Gilchrist

by Christian Galacar

  2

  It was only eight thirty, but the air was already thick with humidity, and the thermometer nailed to the tree beside the porch sat at eighty-five degrees. The previous night’s thunderstorms had cooled things off, but only temporarily. That small reprieve had come at a cost, though. The property was covered in fallen branches. Some of which looked thick enough to have done some real damage to a person stupid enough to have been standing there when they came crashing down. Peter recalled the caretaker’s warning and understood what she had been talking about.

  Peter went to the end of the dock and hung his toes off. On the other side of the lake, perhaps three hundred yards away, a group of what sounded like young children were taking turns running and jumping off a dock of their own. Behind them, a man stood with his hands on his hips. Peter wondered if the man was annoyed by the relentless wails of glee, or if he was simply used to it, the way he imagined a father might become accustomed to such a thing.

  Peter glanced over his shoulder. Shady Cove sat up on its hill. He couldn’t help but draw comparisons to the way Declan had described it in his book. The picture he had painted of the property was spot on. But then Peter’s mind wandered down to a dark place. The last scene he’d read had been where Sandra Thornhill had drowned herself. It’d turned his stomach to see that scene play out in his mind’s eye.

  He found himself worrying all over again about whether or not he needed to keep a closer eye on his wife. She seemed fine, though. She seemed happy. But in the book, Sandra had seemed fine to Jacob, right up until she finished the job she had started with pills.

  Is that what we’re doing now? Are we living by the book? Are we agreeing that this is all really happening and going to happen?

  In an attempt to free himself from his accelerating thoughts, Peter dove off the dock. The water was even warmer than the day before. He stayed under, riding the momentum of his initial dive, and didn’t break the surface until his lungs began to burn. When he came up, he was fifty feet from the dock. Everything looked smaller, more picturesque from this viewpoint. Shady Cove could’ve been the backdrop of a Norman Rockwell painting.

  He treaded water, occasionally taking in big lungfuls of air and floating on his back. He watched birds track across the hazy sky. His neck began to loosen up. Behind him, he heard the kids cannonballing into the lake, but their laughter took on a distant tone, waxing and waning as water lapped his ears. The morning faded away from him. And for a wonderful moment he was without a care, just existing. No past, no future.

  That’s when he felt a tickle on his finger. It was an odd sensation, like someone gently stroking his knuckle. His first thought was a fish. He righted himself and brought his hand out of the water to find a thin, pale tan line across his finger. Panic ripped through him, and he looked down in time to see the glint of his wedding ring as it descended in little fluttering arcs to the bottom of Big Bath, the sunlight kissing it goodbye.

  “No. Dammit,” Peter said, sucking in a huge gulp of air.

  He torqued himself upside down and dove after it, his legs kicking and pumping. His hands grabbed wildly out in front of him, but he found only unpleasant pockets of icy water. His eyes were open, burning as he glided downward, but everything was a muddy blur. He kept going deeper. The water became frigid all around him, hugging him like a heavy lead blanket. After fifteen feet or so, the sunlight couldn’t penetrate, and he was clawing through cold darkness. The pressure was building on his body. He could feel it pressing on his head and lungs, wanting to cave him in. He better touch bottom soon, he thought, otherwise he would have to turn around and swim for the surface. But the idea of finding the bottom struck a line of dread through him. It would be rough and tangled with God knew what. It would be sharp and hard like squid beaks. It would…

  How deep is it right here? I’m only fifty feet or so from shore. It can’t be more than twenty feet deep this far out.

  But why couldn’t it be? It might be a hundred feet deep, for all he knew. It could have a steep drop-off. He hadn’t thought it through. And how the hell was he going to find a tiny ring in the pitch black at the bottom of a lake, anyway?

  He was about to turn back and swim for the surface when he saw it. At first he thought it was a hallucination. It had to be. He had stayed under too long and was running out of oxygen, that’s all. The black in from of him started to bloom with shimmering color.

