Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 15 - Alley

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The sound of crashing glass was followed by another bottle being dropped. Then there was laughter, high-pitched, like a giggle from a crack-voiced teenage boy.

“Hello?” Gordon called again.

“There’s someone out there,” the voice hissed from the other side of the fence.  Then there were other voices, muddled whispers that Gordon couldn’t quite make out.

Then, distinctively, a woman’s voice rang out, before being muffled to silence.

“Help m—,” Gordon clearly heard.

“Miss?” Gordon called from the other side of the ivy-covered fence.  Thunder rumbled overhead again. From the other side of the fence came a collection of stifled laughter.

He stood now in the edge of shadows by the back corner of the gas station.  The large green dumpster pushed against the white cinderblock exterior wall reeked of rotten milk and nidorous refuse, hot and putrid.  From inside came the faint squeak of a rodent searching for its next meal.

Around him, the night air swelled up thick and wet. Gordon’s throat felt constricted and dry. Ahead, Gordon saw the opening in the gate.  On the ground was the chain meant to hold the gate closed.  He scrambled over and snatched the chain in his hands, surprised by its heft, before retreating back to where the shadows quickly swallowed up what little light shone from the halogens near the gas pumps at the entrance to the alley.

“I’m going to call the police,” Gordon called into the darkness.

“Go for it,” the cackling teenager called back and laughed a little more boldly. “We’ll be waiting!” 

Again, Gordon then heard a chorus of chattering whispers.

“Does someone need help back there?” Gordon called.  He was certain he heard a woman cry out for help.  But now he wasn’t sure if he actually heard the stifled reply or if it was just adrenaline buzzing in his head.

He looked at his watch, then shook his head. Why was he out so late?  Why was he meddling again?  Just that morning he tried to help that rotund little woman get the bicycle off the shelf at work.  That act of charity cost him his job.  

What would this act cost him?

“You need a quarter for the phone booth, old man?” the joking teenager called out. “Need to borrow my cell phone?”

Gordon stood dumbfounded.  He started into the blackness of the alley behind the gas station and was now concerned not only for the screaming woman but for his own safety.  

The opening in the fence stared back at him like a cavernous, toothless mouth waiting to swallow him whole. 

Was this a setup? He didn’t know for certain if someone was in actual trouble, or if perhaps the female who’d cried out was an accomplice to mischief.   If he tried to leave right then, would they follow him to his house?  They’d then know where he lived.

And if he had in fact heard someone scream out for genuine help, what could he possibly do? He looked at the chain in his hands.  Did he really think he could take on who knows how many hoodlums — he actually thought the word hoodlums in his mind — and not become a victim himself?

“Please help!” the woman’s voice called out again, the hushed whispers became full volumed voices.

There was a woman there.  But again, was she truly in peril, or was she a part of a plan?

“You got us, Ace,” a different voice called out.

“Come and get us,” another said.

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“Miss?” Gordon asked. He edged toward the blackness, stepping out what felt like no more than millimeters at a time. “Miss, do you need help?”

Gordon shifted the chain to his left hand.  With the other, he reached into his pocket and took out his keychain.  He then slid the longest key, the one to his beat-up old hatchback, between his right hand’s middle and ring finger. 

He leaned forward, cocking his ear toward the darkness beyond the fence. 

“Come on, old man,” the original cackling teenager taunted.

Gordon saw shadows then, first one and then another, until four young men, teenagers most likely, stood just in the entryway of the alley. From behind them, the woman’s voice called out again.

“Please help me!”

Either she was a phenomenally talented actress or a woman in the midst of experiencing trauma that would haunt her like a dark and recurring nightmare for the rest of her life. 

The skinniest of the teenagers stepped out ahead of the others. 

“Come and get her,” he said with his cackling voice. 

He had a long skinny face, gaunt like a skeleton, with a thin mustache and wispy strands of hair on his chin. He wore a black t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off that made his face and skinny white arms look as if they were almost glowing.  He took another step out of the alley, into the weakening light of dusk.

Every single one of them jumped then as a crack of thunder and lightning struck at once.  In the flash of light, Gordon saw something dark and wet on the top of the boy’s hands, his knuckles covered in it. 

The four boys swore and then laughed.

“That was freaking close, man!” one of them said.

The skinny one shook it off and faced off toward Gordon.

“What are you waiting for?” he said.

Gordon turned and looked back toward the exit, toward the busy road where cars kept zipping by, their drivers oblivious to this parking lot showdown where a stupid old man had stumbled somewhere he shouldn’t have, in a place he normally would never have been, trying to get home so he could start planning the rest of his life away from Maplethorpe Avenue.  

Gordon stood upright, shoulders back, and tightened his hand around the keys, the teeth jutting out from between his fingers in a dull jagged blade.  In his other hand, the length of the chain fell down against his leg.  He’d have to strike hard and fast and hope if he got one of them — the skinny leader — the others would fall back.

From the alley, he heard the girl whimpering, broken and fearful.  She was in need, after all.

Without warning, the sky lit up again with an exploding bang.  Gordon shielded his eyes from the glare.

Without a word between them, like a pack of hyenas, the four boys took the opportunity and lunged toward him. Two of them rounded out on either side of Gordon while the other two — including the crack-voiced boy — barreled headlong at Gordon like bowling balls down the center of a lane. They rammed so hard that Gordon spun in the air as he was thrown to the ground.  

He heard another loud crack, this time not from the sky above, but from his wrist giving away as he landed.  The keys fell out of his hand and rattled onto the blacktop next to him.  The length of the chain wedged under his body. 

Each boy grabbed one of Gordon’s limbs.  With surprising strength, they lifted him off the ground.  Gordon screamed out in pain.  The skinny leader jerked at his elbow and twisted Gordon’s arm and whatever had just snapped when he’d been toppled over.

The sky lit up again as the boys carried Gordon’s limp body towards the opening of the fence.  Gordon looked back towards the faint light from the front of the gas station.  Everything was upside down.  

Just before they went through the gate, Gordon was sure he was hallucinating.  Where the halogen lights bore down atop the gas pumps, Gordon saw a mammoth black circle hovering in mid-air.

Then they were beyond the fence, behind the gas station itself, swallowed up into the darkness there.  The four boys then dropped Gordon into a puddle of mud and residue from who knows what or where.  Then the skinny one reared back and started kicking.

“Come on!” he jeered, and the other three joined in, one after another, a clamoring jangle of disharmonious rhythmic violence.  

Gordon’s breath shot out of him and wouldn’t return.  The kicks were relentless, pointless, and endless until finally the skinny cackling teen bent and punched him square in the nose.  Something else cracked and a deeper blackness appeared all around Gordon’s vision.

The four kept kicking, but over the terrible pounding Gordon realized the woman cry out, “I’m sorry!” 

“Wait,” Gordon tried to say.

“What’s that, old man?” the skinny one said.

Gordon looked up at them and his eyes widened.  The black orb he’d seen at the front of the gas station was now as big as the station itself.

“Behind you,” Gordon said.

“Shut up,” the teen said and kicked him one more time.

Then there was a different darkness in Gordon’s vision, like retinal burn.  It was like a fuzzy image floating right in front of him, surrounded by an orb of white lightning and a deafening silence.  

Gordon’s pain turned to numbness, to quiet. 

The last thing he thought he heard was Marie’s voice.  

“Take me to a movie and hold my hand in the dark,” he thought he heard her say, somewhere simultaneously close and far away.  “Hold my hand in the dark.”

Gordon reached out into the blackness towards that beautiful voice he hadn’t heard for over forty years. 

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