Gilchrist: A Novel

by Christian Galacar

  “No one is forcing you to take anything,” Jacob said, laying on the saccharine, I’m-not-your-enemy tone. “If you don’t like the pills, then don’t take them. You said they helped.”

  Then the bottle of pills was hurtling through the air at him. And this time he didn’t have time to get out of the way….

  From Jackson Hill, p. 98:

  Jacob tried to wake her, but she was unresponsive. On the table was a half-empty bottle of gin. He stepped back from the couch, the fear slowly swelling inside him. Her skin looked paper-white against the dark blue of her bathrobe. The sleep looked far too peaceful. Far too eternal, a savage part of his mind suggested, to be mere alcoholic intoxication. Something crushed under his foot. He looked down and spotted the empty prescription bottle. The horrible, swelling wave inside him crested and came crashing down on the shore of his mind.

  “Dear God. Sandra.” He shook her. “Sandra, wake up. Wake up!” He slapped her.

  And, of course, she did not answer him.

  He shook her again, then slapped her cheek. But her eyes would not open to offer their irises. She was still breathing, but barely. Her chest was rising in shallow fits and starts.

  How hadn’t he seen this coming? Worse: what if he had and for some reason had chosen to ignore it?

  He started for the phone, banging his shin against the coffee table as he turned. The bottle of gin clattered to the floor and began to empty itself onto the carpet in thick glugs and slurps. This stalled his mind. He stood frozen in the middle of the living room. He heard the traffic of downtown Manhattan outside, twenty stories below. A thought occurred to him, although it was more like a series of thought fragments that he slowly pieced together. If he called for a doctor, help might not arrive for at least an hour. It was a Saturday, after all.

  He tried it from a different angle.

  That’s right, it was a Saturday, and people don’t work weekends. Not people in his building. So people were home. His neighbors. A doctor. He knew a doctor down the hall. He’d met him at a Christmas party last year, the one where he and Sandra had both gotten too drunk and made fools of themselves. Sandra had fallen asleep on the bed of coats, and he’d used the broom closet as a lavatory. Certainly not their finest moment, but it was a moment that had left an imprint, and now he was recalling it. He was recalling the doctor’s name, too. Bill. No. Will. No. Willams. Harvey Williams. End of the hall. Apartment…

  He was knocking frantically on the door of apartment 20E, and he heard the locks turning. Someone was home…

  From Jackson Hill, p. 117:

  The town had a magnetism to it. It always had, from what he remembered.

  Jacob hadn’t been to Jackson Hill in over two decades, but he recalled even back then, the town had a palpable energy to it. It was a nervous type of caffeine energy, like everyone was waiting for the ground to crack open or for the boogeyman to jump out around every corner. Turned out, little had changed. He and Sandra had moved to town only a few days ago to start a new chapter in their life, and already the feeling was returning. It was all flooding back. And it was flooding hard and strong. Including the dreams. Especially the dreams.

  Welcome back.

  Jacob had been prone to vivid dreams since childhood. When he was six years old, he and his family had come to Jackson Hill to stay at Little Nook for the Thornhill family reunion. At the time, the house belonged to a distant cousin, Hezekiah Thornhill, the father of the cousin Jacob had bought the house from. Hezekiah had grown up in Jackson Hill and built Little Nook on a piece of lake property he had, if one could believe the local stories, won in a game of poker. During that weeklong stay for the reunion, Jacob had come down with an intense bout of night terrors.

  After almost thirty years, he could still see visions of those bizarre nightmares. There was much he didn’t remember—he could feel it more than he could see it—but he had never forgotten the face, that creepy colorful face, like the clear, shimmering brilliance of a soap bubble’s skin. In his dreams, the face always leaned over him, and he could see his own reflection in it. But his reflection was distorted to show an aged and sickly version of him. In the nightmares, the face descended upon him, and right as it was about to swallow him, he would wake up screaming and sopped in cold sweat. And there was always the strong scent of campfire in his nose when he sat up, panting in the cold, dark room, trying to claw his way back to waking life. The house always seemed to have a smoky smell to it, even when they weren’t barbecuing. In fact, the whole town seemed to. But it was particularly strong after a nightmare. He could almost taste the bitterness of ash on his tongue.