  It reminded him of the sparks that swam behind his eyes when he rubbed them hard with his knuckles. And perhaps that was what it was, because that far down, there was no difference between his eyes being open or shut. Maybe it was the water pressure pushing on his eyeballs.

  He began swimming frantically for the surface, sure that if he didn’t reach it, he would black out very soon. His legs kicked until his thighs caught fire. His arms scooped the water in broad strokes. But rather than fading, the color grew brighter. It took shape, forming features—horrible features—the same way a cloud can once the mind decides it sees a figure in it.

  The surface light wasn’t coming. The water should’ve been that muddy color by now. He hadn’t gone that deep. Twenty feet at the most. Suddenly he was hit by the horrifying realization that he didn’t actually know if he was swimming up or heading deeper. In the dark, it was hard to tell. What if the lake was a hundred feet deep and he was swimming toward his certain death? He was disoriented. His thoughts were starting to turn gray and syrupy. And no matter what direction he moved in, that face continued developing in front of him, becoming something he knew he didn’t want to see. It was the face of the thing from his dream.

  His lungs burned. His heart pounded in his chest, threatening to burst. It took every bit of willpower not to open his mouth and breathe in water. That would put the aching to rest. But it would also do the same for him.

  Just keep going. Just keep going. Keep going… going… going… go…

  A high-pitched scream tore out of the dark—a baby crying. It was his baby. He could never forget that sound. It was Noah.

  I’m losing it, Peter thought. I’m slipping away and going somewhere else.

  He swam harder, searching madly, trying to find some sign of which way was up. But at every turn, that expressionless, shimmering face greeted him, and that was all he could see. It was huge, with deep black eyes. Its gaping mouth opened. Wide. Wider. Peter was swimming into it. Something was inside, moving toward him—hurtling toward him. A bloodied face. A child’s face. Noah’s face. His skull was cracked open, his skin gray and rotting.

  Then, as if the world had been pulled out from underneath him, he was falling, plummeting down a rabbit hole to a darker place. He felt his body being stretched and pulled apart. He had the distinct feeling that he was traveling.

  So this is what dying feels like. It’s not a peaceful thing—it’s terrifying, loud, and jarring.

  Then there was nothing. No crying. No colorful face. No dead Noah. No water. He could hear, though. There was no other sound, except his own breathing. His lungs no longer cried for oxygen. And everything echoed intensely.

  Unable to think of anything else, he yelled, “Hhhhh-h-h-h—ellll-el-el-el-o-o-o-o.” It didn’t even sound like speaking; it sounded like electricity coming from his mouth.

  No longer underwater, he was suspended in blackness—a vast nothingness. He could feel its immensity. That bitter smell of smoke hit him, and the water came crashing back around him, as if he had been inside a bubble and it had collapsed.

  He looked up and saw a dim red glow. He swam toward it. Little hard pieces of debris needled his skin as he moved through the water. It was like swimming through a cloud of disturbed sediment, if the sediment had been shards of glass.

  Peter broke the surface. Something was wrong. It was dark out, but the sky was an ominous red, swollen with black clouds. The air was ice cold. He was in that dream place that looked like a bad copy of his own world—a copy that had been molding away in a damp industrial basement for centuries. On the shore the
trees all looked dead and smoldering. All that should’ve been green was black. He found Shady Cove where it should have been, but it was dilapidated, covered in black moss and strange membranous flowers. Ash, or something like it, fell from the sky, coating the surface of the lake in a gray film.

  Peter started swimming to shore. His body stiffened from the cold. His jaw bounced up and down, teeth chattering as he breaststroked his way through the grimy water. It splashed in his mouth and tasted like rust. He wasn’t going to make it to the dock.

  I’m going to freeze to death in here.

  He just wanted out of the water. It was all he could think about. His mind focused on it. Then the focus tightened, and the idea became everything. There was a quick flash, like a strobe of lightning on a pitch-black night, and just like that, he was standing on the dock. He was still cold and shivering but no longer in the water. He turned around and looked out over the lake. It was a plate of obsidian glass, not a single ripple even though he had just been swimming in it.

