Gilchrist: A Novel

by Christian Galacar

  “If you run out of charcoal or fluid, you can pick up some more at the hardware store. You know where that is?”

  “I think so. Tedford’s, right?” Peter remembered parking in front of a hardware store when he’d first come into town.

  I wouldn’t mind one of Dale’s Delights right about now, he thought, instantly developing a yen for one of those greasy burgers and an ice-cold beer. He licked his lips and tried to turn away from the idea of alcohol. It was a slippery thought that could easily snowball and then get away from him.

  “Tedford’s, that’s right. Good. Alrighty. I think that about covers it.” Sue rubbed the back of her hand across her nose again, leaving a shiny streak of snot, which she wiped on her shorts without hesitation. It was an almost childish action.

  Peter tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed, avoiding immediate eye contact. “I appreciate you stopping by to check on us, Mrs. Grady,” he said. “I get the sense we’re in good hands.”

  “Sue,” she said flatly, checking her hand. “If my mother crawls out of the grave, you can call her Mrs. Grady.”

  “Sue, that’s right. Sorry.”

  “No bother. I’ll get outta your hair now, let you and the missus enjoy the place and get settled. It’s shaping up to be a nice day.” She started back up the hill, and Peter followed. When they reached the top, she hooked left and stopped near the front door. “My number’s on the refrigerator if you need me. Don’t hesitate to call,” she said. “Anything else I can do for you while you got me here? Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  “I think we’re all set at the moment,” Peter said.

  “That’s my cue, then,” Sue said. “Take care, Mr. Martell. Same to the wife.” She turned and trudged up the path.

  Beside Peter’s car was her beaten-up old truck, faded yellow with patches of rust. The bed was full of tools and a pile of dead branches. She opened the door and, with a little hop, wedged herself behind the wheel. The truck started with a cough of smoke, and she backed out of the driveway.

  Chapter Six

  A SUNDAY MORNING IN GILCHRIST

  1

  Fayette Pynchon was Pastor Pynchon of Our Savior Lutheran Church of Gilchrist until he suffered a stroke. Two actually. The first had been a minor one. It happened during a Sunday morning mass as he was giving the sermon. His hands were firmly planted on the pulpit as he scanned the room pensively, reciting the word of God. Then his words just sort of became slurred gibberish, and he continued to preach the gibberish with conviction, unaware that anything was wrong. It sounded like porridge falling out of his mouth. Slowly, in the pews, the eyes of all God’s children filled with worry. Mouths scowled, a mix of disgust, fright, and confusion. A light murmur. Then Pastor Pynchon got woozy, passed out, and pissed his pants.

  Pearl Lynch stood and shouted, “Praise the Lord!” She thought it was some strange brand of evangelism and wanted to make sure she was a part of it. Not until Hank Barrett rushed to Pastor Pynchon to provide care did she realize it wasn’t part of the sermon. She sat down quietly, chin up, fanning herself and checking from the corners of her eyes to see if anyone noticed. They had.

  The second stroke came for Fayette six months later when he was taking a bath and listening to the Red Sox beat the Yankees on the radio. It was his sixtieth birthday. His wife found him nearly drowned when she went to bring him a beer and trim the hair on the back of his neck the way he liked her to with the straight razor his father had left him. She dropped it when she saw his head half submerged in the water, his terrified eyes staring up at her, a scared semi-consciousness locked inside a paralyzed and failing body. The razor cut her toe right through her sock when it came down. She has a scar from it that she’s only showed her sister. Hank Barrett also saw it, but that’s because he stitched it up.

  Suffice it to say, the days of preaching and sermons were behind Fayette. Nowadays he spent most of his time in a wheelchair on the porch, painting with oil paints.

  This morning, Fayette was looking rather worried—more than the usual slack-faced partial paralysis gape—as he ate his breakfast of oatmeal, orange juice, and dry wheat toast. He was at his post on the porch, his latest work in progress in front him on the easel Gale had bought for him after he had shown an interest—and some actual talent—for painting. Dr. Barrett had suggested Fayette take up a creative hobby, in hopes it might help retrain the parts of his brain that had been damaged. It seemed to be working. His speech and his upper-body motor skills had improved steadily over the last eighteen months or so. Nothing close to a miracle, but enough for hope to rear its clever little head.