  It went on that way for the six days Jacob and his family stayed at Little Nook. And when they did leave, the night terrors stayed behind in Jackson Hill. But it had left behind something special in Jacob. A channel had been opened in his mind, and now he was freer to travel to and from his dream space with much more ease and recall clarity. Back when he had been having the nightmares, he always imagined it as a construction project happening in his brain. A bunch of men had moved in during the middle of the night and started tearing up the ground, laying pipe, and changing things without his permission. What they had built was the channel. But they’d forgotten to build a door, and something had traveled up that channel and found him. The thing with the awful face. It had a name… a very old name.

  And the name was Gishet…

  From Jackson Hill, p. 267:

  “Do you believe in vampires?” Professor Noonan asked, his face showing no signs he was joking. Leaning back in his desk chair, he removed his glasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket.

  Jacob cocked an eyebrow. “Of the Bela Lugosi variety? Dracula and all that?”

  “I’m serious,” Noonan said. The tall stacks of mythology books in his office and on his desk echoed that sentiment. “There are many different kinds, but none are the blood-sucking sophisticates depicted in movies or books.”

  “To be honest, Mr. Noonan, vampires always seemed a little silly to me,” Jacob said. “Nothing really believable about them.”

  “The way they’re portrayed in fiction is a bunch of horse manure, yes. What I’m talking about is quite real, I’m afraid. There is a long history of it throughout the world. One only needs to know where to look to see it,” Noonan said, steepling his fingers. “When I use the term ‘vampire,’ I’m not referring to what you probably picture. I use it to suggest the relationship between parasite and host, the reliance of one entity upon another as a means of survival. Nothing about a real vampire is elegant. They don’t wear capes or have perfect hair or live in castles. They certainly do not turn into flying vermin, and cannot be defeated by crosses or garlic or any of that holy water nonsense. Religion has nothing to do with what they are, for the same reason it has nothing to do with the laws of physics.” Noonan took a brooding breath. “I doubt very much they can be defeated at all, actually. No more than gravity can be. Some things are just a constant in our universe, a fixture that’s always been and likely always will be.”

  “So what exactly are they, then?”

  “Nothing with a resemblance to anything we’re capable of fully understanding. Ghosts behind the veil, I guess you could say. These ‘vampires’”—Noonan hooked his fingers to make quotes—“they exist in a different dimension, one far different from our own, both spatially and temporally. We don’t see them, not usually, but they’re still a part of nature, nothing supernatural about them. It just so happens to be a part of nature we don’t yet understand. Am I making any sense?”

  Jacob nodded tentatively. “I think I get the big picture. But if you can’t see them, then how do you know they even exist?”

  He had a vague sense of what Professor Noonan was talking about, but a lot of it was lost on him. He was starting to wonder whether or not coming to meet him was a mistake. He wasn’t sure what he’d been looking for, but he hadn’t expected invisible vampires. It all felt a little too foolish.

  “The scientific
approach. We can observe their effect on nature, make deductions from what we see. Find patterns throughout history. Think of it this way.” Noonan lit his pipe with a wooden match and took a few puffs. “Consider gravity again. We can feel and see its effect every day. If I pick up a pen and let it go, it drops due to Newton’s law of universal gravitation. But we haven’t a clue what the hell is at the heart of the attraction that exists between two bodies with mass. What causes this attracting force? So we don’t know what gravity is, but we know that it exists. It influences us in very conspicuous ways.” He paused, and cracked a smile behind a haze of sweet pipe smoke. “And I didn’t say we can never see them. I said we usually can’t. After all, that is why you’re here, isn’t it? You’ve been seeing them?”

