Stephanie Doyle - Possessed

“How else do you think the food gets in the refrigerator?”

Right. Maybe a man who had money all his life would have a staff of people on hand to do his cleaning and grocery shopping, but that wasn’t Malcolm. He would do for himself. It was time that Cass stopped trying to fit his round pegs into the square holes she’d created for him in her mind.

“Do you clean bathrooms, too?”

“Are you insane? I hire somebody to do that.”

Cass shook her head with a rueful grin on her lips and sipped her juice. At least some of the pegs fit. “Where are we going?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there. Why don’t you take the toast to go?”

He was anxious. That much was obvious. And she was certain he wouldn’t take her anyplace that would deliberately hurt her. Still, surprises in general weren’t a good thing for her. Especially now, when she had no idea how she would react in certain situations.

“Malcolm, I’m not great in large crowds or places where I might pick up on a lot of…activity. You know what I mean?”

“Not exactly, but this place won’t be crowded. Especially at this time of the day.”

Speaking of which…“You’ve already blown off work for a few days so you could babysit me.”

“Can you not use the term babysitting? Considering what we’ve done these past few days, it makes me sound like a pervert.”

“All I’m saying is that taking off to stay with me really isn’t necessary. I can handle being on my own.”

“I don’t doubt it. But it’s not an issue. I let them know at the office that I would need a bit of time off. I think I surprised a lot of my employees. They probably thought I would be back to work immediately after the funeral.” He sighed. “I don’t know. If all this hadn’t been going on, maybe I would have been. I would have had nowhere else to go. But right now I’m not in any hurry. Nothing is pressing and the company can live without me for a few days.”

Cass bet that was probably the first time he had ever admitted such a thing. “Okay. Lead the way.”

The surprise was Hank’s Gym. The sign actually read Han ’s Gym, but Cass could make out enough of a faded k to figure it out. It was a squat cinder block building in a seedy section of northeast Philly that looked like it smelled of sweat and testosterone even from fifty feet away. Malcolm parked the car and found a kid riding by on his bike, who gladly took a ten spot to keep an eye on the car for him. Malcolm led Cass across the street. She stopped short at the door.

“Are you trying to tell me I need to work out more? You know that’s the kind of thing that can get a man into trouble with a woman, especially when she knows he’s just seen her naked.”

He laughed and grabbed her hand to pull her forward. “Certainly not. My stepmother taught me better. This isn’t your average workout place.”

The grimy sign and soap-covered windows gave that much away. Malcolm opened the door and caught the eye of an older man with thinning white hair dressed in a stained blue sweatshirt sitting behind the desk. He appeared to be counting cash. Lots of it.

“Hey, Johnny,” Malcolm called out.

“Hey! Mr. M. Good to see you,” he rattled out through smoke-filled lungs. “I was sorry to hear about your loss.”

“Thanks.”

That was it. The man turned his attention back to the cash in his hand and went back to counting. “Johnny is a pretty popular bookie around here. He watches over the place for Hank when he’s in the hospital.”

“Hank of Hank’s Gym is in the hospital? That doesn’t bode well.”

“I guess not. He’s getting his hip replaced.”

“I see.” Cass looked around at the large, cushioned floor mats spread about over an open area of concrete. The back wall sported some spot-riddled mirrors, in front of which two overly large men were lifting free weights. There was a bench with a rack above it loaded with round weights and, next to it on the floor, a bunch of handheld weights in various sizes.

No leg lift machines, no bicep curl machines. Just the weights and the bench. To her left, there was a row of punching bags. Two heavy bags hung on the wall some distance apart, and between them was a smaller punching bag that, given its height over the floor, Cass was certain she would not be able to reach. Behind the punching bags was a tight wire about shoulder height that ran the length of the wall and was secured to either end with hooks.

On Cass’s right, a small, wiry, brown-skinned man with long dreadlocks jumped rope so quickly that she couldn’t be absolutely sure he was even holding a rope.

“You brought me to a boy gym.”

“We like to call it a ‘real’ gym,” Malcolm corrected her. He moved her toward the punching bags. There was a squat shelf loaded with gloves of a few different sizes and a roll of white tape. Grabbing the tape, he motioned for her to hold out her hands.

“Here’s what I was thinking,” he started. “This person is looking for you. We know he’s dangerous. Lauren wasn’t exactly tough, but she was a scrapper. She would have fought to live.”

He stopped and Cass waited while he tried to shake off what must have been a rush of grief.

“Not that I’m going to let anything happen to you, but if this person also comes with this…thing…it leaves you vulnerable. You’re going to need to find a way to fight them both off or at least avoid them. I can’t teach you martial arts or any fancy tricks quickly, but throwing a punch and ducking a punch…that’s pretty standard. At least it will serve you better than yoga.”

Cass wasn’t sure of his logic. “You make it sound like I have control over what happens with the monster in the room. I don’t know that I do.”

“It’s your room, isn’t it? You visualize it. It stands to reason you can do anything you want inside it. For example, it’s not like it’s a real monster. It was a person. Only you’re seeing him like you do. I thought if we could teach your body how to fight, maybe your brain will catch on and it will be easier to visualize the next time you have to defend yourself.”

“That makes sense, I guess. The first time it came after me, my only reaction was to huddle into a ball.”

“Ducking is not a bad place to start, but if you can imagine hitting him back…”

“But he…it…is so strong,” Cass muttered.

“Only in your head. And mentally-I think you’ve got some game yourself. You just need the right tools.”

Cass stared at the bag, then at the worn gloves on the shelves. “Okay, but I’m not putting my hands in those things.”

“We’ll start with tape. If it hurts badly enough you’ll beg for gloves.”

More pain. Terrific.

Malcolm walked her through the basics of how to shape her fist, how to swing through the punch, how to hit the bag with maximum impact. With her right and then her left hand, she hit the bag repeatedly, first jabbing it, then hooking it, then uppercutting it. She hit it until her fingers were swollen and her knuckles were scraped. Until the tape began to fray around the edges.

“Enough with the bag,” Malcolm finally said.

Cass agreed thankfully. She didn’t doubt the usefulness of the workout, but her hands were numb and her shoulders and arms protested.

“We’re done?”

“Do you have a little left in the tank?”

Unfortunately, Cass was the type who, even if she didn’t, wasn’t going to admit it.

“What next?”

“Something more important than hitting. Ducking.”

The taut wire that ran the length of the wall behind the punching bags was expressly for that purpose. Cass ducked and weaved over and over again, moving from one side of the thin rope to the other. Making her legs move forward. More often than not she misjudged and came up directly under the wire. One time she came up so hard the wire snapped her back and sent her tumbling to the mat. She was pretty sure she heard a few chuckles from the other side of the gym.