  How had he just done that? Somehow he had moved fifty feet in the blink of an eye. The better question was: how was he there at all?

  “Where the hell am I?” he said, testing see if he actually had a voice in this place. He did, but it sounded slowed down and sharp with reverb.

  Something crashed in the woods behind him. He turned and looked over his shoulder. Another crash broadcasted from atop the hill beside Shady Cove. The sound of splintering echoed across the lake, followed by a wet, breathy flutter. A giant, colorful face shimmered through the woods. It was attached to a tall gray body with long swinging arms. It was coming for him. He knew it. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He was an intruder. He wanted to be anywhere else.

  In the back of his mind, an old memory rose, punching through the bedrock of his brain like a beautiful, determined flower through a city sidewalk. It was a good memory, born from a place of love and warmth. He hadn’t even meant to think about it; the thought had just come. He knew nothing else but to close his eyes and accept it. And when he did, he was traveling again, once more suspended in an echoing sea of nothingness. But instead of a feeling of falling or being dragged down, he was being pulled sideways at an impossible speed. And as he traveled through cold, huge darkness, more blue light strobed in front of him. But it wasn’t just flashes of light. It was life. Snapshots of places and things and events. They appeared to vary in time period from ancient to current to well beyond anything he could even begin to comprehend. He saw the violence of the universe—the eternal cycle of its birth, its death, its rebirth. He saw space and time folding in on itself and then expanding infinitely. It was like moving through the beam of some giant cosmic film projector, catching glimpses of a feature he was not designed to see.

  Then the sensation of traveling stopped, and he stood on the shores of Crane Beach in Ipswich. However, it was still that same cold realm with the dim red sky and the look of rot. Giant black waves, cast out by a violent sea, crashed over sticky, rough sand that felt as though it had been soaked in oil. The place looked dreadful, yet somehow it retained the sentimentality of the memory that had projected him there from the dock of Shady Cove, more than eighty miles away.

  He and Sylvia had come to Crane Beach with Noah when he was six months old. That was when Peter had taken the picture in the frame that sat on the desk in his office in Concord. He remembered exactly where they had all been standing when he took it, too.

  Peter jogged up the beach toward the lifeguard station, his feet aching in the sand, the cold, dead air stinging his skin. As he approached the spot, he saw what looked like a smudge floating on the air, as if somebody had wiped a big streak of skin grease across a clean pane of glass. But as he got closer, the smudge came into focus, and it was moving. He could see his memory playing out, but it was a silent replay. He continued closer, and when he was only a few feet away, something powerful hit him. It was like stepping into a pocket of raw emotion. The joy of that day surged through him as if he were reliving it again. It was like he was absorbing it as radiation.

  The image was faint, but it was there. They were all ghosts in this place—thin holograms. If the reality Peter knew was the detailed color print, then this place stored the negative.

  “Noah,” he said, overwhelmed. His son was a foot away, in his wife’s arms. She looked so happy. They all did. He reached out, but his hand passed right through them without effect.

  Peter began to cry. But they were tears of pure joy. The contrast of this beautiful feeling in such an ugly place only served to brighten the emotion. He could manage but one word: “How?”

  He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. But he was certain of one thing: he wasn’t meant to see any of this. He was sneaking a peek behind the cosmic curtain.

  An intruding voyeur, he watched from this basement dimension as a younger, happier Peter Martell took photographs of his wife and son over two years ago during a Saturday trip to the North Shore. It was like stepping back in time and getting to experience it all over again, only the second time was somehow sweeter. He had a clear sense that if he closed his eyes and thought hard enough, he could make the whole sequence start over again. If he wanted to, he could watch it a hundred times—experience it a hundred times.