  He had something on his mind today. A dream had struck a chord of unease somewhere deep inside him. The painting was an attempt to capture the vision that had played on the silver screen of his mind as he slumbered away in a fevered sleep.

  “That’s a peculiar one,” his wife said as she sat down beside him in the rocking chair and sipped her coffee. “What is it?”

  Fayette turned to her slowly, bottom lip wet and shiny, mouth still working on his last spoonful of oatmeal. He spoke slowly, almost sounding drunk, sometimes stammering. “I don’t nuh-nuh-know. It’s an odd one… isn’t it?” He set down his spoon and wiped his mouth with the heel of his palm.

  He had been a handsome man before his health betrayed him. Tall, slender, hazel eyes, a square jaw, a hard nose, and short dark hair that’d since turned a silvery white.

  Gale set her coffee down on the little table between her and her husband, then leaned in closer, studying the painting. “This one’s different than your others. It might be your strangest one yet. What is that thing? It looks like some sort of monster, Fay. Ick!”

  Fayette sort of half shrugged. “It was a dreab I had last night.” He had tried to say dream, but sometimes his words came out “wonky,” as his wife would say.

  “More like a nightmare,” she said. “It gives me the willies just looking at it. I don’t like this one.” She looked at him. “No offense. Just maybe not one for above the mantel.”

  “I don’t like it, either,” he said, looking back at the thing he had spent the last four hours working on. He had woken Gale at five o’clock in the morning and asked her to set him up downstairs with the porch light on. He did that sometimes, and she always seemed happy to oblige. If she wasn’t, she hid it well. “But I had to m-mmm-paint it. I couldn’t h-huh-help it.”

  The painting wasn’t completely finished, but it was as finished as it was ever going to be. He was sick of looking at it. There was something upsetting about it, something that chilled his heart. What he had created was a crude offense against the normal order of the world.

  Some hulking, grayish humanoid thing was holding a man in its massive, sinewy hand. The creature had a bald welted scalp with tiny wisps of hair. Its face was a brightly colored swirl that looked almost like a Greek comedy mask with a gleeful yet sinister grin smeared on it. But the mask might not have been a mask at all. At closer look, it almost resembled colored threads of bone growing out of its face. The creature seemed to be a part of the abstract forest behind it, entangled in tree roots and limbs, emerging from a dark cloud of shadows where all definition disappeared into thick smears and globs of black paint. It looked like something pulled directly from the mind of a schizophrenic.

  Some of this Fayette could see simply by looking at what he had put down on the canvas. But a lot of it he knew because he could feel the horrifying nature of the thing. It was one of the clearest feelings he’d had in a long time. And when he closed his eyes, he could see the image of his dream as clearly as if he were in it once again, as if he were so close to something terrible but also separated by an infinite space between.

  “Take this inside,” he said to his wife. “I don’t wamp to suh-see it anymore. I don’t like it. Throw it away.”

  “I said it gives me the creeps, Fay. I didn’t say you should send it out with the garbage.”

  “I’d rather not look at it… if you don’
t mind.”

  “Are you sure that—”

  Fayette reached up and squeezed the sides of his head as if he had a headache. And that might’ve been because he felt one coming on. “Please just get it away from me, dammit.”

  “Okay, settle down, I’ll take it away,” Gale said. “Somebody wake up and step on a thorn today?”

  She plucked the painting off the easel, then carried it into the house. Fayette sat in the stillness of the late morning, watching the woods behind his house, imagining them full of abstract trees that were really more like tendrils rising out of the earth. And that thing with the colorful face—he thought about that, too.

  2

  He had gone somewhere. It was a cold, foul place. The wet basement of the universe. Awful things live there, and he had been hollowed out.

  Jim Krantz prowled up the road, with an expressionless face. He took slow, deliberate steps. His skin burned and itched. It was all okay now. Mother said so.

