Gilchrist: A Novel

by Christian Galacar

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re just crazy,” Peter said. But nothing in his tone suggested he actually suspected this.

  “See for yourself. You said you just bought the book. Go ahead and read it. Everything I’ve just said to you is on record in Jackson Hill. That’s why I wanted to know if you’d read it earlier. It’s also why I thought you were trying to contact me in the first place. Ever since I read that article about your son and saw your picture in the paper, I thought I would get a call from you. I assumed either you or someone close to you had read the book, seen the odd similarities, and thought maybe I’d been trying to exploit what happened to you by writing a story about it. But a simple check of the timeline proves that’s impossible. It’d already been published for six months when that happened to your family.”

  “God, what the hell is going on?” Peter pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.

  “There’s something else you should know, too. I don’t know what it means, but…”

  “But what?”

  “The dreams eventually stopped when I was there,” Declan said. “It was like you both just vanished. First her, then you.”

  “What happened?” Peter asked in a strangled voice.

  “I don’t know. But the last one I had was of you sitting at the kitchen table of Shady Cove. You were alone… and you were crying.”

  Peter scrubbed a hand over his face. “I feel stupid even having to ask, but do you have any idea what it means?”

  “I don’t know, kid. Like I said, this wasn’t exactly handed to me on a silver platter all spelled out. I was piecing it together as it happened, discovering as I wrote.”

  “What happens to her in your book?” Peter asked. A wave of embarrassment wrenched through him when he heard the absurdity of what his question implied. The whole thing seemed silly on the surface, yet underneath it all, he could feel the dark weight of something very heavy and very real.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Declan responded hopefully.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I knew I was making that part up. It didn’t feel divined, I guess you could say. Not the same way the other stuff did. I only understood that you knew she was gone. Same way you can tell when your luck’s about to turn bad in a card game. It’s just a gut feeling. That’s as much as I got. Some things were clearer than others. You have to understand, much of this came at me piecemeal, and I did the stitching together as best I could, the way you do with any story.”

  “What happens?” Peter repeated bluntly. “I’m going to read it, so you might as well tell me.”

  He heard the splashing of water coming from the bathroom, the sound of gentle sloshing in a half-full tub. And all at once, he knew what Declan was about to say. For a horrible moment he was certain he could feel the water filling his lungs.

  I don’t want to hear it, he thought. It’s not true. None of this is true. It can’t be.

  “She… Sandra Thornhill drowns herself in the lake,” Declan said, the regret thick in his voice for having to taste the words. “But like I told you, kid, that was just story. That was me at the wheel, filling in a blank. As far as I knew at the time, she got taken away by aliens. She’s okay now, isn’t she?”

  Aliens. Funny choice of word, Peter thought, as an image of that creature from his dream surfaced in his mind. He could see the gray thing with the shimmering face crouched over the window of his house, a witness watching as his son beat his little pink palms against the screen that would eventually pop out of its frame and send him crashing to the ground. He remembered how in his dream he had dove for Noah and come up short. Peter’s hand went to his knee, then to his elbow, then to his forearm. The places were still sore. He had forgotten all about those mysterious scrapes.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Well, so that’s good. Maybe not everything is true, then,” Declan said. “Or at least not set in stone. I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, or maybe whatever is going to happen just hasn’t happened yet.” With a heavy dose of cynicism, he added, “Are we seriously having this conversation right now? I mean, come on, this is literally right out of a horror novel. And if I’m talking to you about this, wouldn’t you have put that in the book, too? When you were having your dreams, or visions or whatever, wouldn’t you have seen that we talked at this moment and known all about it back then? Is that in Jackson Hill? Does what’s his name—Jacob—stumble upon the book notes of a writer who stayed in the same place as him, and does he decide reach out to the guy?”

  “No,” Declan said flatly.

  “Well, why not?”

