thought to look for the boy in the black dank of the cellar. On rarer occasions, a cough or a sneeze was enough to tip off the older Gordon to his young son’s whereabouts. He’d tear open the door, stomp down those stairs, and drag the much younger version of Lost Hollow’s new constable out by his hair, yanking some of it out of his head by the root.

“I told you never to come down here!” he’d roar. “You’re gonna wish I never found you, boy!”

Then the belt would come down and lash him.

Across the right side of his face.

Across the left side of his face.

Across his ribs, butt, and thighs.

The whip-crack of the leather tore at his skin, sometimes ripping it open in thin slashes around his cheekbones. To this day, he bore that tiny grubworm-shaped scar under his right eye from one of those beatings. Graham again ran the tips of his fingers along its length. It felt larger than it looked these days. That one he got for forgetting to let Butch, his English bulldog, out to pee. The poor old thing had left a huge, sticky puddle just inside the front door, along with fresh scratch marks in the door’s finish from where he’d been trying to alert someone of his urgency. The elder Gordon had stepped in the yellowish ick upon arriving home that evening, a bottle of brew in hand and already drunk out of his mind. Graham had been lucky to not have lost the eye above that scar that night, not to mention his life.

He glanced at the open front door behind him. He couldn’t see them from this angle, but the back of the old door probably still bore Butch’s claw marks. The poor old fella had not been as lucky as his owner. Graham had found the dog’s pummeled corpse laying on the front porch the next day. Butch’s tongue protruded from his mouth and lay flat against the wood. Dried blood was caked on top of his head and had run in rivulets from various injuries in his face. It looked as if his skull and the bones of his face had been bashed in with some kind of blunt object. What muzzle the little guy had had was all but missing, revealing a large open cavity young Graham believed was a sinus. It might have been one of his dad’s beer bottles that had done the damage. Broken fragments of one lay scattered about the body.

He’d buried the dog in the backyard that afternoon, fashioning a makeshift cross out of two fallen branches from a nearby walnut tree and a spare pair of shoelaces he’d found in his sock drawer. He’d never actually been to church. Sunday mornings were sleep-it-off time in the Gordon household. The cross was more of a warning for others to not disturb the remains than any kind of desperate hope that his friend might know a better existence on the other side of the dark curtain. The dog might still be buried at the back of the lot, alongside the edge where the clearing ended and the woods began. He would try to remember to look for the marker before he left, although he did not hold out much hope it would still be there.

The old man’s attempts to relieve whatever shred of conscience he bore always dominated the next day’s first meal (typically it was lunch because the elder Gordon sawed the logs of sobriety until at least 11 a.m. on weekends). No matter which way things had gone the night before, the excuses were as reliably forthcoming as the morning sun. “Your mother’s gone, son. Run off with a nigger man.” Graham always winced when his father said the n-word, even when it was only the memory of his father’s voice. It was one of those words the elder Gordon spat at shout volume, even if he said it in the middle of an otherwise toneless sentence. He couldn’t help himself. “I can’t keep the place up all by myself. I have to count on you. And if I can’t count on you, then I have to make you do what I tell you to do. I can tell you right now you don’t ever want me to have to make you.”

Thinking back on it, as he often did in the wee hours of an anxious, sleepless night, Graham sometimes wondered if his dear old dad wasn’t more insane than alcoholic. No matter how many times he discovered Graham in that cellar, Lee Gordon would never think to look for him there the next time he tied one on. Graham also wondered why his teachers never said anything about the massive bruises and swollen shut eyes he often sported at school. Lee coached him to say that he’d fallen down the stairs, or got hit playing baseball in the backyard, or some other ridiculously unbelievable lie. But it turned out he’d never had to say any of those things, never had to explain how he’d managed to get the marks on his face. No one ever asked.

Graham shivered. That booming, angry voice of his father Lee, now twenty years in his grave, was still able to cow him, even when it was only inside his own head. He heard it most on the off days, those times when no amount of the prescription Xanax his counsellor prescribed seemed capable of warding off anxiety, the foreboding paranoia that someone, everyone, wanted to hurt him. Everyone tried to bully him for his inadequacy, the sense of low self-esteem that always accompanies a man who has spent too much of his life trying to stay out of the way. He heard it on those long, desperate days when he wondered how he had ever managed to dupe the good people of Lost Hollow into electing him their constable.