  In the distance was a house with a garage. And in the garage, a man was doing something. He knew the man and went toward him. The man had what he needed. It was a ring in his pocket.

  (get the ring)

  Somewhere deep inside him, Jim cried out into the void: Help me! Let me go!

  His mother’s voice, soft and sweet, responded: “I am helping you. And you are helping me, Pickle. We are together now. I will take care of you. Just let me show you what it’s like.”

  Jim crossed the street and headed toward the house. It was all some paralyzed dream. He was merely a passenger.

  3

  Leo Saltzman spent the better part of the morning out in the woods looking for good specimens to lathe in the little shop space he had created out in his garage. It was his side hobby, and if he was bold enough to take his own opinion of his work, he was actually pretty good. And if that wasn’t enough, the fifty or so pens he had turned on the machine had all been well received by those who had gotten them as gifts. Mostly he gave them out for Christmas or as a promotional product for his real estate business. But on occasion, especially once word spread around Gilchrist that he was creating some beautiful craftsmanship—which he thought of as artwork, and why shouldn’t he?—he would get a special request. Usually it was for someone who wanted to have something made for them or for a friend. More than a few times, though, it was a wife looking to have something commissioned for a husband as an anniversary present. That seemed to be a popular trend.

  This morning, he had found a great piece of elm burl that he would be able to cut into at least a half-dozen nice pen blanks. The burl he had found was beautifully figured, rich with deformed grain. Deformity was a good thing, he had learned, when it came to woodworking.

  He was thinking about doing one for that writer who had just rented the place out on Big Bath. Something better than the one he had already given him. Something more personalized. It was all about making connections. Do something nice for a fellow like that, a fellow who probably has—or will have—the kind of money that can afford a second home someday, and maybe he remembers the name Leo Saltzman when he starts looking to purchase a lake house of his own.

  Leo was thinking about this as he ran the chunk of burl through his band saw to cut it into pen blanks, each eight inches long and one inch wide. With those made, all he had to do was drill holes for the brass inserts, lathe and polish the wood, lacquer it, then insert the twisting pen mechanism and press it all together in his vise. Voila! He would have a gorgeous custom pen better than anything a person could find in a store. One of a kind, too.

  A tap on his shoulder startled him. He wheeled around and his wife was standing there, dressed in her Sunday church clothes.

  “Jesus Christ!” Leo said. He reached over and shut off the saw. The electric motor came to a stop. “How many times, Helen? How many times have I told you not to sneak up on me when I’m working with these tools? They’re dangerous.”

  He lifted his plastic safety glasses so they were resting at the peak of his forehead.

  “Leonard Saltzman, if you take the Lord’s name in vain with me one more time, you can spend the rest of your days out here in the garage with your tools and your pens. Let’s see how you like that.”

  “All right, all right, let’s not lose our tempers. I apologize. You scared me, is all. I only got the ten fingers, and I’d like to keep em all, if I can.” He held up his hands and wiggled all of his pudgy, hairy-knuckled little fingers for his wife.

  Helen smiled, but the expression didn’t touch her other features. “I forgive you. But it isn’t me you need to worry about, dear.” She gestured toward heaven with one pointed, rigid finger, and her face took on the sanctimonious look of a Sunday school teacher scolding a child who had dared to question the existence of God.

  Leo rolled his eyes. He had been raised with religion, but it had faded through his adolescent years. If he hadn’t married a devout woman, he might never have set foot in a church again. “Well, what is it? I’m working,” Leo said.

  “It’s almost time for church,” Helen said. “I won’t be late.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Just after ten.”

  “Okay. Give me fifteen minutes, and I’ll be ready to go.” He was wearing a pair of sawdust-covered coveralls, but underneath he already had on his church clothes. Maybe he wasn’t a devoutly religious man, but he wasn’t stupid enough to ever make them late for church, either. And it wasn’t God’s wrath he was worried about. “I want to try out one of these blanks real quick and see how the wood turns on the lathe. This is some beautiful grain. Have a look for yourself.” He handed Helen one of the blanks he had just cut.