  “How should I know? Maybe it’s the same reason you don’t see your own nose even though you’re staring at it all day. If there are rules to this, I sure as hell don’t know them. God, kid, stop thinking I’m trying to sell you something. I’m not. I’m just telling you what I know. You can decide for yourself what to do with the information.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just having a hard time wrapping my head around this.”

  “I know. You’re certainly not alone on that one.”

  A moment of dead air grew on the line, and for a second it seemed there was nothing left to say. Peter licked his lips, staring across the kitchen and into the dimly lit bedroom. In the back of his mind, he was thinking about how nice it would be to hang up the phone and pour himself a tall glass of bourbon, then sit out back in one of those low Adirondack chairs and let everything melt away.

  “Last week I would’ve thought you were insane,” Peter said. “But today I’m inclined to keep an open mind.”

  “There isn’t any real protocol for something like this,” Declan said. “I’d say just be careful. Probably nothing will happen. Maybe we changed something simply by having this conversation. It could be now that you know what might be coming, it won’t happen.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Me too, kid. You want some advice?”

  “What?”

  “If I were you, I’d get out of that town and never look back. You and your wife pack up tonight and leave. Play it safe. That place might seem like a cure for what ails you, but I think it feels that way for a reason… and not a good one.”

  There was a rustling on the phone line, and Peter heard Declan, in a muffled voice, tell someone he would be done in a moment. Back to Peter he said, “I had this friend when I was a boy, Eddie Cavanaugh. He was one of those kids that always seemed to be sick. Whenever we’d stop by his house to see if he wanted to come play, his mother would tell us it was too dangerous for her Eddie to come outside. No, Eddie had to stay in so she could take care of her little boy and make him all better. Well, as it turns out, the crazy old bat was poisoning him a little each day. Making him sick just so she could make him feel better. He lost a kidney, and she ended up in a rubber room with a view. I guess she needed the attention. She fed off it, in a way. A sort of one-sided, symbiotic relationship.”

  “Like a parasite.”

  “Exactly,” Declan said. “You know, I think maybe we’ve talked enough madness for one night. Don’t you? Besides, it’s getting late.”

  “Hold on. Let me just ask you this: why here? What’s so damn special about this town?”

  “I wish I knew,” Declan said. “All I have is speculation. The honest truth is I don’t have a clue. If you want my best guess, though, it’s in the book. The research I did on Gilchrist to build the mythos of Jackson Hill led to some interesting things. Let’s leave it at that and say goodnight for now. I’ll give you my phone number, and if you want to hash this out some more in daylight, give me a call.”

  Peter wrote the number down on a scrap of paper and tucked it in his pocket. “This has been, without a doubt, the strangest conversation I’ve ever had, but I do appreciate you calling me back, Declan. Trying to see it from your shoes, that couldn’t’ve been easy to say to me. I’m not sure I would’ve had the guts to.”

  “You bet, kid. Take care of yourself. Don’t be too stubborn j
ust because this doesn’t seem practical. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. Especially there.”

  “Good night,” Peter said, and hung up the phone.

  5

  Peter stood in the doorway of the bathroom, watching Sylvia as she lay in the tub, a folded washcloth over her eyes. Her arms were draped over the sides, creating small puddles on the floor below her fingertips. That was good, Peter thought, because if she could see his face, she would’ve understood how completely shaken he was by the conversation he’d just had.

  “Who was it?” she asked, her head remaining perfectly still. “Not a wrong number, I take it. You were on the phone quite a while.”

  “A colleague of mine,” Peter said, stuffing his hands in his pockets and leaning against the doorjamb. “Someone I’d asked Tom to put me in touch with. He was supposed to get me the guy’s number, not give him this one.”

  “Anyone I know?” Sylvia asked, her hand carefully reaching up and scratching beside her nose.

  “I don’t think so. A friend of a friend, really. I just had some questions I wanted to ask him. Research for the book, nothing that couldn’t’ve waited until morning.”

  “I see,” she said. “Would you do me a favor and get me my towel? I left it on the bed.”