He’d launched the whole campaign on a lark, in an unusual moment of supreme overconfidence following a first date with an online match from Hollow River who had turned out to have an over-the-top interest in community politics. Perhaps, then, it hadn’t been overconfidence at all, but overcompensation for his lack of confidence. Not to mention his simple-minded and overtly masculine desire to impress the pretty girl. He had never intended to actually serve as Lost Hollow’s constable, especially after his match had sailed away mid-campaign in search of more exciting waters with a single attorney from her own town who was running for state senate. In his naivete, Graham had deactivated his online dating account when he thought things were serious between him and Katie. She apparently had not. Now here he was, unexpectedly elected and trying to fake it until he makes it in a law enforcement role he understood only regarding the description he’d read in a Wikipedia article.

Why did they pick me?

YOU WERE THE ONLY ONE WHO WANTED THE JOB, IDIOT, the voice of Lee Gordon chided in his head.

It was true. No one had run against Graham, ridiculous as it might have looked for someone in a help desk position at a major retail electronics chain to pursue a career in law enforcement. He didn’t even own a gun. Didn’t even know how to load one, much less aim and fire one. The city was paying for him to take a gun safety and training course, but the classes hadn’t started yet. For now, at least, he was an unarmed and inexperienced law enforcement officer. How he was to go about enforcing laws without the protection of a piece (did they still call them pieces?), he didn’t know. He could have simply quit, resigned the position as soon as he’d won it. But that would have made him look even more the wimp. He’d made this bed, albeit with help from Katie, and now he had to lie in it and pray he didn’t shit it.

The only net gain for Graham, if it could be considered such, that had come out of the election so far was that he had been able to use the position to convince the town to turn his old homestead over to him for a song and a promise he’d clean up the blight. That had been another lark. In the same town board meeting that had seen him sworn in as constable there had appeared on the agenda a plan to demolish the old place as a means of curbing the juvenile delinquency it seemed to entice. The rumors being spread by the kids in town had reached the board’s ears, and they had come to the same conclusion he had: the place was turning into an attraction for vagrants and ne’er-do-wells. Therefore, tear it down.

When the time came for public input on the matter, he’d suddenly found himself standing—without having previously planned to do so—and arguing that the place had sentimental value for him and that he’d like a shot at restoring it. He might even turn it into some kind of tourist spot, an idea he’d come to by way of town administrator Patsy Blankenship, she whom he’d hung up on moments ago. She had already renovated one old local homestead into a bed and breakfast that hosted the occasional guest or local event. The board had balked at his idea at first, but after he’d promised to either clean up the blight or hand the old Gordon place back to the town for demolition within a year, they’d relented. Now he owned the home: a shelter for rats, snakes, vagrants, and bored teenagers. He had no idea where to begin.

Graham pushed the thoughts away. This was no time to go second-guessing his life choices and cost himself what little nerve he had summoned to search for trespassers. He sidled up the hall. The back of his shirt created a loud scraping sound against the faded and peeling fleur-de-lis wallpaper covering the entry hall, a remnant of his mother’s New Orleans roots. He left his own narrow trail of Wolverine sole prints in the dust on the floor, carefully avoiding stepping on the ones left by the previous visitor. The physical memories of life in the house came flooding back to him. The sound of his footsteps on the hardwood floor. The sound of his father’s footsteps. Even the scrape of the wallpaper against the fabric of his shirt bubbled up memories of him dashing all over the house, running his hands and fingers over the walls as he did, just as any normal wild young boy might do.

The tiny hook and eye latch that had been meant to secure the cellar door was already undone when he got there. Graham didn’t know whether his father had initially installed that latch, but he’d always thought it a silly and unnecessary addition. The door to the cellar was no more than three uneven slats of painted pine carelessly supported along their backs by two horizontal two-by-fours. Large gaps between each slat rendered useless any attempt to keep the cooler air of the cellar out of the entry hall by just shutting the door. Besides, it had always managed to swing shut and stay closed on its own—even unlatched—which was one more reason the cellar had made for such an excellent hiding place.