  “Well, to be honest, I don’t know what I’ve been seeing.”

  Noonan was looking at him sharply. “Describe it to me.”

  Jacob glanced down. “I don’t know. It’s like I can see them, but I can’t. Like seeing a faint reflection of yourself in a pond. If you don’t focus your eyes right, you’ll see right through and miss it.” He rubbed the back of his neck and sighed tiredly. “I always see a face, especially when I have those dreams I was telling you about. It’s a colorful face. It looks like a mask, but at the same time, it’s always shifting. Sometimes I think it looks like a pot of boiling spaghetti.”

  Noonan nodded along, then grabbed an old leather-bound book from a stack in front of him and started flipping through the pages. “You ever heard of a gishet?”

  “I know that word,” Jacob said, perking up.

  Noonan looked up from his book. “You do?”

  “Yeah. I’m not sure how. I just kind of do. It’s like someone has been whispering it to me in my sleep. What is it?”

  Noonan flipped through a few more pages and stopped. “Ah. Here it is.” He turned the book around and set it open in front of Jacob. “This”—he tapped the page with his wrinkled finger—“is a gishet. Otherwise known as the Great Manipulator.”

  The rough sketch on the yellowed book page was an old drawing, and he didn’t think it looked much like the thing he’d been seeing. It resembled a Chinese dragon. Around it was Gaelic writing.

  “What are they?”

  “No one knows for sure,” Noonan said. “But if you believe the oldest texts, gishets are ancient harvesters. They build these worlds, the world you and I live in and call reality, as a means to cultivate. We are their puppets, and they are the masters pulling the strings. Our world is their stage. Do you believe in God, Mr. Thornhill?”

  “Something like that, yes.”

  “And the devil?”

  “Can’t have light without darkness.” Jacob smiled uneasily.

  “Right. Well, gishets would’ve created them both. God and the devil. Light and darkness. All of it. Everything you know that exists, both real and imaginary, does so because they made it.”

  “Why?” Jacob leaned back in his chair.

  “Simple,” Noonan said. “Why do farmers build chicken coops or plow fields?”

  “Forgive me, but that’s a little…”

  “Sounds like bad fiction, doesn’t it?”

  Jacob nodded. “Yes. Exactly. Is this what you honestly believe?”

  “Not exactly, no,” Noonan said. “Gishets feed on our energy. They’re psychic parasites, in that way. They manipulate, creating chaos and disharmony because that’s what they thrive on… that’s what they have a taste for. And they can feed on it from their side. My guess would be that Jackson Hill must be a place where the barrier between our dimension and their own is thin, and that’s why you’re able to see them. On their side, Jackson Hill is probably something like a waterhole in the desert where animals gather to drink. A source of easy nourishment.”

  From Jackson Hill, p. 323:

  Sandra waded out into the lake, her gown rising and drifting around her. The night was clear. The sky was a black slate of twinkling diamonds. The crickets sang to her. On the hill behind her, Little Nook stood solemn and empty. From inside its walls, she heard the crying. She just wanted it to stop. Her own child was haunting her, and she’d had enough. Time to put the baby to sleep.

  She’d screwed it up the first time around with the pills and hadn’t taken enough, but the second time, she aimed to make it stick. The lake had more than enough water to do the trick.

  Her feet moved along the muddy lakebed, through the twists of tree roots and over rocks. The water was at her chest. She could smell the stagnancy of it. And for a split second, clarity seemed to flash inside her.

  What are you doing, Sandra? This isn’t you. It’s this place. Where is Jacob? Tell him. He’ll believe you. You know that there is something he isn’t telling you.

  But the clarity was strangled off by that delirious haze that’d fallen over her since arriving in Jackson Hill, a correlation she had been unable to see. She was headed toward darkness again, ready to let it swaddle her in warmth and take away all the pain.