  “Sure.” Peter got it for her and put it on the back of the toilet tank.

  He stood beside her, his mind racing with what Declan had just told him. None of it seemed possible. The whole thing felt caught in his throat, and he had the strange idea that if he just mustered one huge, whooping laugh, it would all come flying out. He should tell her, he thought. Then he would be rid of the absurdness of it all. He should tell her what was just told to him, and together they could decide what to make of it.

  Yet he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Every time he opened his mouth to speak, he couldn’t find the words. It all felt too complicated, and too big, and in that stubborn part of him where the clay was hard, the idea was too ridiculous to be of any serious consequence.

  “What’s the matter?” Sylvia asked, tilting her head in his direction. The towel over her eyes stayed in place. “I can tell when something’s on your mind.”

  “Nothing. Just wrestling with the end of the book. You know how I get during this stage of a project. Nothing’s ever good enough.” Peter hesitated, then asked, “Hey, Syl, how do you feel? Are you…?”

  She smiled. “I’m okay, Peter. I feel… calm. I think coming here was a good idea. We needed this.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Just checking.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “And you’ll figure out your book. You always do.”

  “I know.”

  He stayed beside her a moment longer, a thin sadness settling over him. He couldn’t shake that sensation of looking down from outside his body: a duality of being himself while at the same time watching a character who had just been thrust into a situation he could hardly comprehend, let alone navigate.

  6

  The sign on the construction fence read KEEP OUT in serious black letters. Jim Krantz looked down at the set of keys he had taken off Leo. The large ring held at least two dozen, but one key stood out. He used it on the padlock, and it popped open. Then he undid the chain securing the gate, pushed it open, and went inside.

  He was two howling green eyes floating in the pitch-black night. He was the crunch of automatic footsteps wandering across gravel, driving toward a singular thought, compelled to move forward. It was dark, but he could see. It was all so clear in his mind. The wind whipped the rain sideways in sheets, sounding like pebbles against metal as it smacked into construction equipment. He felt none of it.

  Four months ago the plot of land had been an acre and a half of woods, but it had been razed by bulldozers and was currently in the process of being blasted. A hundred yards of rock ledge needed to be excavated in order to accommodate the twelve thousand square feet of strip mall that was supposed to be built there the following spring. The late Leo Saltzman had partnered with his brother’s construction company after realizing the potential in the location. The site was on the western side of Gilchrist, settled between Mill Road and Route 2 on a stretch of land where the two roads ran parallel to one another for about a quarter mile. It was ideal: close enough to a major artery to attract the highway traffic, and close enough to local communities to bring in a regular, more consistent customer base and provide local jobs.

  At the back of the construction site, rubber blasting mats were stacked beside a large blue storage container. Jim went to the storage container, gazed down at the keys in his hand again, found the right one, and removed another padlock. He undid the latch and opened the door. Inside, the container smelled sweet and stuffy, like sawdust and bananas. Along the back wall, Jim lifted a dusty canvas tarp. Beneath it were wooden crates with the words WARNING: DYNAMITE HIGH EXPLOSIVE stenciled on the lids in red paint. Beside him on the ground were large coils of wire, and beside that were the detonators.

  Jim took what he needed, then left.

  Chapter Eleven

  JACKSON HILL

  From Jackson Hill, by Declan Wade (Foundry Press: 1963), p. 42:

  Since the wake the day before, Sandra hadn’t stopped with it. “Have you seen the thing?” she would ask anyone who would listen. “It’s so small, it’s teeny-tiny. Where do they even find something like that?” She was talking about the coffin. And every time she said it, she chewed her knuckles, each time a little harder, until eventually, she bled.

  So they buried their son on a Thursday, on a gray October morning with a cold fog rolling in off the Atlantic. And Sandra had laughed at the funeral. Everyone in the church had heard her when she excused herself to the bathroom. At first it sounded like sobbing, but soon came the unmistakable whoop and cackle of hysterical laughter. Then, echoing through the hollows of the church, came her voice: It’s so small, so smaaalllll.

