Gilchrist

by Christian Galacar

  “Answer it, Peter. I’m going to take a bath,” she said, and disappeared into the back bedroom.

  Peter picked up the receiver. “Yeah, hello.” There was no answer. “Hello, anyone there?”

  “Sorry,” a gritty voice said. “I was about to hang up. Didn’t think anyone was going to answer.”

  “I’m here,” Peter said. “It’s a little late, but what can I do for you?”

  “I’m trying to reach Peter Martell. I was told I could find him at this number.”

  “This is Peter. Who’s this?”

  “This is Declan.”

  Peter swallowed. “Declan Wade?”

  “I think so. If not, I’ve been cashing the poor bastard’s checks. I imagine he’ll be righteously pissed when he finds out.”

  “Mr. Wade? Oh man, I apologize. I didn’t know it was you,” Peter said. “That was awfully quick.”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry. Wouldn’t I be just about the biggest asshole if I was mad at you for not knowing it was me? We’ve never even met before. I know who you are, though. I read your first book… the Jupiter one.”

  “Jupiter Place.”

  “That’s it. God, I sound arrogant, don’t I? I didn’t mean to. The book was great is what I should’ve said. You’re a fine writer. Intelligent. And intelligent can be boring. But yours wasn’t.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Wade… I think.”

  “There’s a compliment in there if you pick off all the gristly bits.”

  “I’m sure there is.” Peter laughed. “I imagine you want to know what this is about. I was pretty vague with my agent when I asked him to put us in touch.”

  Declan’s tone stiffened slightly. “All I know is I was given this number by Doreen and told you had some questions for me. Like I said, I knew who you were when she mentioned your name. And to be honest, I had a feeling I’d hear from you sooner or later, kid. If I was a betting man, I would’ve guessed sooner.”

  “I didn’t realize you were expecting to hear from me,” Peter said, slightly confused.

  “I’m making assumptions. Let me back up,” Declan said. “Are you a fan? What I mean is, do you read my books? I won’t be offended.”

  “I’ve read Gray Dawn, but that’s it. I actually just picked up another one today, which was why—”

  “So you haven’t read Jackson Hill?” Declan interrupted. “And that’s not why you’re calling me?”

  “Well, no, I haven’t read it yet. But that is why I’m calling you. At least I think so. I just bought it.”

  “You’re confusing me, son,” Declan said.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid I’m a little confused myself.” Peter pulled out a chair and took a seat at the kitchen table. He could hear the bathtub running, but his wife had become the farthest thing from his mind.

  “So what’s this about, then?” Declan asked.

  Peter realized he hadn’t quite thought everything through. He didn’t know why he had wanted to talk to Declan. Those notes had strangely resonated with his own situation, but that had been nothing more than coincidence. Hadn’t it? He wasn’t so sure anymore. But what he was sure of was that he didn’t want to come off as a complete, raving fool to someone influential enough to torpedo his career with a few well-placed phone calls.

  “My wife and I rented a lake house in the town of Gilchrist. I believe you’ve heard of it. People around here seem to be of the opinion that you have.”

  There was a beat of silence on the other end of the phone. The dead air crackled with static as lightning flashed outside and painted the lake in snaps of blue. Thunder rumbled but never quite broke into a clap.

  Then Declan said, “Let me guess… Shady Cove? Is that where you are?” A strange tone had crept into his voice.

  “Yes. As a matter of fact, I’m here right now. Have been since yesterday. How’d you know that?”

  “Let’s call it a hunch.” Under his breath, Declan added, “I knew this phone number looked familiar. I don’t believe this. I really don’t.”

  Peter kept going, not wanting to lose his focus—or his nerve. “I found some notes of yours… at least I think so. They looked like story notes for what appears to have become Jackson Hill. They were in a desk drawer at the house, scribbled freehand, and your initials were on them. Looked like really rough stuff.”

  Peter took a second to center himself. He could feel the words wanting to come out faster than he could think.

  “And?” Declan asked. “I think I know where you’re going with this, but I’d like to be sure before I sound like a crazy person.”

  “And, well, some of the stuff you wrote down struck me as a little—how can I put this without sounding completely insane myself?—it struck me as a little familiar to my own current situation. I guess what I really want to know is your personal take on this town. I know that’s a bit ambiguous and a strange thing to ask, but—”

  “It’s not strange,” Declan said. This seemed to be the answer he had been waiting for. “If it were Boston or Portland or some other place you were talking about, then maybe I might not understand. But Gilchrist… no, that isn’t a strange thing to ask.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Declan said. “That’s one peculiar town.”

  “Can I ask why you think that?”

  “I spent months there, that’s why. You only have to go there to know it.” He paused, then added: “And you calling me from that house is only confirming it more.”

  “There is something off about it, isn’t there? I just can’t explain what it is,” Peter said.

  “But you can feel it, can’t you? You can feel it in your heart.”

  “I swear it’s like I’ve been here before. The first time I drove through town, it was like the biggest case of déjà vu I’d ever had, and I know I’ve never been here before. I’m sure of it.”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my sixty-six years on this earth, it’s that being sure of something doesn’t mean diddly. It just means you’re convinced. And people can be convinced of damn near anything under the right circumstances. For a time, people were sure that the world was flat, and we see how that turned out.”