  A great impact shook the ground, nearly knocking him down. The air seemed to tighten as if it were a rubber membrane being stretched to its ripping point. He looked toward the water. A massive splash was settling, but it wasn’t a wave. One of those creatures—a gishet—was lumbering out of the sea, headed in his direction, its face a blaring kaleidoscope of intense, metallic color. It emitted a tubular vibrating sound, like a growling siren echoing down a long steel pipe.

  He closed his eyes. Moving from place to place was beginning to have the feeling of intuition. He thought of Shady Cove, focusing on it, and he was traveling again. When he opened his eyes, he was in the kitchen of the lake house. But the room looked as though it had been sitting vacant for a thousand years. Everything was covered in dust and mold. Black moss grew on every surface. The windows were broken, the countertops cracked and rotting. Outside seethed black and red. He and Sylvia walked by—perhaps through—him silently, carrying bags. It was the day they had arrived in Gilchrist. They were looking around Shady Cove, inspecting their new digs. He watched himself reading the list of phone numbers on the refrigerator. He remembered doing that.

  Too easy. Let’s try something else.

  So he tried for better, and the next time he opened his eyes, he was standing in his front yard in Concord. Once more it was a cold, rotten copy of the real thing. The red sky loomed overhead. The grass was black and greasy. The big sycamore beside the house looked charred and sappy. And the house itself resembled something that had been dragged up from the bottom of a swamp and set out to dry in an angry, unforgiving sun.

  Nevertheless, a memory played against the backdrop for him to see. It reminded him of the eight-millimeter home movies his father used to show at Thanksgiving when Peter was a boy. But what he saw in the basement dimension wasn’t being projected onto any screen; he was being shown places, points in time, the raw footage of his life that had somehow bled through and left an indelible imprint on this place.

  I remember this, too, he thought, watching the scene in his front yard. And of course he did, because it was thinking about it that had brought him to it.

  He was washing the car in the driveway while Sylvia sat on the bottom step of the porch, doing her toenails. Noah bounced up and down in his walker. Every once in a while, Peter would turn the hose on Sylvia when she wasn’t looking and get her with a shot of mist, just enough to grab her attention. She would look up, unamused, and Peter would look coy like he didn’t know what had happened.

  Peter laughed as he watched, tears in his eyes. The emotion felt like a drug. But it was a clean drug, and he was happy to absorb it.

  Then something happened. A bright blue light flashed, and the memory disintegrated. His lungs began to ache and feel
heavy, until the sensation exploded, and he doubled over and coughed up a mouthful of water. When he looked up, a scene came flooding back, but it was much more faint than before. And it wasn’t the same one he had just been watching, either. He wasn’t sure what it was. He hadn’t advertently thought of any other memory. The new one came to him unexpectedly.

  The front door of their house burst open, and a teenage boy came storming down the steps. Peter didn’t recognize him. The boy was tall and lanky, with brown shaggy hair. He wore jeans and a faded black T-shirt with the words LED ZEPPELIN written on it—whatever that meant—and his face was familiar, in a strange way. After a few seconds, Peter saw himself follow the boy out of the house, only this version of him was older. His hairline had receded a little. His stomach was rounder. Wrinkles had begun to form around the corners of his eyes. He and the boy stopped in the front yard and began to argue. He had no idea about what because everything was silent and he had no recollection of the memory. As far as he knew, it hadn’t happened.

  “Not yet,” he whispered. And just like that, he knew what he was witnessing.

  Sylvia came out and stood on the porch, wearing an apron, hands on her hips. She said something with a stern face. Then Peter put his hand on the boy’s back and led him inside, the way a father would.

  “C’mon now, you’re okay,” a voice boomed from the sky.

  Peter looked up, around. He didn’t know who had said that or where it had come from.

  His lungs felt heavy and full again. Warm water poured out of his mouth and nose. He couldn’t breathe. Then his mind began to fade to white as foul air was forced into him, making him feel as though he might burst like a balloon.

  The voice again: “Get it out, fella.”