  Laughter. And more laughter.

  Some understood what she was saying and why she was saying it. The others had a unified look of horror on their faces. Dear God, what was happening? Why was she laughing? Why wouldn’t she stop?

  Jacob, on the other hand, thought it was just about the saddest sound he’d ever heard. Something inside his wife had broken, a short circuit brought on by a surge of grief no human body was equipped to handle.

  She was in a state of shock. That was what Dr. Lassiter would tell Jacob when he came to their house to give her a shot later that evening, not that he needed a doctor to tell him what he already knew. Of course she was in shock. Her three-year-old boy had just fallen from the window of their twentieth-floor Manhattan apartment and landed on the sidewalk. And she’d seen it all happen while she was on the phone with her sister.

  “Her mind is having a hard time accepting what’s happened,” Lassiter said. “It’s trying to protect itself. Sometimes these things manifest themselves in bizarre ways.”

  “But laughing at—” Jacob lowered his voice, looking in the direction of their bedroom, where Sandra was fast asleep. “But laughing at our son’s funeral? That’s more than a little bizarre, don’t you think? I can’t get that sound out of my head. She sounded… she sounded insane.”

  “Sometimes, when there’s such an intense emotion, the body doesn’t know how to react. It just needs to get it out somehow. It’s almost like a mental sneeze, a way to clear out whatever’s in there,” Lassiter said. “She’ll be okay. It might just take a little while. In the meantime, I’ll write her a prescription for something to keep her calm. It’ll help, especially with sleep.”

  Jacob didn’t like the idea. Something inside him sent up a red flag at the idea of pills being his wife’s coping mechanism. Looking back, he often pinpointed that exact moment as the place where he should’ve chosen differently.

  “Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”

  And so began the medicated life of Sandra Thornhill. A pill in the morning to start the day, a pill with lunch to keep things rolling smooth
ly, and a pill or two every night before bed to make sure the sandman showed up on time and her sleep was dreamless. It would go on this way for…

  From Jackson Hill, p. 73:

  Jacob had just enough time to duck out of the way as the plate smashed against the wall behind him.

  “Get out!” Sandra screamed. “I don’t care! I don’t want to hear it anymore!”

  “Just calm down, would you?” he said. “We’ll keep trying. The doctor didn’t say it wouldn’t happen. He only said it was taking a bit longer than usual. That doesn’t mean we can’t.”

  “I don’t want to keep trying. I’m sick of it, and I’m sick of you. You keep telling me everything will be all right. You’ve been saying that for the last two years, and nothing has been fine. Nothing has ever been fine.”

  She wasn’t wrong about that. Nothing had been going their way. He couldn’t argue that. But Jacob wasn’t about to agree with her, not out loud. Of course not. If he did that, the whole thing would be over.

  “Honey, why don’t you take one of your pills and calm down. Okay?” Jacob said. “Once you’re feeling a little better, we can talk about this more rationally.”

  Sandra laughed, appalled. “I don’t want another pill.” She grabbed the bottle off the counter and shook it. “Do you know how many of these I’ve taken since he died? Hundreds. Pill after pill after pill to pretend our son isn’t dead. To pretend there isn’t a problem when it’s been a year, and I can’t get pregnant. Maybe that’s a sign. You let one die, you don’t get another.”

  “San—”

  “No. Shut up. I’m tired of not feeling.”

  Jacob found himself trying to work out the math in his head, even as he stood there getting screamed at. James had died in October of sixty-one. Now it was July of sixty-three. God, had it really been almost two years? It all felt like a dreadful blur—two years, two sadness-filled years, gone by as a smear of gray paint across a canvas. He counted them back. It’d been twenty-one months. And if Sandra ate four pills a day—oftentimes more—that was at least one hundred and twenty per month. Times twenty-one months. That’s… She’d been wrong. She hadn’t eaten hundreds; she’d eaten thousands.