  “Expectations shape our perception,” Peter said dimly.

  “Like I said, kid, you’re intelligent. That’s exactly right. It’s simple—we spend our lives thinking we know what to expect, because there are rules, there is order that follows a set of logic we accept to be immovable. So when something queer comes along that doesn’t quite align with what we anticipate, we dismiss it or rationalize it somehow and move on. You hear a bump in the night, and you say, ‘Oh, it’s probably the cat or the dog or a house noise,’ but you only assume that because it’s the only option we’ve been equipped to digest. Because monsters and ghouls don’t exist, except for in our imaginations, right?”

  “That’s the consequence of growing up, I guess,” Peter said. “The clay hardens.”

  “That’s it, kid. That’s exactly it. We forget how to bend our expectations. After too long, if you try, then you’ll end up breaking something. And I’ll tell you, Gilchrist is a place that can do that if you’re not careful.”

  Peter heard the water shut off in the bathroom. “What did you mean when you said that me calling you from here confirmed it?”

  After a somber pause, Declan resumed. “This is where things get a little weirder. And who knows, maybe there is a rational explanation for it, or I’m drawing conclusions I have no business drawing. But if there is, I haven’t found it yet. And if you hang up on me, well, I wouldn’t blame you. Before you do, though, think about what we just discussed about stubborn expectations.”

  “Okay, well you’ve certainly got my attention.”

  Declan breathed heavily into the phone. It was a hard sigh. “You know, a couple years back, I read about what happened to your son in the papers. It was a damn shame. That’s the kind of thing that hurts to hear about, even when you’re not the one it’s happening to.” It sounded li
ke he had lit a cigarette on the other end of the line. “Thing is, I knew who you were back then, too. But not because of any book you’d written or because you were in the paper.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was going through a bit of a rough time when I decided to rent that place. My wife and I were about two arguments away from divorce. I was drinking too much. I couldn’t write. My life was a mess. So we agreed to try what I guess they call a trial separation. She took the house in Cape Elizabeth, and I spent six months at Shady Cove, hoping to find some sort of inspiration for a book I owed my publisher but couldn’t write. It was after about the second week that the inspiration came. It just didn’t arrive how I expected it to.”

  “The town,” Peter said softly. “You were going to write about Gilchrist.”

  “Well, yes. But that wasn’t how it started. For me, it was dreams. Real vivid ones. They started the first night I stayed there. I figured they were brought on by stress, but I’d been stressed before plenty, and I’d never experienced anything like this.”

  A tickle of unease ran across Peter’s chest as a vision of that horrible church popped into his head, but he shut it out.

  “What sort of dreams?”

  “They started small,” Declan said. “Little glimpses of a man and a woman. Nothing special about them. But they got more and more detailed, and it didn’t take long for me to understand that the dreams were all set in Shady Cove. I figured the couple were unconscious representations of me at first. Freud stuff, you know? There was something odd, though—I could see their faces, but I didn’t recognize them. And that doesn’t usually happen. Not to me, it doesn’t. When people are in my dreams, I either know them, or they’re a Frankenstein mishmash of people I already know. But the couple I kept seeing were complete strangers to me. Nothing familiar about them. There was this sad bitterness surrounding them, too. Sometimes I’d even wake up crying, if you can believe it. I had a feeling it was my mind’s way of telling me not to fuck up my marriage.”

  “I can believe it,” Peter said. “Stuff tends to find its way out one way or another. Especially the emotions we try to bury. Simply doesn’t work.”

  “Uh-huh. I thought so, too. But you may think differently when I finish what I’m telling you.”

  “Sorry. Go on.”

  Declan continued: “So, like any writer would do, I started to write about these people to understand them more. And in the back of mind, I had a hunch that maybe I would find a book idea if I did. Turns out I was right. I didn’t know where I was going, or who they were, but the more I dreamed, the more I wrote. And the more I wrote, the more I started to know the couple and why they were at Shady Cove. That’s how the story of Jackson Hill was born. At one moment I had none of it. The next, I had almost all of it being laid out in front of me. I just swapped Gilchrist for the fictional town of Jackson Hill, which was my own little tip of the hat to Shirley Jackson.”

  “I read that in your notes,” Peter said.

  “I’m sure you did.” Declan took a pensive pause, then went on: “You know, I’ve always thought one of the stranger things about writing fiction is how characters take on a life of their own simply by writing about them. But this wasn’t that. It was more like I was receiving a weak television signal, and I was transcribing the glimpses of pictures I saw as best I could and filling in the blanks. Not all the time. A lot of the story I knew I was in control of, I was calling the shots. But a lot of it… a lot of it was something else I’d never felt before. I didn’t really think twice about it at the time. I didn’t care where the inspiration was coming from, because I needed a book for my publisher. Besides, like you said, my clay had long since hardened, and I sure as hell wasn’t thinking anything supernatural was actually at work. Not at first, anyway. Whatever the case, I wrote the thing during the six months I was there. It was published the following year in the fall of sixty-three. That would be almost three years ago now.”