A small wooden cabinet knob was mounted a couple of inches below the hook. Graham grabbed it and pulled. The door swung open easily on its spring hinges and without much complaint about the new tension; surprising after so many years of disuse. The ray from his Maglite spilled into the opening and revealed three splintery and slowly disintegrating steps, approximately one-quarter of the familiar set of plank stairs leading from the mouth of the door before vanishing into the damp darkness below. Graham felt for the light switch just inside the cellar door and flipped it on, but it produced nothing. He’d had service activated so he could begin work on the place. Maybe the power company hadn’t gotten around to it yet. That would certainly explain the state of the security light out front.

“Hello?” he shouted into the depths of darkness. “Lost Hollow Constable! Is anyone down there?”

There was no answer.

Graham stepped through the door. He’d covered only one tread before the sound of the creaking staircase started to get to him. There he paused, not allowing the door to swing shut behind him and not liking the soft and spongy feel of the tread on which he stood. It had much more give in it than he remembered from his youth.

From this position, the narrow beam of his Maglite enabled him to see the end of the staircase, but nothing beyond. The final step looked black and almost completely rotted away. The one above it didn’t appear to be in much better shape. If he went forward, he risked breaking those steps, which would make climbing out of the cellar much more difficult. If he didn’t go on, and someone was trapped down here, he might lose his job in disgrace. Worse, a real law enforcement officer, like a county sheriff’s deputy, might end up investigating the “screams” and finding a dead body he’d missed out of fear, in which case he could at the very least be accused of neglecting his duties as an officer of the peace.

Maglite secured in his left hand, Graham pawed at his right hip, immediately taking comfort in the shape of the county issue radio clipped to his belt. He ran his fingers along the top of the device until they closed around the volume knob, which he turned to the right. A thin click and a spurt of white noise erupted through the tomb-like silence of the old house. It vanished just as quickly, leaving in its wake the distinct hum of radio silence. Even so, it was reassuring that he had not only remembered to carry his direct connection to the Hollow County Sheriff’s Department inside with him but it also appeared to be in proper working order.

“Let’s hear it for technology. Thank God.”

From somewhere inside his head, he thought, the darkness replied: GOD AIN’T GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.

The next thing he felt was the bone-crunching shock of something blunt and heavy striking the back of his head. He heard what sounded like the shattering of thick glass. He was able to stay upright just long enough to feel what might have been a trickle of blood oozing from his scalp to the nape of his neck. A pair of unseen hands at his back thrust him into the darkness of the cellar, launching him down the full length of the rickety staircase. He fell forward, plummeting face first into the densely compacted earth beneath the house. The bridge of his nose exploded in a bright starburst of pain. His upper teeth crashed down on his lower lip, ripping open the pliable flesh. He felt an immediate swelling there. A thin stream of hot blood ran tear-like down his chin from the wound. Dimly, he heard the crack of splintered wood as his shins came down last, disintegrating the deteriorated lower steps in a fireworks show of wood rot and ancient dust.

His radio went flying when he hit. He heard it shatter in a hiss of static somewhere off to his right. The base of his Maglite struck the ground at the same time. It flew from his hand and bounced off the earth once, twice, and rolled some distance over the ground before coming to rest against the farthest cinder block wall of the cellar. The lamp behind the flashlight’s lens flickered madly, creating a nauseating strobe effect, a stop-motion version of Graham’s shadow on the wall beside him as he at first struggled to regain his feet and then gave up, collapsing flat to the earth.

The lamp finally steadied itself at a low burn, illuminating almost nothing about the cellar but the corner in which it had landed. It had come to rest too far from the limit of Graham’s reach. He stretched his left arm out for it anyway, hopeful that the darkness had merely created some sort of illusion of depth. His fingers clawed at the dirt for a second or two before they ultimately surrendered and lay still.

Graham Gordon lay broken and exhausted on the black earth at the bottom of the cellar stairs. In the fading last rays of his dying Maglite, he saw an eye: a disembodied, full white orb broken by jagged lightning-shaped lines of red capillaries. The iris in the center of the eyeball was a murky dark brown color, unshining and nearly black. Its pupil was but a pinprick in the beam from the flashlight.

It stared at him from just beyond the edge of the darkness, unblinking.

“Dad?”

The world went dark.