  She turned it over in her hands, didn’t really seem interested, then handed it back. “That’s nice.”

  “You’re darn right it’s nice.” Leo scoffed.

  “Ten minutes,” she said, turning and heading back toward the door, which led into the house. “God won’t wait on us.”

  “Fifteen. I want to see how the grain shows after a turn,” Leo said after her as she closed the door and went inside.

  He took one of the blanks, the worst of the bunch, and got it ready for the lathe. He had bought the Craftsman from Sears three years before, about a week after the woodworking bug started to bite. It was a twelve-inch, one-horsepower machine. One of the best lathes they had in the store. It was a little more power than he needed, but it did the job well, and if he ever decided to take on some larger projects, its one-horsepower electric motor would easily handle those, too. Somewhere kicking around in the back of his mind, he had designs on building his own dining-room table, lathing the legs himself and everything. But for the moment he was sticking with pens. These days, the strip mall kept him too busy for larger projects.

  He loaded the blank onto the mandrel and secured the whole thing in place on the lathe. He dropped his safety glasses back over his eyes, checked to make sure he didn’t have any loose clothing that could get sucked in—that was the biggest warning the salesman at Sears had given him—then flipped the switch on the side of the machine. It wound to life with a mean whir, the spindle quickly accelerating the mandrel and the wood up to twelve hundred rpms, turning the whole thing into a blur.

  He grabbed the rounded cutter tool off the workbench and set it on the tool rest. He brought it carefully toward the blur until he made slight contact with the turning wood, and flakes of sawdust started to spit up, covering his hands. He slid the tool to the left, running it along the waxed tool rest in even, smooth passes, slowly rounding down the wood. Each time, he took a little bit more. It was a slow process, but that was what Leo liked about woodworking. It was relaxing. It was so different from his day job, which was often stressful and, as of late, had been causing him some severe bowel distress. When he was turning a piece of wood, his mind was completely in the moment.

  As he was making what he thought might be his final pass on the lathe, a shadow fell over him as he stood there hunched over the spinning wood. Hi
s first thought was that his fifteen minutes were up. Helen was probably behind him again, about ready to start yelling that they were going to be late for church. Leo was still hanging on to this idea, even as the strong, peculiar odor of wet smoke washed over him and the air around him cooled.

  He started to turn around, but something violent slapped down on the back of his neck and began to squeeze. It was a cold hand. Leo had never felt strength like that before. Whatever—or whoever—it was could’ve crushed his neck if it had wanted to. The power was there.

  On the floor behind him, he could see a pair of dirty engineer’s boots caked in black mud.

  “What the hell?” Leo cried. “Let go of me!”

  He shrugged his shoulders up and tried to bring his head down, attempting to shirk the hand gripping the back of his neck. He felt very much like a frightened turtle trying to retreat into its shell. He dropped the cutting tool on the ground and managed to turn his head to the side just long enough to see Jim Krantz, Dick Krantz’s boy, standing there. He didn’t know him very well, maybe enough to say hello in passing was all. So he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what the hell Jim was doing in his garage, let alone why Jim would be assaulting him. The best guess Leo could conjure was that the kid was drunk and confused about where he was. But something told him that wasn’t it. Jim didn’t look right. His eyes. God, those eyes.

  Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.

  “Jim, what’re you doing? Let me go. What’s the matter with you?” Leo struggled to break free, but it was no use.

  Jim just stood there, a dead look on his scowling face, his alien green eyes revealing nothing. The grip on the back of Leo’s neck tightened. He thought he heard a crunching sound and felt fingernails dig into his skin. He saw a bright flash of twinkling white light in his periphery. His hands reached up wildly as he tried to free himself from Jim’s grip, but the strength was quickly draining from his body. Then Jim was pushing him down, down and down and down, pushing his face toward the mean whir of the spinning lathe. He hadn’t shut it off. Now he tried to. His hand gave up the task of prying at the viselike grip on the back of his neck, instead fumbling for the switch on the back of the machine. His vision was starting to blur. There was a bitter metallic taste in the back of his throat.