  “I don’t think that seems all that strange to me. Story ideas just sort of appear when you least expect them to.”

  Declan laughed again. The sound made Peter’s skin break out in chills because the laugh sounded more like a warning to get prepared.

  “I didn’t think it was all that odd at first, either,” Declan said. “Anyway, six months or so went by, and the book moved to the back of my mind as I worked on something new. Then one morning I was having my coffee and eating some toast, and I came face-to-face with the man from Shady Cove. The man I had dreamt about during my time there. I recognized his face immediately. I recognized your face, kid. Second page of The New York Times. It was an article about what had happened to your son. There was a picture of you. I nearly choked on my breakfast. What happened to you—how it happened to you—was practically identical to what I’d written in my book. And now you’re in Gilchrist with your wife, staying in the exact same lake house where I kept seeing you. It’s unbelievable. You know, I have never seen a picture of your wife, but I would bet my life that she’s a redhead with blue eyes.”

  A dense stretch of silence sat between them on the telephone line. Outside, the sky opened up, and the rain became a torrential downpour. Peter could feel cool mist spraying in through the window screen behind him and settling on his neck.

  “You still there?” Declan asked.

  “I’m still here,” Peter said.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? Is your wife a redhead?”

  “She is,” Peter said, and suddenly felt as if his mind and his body were separating and he was looking down on himself from ten feet above.

  “Blue eyes, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Incredible. Absolutely goddamn incredible,” Declan said, astonished. “Can I ask you something else? It’s personal, but I think we should see how deep this odd-shit rabbit hole goes.”

  “Let me ask you something first,” Peter said.

  “Shoot, kid.”

  “This isn’t some sort of joke, is it? I mean, I don’t know you. How do I know this isn’t some sick gag?”

  “Be honest with yourself—do you really think that’s what this is? Because I get the feeling you don’t. I get the feeling your time there has already started to soften that clay a little and you’re beginning to see that not everything is as it seems in this world. Especially not in that town.”

  Could not have said it better myself, Peter thought. But for some reason, he didn’t want to confirm it aloud. “I don’t know,” he said. “But if it’s a joke…”

  “It’s all in the book. Read it, and you’ll know. Simple as that. Jacob and Sandra Thornhill have a child who dies by falling from a window in their home. Jacob’s an author, just like you. Grief stricken and unable to cope with it, they move to a lake house to try and start fresh in a town where bizarre things abound. That’s the mile-high view, but it sounds familiar, just like you said earlier, doesn’t it?”

  Peter had a feeling like he was holding the tether of reality and his grip was getting weaker, his palms sweatier, and now he was in imminent danger of losing his hold. Slipping. Slipping. Slip. And when he did, he was terrified to think of the dark void he would be cast into. Coming face-to-face with some ungodly horror. “So what do you want to ask me?”

  “Your wife, she tried to kill herself, didn’t she?” Declan asked cautiously. “Something to do with pills?”

  Peter scoffed and shook his head. “Jesus Christ. How…?”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Declan said.

  “I don’t understand. How could you know that? And it wasn’t like that. It was an accident.”

  “The same way that I’m pretty sure you’ve been trying to have another child but just can’t seem to make it happen, and that’s really why you decided to get away and rent that place. Or that you’ve both quit drinking since being there. Or that you know if you two can’t reconcile your marriage there, then it’s probably never going to work. These things true, too? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that th
ey probably are. If I’m wrong, forgive me. I’m not trying to be rude.”

  “All of it,” Peter said, starting to feel the pit of his stomach turn sour. “Jesus Christ, all of it’s true. I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t, either, kid. But I can guarantee you it has something to do with that town. There’s—I don’t know—a thinness to that place.”

  “It could all just be a coincidence,” Peter said, feeling a sudden flash of defiance. It was his practical mind’s final death knell.

  “Sure. Like I said before, people can be convinced of just about anything. It’s all a matter of what you’re willing to believe and how big a leap of faith you allow yourself to take.”

  “How can you be sure you never saw a picture of me and my wife? I’ve had articles written about me since my first novel. And these articles would’ve had my picture. Probably Sylvia’s at some point, too. How do you know you didn’t see one and forget about it? Maybe your subconscious dragged it up for whatever reason when you were staying here. Couldn’t it be that’s why you dreamed about us? All the similarities could just be bad coincidence. We’re not the first parents to lose a child, and I doubt we’ll be the last.”

  “Suppose you’re right—then how would I know everything else that you’ve just confirmed is true? It’s all stuff I wrote when I was there, when I was patching together these dreams and turning them into a book. It’s like I was absorbing all this just from being in the house, from being in that town, even though none of it had happened yet. I don’t know how that’s possible, but you can’t deny the facts.” Declan hesitated. Then his voice took on an eerily sincere tone, and Peter could tell the man was telling the truth. “Look, I don’t blame you for thinking this is nuts. It is nuts. Hell, I know it sounds like the ravings of a madman. But why would I make any of this up? I have nothing to gain from it.”