  The midnight sounds became muffled as she submerged her head. Her eyes were open, but they saw only black. Then an intense show of colors appeared before her, swirling, drifting, deepening. It was a face, giant and awful. Beautiful.

  She opened her mouth and drew in a long cold breath of water. It didn’t hurt like she’d thought it might. Her body began to tingle with a pleasant…

  Chapter Twelve

  IN THE LAKE

  1

  “Did you sleep out here?”

  The words came to him as if they’d traveled down a great hall to find him. His face rested on a hard surface with an earthy smell. His mind was swimming out of a fractured sleep.

  “Peter? Are you okay?” A little clearer now.

  His eyes fluttered open. He blinked. His mouth was dry and bitter. Sylvia stood at the end of the kitchen counter in her bathrobe. He had fallen asleep sitting on one of the breakfast bar stools, and the wood countertop had been his pillow.

  She started to reach for the book sitting beside his head, the one with all the creased pages folded back. “You really dog-eared this thing to death. What is it?”

  A crick fired through his neck as he sat up. “It’s research.” With one hand, he grabbed his neck and began to massage it; with the other, he picked up the copy of Jackson Hill before she could take a look at it. He dropped it in his lap. “God, I think I really did it this time.”

  “Something you don’t want me to see?”

  “Just a drugstore paperback I grabbed yesterday. I was trying to find some inspiration. You’re welcome to read it after I’m done.” Peter bent back in the stool, stretching his back and yawning. “Excuse me. It’ll be a little marked up, by the time I’m finished.”

  Sylvia seemed to lose interest. “Why didn’t you come to bed?” She went to the stove and put on a kettle for tea.

  “I did. But I got up. You were fast asleep. What time is it?” He checked his watch. Eight fifteen on Tuesday morning.

  “Was something wrong?” She grabbed a mug from the cabinet.

  “No, just couldn’t sleep.” Peter stood, working his head around in slow circles. “I thought I’d do a little reading. Time got away from me, I guess.”

  “Your neck bad?”

  “Nothing some major surgery can’t fix.” He crossed the living room and opened the curtains covering the sliding door. Warm morning sunlight washed over his face. Big Bath’s waters looked deep and black. The trees lining its shore were the lushest shade of green he had ever seen.

  “Want some coffee?” Sylvia said. “I can make some, if you’d like.”

  “I’ll pass. I think I might actually go for a swim. Maybe that’ll stretch out this kink.”

  “Okay.”

  Peter couldn’t help but notice that she was having a hard time making eye contact with him. He had an idea why because he felt it, too. There was a big thing hanging out there between them right now. Well, there were two big things—inexplicable things—but Sylvia only knew about one: the
boy with his strange gift.

  The other thing was Jackson Hill and his conversation with its author. But for the time being, that was Peter’s burden to bear. And if he was being completely honest, he didn’t want either of those things. He wanted to forget about both and just pretend that they’d never disrupted his world, especially after what he’d read in that book. It’d made his skin crawl.

  After an hour of staring up at the ceiling last night, an arm tucked behind his pillow, Peter had given up on sleep. He had gone out to the kitchen a little after midnight, poured himself a glass of milk, made himself a bologna sandwich, and started reading.

  He had an idea that reading the book might actually allay some of the unease he felt about everything recently thrown at him. The plan had been to crack the spine, read for an hour or two, and discover that everything Declan had described to him had been exaggerated and not nearly as specific or disquieting as he had made it seem. He wanted to poke a few holes in all the nonsense, let some of the pressure out.

  Only it didn’t happen that way. If anything, it had been worse than he was expecting. Some of the things he had read seemed as if they had been pulled directly from his head. The worst of which were the creatures in Jackson Hill—the gishets. The way Declan described them was eerily similar to the thing he had seen crouched above the window in his dream. Some of it could’ve been coincidence, he supposed. Horror novels often had monsters in them. But the detail about the swirling face of color felt all too much like the proverbial hammer striking the nail squarely.